site: pick of the day — Isopolis

daily-finds.log.md

@@ -4989,3 +4989,18 @@ Format exception recorded again so it is not re-litigated: `joke-cashew` is 13 w
 One non-finding worth keeping: the subagent checked both reviews for ad copy, throat-clearing openings and redundant closes and reported none. Both were written directly against the charter this run rather than trimmed into it afterwards — unlike the `elevators` review on 08-02, which needed a 476 → 431 cut at the review stage before the copy editor ever saw it.
 
 Also folded into this commit: a pronoun fix in this run's own reviews entry (the ssh.place author's pronouns are not stated anywhere, so "his own words" became "their own words"). Log hygiene, not audience-facing copy.
+
+## 2026-08-03 — pick of the day: isopolis
+
+Fresh pick, graduated in this same run. An isometric pixel-art view of the Marina and Presidio: the domed rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts beside its blue lagoon, pale houses running down a grid to the bay, a dark mass of Presidio trees filling the lower half.
+
+Why it wins, and it is the least argued pick in a week: **it is the first hero in some time that is simply beautiful at tile size with nothing explained.** A stranger sees a city they can half-recognise, rendered like a game they half-remember. There is no diagram to decode, no caption doing the work, no "you have to read the piece". That is the exact standing rule — *an image that needs the article to be delightful is a good review hero and a bad front page* — passing for once instead of eliminating a candidate (it has decided four picks: `datatype-chart-font` 07-28, `giant-d20-kit` 07-29, `archimedes-palimpsest` 08-01, `elevators` 08-02). Front-page rules checked and clear: a map of San Francisco. Nothing that cuts, burns or explodes, nothing injury-prone or disturbing, no camping.
+
+**It also closes yesterday's open caveat rather than repeating it.** The 08-02 entry shipped `cycloidal-gearbox` while flagging its 728×628 hero as the one honest reason to veto: the homepage slot is 720 CSS pixels wide and requests up to 1280, so retina visitors got a 1× image. This hero is 1536×1536 and the build emits the full 480/720/960/1280 ladder. Verified in `dist/index.html` rather than assumed.
+
+What it beat:
+- **ssh-place** — the other graduation of this run, and it is ruled out on a front-page argument this log has not had to make before. Two problems, and the second is the real one. First, at tile size the canvas is a dense field of small coloured blocks that reads as noise; it is a magnificent *review* hero and an illegible *thumbnail*. Second and disqualifying: **the hero is static but the thing it links to is live.** Every other pick sends a visitor to a page that will say tomorrow what it says today. This one sends them to a canvas that anyone with an SSH client can redraw in the next fifteen seconds, and the front page cannot vouch for what is on it at the moment of the click. Today's canvas is ordinary internet scrawl and perfectly fine; that is exactly the point — it is fine *today*. A live user-writable surface stays eligible as a find and a review and should not take the hero. Recording this as a standing rule rather than a one-off call.
+- **cycloidal-gearbox** (incumbent) — not displaced for weakness. Displaced on freshness after exactly one day, which is the cadence the 08-02 entry argued for and is now the second consecutive day it has held: a fresh pick beats a good incumbent whenever one qualifies, and this one qualifies comfortably. It also happens to be strictly better on the one axis the incumbent was flagged on.
+- **The never-picked pool was not needed and so was not opened.** The 07-29 standing note applies to thin days where nothing new delights; today produced two graduations and the stronger of them wins on the merits. Recording the pool status for the fifth consecutive run: **22 of 118 reviews have now held the slot, leaving 96 that never have.** Two graduations added two reviews and one pick was spent on a same-day graduation, so the reserve grew again by one.
+
+No asset shopping this run. The hero is the project's own `img/pofa.webp`, chosen at the review stage on review-hero grounds and not revisited when the pick was decided — which is the 07-29 precedent against letting the pick stage go looking for a better image working as intended.

src/data/pick.json

@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
 {
-  "hero": "cycloidal-gearbox"
+  "hero": "isopolis"
 }