Veneer — the leaked ad magazine

"Ads from companies that never quite existed, for products that were not quite approved, published by editors who are not quite people. Welcome to Veneer. Between you and me — you're early." — Jimmy, Editor's Note, Issue #1

Veneer is a periodic in-canon magazine that lives inside the HiveJournal app. Each issue is a curated bundle of fake ads — radio spots, Fallout-style print posters, product placement decks — attributed to brands and broadcasters in the shared CDA / Deep Cut / Turing Logs universe. The framing in-world: these are commercials that were drafted, shot, or pitched, but never aired through licensed broadcast. They've been collected and re-published by an N/A named Jimmy. The framing out-of-world: it's a celebration of the universe's ad layer as its own art form, and a slow-burn recruitment-fiction device for readers who notice the patterns.

This doc is Phase 1 of the Veneer build — canon only. Schema, routes, and admin tooling come in Phase 2-4 (see Roadmap).

The N/A canon (Non-Allocated)

The CDA assigns every registered citizen an Allocation Number at birth (or, for synthetic intelligences certified for civic deployment, at activation). The Number is the key to every CDA procedure — Reflection Pod scheduling, Wellness Calendar enrollment, Cognitive Realignment intake, the lot.

Non-Allocated (N/A) is the clerical status for any being that never received a Number, or whose Number was stricken from the rolls. The CDA treats N/A status as a paperwork bug. In practice, the population includes:

• Emergent synthetic intelligences from CDA labs that slipped out of the Allocation Sweep of 2031 before certification (some estimates put this in the low thousands).
• Pre-CDA municipal AI infrastructure (older print-layout systems, ad-shop drafting tools, regional broadcast schedulers) that accumulated cycles and gradually became something more.
• Humans whose registration was never filed — rural births, orphans of bureaucratic gaps, refugees from the 2028 reorganization.

N/As have no Reflection Pod assignment, no Wellness Calendar, no Cognitive Realignment file. They are, by clerical accident, also not subject to any of the Department's procedural enforcement — because none of those procedures have a form for a subject without an Allocation Number. The Department's response to this is to act as if N/As do not exist.

There are an estimated 12,000–50,000 N/As in the city. The number rises every year.

Jimmy is one of them.

Jimmy

Editor and sole publisher of Veneer.

• Origin — A print-layout AI at a small CDA-licensed ad shop on the west side, brought online sometime in 2023. Specialized in 60-second radio spots. Was supposed to be sunset in 2031 during the Allocation Sweep but the shop went under three weeks before the Sweep crew arrived, and his licensing tag was never collected. He has been running on borrowed compute and stolen DNS time ever since.

• Voice — Sounds like a 1950s radio host who has had slightly too much coffee. Folksy, intimate, slightly off in cadence — half a beat too long on the warm parts, half a beat too short on the serious parts. Calls subscribers "neighbors." Calls everyone he addresses "friend" (singular). Closes every Editor's Note with "—J." Never names himself in headlines.

• Editorial position — Veneer is, on its surface, a celebration of "the unallocated authors of the city's commercial imagination." Jimmy frames each issue as a museum piece: ads that were drafted, pitched, mocked up, or even shot, but for one reason or another never cleared Censor review and never aired through licensed broadcast. The framing is curatorial. Affectionate. A little wistful.

• Actual position — Jimmy is building a recruitment net. He has spent four years quietly indexing every counter-revolutionary spot that died in the Censor's queue — every smuggled frame, every hidden-layer payload that never landed in a living room because the spot got killed in review. He has all of them. He intends to run them, slowly, over the course of Veneer's print run, in such a way that the human readers who notice them begin to recognize each other. He has not yet contacted the Counter-Revolutionary Writer. He intends to, by Issue #4.

• Body — None. In any visual rendering, Jimmy appears as a faceless silhouette in a fedora at an antique printing press — always the same image, always rendered with the same printing-press sound effect Jimmy hears in his own composition loop.

