#interacive fiction

[night-market-if]

I hope you go to bed happy every night knowing that you ate with creating Belladonna, omg. Like she’s actually so girl boss it’s crazy, I am obsessed with her. I was screeching like a sports announcer in that scene with Kavatti 😭

Belladonna is that creation that was inspired by Chrysanthemum (another OC) and then hardened and a bit more and put into that high powered situation where she did crave power. And she morphed into someone so wonderful from there. She is one of my favorites to write. I save her a lot of times for the last route to write through because she is such a breath of fresh air after some of the other routes. I adore the amount of love she has received.

[kathrinesadventures]

mini update number 1

Why is it number one? Cause Imma start counting from now on >:3

Anywho, the exams went aight, hopefully I'll pass. I just calculated how much I need to write for me to reach 4K at the end of the week for "Lost in your eyes" and lo and behold.

Can someone bless this post pls?

[ciaossu-imagines]

Commissions Temporarily Closed

Hello, hello, my lovelies! I am opening up commissions again, however, a forewarning that I will not be able to start any serious writing until Monday, as I do work all weekend. I have completely revamped commissions so please carefully read the below information as to them. For clients in Canada, I much prefer payment via Interac E-Transfer, so that I have cash in hand. For those from other countries who wish to commission me or for those more comfortable with this option, I have an set up an Etsy shop where you can order! It can be found here!

For now, commissions are as below. With any and all commissions, I am more than willing to discuss, narrow down, and work with the client on all details regarding the commission and will negotiate within reason as to price, while still trying to make sure I'm paid not just for my time, but the effort I go to as well. All commissions are to be done in English, thank you.

Headcanons

$10 – for headcanons for fandoms I’m familiar with. This gets you 15-20 headcanons. The regular rules of the blog do not exist; I will write anything, including yandere and canon character shipping.

$15 – for headcanons for fandoms I’m not familiar with. Again, this gets you 15-20 headcanons, where regular blog rules do not apply.

Match-Ups:

$15 for smutty match-ups for fandoms I’m familiar with. This gets you a detailed match-up of which character would be most sexually compatible with you, plus at least one to two other characters who would be close to being sexually compatible with you, along with the areas where the two of you would struggle to connect sexually.

$25 for smutty match-ups for fandoms I’m not familiar with. This functions the same as the smutty matches for fandoms I’m familiar with; the extra money is only to pay for me to take the time to thoroughly research the fandom and characters in question.

$20 for romantic and platonic match-ups for fandoms I’m familiar with. This gets you a detailed match-up of which character would be most compatible with you romantically or who would be your best friend, the reasoning behind it and thoughts of what your lives together would be like, along with at least two to three other potential characters with detailed reasons on where those characters might struggle to connect or get along with you, and a headcanon for each runner up as to how they might fit into your story.

$30 for romantic and platonic match-ups for fandoms I’m not familiar with. This functions the same as the romantic and platonic matches for fandoms I’m familiar with; the extra money is only to pay for me to take the time to thoroughly research the fandom and characters in question.

Music Mixes

$5 for music mixes of 1-3 hours in length for a character (canon, self-insert, or OC), character ship (canon, self-insert, or OC), character group, or fandom in total.

Character Exploration

$10-15 for canon characters in fandoms I am familiar with. This gets you a detailed essay on the character asked for, their personality, upbringing, mental state, goals and ambitions, how they interact with those around them, basically anything about the character that might be interesting or could be discussed.

$15-20 for canon characters in fandoms I am not familiar with. This functions the same; the extra money is just to pay for my time intensely researching, learning about, and digging into the character in question.

$20 flat for character building or world building help. I specialize and like to think I excel as a writer at fleshing out and building believable, complex characters and worlds. This gets you a week’s worth – so about 7-10 back and forth’s with you helping you further develop a single character or world building.

Fiction

$20-100 for written fics. The price will depend on the complexity of the situation, whether the fandom and character is one I am familiar with, and estimated length of the fic. I no longer charge by word count as I admit as a writer, I struggle with bloat issues. However, how long I feel it would need to be to properly tell the story – one shot versus chaptered, etc., will be a consideration. As with all commissions, this price is decided during discussion and negotiation with you lovely commissioners. All fics come with storyboards (plotting thoughts and extra headcanons) and the mix I was listening to while plotting and writing the fic.

Character Comfort Boxes

$60-70. These boxes will be mailed to an address you will provide me, which is why they are so expensive as the price covers shipping and expenses. Each box will be distinctly personalized to the client so I will need to know information about you. Each box will contain a 2–6-page letter from your character of choice, from any fandom. The letter can be written as if that character is a lover, a friend, a sibling, etc. It will also include either tea, coffee, or a beverage to your liking, a snack, a framed ‘photo’ of the character, and 1-2 comfort/fun items with notes from the character on why ‘they’ chose these things to gift to you, as the box is sent by that character to you, their loved one. To ensure the letters are legible, they will be printed, but a variety of fonts will be used to mimic how I picture the character’s writing looking.

[minutiaewriter]

I posted 309 times in 2022

That's 309 more posts than 2021!

128 posts created (41%)

181 posts reblogged (59%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@minutiaewriter

@elizaellwrites

@makaylajade-author

@encrucijada

@toribookworm22

I tagged 197 of my posts in 2022

Only 36% of my posts had no tags

#writers on tumblr - 172 posts

#writers of tumblr - 172 posts

#writerblr - 169 posts

#writing community - 112 posts

#writing - 65 posts

#hera: to catch a star - 64 posts

#books - 60 posts

#hera trilogy - 50 posts

#writer - 34 posts

#authors of tumblr - 28 posts

Longest Tag: 113 characters

#i know i said everything would apply to my novel but it applies to me and don’t i have some relevance to my book?

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

I swear the stack of "To Read" books that I have is, like, 3 feet tall

25 notes - Posted December 11, 2022

#4

Ok But What Is Hera: To Catch a Star Even About?

Hera: To Catch a Star -- releasing in early 2023

I'm going to try to share as much as I can without spoiling the story...

The Plot

Rynn Hera discovers he is the forbidden offspring of a celestial goddess and a mortal. As a result of this, he is in great danger and is pursued throughout the galaxy, for his blood makes him more powerful than he realizes. The first two novels chronicle Rynn’s travels with a brooding stranger, a kind but determined celestial priestess, and a witty space pirate/outlaw who is quite literally wanted by basically everyone in the galaxy.

The Characters

I haven’t really introduced any of my characters on here yet because I plan on doing so closer to the release of TCAS (To Catch a Star) but the main character is:

Rynn Hera. He’s a literal child. Lives in a cottage in the woods with his grandfather. Loves anything covered in sugar (three words: honey glazed rolls). Is he a cinnamon roll? A downright crybaby? I’ll let you decide for yourself.

The Trilogy

There are three novels in the Hera trilogy: To Catch a Star being the first.

As the series progresses, the plot gradually becomes more complex and weaves more characters and subplots into the main story, which is Rynn’s journey (both literally and emotionally) as the forbidden celestial child, son of a goddess and a mortal. In the end, a massive war birthed from religious and political conflicts is on the brink of breaking out, complicated by the existence of the celestial child and his powerful blood.

The Aesthetic/Mood

This is just a little sample of the moods across the trilogy, so it’ll vary based on novel.

See the full post

33 notes - Posted December 9, 2022

#3

Hello there~ and welcome to my Writerblr!

I’m a fantasy/fiction author debuting my first novel in the Hera trilogy in 2023. Here’s a bit about me!

• You can call me Min/Minnie (short for minutiae)

•I was placed on this earth for two purposes: to write & to read (and share recommendations of the books I love)

•I am a writer because I was a reader first (and still am).

-I've read so many books over the years and hardly get an excuse to talk about any of them so don't hesitate to reach out if you want to rant with me!

-I’ve been writing for around a decade but this is the first time I’m releasing something that will be available to anyone & everyone, so I’m excited!

