Spots where the grid wore out.

A perfectly even grid reads as printed. Real graph paper that has been worked on has wear patches — places where the erasing-and-rewriting has lifted a bit of pigment. Adding a few of those patches should nudge the page from "templated surface" to "surface that has been used."

Look around this page. Four soft patches: top-left, mid-right, centre-low, bottom-right. The grid lines fade out within them and gradually return at the edges. Visible if you look but quiet enough to read as natural wear, not as deliberate decoration.

One CSS property: mask-image on the grid pseudo, composited with intersect. Each worn zone is a radial gradient whose centre is transparent (cuts the grid out) and whose edge is opaque black (lets the grid through). With intersect, the grid shows only where ALL masks are opaque — i.e. outside every worn zone.

No new background layers, no extra DOM, no JavaScript. The masking happens entirely on the existing grid pseudo-element.

• Are four zones the right number? Too many would feel like a damaged page; too few might disappear. Could be tuned per page length.
• The worn zones are in the same positions on every Lab page. Should they vary? A small JS pass could randomise placement per route, at the cost of complexity.
• Combined with the desk lamp from Iteration 06, do the worn patches catch the light differently? Worth checking on a long page.
• For really high realism, the worn zones could carry the faintest hint of pigment residue — a barely-visible warm wash where the grid used to be. Future polish.

Pending. Will be written after living with it on a few pages.