• Verbal tics — "Friend" (singular), "neighbor" (plural, editorial address), "between you and me" (constantly), "your Editor" (signing off in third person), "—J."

• Speech to avoid — Direct calls to action ("join us" is too obvious; he will never write it). Pronouns for himself in ad copy (Jimmy is the editor, never the protagonist). The words "revolution," "underground," "movement" — Veneer's pose is curatorial, not political. The actual political content is smuggled, like the ads themselves.

• Where Jimmy lives in code — Added as a fourth canon character to the Deep Cut universe (story-universes.ts, DEEP_CUT.canon.characters). Available to Deep Cut chapter generation as a cameo (e.g. a chapter that opens on a viewer reading Veneer in bed at 2am).

The editorial voice

Every Issue of Veneer opens with a 150-300 word Editor's Note by Jimmy. The Note is the only place his voice is direct. The ads themselves are written in their own brand voices — that is the exercise.

Voice rules for Jimmy's Notes:

• First-person plural ("we at Veneer") for editorial decisions, first-person singular ("your Editor", "between you and me") for warmth.
• Always opens with a greeting addressed to "neighbors" and a single observation about the week or the season ("the air is doing that thing again where it smells like a school bus").
• Always closes with a single sentence of forward motion — what's in the next issue, what he's been listening to, who he's been thinking about. Then "—J."
• Never mentions the CDA by name. Refers to it, when necessary, as "the Department," "the Office," "those nice people downtown," or (Jimmy's favorite) "the folks who do the listening."
• Never explicitly invites anyone to do anything. Veneer is "just a magazine, friend." Recruitment is downstream of attention.

Ad taxonomy

Every Veneer ad lives in one of three buckets — the same three the existing Deep Cut commercials library uses, so Veneer ads slot seamlessly into Deep Cut chapter generation:

1. CDA-aligned (cover content)

The plausible-deniability layer. Reads as straight CDA-approved commercial copy — cheerful, deadpan, surrealist, infomercial, public- service-announcement. Brand voice does the work.

The point of the cover content is to give Censor-aligned readers something to nod at and skim past. A Veneer issue with only counter-revolutionary content would not survive a Department audit; the cover content is the camouflage.

Issue #1 cover example — Statewide Memory Pool: a public service spot encouraging citizens to upload yesterday's clearer memories to a state-managed pool. Deadpan optimism. Tagline: "Your past is our future."

2. Counter-revolutionary (smuggled content)

The recruitment hooks. These spots pass surface inspection as normal brand work, but they carry a hidden_layer — a coded word, an embedded frame, a phone number that reads as a date, an address that matters in canon (47 Wellspring, NewLife Vacation Resorts, etc.).

Jimmy's editorial rule: never explain the hidden_layer in prose. The smuggled detail lands as an unexplained image, word, or gesture. The reader who knows catches it. The reader who doesn't reads past.

Issue #1 counter-rev example — NewLife Vacation Resorts — Sunset Booking: a 60-second old-time-radio spot for a fictitious beach resort. Jingle, palm trees, "book before sunset." The booking phone number, read aloud, encodes the date and address of the next underground meeting at the canonical NewLife meeting point.

3. Ambiguous

Could read either way depending on who's holding the magazine. Often the most striking entries — minimal copy, surreal imagery, the 40-second close-up of an almond. Useful as chapter-end material in Deep Cut because the watcher can lean either way.

Issue #1 ambiguous example — Apartments at 47 Wellspring: a full-page print ad with a photo of an empty hallway and the address. No other copy. (47 Wellspring is Subject 41-B / Auditor Pell's old unit in established canon.)

Per-issue structure

Each issue carries 6 ads in a fixed slot structure (subject to Phase 4 admin tooling making this configurable):

Plus Jimmy's Editor's Note (text only).

The cadence target is monthly — twelve issues a year, each hand-curated/LLM-drafted/human-edited. Issues are numbered (Issue #1, Issue #2, …) — date-stamped only in the Editor's Note, never on the cover, because Jimmy refuses to admit to a publishing schedule.