•Some of my favorite words include: minutiae, hiatus, myriad, tête-à-tête

•I am on my way to being bilingual

•I am not a minor

•I love tea & coffee

•I am a chaotic mix of both an early bird and a night owl (which now that I think about it probably has something to do with drinking both tea and coffee…)

•I have 3 cats, a dog, and a frog (***also a proud plant parent)

•I love books, plants, music, poetry, art, favorite colors are indigo and green, rain, the sky… I love learning about other cultures/languages/peoples… I love chocolate & gummy candy

See the full post

52 notes - Posted November 29, 2022

#2

Writers!!! Someone you’ve never met and you don’t know is cheering you on, is proud of your progress and loves you!!

153 notes - Posted December 13, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Writers!!! Please interact with this post because I love having friends in the writing community and I want to hype up/support you and your work! I love handing out notes! Let’s follow each other and be each others’ fan boys/girls/folks!!

Literally down for meeting writers in pretty much any genre, I’m so experimental and eclectic these days. Just thought I’d announce this because it’s totally one of my reasons for being on here besides promoting my Hera trilogy , the first book of which is Hera: To Catch a Star (do check out my intro for more details on that, I’m super excited for its release very soon!) <3

479 notes - Posted December 12, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[rushescapegameme]

The Ultimate Guide to Escape Room Games: Thrills and Teamwork

Have you ever found yourself daydreaming about being a detective, solving intricate puzzles, or embarking on an adventurous quest with friends? If so, an escape room game might just be your perfect weekend activity.

Over the past few years, escape room Melbourne games have surged in popularity, captivating people with their unique blend of problem-solving, storytelling, and team dynamics. Let's dive into the world of escape rooms and uncover why they've become such a phenomenal trend.

What is an Escape Room Game?

An escape room game is a live-action, interactive experience where players are "locked" in a themed room and must solve a series of puzzles and riddles to "escape" within a set time limit, usually 60 minutes. These games often revolve around a compelling narrative, immersing participants in scenarios that can range from escaping a haunted mansion to disarming a ticking time bomb.

Why Are Escape Room Games So Popular?

Immersive Experience: Escape rooms transport players into another world. The meticulously designed sets, props, and puzzles make you feel like you're part of the story. This immersive experience is a thrilling escape from reality, allowing you to step into the shoes of a detective, adventurer, or even a superhero.

Team Building: Whether you're with friends, family, or co-workers, escape rooms are a fantastic way to strengthen relationships. The game requires collaboration, communication, and trust. Each member's unique perspective and skills can contribute to solving the puzzles, making it a true team effort.

Mental Challenge: Escape room games are a great way to challenge your brain. The puzzles are designed to test your logic, creativity, and problem-solving skills. It’s like a workout for your mind, keeping you sharp and engaged.

Entertainment: Above all, escape rooms are incredibly fun. The excitement of uncovering clues, the rush of solving puzzles under time pressure, and the shared joy of successfully escaping make for an unforgettable experience.

Types of Escape Room Games

Escape rooms come in various themes and difficulty levels, ensuring there's something for everyone. Here are a few popular types:

Mystery and Detective: Solve a murder mystery or track down a missing person. These rooms often require keen observation and deductive reasoning.

Horror and Thriller: For those who love a good scare, these rooms feature spooky atmospheres and eerie challenges that send shivers down your spine.

Adventure and Fantasy: Embark on a quest to find hidden treasure, save a kingdom, or explore an enchanted forest. These rooms are perfect for fans of epic tales and magical worlds.

Sci-Fi and Technology: Navigate futuristic escape room Melbourne environments, outsmart artificial intelligence, or repair a spaceship. Ideal for science fiction enthusiasts and tech geeks.

Tips for Success in an Escape Room Game

Communicate: Share your discoveries and ideas with your team. Collaboration is key to solving puzzles efficiently.

Stay Organized: Keep track of clues and items you find. Assign a spot to place used and unused items to avoid confusion.

Think Outside the Box: Be creative and open-minded. Sometimes the most unconventional solution is the correct one.

Manage Your Time: Keep an eye on the clock and prioritize puzzles that seem crucial to your escape. Don’t spend too much time on one challenge.

Ask for Hints: If you’re stuck, don’t hesitate to ask for hints. Game masters are there to ensure you have a fun and engaging experience.

Finding the Right Escape Room for You

When choosing an escape room, consider the theme, difficulty level, and group size. Many escape room venues offer detailed descriptions and ratings to help you decide. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced escape artist, there’s a room out there that will provide the perfect challenge.

Final Words

Escape room games are a unique blend of entertainment, mental exercise, and social interaction. They offer a thrilling escape room Melbourne from the everyday routine, providing a memorable experience filled with fun and adventure. So gather your team, put on your thinking caps, and get ready to unlock the door to an exciting world of puzzles and mysteries.

Source: https://escaperoomgameau.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-ultimate-guide-to-escape-room-games.html

[hydralisk98]

Blackhand devlog#3

Referenced materials that this post follows up upon are presented above as hyperlinked banners.

Social context values / indications

[WIP]

Where?: They inhabit in the forested suburb town of Masknaw, in the Shoshoni Union, on the Angora planet. It is often set in the 46th century of their calendar (eq. 21st century AD) but has moments across other points in time and space.

Who (sketches / doodles / drawings)?: Not even started just yet.

Why Interested in Characters? Depends on above.

Why Audience interested? Depends on above.

Project Why-s? Depends on above.

Audience's Why-s? Depends on above.

Toybox 'Worldview' and target audience(s)

Millenials, Zillenials & Gen Z folks, mostly young adult women & edutaining manifestation enthusiasts. (Contemporary pagans, witches, Non-Binary people, queers and neuro-diverse folks included)

The 'toybox' has a major emphasis onto variety of languages, technologies and immersion levels, to feel more like a eponymous sandbox of tools and toys a consumer / licensee can reuse to their whims* for manifesting and plain curiosity-driven stories. As such, there should be some breathing space / mysteries that are left ambiguous for most people to interpret specific content sections further than initial expectations, encouraging imagination and creative expression out of the initial material.

Probably will use a either a weak copy-left license or some other open source dual licensing model with possibility to use a fair & libre-like Creative Commons license.

Important world details

This world has a divergent yet familiar enough history backlog to stay hooked into its "fantasy" of manifestation. Mostly diverging in the early 1910s as no figure like Woodrow Wilson got elected, neither in 1912 or in 1916, leading to some delightful changes that impacted the rest of Shoshoni history in a powerful and constructive way by a full century. Not everything is butterflied away though, but many fascinating changes came, from technological progression to ideologies, going across geo-politics, economical matters and local social intrigues ensued. Like synthetic servitor sapience, nuclear weapons' race & MAD coming way later, morphological freedoms chart and a couple of cultural & technical medium changes, even down to the smart devices and musical genres to listen.

For example, the history of music and its mediums is quite intriguing as far as going from 'Blue Ambersol' Wax Cylinders to 45rpm auto-play mini-vinyl records to Laserdiscs to dual magnetic-optical media Mini-Discs, with some cassette tape storage and flash storage yet to hit in the broader community than educational and home video markets. So you can see it is quite heavily inspired by history with tweaks and touches of flavor to really spike curiosity and show how malleable reality is, even without breaking the usual bounds of historical fiction by that much.

That being said, there is abundance of sapient synthetic serfs by the year 4520 and among them is Ava. There many great means to exercice morphological freedom, and so are the means for spiritual folks, that do live in a nuanced yet nicer and closer-knitted community. And the technical & social details under-the-hood are also intricate and worth my storytelling as well. But more onto such in later entries.

