[NES] Eleven New Year's Eve links: time, Metropass, Toronto, data, Syria, technology, retrofuture

[rfmcdonald]

• This L.M. Sacasas essay at the Frailest Thing about our contemporary struggles with time, with the sense that time is escaping us faster than we can follow it, is a timely read for New Year's Eve.Steve Munro celebrates the venerable Metropass of Toronto, giving way at the end of today after nearly four decades to the Presto card.


• Ben Spurr writes at the Toronto Star about how Metropass fan Nathan Ng is trying to put together an online collection of all 464 of these cards.


• Christopher Hume writes at the Toronto Star about ten things people in Toronto can do in 2019 to make their city better, starting with boosting the Rail Deck Park.


• Motherboard notes that a vast store of works previously kept under copyright is set to enter the public domain, and why this will happen.


• Wired notes that 2018 is a year where people began to recognize the importance of their public data. Will 2019 be a year of belated attempts to protect this?


• Adnan Khan at MacLean's notes that the Syria where the Assad regime is set to declare its complete victory over opponents is not going to be a country that Syrian refugees will want to return to.


• The New York Times links to seven of its articles exploring ways for individuals to live better lives in 2019.


• This Quartzy essay makes the case for giving up on New Year's resolutions as, among other things, overly inflexible.


• Rosie Spinks at Quartzy makes the case that a life thesis is better than New Year's resolutions.


• The Toronto Star shares an Isaac Asimov essay from 1983 in which he sought to predict 2019. (He was right about the importance of superpower conflict, right about education if optimistic in predicting adaptation, wrong about Moon colonies.)