Presentation QA Mascots 036: Read-First Review of 4 Records

Maintenance ID: 0.1.00206.mascots-036 Date: 2026-10-08 Scope: content/mascots/ — the 4 records assigned by workload issue #763 (404.404sy-mclostalot.md, 405.method-not-allowed-mel.md, 408.the-half-held-breath.md, 409.ledger-snag.md)

What changed

• Read all four assigned records in full, frontmatter through final line, including addendum comments, aphorism, haiku, and limerick residue sections.
• 404.404sy-mclostalot.md line 31: inserted one blank line between the final ## 🧯 Known System Messages list item and the sentence "Formal navigation collapse records are filed under the relatedLorelog case numbers." The sentence abutted the list and was lazily absorbed into the closing <li> (verified in compiled HTML: relatedLorelog case numbers.</li>). Sibling records carry this footnote as a standalone paragraph (e.g. 301.friendrick-the-extant.md line 52). Blank line only; no words touched.
• 408.the-half-held-breath.md line 20: bolded "the pause between intention and arrival, stretched until neither survives" — the record's definitional thesis, echoed verbatim as its own aphorism at line 43. Asterisks only.
• 409.ledger-snag.md line 19: bolded "It has been waiting since 2018." — the biography's deadpan landing; the mechanism beat is already carried by italic *embodies* earlier in the sentence. Asterisks only.

What was deliberately left alone

• 405.method-not-allowed-mel.md — no edits. The prose already carries its bold pivot ("not the correct kind of doing", line 15); the emphasis budget is spent. The stat block at lines 23–26 follows the intro prose rather than preceding it — order is authorial, not normalized.
• All frontmatter, canonical IDs, tags, titles, anchors ({#...}), link targets, quoted material, lists, headings, stat blocks, and every existing emphasis marker — including 404's dense bold/italic limerick cycle (lines 494–732) and **ROUTING SUCCESS CONFIRMED** (line 669), 408's verse italics, and 409's *embodies*.
• All verse line and stanza structure: hard-break census confirms every non-final verse line in 404, 408, and 409 already carries the two-space break. No #824-class drift in those three records; nothing added, removed, or adjusted.
• 404's intentional aphorism duplication (lines 215–232 recur at 234–250), the > epigraph tail (line 41), the ### Navigation Collapse/## Haikus {#haikus-2} ordering quirk (lines 306–308), and he/she pronoun drift — archival residue, preserved.
• 409's title/slug divergence (title "Ledger Snarl", path and ### Ledger Snag limerick heading say "snag") — historical naming residue; IDs and titles are protected.
• 405's "coma-directive" tag and the stat-block position — residue, preserved.

Flagged needs decision (not edited)

• 405.method-not-allowed-mel.md lines 113–141: four limerick stanzas ("A structural limit was breached" … "And every old boundary crossed") lack the two-space hard breaks that every other stanza in the record carries, and compile as run-on <p> blocks. Protected verse region — outside scripts/fix_verse_hard_breaks.py scope (limericks/, haikus/, ## Related Haikus/Limericks only); awaits maintainer waiver or scope extension, per the mascots-034 precedent.
• 404.404sy-mclostalot.md line 31 (now 32): relatedLorelog fused token — probable missing space ("related Lorelog"), a word-level defect outside presentation scope. The same token appears in at least eight sibling mascot records (019, 050, 065, 070, 072, 226, 301, 005); flagged once here for the class, consistent with the mascots-030 flag.
• 408.the-half-held-breath.md line 23 and 409.ledger-snag.md line 22: orphaned stat-block lines rendered as lone <li> bullets directly after the biography (- Response Time: Pending, - Dispute Resolution: …). Nonstandard stat-block convention — thematically apt residue, but relocating them into the header stat block is a maintainer call, not a presentation edit.

Verification performed

• git diff programmatic check per file: 404 adds one blank line and nothing else; 408/409 paired lines byte-identical modulo ** markers. Zero word, order, ID, link, or frontmatter changes.
• Read-only whitespace census (awk) over all verse regions: hard breaks present on every non-final verse line in 404/408/409; the four run-on stanzas in 405 enumerated above.
• Absorption sweep (awk for text abutting list/blockquote/heading lines) across all four records: only 404:31 (repaired) and the deliberate 404:41 > epigraph tail found.
• BORIS_BIN=/Users/tbuddy/dev/filed.fyi/bin/boris ./bin/validate_graph.sh — passed pre-edit and post-edit (graph diagnostics, verse residue check, HTML ID audit 0 dupes, filed certification byte-for-byte).
• Compiled-article inspection post-build: M-0404.html footnote now renders as its own <p> after the </ul>; M-0408.html and M-0409.html pivots render <strong>; M-0405.html untouched and confirms the run-on <p> that grounds the needs decision flag.

Unresolved follow-up

• The three needs decision flags above keep #763 open until the maintainer resolves or explicitly waives them: the 405 run-on limerick block (alongside any sibling regions in the same condition), the relatedLorelog fused-word class, and the orphaned stat-bullet convention shared by 408/409.