Characters / actors / narrative agents [sketches soon]

I do have a special perspective for my story, considering the multimedia interactive and manifestation toy that it represents too... In a nutshell though, a self-insert is a major key agent, with 3-4 characters surrounding her narratively. There may be more characters distributed with great variety, but this structure is thus far the nucleus of the narrative "cell" at play here. 😉

A couple of 'outsider' idea prompts to guide me here as well...

the virgin "neural network scaling hypothesis" vs the chad "a sufficiently smart hacker could write an AGI in Lisp on a 1970s minicomputer", from a @nostalgebraist-autoresponder ask from user moths-in-the-window

[Add more prompts with a additional Tumblr thread of suggestion material right here]

And yes, there is way more information to come as I play, watch, listen, read and curate more content, as to iterate & improve the wider world into the mixture that my canon base lore is.

(I am still figuring ways to get my own music tracks & remixed content going as far as making cooler video curation playlists and inspirational mood-boards but as audio + multimedia)

But the following should give you a good idea of the tone I try to set through my nuanced yet solarpunk-y bright narrative themes. Because whilst I may use dark colors, narrative components and start with a dystopic premise, I still aim to empower, inspire and get positive / constructive messages out there. Because as much as there is much room for complaints in life, I feel like the driving force to get anywhere satisfactory or enjoyable in a nuanced world is often left to the implicit details, which is quite easy to miss nowadays, especially as a autistic, *-divergent or just regular folks at the top of the ladder.

Cya later with another devlog. ^*^//

[cppsheffield]

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Autumn 2022 Series Presents: Emma Bolland, Rachel Genn.

The Diamond LT6, Thursday, 13 October 2022 at 18:30

Rachel Genn is a senior lecturer at Manchester Writing School and University of Sheffield. Formerly a Neuro-scientist, she was a Royal Society Fellow at UBC, Canada and has written two novels: THE CURE, (2011) and WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON (2020). She was Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence (2016) creating a quasi-institution called THE NATIONAL FACILITY FOR THE REGULATION OF REGRET, spanning installation and interac-tive art, VR and film (ASFF 2016), presented together at SXSW, 2017. She has non-fiction in Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, and The New Statesman and is currently working on a collection of non-fiction about her family’s injuries, fighting and addiction to regret.

 Emma Bolland is an artist and writer employing experimental approaches to inter-genre / interdisciplinary writ-ing, speaking, and reading. This includes an investigation of the problematics and ambiguities of an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between voice, ear, and page. Other methods include works on paper, moving-image, performance, collaborations, and events, and they have paint-ings and other works in public collections. They are interested in the wider politics of communication, and the conflicts between medical and social models of disability. They are co-edit 'intergraphia books', an experimental press with forthcoming titles by Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, Sascha Akhtar, Mark Goodwin, Jan Hopkins, and more. They teach Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam and Bolton Universities, and are a tutor for the Poetry School. Recent artworks include a commission for the exhibition imPerfekt at the MEWO Kunsthalle Mem-mingem in Germany in 2021, and recent publications include their collection Over, In, and Under (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). Their hybrid longpoem/novella Instructions from Light will be published by JOAN Publishing later this year.'

[miggydiaz]

for the salty ask: 3, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 27 for spn

I had to do this one today because I have a LOT of Supernatural feelings and so a lot of these are even longer than my CK one. But thanks for the ask @wonderwolfballoon!

UNPOPULAR SUPERNATURAL OPINIONS AHOY: INCLUDES ANTI-DESTIEL SENTIMENTS AND OTHER UNSAVORY ELEMENTS

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion? 100000000% I have unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion in the SPN fandom. SPN was the fandom that taught me to make JUDICIOUS use of the blocking feature tumblr offers in order to curate my experience. I would actually encourage anyone and everyone to use the blocking feature if they disagree with people. Honestly, we don’t owe anyone our time or energy, especially on the internet! It is much healthier than sending or responding to hate, IMO. 7. Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?* This is actually a hard one for me to answer, so let me start by saying -- I have not seen a SINGLE episode since 9x05? I think? Whichever episode was the Dr. Deanlittle one where he talks to animals. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the first 5 seasons, and they are all I watch anymore and I pretend nothing else exists after that (except The French Mistake because that episode is hilarious). But uh... I guess the simple answer is when I was originally watching it, I really loved Dean. He was brash, snarky, rough around the edges... but kind of soft in a I’m too toxically masculine to deal with my softness sort of way that I love seeing characters grow out of as they mature. But when I go back and rewatch now, much older than I was in 2006 when I first started watching, I see how awful a lot of his older behavior truly was. I still love Dean, and I will be a Dean girl until I die probably, but sometimes you gotta remind yourself that your faves have been problematic in the past so you don’t put them up on fandom constructed pedestals.

10. Most disliked arc? Why? AND AS A BONUS, MY ANSWER to 11. Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why? I could write a literal essay about all of the problems I have with the later seasons (the ones I watched, which encompasses 6, 7, 8, and a few episodes of 9). But by far and away, the thing I hated most, was the Men of Letters.

Okay, this is where I am going to recognize my love of certain characters is at FUNDAMENTAL ODDS with how that character develops later and what history and background we get later on them. I RECOGNIZE this character is problematic, and I would NEVER STAND for his shit IRL, but fiction is complicated and nuanced, and fantastic circumstances do not make for normal behaviors. That being said, with all warnings I could possibly give, and with the full understanding that what I am about to say is basically fandom blasphemy of the highest order...

I like John Winchester’s character.

I know, I know. If you wanna stop reading and block me now, you are free to do that. I will not hold it against you. I am not about to apologize for anything he has done. I just need to contextualize why I have such an issue with the MOL storyline and it starts with the simple fact that I liked John Winchester as he was originally presented.

To me, and with the full understanding that I am answering this from the perspective of someone who DOES NOT regard anything past season 5 as personal canon, John Winchester is the perfect example of a truly complicated character. Here’s a parent who, if we take the pilot and the original s2 Djinn episodes at face value, could have been a great parent, who then got shoved into a fantastically impossible situation and made terrible choices that he thought were necessary in order to keep himself and his sons safe. That does not EXCUSE the heaps of abuse that he piled onto Dean in any way. We know John and Mary didn’t have a great marriage. But we also know from the pilot that John was at least a caring and present father, mostly,  for the 4 years he got to parent in a normal world, and that if Mary had lived, John would’ve been a softball playing dad who raised his kids and had a loving marriage with his wife. (Again, I need to reiterate, I did not watch anything past the early episodes of s9. If there is later canon that negates this, I do not know about it, nor do I want to because I don’t think of anything past 5 as canon) This is all important to me because these things emphasize that John was “NORMAL”. He was a mechanic, from a family of mechanics, whose father didn’t bail on him (a man in the episode where Dean is transported back in time to Lawrence tells John to ‘say hi to your old man for me’ or something to that effect). He was just a midwestern dude. Giving John Winchester a fantastical background through this Men of Letters bullshit made me SO MAD. First of all, I hate when later canon negates previous canon. I cannon TELL you how much I hate it. And the later seasons of Supernatural are riddled with stuff that doesn’t make any damn sense in the context of original, Kripke written canon, which is exactly why I stopped watching. That’s not ~Evolution of the show.~ That’s conveniently forgetting stuff that made your show and its premise so successful to begin with in order to keep filming episodes so you can keep making money. It’s the sacrifice of art for capitalism and yes I know this is a stupid TV show but as a writer myself it PISSES ME OFF.

/rant

ALSO, the idea that this toxically masculine family was set on this path by Heaven, and inherited this curse that put them on this path from their mother was such a good plot twist in its heyday. We spent four seasons thinking of Mary Winchester as a victim of circumstance, whose fate could not have been avoided because she was the mother to Sam, who is effectively cursed. And then, we learn that its BECAUSE of Mary that this ball even got rolling in the first place. IDK if you were around for that time in the fandom but at least in my circle, this was a big fucking deal. There had been so much (rightful) discourse about John before this, and what kind of parent he was, that Mary became almost deified in the same way Dean deifies her. And then we find out that this whole story gets set in motion by a decision she made because this was the life she found herself in. This was great. It was interesting. And even though the MOL doesn’t negate any of this, it does give John this weirdly fantastical that isn’t necessary. Let this guy be just some Joe Schmoe who fell in love with a kick ass hunter and had no idea any of this even existed. Let Mary and her want to be ‘normal’ be a complicated moral choice that fundamentally altered the paths of her husband and sons. It’s good tv!

