# How to read this folder

Everything under `lore/` is invented — [[lore/index]] says so and the tag is the
honesty. What follows applies *within* the fiction: these pages are written as
history, and history written from thin sources needs reading in a particular way
or it turns into a story without anyone noticing.

## The four questions

Borrowed from [[lore/carding]], which is the best thing anyone in this tradition
produced.

**What says so?** Almost everything here traces to one of five things: the
[[lore/marchford]] ledger, the [[lore/fallow-ledger]], the
[[lore/ashgrove-group]] papers, a board's message base, or somebody's
recollection. Knowing which changes the weight enormously and the prose will not
tell you.

**What condition is it in?** The separate line, and the innovation. A citation
to a document in a drawer and a citation to one nobody has produced since 1998
look identical in a footnote and are not the same object.

**Who benefits from it being true?** Rarely anyone here, which is why the
tradition is more trustworthy than its evidence base. The exception is
[[lore/fenwick]].

**Would I believe this if it were duller?** The one to ask hardest.

## Where this folder has chosen the story

Stated plainly, because a page listing its own weak points is worth more than
one that does not.

- **The 1986 order.** Every account has [[lore/nailhouse]] first. It is
  unestablished, the reverse is better supported, and the popular version makes
  a better narrative — [[lore/the-1986-problem]].
- **The open hand's route.** Carried by [[lore/ruel]] in person, or copied out
  of [[lore/the-specimen-card]] by two boards who saw it in a newsletter. The
  second needs no unattested meeting. The first is what gets told.
- **The hand-off and the banner.** Ten months apart, no evidenced connection,
  universally narrated as cause and effect — [[lore/the-hand-off]].
- **Ruel's character.** Read off fifteen lines of banner text written once and
  never revised by a man who had stopped visiting — [[lore/ruel]].
- **The two-second gap.** The detail the centrepiece rests on, from an issue
  nobody has produced in a quarter-century — [[lore/the-two-second-gap]].

Five places. In each, the better-evidenced reading is duller and the folder has
gone the other way at least once.

## The structural bias

Two, and they compound.

**The middle survives.** [[lore/fallow-ledger]] Nos. 9–63 are in good condition
and both ends are thin. A tradition that keeps its middle will always be read as
more coherent than it was, because the beginning is where the confusion is and
the end is where the group would have said what it thought had happened.

**The record preserves owners.** *Record the plant, not the person* removes
everyone whose contribution was not attached to an object — [[lore/the-unnamed]].
The nine named people are the nine who ran equipment or published paper. The
Ledger went to between sixty and a hundred and ten.

## The correct posture

Not scepticism. Scepticism about this material is cheap and produces nothing,
because almost nothing here can be disproved either.

The posture that works is the one [[lore/sisken]] used and was resented for:
record the claim, record the condition, decline to confirm what you have not
seen, and let the gap stay a gap. A folder in which the unsupported things are
clearly marked is more useful than a folder in which they have been quietly
removed, and far more useful than one in which they have been smoothed over.

Start at [[lore/index]]. Read [[lore/sources]] second, before any of the
incidents, and the incidents will read differently than they otherwise would.