Stan Lee died Monday at 95, and the internet performed the full global grief ritual (the Prince protocol) for the man whose collaborative mythology (with Kirby, with Ditko; the footnotes built half of everything, same week’s lesson) became this century’s shared narrative operating system. The MCU is architecture: twenty films on a common continuity substrate, the boldest long-term integration project in entertainment (the Infinity War snap was its TSB-scale cutover, executed clean). Excelsior, and credit the co-authors.
Amazon’s HQ2 circus reached its punchline: after 14 months, 238 cities’ bids, and municipal humiliations ranging from tax-break arms races to renaming-offer stunts, the “second headquarters” is… split between New York and Northern Virginia, the two most predictable talent pools on the map. The takeaway every mayor learned at cost: the contest was substantially a data harvest (238 cities’ detailed economic-development playbooks, delivered free) with a real-estate decision attached. Run the hand-squeeze test on any process asking you to compete: what does the machine do that the obvious answer didn’t? (NYC’s backlash is already brewing; this file may reopen.)
Gaming’s cautionary counterweight: Fallout 76 launched this week into the most brutal reception of the year, a beloved single-player universe shipped as a bug-riddled, NPC-less online service nobody asked for. The No Man’s Sky clause inverted: NMS overpromised a good idea; 76 competently shipped a wrong one. Vision bugs don’t hotfix.
TIL: RFP-as-reconnaissance, procurement processes that exist to extract information, not select vendors. Now I can’t unsee them. Audit what your bids teach before you submit them.