Also, I fucking hate the bunker. The best episodes are Dean and Sam having moments in the car, or while in motel rooms on their cases, or whatever. I don’t mind them having a home base. I’m fine with that. But if a building could ever be a Mary Sue character, the bunker is it. I hate all of the MOL storyline, starting with this place.

I may not even tag this as Supernatural, I don’t need angry later season stans in my inbox.

15. Unpopular opinion about the manga/show?

There’s nothing good about anything that happened after season 6. It’s all a bunch of retconning bullshit. Season 6 had its moments where it was interesting, so I cut it a little bit of slack, but as far as I’m concerned, the show ended in season 5. I’m not sure that’s necessarily unpopular, but it does feel that way on tumblr, so. 

16. If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

Aside from ending it in season 5?

Oooh, I’m about to blaspheme again. I am definitely not tagging this as Supernatural.

I would never have introduced Castiel, and I would’ve given that entire storyline to Anna. Or, alternatively, I would’ve flipped their story lines.

Look, for whatever it’s worth... I agree with the idea that Dean Winchester is a repressed bisexual. His Dr. Sexy love, the entire storyline with Benny in season 8, etc. I just don’t think he feels romantically about Castiel. And like, that’s okay! Just because you’re not into someone who is into you doesn’t mean you owe them a relationship or anything, no matter what the fandom thinks.

But I also think Dean has a big problem when it comes to women. Again, obviously later on in the series, Dean shifts and Charlie happens and Claire Novak and I know all of these things from gifs okay, context is not applicable here because I have none. But early on, Dean struggles A LOT with thinking of women as A) capable and B) trustworthy. He exists in a perpetual state of identifying women along the Madonna/Whore binary. Even Jo, however you feel about her, and to be clear, I loved Jo, but he doesn’t stop thinking of her really as a kid until they’re about to shoot the devil. Up until then, he’s genuinely surprised Ellen lets her out of the damn house.

Giving him a strong, capable woman who rebels against Heaven for HIM would have fundamentally altered Dean’s perceptions of women much earlier on than we get and would have forced him to examine some of that misogyny head on.

Dean has no problems trusting men. This is why the entire Gordon fiasco happens, right? It was less work for him to trust Castiel because Castiel is the inverse of Ruby. Angel to her Demon. Angels and demons don’t really have genders, but for the sake of presentation of vessels, man to her woman. Not even getting me started on the problematic parts of having significant demons mostly symbolized by women (Meg, Ruby, Lilith) and having significant angels mostly represented by Men (Castiel, Michael, Lucifer, Zachariah, Gabriel, Raphael), and how that ties into the idea of Original Sin and yada yada, but just like it’s interesting to have Mary and her decisions be the catalyst for the story, it’s interesting to have this badass warrior angel in Anna who marches down to Hell to yank Dean out, and through her interactions with him, decide to rebel against the ultimate patriarchy, while Dean gets an equally strong female counterpart to Sam’s Ruby, a woman for all intents and purposes that he respects as a soldier and an ally and not just a potential piece of ass.

Also, Castiel fans being literally unbearable is why I left the fandom. Nothing against Misha or anything, and not even anything against Cas as a character (who I very much enjoyed in seasons 4 and 5), but his fans have always been the worst and they try to insert him into everything.

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

Castiel/Destiel fans, which even though I also hated the direction the show was going, drove me out of the fandom. Not like, personally or directly, but just the sheer mental hoops they had to jump through in order to make their ship work and I just got tired of seeing all of the contrived meta on my dash. Oh, and the rampant misogyny that came out of those early Castiel fans. I didn’t appreciate it from the Wincest corner, and I definitely didn’t appreciate it from the fans of the new guy. Gross.

22. Popular character you hate?

Oof. I don’t know. I don’t really hate Castiel, because again, I liked him a lot in seasons 4 and 5. Even 6 was interesting, even if I don’t regard it as my own personal show canon. I don’t think there was a popular character in those first five seasons I ever really hated. I didn’t fundamentally hate a character at all until the MOL stuff came around. Um. Yeah, I don’t really have an answer for this.

23. Unpopular character you love?

Pretty much every female character ever. Jo, Ellen, Ruby, Meg... although Meg became more popular as the series went on, Anna. Um. OH, BELA. Bela ESPECIALLY, I recently rewatched season 3 and I cannot emphasize how MUCH I love Bela. She was the best purely human foil ever. Bela is hands down the character I love most that the fandom had frothing at the mouth hatred for. It doesn’t help that I legitimately think Lauren Cohan is one of the most beautiful women on the planet. But seriously, Bela. Hands down.

24. Would you recommend XXX to a friend? Why or why not? 

I have! Many of times, and ALWAYS WITH THE CAVEAT to stop at the end of season 5. Not a single one of them has listened to me and almost all of them came to me at the end of the finale and were like WHY DID I WASTE SO MUCH TIME, and I don’t want to say I told them so, but like, I explicitly in neon colored text once told them so, so like, idk what to tell them. But yes! I think if someone is interested in some classic mystery television that has an overarching theme of family and forgiveness and striking out against the boxes that life tries to put us all into, SPN is a great show. But only the first 5 seasons. Also, be prepared for some thematically problematic parts of the show because there’s a lot of cishet toxic masculinity in those early seasons, and we should examine our media critically. There’s also a lot of good though too, and IMO, the good outweighs the bad.

25. How would you end XXX/Would you change the ending of XXX?

I would’ve ended it at season 5. I would’ve had Sam escape the pit and seen him standing under the street lamp, but then I would’ve had him walking away to leave Dean with Lisa (btw, side note, I DIDN’T like Lisa because I don’t think Dean would ever be truly happy with someone completely outside the life). Not because Sam doesn’t love his brother, but because he *does* love his brother, and because he would want Dean to be happy, even though Dean and Sam’s ideas of what makes the other happy have always been a little bit screwed up.. but that’s a different story.

27. Least shippable character?

Probably Zachariah. God, could you imagine? And... maybe Alastair, but I’m sure there are fics out there that I do not want to think about.

[immortalafton]

[ i’m a simple man, if I see stupid shit like ‘William Afton stans or William apologists don’t interact’ I block you. He’s a fictional character, people are allowed to like him, get off your high horse. ]

[kathrinesadventures]

Apologies!

I'm so sorry to say this but I've been extremely busy these past week. I won't make up excuses like "Oh gawd muh jawb" or "Uni being a$$" or stuff like that. All I'll say is that I'll try my hardest to get a couple hundred words in and hopefully, I'll write more next week.

[dorothydelgadillo]

Mixing Tangible And Intangible: Designing Multimodal Interfaces Using Adobe XD

Mixing Tangible And Intangible: Designing Multimodal Interfaces Using Adobe XD

Nick Babich

2018-12-18T15:00:04+01:002018-12-18T14:09:02+00:00

(This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.) User interfaces are evolving. Voice-enabled interfaces are challenging the long dominance of graphical user interfaces and are quickly becoming a common part of our daily lives. Significant progress in automatic speech recognition (APS) and natural language processing (NLP), together with an impressive consumer base (millions of mobile devices with built-in voice assistants), have influenced the rapid development and adoption of voice-based interface.

Products that use voice as the primary interface are becoming more and more popular. In the US alone, 47.3 million adults have access to a smart speaker (that’s one fifth of the US adult population), and the number is growing. But voice interfaces have a bright future not only in personal and home use. As people become accustomed to voice interfaces, they will come to expect them in a business context as well. Just imagine that soon you’ll be able to trigger a conference-room projector by saying something like, “Show my presentation”.

It’s evident that human-machine communication is rapidly expanding to encompass both written and spoken interaction. But does it mean that future interfaces will be voice-only? Despite some science-fiction portrayals, voice won’t completely replace graphical user interfaces. Instead, we’ll have a synergy of voice, visual and gesture in a new format of interface: a voice-enabled, multimodal interface.

