I had some physical therapy sessions back in 2021, and during that time, I discovered the myths of Procrustes and his infamous bed. I shared the profile of Procrustes with the doctor of PT, and he was thrilled. He will probably get a tattoo of that guy.
Perhaps every month I should bestow a Procrustean Award on some Show HN like this. I hereby proclaim the September 2026 Procrustean Award goes to vantezzen for their 11-bit flag-encoding.
I will also point out that flags change over time, and there may be more than one flag in use by an entity (the latter is something that Unicode ignores.)
And my favorite flag drama of the 2020s is when Wikipedia "discovered" that its Vatican Flag image was "wrong"... after distributing it far and wide: https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/wikipedia-had-the-wrong-va...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
> In Greek mythology, Procrustes [...] was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed.
> The word Procrustean is thus used by analogy to describe, for example, situations where an arbitrary standard is used to measure success, while completely disregarding obvious harm that results from the effort.