Lady of the Lake
Known by many names (including Nimue, Nineve, Niniane, Viviane, Vivien and Vivienne, among others), the Lady of the Lake is thought to have been based on lake fairies in Welsh stories. According to the legends of King Arthur Pendragon, she stole Lancelot when he was a child and cured him when he went mad. As his foster-mother, she raised him (thus his full name “Sir Lancelot du Lac”) and many legends say the Lady of the Lake was responsible for educating Lancelot. However, she is best known for presenting the magical sword Excalibur to King Arthur.
Though some legends state that Morgan le Fay was the object of Merlin’s obsession, others say he met the Lady of the Lake at the Fountain of Barenton in Brittany, and fell so deeply in love with her that he agreed to share all his mystical powers with her. The Lady became Merlin’s scribe, recording his prophecies. Over the years, Merlin taught her so well that, whether out of jealousy, love or possessiveness, the Lady of the Lake became a better magician, imprisoning him in a tree, a glass tower, a crystal cave, or other legendary trap. The lack of Merlin’s help contributed to Arthur’s downfall, as the Lady of the Lake was unable to fulfill Merlin’s role as magician to Arthur. She was eventually obliged to reclaim Excalibur when Arthur was fatally wounded at the Battle of Camlann and Excalibur was hurled back into the misty waters by Sir Bedivere. Along with Morgan le Fay, she was one of the three queens who escorted the body of King Arthur to Avalon, represent the Celtic Triple-Goddess. Geoffrey of Monmouth cites the leader of the maidens of Avalon as Morgan le Fay, while later stories say that the Lady was their ruler. It could also be that the two were aspects of the same character.
Lag
- Slang term for a noticeable decrease in an application’s speed, typically due to either extreme network congestion or insufficient processing power in a computer.
- In real-time applications (such as games), lag refers to an application’s failure to respond to inputs in a timely manner, and is commonly used to describe a time delay between a player’s action (such as pushing a button) and the game’s response time in initiating the player’s intended application or game action. In the case of games running on a computer or console, this may be caused by a lack of processing power. Online video games also experience lag during periods of network congestion and insufficient processing power. Lag is especially noticeable when playing online games via dial-up connections. Some online multiplayer games suffer lag due to communication latency (sending/receiving packets) and local processing deficiencies.
- As a verb, a player who is “lagging” may be slowing down the game.
LAN
Land of the Giants
In this 1968-70 ABC television series, The Spindrift, a sub-orbital spaceship on a flight from Los Angeles to London, passes through a strange cloud and lands on an Earth-type planet, but their technology is 20 years behind Earth’s, and the inhabitants are roughly twelve times the size of the lost passengers. The ship’s captain, co-pilot and stewardess, along with an engineer, a jet-setter, a mysterious con artist, a young boy and his dog, must battle the planet’s totalitarian government, try to avoid capture, and repair the Spindrift in order to get back home … if they can figure out how!
Lang, Fritz
Fritz Lang (1890–1976) was born in Vienna. For several years, the young Lang traveled in North Africa, Asia, the South Seas and throughout Europe, studying painting in Munich and Paris. An exhibition of his paintings opened in Paris in 1914, just before he returned to Austria and was conscripted into the Austrian army for service in World War I. He was wounded four times, losing vision in his right eye and requiring a year’s convalescence in a Vienna army hospital, where he tried his hand at writing screenplays. After his discharge, he began acting on the Vienna stage. In Berlin in 1919, he was given the opportunity to write and direct his first movie, Halbblut (The Half-Caste), and in 1920 he began working for producer Erich Pommer at Decla Biscop Studio (which later became part of the German filmmaking giant UFA).
Lang’s first project upon his return to Germany was the futuristic masterpiece Metropolis (1927), which borrowed the “pampered society living above, while the oppressed workers hovel below” theme from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, a theme that would be repeated again and again (even in one Star Trek episode). In 1928, Lang returned to science fiction for the silent production Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon; also known as By Rocket to the Moon), released without even a score in 1929, which told of Man reaching the moon exactly 70 years before the feat was actually accomplished.
