#not a single time where i have even uttered their name on any public website

[mothslimes]

honestly do not get comfort characters any character is a discomfort character to me i look at them and get really uneasy and it physically hurts and i wanna hide in a cave curled around them like a dog for the rest of my life and never see sunlight again. is that a thought you guys find comforting?

[wirewitchviolet]

A Little Horrifying Primer on Transphobes

Some time ago, I put together a Little Fact Checking Primer on Trans People, as a basic resource for disabusing people of some of the many completely ridiculous yet absurdly widespread beliefs about trans people that simply have no basis whatsoever in reality. And wouldn’t you know it, every single lie exposed in that primer is not only still widely believed, but is presently being used as a basis to sign some absolutely horrific human rights abuses into law. So it’s high time I follow that up, in this case focused more on who keeps actively spreading these lies and why. I’m going to try and keep things as light as I can here, but we’re going to be looking at the most monstrous side of human nature, so apologies in advance if this is a dark read.

First, let me just note that there are two things I don’t plan to do in this piece. I’m not going to waste time debunking the arguments of the people I’m highlighting (much of this is already covered in my earlier primer, others have done the work in cases where I haven’t, and frankly these people’s claims should be self-evidently utter nonsense to begin with). I am also going to be very selective in what I link to, or even share related images of, as I would frankly not like to fill a post on a blog I generally try to keep safe for all audiences with media directly dealing with, for instance, child sexual assault, and much of the relevant information also involves stochastic terrorism against innocent people, and I would prefer not to throw more fuel onto such fires.

Transphobes lie constantly, about everything.

To some degree this is obvious. We’re talking about people who scaremonger about the possibilities of trans women dominating competitive sports and assaulting people in restrooms, despite the status quo already reflecting the conditions they insist would make these inevitibilities for decades and centuries respectively, and their grim visions never once having come to pass, and also constantly insisting that the woman in the photo below is actually a man, going further to say this is evident to anyone giving her the merest glance.

It goes beyond that though. There’s at least a little plausible deniablity in claims like this, or that “science is on their side” if they were simply uninformed about the world they live in, never actually looking into what laws exist, what science actually says, and never actually meeting a trans person or even seeing a picture of one of us. I’m talking really bold lies here. Like wholecloth fabricating a story that a convicted murder was trans, including anecdotes about wigs dresses and a planned name change, in a major newspaper. Or to cite an old favorite of mine, the time a pack of bigots walked up to a crowd of people peacefully picketing a transphobic legal proposal, started roughing them up and taking closeup photos of members of the crowd to stalk online when they got home, got sufficiently riled up for one to straight up assault an innocent person half her size, filmed the whole thing, uploaded it to youtube, and used stills of that assault as acomanying photos when they went home to write articles about the assailant being a “grandmother” attacked by rowdy trans women. And yes, they did monkey’s paw my wish to see that specific image on newspapers. Interesting side note, when it came to real public light that J.K. Rowling endorsed this sort of hatred, it was because she accidentally pasted some profanity laden rambling about how the imagined moral character of the other party in that incident, years after the fact, into a post praising a child’s fan art of her work.

To be a little less niche, transphobes can’t get enough of spreading the lie that the young fellow in this photo is a girl. Specifically a trans girl, providing proof that all their scaremongering about the dastardly threat of trans girls in competitive sports has finally come to pass.

To be fully clear, that’s a man (or a boy if you want to split hairs about him being 17 in that photo). Mack Beggs. A rather insidious choice for this sort of story, considering the actual context for that photo. See, Beggs attended high school in Texas, during a (still ongoing as I write this) period wherein that particular state had caved to this exact sort of propaganda, and in order to head off a wholly imagined wave of trans girls competing on girls’ sports teams, and enacted a law mandating that in all such competitions must compete under whatever gender is stated on their birth certificates. And as it happens, the first, and to my knowledge ONLY time this has come up was with Beggs here, who again, is a man, as no one with a grip on reality could argue against, has “female” on his birth certificate. Which is another way of saying he is a trans man. The guys in the same boat as trans women who we talk about a whole hell of a lot less because their existence is extremely inconvenient to the majority of transphobic propaganda. Case in point. And this is all information it is really impossible to come across if you’re coming across this photo in any sort of respectable source. Take this story, which is as unambiguous about this as you can get. And yet, in the very comments section of that story, there they are. Carrying on like this story about a trans guy, forced by a transphobic law to compete as a girl, which he absolutely did not want, and received horrific threats over, using phrases like “female to male” and bringing up that he was assigned female at birth and is on testosterone-based HRT, is about a trans woman cheating the system. Or to quote word for word, “Now also transgender female want to be male also compete in female sport. biological born“ That’s not “being confused,” that’s standing next to you in a white desert and complaining about being adrift in a black ocean, bald-faced, not even trying to be convincing just make a power play, lying through one’s teeth.

I could spend this whole article on just this point. Lying about who they are, various people’s falsified credentials, whole websites full of “anonymous parents of children who think they’re trans” turning out to be one single woman documenting the abuse of her very much trans son, or of course the people behind the whole “bathroom bill” panic candidly admitting it was all based on utter fiction. I do have other points to cover though.

Transphobes are firmly entrenched in the media.

It is extremely difficult to find oneself in a position of having to explain to people that a particular group of people is effectively in control of press outlets, as that is rather classically a claim conspiracy theorists absolutely love to toss around at various marginalized groups (including trans people hilariously enough, but of course the most common and lingering version of this is the antisemitic variant). I really can’t get around it here though. Specifically in the U.K., you honestly can say that transphobes control the media. I already touched on this with the assault case I mentioned above and the fabricated story about the murderer, but this is a pretty well-documented situation. I mean, even The Guardian calls out The Guardian on this, and that’s the outlet that gets the most attention because it’s the one with the most otherwise respected name, but every paper in the country has been running transphobic propaganda pieces on a weekly if not daily basis for years now, and while they do get reprimanded by watchdog groups and have mass walk-outs over the worst of it, it’s not like there’s some governing body with the authority to step in about it. Meanwhile the BBC is constantly inviting diehard zealots like Graham Linehan to news programs where he compares being trans to being a nazi, and hosting debates where someone just sits down and repeatedly chants the word “penis” at a trans woman.

Things are better in the rest of the world, but we still have right-wing creeps like Jesse Singal both writing horrific propaganda pieces (we’ll get back to that one) and blackballing trans writers out of covering trans issues ourselves (and personally stalking the hell out of those of us who try). We’ve got our Joe Rogans and Tucker Carlsons out there (no way in hell I’m linking videos here, have a real information link and a still).

The line between diehard transphobes and straight-up nazis basically does not exist.

What even is there to say here? You can easily poke around havens for nazi activity for yourself and compare the particular unique vocabulary used there to the primary bastion of anti-trans hate speech on the internet (the “feminism” section of what was originally a site for parenting tips before violent fascists took the forums over) or just peruse the follows of the thousands of people I’ve blocked on social media and see if you can sort out a clear division in the networks of channers with frog avatars and the accounts with names like GoodieXXrealwoman, or you can read up on Gab and Spinster, the two twitter alternatives that are just different portals to the same server, set up by the same guy. Maybe do some research into “the LGB Alliance,” or WoLF but any way you slice it the only real difference to be found is the general purpose nazis take a little time off now and then to watch borderline pedophilic anime and the really dedicated transphobes think to use language that sounds vaguely well-educated and left-leaning. I mean, this came from the “feminist” side of the fence:

And not to belabor the point here, but the ones claiming to be a bunch of “feminist mums” sure do let the mask slip any time they’re confronted with the fact that “women” includes black women, and oh just have a whole thread about all the weird conspiratory theories these people have about how trans people’s whole existence is some sort of Jewish plot for world domination. I swear a few months ago they were all passing around a story about some bank having an above average number of trans employees and they were all just “and we all know who controls the banks, right?” about it.

Transphobes endorse an awful lot of people who are openly pro-pedophila.

This is the part where I am really loath to link the many many specific examples I have on hand. Or to talk about this at all for reasons of good taste. Or, for that matter, to talk about this in a tumblr post when there’s an ongoing problem of people with backgrounds strongly tied to this site making baseless accusations of pedophilia against every queer person they can find, so let me be very clear just what I’m talking about while avoiding anything too graphic.

That’s James Cantor. Transphobes love him for being one of the closest things they have to a scientist on their side. And I am featuring him in a screenshot here showing that he is followed by current queen of the transphobes J.K. Rowling, while speaking to both another big name in transphobic circles, Debra Soh, and based on their names, what I’m guessing is at least one straight-up nazi. And in case you think “the P” he’s talking about adding to LGBT (or “GLBT” as weird anti-queer bigots who also have issues with women often write it) might stand for “poly” or “pan” he’s all too happy to clarify that.

This is the entire thrust of Cantor’s work and life. He is the world’s biggest pedophile rights advocate. He wants it declassified as a mental disorder, all stigma on it removed, and tirelessly pushes forward the idea that the majority of.. people who feel compelled to sexually assault children are good people who present no potential harm to anyone and should in fact be lauded.

I am not generally one to claim that someone with a PhD is spewing out questionable garbage with regard to their field, but the reason I am aware of Cantor at all is that other transphobes keep trying to hold up a particular post on his blog as "a study” (which it is not) that offers “proof” (in the form of a blurry jpeg of basically some random numbers) of some ridiculous quackery about how trans kids will “grow out of it” if exposed to conversion therapy (another way of saying torture), which Cantor himself seems to be pushing, so I am somewhat skeptical of his academic chops. And I am, of course, REALLY suspicious that all these other bigots gravitate to him purely because they’re that desperate to find anyone with a PhD in anything that backs them up against literally every scientist in a relative field, to the point that they merely forgive his particular advocacy they are plainly all aware of, particularly when such a common fig leaf used by transphobes is “keeping children safe from sexual deviants.”

And of course, Cantor is most often invoked when coming to the defense of Kenneth Zucker. This Kenneth Zucker.

Those are separate papers. Zucker isn’t controversial though for organizing panels to discuss how attractive people agree small children are (at least not exclusively). Mostly, he’s known for running a conversion therapy center which subjected gay and trans children to various sorts of torture in an effort to “fix” them, which at least for those trans "patients” I have spoken with involved a fair amount of having them strip completely naked and talking a lot about their genitals.

Zucker is something of a controversial figure with the transphobic scene, as they are extremely on board with his sexual torture of queer children, but he does actual work (for some value of the term) involving trans people and thus is not able to commit as fully as they would prefer to making life horrible for trans people, due to a professional obligation to acknowledge reality now and then. As an aside, the similarly positioned Ray Blanchard, while not to my knowledge particularly interested in the attractiveness of children, lives in a similar purgatory of trying to reconcile his career, bigotry, and sexual hangups, yielding compromises like this:

Of course, that’s just looking at the straws transphobes grasp at when looking for scientific credibility. Real leaders of the movement include Germaine Greer, author of The Beautiful Boy, which is about what you are afraid it might be, and features a very young child in a cover feature he did not consent to posing for. Or Julie Bindel, who among other things is rather infamous for writing whole articles on subjects like whether a teenage girl she came across maybe has a huge penis you can totally see if you really squint at her skirt. Again, I will not share a link to go along with that one.

Transphobes terrorize and attempt to defund charities and other unambiguously good organizations.

Graham Linehan, previously best known for cowriting some sitcoms and possibly spending a year angling to get into my pants so awkwardly I didn’t pick up on it is now best known for trying to pull the plug on a children’s charity, in a story that somehow also involves Donkey Kong. Well, and the interview about nazis. And possibly the other interview about “defending me from nazis” until it got into his head that I might not be as young and hot as he imagined. Rather not link to a far right extremist youtube channel though.

There’s also a current effort to replace Stonewall (an organization named after the location where a pair of trans women kicked off a riot which is generally agreed to be the start of the LGBT+ rights movement) as the UK’s primary LGBT+ rights organization with the “LGB Alliance.” The hate group mentioned above, with the skull face and the rifle. Closest I can find to an article on that effort on short notice that isn’t propaganda.

