🔷 Open Thread

I try to be opened minded about change, but it's going to take a while to warm up to this.

“Looks good on you though…”
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The old logo screamed "museum" and while it was hardly original or particularly good design, it adequately fit its purpose. The new one says...nothing whatsoever about the organization it is supposed to be a logo for. It could be an app, a social network, a stupidly-hard-to-pronounce restaurant. It's as if the design brief was to make it stand out as little of possible in a sea of "minimalist" logo trends. If it doesn't look ludicrously dated in a surprisingly short time once the basic trends change, it'll be solely because it's so empty of any meaning or distinctiveness (making it effectively worthless as a logo).
I think that was actually the design brief...


So serifs and good design are exclusionary now, apparently. Have we really reached a point where organizations are demanding blandness as much as possible to not look too elite? Can't look threatening or intimidating if it looks like everything else out there!

While on the topic of logos, glad to see the DCU Center referencing it's Centrum history. So many good childhood memories associated with that logo:

 
I think I have figured out what bothers me the most about the rebranding. I really dislike the combined AB. I understand it was intentional but it makes the Museum seem smaller and more regional rather than global.

The MET, The Louvre, The V&A*, The Art Institute, The MFA.

People who are even slightly aware of the art world know where these places are located. The rebranding puts them on more of the level Portland Museum of Art, The Peabody Essex or The Cape Anne Museum. (All great museums, but not quite the same tier.)

If anything, I would have liked to see them go in the opposite direction and dropped Boston from the logo altogether and emphasized The MFA.

*The obvious exception to this is The British Museum, but that's more of an Imperial flex.
 
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Some decent looks at BU and Back Bay environs from this on-location clip way back in 1996. Plus it's Letterman's in top form doing his Letterman thing :ROFLMAO:

 
Twitter might actually be going downhill and collapsing. Many urbanist/transit twitter members have moved elsewhere, setting up backup links and other sites for continuity. Don't expect twitter to last long. The site will just get slower and more broken over time until it just goes down and stops working sometime later.

(Given since I think twitter going down is inevitable at some point, I'm using screenshots instead of direct links to twitter threads, so it'll be archived as such)

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Everyone thinks it's going to implode. Sure, there's a chance it will. And sure, anyone who actually uses it should have a backup plan.
But I'd find it much more interesting if it actually survived (and, no, I am not a fan of the new guy in charge nor his approach whatsoever). Rather, it would be an incredibly interesting experiment to see if a couple hundred talented people could actually run it, as opposed to the 7,500 who were there. Big tech is super bloated (as of relatively recently). And it has been a brain drain away from the tech problems society actually needs solved (energy, transportation, healthcare, education, etc). It would be very interesting to know if a few hundred software engineers could run a thing like that, because if they can, that's the actual interesting game changer to me. Twitter imploding because of a megalomaniac billionaire imploding it is not that interesting, to me anyway.
 
My wife got me this "4D Cityscape" puzzle last Christmas, and finally got around to finishing it this afternoon. Not overwhelmingly accurate but it gets the general stuff correct. Some errors- they list the Museum of Science building at 1860-something, and then the TD Garden as the "Sports Museum" in 2000 (probably couldn't get the rights from Delaware North, I bet).

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Everyone thinks it's going to implode. Sure, there's a chance it will. And sure, anyone who actually uses it should have a backup plan.
But I'd find it much more interesting if it actually survived (and, no, I am not a fan of the new guy in charge nor his approach whatsoever). Rather, it would be an incredibly interesting experiment to see if a couple hundred talented people could actually run it, as opposed to the 7,500 who were there. Big tech is super bloated (as of relatively recently). And it has been a brain drain away from the tech problems society actually needs solved (energy, transportation, healthcare, education, etc). It would be very interesting to know if a few hundred software engineers could run a thing like that, because if they can, that's the actual interesting game changer to me. Twitter imploding because of a megalomaniac billionaire imploding it is not that interesting, to me anyway.
Not everyone. 😉
 
Hiii. There is a photo of the side of the Center Plaza building while it was under construction (in the mid-late 1960s) with a big banner on the side of the first building saying "To Be Continued". I know I saw it somewhere .. does anyone have a lead?
 

SVB acquired Boston Private in 2021 so this will likely have significant ramifications locally too.

From what I read on it, the FDIC made it sound like it would be business as usual by Monday. It's just a matter of whether the depositors who had more than the 250k limit would get their money back.
 

SVB acquired Boston Private in 2021 so this will likely have significant ramifications locally too.

SVB advertised they bank for nearly half of 2022 venture-backed tech and life sciences/healthcare companies. Unclear how many Boston-area life sciences places may bank with them, but it could pose some risk here...

From what I read on it, the FDIC made it sound like it would be business as usual by Monday. It's just a matter of whether the depositors who had more than the 250k limit would get their money back.

From what I've heard, it sounds like it's going to be wait-and-see, and see if you still have any nails left to bite at the end. Half of my twitter feed is crying about the end of the world, the other half is saying it's not really that bad. If their depositors aren't desperate, I'm hearing it should be -okay- in a week or two. If their depositors can't take the heat of pausing payments, payroll, and other expenses, its going to get messy.

There was apparently a line out the door at Boston Private in Wellesley this morning.
 

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