#and recently just pulled out of giving a speech on my success as a disabled author

[not-poignant]

Hi there! I absolutely love your works and, having followed you for a while now, I also really admire you as a person and an author in general. Every update on AO3 and Tumblr is always such a delight. I'm sorry if this ask is coming out of the blue or if it's something you've been asked before, but how did you take the plunge from writing predominantly fanfic to posting original fiction in serial form and also self-publishing novels? I'm currently in the process of drafting two original works after writing/posting fanfic regularly for years, and I'm just lost as to how to set everything up. I have a general idea (post chapter-by-chapter on AO3 and offer early access and some exclusive content on patreon or some other subscription service), but it all feels so daunting right now. Any bit of info or advice on how you got started would be immensely appreciated <3

Hi anon,

Tbh, I went from writing fanfic to original fiction because I had original characters in my fanfiction and readers asked me about them.

I had no kind of...dreams of being an original author in this way, I was published via other pathways already, and fanfiction was really an escape for me, a chance to break with all the conventions of standard writing and just do what I wanted.

But I needed a broader cast than what the movie gave me re: my first fanfics, and I added my own OCs, and left them in the background as much as possible, but even back while writing that fanfic, even the OCs were getting fanart. Sometimes readers would send me anons about them, or ask me more details about them.

Finally, I decided to write some hatesex between them, just something to kind of...idk get it out of my system? Answer what the readers were looking for?

The flow through therefore felt natural. Game Theory flows very naturally on from From the Darkness We Rise & Into Shadows We Fall. And from there, moving into other original works has been easy, in part, because I've often being doing alternate universes from a core of original characters.

If I want to introduce new original characters, I introduce them in stories where pre-existing original characters have already been established.

I didn't even start writing original works with a view to making money off that. In fact I thought it was a very foolish thing to do. A lot of people on AO3 don't want to read original works on AO3 and refuse to do it or only do it if it's PWP / pornography.

I started my Patreon account because readers asked me to. I got asks from very very generous people who wanted to know my Paypal, or asked if I'd start a Ko-Fi, and finally a few people just asked if I'd start a Patreon. I said I didn't think it was a good idea, and they said it was up to them if they wanted to pay me or not, but I should at least consider giving them the choice.

From there, I found it all very overwhelming. I made lots of mistakes. I had to go on hiatus for a year because I promised too much and couldn't deliver on many of those rewards. And for many years I only offered one early access chapter per week for one story, and my main stories were never early access (and still aren't, Underline the Black goes up for everyone at the same time - and while that may change in the future, it's definitely unconventional).

I've always been transparent with my readers that with very few exceptions, if they just wait, they eventually get everything for free. But if they want to support this kind of writing and/or enjoy it, and can comfortably afford to send some dollars my way, they can ensure that I can keep writing this way.

I have for a long time offered no exclusive content at all, I believe that can do well, but it's not my preferred way of doing things.

This career has been incredibly reader driven, anon. I would not personally attempt it cold, without a really fantastic readerbase who encouraged me every step of the way in the first place, because I am a cautious, insecure writer who doesn't like to take risks. So I can't give you advice on how to build this career without the support of the readers there in the first place, and I believe the only reason why I had their support was, in part, because of the actual strength of the writing itself. Which isn't to say it's the best, it's not, it's what I needed at the time and it's what a few other people needed, and that's basically how this works.

If you turn up with the writing, and the audience comes, and they want the story, you have the career.

In terms of practical advice - you can introduce original characters in fanfiction, just be aware that readers tend to be hostile by default if they pull any significant 'screen time' away from the fandom characters (and readers are extremely savvy to authors trying to build a financial business through AO3)

It IS daunting, but the good news is you can do a soft launch. You can open a Patreon or Ream account tomorrow and tell no one. You can mess with your graphics and your tier rewards to your heart's content when you don't have any subscribers. Build a buffer of early access/chapters, and make sure you don't overpromise on anything. Whatever you think you can realistically deliver to readers, cut it in half, because the stress of chapter update deadlines every month can really add up and it's a very different landscape to novel releases.

You can take your time, you can build interest slowly.

Remember you can never ever mention any kind of site where you're getting paid inadvertently, sneakily, or directly on AO3. You can't mention Ream, you can't mention Patreon, you can't mention Ko-Fi, you can't go 'learn more about my writing here' and link to those places. You can't mention buy links. You can only mention sites like Tumblr, Linktree, Twitter etc. Places where the point of sale isn't happening. Not doing so risks AO3's Not For Profit status and risks your entire account, and it's not worth it.

I did an interview with Subscriptions for Authors where I actually talk about many of these things so you can watch (or listen to) the podcast here if you're inclined! It also talks about the importance of community-building, gratitude to the readers, and generosity.

I am here because my readers wanted me to be. So I'm very concerned with making sure I can give them the best writing possible within my abilities. This makes me not very suited to offering 'how to start in this career' advice because it was a happy accident. It's hard to teach something I have never done your way myself, anon, because I worry I'd give bad advice. My writing had people turning up, but I'm not sure anything else I did, added much! I think responding to Tumblr asks and replying to every comment helped too! But...I don't know for sure.

But this career path does make me pretty well suited to offering 'how to keep this going' advice, because I've been doing this for ten years. <3333

[godaddywebsitebuilder285]

Usability Testing for Voice Content

It’s an important time to be in voice design. Many of us are turning to voice assistants in these times, whether for comfort, recreation, or staying informed. As the interest in interfaces driven by voice continues to reach new heights around the world, so too will users’ expectations and the best practices that guide their design.