Lang was already a respected filmmaker before coming to the United States in 1934. He finished 22 Hollywood films in the next 21 years, at least half of which would become film noir classics. Lang’s films, dealing mainly with the theme of fate, are considered masterpieces of visual composition and suspense. His first sound film, M (1931), a horrifying account of a true child murderer case, starred Peter Lorre and was Lang’s greatest international success. The Woman in the Window (1944), adapted by Nunnally Johnson from an obscure novel, starred Edward G. Robinson as a married college professor who becomes involved with Joan Bennett), who plays the subject of a painting with which he has become infatuated. Bennett, who would later go on to star in the television serial Dark Shadows, did two other films for Lang: 1941’s Man Hunt and 1945’s Scarlet Street.
Lang’s grim film You Only Live Once (1937), based partly on the story of real-life American fugitives Bonnie and Clyde, starred Henry Fonda as an ex-convict who is unjustly sentenced to death. The filmmaker then moved to Twentieth Century-Fox, where he made a few Westerns and war films, but his clashes with producer Darryl F. Zanuck resulted in the director’s departure from the studio. By 1945, after several cinematic triumphs, Lang’s career entered a prolonged slump of badly-received productions, but with Rancho Notorious in 1952, Lang was back on his feet. He directed a high-profile cast that included Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan, Paul Douglas and Marilyn Monroe in the emotional melodrama Clash by Night (1952), based on a play by Clifford Odets, and in 1953, The Big Heat featured a stellar performance by Glenn Ford. Lang made a pair of related films in India—Tiger of Bengal and The Tomb of Love (also known as The Indian Tomb), both released in 1959—that were edited into the single film Journey to the Lost City for its United States release the following year. He returned to Germany in 1960, where he directed his final film, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse), before retiring in Los Angeles, California, where he passed away in 1976.
Lannister, Tyrion
A central and complicated character in the HBO series Game of Thrones, based upon the George R. R. Martin novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, Tyrion Lannister can accurately be described as a party animal, a skilled military tactician, the odd-man-out of his family, and an assassin with a heart of gold. The youngest heir of Lord Tywin Lannister started his life on a low note: born with an inferior appearance, his mother died giving birth to him, a fact for which his father and sister Cersei never forgave him. Convicted of the murder of his nephew, the loathed King Joffrey, Tyrrion escaped execution to become a replacement ruler of another kingdom. Slaying both his lover and his father, the fact that he eventually developed a conscience rather disturbed the diminutive knave.
In Game of Thrones, Tyrion is portrayed by Peter Dinklage.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator developed by CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, which is French for European Laboratory for Particle Physics) near Geneva, the world’s largest organization devoted to particle physics. A particle accelerator, sometimes called an “atom smasher” by laymen, is a device that uses intense magnetic fields generated by superconductivity to propel subatomic particles called hadrons at high speeds around a circular underground tunnel 27 km (16.8 miles) in circumference, around which two streams of hadrons are sent in opposite directions before being brought together in a high-energy collision. Machines such as the LHC make it possible to split particles into smaller and smaller components, in the quest to identify elementary particles, from which all matter and energy might derive. The LHC began operation on September 10, 2008, and it is expected to replicate, on a miniature scale, the conditions existing in the universe only a tiny fraction of time after the Big Bang. Thus, it may be possible to discern what happened in the early evolutional stages of the universe. Among other possible outcomes, the LHC may yield evidence of further dimensions beyond our familiar four (length, width, height and time), and the collider is expected to help physicists, astronomers and cosmologists answer questions about the nature and origins of matter, energy and the universe.
Larp(ing)
See Live-action role-play(ing).
Larson, Gary
Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1950, the cartoonist and creator of The Far Side was an avid reader of comics from a young age, but art wasn’t his first love. Science – and more specifically, biology – was. Larson graduated from Washington State University in 1972 with a degree in Communications. He had planned to pursue a career in writing television commercials, but upon graduation he formed a jazz duo with himself on guitar and banjo while a friend played trombone and keyboard. His duo folded after three years, and then he found a job at a music store in Lynwood, Washington. He soon realized that this job wasn’t meant for him, and decided to concentrate on drawing. He took some samples of his work to the editor of a magazine called Pacific Search in Seattle. The editor loved them, and Larson quit his job at the music store to begin writing comics for a living. This comic, called Nature’s Way, was described by Larson as a “Mesozoic Far Side.”