Transphobes paper areas in truly disgusting propaganda.

I don’t want to directly link to grown adults skulking around children’s playgrounds and bathrooms plastering surfaces with mass printed stickers of crudely drawn penises, but would encourage you to read this very long post, being sure to load all the images, to really understand how deeply strange this behavior gets.

Finally, I cannot stress this enough, this really extreme behavior I’m citing, and the specific people involved in the examples I’m giving, these aren’t random cranks on the fringe of things. The people going on televised panel discussions, writing up news stories, and testifying before lawmakers in efforts to pass horrifically discriminatory if not literally life-endangering laws (there is a major ongoing effort to legally end all medical care for trans people, and I don’t just mean care directly relating to being trans) are literally the same people involved in the sexualization of children, nazi collaborations, and roving gangs assaulting people in the street. At a bare minimum I urge people, when booking guests and handing out writing contracts, to do background checks and see if they’re platforming actual terrorists. If we could actually bring legal consequences to bear against the worst of this, that would be great too. As things stand though, the whole world is just consistently citing a bunch of racist, woman-hating, serial liars with no real credentials, and questionable attitudes towards the sexual abuse of children, as “trusted experts” and refusing to seat actual trans people or people who have legitimately committed lifetimes to academic and practical work with trans people any seats at the table.

[doofbox-hero]

Long Snippet from A Possibly Abandoned WIP

My first fic I was planning on writing and posting was a cooking competition similar to the The Great British Bake Off with inspiration from a few other shows as well. It was full of OCs and I had big plans but it has since fallen far into the back seat. I like sharing snippets a lot so here is a long snippet though the last paragraph is more notes for me lol. |----| CW Food (Of course) In the lobby of the Black Spire Hotel a very tired looking Remus sits with a cellphone in hand staring at the screen with eyebrows knitted close together in both concentration and slight frustration. The frustration comes from getting far too many messages from friends, family, and people he barely considers acquaintances linking the same promo video he has been avoiding for the past few days since the official Ultimate Kitchen Witch website made it public.

While he is happy the promotion for the show has been an obvious success he absolutely hates seeing any media with his face in it at any point in time. The attention is anxiety inducing in a way that feels almost constricting and leaves him confused on how he of all people ended up here.

But the longer he sits staring at the link the more curious he is what clips they used and which of the other contestants have been featured in the promo. Sirius of course and probably Ignotus if they’re using Sirius. He taps his foot nervously as he presses the link and waits for the video to load.

The video opens with the famous Ultimate Kitchen Witch logo transitioning into existence with some white sparkles against a black background as soft violins begin to play a tune that could only be described as jaunty. This fades from top to bottom to reveal “Mad-Eye” Moody and Nymphadora Tonks standing by a tree in a beautiful field looking wistfully out towards a tent set up in the middle of the space.

“It’s almost time you know.” Moody says with a soft smile as he gives the woman next to him a quick glance.

“Time for what?” Tonks asks with a slight crook in her neck, eyes still trained on the tent.

As he turns towards Tonk his face drops losing any amusement it once held as he raises a hand to punctuate his words as he speaks. “Tonk, did you really just ask that?” She turns towards him looking confused and shrugs her shoulders.

“Yeah I guess, I did.”

“It’s less than two weeks before the Ultimate Kitchen Witch begins, a show that you and I are hosting, and you’re really just asking, ‘time for what?’”

“Hold on. Hold on. What’s happening in less than two weeks? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Moody’s eye seems to almost pop out of his head as he looks at Tonk in utter shock and then shifts to angrily glaring at her in an almost comedic way. “Tonks, you agreed to co-host the show with me. Do you even know what the Ultimate Kitchen Witch is?”

“No I don’t think I do.” Tonk says as she rubs a hand against her forehead feigning an almost obvious fake embarrassment. The man looking down at her rolls his eyes and lets out a sigh before patting her back and gently turning her towards the tent again.

“Come on. Let me run you through the basics.” With a fade from left to right the two are now walking inside of the large tent down the middle of two rows of small, wooden workstations equipped with some basic cooking utensils in polka dotted holders and a cooktop on one end. Moody and Tonks turn to step behind one of the workstations and stop once they’re both standing in a spot where they can both comfortably rest their elbows on the countertop and rest their heads in their hands looking at the camera now zooming in on their faces.

“So what is the Ultimate Kitchen Witch, Moody? Is it magical?” She asks looking his way without turning her head.

“I would say very magical, but not in the wands and shape shifting ways you’re probably thinking.” As he continues on clips from past seasons show in a montage of many memorable moments. “The Ultimate Kitchen Witch is a competitive cooking show where we put 12 up and coming chefs to the test to show us the magic they can do in the kitchen. Each week they are given a different theme and a catch they must keep in mind as they prepare for the three challenges.”

All of a sudden it cuts to Tonk and Moody by a river side and she is reeling in a big, fake carp with a neon pink fishing rod. Tonks looks up at him with an inquisitive look on her face as she asks. “What’s the catch?” He rolls his eyes at her and lightly knocks the rod out of her hand with a displeased look on his face but she just shrugs.

Remus quietly laughs and shakes his head a little at the antics which have always been pretty slapstick on the show but he had a feeling it was only going to get worse with Tonks involved.

The video cuts back to the tent where Moody is leaning against the front of a workstation now mixing what seems to be cookie dough in a bowl while Tonks watches with wide eyes following the spoon. “The catch is mostly what it sounds like. Our chefs must make dishes that fit the theme as best as possible while keeping whatever factor has been chosen in mind as the catch. My favorite example from the past was the week the theme was cookies but chefs had to make everything gluten free. Themes can vary from an ingredient, to an aesthetic, or honestly some of the most random bull I’ve ever heard.”

“So what are these challenges you spoke of earlier?” As she asks she reaches her hand slowly towards the bowl which Moody catches and taps her hand with the spoon causing her to stop. He shakes his head as he goes back to mixing the dough and before he goes on he notices Tonks lick the back of her hand then looks back to the camera with an eye roll.

“There are three challenges. The first challenge is called ‘The Personal Charm Dish’ and it gives the chefs a chance to work on recipes that really show the judges who they are as a person and chef. Winner of this challenge is usually based on who best executed the concept within the theme while still making a spellbound dish. The second challenge is the Zippy Skill Exercise which is where the competitors are given a surprise recipe missing some key details they have to use their experience and knowledge to successfully complete in a very short amount of time.

Of course the winner of this round is mostly based on whoever can actually make the damn recipe correctly but on a rare occasion someone wows the judges with something less accurate yet spectacular. Now the third and final challenge…”

When he looks over at Tonk she’s now eating chocolate chips out of a bag while nodding along in a way that makes it seem she’s only half listening. He grabs the bag out of her hands and dumps half of the chocolate chips in his bowl before putting the bag down on the counter on the opposite side of where she is standing. As he continues to stir he side-eyes her with his non-eye-patched eye and purses his lips before asking. “Were you even listening to a word I just said?”

Tonks rolls her eyes and reaches behind him to grab the bag of chocolate chips. “Yes. Yes I was. Personal Charm Dish, Zippy Skill Challenge, and the third and final challenge is?”

With a face devoid of amusement he turns his eyes back to the camera and continues. “The Truly Magical Challenge. This is where chefs have to show the judges something that ‘makes them believe in magic.’” While he says the end of the sentence a sparkle effect floats in from the left side of the screen to the right passing over his head. “The winner is based on who does the best job of amazing all of the judges with something special. Over the course of 10 weeks the judges take into consideration things like amount of wins, consistency in performance, a real wow factor, and growth over the competition in order to pick an Ultimate Kitchen Witch.”

Now the video cuts to the two looking into an open oven as Moody slides a tray of cookie dough balls in. “But Moody who are the judges?” She turns her head to look at him as she asks and he gives her a glance before looking back at the camera with a cheeky smile.

Another montage of clips play including a very no nonsense Rowena Ravenclaw cutting up an onion while she tells someone off camera why they need to immediately leave her kitchen, Helga Hufflepuff precariously carrying a tray full of dozens of different cookies looking wide eyed and scared of the possible tumble, Godric Gryffindor laughing and handling a large blow torch in way that seems very unsafe, Salazar Slytherin just looking into the camera with a pointed unpleasant look before he grabs a plate from the table in front of him and throws it across the room against a wall, and then varying black silhouettes against a pastel blue background as the words ‘Surprise Guest Judges Announced Every Monday’ roll in front of the figures.

Once the video cuts back to Moody and Tonks she is softly bouncing with a cookie in hand while he just admires the tray holding the rest. “This is so great, I’m gonna get so fat on amazing food and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me.” The two laugh a little before a look of realization appears on her and holds up a finger to single she has something to add. “What do the chefs get if they win?”

(Moody explains[I still need to figure that out] and then prompts a montage of the contestants this season. Each one has a few clips from various sources shown before they play a short clip of them against a pastel blue background with words with their name and occupation displayed beside them. Remus is annoyed with the clips they used for him, shocked by the clips of Sirius they used, and clicks off after a few more including Sable, Edmund, Ignotus, and Hudson).

[minas-writing]

Blinking and Screaming

World: misc original superhero world

Length: 2,500 words

Summary: Blink is the villain and Scream is the hero. Unfortunately, the city has it backwards. A major villain decided to visit, and the two were forced to team up, but Scream got hurt in the process. Now Blink is struggling with Emotions. (It gets better as it goes, I promise!)

TW: hospitals, pain

"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Blink murmured. The bleeps and blips of monitors were fading into the background as she focused on the person in front of her.

He was just a touch older than she was. Without the mask that barely hid anything, without the brightly-colored jumpsuit and flowing cape, the notorious Scream was a skinny kid with curly brown hair. It was his innocuous appearance that let Blink carry him to the hospital without problems. She had claimed he was a casualty of the fight, which was just a tiny bit misleading. Well, it wasn't exactly Blink's fault that people would assume he was an innocent bystander.

Blink shut her eyes tightly, refusing to let the tears fall. How she could be mistaken for the city's hero escaped her understanding, much less how Scream had been vilified as its villain. She thought she was the perfect picture of evil - bat wings, powers of darkness, lilac-tinted skin - while Scream was practically the good guy superhero. Then she'd botched a bank robbery, marching in on her hired hitmen and telling them to let their hostages go. Every time Blink remembered that incident, she cringed a little inside. Those guys had known what they were doing. She could have gotten over her reluctance to keep hostages and risk people's safety. It wasn't Scream's fault that he judged the situation accurately. It wasn't fair that his power was particularly destructive, if effective.

That same power had been invaluable to their combined efforts against The Wranglian, who had been legitimately attacking their city. Blink didn't really want to feed the populace's adoring opinions of her, but more than that, she didn't want them to get hurt. Her and Scream's goals had aligned there, so they worked together. "Just this once," they said, but Blink had actually been surprised to see how well they worked together.

The room's door opened with a loud clunk, admitting a young woman in scrubs who checked on Scream's monitors. She seemed startled to see Blink there, but did an admirable job of ignoring her, just like she would any other visitor. Or so Blink assumed. She didn't exactly want to look up and watch the nurse. Having eyes on you constantly was unnerving, as Blink well knew. She couldn't go anywhere without being stared at.

"Do you know when he'll wake up?" Blink asked suddenly. At least her voice didn't sound too hoarse.

To the nurse's credit, she did try to meet Blink's eyes. "His injuries aren't too major, so we're taking him off the sedatives. He'll be awake in half an hour, though groggy and incoherent, but that should fade given another half hour. We'll likely keep him at least overnight."

"Thanks."

