# The unfinished thought

23 October 2026. ETS27 paper concept, v3-astra-team.

The summit is an unfinished poster. Visiting leaves your mark. The information sits on one cream sheet: a timetable, a gathering of faces, a deck of photographs, and shorter notes about Austin, tickets and ETS. The visitor can read it directly, ask for a way in, or make it their own with circles, drawings and arrangements.

This is the working concept described in [plan.md](plan.md), built against the owner's [brief](../BRIEF.md) and [continuity direction](../CONTINUITY.md). It is a complete static source folder within the studio tree, with a separate local review proxy. It is not the production AI service.

## Ten decisions and their tradeoffs

1. **Keep the approved hand.** Brief 3.1 and its settled rules make the v16 reveal, paper, tooth, marker, cursor and measured physics the starting point. Copied engines are extended locally. This preserves the owner's direction while accepting its asset dependencies and the cost of coordinating several animation systems.

2. **Give each place a real address.** Brief 3.2 becomes one persistent 4,200 × 3,300 DOM poster, eight places and eight HTML entry routes. The camera moves between them; the overview exposes the composition. Real links and browser history survive the theatrical transition. The phone reading view reflows each place at usable width, while the complete overview remains a small navigational map.

3. **Separate reading, drawing and moving.** Brief 3.3, 3.6 and 3.11 require play without sacrificing ordinary access. Explicit Read, Draw and Move modes resolve competing touch gestures. This adds a small tool vocabulary. Arrangement applies to the mark/menu, featured faces, opened archive prints and selected paper elements, not every paragraph or timetable row.

4. **Keep circles local and explain their result.** Brief 3.8 and section 8 become closed-stroke geometry against session boxes, backed by manual selection buttons. The visitor can filter the timetable, review overlaps and download a real sample `.ics`. No model decides what a circle means. Recognition has size and enclosure thresholds, so a decorative or very broad loop may not select a session.

5. **Invite one bounded drawing response.** Brief 3.4 becomes a prompt beside a fresh drawing and a separate mind layer with its own undo. The configured endpoint receives invited normalized points, not the whole page or a photograph. A validated response uses the same marker. If the service is absent or fails, a named small rule gives a closed loop a face or adds a star-like mark. The fallback keeps the interaction usable while stating when it is not a live answer.

6. **Use the chosen solid-mass portraits.** The later brief section 12 settles the avatar family: “03 solid masses, Gemini / Nano Banana Pro.” The main people page reads the shared generated-avatar manifest and reveals the source photograph on hover or tap. Missing, null or failed artwork becomes a typed name card. The earlier contour/hatching study is retained as collapsed, explicitly superseded history on [sketches.html](sketches.html). This replaces the original provisional B choice; likeness and generated assets remain attributable to the shared portrait lane.

7. **Preserve the archive's object behavior.** Brief 3.6 and the approved round 02 deck become a scoped component with the same measured motion, real pull/flight/return handoff, borderless prints and seeded curl. The scene pauses off-route. It needs a substantial local stage, and photographs remain dependent on the existing studio asset directories.

8. **Make continuity a visitor-owned copy.** Brief section 9 becomes one versioned local journey: ink, selected sessions, arrangements, archive state, seed and played/hint flags. A compressed fragment carries a snapshot; importing creates a new local fork and consumes the fragment only after persistence succeeds. Validation rejects malformed envelopes before adoption. This avoids accounts, but long links are awkward to transport and browser storage is not a backup service.

9. **Export the composition, not the camera.** Brief 3.3 and 3.9 become a full PNG and browser-printed A1 landscape PDF with all four agenda days, visitor/mind ink, anchored circles and the mark with 27. Temporary layout changes are restored after success or failure. The finite poster includes eight featured faces and the current archive selection, not all 77 biographies or all 107 photographs. The mail offer describes a future service.

10. **Keep the mind quiet, useful and connected.** Brief 3.5, 3.10 and sections 7, 8 and 10 inform the short question, written bubbles, restrained hints, typewriter blocks and explicit replay/skip. Section 11 makes intelligence integral on the published preview too. One base URL in `studio.js`, `window.ETS27_MIND_BASE`, takes an explicit `?mind=` override and otherwise uses the local review proxy when served there. A configured hosted endpoint uses the same text/drawing interface; the shared guarded Worker is separately coordinated. An unavailable service has handwritten guidance and useful routes. The final [mind consensus](../THE-MIND.md) specifies the shared capability list, voice and production controls; [THE-MIND-astra.md](../THE-MIND-astra.md) preserves the earlier analysis.