Voice interfaces (also known as voice user interfaces or VUIs) have been reinventing how we approach, evaluate, and interact with user interfaces. The impact of conscious efforts to reduce close contact between people will continue to increase users’ expectations for the availability of a voice component on all devices, whether that entails a microphone icon indicating voice-enabled search or a full-fledged voice assistant waiting patiently in the wings for an invocation.

But voice interfaces present inherent challenges and surprises. In this relatively new realm of design, the intrinsic twists and turns in spoken language can make things difficult for even the most carefully considered voice interfaces. After all, spoken language is littered with fillers (in the linguistic sense of utterances like hmm and um), hesitations and pauses, and other interruptions and speech disfluencies that present puzzling problems for designers and implementers alike.

Once you’ve built a voice interface that introduces information or permits transactions in a rich way for spoken language users, the easy part is done. Nonetheless, voice interfaces also surface unique challenges when it comes to usability testing and robust evaluation of your end result. But there are advantages, too, especially when it comes to accessibility and cross-channel content strategy. The fact that voice-driven content lies on the opposite extreme of the spectrum from the traditional website confers it an additional benefit: it’s an effective way to analyze and stress-test just how channel-agnostic your content truly is.

The quandary of voice usability

Several years ago, I led a talented team at Acquia Labs to design and build a voice interface for Digital Services Georgia called Ask GeorgiaGov, which allowed citizens of the state of Georgia to access content about key civic tasks, like registering to vote, renewing a driver’s license, and filing complaints against businesses. Based on copy drawn directly from the frequently asked questions section of the Georgia.gov website, it was the first Amazon Alexa interface integrated with the Drupal content management system ever built for public consumption. Built by my former colleague Chris Hamper, it also offered a host of impressive features, like allowing users to request the phone number of individual government agencies for each query on a topic.

Designing and building web experiences for the public sector is a uniquely challenging endeavor due to requirements surrounding accessibility and frequent budgetary challenges. Out of necessity, governments need to be exacting and methodical not only in how they engage their citizens and spend money on projects but also how they incorporate new technologies into the mix. For most government entities, voice is a completely different world, with many potential pitfalls.

At the outset of the project, the Digital Services Georgia team, led by Nikhil Deshpande, expressed their most important need: a single content model across all their content irrespective of delivery channel, as they only had resources to maintain a single rendition of each content item. Despite this editorial challenge, Georgia saw Alexa as an exciting opportunity to open new doors to accessible solutions for citizens with disabilities. And finally, because there were relatively few examples of voice usability testing at the time, we knew we would have to learn on the fly and experiment to find the right solution.

Eventually, we discovered that all the traditional approaches to usability testing that we’d executed for other projects were ill-suited to the unique problems of voice usability. And this was only the beginning of our problems.

How voice interfaces improve accessibility outcomes

Any discussion of voice usability must consider some of the most experienced voice interface users: people who use assistive devices. After all, accessibility has long been a bastion of web experiences, but it has only recently become a focus of those implementing voice interfaces. In a world where refreshable Braille displays and screen readers prize the rendering of web-based content into synthesized speech above all, the voice interface seems like an anomaly. But in fact, the exciting potential of Amazon Alexa for disabled citizens represented one of the primary motivations for Georgia’s interest in making their content available through a voice assistant.

Questions surrounding accessibility with voice have surfaced in recent years due to the perceived user experience benefits that voice interfaces can offer over more established assistive devices. Because screen readers make no exceptions when they recite the contents of a page, they can occasionally present superfluous information and force the user to wait longer than they’re willing. In addition, with an effective content schema, it can often be the case that voice interfaces facilitate pointed interactions with content at a more granular level than the page itself.

Though it can be difficult to convince even the most forward-looking clients of accessibility’s value, Georgia has been not only a trailblazer but also a committed proponent of content accessibility beyond the web. The state was among the first jurisdictions to offer a text-to-speech (TTS) phone hotline that read web pages aloud. After all, state governments must serve all citizens equally—no ifs, ands, or buts. And while these are still early days, I can see voice assistants becoming new conduits, and perhaps more efficient channels, by which disabled users can access the content they need.

Managing content destined for discrete channels

Whereas voice can improve accessibility of content, it’s seldom the case that web and voice are the only channels through which we must expose information. For this reason, one piece of advice I often give to content strategists and architects at organizations interested in pursuing voice-driven content is to never think of voice content in isolation. Siloing it is the same misguided approach that has led to mobile applications and other discrete experiences delivering orphaned or outdated content to a user expecting that all content on the website should be up-to-date and accessible through other channels as well.

After all, we’ve trained ourselves for many years to think of content in the web-only context rather than across channels. Our closely held assumptions about links, file downloads, images, and other web-based marginalia and miscellany are all aspects of web content that translate poorly to the conversational context—and particularly the voice context. Increasingly, we all need to concern ourselves with an omnichannel content strategy that straddles all those channels in existence today and others that will doubtlessly surface over the horizon.

With the advantages of structured content in Drupal 7, Georgia.gov already had a content model amenable to interlocution in the form of frequently asked questions (FAQs). While question-and-answer formats are convenient for voice assistants because queries for content tend to come in the form of questions, the returned responses likewise need to be as voice-optimized as possible.

For Georgia.gov, the need to preserve a single rendition of all content across all channels led us to perform a conversational content audit, in which we read aloud all of the FAQ pages, putting ourselves in the shoes of a voice user, and identified key differences between how a user would interpret the written form and how they would parse the spoken form of that same content. After some discussion with the editorial team at Georgia, we opted to limit calls to action (e.g., “Read more”), links lacking clear context in surrounding text, and other situations confusing to voice users who cannot visualize the content they are listening to.

Here’s a table containing examples of how we converted certain text on FAQ pages to counterparts more appropriate for voice. Reading each sentence aloud, one by one, helped us identify cases where users might scratch their heads and say “Huh?” in a voice context.