Drawing didn’t earn much at first, so Larson got a job as an investigator for the local Humane Society, but a reporter showed Larson’s cartoon work to an editor at the Seattle Times, and soon after, Nature’s Way was being published in the children’s section of the Times’ Saturday paper. During a 1979 vacation, Larson drove down to San Francisco with his portfolio of comics, and approached the San Francisco Chronicle with it. This soon led to a syndication contract for Nature’s Way, but the editors changed the single-panel strip’s name to The Far Side. This turned out to be perfect timing, as the Seattle Times dropped Nature’s Way upon Larson’s return to Washington. On January 1, 1980, the new strip debuted in the San Francisco Chronicle. Slowly syndicated by more and more newspapers, The Far Side thrived for fourteen years, until Larson retired from creating the daily panels on January 1, 1995. At that time, the panel was appearing in more than 1,900 daily and Sunday newspapers worldwide. Quite a number of best-selling Far Side collections have been produced over the years, and Larson has also received many awards for it, including the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, and the Max & Moritz Prize for Best International Comic Strip/Panel. Larson has also completed two animated films, Gary Larson’s Tales From The Far Side I and II, which were completed in 1994 and 1997, and were screened at international film festivals. It’s also worth noting that Larson had a newly discovered species of chewing louse named after him in 1989: the Strigiphilus garylarsoni.
Laserdisc
Also called a video disc, this predecessor to compact discs (CDs) and digital video discs (DVDs) was literally a disc with video and audio signals stored on it as an analog signal, played back by laser. The material recorded onto the disc was stamped onto the disk similar to how compact discs are produced. The earliest disc to contain recorded images appeared in 1928 when the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird developed the Phonodisc, a 250 mm, 78 rpm record, similar to the discs being produced for sound recording at that time. On the Phonodisc, a 30-line television signal was recorded. Despite its novelty, the Phonodisc was not a commercial success, and the idea was abandoned in 1936.
Early optical Laserdisc technology was devised by David Paul Gregg in 1958. By the time he patented his transparent videodisc system in 1961, and again in 1969, he decided to sell the patents to electronics manufacturer Philips. Philips had already been working on a reflective videodisc system at the time, and gaining ownership of Gregg’s invention helped them push the technology forward. They teamed up with MCA, an entertainment company that owned the rights to the largest catalog of films at the time, to marry feature films with the Laserdisc technology to sell them to consumers.
In the late 1970s, Philips and Sony brought laserdiscs, which recorded images and sound as tiny pits on the surface of the disc, to the market. Pioneer originally made use of the format as a form of karaoke entertainment, which made the format popular in commercial circles of Asia. Collaboratively, Philips and MCA demonstrated the technology in 1972 and made it available for consumers on December 15, 1978. Philips manufactured the hardware players and MCA made the discs. The format went by many names (including DiscoVision at one point!), but most referred to it as laserdisc. The first title to release in North America on the new format was Jaws. Up until the mid-1980s, laserdisc players used helium-neon laser tubes to read discs, and when Pioneer came along, they adopted consumer players with solid-state lasers. Laserdiscs were never really widely accepted, as discs could not be used to record and viewers were restricted to pre-recorded films. Starting in the late 1980s into the 1990s, Pioneer and other manufacturers starting making LD combination players that could read LD, CD, and DVD formats. In 1992, Sony invented the Muse Laserdisc format for the Japanese market. Also known as Hi-Vision, the Muse format boasted high-definition video playback and required a 16×9 aspect ratio and a dedicated Muse player.
In addition, the hardware was expensive, and the average user was content with videotape technology. Despite a last push from the format to showcase its superior video and audio capabilities, laserdiscs were largely superseded by a new format based on a dual-layer CD called DVD, and were never really widely accepted, as laserdiscs could not be used to record, and viewers were restricted to pre-recorded films. In addition, the hardware was expensive, and the average user was content with videotape technology. Unlike the older players like the Magnavox Magnavision, Pioneer’s new models featured front-loaders instead of top-loaders. The solid-state laser diode players had many advantages over the older players. For example, they featured a tilt-servo mechanism that physically tilted the player’s laser table base so that it would stay parallel with the disc at all times, even if an external vibration source sat below the player. The two last titles released were Paramount’s Sleepy Hollow and Bringing out the Dead in 2000. Laserdiscs continued to sell in Japan until the end of 2001. The format effectively died on January 16, 2009, but discs can still be purchased today.
