The loop closes: ticket -> toast -> spread -> ENTER -> verdict -> next day.
- judging.ts: 9 weighted criteria, each reading the same fields the knife was
pushing around, so every line of the scorecard points at something real
("0.78 against 0.68 asked", "thick — thin asked", "28% burnt").
- lines.ts: ~45 lines keyed to whichever criterion actually decided the score,
so the verdict and the scorecard always agree — the verdict just has feelings
about it. MITEY has its own vocabulary.
- judge.ts: the toast turns on a pedestal under a spotlight, grade stamps in,
heatmap toggle for browning/spread. The generated inspector reacts by grade.
- orders.ts: seven handwritten days, then procedural. Day 1 is soft butter on
white; day 7 is a translucent film of MITEY on wet sourdough with fridge-hard
butter and a steak knife.
The find: every art colour was authored as sRGB and fed straight into a linear
lighting pipeline. Linear 0.14 encodes back out to sRGB ~0.4, so "near-black"
MITEY rendered as TAN and saturated butter washed to pale cream. This was the
root cause of the legibility fights in M0 and M2 — I'd been treating the symptom
by pushing the specular around. One line (albedo = pow(albedo, 2.2), mixing
stays in sRGB because that's the space the palette was picked in) and the whole
art direction landed: MITEY is genuinely black, butter is butter, the crust went
from cream to a rich golden brown.
Also: the specular lobe was far too broad. The slice is flat with the light and
camera both above it, so dot(N,H) ~0.98 everywhere and a wide lobe blankets the
whole slice in white. Tightened, so only ridges tilted into the light catch —
which is what a spread actually looks like.
The slice rolls its own lighting and ignores scene lights, so the judge's
spotlight did nothing to it; it now swaps its own rig for presentation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