BeforeAfterLearn how to change your name on your Social Security card.The Social Security Administration can help you change your name on your Social Security card.You can receive payments through either a debit card or direct deposit. Learn more about payments.You can receive payments through either a debit card or direct deposit.Read more about this.In Georgia, the Family Support Registry typically pulls payments directly from your paycheck. However, you can send your own payments online through your bank account, your credit card, or Western Union. You may also send your payments by mail to the address provided in your court order.

In areas like content strategy and content governance, content audits have long been key to understanding the full picture of your content, but it doesn’t end there. Successful content audits can run the gamut from automated checks for orphaned content or overly wordy articles to more qualitative analyses of how content adheres to a specific brand voice or certain design standards. For a content strategy truly prepared for channels both here and still to come, a holistic understanding of how users will interact with your content in a variety of situations is a baseline requirement today.

Other conversational interfaces have it easier

Spoken language is inherently hard. Even the most gifted orators can have trouble with it. It’s littered with mistakes, starts and stops, interruptions, hesitations, and a vertiginous range of other uniquely human transgressions. The written word, because it’s committed instantly to a mostly permanent record, is tame, staid, and carefully considered in comparison.

When we talk about conversational interfaces, we need to draw a clear distinction between the range of user experiences that traffic in written language rather than spoken language. As we know from the relative solidity of written language and literature versus the comparative transience of spoken language and oral traditions, in many ways the two couldn’t be more different from one another. The implications for designers are significant because spoken language, from the user’s perspective, lacks a graphical equivalent to which those scratching their head can readily refer. We’re dealing with the spoken word and aural affordances, not pixels, written help text, or visual affordances.

Why written conversational interfaces are easier to evaluate

One of the privileges that chatbots and textbots enjoy over voice interfaces is the fact that by design, they can’t hide the previous steps users have taken. Any conversational interface user working in the written medium has access to their previous history of interactions, which can stretch back days, weeks, or months: the so-called backscroll. A flight passenger communicating with an airline through Facebook Messenger, for example, knows that they can merely scroll up in the chat history to confirm that they’ve already provided the company with their e-ticket number or frequent flyer account information.

This has outsize implications for information architecture and conversational wayfinding. Since chatbot users can consult their own written record, it’s much harder for things to go completely awry when they make a move they didn’t intend. Recollection is much more difficult when you have to remember what you said a few minutes ago off the top of your head rather than scrolling up to the information you provided a few hours or weeks ago. An effective chatbot interface may, for example, enable a user to jump back to a much earlier, specific place in a conversation’s history.An effective chatbot interface may, for example, enable a user to jump back to a much earlier, specific place in a conversation’s history. Voice interfaces that live perpetually in the moment have no such luxury.

Eye tracking only works for visual components

In many cases, those who work with chatbots and messaging bots (especially those leveraging text messages or other messaging services like Facebook Messenger, Slack, or WhatsApp) have the unique privilege of benefiting from a visual component. Some conversational interfaces now insert other elements into the conversational flow between a machine and a person, such as embedded conversational forms (like SPACE10’s Conversational Form) that allow users to enter rich input or select from a range of possible responses.

The success of eye tracking in more traditional usability testing scenarios highlights its appropriateness for visual interfaces such as websites, mobile applications, and others. However, from the standpoint of evaluating voice interfaces that are entirely aural, eye tracking serves only the limited (but still interesting from a research perspective) purpose of assessing where the test subject is looking while speaking with an invisible interlocutor—not whether they are able to use the interface successfully. Indeed, eye tracking is only a viable option for voice interfaces that have some visual component, like the Amazon Echo Show.

Think-aloud and concurrent probing interrupt the conversational flow

A well-worn approach for usability testing is think-aloud, which allows for users working with interfaces to present their frequently qualitative impressions of interfaces verbally while interacting with the user experience in question. Paired with eye tracking, think-aloud adds considerable dimension to a usability test for visual interfaces such as websites and web applications, as well as other visually or physically oriented devices.

Another is concurrent probing (CP). Probing involves the use of questions to gather insights about the interface from users, and Usability.gov describes two types: concurrent, in which the researcher asks questions during interactions, and retrospective, in which questions only come once the interaction is complete.

Conversational interfaces that utilize written language rather than spoken language can still be well-suited to think-aloud and concurrent probing approaches, especially for the components in the interface that require manual input, like conversational forms and other traditional UI elements interspersed throughout the conversation itself.

But for voice interfaces, think-aloud and concurrent probing are highly questionable approaches and can catalyze a variety of unintended consequences, including accidental invocations of trigger words (such as Alexa mishearing “selected” as “Alexa”) and introduction of bad data (such as speech transcription registering both the voice interface and test subject). After all, in a hypothetical think-aloud or CP test of a voice interface, the user would be responsible for conversing with the chatbot while simultaneously offering up their impressions to the evaluator overseeing the test.

Voice usability tests with retrospective probing

Retrospective probing (RP), a lesser-known approach for usability testing, is seldom seen in web usability testing due to its chief weakness: the fact that we have awful memories and rarely remember what occurred mere moments earlier with anything that approaches total accuracy. (This might explain why the backscroll has joined the pantheon of rigid recordkeeping currently occupied by cuneiform, the printing press, and other means of concretizing information.)

For users of voice assistants lacking scrollable chat histories, retrospective probing introduces the potential for subjects to include false recollections in their assessments or to misinterpret the conclusion of their conversations. That said, retrospective probing permits the participant to take some time to form their impressions of an interface rather than dole out incremental tidbits in a stream of consciousness, as would more likely occur in concurrent probing.

