We seem to be finally, actually doing it: making the whole world aware of the polyamorous possibility. That’s Elisabeth Sheff’s term for discovering that happy, ethical
multi-loving relationships are even possible, that people are successfully doing them right now, and that maybe you can too.
Every December, Google announces the year’s top trending search terms compared to the year before. In the Relationships category, Google just announced that polyamory
became one of the top four topics. CNN Moneyreported
this morning,
As somebody who likes to keep his content on his own server (y’know: right here!) but whose readers sometimes prefer that it’s syndicated to e.g. Facebook (as it is), I appreciate this comic by The Oatmeal.
Do you remember how earlier this year, half of the Internet went nuts about the fact that – based on the emoji they’d drawn – Google didn’t know how to make a cheeseburger? It was a fun distraction from all the terrible stuff
happening in the world, which was nice, but it also got me to thinking: how many other emoji are arguably “wrong” in their depiction of whatever-it-is they’re supposed to be
showing.
I was never so offended by the fact that the cheese was underneath the burger as I was by the fact that the cheese was depicted as having somehow been melted… by the bun.
I’ve got a special kind of relationship with emoji to begin with. I wouldn’t even call it love-hate, because that would imply that there’s something about them that I love. But I
certainly think that they’re culturally-fascinating, and I wonder how future anthropologists will look back on this period of our history: the time that we went back to
heiroglyphics for a while! It’s great to have a convenient, universal, lazy icon set that anybody can use… but it’s unfortunate that people use them for literal rather
than figurative meaning (such as sharing the [?️ | reminder ribbon] icon with somebody because it’s pink and you’re doing a breast
cancer awareness fun run… without realising that the ribbon is only pink on your model of phone), or for figurative meanings that depend on specific iconography (such
as sending the [? | aubergine/eggplant] emoji to somebody to tell them that you’ve got an erection… which is apparently a thing –
I’m out of touch with youth culture… without knowing that their LG phone is going to render it as super-bent).
These two are both emoji for “ATM”: the former, by Microsoft, shows a cash machine. The latter looks like a corporate headquarters for a company called “ATM”. If you’re using a
picture because it has a specific meaning, you perhaps ought not to use emoji!
Emoji can be a way to accentuate a message, but they aren’t and shouldn’t be the message themselves because the specifics of their display are not so much a standard as a loose
collection of standards implemented by some… imaginative… graphic artists… And some cases are particularly bad:
This isn’t what juggling looks like, Apple.
Apple seem to think that three-ball juggling involves all three balls being in the air at the same time. And also, for some reason, wearing a bowler hat and a bow tie.
The most-common three-ball juggling technique is to throw from the inside, catch on the outside.
The idea that three-ball juggling routinely involves multiple balls in the air at once is a common one, but it’s (mostly) false. As the animated GIF above shows, there are two stages to
juggling. The first is the stage where one ball is held in each hand and a third ball is in the air. The second is the stage where the juggler throws a ball from their hand in order to
free up space to catch the descending ball. This latter one is the only point when there are multiple balls in the air, and even then it’s only two of them (specifically, for
conventional N-ball juggling, the number of balls in the air is usually N-2 and occasionally N-1).
Apple’s emoji also places the balls in very unlikely places: consider the two lowest-down balls: they’re both further out than the centre of the juggler’s hands! This means
that the juggler is throwing the balls away from himself (presumably out of panic that he’s somehow been hired as a juggler despite not knowing how to juggle).
Who’s even seen a camera like this, let alone tried to use one to capture a speeding vehicle?
Yes, yes, I get it: icons should be symbolic rather than representative, and with that in mind Apple’s icon isn’t too bad. Especially not when you compare it to some of the
other options.
This is what Google (left) and Samsung (right) think that juggling looks like.
Both Google and Samsung’s emoji have the same problem: that all the balls are bunched up in the same path, like they’re being fired from a shotgun at an unsuspecting children’s
entertainer. They form an arch over the juggler’s head like a rainbow of mistake, all rocketing from the juggler’s right hand to their left which is clearly going to be incapable of
catching them all at once. What we’re seeing, then, is a split second before the moment of photographic perfection: the point at which all the balls are in the air and
you don’t have to wait and see what a disaster happens when they all come down at once.
Also, Google: you too? What’s with the bowler hat and bow tie? Is this what jugglers are supposed to wear? Have I been doing it wrong my whole life?
Facebook has a picture of… disembodied hands spinning a three-coloured ring with balls on it?
Facebook’s “juggler” emoji is even worse. For a start, it doesn’t actually show a juggler, it shows juggling (and this isn’t a consistent style choice: Facebook’s emoji
for e.g. snowboarder, mechanic, farmer, teacher etc. all show a whole person or at least a person from the waist upwards). Secondly, the motion of the balls most-closely represents
circle-juggling, which is a way to juggle but isn’t what you normally see jugglers doing: compared to conventional juggling patterns, circle juggling is both harder to
do and looks less-impressive!
But even then, it’s confusing: why is the blue ball turning a corner of its own accord to try to avoid the hand? Perhaps this is some kind of magic available only to people who are
missing a finger from each hand, as this unusual “juggler” seems to be.
Twitter changed their “juggler” emoji in September 2016 from the one on the left to the one on the right.
Twitter used to have many of the same problems – circle juggling, balls that randomly change direction in flight, no juggler – until they revamped their emoji collection last year. Now
they’ve still got most of those, plus the “all the balls in the air” problem and the most disinterested-looking juggler I’ve ever seen. As he stands there, shrugging,
it feels like it needs a speech bubble that says “I have no feelings about what I’m doing whatsoever.” At least he’s not wearing a bowler hat and bow tie, I suppose.
Also: why do we have an emoji for juggler, but not for magician?
The short of it is: emoji have a lot to answer for.
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.