"My pleasure, Miss Blink." The nurse left. Her news took a load off Blink's conscience. She slumped forward to put her elbows on her knees and ran her fingers through her unraveling ponytail. The wayward strands reminded her that she hadn't had a chance to clean up since the fight. Would Scream feel guilty that she had gotten roughed up, too? Probably. Even if Blink cleaned up, he would feel bad that he had been out for so long. Nothing she did would tell him that it was fine that he had been injured.

So Blink stood and made her way to the tiny bathroom inside the room. She was a mess, she thought when she saw the mirror. There wasn't much she could do right now, but she did manage to clean up her ponytail and wash the dirt from her face. Blink peeled her long gloves off and hung them on the towel rod so they could dry, then washed her hands. A surprising amount of dirt came from her arms.

She knew she was stalling, but Blink went back to her chair and took her boots off anyway. No harm in stalling. Finally, when Blink had stared at the floor for at least ten minutes, she couldn't put it off any longer. She unzipped a hidden pocket and took out a tiny bundle of folded metal pieces. When it lay flat, the screen had a single thin border and was as large as many television sets, but it didn't have to be that big. Blink unfolded the screen to a comfortable size, then powered it up. The link to the Blink Away website was saved right on her homepage. Why had she done that, she wondered, annoyed.

When the website had begun gaining traction, Blink had reserved a username on the forum section, though she very rarely used it. Somehow, word had gotten out that @officialblink was actually the real Blink, and so people had begun tagging the name in things. It had really discouraged her at first, realizing that most people considered her some sort of anti-hero, one who would occasionally run rampant but do the right thing in the end. But eventually, Blink grew to tolerate the website, though she refused to contribute. She had a feeling that anything she said would be twisted by the adoring public.

Currently, people were frantically discussing the fight Blink had just gotten Scream out of. It looked like they thought that Scream had recruited The Wranglian. Amateur videos, shot directly with screens, confirmed that The Wranglian went down with a wall of darkness while he was distracted by Scream. As The Wranglian fell, however, he lashed out with one of his extra, noodley limbs and caught Scream in the back. Both of them dive-bombed toward the earth, Blink in hot pursuit. That's when the videos ended, content that the fight was over and their "hero" had won.

The villain had been defeated, but the people of the city still didn't know the actual dynamics of the two powerful people they were used to. They just rolled on their assumptions. Blink sneered at one particularly obnoxious comment: "blink rrulez guys lol"

A new notification popped up on the screen - a news station was currently showing something about the fight. Blink hesitated to connect. She made sure the sound was off and turned on the subtitles so she didn't bother Scream.

A pretty reporter stood outside the demolished stadium where it had all gone down. Blink watched with a growing scowl as the reporter rattled off damages. Luckily, from what Blink could tell, the only people hurt were The Wranglian and Scream, but they had cost the stadium, and city, millions. And she couldn't do anything to help.

That thought made Blink pause. Did she want to help? A deep, cold horror began to swell somewhere in her chest. Yes, she did kind of want to help. Blink cursed her luck. She couldn’t be a very effective bad guy if she cared too much about property damage! She could justify caring about hurting people, but property damage? Blink rolled her eyes and shut the news off.

She didn’t care about property damage. It created construction jobs, which stimulated the economy and definitely helped out a few people. And the fight had likely scared off any other real villains who had been eyeing the city. So. This was all a good thing, especially because the only injury was skinny little Scream.

Blink abruptly shut off her screen and folded it back up. Sure, it was a good thing that there had really only been the one big injury, but Blink really wished that nobody had been hurt at all. She and Scream had tried so hard to keep that from happening. Unfortunately... The memory of that moment ran through Blink’s head again. She’d seen The Wranglian’s tentacle whip out as if in slow motion, and saw the trajectory. Her wings weren’t well suited to abrupt maneuvers, though, and it had taken a split second too long to change direction. Blink had been grazed by the tentacles before, but neither of them had actually been hit by one. She could only imagine how that would feel.

In the hospital bed, Scream groaned. Blink froze, wondering if perhaps she should hide, but it was already too late for that. He’d seen her. He inhaled deeply through his nose, as if he was going to try to use his power.

After a split-second to decide, Blink leaned over and slapped her hand over Scream’s mouth.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said firmly and quietly. “As far as the hospital knows, you’re just a civilian, ‘kay? No point in changing that - you know they hate Scream for some stupid reason.”

Scream narrowed his dazed eyes. He was still under the influence of drugs, though hopefully he was coherent enough to understand her. After a protracted moment, he nodded, and Blink retracted her hand.

“What happened?” he asked reluctantly, his voice breathless.

“The Wranglian hit you with a tentacle,” Blink replied softly, scowling when Scream winced and put a hand to his torso. “According to the doctors, you don’t have any major injuries, not really. Some torn-up skin on your back, mostly. They want to keep you here until tomorrow, just to be sure. We don’t know what kind of damage The Wranglian could do.”

Slowly, Scream nodded. “I can’t believe we did that. What do people think about it?”

“Ugh.” Blink sighed and put her head down in exasperation. “Most people seem to think that Scream and The Wranglian were working together. They saw Scream go down a moment before The Wranglian did, so they’re not expecting to see him anymore.”

Scream’s face showed complete and utter resignation. “I’m never getting through to them, am I?”

“I’ve been trying, believe me,” Blink replied wryly. She almost smiled.

Scream grinned at that, then coughed, which turned into more than one and lasted far too long for Blink’s taste. When it had subsided, Scream laid there for a moment, then stuck out a hand.

“It seems an introduction is in order, oh mighty hero,” he said, a touch of sarcasm coloring his voice. “I’m Gavin.”

With a touch of suspicion, Blink returned the gesture. “Lucille,” she replied, using her real name for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate. “Is there anybody we should contact?”

Scream - well, Gavin - did his best to shrug. He winced at the action. “Not really. I live with a roommate but he rarely notices I’m gone. We have separate lives. We’ve got to, for me to have any chance at saving people.”

“I’ve got all the time in the world for doing that,” Blink said. “Well, doing the opposite of that, I guess.”

“Just one more reason that heroes get the short end of the stick.”

At that, Blink did laugh, though it wasn’t long. “Short end of the stick, huh? Come on, Gavin. You can go shopping without people staring at you. You can have a normal conversation with normal strangers. There’s a reason I pay other people to do things for me!”

Gavin was quiet for a moment, his eyes deep and calculating. “You know, I never thought about it that way. Maybe you’ve got enough short-endedness to be a hero, too.”

“Me? A hero?” Blink scoffed. She gestured to her wings, to her horns, to her lilac-colored skin. “Forget about it. I was created to be a villain. Look at me - wouldn’t a hero look a little more like a unicorn or something? A little less frightening?”

“I think you’re pretty,” Gavin said, then quickly blushed. “I - I mean - um, drugs.”

Blink blushed, too, though she shrugged it off the best she could. “Uh huh. Sure. Drugs. One thing’s for sure - I am not a hero, nor do I have any desire to become one.”

“Really?” Gavin sounded doubtful, though the smirk on his face indicated that he was teasing her. “You teamed up with me, the real hero, to fight The Wranglian, a real, big bad villain. I’d say there’s some hero in you yet.”

“Never!” Blink protested. “Look, The Wranglian was a one-time thing. This is my city, other villains don’t have a right to come in. It’s in the official Villain’s Code of Conduct. The Wranglian broke it, meaning that if there were villains in the cities around us, they’d have come in to put him down, too. It’s my right and responsibility as the villain of the city!”

Gavin coughed again through a laugh. It sounded painful, but he didn’t draw attention to it. Blink stood anyway to get him one of those large hospital bottles of water. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” he managed to get out after a few desperate gulps of water.

Blink didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. She just took the water back when he was done and put it on a table that he could reach if he wanted it again.

Surprisingly, the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It was almost downright companionable, although Gavin still had a far-off look in his eyes that indicated that the drugs weren’t completely gone. Blink just tried not to think about anything at all. Gavin’s earlier words had just a touch too much of a truth to them. He broke the silence a moment later with a guilty voice.

“Sorry to make you deal with this,” he said dully. He wouldn’t meet Blink’s surprised gaze.

“Sc - Gavin - no.” Blink was about to veer into sappy territory about how he didn’t need to worry about it, how she would have done that for anyone, especially her only sort-of friend - but she realized soon enough that it wouldn’t help her cause. She was not a nice hero, dang it!

Blink tried again. “Look, you’re the hero. You lose, but you have to be there to make the fight mean something. And you do stand for good, and that’s not a bad thing - ” She was still losing this fight. Gavin was giving her a weird, knowing look. “Hey! Don’t look at me like that! You did good fighting, that’s all. I was confused.”

“Would you have left me there if you’d had a chance to think about it? Instead of bringing me here?”

It took Blink a moment to compose herself. Her instinct was to say no, definitely not, I couldn’t have left you in the rubble, but of course she couldn’t tell him that. He was trying to coerce her to do good things. So Blink looked away from his eyes, and his face, and his too-pale, skinny body that had been hurt partly because of her, and lowered her voice into something predatory. “Yes. Yes, I would have.”

Now the silence was awkward. It stretched. Blink wanted to apologize and take back her words, but knew she couldn’t say anything, couldn’t glance at him. He’d look at her, upset, and she didn’t want to see betrayal on his face. Even if he probably knew she was lying.

So Blink collected her things and walked to the door, not once looking back at Scream.

“I’m your first contact here. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” She opened the door, and just before it closed, she heard his weak little voice reply.

“Bye, Lucille.”

Blink shut her eyes and walked down the hallway, avoiding the carefully not-staring stares of everybody in the hospital.

[madaraism]

Parallels - Liam x Riley

A/N: This has been on my mind, brewing for the longest time since I watched Harry and Meghan’s wedding.

Summary: The concept and traditions of monarchies are different in each country. Riley reflects on Cordonia’s.

Inspiration: Photograph by Ed Sheeran

Perma tag: @topsyturvy-dream @hellospunkiebrewster @umccall71

“Harry and Meghan, the perfect kiss.”

“Two people fell in love and we all showed up.”

“There is power in love.”

--

She can only imagine just how happy they feel.

The white dress, the embroidered details on her veil, the hand-picked flowers from her prince, the cheers and support for their love echoing from all around the world.

To feel all eyes on her as she walks down the aisle, warm rays of sunshine on her face. The flowers, the stain-glassed windows, the orchestra, the ecstatic page boys and flower girls.

The moment her eyes meets his.

The tears in his eyes and the overwhelmingly cheerful grin when he sees her walking towards him.

How he stands tall and proud, yet somehow still so humble at the sight of her.

How happiness beams from her face.

The loving gazes exchanged when he finally lifts her veil to see her face to face.

She feels a lot of things, and each of these emotions hit her like endless waves.

Happy that another woman found the love of their life – a prince, even, much like herself.

Proud that the said woman was also an American, much like herself.

Pleased that they got to prove everyone wrong.

A sense of righteousness with how she carried herself down the aisle, her love for her prince outshining all the gossips and rumours on her marrying for fame and fortune.

But such intense jealousy in her heart when she reads that the other American got to walk down a foreign church aisle, unlike her.

It feels like she’s floating and sinking at the same time.

Despite Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle being a while ago, Riley couldn’t help herself but allow her mind to bask in such depressing thoughts.

She wonders how the now-Duchess of Sussex dealt with all her drama, how different and just how modernised the British monarchy must be for Meghan to marry Harry.

How thick-skinned she must be to withstand all the gossip, the drama, the ongoing slander of dirt thrown at her name in tabloids, websites and late-night talk shows.

She is jealous in so many ways.

The British Monarchy has had such a strong foot in the world for the longest time. Their crown adapted to the progressive modernisation for the sake of their people; one that gave in to concessions and sacrifices that chips away at their authority.

But they adapted in the most beneficial way.

Their sacrifices allowed their crown to rule in hindsight with such grandeur in the spotlight – one that ultimately benefited their nation in so many ways.

Cordonia however, was different.