What makes voice usability tests unique

Voice usability tests have several unique characteristics that distinguish them from web usability tests or other conversational usability tests, but some of the same principles unify both visual interfaces and their aural counterparts. As always, “test early, test often” is a mantra that applies here, as the earlier you can begin testing, the more robust your results will be. Having an individual to administer a test and another to transcribe results or watch for signs of trouble is also an effective best practice in settings beyond just voice usability.

Interference from poor soundproofing or external disruptions can derail a voice usability test even before it begins. Many large organizations will have soundproof rooms or recording studios available for voice usability researchers. For the vast majority of others, a mostly silent room will suffice, though absolute silence is optimal. In addition, many subjects, even those well-versed in web usability tests, may be unaccustomed to voice usability tests in which long periods of silence are the norm to establish a baseline for data.

How we used retrospective probing to test Ask GeorgiaGov

For Ask GeorgiaGov, we used the retrospective probing approach almost exclusively to gather a range of insights about how our users were interacting with voice-driven content. We endeavored to evaluate interactions with the interface early and diachronically. In the process, we asked each of our subjects to complete two distinct tasks that would require them to traverse the entirety of the interface by asking questions (conducting a search), drilling down into further questions, and requesting the phone number for a related agency. Though this would be a significant ask of any user working with a visual interface, the unidirectional focus of voice interface flows, by contrast, reduced the likelihood of lengthy accidental detours.

Here are a couple of example scenarios:

You have a business license in Georgia, but you’re not sure if you have to register on an annual basis. Talk with Alexa to find out the information you need. At the end, ask for a phone number for more information.

You’ve just moved to Georgia and you know you need to transfer your driver’s license, but you’re not sure what to do. Talk with Alexa to find out the information you need. At the end, ask for a phone number for more information.

We also peppered users with questions after the test concluded to learn about their impressions through retrospective probing:

“On a scale of 1–5, based on the scenario, was the information you received helpful? Why or why not?”

“On a scale of 1–5, based on the scenario, was the content presented clear and easy to follow? Why or why not?”

“What’s the answer to the question that you were tasked with asking?”

Because state governments also routinely deal with citizen questions having to do with potentially traumatic issues such as divorce and sexual harassment, we also offered the choice for participants to opt out of certain categories of tasks.

While this testing procedure yielded compelling results that indicated our voice interface was performing at the level it needed to despite its experimental nature, we also ran into considerable challenges during the usability testing process. Restoring Amazon Alexa to its initial state and troubleshooting issues on the fly proved difficult during the initial stages of the implementation, when bugs were still common.

In the end, we found that many of the same lessons that apply to more storied examples of usability testing were also relevant to Ask GeorgiaGov: the importance of testing early and testing often, the need for faithful yet efficient transcription, and the surprising staying power of bugs when integrating disparate technologies. Despite Ask GeorgiaGov’s many similarities to other interface implementations in terms of technical debt and the role of usability testing, we were overjoyed to hear from real Georgians whose engagement with their state government could not be more different from before.

Conclusion

Many of us may be building interfaces for voice content to experiment with newfangled channels, or to build for disabled people and people newer to the web. Now, they are necessities for many others, especially as social distancing practices continue to take hold worldwide. Nonetheless, it’s crucial to keep in mind that voice should be only one component of a channel-agnostic strategy equipped for content ripped away from its usual contexts. Building usable voice-driven content experiences can teach us a great deal about how we should envisage our milieu of content and its future in the first place.

Gone are the days when we could write a page in HTML and call it a day; content now needs to be rendered through synthesized speech, augmented reality overlays, digital signage, and other environments where users will never even touch a personal computer. By focusing on structured content first and foremost with an eye toward moving past our web-based biases in developing our content for voice and others, we can better ensure the effectiveness of our content on any device and in any form factor.

Eight months after we finished building Ask GeorgiaGov in 2017, we conducted a retrospective to inspect the logs amassed over the past year. The results were striking. Vehicle registration, driver’s licenses, and the state sales tax comprised the most commonly searched topics. 79.2% of all interactions were successful, an achievement for one of the first content-driven Alexa skills in production, and 71.2% of all interactions led to the issuance of a phone number that users could call for further information.

But deep in the logs we implemented for the Georgia team’s convenience, we found a number of perplexing 404 Not Found errors related to a search term that kept being recorded over and over again as “Lawson’s.” After some digging and consulting the native Georgians in the room, we discovered that one of our dear users with a particularly strong drawl was repeatedly pronouncing “license” in her native dialect to no avail.

As this anecdote highlights, just as no user experience can be truly perfect for everyone, voice content is an environment where imperfections can highlight considerations we missed in developing cross-channel content. And just as we have much to learn when it comes to the new shapes content can take as it jumps off the screen and out the window, it seems our voice interfaces still have a ways to go before they take over the world too.

Special thanks to Nikhil Deshpande for his feedback during the writing process.

[thisdaynews]

Why Is Andrew Yang Still in This Race?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/why-is-andrew-yang-still-in-this-race/

Why Is Andrew Yang Still in This Race?

BEAUFORT, S.C.—Andrew Yang was sitting here in a rented silver Suburban outside a black chamber of commerce surrounded by five members of his rapidly growing campaign staff when he saw a new Fox News poll in which he was tied for fifth in the sprawling Democratic presidential primary.

He stared at the screen of his phone and scrolled.

Story Continued Below

“Three percent!” Yang said, in his characteristically dry, droll way. “This team. Is the team. That’s going to go … all. The. Way. To the White House!”

Yang breezily walked into the chamber building and got onto a packed elevator. To the county party chair squeezed into a corner, Yang excitedly passed along the results of the poll, listing in order the only people who were ahead of him—a former vice president (Joe Biden) and three high-profile senators (Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris).