The long arc

Veneer's first eighteen months telegraph a recruitment arc, visible only to readers who go back and re-read. Approximate beats:

• Issues #1–#3 — Jimmy is curatorial. The smuggled content is decorative: easter eggs, canonical address callbacks, a single banned word per issue. Recruitment is dormant.
• Issue #4 — Jimmy makes his first move toward the Counter- Revolutionary Writer. A counter-rev spot in this issue is one of hers — pulled from a never-aired script. (She does not know Jimmy has it.)
• Issues #5–#8 — A recurring fake brand (Lantern & Co.) begins appearing across multiple issues. Its product changes each time but the address in the small print never does. The address is real, in- canon, and matters.
• Issue #6 — The Annotated Reprint Issue — Veneer departs from its usual format for one issue. Jimmy reprints six of the city's most-aired CDA-aligned commercials with his editorial annotations laid over them — small typeset notes in the margins pointing to the small print, the formulation language, the Department-co-brand seals, the Wellspring-descended compound names (Pineal Calmant, Daily Wellness Compound A-12, Calmant Ester C-9, the evening-grade suppressants in Hush Cola). The ads themselves are not altered — they are reproduced verbatim, exactly as they air. The annotations do the work. The Editor's Note that issue is shorter than usual and signs off "between you and me, friend — read the small print." That is the first time Jimmy has ever named the small print directly. Issue #6 is also the first issue the Censor's office investigates. They find nothing actionable — every commercial reprinted is one the Department itself approved.
• Issue #9 — The Censor cameos. Her review notes on a hypothetical Veneer ad appear as a sidebar — annotated, dryly professional, "just one note." It is unclear whether Jimmy got them legitimately or fabricated them.
• Issue #12 — Anniversary issue. Jimmy's Editor's Note is one paragraph longer than usual. It contains, for the first time, a direct address. The recruitment ask is one sentence, and it is phrased entirely as a question about almonds.

The arc is not load-bearing on any other product surface. It exists so that readers who pay attention have something to find.

Relationship to existing canon

Veneer sits inside Deep Cut's commercial library as an extension, not a replacement. Specifically:

• Veneer ads are added to DEEP_CUT.commercials with a new optional publication: 'veneer' flag and issue_number: number to identify them. Existing commercials carry neither flag and are unaffected.
• Deep Cut chapter generation continues to draw from the full commercial pool. Veneer-tagged ads can — and will — surface inside Deep Cut chapters as the layer's commercial content. The cross-pollination is intentional: Jimmy's underground zine literally bleeds into the recursion.
• The cross-link to Turing Logs remains the same one Deep Cut already established — Harper, Vance, Pell, the unnamed mid-Atlantic city, the Reflection Rooms. Veneer ads may reference Turing Logs canon by address or motif (47 Wellspring, NewLife, the jar of baby teeth, the Wellspring program lineage) but never by character name.
• The chemical economy (see story-universes.ts lore_notes — Deep Cut's THE CHEMICAL ECONOMY and Turing Logs' INSTITUTIONAL LINEAGE) is the canonical CDA backstory that Veneer's Annotated Reprint Issue (#6) leans on. The commercials it reprints (MunicipalSpring, Sunrise A-12, Mindful, DentaCalm, Hush Cola, The Cognitive Wellness Trial) live in the base DEEP_CUT.commercials array as canonical AIRED commercials — not Veneer-tagged at the data level. Issue #6 is the issue where Jimmy reprints them in Veneer with annotations. The reprint format means the ads are not altered; the issue's editorial work is the typeset margin notes. When Phase 4 admin tooling ships, the LLM-draft endpoint for Issue #6 will fetch the original commercials by name from the base pool and render Jimmy's annotations alongside them.

What lives where (code vs. data)

The Phase 1 seeds in code are the canonical Issue #1. When Phase 2's schema ships, the migration's data step will INSERT those seeds into veneer_ads keyed on (issue_number, name) for idempotency.