Tradition and customs in this small, Mediterranean country was so deeply rooted in everyone. The concept of patriotism and love for culture and tradition was so annoyingly engrained in their people’s daily lives; from festivals dedicated to apples to separated classes of nobility and the concept of social seasons.

She had found herself to be in the middle of political drama and scandals, purely because she fell for a man who was selfless, compassionate, dedicated, loving and every other positive adjective that she could think of.

And a crown prince.

She wonders if Prince Harry was first-born, would his Meghan encounter the same situation that she was in?

Riley thinks back on all the hardships that she has been through to get here; to play by specific rules, to look a certain way, to embrace a country and its traditions by the reins the moment she steps foot in Cordonia just so she could prove herself worthy for their people.

Meghan certainly had to do the same, and she couldn’t help but wonder where she went wrong.

But did it matter?

The cultural differences, the importance of tradition, Leo’s abdication… It was all so interwoven and connected.

An American marrying a European prince.

She would roll her eyes at the irony and coincidence of it all if she wasn’t in such a dire situation.

After all, it didn’t matter that Liam was born second, and Leo’s abdication confirmed that.

Perhaps her love for Liam was doomed right from the start.

It is a beautiful day for a wedding, Riley notes.

The palace is in a frenzy. Palace staff rushing about with different materials or flowers in their arms. Their higher ups giving out orders to different people in different directions.

But Riley is oddly calm. Her outer appearance is, at least.

She is numb. Her insides seem to shrivel up in pain as she tries to maintain the look of peace on her face.

Much like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding, there isn’t a single cloud in the sky. The breeze is gentle, the weather just perfect – not too hot and not too cold.

Depressingly and agonizingly perfect.

If she loved Liam any less, she would’ve wished for rain to pour. For a storm to come crashing down. For anything to happen to ruin a seemingly perfect day.

Jealousy did not sit well with her.

She hates how it dissolves her from the inside. She hates how it feels like there are nails digging into her heart. She hates the stinging in her eyes.

She wanted it all.

The perfect day, the white dress, the embroidered veil and long train, the orchestra, the stained-glass windows, the positive cheers from the Cordonian people.

She wanted acceptance.

She wanted to prove the world wrong; that she was fit to be Queen, that she loved Cordonia and it’s almost stupid traditions.

But most importantly, she wanted to walk down the aisle in a white dress, with Liam beaming at her with tears in his eyes.

She wanted to proclaim her love for Liam in front of the whole world. In front of the cameras. In front of those who didn’t believe her.

She wanted to be the one who felt the excited butterflies in her stomach while she got ready for her wedding. To worry and fuss over miniscule, pointless details like her eyeliner not being perfect, or her hair being too messy, or if Liam would find her dress pretty or not.

She wanted to be the one that Liam breaks tradition for. For him, like Prince Harry, to wear their wedding band on his finger. For him, like Prince Harry, to present her with hand-picked flowers from the royal gardens that was his mother’s favourite to be added to her bouquet. For him, like Prince Harry, to lift up her veil and to tell her how nervous yet excited he is, how lucky he is and how beautiful she looked.

To share loving and admiring glances with in front of the world.

She wanted to be the one that Liam recites his vows to, to be the one that Liam exchanges ‘I will’s to.

To be the one that Liam kisses.

To be announced as Husband and Wife.

To be his Queen while he is King.

She takes in a shaky breath and straightens herself, brushing away her tears before knocking on the door.

Upon granted entry, she steps in with a weak smile on her face.

The room is cold and muted.

“Lady Riley…”, Liam starts. His voice is breathless and he allows his eyes to linger on her as she makes her way over to him, her modest navy dress swaying with her movements.

She is breathtaking in whatever she wears.

But he had wished the next time he saw her would be when she was walking into the chapel and down the aisle to stand by his side.

“Madeleine will probably scold you if you keep looking so sad like that.” A weak laughter.

“She’ll say it’s not a good look for Cordonia, or something.” She attempts to joke while her hands go to fix up the already perfect line of badges, his already perfect hair and to brush the imaginary bits of fluff off of his suit.

Liam’s expression doesn’t change. Instead, he takes hold of her moving hand to press against his own cheek.

He lays a kiss on her wrist, eyes never leaving her face as he takes in every tiny detail, memorising.

“How can I be happy when the only person I could ever want to marry won’t be the one walking down the aisle?” His voice is sombre and she can feel the tears reappear in her eyes.

She swallows. “…Madeleine is the Queen that Cordonia needs, Liam…”

She tries to reason with him using the very words he had uttered before. She tries to think logically, to think with reason and for the benefit for his country; anything to stop him from persuading her to stay as his other.

She can see the anger and sorrow flash through his eyes, and they both know just how hard she has worked to try and gain the approval of the court and public.

Madeleine was perfect in the public’s eyes, much like this blasted day.

“Can you not stay…?” He pleads, his eyes now wet.

She shakes her head. She hopes he understands that she is already pushing her own limit simply by being in Cordonia on this very day.

Instead, she tells him how handsome he looks. The way he styled his hair and how he decided to shave his stubble. How amazing he smelt and how perfect he is in his suit, how the theme and flowers of the wedding she saw in the arms of the hurried palace staff really suited him.

She tells him how lucky Cordonia is to have him as their king, and Madeleine his queen.

He is quiet, taking in her words while he keeps her hand pressed against his cheek.

He relishes her touches, the sound of her voice and the look in her eyes. The way her other hand would fidget and continuously tuck a fallen strand of hair behind her ear. The way she would nibble on her lip in between sentences.

“It’s a beautiful day for a wedding, Liam…” She repeats her thoughts from earlier.

And he embraces her, memorising the way her body felt against his, her smell, the softness of her hair and the fluttering of her lashes against his neck.

She wants to kiss him one last time but she feels the guilt of being labelled the other woman.

He kisses her anyways, damning it all.

She feels the hair on her skin stand up as she remembers the last night they spent with each other. His touch on her skin, his moans and desperate calls of her name. Her nails on his back and lingering kisses.

She pulls away before she becomes the reason the groom is late for his own wedding.

She caresses his cheek once more before giving him a last kiss, her touch lingering.

He is tempted to pull her into his arms to run away but his feet are planted firmly to the ground, rooted with a sense of duty.

Her hand stays on the door handle as she looks at him standing there, in the middle of a grand room all by himself. Looking so regal, so perfect; the man of the hour.

She gives him the best smile she can muster. “Goodbye, my king. I’ll love you always.”

He mirrors her faltering smile. “You’ll always be in my heart, Lady Riley.”

She closes the door behind her, her heart in excruciating agony, her body heavy.

--

Meghan Markle is so lucky.

[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.

[jeffybruce]

FASHION BY THE RULES

MUSINGS ON THE EVER CHANGING WORLD OF FASHION

Thursday, April 9, 2020

meet Erick Monterrosa: photographer extraordinaire

CELEBRATE:

to honor especially by solemn ceremonies or by refraining from ordinary business, b:

to mark (something, such as an anniversary) by festivities or other deviation from routine and 3:

to hold up or play up for public notice

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The the solemn ceremony here is photography and the rasion d’etre for the celebration is the human male form. In my opinion, you couldn’t find many who would disagree that Mr. Monterrosa quite literally celebrates the male form with more finesse, skill and taste than so many that we encounter on social media platforms ….  He leaves them in a trail of dust.

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His is not the work of a “snapshot photographer” … he is quite literally an artist whose tools are his camera, his lighting, his setup and his taste level for exhibiting the exquisite attributes of beautiful men.

click image to enlarge

Today, much to my utter delight, Erick has offered his own insights into his private life and his profession … but if you do the math (there are about 250-275 words on a typewritten page) then here is a 130 page volume that proves what I’ve just stated.

click image to enlarge

Jeffrey Felner: How would you say the internet and social media, especially Instagram, have affected the world of photography and how far to push the envelope?

Erick Monterrosa:

I wouldn't be the photographer I am today without the internet. More than 30 years ago, art was exclusive to the upper classes. Magazine powerhouses like Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair, etc., played a major role in exposing first world countries to the works of top ranked photographers, such as Meisel, Avedon or Demarchelier. However, third world country boys like me didn't have access to these publications. They were either too expensive, or their distribution was simply nonexistent. It was the internet that built a bridge between art and the masses. I no longer needed to pay for a printed magazine in order to gather inspiration; I now do this from home through social media. This is why I treat my Instagram feed as an online gallery. I want my audience to have that sort of experience whenever they click on my account. I feel small creators like me are more empowered than ever thanks to the internet. I wouldn't say I don't love the idea of my work being at an art gallery, however it's no longer a prerequisite to be successful.

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JB: Much has been written about creatives who have a signature look; would you say you have one? Want one? … and how would you best describe yours?

ER:

I definitely think I have a signature style, which has taken me years to develop and yet it is constantly evolving. I'm inspired by eroticism and the human body. My photography goes around three key elements, which I call my holy trinity: art, fashion and sex. The images I create lie somewhere within this spectrum, as I avoid falling into one single genre. I always joke about my work being too pornographic to be fashionable, too fashionable to be artistic and yet too artistic to be pornographic.

click image to enlarge

JF:

If you could invite any 5 people to dinner who would they be and why?

ER:

I don't know if I could invite 5 people, I admire at the same time hahaha. I would rather focus on just one, so I get the best out of the experience. No other name comes to my mind but top model Coco Rocha. As soon as I knew the existence of the fashion industry, I was exposed to her covers, editorials and behind-the-scene videos. I was so impressed, not only by her looks but her ability to pose in very dramatically. Later on, I found out she was a Jehovah’s witness which led her to avoid posing nude in front of the camera. This is groundbreaking, as models are expected to show their bodies if the concept requires it. The way she managed to get so big in the industry without sacrificing her values inspired me to stick to my gut, even when my values are quite the opposite of hers. I'm not religious and I'm all about nudity.

click image to enlarge

JF

:

What would you say has been your most rewarding or fulfilling accomplishment/s to date and why?

ER:

My biggest accomplishment has been my ability to be supported by my art, which is something I was told would never happen. I'm far from rich, but money isn't really my drive. I feel accomplished just by waking up every day knowing I'm doing what makes me the happiest.

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JF:

If you could “rewrite” your career path … how would you change it and why? Or how did you decide that this is your career path and why?

ER:

I rarely regret things in my life, but I wish I had moved to Europe at an early age to have proper photography training. I have a business degree, which I pursued because I had no art related options back in my country Nicaragua. I was never a business person, but a frustrated artist. It took me a while to come to this realization. Where I come from, art is a joke, thus doing what I loved the most was perceived by my family and peers as a phase; something a young immature boy would do just to have fun. In college, I worked as an event photographer and that's when I realized photography gave me purpose. Suddenly, it became part of my identity. Till this date, I'm fighting to get proper education. It's a personal goal of mine, even when many tell me I don't need it. find him also on his website....

www.behance.net/monterrosa31fe

[blogging-bible-blog]

BLOGGING BIBLE PART 1!

Warning: If you’re religious, or easily offended, I’d recommend that you leave now and forget that this ever happened. I REPEAT: this is the Bible from the view of an atheist, and no amount of hate-anons or spiritual messages will convert me to anything other than my self-proclaimed atheistic-Satanism.

Today on Blogging Bible – I beat up the 10 Commandments and call out their rules as bullshit!

Lucy here. Dude, I am fucking ready to read a bible. (Cue the into to song “Vampire Money” by the late, extremely satanic punk band, My Chemical Romance. Shudder, I’m definitely going to hell because of my music selection.)

     Stuff to know before you start reading:

Yeah, I’m a girl. And a lowkey feminist. And yeah, I know I’m gonna get butthurt over the extremely disgusting treatment of women in this “book”.

Yeah, I know people are gonna get butthurt over me getting butthurt over this 2,000-page book made of tissue paper and incredibly bad binding. But I’ve got a brick that weighs five pounds with the word Bible on it and I’m not afraid to use it. (This thing could cause some pretty wicked blunt force trauma, y’all.)

