Rilakkuma (リラックマ Rirakkuma) is a fictional character produced by the Japanese company San-X, created by former employee Aki Kondo. Companies such as Re-Ment have collaborated with San-X to create Rilakkuma merchandise. Rilakkuma appears on items such as stationery, dishware, backpacks, and stuffed animals. A Netflix original series based on this character titled Rilakkuma and Kaoru is slated to premiere globally in Spring 2019.
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👓 Webmention improvements on Micro.blog | Manton Reece
I rolled out a few Webmention improvements to Micro.blog today: Fixed the permalink for a reply when you aren’t signed in, which was preventing external sites from verifying the link after receiving a Webmention from Micro.blog. Added limited support for accepting replies from external sites that ...
👓 Preparing a conference talk | Adactio
There are two aspects to preparing a talk: the content and the presentation. I like to keep the preparation of those two parts separate. It’s kind of like writing: instead of writing and editing at the same time, it’s more productive to write any old crap first (to get it out of your head) and then go back and edit—“write drunk and edit sober”. Separating out those two mindsets allows you to concentrate on the task at hand. So, to begin with, I’m not thinking about how I’m going to present the material at all. I’m only concerned with what I want to say.
👓 UX of Parenting: Teething | Greg McVerry
In every start-up we have sleepless nights. Yet nothing kept us up more than the pain of trying to add new data processing servers to each of the three instances we added to https://nuevacastra.glitch.me. At first we started each instance off on a small stream of data. It was a very bespoke system a...
👓 Girl pulls 1,500-year-old sword from lake | BBC
Eight-year-old Saga Vanecek found a pre-Viking-era relic while playing in a lake in Sweden.
👓 The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders—I like to say we’re archivists” | ArsTechnica
Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham outlines the scale of everyone's favorite archive.
👓 Johns Hopkins University Names Medical Building After Henrietta Lacks | Huffington Post
In the early 1950s, the university's hospital stole cells from Lacks, who has been called the "mother of modern medicine."
👓 What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet? | Jeremy Dormitzer
ActivityPub is a social networking protocol. Think of it as a language that describes social networks: the nouns are users and posts, and the verbs are like, follow, share, create… ActivityPub gives applications a shared vocabulary that they can use to communicate with each other. If a server implements ActivityPub, it can publish posts that any other server that implements ActivityPub knows how to share, like and reply to. It can also share, like, or reply to posts from other servers that speak ActivityPub on behalf of its users.
👓 Digital learning experts reflect on evolving field in new book | Inside Higher Ed
Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris examine their evolving thoughts on classroom technology and online education. A lot has changed in a short time, they found.
👓 After selling off his father’s properties, Trump embraced unorthodox strategies to expand his empire | Washington Post
In 2005, Donald Trump kicked off a decade-long buying and spending spree, vastly expanding his hotel and golf-course empire and cementing his image as a brash impresario. The unorthodox approach Trump took in making those bold bets — racing through hundreds of millions in cash and drawing loans from the private-wealth office of Deutsche Bank — came when he was on new terrain as a developer.
👓 How to Delete Facebook and Instagram From Your Life Forever | New York Times
Lost faith in Facebook and Instagram after data leakages, breaches and too much noise? Here’s a guide to breaking up with the social network and its photo-sharing app for good.
👓 Exploring Future’s Past: An IndieWeb NYC Reflection | Greg McVerry
As I sit in design studio, an optional drop in class for my #edu106 class to sit during a quiet hack hour or to get help, I can finally draw in my reflections on IndieWeb Camp. I left invigorated. Together as a community we want to save the web, rebuild our networks, and wrestle back control from th...
👓 Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis | Wired
When writers swap Trump for Cheeto and 45, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.
To my experience, the phrase “bird site” was generally used as a derogatory phrase on Mastodon (represented by a Mastodon character instead of a bird), by people who were fed up by Twitter and the interactions they found there. I recall instances of it as early as April 2017.
In addition to potential SEO implications, this phenomenon is also interesting for its information theoretic implications.
I particularly like the reference in the van der Nagle paper
[…] screenshotting, or making content visible without sending its website traffic – to demonstrate users’ understandings of the algorithms that seek to connect individuals to other people, platforms, content and advertisers, and their efforts to wrest back control.
This seems like an awesome way to skirt around algorithms in social sites as well as not rewarding negative sites with clicks.
👓 Stephen Miller’s Third-Grade Teacher: He Was a “Loner” and Ate Glue | Hollywood Reporter
In 1993, Donald Trump's senior political adviser attended Santa Monica's Franklin Elementary, where he was "off by himself all the time."
👓 I Was Reported to Police as an ‘Agitated Black Male’ — for Simply Walking to Work | ACLU
Last month, I walked across the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst to get to work. It was an ordinary stroll. But to a bystander, the sight of an educated Black professional going about his day was apparently cause for alarm.That bystander called the police. My workplace was shut down. I was, and remain, humiliated.Racial profiling at predominantly white institutions is nothing new, and this wasn’t the first time that I had to grit my teeth through a degrading interaction with police at the university.
Similar examples of this in our culture include falsely reporting bomb threats, falsely pulling fire alarms, and even recent incidences of “SWATting“. Swatting is typically a situation in which a party that feels wronged by another will call in a terrorist related threat resulting in the dispatching of a SWAT team to an innocent person’s location. This can occasionally lead to the accidental death of an innocent person. We’re prosecuting against these types of crimes (all examples of dangerous false claims) , so why not prosecute or require restitution in cases like Reginald Andrade’s?
I recall a related case like this in July when a white neighbor called the police multiple times on an African American boy for mowing a lawn. The national media attention called to the issue likely helped to shame the perpetrators of the situation into never allowing it to happening again, but this type of public shaming often doesn’t occur in the majority of these cases. In Andrade’s case, much of the shame only falls unfairly on Andrade and, potentially worse, on the broader University of Massachusetts Amherst community at large (and in the long run will tend to discourage diversity there in general–part of the intended effect) and not on the particular person who made the false report.
Why don’t we come up with a better name for this type of harassment to call attention to it and help put a stop to it? Giving swatting a sensationalist name has seemingly helped to curtail it. Perhaps “racial terrorism”? or, better, maybe “community terrorism” which includes not only the terrorism inflicted on the individual target but on the broader community which is heavily damaged as well. Is there a way to take anti-swatting laws and have them apply to these cases?