“And thenme!” he exclaimed, flashing a goofy, exaggerated smile.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Andrew Yang is … surging? It sounds crazy, and who knows how long it lasts? But for now he is one of 10 candidates who have qualified through sufficiently robust polling and fundraising for this fall’s third and fourth debates. The exhausting cluster of Oval Office aspirants, at least for these purposes, has been whittled to this: the aforementioned top four, two more senators, a mayor, a former member of Congress and … this guy. Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur from New York and a father of two young sons who’s never run for any office of any kind before this, and whose campaign is fueled by a deeply dystopian view of the near future (trucker riots, anybody?), a pillar of a platform that can come off as a gimmick (a thousand bucks a month for every American adult!), and a zeitgeisty swirl of podcasts, GIFs, tweets and memes. Last week, as a successful governor from a major state dropped out and the bottom half of the bloated field continued to flounder, Yang passed the 200,000 mark for unique donors—outpacing an array of name-known pols. He’s gotten contributions, on average $24 a pop, from 88 percent of the ZIP codes in the country, and he’s on track, he says, to raise twice as much money this quarter as he did last quarter. Just the other day, he made his Sunday news show debut.

It’s a phenomenon hard to figure—until you get up close and take in some strange political alchemy. At the heart of Yang’s appeal is a paradox. In delivering his alarming, existentially unsettling message of automation and artificial intelligence wreaking havoc on America’s economic, emotional and social well-being, he … cracks jokes. He laughs easily, and those around him, and who come to see him, end up laughing a lot, too. It’s not that Yang’s doing stump-speech stand-up. It’s more a certain nonchalant whimsy that leavens what he says and does. Sometimes his jokes fall flat. He can be awkward, but he also pointedly doesn’t appear to care. It’s weird, and it’s hard to describe, but I suspect that if Yang ever said something cringeworthy, as Jeb Bush did that time in 2016—“Please clap”—the audience probably would respond with mirth, not pity. Critics ding his ambit of proposals as fanciful or zany (getting rid of the penny, empowering MMA fighters, lowering the voting age to 16) and question the viability of his “Freedom Dividend,” considering its sky-high price tag (“exciting but not realistic,” Hillary Clinton decided when she considered the general notion in the 2016 cycle). And his campaign coffers are chock-full of small-number contributors and even $1 donors. Still, at this angry, fractious time, and in this primary that’s already an edgy, anxious slog, Yang and his campaign somehow radiate an ambient joviality. Of his party’s presidential contestants, he’s the cheerful doomsayer.

His most foolproof laugh line—“the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math”—suggests that his candidacy is premised on distinguishing himself from the president the same way as his fellow challengers. But it’s not quite that simple. He’s attracting support from an unorthodox jumble of citizens, from a host of top technologists, but from penitent Trump voters, too. He’s one of only two Democrats (along with Sanders) who ticks 10 percent or higher when Trump voters are asked which of the Democrats they might go for—a factoid Yang uses as evidence that he’ll win “easy” if he’s the nominee come November of next year. Trump, of course, is the president, and Yang (let’s not get carried away) remains a very long long shot to succeed him.

But to spend any time with Yang is to grapple with this unexpected Trump-Yang Venn diagram. While Yang talks in different, far less overtly divisive ways, identifies different scapegoats (robots, not immigrants) and offers different solutions (cash, not walls), he’s zeroed in on the same elemental problem Trump did en route to his shock of a win in ’16: A large portion of the populace is being left behind, and it’s not remotely OK. Similarly, Yang’s campaign packs an anti-Washington, convention-bucking, on-the-fly, filter-free vibe. There are four-letter hats—not MAGA, but MATH (Make America Think Harder). And his Trump train? It’s the Yang Gang. Yang is not thenot Trumpof the 2020 trail. “Yang is thenewTrump,” a traveling Trump-voter-turned-Yang-Gang-YouTuber told me.

There are plenty of differences, too, of course. To wit: In the chamber building, after the elevator disgorged a floor up, a lobby was filled with the bouncy beats of line dancing emanating from a different room. One of his staffers joked that Yang should join in. And then … he did. Apparently unafraid of looking silly, or potentially creating an embarrassing, indelible, campaign-altering moment with the presence not just of me but also a state-based reporter from The Associated Press, Yang proceeded to team up with a handful of senior citizens for what most onlookers ultimately agreed was a quite credible, rhythm-keeping rendition of the catchy “Cupid Shuffle.”

“Down, down, do your dance, do your dance,” went the lyrics—and Yang did.

“Get it, Andrew!” the group leader called into her microphone. “Lookin’ good!”

When it was over, Yang jogged around the room to hearty cheers, grinning and giving everybody high fives.

“Thanks for letting me crash your class,” he said to the head of Family Slide Dancers.

“Thank you all!” he said to the members of her class.

By the time we got back to the Suburban, my phone was buzzing nonstop in my pocket. A tweet of the video I shot was starting to zoom around the internet.

***

“We are basically fucked,”Yang said, sitting in the Suburban, earlier in the day, not too long after we met, “unless we un-fuck ourselves, systematically and collectively.”

This blunt declaration didn’t surprise me. That’s because I’d read his most recent book. It’s one heck of a downer.

InThe War on Normal People, which came out last year, Yang sketched a stark picture of “broken people” and “jobless zones” and “derelict buildings” and “widespread despair” and “hundreds of thousands of families and communities being pushed into oblivion” and “a society torn apart by ever-rising deprivation and disability” and a “best-case scenario” of “a hyper-stratified society like something out ofThe Hunger Games.”

“It’s possible that we may already be too defeated and opiated by the market to mount a revolution. We might just settle for making hateful comments online and watching endless YouTube videos with only the occasional flare-up of violence amid many quiet suicides,” he wrote.

