Ornoth

It doesn’t happen often, but there was an interesting TED talk recently. The topic—a little esoteric for some, perhaps—was flag design, and specifically municipal flag design.

Flags—at least well-designed flags—are cool, so I checked it out.

The talk is structured largely by the five principles of flag design:

1. Keep it simple
2. Use meaningful symbolism
3. Use two or three basic colors
4. No lettering or seals
5. Be distinctive or be related

If you’d like a little more detail, those points are derived from an awesome, easy to read pamphlet called “Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag” by Ted Kaye, who helped draft the much more detailed “Guiding Principles of Flag Design” for the North American Vexillological Association.

The talk was interesting and informative. One of the main points is that most cities just stick their official seals on a solid blue or white background and call it quits. But seals make for the worst flags on the planet.

Why? Because flags are usually seen from a distance, and are either flapping in the breeze or largely obscured when there’s no wind. At a distance, seventy percent of all municipal flags look the same and sameness is anathema for something whose sole purpose is to be distinctive.

Flags are descended from medieval battle standards, which in turn reflect families’ original heraldic coats of arms. When knights—all of them encased in armor—needed the ability to differentiate friend from foe at a distance, having distinctive flags was a matter of life and death. That’s something I saw in practice in the chaotic mass melee battles I observed during my medieval recreationist days.

Heraldry eventually became a more decorative art that led to larger presentations that included not just a family’s coat of arms displayed on a shield or flag, but also other bits of armor like helmets, decorative borders, mottos on scrollwork, and supporting figures like animals or saints to frame the arms. It became this whole big presentation called an “achievement”.

Seals only began to appear after all those extraneous elements were added, so they encompass the entire heraldic achievement, rather than just the escutcheon. If medieval knights put complex seals like that on their shields or their banners, they’d have to do what Japanese businessmen do: meet face to face, present their heraldic devices, bow, and reflect on them for a few moments before figuring out whether they were friends or foes!

Putting a seal on a flag is a lot like printing the Constitution on a postage stamp; although it fits and is convenient, it’s unintelligible and unfit for use either as a readable document or as a postage stamp!

Of course, I was kinda hoping the flags of my city, state, and region might make an appearance in the guy’s talk. Sadly, they didn’t, so now I have to write about them myself.

There are few things I have an emotional identification with so much as the city of Boston. It is my home, like no other place ever was, and no other place ever will be.

Sadly, Boston’s flag is just as terrible as every other crappy-ass hick town in America: a dumb, unintelligible seal, smack in the middle of an empty blue field. A pathetic effort for a city with as much history and distinctiveness as Boston. It was adopted in 1907.

The flag of Massachusetts is absolutely no better: just another shitty seal, this time in an empty white field. It was adopted in 1971, when it sadly replaced a much more usable blue shield bearing a green tree on a white background, which had served perfectly well for sixty years.

And then there’s the flag of New England. Although its origin is unclear, it was well established by 1775 and its use in the Revolutionary War. This is no crappy seal devised by self-inflated (sic) twentieth century bureaucrats! A solid red flag, with a green pine tree in a white canton: pure, bold, simple, and communicating the character of the region it represents.

And because of its vastly superior design, it has been used as a symbol by the New England Revolution supporter clubs, and—just this year—by the player away uniforms of the team itself.

I can guarantee that you won’t ever see individuals, businesses, or sports teams adopting the underwhelming, ineffective, and utterly forgettable flags of Boston or Massachusetts!

Yes, I’m early this week. I’m that good.

Those of you who pick up the Friday Five from my page might want to know that there’s an official Web site at http://fridayfive.org/, and there’s an RSS feed at fridayfive_feed that you can put on your friends page.

What was your first Halloween costume?

The first one I remember was a skeleton. Ha ha, look at the skinny kid in the skeleton costume.
 

What was your best costume and why?

Well, that’d have to be my SCA getup. As a member of the Verminssun clan of the barbaric Veassllurds, I got to prance around in nothing but a loincloth. The front half, including the fox’s head, covered my crotch, and the back half, including his bushy red tail, covered my backside. I got a lot of looks and many comments in that one.
 

Did you ever play a trick on someone who didn't give you a treat?

On Halloween? I doubt it.
 

Do you have any Halloween traditions? (ie: Family pumpkin carving, special dinner before trick or treating, etc.)

Really, no. Halloween, the Samhain cross-quarter day, my birthday, and the end of daylight savings—all depressing events—all come within a few days, and it always marks the beginning of the worst time of year for me. So generally I try to ignore it all and hang onto the last vestiges of summer’s happiness as long as I possibly can.
 

Share your favorite scary story...real or legend!

I’m really not a fan of gothic or horror type stuff, although I do have a few classics to point out that might be worth investigating. Clarke Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany are both very good. Lots of people will mention Poe, but I particularly enjoyed one of his more obscure stories, the “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym”. Similarly, I think people will mention Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, yet be completely ignorant of his most excellent “The Jewel of Seven Stars”. Many folks will no doubt mention Lovecraft, but frankly once I was familiar with his style I found him awfully predictable and formulaic.

Recently, I've tried to be a lot more supportive and (specifically) a lot less judgemental about stuff. Unfortunately, there's one group of people that I can't stop being judgemental about. So it makes sense to talk about it here.

There's a circle of people I know who share some of the same interests as me. It's not a single group, or even specific individuals; it's more like a personality type who tend to flock. I guess I started running into this kind of group sometime back around 1980, when I first started getting involved in wargaming and Tolkien fandom, and back then I was pretty well immersed in the group culture. You know who I'm talking about, don't you? They're all:

Now, I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with any particular one of those attributes; in fact, I'm proud about sharing a couple of them. But the above list is the universe that defines them, and very few of them seem to want to interact on a meaningful level outside of the aforementioned topics. Despite intelligence and such an obvious breadth of interest, they seem very two-dimensional. That's one of the things that really frustrates me about these people.

Another is that this personality type floods most of the circles where their interests and my own intersect. This personality type dominates the local poly scene, the local BDSM scene, the local bisexual scene, and they tend to drive other people out. I'd just like to meet some "normal" people who share my interests who don't also come with all the predictable other stuff that this personality type engenders. But like kudzu, they seem to overpower a group, suffocating or driving out the real diversity.

And part of my problem is that I'm just so tired of the Python quotes, the pithy geekery, the tired sexual innuendoes. That stuff was funny back in high school in 1980, but it's so stale now that it only turns my stomach. I just want to grab one of these geeks and scream in their face "Evolve!". There's a hell of a lot more to a meaningful and fulfilling life than endlessly repeating 25-year-old rituals like cloven fruit and quoting "Bring out yer dead" and calling your car a "dragon".

I dunno. I used to be one of those people once, and I was happy. I guess I just moved on, finding that other things also made me happy, too. Some of the values I once had, I still retain, because they're still meaningful for me, but I've also surrendered others as I grew and gained more wisdom and insight. Today, being a cookie cutter geek, and never aspiring to anything more than that, seems like a horrible waste of the precious time I've been given, when there's so much more to life than being a "Level 60 High Priest With A Noodle" in Everquest.

For the past ten years, I've been an occasional visitor in that crowd, showing up for a few events and then disappearing for a year or three at a time. Each time I return, I find my patience with that stock personality type getting shorter and shorter. I don't think I'm predisposed against any individual that I meet, but each meeting tends to reinforce my generalizations.

There's no conclusion here; I'm just exploring and recording my own reactions to this group and why they're so strong.