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.