the internet

Ladies and gentleman of the Internet, I think today we may have found the best possible application for chiptune music--that uber-geeky genre utilizing vintage game console's music synthesizers, real or software-emulated, as the sole instrumentation. It just so happens that faithful covers of jazz classics sound great: the pleasures of one of my favorite albums of all time intermingling beautifully in my (significant) brainspace cubby where the Contra and Tecmo Bowl themes are on infinite loop.

I've always been a fan of the pixel-art illustration style, whether it's the latest eBoy poster or illustrations by Quick Honey featured in our own pages. But this, I'm afraid, takes the ultimate pixel-art cake: a ginormous, ultra-high-resolution pixel-art map of Hong Kong that's zoomable, brosweable and searchable just like a Google Map.

So all that importance-of-social-media business you keep hearing about Iran? This should tell you something about the underlying truth, no matter how numbing the barrage from the media can be: When the U.S. State Department heard of Twitter's plans for an hour-long regularly-scheduled maintenance outage that would have denied daytime Twitter service to Iran, they stepped in and "urged" them to reschedule.