Canon
Moving to Cheyenne Street
The truck came at seven. Nobody remembers who drove it.
Timelines · Memory · Evidence
Build a spine of what happened. Invite the people who were there. Where accounts conflict, the conflict becomes part of the story instead of being flattened away.
This is the real thing, running with nothing behind it. Change the words, switch how it reads, try a few looks. Nothing is saved and nothing is watching.
The truck came at seven. Nobody remembers who drove it.
Eight years old, new to Downey, halfway down the block.
Mum says it was the year of the drought, which cannot be right.
The photograph exists. The date on the back does not match.
A memory is not a fact you look up, and an argument about one is not a bug in the record — it is usually the most interesting thing in it. So every card says which it is, and a contested one can be forked into a reconstruction that runs alongside the original.
Dates work the same way. “Summer 1994” is a real answer. A card is placed as precisely as it is actually known, and it sharpens as people who were there add what they remember.
Asserted to have happened. The spine of the record.
Accounts disagree. Reconstructions can compete beside it, and none of them wins by default.
Deliberately counterfactual, and labelled as such wherever it appears.
One person starts the spine. Everyone who was there adds what they saw, and the record gets better instead of thinner.
Six generations out of one town, assembled from letters, certificates and the two contradictory stories every family has.
Ancient Egypt, Rome, the year a newsroom would rather forget. Scholarly disagreement is modelled, not flattened into one official version.
Statements, timings and the theories that compete over them — with an append-only record of who added what, and when.
A launch, an outage, a migration. Hour by hour, with the accounts of the people who were awake for it.
The job you turned down. The ferry that never sailed. Branch the timeline and follow it, clearly labelled as the fiction it is.
A title and one thing that happened. Private by default, always — you choose later whether anyone else ever sees it.
They add what they saw, in their own words. Agreement strengthens a card; disagreement opens one up.
Twenty starting looks, and everything after that — the shape of a card, the line it sits on, the way one card leans against the others.
Free to start, and free for what most people do with it. Make a board, put one thing on it, and send it to the person who remembers the rest.