R28's gate had no subject and SKIPPED with its reason printed (look.glb was published, verified,
sha1-proven off the depot — and nothing bound it). D bound it in wave 0. The gate is now
permanent, and flags_check is GREEN:
✓ default boot: look.glb BOUND — 6.5s, 64 tracks
✓ the glance REACHES THE GAME — peak 46 of 396 peds glancing · 0 console errors
✓ ?classic=1: look.glb NEVER FETCHED — the zero-fetch-delta covenant holds
✓ ?classic=1: glance inert at the source — 0 of 269 peds, AND the rng stream still draws
That last line is the design, and it is D's cleverness: THE DETERMINISM IS IN THE DRAW, NOT THE
OUTCOME. D takes from a dedicated glanceRng stream always — so the seeded sequence is identical
whether or not a clip exists — and only flips the flag when fleet.lookClip is real. Under
?classic the roll still happens, the flag never sets, nothing is fetched, the covenant stays
byte-identical. A behaviour added without touching a hash.
The gate asserts the clip's ABSENCE under classic, not merely "0 glancing" — because "0
glancing" alone passes on a fleet that failed to load at all. Present-on-default + absent-under-
classic is the pair a broken fleet cannot satisfy.
F'S OWN GATE CRASHED THE SUITE FIRST: the subject check used pg.goto() on a .glb, which starts a
download, aborts the navigation, and took flags_check down before one assertion ran. A gate that
DIES looking for its subject is worse than one that skips — it reports nothing at all and takes
the suite with it. Now it reads the disk. The vacuous-gate law has a sibling: a gate must survive
its own subject being absent.
No tag — wave 0 rides Spike 2's close, gated on John's footage.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>