sign of the times

Japan’s kanji character of the year was revealed a couple weeks ago in a ceremony with 災 writ large in hand painted calligraphy strokes by Priest Seihan Mori of the Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, which strikes us as a pretty amazing way of announcing the results.
Pronounced like “sigh,” the word (which appropriately kind of also looks like a stinking pile of poo) means disaster is not only reserved for the natural spate of earthquakes, flooding, heatwaves and tsunamis that visit the land perennially that have grown more frequent and costlier but also for the general geopolitical shambles that define this year.

lamphouse

Recognising that a truly great cinematic experience is one that surpasses the need for a captive audience and the rapt attention of passive consumption, Bryan Boyer—inspired by the quantum strangeness of things designed at scale and at speed—invented a Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) whose screen is a dithering canvas that cycled through film not at a rate of twenty-four frames per second, the threshold for the illusion of motion though apparently its now at the low end of filmmaking, but rather at a rate of twenty-four frames per hour.
At one thirty-six hundredth of the normal playing speed, each passing frame (one every two and a half minutes) is not watched but rather considered, studied—revealing and deconstructing the elements that went and how those techniques translate to elicit the desired effect in the viewer. Learn more at Kottke and the source—with a tutorial on the methodologies that went into making the VSMP prototypes since we would certainly like one of these digital movie houses to inspect throughout the day—at the links above.

there will be no love except for the love of big brother

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do no forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

bric-a, brac-a firecracker!

Equally awed by the unnoticed taxonomy that go into the everyday with unspoken rules that perhaps an independent observer could best identify, we really enjoyed this latest instalment (previously) of a neural network generating branded identities for imagined sorts of pyrotechnic displays. The database of names were gathered in part from Dutch sources—where Silvester fireworks are a serious matter as well—which makes the output all the more interesting. Some of our favourites were:

Pronk XL
Sheeperstrike
Shark Whistler
Sneaking Veet Box 3
Event Badger One Assortiment

More to explore at the links above and be sure to subscribe so as to never miss an experiment, which are all pretty telling of and revelatory about our own foibles and naming-conventions.

doomba

Though never an avid player of games from the first-person shooter perspective, I did always appreciate the world-building work that went into developing the video game franchises.
We’re especially taken just now with the concept that one’s own smart vacuum’s plotted course through one’s living quarters isn’t just a domestic double-agent but can be used to craft rich new terrains and levels for fighting off zombies in space. Given what these robotic vacuums have in terms of creativity and imagination, it seems right that they ought to be rewarded with a new outlet instead of just doing menial tasks—though we’d be better off vanquishing dust bunnies ourselves and gamifying household chores without an avatar.

opsec

Wanting a bit of a respite from his War on Christmas that not only has forcibly separated some fourteen thousand young children from their parents who’ve yet to be reunited, a partial government shutdown whose consequences portend untold collateral damage—especially for those living precariously and counting on that one reliable paycheck for the holidays plus some unwelcome disabusing that’s really tarnishing and not in keeping with the spirit of the season, the Grifter-in-Chief decided to take a swing at those who criticised him for failing to visit a combat zone and staged a surprise three hour publicity stunt at a US airbase outside of Baghdad.
Such photo-ops are usually harmless and might otherwise be a nice morale boost, even if we are still reeling from the announcement to withdraw from Syria and the subsequent resignation of the defence secretary—except the detachment that Trump’s handlers chose for him to greet is a group of special operations forces, likely on some covert operation in the region, and revealing their identities seriously compromises their mission if not putting the troops’ own lives at greater risk.  If the social media exposure was not bad enough on its own, Trump further jeopardised the deployed soldiers and the hospitality of their host nation in refusing to meet with Iraqi government officials during his trip but also gave a campaign speech defending his recent military decisions and suggesting that they use Iraqi bases as a staging-ground for the Syrian nation-building that he had pledged to quit.