Good morning, RVA! It's 48 °F, and today looks like a stunner. Expect sunshine, extremely A+ temperatures in the upper 70s, and every reason in the world to take an evening beverage out on the stoop, porch, or deck. If bikes are your thing, it’s a great day to get out there and get rad—otherwise, I hope you at can find at least a little bit of time to spend outside.
Water cooler
Proving that they can in fact rapidly respond to serious incidents of traffic violence, Richmond’s Department of Public Works will “install speed tables in the VCU Monroe Campus vicinity from Belvidere Street to Harrison Street” beginning tomorrow, May 11th. While this new infrastructure won’t address the portion of Main Street where a driver killed Shawn Soares last week, it will help slow traffic in and around VCU’s campus—one of the city’s most pedestrian-dense neighborhoods. I hope this will be good practice for DPW, and that the Mayor’s administration will see that rapid-response infrastructure is possible and should be a regular part of Richmond’s Vision Zero toolkit.
About two months ago, the Governor announced he’d allocated $30 million for Learning Recovery Grants to pay for “qualifying education services intended to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students' educational progress and well-being.” Those grants have since been renamed “Learning Acceleration Grants,” and, if you’re a parent of a school-aged kid in Virginia, you can now apply online. Should you choose to take advantage of this opportunity, you’ll need to spend the grant funds on an approved tutoring service, specialized educational therapy services, or assistive technology (you can read through more comprehensive definitions here). Definitely seems like something to take advantage of if your young learners have some tutoring needs over the summer. Note: Anyone can apply for the $1,500 grant, but only folks making below 300% of the Federal Poverty Limit can apply for the $3,000 grant.
Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch recaps the City’s shiny new budget, which Council passed on Monday without issue. You can watch the Mayor’s statement on this year’s budget over on his Instagram, and he seems pretty stoked about it. Honestly, I’m impressed by how smoothly the Mayor, City Council, and Richmond Public Schools all worked together this year to get a budget proposed, amended, and passed—all ahead of schedule! Certainly a huge improvement over years previous. While this mostly marks the end of the 2023 budget season, the State’s budget still looms on the horizon, and its level of commitment to public school will have a huge impact on the funding (and stress levels) at RPS. That decision is another few weeks out, so stay tuned.
Reminder, as the owner of Twitter continues to show you who he is, you can leave that space and take your thoughts, feelings, and content elsewhere! Mastodon is one of those elsewheres, and I’ve set up a chill, GMRVA-centric (but not exclusive) community over on rva.fyi. Feel free to set up an account and experiment! At the moment, I’m using Ivory as my app of choice, but I’ve also dabbled with Toot! and it has a cuter icon.
Today, for RVA Bike Month, you’ve got a couple different options (which did include the Roll Call Sunrise Gravel Ride, but—looking out the window—you’ve definitely already missed that one). However! At 5:30 PM you can Pedal to Patios with I am RVA and at 6:00 PM you can take an East End Revitalization Bike Tour with the Better Housing Coalition. Also, the Virginia Capital Trail Foundation will host their annual Cap2Cap ride this coming weekend out on the Capital Trail, and I thought I’d mention it now because you may need a few days to prep for riding 25, 50, or 100 miles. Also, and especially for readers of this email newsletter who have oddly narrow and overlapping interests, you can join UpVote Virginia and ride the Cap2Cap this weekend while also supporting Ranked Choice Voting!
This morning's longread
How The Legend of Zelda Changed the Game
It’s not every day that the New York Times runs a full-length, interactive article about Nintendo’s Zelda franchise. As a mostly Zelda completionist myself and with the forthcoming release of Tears of the Kingdom on May 12th, I’m basically required to share this with you.
But Lobanov said that the wildly successful 2017 release of Breath of the Wild, one of the flagship games for the Nintendo Switch, led many developers to scrap their rival projects. The game sold more than 29 million copies, far more than any other entry in the series. Nintendo had succeeded in recapturing the original Legend of Zelda’s joy of exploration, giving Link the new abilities to freely jump and climb walls. Although he remained silent, other characters had fully voiced dialogue for the first time. Traditional dungeons were replaced by puzzles hidden inside four divine beasts and 120 shrines, and 900 scattered Korok seeds gave Link incentive to search the landscape. “Breath of the Wild was so ambitious,” Lobanov said. “It had a clear sense of progression even though it was so open-ended.”
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Picture of the Day
Lines and angles under the highway.
