site: copy edit — 1 piece tightened

daily-finds.log.md

@@ -5228,3 +5228,20 @@ Amazon: n-a (a free web page).
 - **the-phone-in-your-hand** was the fourth candidate and the closest call of the run. It is genuinely good and it is ranked second on today's shortlist. Held for one reason: its only available image is a 1200×630 OG card, and having already accepted one OG-card hero this run (`the-listening-museum`, above, where there was no alternative at all), taking a second would make it a habit rather than an exception. It is the strongest ungraduated candidate on the board and stays that way until someone can screenshot it.
 - **the-pickle-guys** clears the bar on story and hero and was held on access: Atlas Obscura place pages are Cloudflare-blocked, so the mandatory fact-check would have to run entirely against thepickleguys.com, and the interesting claims (eighty pushcarts, the brine timeline) are historical rather than checkable on a shop's own site. It went into a bundle instead, which is the right home for it today.
 - **newold-computer** remains ungraduated for the third run running, on the same hero gap flagged when it was captured. Recording the count because it is now the second candidate (with `project-espanol`) held purely on media rather than merit.
+
+## 2026-08-07 — copy edit
+
+Fresh-eyes sonnet subagent over all twenty-five pieces written this run (20 find bodies, 2 bundle blurb-plus-intros, 3 review bodies). **One file changed; everything else left alone.**
+
+The edit:
+- `morningprint` (review) — 495 → 431 by the subagent's count, 483 → 419 by the main session's. Six cuts: the "Only the artwork and the verse print. No title, no branding." pair; the closing line about a fresh continuation raising the bar for the next; the "Without that, block art is stripes." tag; "with a one-line style note each"; "not as bytes but"; and the byte-level-protocol clause. Accepted on review — no fact, name, link or claim changed, and the subagent kept the whole July-2026 failure paragraph intact, which was the right instinct and the reason the piece is worth reading.
+
+Two reservations recorded rather than left to be rediscovered:
+1. **"Only the artwork and the verse print. No title, no branding." was a fact, not a flourish.** The README states it and the restraint is part of what makes the object good. Nothing became *wrong* — the blockquote's "one copy, no way to subscribe" carries the adjacent idea — but the review is now quieter about the deliberateness of what is left off the paper. Same shape as the `creakwork12` cut on 08-03.
+2. **"Without that, block art is stripes."** was the sentence that made the `ESC 3` paragraph land for a reader who does not know what line spacing does. The preceding clause ("makes the block rows fuse into continuous fields") still carries the fact, so this is a readability loss rather than an information loss.
+
+The counting-convention drift is now measured for the fourth run running and is unchanged in character: the subagent ran 12 words high on the one file it counted (495 vs 483 before, 431 vs 419 after), the same em-dash and hyphenated-compound tokenisation gap noted on 08-02, 08-03 and 08-04. Both counts put the finished review inside the 250–450 band, so it does not matter here either. Not worth a fix; worth not re-deriving a fifth time.
+
+Format exception honoured again: `joke-eggs-break-up` is 10 words against a 40–90 budget. The subagent was told up front that the joke-find format is the setup and the punchline and nothing else (precedent: `joke-cashew` 13 words on 08-03, `joke-ground-beef` 11 on 08-02, `joke-two-eyes` 14 on 08-01) and correctly left it alone.
+
+One non-finding worth keeping: all nineteen other find bodies measured 61–82 words against the 40–90 band, and the subagent reported finding no ad copy, no throat-clearing openings and no redundant closes in any of them or in either bundle. On a twenty-find day that is the capture stage writing to the charter rather than being trimmed into it afterwards.