I am an atheist. However, I have no problem adhering to the eleven rules of Satanism as stated at the official Church of Satan website. So, you could call me an Atheistic Satanist. Please don’t yell at me, I know that’s not the most popular label to identify under, but frankly, I don’t care.

I don’t have any problem outright bashing this book. Figuratively and literally. It’s a fucking book, I can throw it into the wall if I want to. (I wouldn’t do that with any other book, tbh. This one is a special case.) Also, I’ve already thought of some sick burns to use, so once again, if you easily get offended, please leave now.

 Yeah. So. Got all that stuff covered. Now… time to get out the Bible.

 First Impression:

God, this thing is heavy.

I picked this thing up at the free pile in the public library, and I can understand why nobody wanted it. There’s this awful plastic cover on the front that’s wrinkly enough to be my grandma’s face. NIrV, The Adventure BIBLE FOR YOUNG READERS.

Yeah, I’m reading the young-readers version because I would not, I repeat not, be able to make it through a normal one. Also, I am young and must be protected from the word “sex”. (JK. But seriously, this book seems to have a problem with the word sex. Couldn’t they just say, “Adam and Eve had some sweet, sweet baby-making bangin’”? It would make much more sense than “They made love. Then she went through an excruciatingly painful birth and had a child.” I think God had a thing against humor.)

Okay… first page. Looks like some sort of diary thing, because there’s lots of lines and bad little kid handwriting. Once again, I am painfully reminded of the fact that I’m reading the watered-down kid’s version.

This NIrV bible was given to…

Name: Caleb Grant Speight

On: 2-22-05

By: Daddy and Mama

Okay, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel bad for this kid, because this whole page has a “Son, this is your entire birthday present” vibe. Also – 2005? God, do you remember what computers looked like back then? Jeez. (I now realize that I just said the Lord’s name in vain twice in one go, so yeah, I’m definitely going to hell.)

Next page. I still feel bad for this kid, who’s probably 20 by now. I wonder if he still lives here. I wonder if he’s still alive. I wonder if he’s still brainwashed by… okay, here we are, the 10 Commandments for Kids! Joy, joy! These are sure to be good.

1.       You may not love anyone or anything more than you love God.

Okay but… what if you’re dyslexic? “I agree, I don’t love anything more than I love… my dog…” To be clear here, I definitely love my dog more than I love God, because she’s beautiful, loving, and always there for me. The dog, I mean. God could be some ugly troll in the sky for all I care, he hasn’t done batshit for me. This rule is bullshit.

 2.       You may not worship, or put more importance on any person or thing, other than God. You must worship only the Lord, not your parents, not a friend, not a movie star or sports hero, not a car or a boat or skateboard. Nothing.

Oh, jeez. I have to worship my parents more than I worship God, ‘kay? My parents work hard every single day to put dinner on the table and put a roof over my head. God has nothing to do with that, it’s all them. My parents are wonderful people who’ve been raising me since the day I was born. Yeah, they make me do this dishes, (gross gross gross!) but God hasn’t even given me two dollars in my life. This rule is bullshit.

 3.       You may not swear. Use God’s holy name only in a loving way, never to express anger or frustration.

Why the ever loving fuck can’t I swear? Why can’t I fucking use God’s name in an angry way? God, I’m using it now. This is a rule that not even the most Christian-y of Christians follow because I’ve seen them say it in a not-nice way, okay? If you want me to use a different word, then tell me which word you want me to fucking use, God. This rule is bullshit.

 4.       One day of your week should be set aside for rest and the worship of God. Work six days of the week only. You need a special day set aside to relax and meet with other Christians.

Relax, my ass. Have you ever been to church? I went once for a funeral and it was fucking stressful. The pews are like fucking cold ice slabs under your ass and the hymns?? God, it’s stressful to try and sing hymns when you don’t know the fucking lyrics or what the hell they’re about. It’s not relaxing at all. This rule is bullshit.

 5.       Be respectful to your parents. Love them, and the Lord will reward you with a long life.

Huh. The first part of this rule makes sense. However, I think the Bible’s absolutely retarded for talking like this. Tell this to my fucking friend who has a child molester as a father. What if one of your parents is a serial killer? Rapist? What if your parents abuse you!? Are you just supposed to unconditionally love everyone who fucking wrongs you? This is BULLSHIT, you don’t get a long life for loving people that hurt you, you get Stockholm Syndrome. This rule is bullshit.

 6.       You may not hate other people, don’t ever think of hurting someone else in any way.

Okay, I’m just gonna say this: Genesis 4:17 – CAIN FUCKING MURDERS HIS BROTHER FOR ABOLUTELY NO FUCKING REASON, AND HE BECOMES PRACTICALLY IMMORTAL WITH A REVENGE SPELL ON HIM, AND HE HAS SEX WITH HIS WIFE AND GETS CHILDREN AND BUILDS A FUCKING CITY. This is saying that it’s OKAY to hurt people, or at least that’s what I’m getting from it. Also, don’t even let me get started on self-defense. This rule is bullshit.

 7.       Keep your thoughts and actions pure. Sex is a gift of God to married couples.

Um, no. I could go and have sex with a random person I’m not married to and it would just be SEX, not a gift from God. God isn’t fucking gifting me with anything, he’s gifting me with monthly period cramps and hell 12 weeks of the year. My thoughts are not pure, that’s a byproduct of having teenage friends – friends that are perverted boys – at school. There’s no way to stop horny teenagers, ‘kay? The only thing that’s gonna come from sheltering your kids is rebellious sex and STDs. This rule is bullshit.

 8.       You may not take and keep anything that doesn’t belong to you.

This rule may be the only one that makes any fucking sense to me at all. However, I know for a fact that many notorious Christian people don’t follow this rule. THEY WANT GAY PEOPLE KILLED FOR THEIR SEXUALITY, OKAY? Gay people’s lives don’t belong to Christians, yet they’re still taking them through hate crimes. Same goes for the other people that they heartlessly murder and destroy. This rule is bullshit.

 9.       You may not tell lies, especially when that lie will hurt someone else.

This is ridiculous. In my humble Atheist opinion, Christians lie to themselves and others on that one special rest day every week. Honestly, most of the things in this book are gonna be big fat lies and exaggerations, and I’m gonna remember this Commandment as I read it. This rule is bullshit.

 10.   You may not be jealous of what others have. You may not be jealous of your friend’s new toy or clothes or the big house your neighbor lives in. Be satisfied with what you have.

Once again, my friends come to mind. They’re a pretty fucked-up set of individuals and they have every fucking right to be jealous of other stuff, because if God really exists, he dealt them a fucking shitty hand in the Card Game of Life. Also, tell this to the thousands of starving, neglected children around the globe. God could just wave his fucking hand and make our earth bigger and add more food, but no, he’s just gonna sit there and let everyone die. This rule is absolute and utter BULLSHIT!

 That’s all for now! Tune in next time for more Blogging Bible, where I’ll start reading Genesis!

[ice-daddy-vitya]

99 ~Cookie anon

“I don’t care what they said, it doesn’t mean shit!”

Or, the day Viktor grew tired of Yuuri’s obsession with the media’s opinion of their relationship. 

“Have you seen this, Vitya?” 

Viktor perked up at hearing his name. He’d been in the middle of scribbling in his notebook, making adjustments to his programs and fixing things he wanted to improve upon by World’s. He’d already managed to snag his first gold medal of the season at the European Nationals, which caused quite a stir amongst both fans and competitors alike after his impromptu decision to return to figure skating at the Grand Prix Final last December. 

He stood up from where he’d been comfortably sitting on the sofa, walking over to where Yuuri was seated at the computer desk. Yuuri was staring with intensity at the screen, fingers clicking away with manic fervor through several different celebrity gossip websites. 

“You know I hate those articles, Yuuri. Why do you even bother reading them? You know they aren’t true.” Vikor let out, tone clearly frustrated, through a sigh. Crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the back of Yuuri’s chair. 

“They claimed I took you away from skating, Viktor. Now they’re saying it’ll be impossible for you to coach me and compete at the same time. They’re saying I only got a silver medal at the GPF because I fucked my way into getting it. They’re spreading all of these lies, Viktor. They’re-” 

“- Exactly. They’re lies, Yuuri. We both know you got that silver medal because you earned it. Don’t worry about what they say. Does it honestly matter what a few idiots who write gossip for a living think, Yuuri?” 

“ … No. I suppose it doesn’t, but-” 

“ They don’t know you. They don’t know me. They don’t know us or what goes on behind closed doors with our relationship.” 

“… They’re saying that there’s no way we can both balance our relationship and our being competitors at the same time, Viktor. They’re saying we wont even last as a couple past Worlds. They’re saying we’ll never get married. They-” 

“I DON’T CARE WHAT THEY SAID. IT DOESN’T MEAN SHIT!” 

There was a silence in the room that grew so uncomfortable, so thick, you could slice it with a knife. Yuuri had never seen Viktor so upset before. His hands were balled tightly into fists, and his lips were pressed into a fine line. 

Yuuri knew that Viktor was right. The more logical, realistic side of his brain knew that these articles were complete and utter garbage. And real, true fans of their skating careers would be supportive through their decisions. But of course, on more than one occasion, Yuuri allowed the anxious part of his mind to take over and actually start to believe what these people said. Hell, the entire reason Viktor had decided to come back to skating was a topic they’d only ended up discussing because Yuuri had believed, somehow, that he had single handedly removed Viktor Nikiforov from the skating world. 

And right now, Viktor must have recognized that same fear in Yuuri’s eyes because in a split second, the man was on the floor, kneeling in front of Yuuri where he was sitting on the computer chair. 

“Viktor?” 

He could see a shift from the anger that was originally in his face, to one of understanding. His expression had softened. And those piercing, blue eyes stared into his. A way of saying ‘I know…’ without any words. Viktor just took Yuuri’s hands into his own, and held them, before letting out a heavy sigh and glancing at the computer screen. Yuuri could see that Viktor hated these websites, too. 

“Viktor… I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t believe these stupid articles. I just… I see them and I get so angry, you know? To think that there are people out there in the world who don’t understand that what we have isn’t some dumb publicity stunt. That what we have is real, and we’re in love, and we’re getting married. And none of these articles can stop that. And I read them and I see them pop up and it’s just… I hate it, Viktor. I hate that for some reason the idea of being both professional ice skaters doing our JOB as competitors while also having a functional, healthy and real relationship is a concept that’s so foreign to these people. Why can’t these writers just be happy for us and let us live our lives in peace?”

Viktor didn’t answer. Instead, his expression changed again. And his lips curled into a smirk. And he stared at Yuuri with this amused expression. 

“What?” Yuuri asked, suddenly really confused. 

“Mm.. Nothing. It’s just… a year ago you wouldn’t even look me in the eye, yet here you are now, proclaiming about and fighting for our love so proudly and passionately. I think I’ve fallen even deeper in love with you, Yuuri.” 

Yuuri’s face was immediately burning, and he covered his face with one hand, while the other reached forward and playfully shoved Viktor’s shoulder, pushing the man away from him. 

“Sh-shut up!” Yuuri tried to sound upset, but it only came out through laughter instead. And he couldn’t fight the smile on his face. When he uncovered his embarassed expression with his hand, he saw Viktor, still sitting there with the same, shit-eating grin on his lips. 

“So, we’re getting married after all, hm?” 

“Of course we are.” 

“I thought you had taken my statement about a gold medal first, seriously, Yuuri.” 

“Of course I did. Luckily for you, World’s is only a week away.” 

“Oh, so confident, Yuuri! I find your confidence to be so sexy, you know…” 

“VIKTOR!” 

Yuuri mumbles, under his breath, “You know, I think they were right about us not being able to handle competing and being married…” 

“Yuuri! So mean!” 

[airoasis]

MyDigital6 Bitcoin Program-Official MD6 Intro Video 1 (of 2).

