For the last eight winters, we at Three Rings have sent out Christmas cards – and sometimes mugs! – to our clients (and to special
friends of the project). The first of these was something I knocked up in Photoshop in under an hour, but we’ve since expanded into having an official “company artist” in the form of
our friend Ele who each year takes the ideas that the Three Rings volunteer team have come up with and adapts them into a stunning
original design that we’re proud to show off to our clients.
Our first Christmas card, in 2009, was knocked-up quickly and printed only a couple of days before the Christmas posting deadline, but it kicked-off a tradition that’s grown every
year since.
This year’s card is still winging its way to some of our more-distant customers, as Three Rings is used in six countries, and so it doesn’t yet appear on our gallery of previous cards. But here’s a sneak peek:
Last week, I helped stuff a little under 400 of these into envelopes and put stamps on them all for delivery to our UK customers. (Our international customers needed slightly
more-careful attention.)
For most of Three Rings life, our server’s been hosted by the awesome folks at Bytemark. We had a brief dalliance with Amazon Web Services for a while but had a seriously unsatisfying experience and we eventually came crawling back to Bytemark (complete with a
conveniently-timed Valentines’ Day message expressing our love for them and our apologies for our mistake). What I’m saying is that we’ve made a habit of sending seasonal greetings to
our buddies at Bytemark – and this Christmas was no different – but what surprised us was what we received from them this year:
Bytemark sent us not only a Christmas card but a fancy-looking fruitcake! Thanks, Bytemark!
Not only did Bytemark send us a delightful Christmas card (with a pixel-art picture of Sana literally burning the logs) but they included a fabulous-looking fruitcake. Thanks
for bringing a little bit of extra cheer to our Christmas, Bytemark!
My friend Jen‘s been blogging and vlogging about cystic fibrosis – which her young son Lorcán has – in order to raise awareness of
it and of a promising new treatment, Orkambi, which would very likely dramatically improve the lifespan and health of chidren like Lorcán… were it available on the NHS. For more
information, including petitions you can sign, see their blog Little Fierce One.
Once upon a time, long before I began selling my face by the acre for features on VICE dot com, I worked other jobs. There was one in particular that really had an impact on me:
writing fake reviews on TripAdvisor. Restaurant owners would pay me £10 and I’d write a positive review of their place, despite never eating there. Over time, I became obsessed with
monitoring the ratings of these businesses. Their fortunes would genuinely turn, and I was the catalyst.
This convinced me that TripAdvisor was a false reality – that the meals never took place; that the reviews were all written by other people like me. However, they’re not, of course –
they’re almost all completely genuine. And there was one other factor that seemed impossible to fake: the restaurants themselves. So I moved on.
And then, one day, sitting in the shed I live in, I had a revelation: within the current climate of misinformation, and society’s willingness to believe absolute bullshit, maybe a
fake restaurant is possible? Maybe it’s exactly the kind of place that could be a hit?
In that moment, it became my mission. With the help of fake reviews, mystique and nonsense, I was going to do it: turn my shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.
This site maintains a table cross-referencing the most popular “secure” messaging apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Skype etc.) against their security features, so that you can make an informed
decision.
The tl;dr is, of course, what I’ve been saying all along: use Signal! (at least until Riot is more
mature…)
hen I was very young, before I was on the internet — even before the internet was really a thing you could “go on” — I would dial into BBSs (bulletin board systems). BBSs were kind of
like private, micro-internets that people set up in their
houses. You had to use a dial-up modem to connect to them, and the people who were in charge of these networks (usually just some random technology enthusiast) could shut them off or
boot you at any time. I got booted a lot when I was kid, because I was curious and annoying and all the things I am today but way less savvy about it. Once a guy who ran a BBS called
my house to complain to my mother that her son had been snooping around in places he wasn’t supposed to go — I don’t remember what I was after, but I’m sure he had a very good reason
to be angry.
Here’s why I mention this: What I was doing online, in a virtual space, had real-world repercussions. It was real. What I was doing was real. That guy who complained about me was
real. And I realize now that I never treated or experienced the internet like some other thing — as if the physical world were “real” and what happened on the internet was something
less. That was where my real life was. That’s where I was, as a person.
The internet was the most real thing to me that I’d ever had in my life, before my wife and my daughter; my job, my house, my things. Its existence helped to form the basis of my
worldview, my politics, my obsessions. It gave me tools to talk and create in ways that would have been impossible in another age. But it was never not reality. I wish the rest of the
world had always seen it this way…
If you’ve not come across her before: Elena Filatova is a Ukranian woman who periodically motorcycles through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, recording her progress and
filming/photographing what she sees on her adventures. I bought her photobook the other year and I’ve particularly enjoyed her videos ever since. Worth a look.
The time capsule was buried in a secluded square in Murmansk in 1967 on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Inside was a
message dedicated to the citizens of the Communist future. At short notice, the authorities brought forward the capsule’s exhumation by ten days, to coincide with the city’s 101st
birthday. With the stroke of an official’s pen, a mid-century Soviet relic was enlisted to honour one of the last acts of Tsar (now Saint) Nicholas II, who founded my hometown in
October 1916. From socialism to monarchism in ten days. Some of the city’s pensioners accused the local government of trying to suppress the sacred memory of the revolution. ‘Our
forefathers would be turning in their graves,’ one woman wrote in a letter to the local paper. The time capsule ‘is not some kind of birthday present to the city; it’s a reminder of
the centenary of the great October Revolution and its human cost.’
My father had watched the time capsule being buried. He came to Murmansk aged 17. From his remote village, he had dreamed of the sea but he failed the navy’s eye test. In October
1967, he was a second-year student at the Higher Marine Engineering Academy, an elite training school for the Soviet Union’s massive fishing fleet. As a year-round warm water port,
Murmansk – the largest human settlement above the Arctic Circle – is a major fishing and shipping hub, home to the world’s only fleet of nuclear-powered ice-breakers…