“The group I worry about most is poor whites,” he added. “There will be more random mass shootings in the months ahead as middle-aged white men self-destruct and feel that life has no meaning.”

My copy of his book is littered with my disconsolate scribbles.

“Yikes.”

“… bleak …”

“… hellscape.”

Know what else, though, I penned into the margins?

“Ha!”

“When I was 13,” Yang wrote, for instance, “I had to have four teeth pulled in preparation for wearing braces. I was actually kind of excited about it because I saw my dad’s teeth and was like, ‘whatever it takes, let’s not have those.’” He said the answer for out-of-place workers was not a career as a home health care aide because “former truck drivers will not be excited to bathe grandma.”

And as we traveled around, a busy, six-stop day in this sweaty, marshy terrain—from Bluffton to Okatie to Beaufort, from town halls to meet-and-greets with local Democratic clubs to a quiet, private stop at a shelter for abused women and children—the laughter never stopped for long.

Nibbling on a belVita vanilla oat biscuit, he praised the company for marketing the product as a healthy option. “It’s, like, you’re clearly good for me,” he said, “and then it’s a fucking cookie for breakfast!”

He referred repeatedly to his $24 average donation. “My fans are cheaper than Bernie’s!”

Entering a Mexican restaurant for a town hall, he said, “The best thing about running for president is I walk into a room and people clap!” The crowd roared.

He wasn’t always this way. His parents came to America from Taiwan. His mother was a computer services administrator before becoming a pastel artist. His father grew up poor on a peanut farm and got a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California at Berkeley and worked for General Electric and IBM in New York. Yang described him as a “workaholic” and “a brusque lab geek.” Growing up in the suburbs of Westchester County, Yang as a kid was “angsty,” “brooding” and “sad,” he said. He read science fiction and fantasy and Herman Hesse and listened to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Sarah McLachlan and played piano and decent tennis and lots of Dungeons and Dragons. He was, for a time, a tad goth. He suffered racist slurs. At prep school at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire, and then at college at Brown, where he majored in economics and political science, he began to come out of his shell. He started to lift weights, mostly to try to get dates, and was proud to be able to bench press 225 pounds eight to 10 times in a row.

Now, here in the Suburban, as we crossed the Broad River, I brought up “Rex and Lex.” That’s what Yang named his pecs, “Rex” for the right, “Lex” for the left, when he was lifting all those weights. I knew about this because he wrote about in his other, earlier book,Smart People Should Build Things. He “could jostle them on command,” he had written, “to make them ‘talk.’” Obviously, I wanted to hear more.

Yang obliged. Having shed his blue sport coat, he looked down at his chest, and he … channeled “Rex.”

“He’s, like, almost mute,” he said, “but he’s still like”—and here the candidate for president made his dad-bod-dormantpectoralisundulate under his checked, collared shirt and assumed a diminutive, sing-song cadence—“‘Andrew, I still have a little bit of voice left. You haven’t fed me in a long time. You used to looooove meeeeeee.’”

Zach Graumann, Yang’s 31-year-old campaign manager, looked some combination of mesmerized and mortified. “You’re such a tool,” he said.

Yang was undeterred. He was on a roll. He turned his attention to “Lex.”

“Oh man,” he lamented, “Lex is wimpier than Rex!”

Everybody inside the Suburban laughed and laughed.

***

At the town hall in Hilton Head—a standing-room-only crowd of mainly older folks wearing boat shoes and flip-flops���it was hard to miss the young guys in the pink hats.

They listened intently as Yang introduced himself. “Hello, everyone! I’m Andrew Yang, and I’m running for president! … I’m going to be honest. I’m the last person anyone thought was going to run for president, in terms of my high school, my upbringing. My parents were not like, ‘You’re gonna be president someday.’” This assertion drew laughs. After Brown and law school at Columbia and five unhappy months as a corporate attorney, he started a company (Stargiving.com) that failed, he said. He was the CEO of a company that succeeded. He launched a non-profit that did a little bit of both. Then Yang gave his political pitch, about truckers, and soon-to-be self-driving trucks, and so many other kinds of workers, and automation, and artificial intelligence, and the real reason he thinks Trump won—millions of jobs automated away in the most important Midwest swing states—and the coming “buzz saw” and “the race to the bottom” and “suicides, drug overdoses, anxiety, depression,” and how the average American life expectancy has declined for three straight years for the first time in a century, and how “D.C. is not up to it at all,” and about $1,000 a month for every adult.

“How am I doing so well?” he said. “It’s because Americans recognize the truth when they hear it.”

The guys in the pink hats were impressed.

“He nailed it,” Mike Gallagher, 29, told me after Yang finished.

“Awesome,” said Wayne Boyce, 28.

They had driven the hour or so up from Savannah, Georgia, and both of them said they had voted for Trump but would not be doing it again.

Ditto for their other friend. “He’s an asshole,” Jordan Snipes said of the president. “And he hasn’t done anything he said he was going to do.”

They were members, they all said, of the Yang Gang now.

I asked if there were others like them where they’re from.

“Most of our friends,” Snipes reported.

A few hours later, at the Mexican restaurant, I met the Yang Gang YouTuber. Russell Peterson, 43,from Union County, North Carolina, was with his wife, Elasa, who was wearing a MATH shirt, and their toddler son, Zephaniah—“country folks,” Peterson said, and “former Trump supporters.” He had a lot to say.

“We all saw a problem, and that’s why we elected Donald Trump,” he told me. “Because he was saying he was going to go in and he was going to drain the swamp. He was a larger-than-life figure, you know? We all knew that there was a problem. We just didn’t know what that problem was. But then, when you listen to Andrew Yang, you realize: Oh, yeah, it is automation—it’s not immigrants. It’s automation. We’re all losing our jobs. We’re all being phased out. I’m an ex-landscaper. I just saw yesterday they’ve got a mower that just goes and mows your yard, just like a Roomba, you know, does your house.”

