intergalactic planetary

Sampling from sources as diverse as Les Baxter, Modest Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain through the filter of piano virtuoso Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Beastie Boys’ Grammy winning single showcased in a music video is celebrating turning twenty this year, inspiring a Toronto trio, Angela Young and children Lilah and Levi, to honour this anniversary with their holiday greeting. The three MCs dance their way through the city’s metro and Union Station to the song, outfitted like the band, wishing all a celestial season. You can watch the original at the link from Nag on the Lake above as well.

men would be silent and women would shed tears

Far more complex and nuanced that the Western internet slang that we used to invoking—LOL, ROFLMAO, etc.—though more sophisticated translations are to be found of even these basic expressions like ptdr, pété de rire, that is broken from laughter, Chinese speakers have adopted some of the conventions of Hanyu Pinyin (the official Romanization system for Mandarin—see also) as text messaging shorthand.
This use is not restricted to simple abbreviations however but as homographic initialisms of rather elaborate set phrases (chengyu) and stock epithets, like the title nánmònǚlèi or nmnl (男默女泪, “men would be silent and women would shed tears [to see it]. I would equate it to being able to telegraph thtc, am I right? Tell me about it [Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, / With cadent tears fret channels in her checks, / Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits / To laughter and contempt, that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / ] To have a thankless child! Another common one is rjbc—rénjiānbùchāi, 人艰不拆 short for human life is [already] so tough, you shouldn’t subject it to further [trials] or sqsj—shānqióngshuǐjìn, 山穷水尽 the end of hills and rivers, to be up to one’s neck, to be totally exhausted. Incidentally, the Mandarin slang equivalent of the LOL that we started with is xswl—xiào sǐ wǒ le 笑死我, making me laugh myself to death.

side-scrolling

A clever gaming enthusiast engineered a rotating LED cube as a custom platform for playing classic arcade games, like Castlevania featuring our vampire-hunting protagonist Simon Belmont, with the sixty-four by sixty-four panels mounted on a mechanised lazy-susan spindle whose speed and advance is adjusted with foot pedals to free up the hands for game play.
It is pretty keen indeed when nostalgia and know-how and retool the retro,  imbuing new life in an older franchise.  As impressive as the spinning display is, it belies the biggest technical challenge found in the programming of staging format games with the playable-character remaining stationary in the centre of the frame with the obstacles and opponents rushing towards and past our hero. Deconstructing the virtual world on a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator to track the character’s progress relative to game-play. More demonstrations and specifications are at the link up top.

o come, o come, emmanuel

With the evening prayer of the last week of Advent (previously) denoted as the hortatory Antiphons—a short chant with refrain textually based on the Book of Psalms and a call to meditate on one of the aspects of Jesus as Saviour, the last and final falling on the eve of Christmas Eve exhortation that O God is With Us, expanded into the carol.

worldbuilding

In contrast to an early twentieth century conjecture that the then three and a half billion humans could all be fit on the Isle of Wight if all were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, science fiction author John Killian Houston Brunner (*1934—†1995) predicted that the population of seven billion of the 2010’s—an accurate foresight like many of the other visions of his future, overcrowded world, with all its attendant calamities—in his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar would need a significantly larger landmass.
The rather pioneering piece for the genre alternated between narrative and expository chapters that formed the future world setting that’s strangely familiar and would be one dystopia recognisable to contemporaries. A world of propagandised social media, centralised super computers, American hegemony, nuclear proliferation and mobile, instantly-accessible encyclopædic knowledge, the litany of negative predictions that do ring true is a bit bleak (though there are on balance enlightened ideas and attitudes towards gender-identity, sexuality and race that have their place in this future as well) but the methodical process that led Brunner to correctly extrapolate the fantastical and unimaginable by the conditions and trajectory he witnessed more than a half a century ago confer a certain solace on our inability to appreciate future consequence.

7x7

fintech: the Nordic country put together an artificial intelligence crash-course for its citizens and now is making the curriculum available to all—via Kottke

chirogram: a deaf student at the University of Life Sciences at Dundee, seeing a deficit in communication, invents one hundred new signs to quickly articulate complex scientific concepts—via Dave Log

the year in pictures: TIME curates one hundred iconic images that tell the stories of the past twelve months

the decade in content: Vanity Fair reviews the trends, memes and moments that defined aspects of the past ten years

dj earworm: the decade encapsulated (previously—albeit on a smaller scale) in a mashup of one hundred songs

klaviatur: a demonstration of the six-plus-six, four row Jankó keyboard—which allowed players to cover ranges impossible by a single performer on a traditional piano

headspace: the framework of current privacy protection advocacy and laws is unprepared to safeguard us from the coming mind-reading technologies 

backstop, full-stop

Retaining a comfortable majority of votes in favour on the bill’s second reading, the newly constituted Parliament of Boris Johnson (previously) has passed a Brexit arrangement, essentially the same framework (albeit with a few key adjustments) as the one rejected numerous times proposed by Teresa May, just with the comfort of couching this disaster with mansplaining, which looks to guarantee that the UK will leave the EU by 31 January 2020.