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[batterymonster2021]

MyDigital6 Bitcoin Program-Official MD6 Intro Video 1 (of 2).

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/mydigital6-bitcoin-program-official-md6-intro-video-1-of-2/

MyDigital6 Bitcoin Program-Official MD6 Intro Video 1 (of 2).

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[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: May 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of May 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

Remember how Gavin Williamson described Jeremy Corbyn as “a threat to national security” last year?  Well that comment came back to bite him after Williamson thought it was a bright idea to leak details of a National Security Council meeting discussing a deal with Huawei to the press, which saw him sacked as Defence Secretary and facing calls for a police investigation - and no doubt also irritated former members of Cameron’s inner circle Lord Browne, Andrew Cahn and John Suffolk who just so happen to have prominent positions within Huawei’s corporate structure and would have personally made millions from the deal

The irony is that Williamson’s cockup meant that Chris Grayling was out of the firing line when it emerged on the same day of Williamson's sacking that he’d cost the British taxpayer another £56m over the botched post-Britait ferry contracts due to negotiating contracts that were supposed to kick in on a certain date, so instead of news of yet another Grayling cockup deflecting attention away from a far more serious one as usually happens, for once it was the exact opposite with Grayling’s cockup being dwarfed by Williamson’s

How nice of Alabama’s lawmakers to decide that they should have the final say on a woman’s right to abort an unborn child even if that child is a child of incest or rape, bringing Alabama’s abortion laws in line with countries such as Brunei and Syria - and was soon followed by Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Utah, Kentucky and Ohio lawmakers all having the same idea at the same time, which definitely does not make it look like a coordinated plan

Judging by how the BBC covered the local elections it’s fair to say that they should not have ditched Open University programming fifteen years ago considering they kept trying to push a narrative that the Tories and Labour did just as badly as one another in the local elections, even though while Labour losing 84 council seats isn’t a good look it simply does not compare with the Tories losing 1330 of them - and if that wasn’t reality reversing enough, they attempted to say the result reflected how the British public wished they would get on with Britait even though the results also showed UKIP losing 145 of the 176 council seats they previously held, which means their factually challenged coverage of the Spanish election result the previous month was not an isolated incident

After bullying the poor and vulnerable for our entertainment for well over a decade the axe fell on The Jeremy Kyle Show when it emerged that one of the guests had committed suicide a week after appearing on an episode of the programme - which in turn led to tales of the show’s team camping out near drug clinics and halfway houses looking for a steady supply of people to be exploited for the entertainment of the sort of people who think an audience bellowing abuse at somebody at 9:30 in the morning is entertaining - however this led to one hell of a strawman when people, not least a certain failed gameshow contestant who screams into the void on Twitter to try and keep her poison relevant, demanding to know why Love Island hasn’t been cancelled in spite of two of its contestants committing suicide compared to “only” one of Jeremy Kyle’s guests, because apparently whataboutism has reached the level where we play Top Trumps comparing the death toll of two shows instead of consider one suicide is too many

On the subject of the local elections there’s the ten Tory candidates in the Highworth election who were all elected with over 3000 votes - which was slightly problematic considering only 2477 ballots were issued in Highworth, meaning that every single Tory candidate received between 700 and 900 more votes than were actually cast, leading to the electorate taking the result to the High Court

Another month another reason to ask what purpose The Independent Hashtag Change Group Ltd actually serve as they decided what they needed now was another name change, this time to For Change Now...a name which is anything but fitting for a group who have stated they will support Theresa May if she faced a No Confidence vote, were opposed to a general election and certainly not be holding by-elections in the constituencies they are holding hostage.  On top of that, this name change has cost them their verified status on Twitter, completely cocked up all their previous links to their social media...and also seen somebody snatch the Twitter handle of their original name and use it to spread Hard Leave propaganda that their website is now linking to

The humiliations continued to pile up when Chuka Umunna responded to the leading Independent Hashtag Change Hashtag Now Group PLC candidate for Scotland jumping ship and joining the Lib Dems by moaning about the disappointment felt by fellow candidates and activists by somebody jumping ship - as if that’s not exactly what he did with a few of his friends as they embarked on their slow motion trainwreck 

If a party wishes to portray themselves as standing up to the Tories and UKIP, as the Lib Dems have been doing so since the local elections, the one thing they should not do is band together with the Tories and UKIP to force out a Labour council and install the Tories in their place - which is exactly what the Lib Dems did in Bolton a week after the local elections

Once again the BBC showed just how committed they are to providing a balanced view by pulling an episode of Have I Got News For You where Independent Hashtag Change Now Ltd leader Heidi Allen leader was panelist at the last minute and claimed it was because the episode was too close to the European elections and didn’t want to appear biased - yet this episode was to air less than 24 hours after Question Time gave Nigel Farage the red carpet treatment where he was given plenty of time to monologue without interruption or interjection - and after the HIGNFY fiasco the BBC then announced that Farage would also be a guest on the Sunday Politics show with Jason Keen patronisingly talking down to anyone who would dare criticise the BBC for failing to educate, inform or entertain

Remember how Nigel Farage said that, if the Britait he scammed the British public into thinking was a good idea wasn’t delivered, he’d don khaki, pick up a rifle and lead a civil war?  Funny he didn’t look anywhere near as brave when refusing to get off his bus in Wakefield because somebody in Newcastle threw a milkshake at him earlier that same day, while his loudmouthed supporters howled in protest about “political violence” as if Farage having a milkshake chucked at him was on the same level as Jo Cox being murdered by a member of Britain First on the streets of her own constituency

So now we know that Theresa May will shed a tear for losing her feeble grip on power - but for those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire, those on the Empire Windrush whose landing cards she had destroyed, every single victim of her Hostile Environment policies, every last person sleeping on the streets or having to use a foodbank, not a single tear was shed for any of you

It’s a shame that Ben Shapiro didn’t also write a book titled How To Debate Right Wing Blowhards as that may have prevented himself from looking like a puffed-up buffoon when being interviewed by Andrew Neil, followed by looking like a thin-skinned buffoon when flouncing out of the interview, and finally exposing himself as an ill-informed buffoon when howling in outrage that Andrew Neil being the sort of left-wing bigot who edits The Spectator and has a history of giving right-wing guests and easy ride while barely letting anyone vaguely left-wing time to complete a single sentence without constant interjections

Yet this somehow led to Nigel Farage claiming that the BBC ignore him.  While being interviewed by Andrew Marr on the BBC.  Two days after he appeared on the BBC’s Question Time for a 34th time...

And yet the BBC were quick to try and prove Farage correct, because they certainly did ignore him - or, to be more accurate, they completely ignored the story broken by Channel 4 News about Arron Banks privately funding Farage to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, which Farage neglected to declare, even after Banks confirmed it was true

Equally desperate was David Vance responding to the Argentine-managed Tottenham Hotspur reaching the Champions League final thanks to a hat trick from the Brazilian Lucas Moura, where they will meet the German-managed Liverpool who reached the final thanks to two goals apiece from the Belgian Divock Origi and the Dutch Georginio Wijnaldum with some remarkable piffle about the plucky Brits giving Johnny Foreigner a bloody nose - to an utter cascade of mockery by people who pay attention

On a similar bent Jamie Carragher mouthed off about how unfair it is the Champions League final takes place three weeks after the Premier League season wrapped up, somehow failing to comprehend that the Champions League is a competition for all European leagues and that La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, the Eredivisie and Ligue 1 seasons all finished one or even two weeks after the Premier League - although he soon topped that remarkable stupidity by tweeting a “clever” joke phone number for fellow Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville...which led to the person who actually has that phone number being inundated with calls and texts for several hours afterwards

Serial liar Isabel Oakeshott attempted to pull the wool over the eyes of her Twitter followers by claiming that the Electoral Commission had met with The Nigel Farage Ego Project and found that their funding and finances were completely above board - which had the slight issue that, no, they absolutely did not say anything close to that

On the subject of serial liars, mouthpiece of Guido blog Hugh Bennett concocted a story claiming that the Electoral Commission had investigated Led By Donkeys for violating electoral spending in spite of the fact that, as Led By Donkeys are not a political party and certainly are not partaking in any elections, they would not be subject to this code of conduct and only and easily-led moron would be taken in by this...so the usual Guido blog fanatics, in other words

But Moggmentum needed to take the lie further, so accused Led By Donkeys of being funded by George Soros, because why merely lie when you can spin the usual antisemitic conspiracy tropes into your obvious bullshit?

In a desperate bid for relevance Milo Yiannopoulos attempted to position himself as the man who would lead a civil war...to a remarkably apathetic response from his 70,000+ Gab followers

Not only is Joan Ryan responsible for possibly the most cringe-inducing press conference by a sitting MP with her “look at your hands” speech, but she attempted to play it off as everyone critical of her being humourless...while also promoting a downright libelous petition on Change UK (that’s the online petition website Change UK, not the previous name of The Independent Hashtag Change Now Group Ltd) that made her look completely demented

Company secretary of The Independence For Hashtag Change Hashtag Now Group Ltd Gavin Shuker showed remarkably political nous when whining about how bad it was that Labour were fielding a candidate in the Peterbrough by-election even though his lot, the Lib Dems and the Greens all agreed to stand aside and allow a People’s Vote candidate to stand...or, to put it another way, Gavin Shuker complained that it was unfair that Labour weren’t throwing away a seat they held prior to the by-election in order to make it a penalty shootout between the People’s Vote and Tory candidate, even though Labour never agreed to stand aside in the first place  

If watching Andrea Jenkyns having to have WTO trade terms explained to her like she it was her first day of school (to which she responded by just talking over people louder and louder, because that covers up her ignorance!) wasn’t proof of her being an ill-informed moron who doesn’t know when to shut up, her teeth-gnashing while saying she wouldn’t support Victoria Atkins’ leadership bid because Atkins said mean things about her in an e-mail certainly did...because Atkins had not announced any plans to challenge for the leadership when Jenkyns started gnashing her teeth

This month it was Godfrey Bloom who was getting excessively triggered by Greta Thunberg, proving himself to be a big man by tweeting how he wanted to give “a good shaking” to the “ghastly child” - thus making it a double whammy of being ignorant of climate change while fantasising about assaulting children

When ProJared posted a statement on Twitter saying his marriage was coming to an end, a statement supported by Game Grumps’ Holly Conrad, he received sympathy from his fans and those he worked with - right up until his wife interjected that Jared had blocked her on Twitter before making that statement and informed the public that not only had Jared been cheating on her with Holly Conrad (while Conrad was married to Game Grumps’ Ross O’Donovan) but had also been sleeping around with his fans at various conventions, but when he was not at conventions he was using a second phone to sext with them and send dick pics

Due to the Epic Games Store still not having a shopping cart implemented, meaning people have to buy games and DLC individually instead of in bulk like they can on Steam etc, this led to Epic Games Store users finding that they had triggered the store’s anti-fraud protection and were getting blocked because they were buying too many games too quickly - which would not be an issue if the Epic Games Store had bothered implementing a sodding shopping cart

In an attempt to rally the Tory faithful Boris Johnson took to Twitter to proudly state that he had voted in the local elections...only for the tweet to vanish into the ether within minutes, which is no doubt related to somebody explaining to Johnson that there were no local elections in London and, as a London resident, it was literally impossible for him to vote in one that day

Britain’s most triggered man Piers Moron Morgan acted like a normal adult man at the news that Marks & Spencer confectionery was now vegan by putting one in his mouth on Good Morning Britain before spitting it out and going on the usual impotent rant that will no doubt shift significantly more of the product due to the knowledge that it will piss him off 

While you could forgive walking liability Randy Pitchford for his promise that there would be no microtransactions in Borderlands 3 in literally the same sentence as talking about the purchasable character skins as a flub when he meant to say no lootboxes or premium currency, the meltdown he had after Game Informer rightly pointed out that custom skins are microtransactions certainly can’t be excused - and that’s not to mention the other meltdown he had after badmouthing former Gearbox programmer/voice of Claptrap in the first tow Borderlands games David Eddings who the company let go as he wouldn;t be providing the voice of Claptrap for free for Borderlands 3, which rapidly escalated into allegations of assault by Pitchford

Surely it occurred to Danny Baker that tweeting a photo of two posh people with a chimpanzee and saying it's a photo of the royal baby would come back to bite him considering the 150+ years of evidence that racists like to draw direct comparisons with apes, but then again given his defence was that he had no idea that Meghan Markle had given birth didn’t hold any weight whatsoever as that would have been plainly visible in Twitter’s trending tab while he was thinking of a witty caption

Having lost the Championship playoff final, I’m sure Derby County were glad to see Leeds United posting tweets slagging them off - which definitely didn’t serve as yet another reminder why pretty much every set of fans in the country were glad to see Leeds fail to gain promotion

And of course, a month would not go by without Donald Trump and his ego so fragile that one minute he’s happy to pardon a convicted fraudster because they wrote a book which gushed about him endlessly and the next leaving the US Navy with a request to try and hide an 8900-ton destroyer because he might get triggered by it being named after John McCain - although I’m sure this isn’t in any way related to his pathological fear of Congress that’s seen him try to force $8bn of arms sales to Saudi Arabia through a tiny loophole so he can avoid Congress having to approve it...