## Functional scope

| Area | Implemented scope |
| --- | --- |
| Opening and navigation | Approved reveal adaptation, mark menu, direct routes, camera transitions, overview, keyboard controls and reduced-motion branches. |
| Agenda | Four days, 50 ETS26-derived sample sessions, geometric and manual selection, circles-only view, clash preview and sample calendar download. |
| People | Eight movable featured portraits; 77 searchable profiles; available roles, organizations, biographies and sample session links; photograph reveal by pointer or keyboard. |
| Portrait data | Shared approved-avatar manifest. Null, absent or failed files use typed name cards, never the superseded engine sketches. |
| Archive | 112 moments: 107 client photographs and five written cards, with year selection, deck navigation, print reveal and print arrangement. |
| Other places | Venue explicitly unannounced, Austin/date information, external registration, about/contact links and the mind question. No checkout or registration write. |
| Paper | Four inks, three nibs, section-local user/mind layers, independent undo, replay, local persistence, snapshot sharing and whole-poster export. |
| Mind transport | Text SSE and bounded drawing JSON through one configured local or hosted base. Authored text and deterministic drawing remain the unavailable-service fallback. |

## Source and license status

The paper, lettering, mark, cursor, print renderer and audio engines come from the approved studio rounds. ETS photographs remain referenced in their existing client directories. Portrait URLs come from the sample fixture; their attribution is retained in the derived drawing records. This work grants no new rights to those photographs.

Kalam and Special Elite load from Google Fonts; no font binaries were copied. Special Elite is the provisional typewriter face. Chapter 11 remains subject to purchase of the appropriate web license and delivery of a real font file, as recorded in the [brand font note](../../../brand/fonts/README.md).

Pinned CDN dependencies are Lenis 1.3.27, MIT licensed, and dom-to-image-more 3.11.0, MIT licensed. Their locations and license links are in [HANDOVER.md](HANDOVER.md). The owner's selected ambient recording still needs clearance or replacement before production launch. The stock doodle sheet was a style reference, not an imported asset.

## Evidence and boundaries

The plan and first visible milestone each received four independent refutations, preserved in [reviews/](reviews/) with the coordinator's synthesis in [pal-log.md](pal-log.md). They identified real defects, including malformed journey adoption, repeated-link restoration, crowded phone controls and a two-page initial PDF. Later journey and export checks supersede those specific earlier failures; the reviews are not final approval.

The retained export is an actual 4,200 × 3,300 application PNG. The actual PDF is one A1 landscape page; its rasterized page and the PNG were visually inspected. All four days and 50 sessions appear, including drawings on days one and four, independent mind strokes and a moved portrait. State was unchanged after successful PNG, PDF preparation/restoration and forced renderer failure. See [export-NOTES.md](export-NOTES.md) and [HANDOVER.md](HANDOVER.md) for the evidence files and platform limits.

Phone checks use a 390 × 844 Chromium touch proxy at 2×, not a physical iPhone. Native Safari, native file sharing, calendar import and audible sound quality remain unverified. Individual likenesses, poster hierarchy, hand-drawn treatment of secondary controls and phone density remain design judgments. The hosted Worker and generated portrait batch are shared lanes outside this team's folder; their deployment, spend configuration and generation are not claimed as this team's work. Account/passkey continuity and fulfillment are not built.


## Final local result

[Independent verification](verification.md) finished with no reproduced local blocking defect. The last phone retest covered actual Clear/Undo taps, cobalt/chisel inheritance by the mind, saved portrait position, menu movement and the quiet action. Marker headings preserve the original semantic text and wrapping; their layout was compared at 320, 390, 768 and 1440 pixels. The completed handover links the exact evidence and separates native-device, production AI, fixed-sheet geometry and portrait-quality limits from tested behavior.


The late owner decisions are incorporated: open-wrist lifting cursors, the chosen shared solid-mass portraits, and the shared hosted mind client. The final manifest supplies 58 portraits and explicitly leaves 19 profiles as typed name cards. Current people and export evidence is linked from the handover. The one-page A1 PDF is 23.59 MiB. Hosted transport checks use intercepted responses; public inference deployment and the deeper AI pass remain separately coordinated.