I am having more fun than I should following the Axios D.C. building madness brackets. The semifinals feature two traditional versus modernist face-offs: EEO building v. MLK library and the National Cathedral v. NMAAHC. Just delightful.
If you haven’t yen seen CGP Grey’s new video in which he ranks the US state flags, please do so now. It is vintage Grey.
The DMV region is 2 for 3 in the good flag department: Maryland’s is in the so-bad-it’s-good category, DC’s is just a really good flag I’m proud to see fly every day. Virginia’s is… quite bad. The seal is good — I love to see Latin in the wild — but as Grey notes, plastering your seal over a blue background does not magically make a flag.
What would make for a good flag of Virginia is the black snake on yellow background design it’s put on its specialty license plates, but of course “Don’t tread on me” has been forever poisoned, and other than the plates it has no particular ties to Virginia. If anything, since Ben Franklin drew the original design Pennsylvania could have use it to replace its own vexicological abomination, but for the toxicity.
No, if Virginia is to lean into its herritage it should put a ball of cotton on the left, a leaf of tobacco on the right, and a congestion-priced highway right down the middle.
As evidence that people can change with age, I present this manual for spaced repetition. Some 20 years ago I would’ve eaten it up — I did, in fact, run SuperMemo on a Palm Tungsten T while in med school — but now the technique seems good for test prep and little else.
For your Saturday reading pleasure: How to Beat Roulette: One Gambler Figured It Out and Won Big
That one gambler was from Croatia, some of his gambling buddies were from Serbia, and the Bloomberg reporter had this typically Balkan interaction:
As I pressed him about computers, he threw up his hands in exasperation and started to argue with his friend. Is he angry, I asked. “No, that’s just how he talks,” the friend replied.
That is indeed just the way we talk.
I made my feelings about Substack known a few days ago, so why should I care that a blue bird pooped on them?
Well, for one, while writing on Substack isn’t the best choice for most people, some do have things to say and say them well. And two, as much as it was clear that Twitter was in a death spiral, well, actually seeing it is quite a bit sadder than I thought it would be. Pour one out…
To put in perspective some recent SCOTUS-related news, I was once, as a federal employee, chastised by the powers to be for not reporting my personal blog as an “outside activity”.
The obsession of prolific Mastodon posters with Twitter is what gets me the most. It's like professors complaining to everyone at a lecture that no one comes to lectures any more. Wrong audience?
Each time I pop into the Midjourney Discord server I feel like I’ve entered a crowded wizards' guild with spells flying all around and no one’s exactly sure what’s going on but my goodness, isn’t it all exciting?
Anyhow, here is my most recent conjuring.
📺 Severance… Well, what is there to be said about Severance? Just hook it to my veins.
I love my current blog template: good typography, pleasant color scheme, Tufte-esque footnotes. Thank you, @pimoore!
But: what knobs should I tweedle to have front page excerpts not show up like this?
It is unseemly.