[realrhythmskrp]

DISPATCH, (05/03/17): Kaleidoscope Records has officially released information about soloist, Han Sebin, on the official website! Sebin is a ‘91 liner and has been beloved by fans since her soloist debut in 2015. Find out more about Sebin below!

I, Han Sebin, have read and understand the terms and conditions as my position of soloist and agree to honor the standards that are to be expected of me as an employee of Kaleidoscope Records.

OOC INFORMATION

Preferred name: Yachi.

Pronouns: She/her.

Timezone: GMT.

Other muses: None.

IC INFORMATION

Faceclaim: Song Ji Eun ( Secret ).

Name: Han Sebin.

Stage name (if applicable): N/A.

Idol concept: Under BKB, Sebin was pushed to embrace a cute concept alongside her fellow silverBEAT members, which she had no issue with initially. She didn’t object to maintaining a bright, cheery demeanour until the idol life wore her down and she found it increasingly difficult to act accordingly. However, it was at Kaleidoscope that Sebin could finally have a say in what she wanted to do, and is now commonly known for her mature yet youthful image; a stark contrast to her debut.

Birth date and age: May 10, 1991 (25).

Company name: Kaleidoscope Records.

Group Name (if applicable): N/A.

Group Position (if applicable): Soloist.

Strengths:

VOCAL RANGE / natural talent, in addition to the endless lessons during her youth, sebin is well known for her vocal technique, especially when it comes to reaching high notes. in fact, it’s quite rare for her to falter due to the amount of control she exerts upon hitting the high notes. in pop music, sebin’s power is most noticeable, meanwhile in ballads, her ability to convey emotion receives praise from both critics and the public. she does admittedly enjoy singing songs that she’s comfortable with, but has demonstrated a willingness to challenge herself across various musical genres and continuing to improve on her skills.

PROFESSIONAL / having been part of the entertainment industry for a long period of time, sebin is very much aware as to what’s expected of her. politeness is key; words and gestures are chosen carefully, while any concerns are masked beneath bright smiles and high pitched laughter. she’s quick to greet seniors, never failing to use the appropriate honorific during brief conversations, and staff are individually thanked at the end of a long shoot. image is everything; a single slip up is capable of ruining a career in an instant, and sebin knows better than to reveal her true thoughts to the world, at least in the public eye.

VARIETY / any opportunity to poke fun at herself is taken up almost immediately, mostly to temporarily ruin her image. sebin quickly picks up on the cues to laugh at a joke before responding with a clever quip of her own. upon debut, she did struggle in joining in on the fun and would rely on her group members to help cover for her, particularly on shows where she wasn’t familiar with the concept. but, she’s since mastered the art of saying enough to contribute to a lively atmosphere, yet not enough to be caught up in a far fetched rumour or scandal.

Weaknesses:

DANCE / by no means is sebin a horrible dancer; she can follow choreography relatively well without making a mistake, but in comparison to her former group mates, she wasn’t a stand out. her movements might’ve been fluid, yet it lacked the sharpness and power to truly “own the stage”, so to speak. as a soloist, sebin is dedicating plenty of time towards perfecting her abilities now that she no longer shares the stage with other proficient dancers— and it hasn’t been easy when she has no one to hide behind.

PERFECTIONIST / there’s no such thing as a half-assed attempt at mastering a particular task — either go hard or go home. sebin doesn’t hesitate in pushing herself to the brink time and time again in order to achieve a flawless result. whether it regards practicing a dance routine or tweaking a song prior to release, it’s no surprise to find her holed up in the studio until dawn, refusing to leave until she’s certain everything is of a high standard. reassurances by others that it doesn’t require further adjustments usually falls on deaf ears.  

POOR HEALTH / after years of unhealthy eating habits and inadequate rest, it’s to be expected that sebin’s health has suffered as a consequence. gastrointestinal issues often interfere with her schedules, and strong medication is sought to overcome the pain in the lead up to performances. though she tries to hide her discomfort in the public, there has been times when she’s been photographed looking a little worse for wear, sometimes avoiding interactions in an attempt to return home and rest, which gives anti fans further reason to bombard her with hate.

Positive traits: Humble, determined, sociable.

Negative traits: Lonely, insecure, secretive.

PERSONAL HISTORY

i. )

the household is calm and void of drama, where she’s constantly showered with love and affection, apart from the times she’s chastised for taking her older sister’s dress without asking for permission. both parents instil the importance of hard work from an early age; laziness is frowned upon, meanwhile self improvement and contributing to society is praised. in comparison to her sister who’s fixated on a career in science, she decides the arts, specifically music, is the area which she intends to explore, and informs anyone and everyone of her goals for the future: a singer. her mother is admittedly a little worried about her career choice, and although she offers to cover the cost of singing classes as a belated birthday present, she believes this is a phase that’ll pass soon enough.

ii. )

singing lessons are conducted every sunday afternoon in a building opposite her father’s dental clinic, and every sunday afternoon she appears right on the dot, ready to hone her skills. which isn’t easy, even with natural talent. the lower notes are problem free, yet striving for those higher notes rattles her to the core, prompting the teacher to suggest she stay within her range if she wishes, sticking to something she’s more comfortable with. perhaps it’s the assumption she can’t do more, combined with the dogged determination to improve that pushes her to practice over and over again, until going up several octaves is nothing. she isn’t paying fees to be deemed a mediocre student, she wants to be the best of the best.

iii. )

the audition for bkb eventually overtakes planning for her upcoming thirteenth birthday. she switches between songs, unable to fully make up her mind when she stresses over the possibility of humiliating herself and ruining her chances. the indecisiveness ceases to disappear on the train ride to the venue, before being overcome by nerves when she’s confronted by the long queue of potential stars, kids like her eager for a taste of stardom. she spends a good portion of her time bouncing around to maintain her cool, then overhears the velvety voice of a stranger and immediately begins to lose said cool. what her parents expect is for her to arrive home to share bad news, what they don’t expect is for her to arrive home with bkb’s coveted card in hand.

iv. )

reality strips her of her innocence. training is harsh, and if she hasn’t cried in the female bathrooms following a long, exhausting dance practice, then she clearly hasn’t pushed herself hard enough. compliments are difficult to come by when everything she seems to do isn’t up to par. she’s either too slow or too fast, too awkward or too meek in her movements. even her singing voice, the one thing that has led her here in the first place goes unnoticed by staff who prefer to criticise her appearance than utter a few kind words. except it’s the shared suffering alongside the other trainees, her future group mates, which stops her from deciding to catch the next train home and encourages her to stay.

v. )

in her opinion, debut couldn’t have come at a better time. standing on stage in front of a screaming audience distracts her from the hardships she’s experienced to get this far; the tiring practices, strict dieting, homesickness. the group rises up the ranks in a short amount of time, and it would be a lie to claim she doesn’t become addicted to life under the spotlight, completely oblivious to the issues set to plague the rest of the girls, herself included. the packed schedules do slowly get to her, along with the lack of consideration towards sleeping properly and visiting family members. she can barely recall when she’d last seen her parents face to face, but she knows better than to complain when the company has already done so much for her.

vi. )

silverBEAT’s popularity soars— and unfortunately, so does her intentions to leave. of course, such a thought hasn’t stemmed from any discord with her members, all of whom she’s grown attached to over the years together. fears instead linger on how long the group is meant to carry on when they’re falling apart, bit by bit. she desperately tries to hold on; smearing layer upon layer of concealer beneath her eyes to hide the lack of sleep, forcing another smile during another late recording for a variety show she’s forgotten the name of, gritting her teeth when she’s berated for her supposedly “lacklustre” performance. but she too has her limits, and after her mother tearily begs her to eat more during a phone call home, enough is enough.

vii. )

the contract termination becomes one of the trending news stories for the next few weeks. is she surprised by the various articles more focused on addressing rumours than fact? no, she isn’t. nor is she caught off guard by the barrage of hate comments left behind on her social media posts, labelling her a “traitor” and a string of other names unacceptable for everyday conversation. though it’s not to say she isn’t hurt. these same people who were cheering for her, supporting her only years earlier, are the same people cursing her existence. alone and despised, she turns her attention to what her new company has to offer, as if to convince herself that what she’s doing is for the best— even if it doesn’t feel like it.

viii. )

step by step, day by day, she adjusts to being a soloist. a new EP on the agenda allows her to channel her energy into establishing a brand new beginning, rather than wallowing in self pity over a harsh anonymous comment. for once, she can safely say she’s finally happy with the opportunity to look over the material she intends to release; something she thinks would never have happened at bkb, not unless she wanted a stern talking to behind closed doors. despite taking it in her stride, there are occasions when she finds herself missing her members, especially when she stands on stage for promotions. she’s singing a song she loves, but without the people she loves. it’s all bittersweet.

ix. )

the concerns suggesting impending failure has disappeared, or at least is drowned out by the determination to capitalise further on her success. pessimism is replaced by optimism, the fresh faced former silverBEAT member is making an appearance once more—to the delight of her parents and fans. the passion for performing has returned, and she vows to strive forward, if not to pen her many life experiences through music, then to assure the public that she has no intentions of going anywhere anytime soon. nevertheless, she realises her situation isn’t shared by those she’s left back in bkb, and is very active in following up on both their individual and group activities, fully supporting their endeavours from a far.

x. )

han sebin is back— and about time too.

[pebblesandjamjam]

Critical Jam #9: Psalm for the Newly Anointed

Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but: nobody’s in charge.

For newer media especially--games and comics and whatever comes next--there is no established authority, no canon of critical texts that guides the consumer, the critic, the creator. There’s nothing enshrining us, nothing empowering us. No true criticism; a legitimation crisis.

This is freeing in some aspects, but frustrating in others. In her January Crown on the Ground column, critic Emma Houxbois touches upon the transience in comics criticism in particular, though her points are applicable to the present states of criticism elsewhere:

“One of the truest and most fundamental realities of comics criticism is that it’s a transient field with a very short life cycle. People come into it with little to no formal training because there’s little to none available and they have a crack at it until they move onto something more fruitful or diminishing returns catch up with them. As a result there’s no established and easily accessible canon, there’s little in the way of bodies of work to build from and refine the field, especially since the waves of consolidation and site shutdowns have wiped out massive amounts of it.”

In other words--with nothing shoring us up, we are vulnerable, scattered, and easily erased. Though some handful of us are protected by the pillars of major publications, the vast majority exist on social media, in the comments sections, and websites that fall just as soon as they rise. With a few exceptions, none are household names and none (individually) wield the power to make or break their subjects. This instability, the absence of permanence reflected both in where criticism can be found as well as its shifting flagbearers, has a great deal to do with why people like to say that modern criticism is dead, bad, or somewhere in between.  