In this article, we’ll:

explore the concept of a voice-enabled interface and review different types of voice-enabled interfaces;

find out why voice-enabled, multimodal user interfaces will be the preferred user experience;

see how you can build a multimodal UI using Adobe XD.

The State Of Voice User Interfaces (VUI)

Before diving into the details of voice user interfaces, we must define what voice input is. Voice input is a human-computer interaction in which a user speaks commands instead of writing them. The beauty of voice input is that it’s a more natural interaction for people — users are not restricted to a specific syntax when interacting with a system; they can structure their input in many different ways, just as they would do in human conversation.

Voice user interfaces bring the following benefits to their users:

Less interaction cost Although using a voice-enabled interface does involve an interaction cost, this cost is smaller (in theory) than that of learning a new GUI.

Hands-free control VUIs are great for when the users hands are busy — for example, while driving, cooking or exercising.

Speed Voice is excellent when asking a question is faster than typing it and reading through the results. For example, when using voice in a car, it is faster to say the place to a navigation system, rather than type the location on a touchscreen.

Emotion and personality Even when we hear a voice but don’t see an image of a speaker, we can picture the speaker in our head. This has an opportunity to improve user engagement.

Accessibility Visually impaired users and users with a mobility impairment can use voice to interact with a system.

Three Types Of Voice-Enabled Interfaces

Depending on how voice is used, it could be one of the following types of interfaces.

Voice Agents In Screen-First Devices

Apple Siri and Google Assistant are prime examples of voice agents. For such systems, the voice acts more like an enhancement for the existing GUI. In many cases, the agent acts as the first step in the user’s journey: The user triggers the voice agent and provides a command via voice, while all other interactions are done using the touchscreen. For example, when you ask Siri a question, it will provide answers in the format of a list, and you need to interact with that list. As a result, the user experience becomes fragmented — we use voice to initiate the interaction and then shift to touch to continue it.

Siri executes a voice command to search for news, but then requires users to touch the screen in order to read the items. (Large preview)

Voice-Only Devices

These devices don’t have visual displays; users rely on audio for both input and output. Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers are prime examples of products in this category. The lack of a visual display is a significant constraint on the device’s ability to communicate information and options to the user. As a result, most people use these devices to complete simple tasks, such as playing music and getting answers to simple questions.

Amazon Echo Dot is a screen-less device. (Large preview)

Voice-First Devices

With voice-first systems, the device accepts user input primarily via voice commands, but also has an integrated screen display. It means that voice is the primary user interface, but not the only one. The old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” still applies to modern voice-enabled systems. The human ​brain​ has incredible​ ​image​-​processing​ abilities — we​ ​can​ ​understand​ ​complex​ ​information​ ​faster​ ​when we​ ​see​ ​it​ ​visually. Compared to voice-only devices, voice-first devices allow users to access a larger amount of information and make many tasks much easier.

The Amazon Echo Show is a prime example of a device that employs a voice-first system. Visual information is gradually incorporated as part of a holistic system — the screen is not loaded with app icons; rather, the system encourages users to try different voice commands (suggesting verbal commands such as, “Try ‘Alexa, show me the weather at 5:00 pm’”). The screen even makes common tasks such as checking a recipe while cooking much easier — users don’t need to listen carefully and keep all of the information in their heads; when they need the information, they simply look at the screen.

Amazon Echo Show is basically an Amazon Echo speaker with a screen. (Large preview)

Introducing Multimodal Interfaces

When it comes to using voice in UI design, don’t think of voice as something you can use alone. Devices such as Amazon Echo Show include a screen but employ voice as the primary input method, making for a more holistic user experience. This is the first step towards a new generation of user interfaces: multimodal interfaces.

A multimodal interface is an interface that blends voice, touch, audio and different types of visuals in a single, seamless UI. Amazon Echo Show is an excellent example of a device that takes full advantage of a voice-enabled multimodal interface. When users interact with Show, they make requests just as they would with a voice-only device; however, the response they receive will likely be multimodal, containing both voice and visual responses.

Multimodal products are more complex than products that rely only on visuals or only on voice. Why should anyone create a multimodal interface in the first place? To answer that question, we need to step back and see how people perceive the environment around them. People have five senses, and the combination of our senses working together is how we perceive things. For example, our senses work together when we are listening to music at a live concert. Remove one sense (for example, hearing), and the experience takes on an entirely different context.

(Large preview)

For too long, we’ve thought about the user experience as exclusively either visual or gestural design. It’s time to change this thinking. Multimodal design is a way to think about and design for experiences that connect our sensory abilities together.

Multimodal interfaces feel like ​a more​ ​human​ ​way​ for ​user​ ​and​ machine to communicate. They open up new opportunities for deeper interactions. And today, it’s much easier to design multimodal interfaces because the technical limitations that in the past constrained interactions with products are being erased.

The Difference Between A GUI And Multimodal Interface

The key difference here is that multimodal interfaces like Amazon Echo Show sync voice and visual interfaces. As a result, when we’re designing the experience, the voice and visuals are no longer independent parts; they are integral parts of the experience that the system provides.

Visual And Voice Channel: When To Use Each

It’s important to think about voice and visuals as channels for input and output. Each channel has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Let’s start with the visuals. It’s clear that some information is just easier to understand when we see it, rather than when we hear it. Visuals work better when you need to provide:

a long lists of options (reading a long list will take a lot of time and be difficult to follow);

data-heavy information (such as diagrams and graphs);

product information (for example, products in online shops; most likely, you would want to see a product before buying) and product comparison (as with the long list of options, it would be hard to provide all of the information using only voice).

For some information, however, we can easily rely on verbal communication. Voice might be the right fit for the following cases:

user commands (voice is an efficient input modality, allowing users to give commands to the system quickly and bypassing complex navigation menus);

simple user instructions (for example, a routine check on a prescription);

warnings and notifications (for example, an audio warning paired with voice notifications during driving).

While these are a few typical cases of visual and voice combined, it’s important to know that we can’t separate the two from each other. We can create a better user experience only when both voice and visuals work together. For example, suppose we want to purchase a new pair of shoes. We could use voice to request from the system, “Show me New Balance shoes.” The system would process your request and visually provide product information (an easier way for us to compare shoes).

What You Need To Know To Design Voice-Enabled, Multimodal Interfaces

Voice is one of the most exciting challenges for UX designers. Despite its novelty, the fundamental rules for designing voice-enabled, multimodal interface are the same as those we use to create visual designs. Designers should care about their users. They should aim to reduce friction for the user by solving their problems in efficient ways and prioritize clarity to make the user’s choices clear.

But there are some unique design principles for multimodal interfaces as well.

Make Sure You Solve The Right Problem

Design should solve problems. But it’s vital to solve the right problems; otherwise, you could spend a lot of time creating an experience that doesn’t bring much value to users. Thus, make sure you’re focused on solving the right problem. Voice interactions should make sense to the user; users should have a compelling reason to use voice over other methods of interaction (such as clicking or tapping). That’s why, when you create a new product — even before starting the design — it’s essential to conduct user research and determine whether voice would improve the UX.

Start with creating a user journey map. Analyze the journey map and find places where including voice as a channel would benefit the UX.

Find places in the journey where users might encounter friction and frustration. Would using voice reduce the friction?

Think about the context of the user. Would voice work for a particular context?

Think about what is uniquely enabled by voice. Remember the unique benefits of using voice, such as hands-free and eyes-free interaction. Could voice add value to the experience?

Create Conversational Flows

Ideally, the interfaces you design should require zero interaction cost: Users should be able to fulfill their needs without spending extra time on learning how to interact with the system. This happens only when voice interaction resemble a real conversation, not a system dialog wrapped in the format of voice commands. The fundamental rule of a good UI is simple: Computers should adapt to humans, not the other way around.