Lasseter, John
A pioneer of modern computer-generated animation that dominated the mid- to late 1990s, writer/producer/director/animator John Lasseter was born on January 12, 1957 in Hollywood, California. Lasseter started out doing traditional hand-drawn work. Shortly after high school graduation, Lasseter became only the second student to be accepted into Disney’s new animation program at the California Institute of the Arts. During the summers, he worked as an apprentice at the Disney Studios. While in school, he created two short films, Lady and the Lamp and Nitemare, both of which won Student Academy Awards. After graduating from the Institute, Lasseter was hired by the Disney feature animation department and spent the next five years there, working on such animated features as The Fox and the Hound (1981) and the short Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983).
In 1982, Lasseter received his first exposure to computer animation during the production of Disney’s Tron. Intrigued by the possibilities of the radical new medium, he and colleague Glen Keane made a very short film based on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are that combined simple computer animation with hand-drawn characters. In 1984, Lasseter left Disney to join the computer animation division of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic. Initially, he only planned on working there for a month, but six months later when the department was purchased by Steven Jobs, he was still there. Jobs named the new company Pixar and gave Lasseter the freedom to direct, produce, write and create models for many projects, including television commercials.
In 1988, Lasseter released the first completely computer animated short, Tin Toy, and won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Animated Short Films. In the early ‘90s, Lasseter and three writers developed the script for the groundbreaking Toy Story (1995). To make the film, Pixar teamed up with Disney, and with Lasseter at the helm, the result was an eye-popping adventure, in which the toys had almost as much dimension and detail as live-action. The film received four Oscar nominations, and Lasseter was presented with a Special Achievement Academy Award for his part in bringing the first feature-length computer animated film to the screen.
This marked only the first in a series of feature-length blockbusters that turned computer-generated (CG) animation on its head while enchanting children and adults alike. Continuing as the head of Pixar’s creative department after Toy Story, Lasseter became the central creative and entrepreneurial force behind all of the studio’s subsequent efforts, with his high-octane imagination driving feature after feature. His accomplishments include directing A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Cars (2006), which he co-wrote and co-directed with his close friend, the late animator Joe Ranft, just prior to Ranft’s death in August 2005. Very close to Lasseter’s heart due to his lifelong love of automobiles, Cars went on to capture the first-ever Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. Lasseter also executive produced Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004), all of which not only broke box-office records, but became critical sensations in their respective years.
As astonishing as it is to top these stellar accomplishments, Lasseter’s career, reputation and future shot skyward in early 2006 when Disney officially acquired Pixar, and promoted Lasseter to lead Walt Disney Feature Animation and proclaimed him the savior of the entire company, from its feature-length animations to its video and cable sales to its feature films. He continued to oversee the remarkable run of Pixar movies that came out through the end of the decade, but didn’t return to the director’s chair himself until Cars 2 in 2011.
Last known good configuration
A startup option in versions NT and later of the Windows operating system (OS) which pulls up a copy of the most recent system hardware configuration and driver settings that worked correctly, taken from the system’s registry when the OS successfully boots. The configuration is purposely stored when Windows detects a problem in the boot process in case a subsequent boot process fails. This configuration record often comes in handy after the installation of new drivers or devices, which may cause system errors. Every time a computer is shut off and Windows shuts down successfully, important system settings are saved in the registry. Each time the OS successfully boots, it replaces the previous last known good configuration record with the new one from the most recent successful boot.
Last Starfighter, The
After finally achieving the high score on the Starfighter arcade game, teenager Alex Rogan meets the game’s designer: an alien who reveals that he created Starfighter as a training device for developing and recruiting actual pilots to help fight a war in space. Whisked away to a distant planet, Alex struggles to use his video game-playing skills to pilot a real ship, with real lives at stake. The 1984 Universal Pictures release starred Lance Guest, Robert Preston and Catherine Mary Stewart.
Last Unicorn, The
See Beagle, Peter.
Latchkey kids
See “Generation X.”