You can pin it to the rise of the digital age, certainly. The transition from analog to digital has meant that years of work can vanish with the closing of a site, with the click of a button. And in turn, anyone with access to the Internet can become a critic--present company included. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr--all of them allow for greater access than ever before. Criticism has ceased to become (at least, entirely) the province of the elite and has expanded to a much more grassroots endeavor.

“Because The Internet” is an all right answer, but I think postmodernism--a concept that precedes the Internet by a longshot--is a slightly better fit. It’s a movement, literary, artistic, and otherwise, specifically concerned with the destruction of gods and masters in favor for contingent truths and individual narratives. (I’ve written a light discussion of postmodernism through comics here.) I favor it for many reasons, up to and including its revolutionary potential, but I hold it in tension with its force for destruction. The expansion and impermanence of criticism, while opening the doors to many, also makes it difficult for the lot of us to eat. Because anyone could potentially do the work we do, the labor becomes cheap and many of us go unpaid, regardless of the quality of our material.

Quality is hard to pin down too, under a postmodernist regime. Everything is subjective--no gods and no masters, remember?--so who is to say really, who is a good critic or a bad one. Greater access should lead to a more meritocratic system of rewards, but because there is no uniform set of criteria, the infrastructure inevitably collapses upon itself. The arbitrary rubric assigns value, but can only do so if its arbitrariness is allowed unjust sovereignty. We random users of the Internet are finally permitted the title of critic, but now the title means nothing at all, and so, we frequently work for free. Tricky. Frustrating. A double edged sword. In eroding the canonic power of the elite critic, we erode ourselves. Our crowded presence and eagerness to welcome everyone devalues the field.

So the death of criticism is frequently touted because we are no longer kingmakers or heartbreakers. There was a time--or so they say--that a restaurant, a play, a ballet, a film, would live or die by the word of an individual critic. Back then, criticism was Good--which is as much a designation of quality as it was a designation of power. After all, critics of the modernist tradition and style of these kingmakers still exist and still win Pulitzers for their efforts, but the impact of a single critic’s word, even of the Pulitzer-winning variety, has diminished over time. These days, a critic can write beautiful, carefully considered prose in discussion of their subject and be met with some variety of “Yeah? Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man” in the comments section.

Which, when all is said and done, is irritatingly just.

It is just my opinion and that it exists in such a way that it can be dismissed soundly in favor of someone else’s is an annoyingly just consequence of destroying everyone’s sense of authority.  This monstrosity of collapsed power which leaves many of us working for free is the consequence of inviting everyone to the party, and for newer media, doing so before a canon could establish itself in the background.

Part of the problem is that the old ways are not entirely dead. Modern structures, specifically, power structures still exist and therefore still benefit from and exploit the hierarchy. As strong as grassroots efforts have become, criticism backed by established outlets holds more weight than criticism elsewhere. The would-be meritocratic rise of quality criticism is hampered not just by an inability to judge quality objectively, but also the same old devaluing problems we had during modernist times--that one’s criticism is only as good as where it appears and is only financially compensated when it appears in those forums. In other words--you’re not Good until you’ve been externally validated as Good, usually in the form of someone thinking you’re Good enough to compensate with capital.

It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg game: is the criticism presumed Good because the critic was paid well for it, or was the critic paid well because the criticism was Good? Or is it Good because it is exclusive, because not everyone is chosen to write for particular publications, so surely the choice was based on merit. “She must know what she’s doing if she writes for The Guardian,” and so on.

I’m not sure what comes next, what comes after this. We’re trapped in a righteous hell of our own making, because we don’t have the political strength to see ourselves paid fairly and because acquiring the political strength would turn us into the systemic monsters we seek to topple.

I don’t know what comes next, but, in the end, I think everyone starts to look for God.

For me, part of Seeing with eyes unclouded is continually reckoning with my own irrelevance, but at the same time--it’s tiring to have no one in charge, tiring to make every evaluative decision for oneself, tiring to wade through a sea of information without a single, certain guide for what is Absolutely Good or Absolutely Bad. It’s exhausting to permit such uncertainty. And so, we take shortcuts, we look for some form of God to pass us The Word so we don’t have to burden ourselves. It’s the sensible thing to do if we are tired, if our attempts to strike out on our own have burned us, if the world has been proven to be cold without Him, without some kind of authority on whose criticism is Good.

Maybe what’s next is a return to modernism, a retreat to structural certainty. Maybe the kingmakers will rise again. Maybe criticism will be Good once more.

But probably not. Postmodernism is here to stay and its embracing of fractionation is such that it cannot be defeated. The Internet doesn’t seem to be going anywhere either. So, as I find myself asking so often in this column: what’s to do?

We cannot and should not return to the old ways of denying access to the many, but we can all collectively take this access and make it something great. My solution, generally, has been to behave as though I possess the authority of a kingmaking critic, while still holding firmly to the reality of my complete and utter unimportance. I’ve decided to be my own god.

That most of us remain uncompensated is something that remains, largely, out of our control, but the way we conduct ourselves always is. The endpoint of this hierarchical deconstruction is the formation of us as new, smaller gods rather than erasing godhood entirely. If we, individually, are the newly anointed, then we must act with the same discretion, honor, and reverence as we would have expected from the old ones. We must treat our work and the work of others with the same respect as we would any old classics, while still realizing that it’s just our opinion.

It’s artifice, certainly, but it’s an artifice that improves us--which is rather the function of god to begin with. If there’s nobody in charge, nobody on the throne, nobody to worship--it may very well be that you’re the only one left.

Act accordingly.

Previous: On Conflicts of Interest

Next: We Must Be Better

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[zzdrkzz]

Mass Effect:  Andromeda

This is going to be one big rant, about similar to my X-files one a year ago.  Structure.

The background:  Been a long time fan and player of all things Mass Effect.  Played through all 3 games with all dlc more times than I can count.  This isn’t some heartless, soulless, one sided rant, this is addressing an insult to long time fans of the ME series.

Foreground:  Leading up to this game, I was starting to get hyped about it, the gameplay looked promising, the premise had me intrigued.  I was going to buy it day one, but then school got crazy.  During that time I read reviews about how bad the game was, as always, I’m skeptical of reviews and 9 times out of 10 I never trust them.  I hesitated on buying it when school let out and decided to wait until a trial was released, which it was a month ago.  I played the trial which ends about 3 hours into the game.  I “acquired” the full game soon after since I had some interest in the game, which had me restart the game.  Then the anger started to build up as I loaded the game...

Rant:  The main menu of the game is very true to the previous Mass Effect games, you create your own character/choose trait/choose background/choose name/hit start game.  PLOT: After that, the cracks in this game reveal themselves within the first 30 seconds.  It starts off with some quote that should get you pumped about the lore and then delves into what is going on.  Essentially your on an arc that is meant to go into deep space (about 600 years of cryo sleep) to explore and find habitable planets.  For about as long it took for you to read that previous sentence was about as long as they took to explain all of this to you.  They completely spit out the plot.  

I felt no emotion yet, wasn’t even intrigued, mainly because of how fast they presented the lore to you, but how bland the voice actor was.  VOICE ACTING: Every SINGLE FUCKING CHARACTER has the BLANDEST voice ever.  Not even remotely kidding on this.  It truly is amazing how bad the voice acting is by everybody.  At first I thought the animation was causing it to seem bad, but nope, the voice acting is utter garbage.  The dialogue makes it worse.  Back on topic, so you wake up from cryo sleep, find out your twin brother is stuck in cryo sleep because of plot device.  Your character doesn’t even give a shit that your brother could die (OH PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY SAY HE’LL BE SAFE), basically killing any tension for me to care about him.  So we brush over the fact I have a twin brother and go to the nearest planet.

SQUADMATES: You scout out a planet with your squadmates and your father (he dies, don’t worry it’s so goddamn obvious).  The planet is pretty interesting, they introduce you to an alien species (main villain) that immediately want to kill you.  Whats weird here is that your squadmates talk as if you guys are best friends and just say weird lines in combat.  Let me give you some contrast.  In the first game you are slowly introduced to your squadmates and over the course of the first game you start to form bonds with them.  You learn their quirks, emotions, background and makes you understand their combat dialogue more.  That way by the 2nd game (Mass Effect 2) when you have your squadmates back and they’re cracking jokes you understand why they would do that because you know that character so well already.  This game just assumes that you know everyone right off the bat and are best friends.  It assumes that me as a player fully understands this character based off their 5 second screen appearance and bland voice acting.  (WELL I FUCKING DON’T AND IT’S INSULTING).

DEATH: So you get to the cutscene where your dad dies, it has no emotion and no purpose at all besides making you the leader of everything.  There is no emotional applied here since you’ve only seen your dad on screen for about 15 seconds in total.  He honestly just feels like a squadmate than a father since your characters interact so weirdly with one another.  Not going to talk more about this, it was so pointless.

LEADER:  Your character is meant to be this leader of everything, a strong leader that is meant to sacrifice herself for the greater good.  The issue is, she just kind of nonchalantly wants to be a leader.  Her dialogue is constantly talking about “we’ll see what happens” or “I guess we’ll give it a shot” or even better, “this will be an adventure!”  She doesn’t seem like a strong leader at all, more like a spoiled teen in high school driving a hot pink mazda with “PINK” on the bumper that dad bought for her.  In the original Mass Effect your main character was just a soldier that learned about this great threat to humanity.  He began to take matters into his own hands and didn’t back down from anything or go “THIS WILL BE AN ADVENTURE” like a kid going to the zoo.  

ANIMATIONS:  I know, I KNOW, this topic is done to death.  The animations are terrible.  The reason why I have this section is to talk about this:  The entire Mass Effect games are most known for their facial animations.  Hell, the first 3 games have the best animations an NPC could have in an RPG, you can read their emotions easily.  The animations helped amplify the voice acting and it even made it so that every alien species in the game was unique.  Compare to these krogan voice actors from Mass Effect 2: https://youtu.be/9Q9acaCQAlU To this very odd choice in voice modulation for this Krogan in Andromeda:  https://youtu.be/WKxk1LEyYyc?t=1m29s  You see what I’m getting at?  And why I was completely dumbfounded when I first saw that reveal of the Krogan species in Andromeda?  That brings me to my next topic.

EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING IS HUMAN:  Every species in this game sounds human.  Its oddly crisp, flat, and has no inflection at all.  My breaking point was a result of this.  I was initiating dialogue with a character when I got so sick and tired of hearing every character sound so clean with their dialogue.  It was strange, it was just so bland.  Their was no inflection, every species sounded the same.  I didn’t even quit out, I got so pissed I just turned off my computer because I was not about to sit through a 40 hour game listening to the same monotone voices.

USER INTERFACE:  It’s very clunky, annoying to navigate and not very responsive.  There a lot of micro managing within the menus and the game is nothing but menus.  It’s annoying to navigate and just cumbersome.  

FINAL THOUGHTS:  The best way to put this game is like reading a fan fiction story on some website.  It doesn’t feel like it was ever meant to be a unique game, the story is boring and very predictable.  You can already assume how the story is going to go early on because they use plot twists that have been done to death.  You are never fully immersed into the world at all or why you should even care about saving anyone.  There are not any high stakes that can compel you to stay with this story.  They should of just dropped the Mass Effect title and just called it “Andromeda.”  They should of made the plot more intriguing like what if you found out the initiative was never meant to succeed.  What if it had a more sinister approach like how Fallout Vaults worked?  To the public it was a safe haven, but on the inside, it was just a big science experiment.  I’m glad to see that Casey Hudson has returned to the studio and that this series is put on hold for awhile.  They should scrap the initiative story line all together and just start anew.  

[holytheoristtastemaker]

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 differently abled citizens. 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 differently abled 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 differently abled 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. Before After Learn 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 differently-abled 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.

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