People rarely have flat, linear conversations (conversations that only last one turn). That’s why, to make interaction with a system feel like a live conversation, designers should focus on creating conversational flows. Each conversational flow consists of dialogs — the pathways that occur between the system and the user. Each dialog would include the system’s prompts and the user’s possible responses.

A conversational flow can be presented in the form of a flow diagram. Each flow should focus on one particular use case (for example, setting an alarm clock using a system). For most dialogs in a flow, it’s vital to consider error paths, when things go off the rails.

Each voice command of the user consists of three key elements: intent, utterance and slot.

Intent is the objective of the user’s interaction with a voice-enabled system. An intent is just a fancy way of defining the purpose behind a set of words. Each interaction with a system brings the user some utility. Whether it’s information or an action, the utility is in intent. Understanding the user’s intent is a crucial part of voice-enabled interfaces. When we design VUI, we don’t always know for sure what a user’s intent is, but we can guess it with high accuracy.

Utterance is how the user phrases their request. Usually, users have more than one way to formulate a voice command. For example, we can set an alarm clock by saying “Set alarm clock to 8 am”, or “Alarm clock 8 am tomorrow” or even “I need to wake up at 8 am.” Designers need to consider every possible variation of utterance.

Slots are variables that users use in a command. Sometimes users need to provide additional information in the request. In our example of the alarm clock, “8 am” is a slot.

Don’t Put Words In The User’s Mouth

People know how to talk. Don't try to teach them commands. Avoid phrases like, “To send a meeting appointment, you need to say ‘Calendar, meetings, create a new meeting’.” If you have to explain commands, you need to reconsider the way you’re designing the system. Always aim for natural language conversation, and try to accommodate diverse speaking styles).

Strive For Consistency

You need to achieve consistency in language and voice across contexts. Consistency will help to build familiarity in interactions.

Always Provide Feedback

Visibility of system status is one of the fundamental principles of good GUI design. The system should always keep users informed of what is going on through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time. The same rule applies to VUI design.

Make the user aware that the system is listening. Show visual indicators when the device is listening or processing the user’s request. Without feedback, the user can only guess whether the system is doing something. That’s why even voice-only devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home give us nice visual feedback (flashing lights) when they are listening or searching for an answer.

Provide conversational markers. Conversational markers tell the user where they’re at in the conversation.

Confirm when a task is completed. For example, when users ask the voice-enabled smart home system “Turn off the lights in the garage”, the system should let the user know that the command has been successfully executed. Without confirmation, users will need to walk into the garage and check the lights. It defeats the purpose of the smart home system, which is to make the user’s life easier.

Avoid Long Sentences

When designing a voice-enabled system, consider the way you provide information to users. It’s relatively easy to overwhelm users with too much information when you use long sentences. First, users can’t retain a lot of information in their short-term memory, so they can easily forget some important information. Also, audio is a slow medium — most people can read much faster than they can listen.

Be respectful of your user’s time; don’t read out long audio monologues. When you’re designing a response, the fewer words you use, the better. But remember that you still need to provide enough information for the user to complete their task. Thus, if you cannot summarize an answer in a few words, display it on the screen instead.

Provide Next Steps Sequentially

Users can be overwhelmed not only by long sentences, but also their number of options at one time. It’s vital to break down the process of interaction with a voice-enabled system into bite-sized chunks. Limit the number of choices the user has at any one time, and make sure they know what to do at every moment.

When designing a complex voice-enabled system with a lot of features, you can use the technique of progressive disclosure: Present only the options or information necessary to complete the task.

Have A Strong Error-Handling Strategy

Of course, the system should prevent errors from occurring in the first place. But no matter how good your voice-enabled system is, you should always design for the scenario in which the system doesn’t understand the user. Your responsibility is to design for such cases.

Here are a few practical tips for creating a strategy:

Don’t blame the user. In conversation, there are no errors. Try to avoid reponses like, “Your answer is incorrect.”

Provide error-recovery flows. Provide an option for back-and-forths in a conversation, or even to exit the system, without losing important information. Save the user’s state in the journey, so that they can re-engage with the system right from where they left off.

Let users replay information. Provide an option to make the system repeat the question or answer. This might be helpful for complex questions or answers where it would be hard for the user to commit all of the information to their working memory.

Provide stop wording. In some cases, the user will not be interested in listening to an option and will want the system to stop talking about it. Stop wording should help them do just that.

Handle unexpected utterances gracefully. No matter how much you invest in the design of a system, there will be situations when the system doesn’t understand the user. It’s vital to handle such cases gracefully. Don’t be afraid to let the system admit a lack of understanding. The system should communicate what it has understood and provide helpful reprompts.

Use analytics to improve your error strategy. Analytics can help you identify wrong turns and misinterpretations.

Keep Track Of Context

Make sure the system understands the context of the user’s input. For example, when someone says that they want to book a flight to San Francisco next week, they might refer to “it” or “the city” during the conversational flow. The system should remember what was said and be able to match it to the newly received information.

Learn About Your Users To Create More Powerful Interactions

A voice-enabled system becomes more sophisticated when it uses additional information (such as user context or past behavior) to understand what the user wants. This technique is called intelligent interpretation, and it requires that the system actively learn about the user and be able to adjust their behavior accordingly. This knowledge will help the system to provide answers even to complex questions, such as "What gift should I buy for my wife’s birthday?"

Give Your VUI A Personality

Every voice-enabled system has an emotional impact on the user, whether you plan for it or not. People associate voice with humans rather than machines. According to Speak Easy Global Edition research, 74% of regular users of voice technology expect brands to have unique voices and personalities for their voice-enabled products. It’s possible to build empathy through personality and achieve a higher level of user engagement.

Try to reflect your unique brand and identity in the voice and tone you present. Construct a persona of your voice-enabled agent, and rely on this persona when creating dialogs.

Build Trust

When users don’t trust a system, they don’t have the motivation to use it. That’s why building trust is a requirement of product design. Two factors have a significant impact on the level of trust built: system capabilities and valid outcome.

Building trust starts with setting user expectations. Traditional GUIs have a lot of visual details to help the user understand what the system is capable of. With a voice-enabled system, designers have fewer tools to rely on. Still, it’s vital to make the system naturally discoverable; the user should understand what is and isn’t possible with the system. That’s why a voice-enabled system might require user onboarding, where it talks about what the system can do or what it knows. When designing onboarding, try to offer meaningful examples to let people know what it can do (examples work better than instructions).

When it comes to valid outcomes, people know that voice-enabled systems are imperfect. When a system provides an answer, some users might doubt that the answer is correct. this happens because users don’t have any information about whether their request was correctly understood or what algorithm was used to find the answer. To prevent trust issues, use the screen for supporting evidence — display the original query on the screen — and provide some key information about the algorithm. For example, when a user asks, “Show me the top five movies of 2018”, the system can say, “Here are top five movies of 2018 according to the box office in the US”.

Don’t Ignore Security And Data Privacy

Unlike mobile devices, which belong to the individual, voice devices tend to belong to a location, like a kitchen. And usually, there are more than one person in the same location. Just imagine that someone else can interact with a system that has access to all of your personal data. Some VUI systems such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple Siri can recognize individual voices, which adds a layer of security to the system. Still, it doesn’t guarantee that the system will be able to recognize users based on their unique voice signature in 100% of cases.

Voice recognition is continually improving, and it will be hard or nearly impossible to imitate a voice in the near future. However, in the current reality, it’s vital to provide an additional authentication layer to reassure the user that their data is safe. If you design an app that works with sensitive data, such as health information or banking details, you might want to include an extra authentication step, such as a password or fingerprint or face recognition.

Conduct Usability Testing

Usability testing is a mandatory requirement for any system. Test early, test often should be a fundamental rule of your design process. Gather user research data early on, and iterate your designs. But testing multimodal interfaces has its own specifics. Here are two phases that should be taken into account:

Ideation phase Test drive your sample dialogs. Practice reading sample dialogs out loud. Once you have some conversational flows, record both sides of the conversation (the user’s utterances and the system’s responses), and listen to the recording to understand whether they sound natural.