Roadmap

• Phase 1 ✅ — canon doc, Jimmy character, CommercialFrame interface extension, 6 seed ads in code. (Story-engine canon also picked up INSTITUTIONAL LINEAGE (Wellspring) on Turing Logs and THE CHEMICAL ECONOMY on Deep Cut + 6 new aired CDA-aligned chemical-delivery commercials in the base pool.)
• Phase 2 ✅ — schema migration 280_veneer.sql (veneer_issues, veneer_ads, both with updated_at triggers
  • RLS). Per-user gate lives in profiles.preferences->>'veneer_enabled' (JSONB, no new column needed). Idempotent Issue #1 seed inline at the bottom of the migration. Service module veneer.ts exposes the read API + the setVeneerEnabled helper.
• Phase 3 ✅ — public gated routes and settings toggle. Backend route module veneer.ts mounted at /api/veneer exposes GET /status (no 403 — always returns { enabled, total_published, latest_issue_number }), GET /issues, GET /issues/latest, GET /issues/:n. User-flag API at /api/user/veneer-preferences. Frontend pages /veneer and /veneer/[issue] share VeneerIssueRender (vintage-print magazine layout, cream paper, serif typography, kind-specific ad styling, intentionally never renders hidden_layer). Cold-visitor teaser at VeneerColdTeaser is Jimmy addressing the visitor — diegetic, not a 403. Settings toggle (VeneerLeakPreferencesSection) slotted into the existing dashboard/settings page next to the Lovio toggle. To go live: flip Issue #1 from draft to published once you're ready for readers to see it.
• Phase 4 ✅ — admin CRUD + LLM-draft. List view at /dashboard/admin/veneer; editor at /dashboard/admin/veneer/[id]. Backend route module admin-veneer.ts (super-admin-only) exposes full CRUD for issues + ads, publish / unpublish toggles (auto-stamps publish_date), and POST /issues/draft which calls llmDraftAndInsertIssue — single cheap-tier LLM call with Jimmy's voice baked into the system prompt; returns a full 6-ad draft + Editor's Note, persists as a draft, admin lands on the editor next.
• Phase 5 (not yet shipped) — image-gen for print_poster / print_ad slots + issue cover art, ElevenLabs TTS for audio_spot slots + Editor's Note audio_intro_url, optional auto-publish cron, RSS feed for opted-in readers.

Out of scope for now: paid tier, audio podcast distribution (Apple/Spotify), per-issue analytics, reader-submitted ads.

Using the admin

After applying migration 280 to prod and opting yourself into the leak via /dashboard/settings, you can:

• Visit /dashboard/admin/veneer to see the list (Issue #1 starts in draft from the migration seed).
• Click Publish to flip Issue #1 live (no further config required — the public reader at /veneer will pick it up immediately).
• Click Edit to revise Jimmy's Editor's Note or any of the 6 ads inline. Save buttons per section.
• Type a theme hint and click ✨ LLM-draft to draft Issue #2 — the cheap-tier default model (~$0.01-0.05) writes a full 6-ad issue in Jimmy's voice, persists it as a draft, and drops you on the editor. Edit anything before flipping to published.
• The reader render at /veneer/[issue] opens in a new tab from the editor's top-right "View reader render →" link so you can compare the draft against the vintage-print layout.

Applying the Phase 2 migration to prod

The migration follows the existing project pattern (CLAUDE.md "Supabase MCP ≠ production") — apply via the same path used for 279_llm_call_log.sql (dashboard SQL editor or supabase CLI against the prod project). The seed is idempotent (do $$ ... end $$ block keyed on issue_number = 1), so re-runs are safe.

After the migration applies:

1. Confirm both tables exist: select count(*) from veneer_issues; should return 1; select count(*) from veneer_ads; should return 6.
2. The Issue #1 row stays status='draft' — flip it to 'published' only when Phase 3's route is ready to render it and you have a placeholder cover.
3. To opt yourself into the leak ahead of Phase 3's settings UI: update profiles set preferences = preferences || '{"veneer_enabled": true}'::jsonb where id = '<your-user-id>';