Latency
Essentially, any delay or lapse in time in a computer’s processing functions. In general, it is the time between initiating a request in the computer and receiving the requested answer or action. Data latencymay refer to the time between a query and the results arriving at the screen, or the time between initiating a transaction that modifies one or more databases and its completion. Disk latency is the time it takes for the selected sector to be positioned under the read/write head. Channel latency is the time it takes for a computer channel to become unoccupied in order to transfer data. Network latency is the delay introduced when a packet is momentarily stored, analyzed and then forwarded. With malicious software, latency is the period between infection and the first obvious damage to the host system.
Laufey
In Norse mythology, the giantess mother of Loki. Also known as Nál (which meant “needle,” due to her slender and weak physique), Laufey conceived Loki with the giant Fárbauti. Afterward, some stories say that Laufey gave birth to Loki when a lightning bolt thrown by Fárbauti struck her. Laufy apparently did not raise Loki, since most sources say the trickster god was a foster brother of Odin, the most powerful Norse god. Some say that Laufey is not a giantess, but a goddess. The main evidence for this is her name, which may mean “leafy island,” which does not sound like a name given to a giantess. (They tend to go for names suggesting cold, mountains or other inhospitable terrain.)
In contrast to legend, Laufey is represented in the Marvel Comics and cinematic worlds as male. He is the father of Loki and king of the frost giants of Jotunheim. In the 2011 film Thor, Laufey was portrayed by Colm Feore.
Law, John
Scottish economist, banker, merchant, statesman and originator of the “Mississippi scheme” (also known as the “Mississippi bubble”) for the development of French territories in America, John Law (1671-1729) studied mathematics, commerce and political economy in London. After killing an adversary in a 1694 duel, Law was sentenced to death. He initially fled to Amsterdam, where he studied banking operations. A decade later, he returned to Scotland and wrote his best-known work, Money and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money, first published in 1705. His extensive travels during his exile, which lasted until 1717 when he was pardoned by King George I, enabled him to study diverse economic institutions and conditions abroad. He submitted his banking reform plan to the Scottish parliament, but it was rejected. Over the next twenty years, Law made proposals for the establishment of banks, both in Scotland and Europe, and these efforts eventually culminated in the founding of the first Bank of France.
The French government was heavily in debt as a result of the extensive wars of Louis XIV, who died in 1715. Law’s program, which promised to reduce the public debt, held obvious appeal. Law, who believed that money was a creative force in economic development and that an increase in its quantity would stimulate a larger national product and increase national power, founded a bank in Paris with the authority to issue notes. Early in 1717, Law first became involved in the financial scheme eventually known as the “Mississippi Bubble” (the area now known as the state of Louisiana being commonly called “Mississippi” at that time). Later he combined his bank with the Louisiana Company, which had exclusive privileges to develop the vast French territories in the Mississippi Valley of North America. Law’s plan worked well for a few years, but ran afoul of speculative complications and political intrigue, neither of which were directly attributable to Law. As the author of the program, Law was held responsible and fled France in 1720. He died in Venice a poor man.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (film)
Based on Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (graphic novel series), the story takes place in an alternate 1899 where the fictional characters of the Victorian era live. A team of literary legends from that era (including Allan Quatermain, vampiress Mina Harker from Dracula, Skinner (an invisible man), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tom Sawyer, Captain Nemo and Dorian Gray) are recruited to stop a villain intent on turning the nations of the world against each other. The film featured Sean Connery as Quatermain and Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (graphic novel series)
Writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel series was first conceived around the time Moore was writing the Jack the Ripper-themed graphic novel From Hell and the original serialization of Lost Girls in the Taboo anthology in the late 1980s. Moore’s concept brought together the literary heroes and antiheroes of the Victorian era in a kind of parallel Earth, where the fictional characters of the era are real and can intersect, team up, and undermine nefarious schemes with increasingly preposterous measures. It was a concept fully owned by the creators, so it could be published elsewhere in the years following Moore’s final split with DC Comics and what remained of Wildstorm Comics. Though the second half of the firstLeague series would lean more toward O’Neill’s bombastic preferences in showing a London under siege, he does a more-than-admirable job portraying the underlying conflicts and convincingly mashing up these characters from various sources.