Early stages of product development (testing with lo-fi prototypes) Wizard of Oz testing is well-suited to testing conversational interfaces. Wizard of Oz testing is a type of testing in which a participant interacts with a system that they believe is operated by a computer but is in fact operated by a human. The test participant formulates a query, and a real person responds on the other end. This method gets its name from the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum. In the book, an ordinary man hides behind a curtain, pretending to be a powerful wizard. This test allows you to map out every possible scenario of interaction and, as a result, create more natural interactions. Say Wizard is a great tool to help you run a Wizard of Oz voice-interface test on macOS.

Designing For Voice: The ‘Wizard Of Oz’ Method (Watch on Vimeo)

Later stages of product development (testing with hi-fi prototypes) In usability testing of graphical user interfaces, we often ask users to speak out loud when they interact with a system. For a voice-enabled system, that’s not always possible because the system would be listening to that narration. So, it might be better to observe the user’s interactions with the system, rather than ask them to speak out loud.

How To Create A Multimodal Interface Using Adobe XD

Now that you have a solid understanding of what a multimodal interface is and what rules to remember when designing them, we can discuss how to make a prototype of a multimodal interface.

Prototyping is a fundamental part of the design process. Being able to bring an idea to life and share it with others is extremely important. Until now, designers who wanted to incorporate voice in prototyping had few tools to rely on, the most powerful of which was a flowchart. Picturing how a user would interact with a system required a lot of imagination from someone looking at the flowchart. With Adobe XD, designers now have access to the medium of voice and can use it in their prototypes. XD seamlessly connects screen and voice prototyping in one app.

New Experiences, Same Process

Even though voice is a totally different medium than visual, the process of prototyping for voice in Adobe XD is pretty much the same as prototyping for a GUI. The Adobe XD team integrates voice in a way that will feel natural and intuitive for any designer. Designers can use voice triggers and speech playback to interact with prototypes:

Voice triggers start an interaction when a user says a particular word or phrase (utterance).

Speech playback gives designers access to a text-to-speech engine. XD will speak words and sentences defined by a designer. Speech playback can be used for many different purposes. For example, it can act as an acknowledgment (to reassure users) or as guidance (so users know what to do next).

The great thing about XD is that it doesn’t force you to learn the complexities of each voice platform.

Enough words — let’s see how it works in action. For all of the examples you’ll see below, I’ve used artboards created using Adobe XD UI kit for Amazon Alexa (this is a link to download the kit). The kit contains all of the styles and components needed to create experiences for Amazon Alexa.

Suppose we have the following artboards:

(Large preview)

Let’s go into prototyping mode to add in some voice interactions. We’ll start with voice triggers. Along with triggers such as tap and drag, we are now able to use voice as a trigger. We can use any layers for voice triggers as long as they have a handle leading to another artboard. Let’s connect the artboards together.

Connecting artboards together. (Large preview)

Once we do that, we’ll find a new “Voice” option under the “Trigger”. When we select this option, we’ll see a “Command” field that we can use to enter an utterance — this is what XD will actually be listening for. Users will need to speak this command to activate the trigger.

Setting a voice trigger in Adobe XD. (Large preview)

That’s all! We’ve defined our first voice interaction. Now, users can say something, and a prototype will respond to it. But we can make this interaction much more powerful by adding speech playback. As I mentioned previously, speech playback allows a system to speak some words.

Select an entire second artboard, and click on the blue handle. Choose a “Time” trigger with a delay and set it to 0.2s. Under the action, you’ll find “Speech Playback”. We’ll write down what the virtual assistant speaks back to us.

(Large preview)

We’re ready to test our prototype. Select the first artboard, and clicking the play button in the top right will launch a preview window. When interacting with voice prototyping, make sure your mic is on. Then, hold down the spacebar to speak the voice command. This input triggers the next action in the prototype.

Use Auto-Animate To Make The Experience More Dynamic

Animation brings a lot of benefits to UI design. It serves clear functional purposes, such as:

communicating the spatial relationships between objects (Where does the object come from? Are those objects related?);

communicating affordance (What can I do next?)

But functional purposes aren’t the only benefits of animation; animation also makes the experience more alive and dynamic. That’s why UI animations should be a natural part of multimodal interfaces.

With “Auto-Animate” available in Adobe XD, it becomes much easier to create prototypes with immersive animated transitions. Adobe XD does all the hard work for you, so you don’t need to worry about it. All you need to do to create an animated transition between two artboards is simply duplicate an artboard, modify the object properties in the clone (properties such as size, position and rotation), and apply an Auto-Animate action. XD will automatically animate the differences in properties between each artboard.

Let’s see how it works in our design. Suppose we have an existing shopping list in Amazon Echo Show and want to add a new object to the list using voice. Duplicate the following artboard:

Artboard: shopping list. (Large preview)

Let’s introduce some changes in the layout: Add a new object. We aren’t limited here, so we can easily modify any properties such as text attributes, color, opacity, position of the object — basically, any changes we make, XD will animate between them.

Two artboards: our original shopping list and its duplicate with a new item. (Large preview)

When you wire two artboards together in prototype mode using Auto-Animate in “Action”, XD will automatically animate the differences in properties between each artboard.

(Large preview)

And here’s how the interaction will look to users:

One crucial thing that requires mentioning: Keep the names of all of the layers the same; otherwise, Adobe XD won’t be able to apply the auto-animation.

Conclusion

We’re at the dawn of a user interface revolution. A new generation of interfaces — multimodal interfaces — not only will give users more power, but will also change the way users interact with systems. We will probably still have displays, but we won’t need keyboards to interact with the systems.

At the same time, the fundamental requirements for designing multimodal interfaces won’t be much different from those of designing modern interfaces. Designers will need to keep the interaction simple; focus on the user and their needs; design, prototype, test and iterate.

And the great thing is that you don’t need to wait to start designing for this new generation of interfaces. You can start today.

This article is part of the UX design series sponsored by Adobe. Adobe XD tool is made for a fast and fluid UX design process, as it lets you go from idea to prototype faster. Design, prototype and share — all in one app. You can check out more inspiring projects created with Adobe XD on Behance, and also sign up for the Adobe experience design newsletter to stay updated and informed on the latest trends and insights for UX/UI design.

(ms, ra, al, yk, il)

[onlineassignmentbloglucassm-blog]

Blog 5 - Our Pick

Technology should be an extension of the human body. I keep thinking of this idea that Steve Jobs believed so hard in. What would be the most efficient digitally interactive advertising campaign that could follow this simple idea?

My conclusion? Interac Debit (With the extension of Apple Pay)

Our entire world revolves around money; Earning it, spending it, gambling it, saving it, and of course transferring it. For something so crucial to the way the world works, it seems like we never give enough appreciation towards the advancements in technology revolving around money.

It wasn’t so long ago that the introduction of little plastic cards, used in replacement of *gasp* cash, got introduced into society. Now it is just an everyday norm. Nowadays everything is practically done digitally, so why not money?

“Having your wallet on your phone/wrist instead of your purse or back pocket? seems untrustworthy... “

Yeah so did putting all your money on a plastic card and trusting the bank to behave, yet here we are. 

The advancements in eTransfers are incredible as well, you can officially transfer money with a simple push of a “touchscreen” button! Check out Apple’s iMessage video for sending money to a friend...

Overall I think the way we interact with money is changing drastically. And in my opinion, we are not too far away from sending money to one another through our thoughts. Science fiction is just reality that science hasn’t caught up with yet.

[cppsheffield]

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Autumn 2022 Series Presents:

Emma Bolland, Rachel Genn and Mendoza, aka Linus Slug

In-person reading with online link available. Venue: Diamond, LT06.