And what’s he do for work now?

“This is what we do,” he said. “We follow Andrew Yang full-time.”

He doesn’t work for the campaign, but …

“This has become my passion. There is nothing more important than getting this man elected,” he said, breaking down his video equipment.

“I’m tired of politicians. I don’t want a politician. I want somebody who’s going to tell me the fuckin’ truth, tell me what’s going on, and thenprovidesomething that’s actually going to impact my life! Since I’ve been an adult, there’s not beenonepolitician that has directly impacted my life, but I promise you that freedom dividend and putting $2,000 a month into my household would directly impact my life. I mean,game over.”

He wasn’t finished.

“People are so disillusioned,” he said. “Donald Trump? He was the WWE superstar guy. You know, he was going to take his metal chair into Washington, and he was just going to use it on everybody. We were finally going to be working like we were supposed to be working—and I’ve only seen the country get more and more divided. And then when you have Trump acting like he’s acting, I can’t support that, bro’. And then there’s a lot of people in the center who are like me who are moving over to Andrew Yang because we don’t like what we see. Wedon’tlike what Trump has done to the country. He’s only divided us more and more. So now we actually have some solutions and a guy who’stalkingabout solutions—so, like, let’s get this guy in, because he makes too much damn sense!”

All day long, everywhere we went, Yang was asked about Trump. How was he going to handle him? How was he going to debate him? How was he going to beat him?

He said he “would make him seem ridiculous.” He said he “would just diminish him by dismissing his arguments and making him seem like the buffoon and joke that he is.” He said Trump was “fire”—and he said he was “ice.” He told people he was on the debate team in high school that went to the world championships in London. He said he would “use humor.”

And at the last stop of the day, here at the Grand Army of the Republic Hall, outside of which I spotted parked a red Ford F250 pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read TRUMP, the throng of a couple hundred that had gathered couldn’t fit inside. They spilled out onto the lawn off to the side. “Let’s do it!” Yang hollered. He had no microphone. “Let’s project!”

And at this last event the last question was about Trump.

“When you become the nominee,” a woman asked, “how will you stand up to that nastiness in the White House?”

“Voters around the country have said to me they cannot wait to see me debate Donald Trump,” Yang said. He was all about “logic and reason and problem-solving” while Trump was “all bluster, and Americans can tell the difference very quickly,” he said, snapping his fingers. “There’s a reason he hasn’t touched me,” Yang continued. “Because he knows I’m the wrong person to touch. His supporters are all coming my way. … I’m peeling off Trump supporters right and left.” And one more thing: “I’m better at the internet than he is!”

More laughter.

“On that note …”

A snaking line of people waited for pictures. The sun set. Through the buggy, muggy haze, a single orange orb of a streetlight glowed past clumps of spectral Spanish moss. Yang autographed MATH hats. Flashes from phones pulsed in the dark.

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[itsnelkabelka]

Speech: Speech by UK ambassador during the Queen's Birthday Party in Mogadishu

Welcome Queen’s Birthday Party, our guest of honour H.E. Deputy Prime Minister, Mahdi Ahmed Khadar.

This may be a humble patch of astroturf on an airfield but it’s greatly elevated by your presence. I know that one day, if your government’s vision for reform succeeds, we’ll be able to build a new Embassy downtown.

And H E Mohamed Waare, President of Hirshabelle state. I salute your efforts this year in responding to floods and to improve security.

Speaker of the Upper House and Somalia’s Commander of Defence Forces

Federal Police Commissioner

And to all our distinguished Somali friends – delighted to see such a large number of Ministers, former ministers, Members of Parliament, Chairs of Parliamentary committees, officials, and members of civil society.

Some of you are British Dual nationals – so this is your Queen’s birthday party as well as mine

And a warm welcome to our international friends and partners from Mogadishu and Nairobi.

General Jim AMISOM Force Commander – Sir, we salute your efforts and the sacrifices made by AMISOM troops over many years to create the space for the promising political developments we are seeing today.

Phil Evans from the UK’s Department of Intl Development and his colleagues from Nairobi

Rosie Tapper from British Office in Hargeisa

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Lestrange and British Military

My own team, who, led by my Deputy Mary Shockledge, brilliant job of making our embassy look so good and logistics. Round of applause please for them and our wonderful caterers.

To our Somali guests I have a few things I want to say.

First, you are – together - the movers and shakers who will shape the future of this country

The people who will – together - ensure that Somalia’s future is not defined and limited by its recent past

Who will ensure that unity, peace and prosperity triumph over conflict. That the cowardly attacks we saw earlier this month including on the Ministry of Internal Security are ended once and for all.

That governance and rule of law can be rolled out across the country

That trust in Somali security forces is rebuilt

You – and the choices you make – will matter, not just to yourselves but to future generations

A lot of pressure? Well, perhaps. But you are not alone and there’s no better time to be shouldering these challenges of remaking a nation.

In the partnership between the President and the PM you have the guiding light of a stable federal leadership.

In fledgling new federal member states, like Hirshabelle, you have the beginnings of a new, cooperative way of organising the country and sharing power, resources and responsibilities.

In the UK you have a steadfast supporter.

A supporter who’s here not to pursue narrow self-interests – but something bigger and of mutual benefit.

A stable, sustainable Somalia. A Somalia at peace with itself and at peace with the region.

What does UK support mean in practice?

Let’s start with money. The present year we are spending £323 million of UK taxpayers’ money in total.

On development

On security sector reform

On humanitarian relief

UK money not always visible, because it is channelled through multilateral agencies, especially in case of humanitarian relief. But it is there, underpinning the international community’s ability to stand by Somalia at its times of greatest need.