Throughout the series, such recognizable characters as Dr. Henry Jekyll, his alter-ego Mr. Hyde, Allan Quatermain, Campion Bond (the alluded grandfather of James Bond), Mina Harker Murray of the Dracula tales, Captain Nemo, and Rodney Skinner, an invisible man (based loosely on H.G. Wells’ original character, who was only referred to as “Griffin.”) Featuring such creative period-constructed contraptions as Chinese war-kites, aerial cannons, a flying death ray, and a hot air balloon, the popular series ended in a set-up for the next series, and the characters and concept spawned 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (film) that starred Sean Connery as Quatermain and Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray.
LED
See Light-emitting diode (LED).
Leda
In Greek mythology, Leda, the daughter of King Thestius of Aetolia, was a contemporary of Herakles, who had set her husband Tyndareus on the throne of Sparta. Leda was the wife of King Tyndareus and queen of Sparta, who was seduced by Zeus in the guise of a swan. There are several versions of the legend in terms of the actual birth of her children. Some tales say she laid an egg from which were hatched the Dioskouroi twins, Kastor and Polydeukes, both sons of Zeus. Others relate that she laid two eggs, each of which contained one child of the god–Polydeukes in one and Helene in the other. Still others relate that the second egg containing Helene was delivered to Leda by the goddess Nemesis, who had lain with Zeus in the guise of a goose. (The egg was shown to tourists in Sparta in the 2nd century ad, according to the travel writer Pausanias.) Some ancient writers portray Leda as the mother (by Tyndareus) of Clytemnestra, who would become wife of King Agamemnon.
Her sons, the Dioskouroi, joined the expedition of the Argonauts and the Kalydonian Boar Hunt, albeit at a very young age, while her daughters, Helene and Klytaimnestra, were wives of Trojan War heroes. In an ancient Greek vase painting, the generational gap between the sons and daughters of Leda is clearly represented: where Helene is depicted hatching from the egg, her fully grown brothers stand by as witnesses. Later, the Dioskouroi led an army to Athens when Theseus kidnapped their ten-year-old sister.
The divine swan’s encounter with Leda was a subject depicted by both ancient Greek and Italian Renaissance artists; Leonardo da Vinci undertook a painting (now lost) of the theme, and Correggio’s Leda (c. 1530s) is a well-known treatment of the subject. William Butler Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” is one of the classic poems of literary modernism.
Lee, Stan
Born Stanley Martin Lieber on December 28, 1922 in New York City, Stan Lee was hired as an office assistant at Timely Comics in 1939 and became an interim editor for the company in the early 1940s. After Timely changed its name to Marvel Comics in the early ’60s, Lee was called upon by his boss to create a series that could compete with rival DC Comics’ hit title Justice League of America. Together with artist and co-creator Jack Kirby, the Fantastic Four was born in 1961. A slew of new Marvel characters soon followed, including The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil and the X-Men.
Unique in the genre of comic books, Stan Lee became well-known for his imperfect and very human characters, who tackled real-world issues like alcoholism, bigotry and drug use.
Over the years, Lee has appeared on television and in film, notably so in the cinematic depictions of the Marvel characters that he helped to create.
Stan Lee passed away on November 12, 2018, leaving behind a legacy of creativity and a dedicated legion of fans.
Leet
Short/informal form of the word “elite.” The word is commonly used in video/online gamer text communications to suggest that a player is skilled. Such skilled players also engage in Leetspeak and are referred to as Leetspeakers.
Leetspeak
An informal internet language, jargon or code originating in the 1980s, in which standard letters are often replaced by numerals or special characters (ex: !337$p3@k for leetspeak). Originally used by “leet” hackers to evade detection of their websites/newsgroups by search engines via simple keyword searches, the invented language grew in common online usage, and became very popular in online games such as Doom in the early 1990s. In leetspeak, the rules of standard English are rarely obeyed. For example, a leetspeaker may capitalize every consonant or every other letter, or they may omit the vowels in a word.
Leetspeaker
A skilled (or “leet”) computer hacker/gamer/user who commonly uses leetspeak in their online communications.
Legend of Zelda, The
A dark wizard, a princess in peril, and an adventurous boy. The timeless story provided Shigeru Miyamoto with a skeleton of a story for a video game, which he developed for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). In 1985, Miyamoto began work on the two games that would come to define the system more than any others. The first was Super Mario Brothers, and the second was The Legend of Zelda.
