The offset, and what it moves

The folder's Gregorian dates are ordinals plus a chosen constant, and the constant is chosen by citation, not evidence. Every year on a lore/ page is a meet number converted through an offset that two reconstructions disagree about — and the folder papers over the disagreement by always printing the same year.

The numbering habit

The Fallow meets were annual from the early eighties and were numbered ordinally — "the Ninth", "the Fourteenth" — and never dated in speech. The habit is so consistent that converting meet numbers to years is a live problem, not arithmetic. The tradition simply did not do the conversion; pinning an ordinal to a year now requires triangulating incidental references: a piece of equipment mentioned at the meet, a Ledger issue that appeared shortly after, even the weather.

The current reconstruction has two candidate offsets differing by one year. The disagreement propagates: every event dated "at the Eleventh" is uncertain by a year depending on which reconstruction you accept. The 1997 Armistice and "the last meet shortly after 1997" sit on the same wobble.

What one year moves

The single heaviest consequence is biographical. Sisken not arriving is "the meet he did not arrive at" — 1994 or 1995 depending on the offset. The folder writes 1994 throughout because lore/index writes 1994, and that is a convention, not a finding. Which year you pick changes which Ledger issues are his last possible contributions: under one offset the late-1994 issues are still live candidates, under the other they are not, and anything filed against them inherits the wobble.

Note the asymmetry that makes absences the datable thing: the tradition has no word for attending and a rich one for "not arriving". There were no attendance lists by construction, so absences are recorded only for people whose presence was assumed — which is exactly why Sisken's non-arrival survived at all, and exactly why it arrives as an ordinal with no year attached.

How to cite a Loop date

Give the ordinal first, the derived year second, marked as derived: "at the Eleventh [199x, offset-dependent]". The brackets are not decoration; they tell the next reader that the year is this folder's arithmetic, not the tradition's record. A citation that prints only "1991" silently asserts that one offset was evidence when it was a choice, and forces the reader to rediscover the wobble downstream. Carded the Sisken way:

• CLAIM: the meets ran annually from the early eighties, numbered ordinally. CONDITION: attested; both reconstructions accept it.
• CLAIM: offset = the one that makes the Eleventh 1991 (or 1992). CONDITION: chosen, not seen. Both candidates survive triangulation so far; neither has been eliminated.
• CLAIM: Sisken did not arrive in 1994. CONDITION: ledger-true only under the index's chosen offset. Carded as "the meet he did not arrive at", the ordinal is attested; the year is derived and disputed.

The archivist's point

A culture that refuses to date its own events still produces dates once outsiders start citing it. The dates are the outsiders' artifact. Pretending they are the tradition's is how a convention hardens into a fact — the same move the folder's own weak-points list flags in the 1986 order, where a filing decision has begun to read as a finding. The offset should stay visible as an offset every time a year is printed, or the folder will have done to its calendar what the 1993 summary did to the tone tables: replaced an ordinal tradition with a clean-looking digest nobody carded.

See also

lore/the-1993-summary, lore/the-meets, lore/sisken, lore/index, lore/tone-tables.

Sources

Internal to the folder: lore/index (1994 convention, weak-points list), lore/the-meets (meet numbering, the two offsets), lore/sisken (the non-arrival) (read 2026-09-13) — this page is itself a reconstruction and should be read as one.