Coherent bodies of work that are not prerequisites for anything. Do them because they are worth doing, not because a track told you to.
The tracks are the main paths: ordered, cumulative, and designed so each one ends in a capability you can describe.
A side quest is different. It is a coherent body of work that does not sit on any track’s critical path. Finishing one does not put you further along a track, and you do not need to have finished a track to start one. It is worth doing on its own terms, and in at least one case it is worth more to a lab than most of what surrounds it.
They are listed separately rather than folded into a track for a reason. Material buried inside a sequence gets read as “step 7 of 12,” which is exactly the wrong frame for something you might reasonably spend a month on and never touch the rest.
Two built, and one named because the gap is real, not because it is ready. Naming a category and then padding it would defeat the point of having one.
The two built quests form a natural pair: the first trains the identification skill, the second is the proofreading work that skill exists for. Each stands alone, but the first ends exactly where the second’s hard prerequisite begins.
The EM identification training behind competent proofreading: the compartment and glia cues from Units 05–07 pulled into one sequence, a unified axon–dendrite–glia decision checklist, a self-run calibration drill on a real public volume, and the mapping from anatomy cues to merge and split calls.
Correcting automated reconstruction errors, treated properly: as an allocation problem under a fixed budget rather than as cleanup that ends when the data looks right. Around 17,000 words of reference material, a full technical unit, five worked scenarios, and a portfolio artifact a lab can read.
A hosted drill on native-resolution EM crops with known ground truth and planted errors, scoring into a confusion matrix and reporting accuracy within your own high-confidence calls. Units 05–07 describe how to build one and argue for why it matters. Neuroanatomy for Proofreaders now carries a self-run substitute against released segmentations, but the curated corpus itself does not exist. Listed here so the gap stays visible.