As the game’s tale goes, a long time ago in an age of chaos, the legend of the Triforce, golden triangles possessing mystical powers, was handed down from generation to generation in the little kingdom of Hyrule. One day, an evil army led by Ganon, the powerful Prince of Darkness who sought to plunge the world into fear and darkness under his rule, stole the Triforce of Power. Fearing his wicked rule, Zelda, Hyrule’s princess, split up the Triforce of Wisdom into eight fragments, then hid the fragments throughout the realm. She also commanded her most trustworthy nursemaid, Impa, to secretly escape into the land and seek out a man with enough courage to destroy the evil Ganon. A young lad named Link appeared and skillfully drove off Ganon’s henchmen, saving Impa from a fate worse than death. Link resolved to bring the scattered eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom together, to defeat the powerful Ganon and to save Zelda.
A player of The Legend of Zelda controlled Link, a small boy on an epic quest to collect the fragments and re-assemble the Triforce, as he explored a large map of the land. Using exploration elements, transport puzzles, adventure-style inventory puzzles, an action component, a monetary system and simplified level building, The Legend of Zelda bucked much of the conventional wisdom about game design in Japan, creating something that resembled Warren Robinett’s Adventure and Howard Scott Warshaw’s Indiana Jones for the Atari 2600, yet drew on many original ideas and helped to establish a new sub-genre of action-adventure that remains popular to this day in its various evolved forms.
One year later, Nintendo followed The Legend of Zelda up with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
Lego
Founded in 1932 by master carpenter and joiner Ole Kirk Kristiansen in Billund, Denmark, The LEGO Group has passed from father to son, and is now owned by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the founder’s grandson. The name “LEGO” was taken from the Danish words “leg godt,” which mean “play well.” (Coincidentally, it is later realized that in Latin, the word means “I put together.”) Originally a small carpenter’s workshop manufacturing stepladders, ironing boards, stools and wooden toys, the company has grown to become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of toys. In 1946, LEGO became the first company in Denmark to buy a plastic injection-molding machine for toy production. In 1948, LEGO produced a game of Tiddlywinks, and by 1949, the company was producing around 200 different plastic and wooden toys, including “Automatic Binding Bricks,” a forerunner of the modern LEGO bricks sold exclusively in Denmark. By 1951, plastic toys would account for half of the company’s products.
In 1958, Ole Kirk Kristiansen passed away and his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen became head of the company. In 1969, Lego launched its new DUPLO series internationally, targeted for children under five, with bigger pieces for smaller hands, with the DUPLO Factory eventually becoming an independent unit in the LEGO Group. By 1962, sales start in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Morocco, Japan and Australia. By 1990, The LEGO Group was one of the world’s 10 largest toy manufacturers, and the only one in the top 10 located in Europe (with the others headquartered in America and Japan). In 1992, LEGO Japan and LEGO Hungary are established. In 1995, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen passed away and his son Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen took over as CEO. Four years later, The LEGO brick was named as one of the “Products of the Century” by Fortune Magazine. Not only did the LEGO brick celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2008, but LEGO owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame (US). In 2010, The LEGO Group is declared the world’s third largest toy manufacturer in terms of sales. In the beginning of February 2014, in a brand-new venture for the toy company, The LEGO Moviepremiered in a number of countries.
Lehrer, Tom
Born April 9, 1928, the popular musical satirist of the 1950s grew up in Manhattan, where he began playing piano at the age of seven. He enrolled at Harvard University at only 15, and eventually taught math classes there. His short stint in show business started in 1952 and ended when he voluntarily bowed out of the spotlight in 1959, after three albums and 109 concerts throughout the U.S., Britain, Europe and Australia. After retiring from performing (which he claimed eventually bored him), Lehrer returned to teaching math at Harvard and at MIT. In the 1960s, Lehrer wrote music for the U.S. version of the British satirical TV news program That Was the Week That Was. His tunes would take on such timely topics as racism, religion, war, nuclear proliferation and pollution. An album of songs from the show, aptly titled That Was the Week That Was, was released in 1965. It was first release in 6 years, and would be his last complete album of new material. He also wrote tunes for the children’s television program The Electric Company (including the memorable ditty “Silent E”). Tomfoolery, a stage production that featured Lehrer’s compositions, enjoyed runs on London’s West End, beginning in 1980, and off-Broadway in 1981. Lehrer’s catalog of 37 songs include “The Vatican Rag,” “The Masochism Tango,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “So Long Mom (I’m Off to Drop the Bomb)” and “The Elements” (which lists all the elements in the then-current Periodic Table of Elements! … in rhyme!). An extensive collection, The Remains of Tom Lehrer, was released in 2000. Lehrer taught at UC-Santa Cruz until 2001.
