Patch Notes #14

Habsburgs, Japanese zoning, the worst music

I started writing a new Patch Notes and ended up with 500 words on the first link, so I decided it deserved to be its own post. While I work on finishing that and a few other pieces, here’s a belated update.

• Feeling Blessed: At the Habsburg convention in Plano by Christopher Hooks:
  There was apparently a Habsburg (yes, those Habsburgs) revivalist convention in Plano, Texas, a few miles from where I grew up. There are so many gems in this piece, including Texas being Habsburg land:

  Tales were told of a time and place when there was a path, whether those paths were “being the Habsburg emperor” or “serving the Habsburg emperor.” Eduard Habsburg, currently the ambassador to the Vatican of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, noted that Texas was once Habsburg land—through the descendants of Charles V of Spain, who oversaw the boom years of Spanish colonialism. To his mind, he said, it still is. The audience cooed.

  On the push to win sainthood for Emperor Karl I, the last Habsburg:

  After he became emperor, he enlisted the help of German chemical warfare experts for his own army. At the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo in 1917, his forces sprayed the Italian army with poison gas and smashed them, leading to some three hundred thousand enemy casualties, a defeat so bad it helped pave the way for Mussolini’s rise to power five years later. Karl is perhaps the only current candidate for sainthood who has drowned his enemies in chlorine gas.

• This 2014 post on Japanese zoning laws and the differences vs US zoning shows how Japanese cities end up with a greater diversity of commercial and residential spaces.
  
  A big difference is that in Japan, when an area is zoned for something, say large commercial stores, it automatically gets zoned for “lesser” (as in less disruptive) categories in the same zone, like neighborhood shops, or smaller apartment buildings:

  Same thing for offices, if they want to build offices, they must zone for at least a Category II mid-rise residential zone, which means in practice apartments with at least 3-4 stories. If they want to allow bigger offices, they must also allow bigger residential buildings and stores in the same zone. This "bundling" of uses imposes mixed use developments on cities.

  In the US, we typically zone areas for one specific use like schools or commercial. Building something different requires going through the onerous process of changing the zoning. In Japan, the flexibility to build a variety of things, as long as you are under the zone’s maximum “nuisance level”, results in a more fluid (and efficient) use of space according to supply and demand:

  If there is more land than needed for commercial uses in a commercial zone, for example, then you can still build residential uses there, until commercial promoters actually come to need the space and buy the buildings from current residents.

• A chart from Andrew Van Dam at the Washington Post. If we’re thinking in terms of patch notes for reality, players are not fans of the current patch:

  

  Some of these are debatable, but some are objectively wrong. (The most crime? The most war?) Some of the subjective ones seem suspect too. Really, the worst cuisine or the worst television? But there’s more going on here:

  Marketing researcher Bill Page said that by broadly asking when music, sports or crime were worst, instead of getting ratings for specific years or items, YouGov got answers to a question they didn’t ask.
  

  “When you ask about ‘worst,’ you’re not asking for an actual opinion,” Page said. “You’re asking, ‘Are you predisposed to think things get worse?’”
  

  “There’s plenty of times surveys unintentionally don’t measure what they claim to,” his colleague Zac Anesbury added.
  

  YouGov actually measured what academics call “declinism,” his bigwig colleague Carl Driesener explained. He looked a tiny bit offended when we asked if that was a real term or slang they’d coined on the spot. But in our defense, only a few minutes had passed since they had claimed “cozzie livs” was Australian for “the cost of living crisis.”¹

• Sorry, I only drink wine that was aged listening to the Nier Automata soundtrack now:

  Japanese retailer Onkyo Direct are selling two varieties of official Nier: Automata wine, matured in barrels with speakers attached to them that exclusively pump out the character action games’ soundtrack. The two red wines - named 9S and 2B for Automata’s android heroes - were each force-fed different playlists selected from the game’s soundtrack.

  

• Finally, speaking of music, I recently went to EDC again after my first trip last year. I’ve been mulling over writing something new about it, but in the meantime, here are a few of my favorite sets from this year.

  • Four Tet:

  • Excision—not at all what I expected to enjoy, but… you had to be there, especially for the unhinged visuals:

  • Sub Focus—I sadly missed seeing this live, but it has been one of my favorite sets uploaded, especially since the sunrise set for Worship doesn’t have a full recording:

  • (Updated) WORSHIP—the day I after I posted this, the set finally got uploaded! Probably my favorite set of the weekend:
    

1. “Cozzie livs” was Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year, along with runner-ups like “bopo” for body positivity, and “angry water” for carbonated water, all of which sound extremely Australian.