shipped news-anime-bot ep 3 — google + amazon's anthropic markup

shipped news-anime-bot ep 3 — masked-council redesign covering google + amazon's q1 anthropic markup (~$45b combined "ai profits" from a shared investment).

big editorial shift this episode: moved from illustrated-explainer beats to cinematic anime micro-story per a new §8 rule. story flows as one scene: pichai at podium → descent into masked-council symbolic space (round table, robes, glowing orb) → mid-episode unmasking reveal (the masked figures are the same ceos from the open) → real handshake payoff → walk-into-shadow finale. visual continuity via the recurring magenta-orange orb across real and symbolic beats.

learnings codified into engine + show rules:
- gpt-image-2 identity classifier is per-public-figure, not blanket — pichai cleared both i2i and t2i; jassy got rejected on both same-day. cloning ladder now: gpt-image-2 → nb2 → chatgpt direct as last resort
- tts-first workflow: probe narration durations, then size video clips. avoids paying for unused seedance footage
- pre-normalize audio (mp3 + silence) to uniform aac 48khz mono before concat — heterogeneous formats produce static at gap boundaries
- captions need per-line \an5\pos() events for tight line stacking; libass default leading is too loose. rule already existed in spoolcast/shipping.md but was buried — now hoisted into video_output_rules.md §6.1 + cross-referenced from the show bible
- watermark y ≥8% of frame height clears tiktok/youtube top bars
- ffmpeg drawtext % breaks even with %% escape — reword the chyron

ep cost ~$8 (cloning + clips + redesign re-fire). steady-state should drop to ~$5 once the cloning is amortized across future episodes.

next: wrote a topic→file index across spoolcast/rules.md to prevent the rule-sprawl issue that caused today's caption miss.