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
Sometime during 1986, programmer/designer Al Lowe and programmer Ken Williams produced the first “child-unfriendly” video game, set in an adults-only world full of loose women, drunks and, of course, leisure suits. The then-popular Compuserve online system was used to invite beta testers, and after two months of testing and modifications, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards hit the shelves. Although the first incarnation of Larry was greeted by critical acclaim, its initial sales were extremely poor: only 4,000 copies were sold in the game’s first month. Lowe was left considering his future and when a programming slot came up on Police Quest 1, he jumped at it. Meanwhile, Larrykept selling and positive word-of-mouth soon spread. Despite considerable opposition to the game, as well as a bill being put forward banning all adult content from games and some stores even refusing to stock the title, Larry picked up the Software Publishers Association’s “Best Adventure/Fantasy Role-Playing Game” award for 1987, and a whole string of “sequel” games were produced.
Leonidas
The legendary Greek king and hero of Thermopylae was born in the city-state of Sparta c. 530 BC. Almost everything that is known about Leonidas comes from the work of the Greek historian Herodotus, whose work Histories supposedly traced the family lineage of Leonidas back 20 generations to the mythical Greek hero Heracles (equivalent to the Roman hero Hercules) himself. A member of the Agiad house and son of King Anaxandrides, Leonidas was married to Gorgo, daughter of his older half-brother Cleomenes I, and succeeded Cleomenes as one of Greece’s two kings in 490 BC. (Due to its constitution, Sparta maintained two kings, who worked in partnership to theoretically keep each other honest.)
One of the first Spartan rulers to complete the infamously harsh training as a hoplite warrior, Leonidas was selected to lead the Greek resistance against attack by the Persian army in 481 BC. At the time of the invasion, the Spartans were in the midst of their sacred Karneia festival, and could not go to war until it was over. At any other time, Sparta could well have fielded up to 8,000 hoplites, but due to this restriction, only 300 Spartans went into battle, joined by troops from various other city-states to make up a force of up to 7,000 men. Regardless of their ingenious positioning at Thermopylae, they were no match for the Persian army of 80,000. In fact, the Persian king Xerxes was so confident of success, he sent a messenger to Leonidas, demanding the Greeks lay down their arms. The Spartan king’s reply was “molōn labe,” literally translated as “Come and take them.” Facing inevitable defeat, Leonidas ordered the bulk of his force to withdraw, making a last stand and providing rear guard with only the Spartans, Thespians and Thebans. Once they had defeated the Spartan force to a man, the Persians found and beheaded Leonidas’ corpse, an act that was considered to be a grave insult. Xerxes ordered Leonidas’ head put on a stake for public display, a highly dishonorable act and against all rules of warfare at that time.
After their victory, the Persians were defeated only months later by the Athenian navy in September 480 BC at the Battle of Salamis. Leonidas’ death at Thermopylae was seen as a heroic sacrifice that bought the Greek city-states valuable time and gave an inspirational example, not only of what Greek hoplites could achieve against the invading forces, but also of the price Greeks were willing to pay to maintain their freedom from foreign oppression.
Leonidas’ son Pleistarchus became king upon his father’s death, but due to his young age, Pausanius acted as regent. A monument was set up at the site of Leonidas’ defeat that included the words of Simonedes’ epitaph: “Go tell the Spartans, you who read: We took their orders and here lie dead.” A stone lion was also placed in memory of Leonidas and his men. Forty years after the battle, the king’s remains were exhumed and returned to Sparta, where they were given proper burial and a hero’s shrine was also established in his honor.
Leonidas has been portrayed in film by Richard Egan in The 300 Spartans (1962) and by Gerard Butler in 300 (2006).
©2015-2024 nerDictionary.com. All rights reserved.
Photo and Image Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute. nerDictionary.com is a reference site intended to educate, and all images reposted herein are for that purpose.