pause for station identification

As always thanks for visiting and please don’t be a stranger. From ours to yours, PfRC wishes you all a happy and auspicious holiday season!

hark the herald ai’s carol

Reprising a 2017 experiment this time with more powerful machines, Janelle Shane (previously) had her neural network try its hand at composing Christmas songs, drawing from a dataset of two hundred and forty carols compiled by the Times of London, and the output really underscores how profoundly strange that the holiday with its strange fossilised language would be for outsiders.
With verses for Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer like “Its heart was full of sugar / And the most prized food item was its head” and “For sinful men such a deity doth appear / And wink and nod in reply.” If you subscribe to AI Weirdness at the link above, you can sign up to receive the full text of these and other experiments—which as an occupational hazard feature an inordinate amount of cusses and references to gun-violence. Grandma got run over by a reindeer.

The wretched world is run by ox and ass
The wretched world is run by ox and ass,
And in vain build I.

unwort des jahres

Whilst the jury is still out on the national Unwort of the Year for 2019 (previously), the Landeshauptstadt of Hesse, Wiesbaden the arbiter of the actual Word of the Year—has made a few selections of its own, reflective of state and local culture and politics.
While we’ve encountered all three of the finalists and agree that the signage proclaiming the shopping corridors of the pedestrian mall downtown to be a weapons-free zone irksome and depressing and the winner in the form of an unending major construction project that has had Autobahn traffic in a snarl for years on end a frustrating if not befitting champion, we most enjoyed reconnecting, re-engaging with those awful E-Roller, electro-scooters abandoned, crowding the sidewalks. Do you have a nominee for Unwort of the Year for your area?

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.