When the floods came, it was medical supplies, food and tents paid for by the UK that helped provide much of the initial relief.

And when you hear about EU funding, please remember the UK’s contribution to this. 15% of all EU development and humanitarian funding comes from the UK.

You may have heard we’re leaving the EU. But UK money will continue to flow through the EU and into Somalia for years to come.

Last week at the Somalia Partnership Forum in Brussels it was confirmed that the EU will be providing Somalia with euros100million of direct budgetary support. Euros 15 million of this amount will come from the UK’s contribution to EU development funds.

Good news – and a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister, his economic reform plans and the cooperation now gaining momentum between the Federal Gov and the Federal Member States.

And later this year we hope to see another major vote of confidence in Somalia when the World Bank approves a $140 million grant to Somalia for economic reforms and infrastructure.

Again, the UK is a major contributor to the World Bank. $18 million of that grant will come from the UK’s contribution to World Bank funds

But money isn’t all we offer.

We also use our voice and convening power to support Somalia – and to rally others to support you.

At a time of so many competing needs around the world, that’s important.

It’s why last year’s London Somalia Conference was a milestone. Generating a new phase of momentum for a new phase of Somalia’s long march back from collapse.

Out there in the world’s international fora, Somalia has no stronger friend than the UK. Take the issue of debt relief. Somalia owes its creditors more than $5bn and cannot access concessional financing in the meantime from international financial institutions.

That’s a major obstacle. The UK is helping Somalia and the international community work together to find a way forward on debt relief. This could be a game-changer for Somalia.

Somalia will need to continue to play its part. The Federal Government is to be congratulated for successfully completing a second IMF reform programme. The next IMF programme will be challenging. It will require painful changes. But it is critical to Somalia’s future. We call on everyone here to pull together to support the Federal Gov in delivering it.

Expertise is something else we provide, where Somalia needs it and we have it to give, including advisers who can work closely with ministers and ministries to help them translate their visions and policies into plans and actions.

And supporting civil society and developing Somali talent. We do that too. Many Somalis have won Chevening Scholarships in recent years to study in the UK. Some of those scholars are now in government and here today.

And this year I was particularly pleased we were successful in winning places for on the British Government’s prestigious and highly competitive International Leaders’ Programme for two exceptionally talented young Somalis -

Ilwad Elman, a champion of human rights and the cause of women and girls

and Adam Haji Ali, Chief Justice of Somaliland.

I congratulate them both and wish them well on their forthcoming leadership programmes in the UK.

So, we support Somalia with our wallet

We support it with our voice

With our networks

And with opportunities for future leaders

And throughout all of this we are determined to do so in a way that’s inclusive of all Somalis

Prime Minister is championing here an inclusive politics agenda. We fully support that.

Agreements on the constitution, on the one person one vote elections that will be held on 2020, on how resources and responsibilities are to be shared between centre and the regions.

I’d hope we all agree that such fundamental advances must be made inclusively if they’re to bring stability to Somalia and a firm foundation to build on.

Inclusion more widely is something the UK is determined to champion – at home, in Somalia and across the world.

This week in London we hosted the world’s first ever Global Disability Summit, with more than 700 delegates from across the world gathering to commit to making the world a better, more inclusive place for people with disabilities.

I’m pleased to say Somalia was well represented - by a delegation led by Deqa Yasin, Minister of Women and Human Rights.

Global estimates put rates of disability between 10-16%. In Somalia the figures are likely to be higher still, due to the effects of malnutrition and prolonged conflict. Over 25% of the Somali households we reach with humanitarian cash transfers have a person with disability living among them.

So let’s work together to end the social stigma against people with disabilities here in Somalia and promote disability inclusion.

Be assured we’ll be practising what we preach. My colleagues in DFID Somalia are looking across our support programmes to identify opportunities to advance disability inclusion.

For example, we’re exploring how to ensure Somali farmers affected by disabilities can benefit from a programme to promote inclusive markets in Somalia.

And we’re looking too at the support we’re providing for girls’ education in Somalia.

The UK is already providing 53,000 marginalised girls in Somaliland, Puntland, Galmadug and Benadir with access to education. That in itself is a major contribution to inclusion. The next phase is likely to see over 200 schools supported on disability inclusion. Over 2,800 girls with disabilities are likely to benefit.

So, inclusion is something the UK is committed to developing as a shared value with Somalia. We want this not just because inclusion is right, but because it is essential. With so many displaced people and marginalised groups, Somalia’s only path forward is to put inclusion front and centre of everything it does.

Two other values are fundamental to our partnership. Accountability and transparency.

I promise you all today that in all of the support we provide to Somalia, we’ll continue to be both accountable and transparent.

Continue to work in partnership and friendship with other countries, through the aid coordination mechanism and the Comprehensive Approach to Security mechanism set up in London.

The challenges Somalia faces – and the opportunities it must now seize – are too complex and big for any one donor. We must all work together. Putting Somalia ahead of any national interests as we do so.

Let me end by thanking all of you again for coming here today. You’ll have noticed the bunting fluttering in the wind. I have news for you. These are the winds of change. Moving across the Horn from Ethiopia and Eritrea, where historic, bold steps are being taken to end years of confrontation and conflict and open up new possibilities for economic integration in this part of Africa.

I say to our Somali friends – as others said in Brussels last week – take advantage of those winds of change. Get your own sails out. Move faster on reconciliation and political reforms. Above all, be prepared to compromise for the greater good, as PM Abiy and President Isaias are doing. Things are moving forward in the Horn – don’t get left behind.

I’d now like to propose a toast as is the custom to H.E. President Mohamed Abdulahi Mohamed Farmajo of Somalia.

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