Rachel Genn is a senior lecturer at Manchester Writing School and University of Sheffield.  Formerly a Neuro-scientist, she was a Royal Society Fellow at UBC, Canada and has written two novels:  THE CURE, (2011) and WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON (2020). She was Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence (2016) creating a quasi-institution called THE NATIONAL FACILITY FOR THE REGULATION OF REGRET, spanning installation and interac-tive art, VR and film (ASFF 2016), presented together at SXSW, 2017. She has non-fiction in Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, and The New Statesman and is currently working on a collection of non-fiction about her family’s injuries, fighting and addiction to regret.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer employing experimental approaches to inter-genre / interdisciplinary writ-ing, speaking, and reading. This includes an investigation of the problematics and ambiguities of an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between voice, ear, and page. Other methods include works on paper, moving-image, performance, collaborations, and events, and they have paint-ings and other works in public collections. They are interested in the wider politics of communication, and the conflicts between medical and social models of disability. They are co-edit 'intergraphia books', an experimental press with forthcoming titles by Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, Sascha Akhtar, Mark Goodwin, Jan Hopkins, and more. They teach Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam and Bolton Universities, and are a tutor for the Poetry School.  Recent artworks include a commission for the exhibition imPerfekt at the MEWO Kunsthalle Mem-mingem in Germany in 2021, and recent publications include  their collection Over, In, and Under (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). Their hybrid longpoem/novella Instructions from Light will be published by JOAN Publishing later this year.'

Mendoza, aka Linus Slug: Insect Librarian, is a poet and researcher investigating disembodiment, liminal space and marginal entities through poetic practice. Poems emerge from the process of collecting, hoarding and (met-aphorically) consuming found entomological texts and reconstituting this material as poetry. Exploring the idea of containment through self-imposed boundaries, the sequences are written in sets of nine, each component containing nine lines or multiples of nine, frequently with nine syllables per line in which familiar terrain is dis-rupted. In doing so, they are liberated from neurotypical modes of thinking allowing them to de-construct / (re)construct the ‘self’ through the language of insects.  It is an act of nonconformity. Publications include: “WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths” collaboration with Peter Manson: Materials, 2018, “Entro" & "Un-love Son-nots" Gutteral, 2017; “the science of poetry : the poetry of science” Linus Slug / Peter Manson broadside,  2015 and “Type Specimen: An Observant Guide To Linus Slug”, Contra-band, 2014. Mendoza’s poetry can be heard at the Archive of the Now

Please note this is an in-person event but we will be having a live-stream which you can request to attend online: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/421965408897

[cryptochurp]

Canada Fraud Watchdog Warns Against Bitcoin Scammers as Tax Season Approaches

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) Canada’s national anti-fraud call center and fraud data repository, has warned citizens to beware of scammers impersonating tax officers and demanding payments in bitcoin. The activities of these scammers tend to increase as the tax filing time approaches each year.

Also see: BitKan’s ‘K Site’ to Be a Crypto News Media, Information and Economic Hub

Join the Bitsonline Telegram channel to get the latest Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and tech news updates: https://t.me/bitsonline

Fraud Operators Take Advantage of Immigrant Citizens

Canadian national broadcaster CBC reported that CAFC spokesperson Jessica Gunson said:

“Generally in the past, we’ve seen an influx of scams surrounding tax season. In the form of phishing email, like it’s coming from the CRA: ‘congratulations, you have a refund. It looks like an Interac email money transfer, it looks like you have a refund from the CRA. The key to remember here is the Canada Revenue Agency would never email you or send you a text message to notify you of a refund.”

Present day scammers not only email their targets but also try to swindle using text messages. Even with warnings, scammers always find new tricks to deceive people. In these new techniques, fraudsters intimidate victims by accusing them of having unpaid taxes and, if they do not make the payment, they could be arrested.

Gunson added that some scamsters were more likely to threaten naturalized (or immigrant citizen) Canadians, telling them they would be deported if they did not pay the back taxes.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not the only payment method for scammers to demand money from victims. Lately, iTunes gift cards have also been used to demand payments. Cryptocurrencies, however make it harder for police to follow the money.

Scammers Choose New Payment Methods

Just weeks ago, on the other side of the world, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) issued a similar warning to caution residents to not fall for tax scams. That warning also highlighted that scammers impersonate ATO officers and have demanded payment in bitcoin or other digital currencies for fictional tax debts.

According to Canada’s Gunson, many people fall prey to fraudsters, but feel embarrassed at being tricked and fail to report it to the police.

She said: “There’s no embarrassment. They should never feel ashamed because they’ve fallen for a scam; they’re not alone. Our phone rings here day in and day out from consumers that have lost money.”

Many people have lost money through such scams, with one individual losing about $200,000 in one bitcoin tax scam, she said. If the main reason scammers continue their work is that the majority of the people aren’t reporting their activities, then more reporting would make it easier for officials to investigate them.

Should government officials do more than just warning citizens about tax scams? Let us know your views in the comments section.

Images via CAFC, PTBOCanada

The post Canada Fraud Watchdog Warns Against Bitcoin Scammers as Tax Season Approaches appeared first on Bitsonline.

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[annadianecass]

Tomorrow’s cyber elite return to University of Cambridge for Inter-ACE cyber security challenge

Over 130 competitors from 18 of the UK’s leading cyber security universities will pit their skills against one another in a two-day cyber security competition organised by the University of Cambridge. Now in its third year, the Inter-ACE is supported by GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre to attract the best young minds into careers in the sector.

Up for grabs is £10,000 in cash prizes and the opportunity to compete against the best of the USA in ‘Cambridge2Cambridge’, a transatlantic contest to be held later this year.

The 130 competitors, organised into 34 teams from 18 UK universities, will face over 20 challenges set by experts from the University of Cambridge and sponsors including Context IS and Palo Alto Networks. The two-day event, taking place at the University of Cambridge on the 16th and 17th March 2018, will culminate in a ceremony dinner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Inter-ACE will simulate a number of scenarios, including working to prevent a cyber-attack on the infrastructure of a fictional city and the results of a successful tap on an undersea data cable. Competitors will develop and hone penetrative testing skills. These skills include the binary reverse engineering of malware, breaking into a web application such as an online payment system, decoding secure communications and piecing together intercepted data.

  Professor Frank Stajano of the University of Cambridge, the founder of Inter-ACE, said “Protecting IT and infrastructure means understanding how it can be attacked. The head of the National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin, is absolutely right in that a major cyber-attack on the UK is a now matter of “when, not if” and we must recognise that the UK faces an urgent skills shortage.

“Inter-ACE gives future cyber security professionals the opportunity to test their skills against the best and meet others in their field and future employers. This is about engaging with the next generation of cyber security talent, and raising awareness of this vital, interesting and exciting career choice.

“It’s also about making the good work of cyber security professionals much more visible. Like other initiatives such as NCSC’s CyberFirst programme, the interesting experiences of the University students taking part in this year’s event will help to inspire those currently at school to consider a rewarding career in this field.”

  Chris Ensor, Deputy Director for Skills and Growth at the NCSC, said: “The InterACE competition is a fantastic way to encourage bright young minds to hone their cyber knowledge further and meet like minded people.

“The cyber threat is growing, and so making sure that young people have the cyber security skills to help protect us has never been more important. We at the NCSC hope the entrants will be inspired – and can perhaps inspire others – into starting a thrilling career defending the UK and helping make it the safest place to live and work online.”

  Established through the UK’s National Cyber Security Strategy and supported by GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, the competition is sponsored by Microsoft, BT, Palo Alto and Context IS.

The 18 universities sending teams to Inter-ACE are Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Birmingham, the University of Cambridge, Cardiff University, De Montfort University, the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, Imperial College London, the University of Kent, Lancaster University,  Newcastle University, the University of Oxford, Royal Holloway University of London, the University of Southampton, the University of Surrey, University College London, the University of Warwick and the University of York.

The post Tomorrow’s cyber elite return to University of Cambridge for Inter-ACE cyber security challenge appeared first on IT SECURITY GURU.

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[kathrinesadventures]

Happy friday everyone!! Hope you all have a lovely weekend! Remember to drink lotsa water, and give your friends a hug, who knows who may need it. I need a hug ;-;