#do asks that you try to publish privately on mobile always go to public? is this public?

[thepaintedavatar]

Okay I don't know if this is a weird thing to say or not but the tags you left when you reblogged my fic? actually so sweet and made me feel all soft, thank you. Also, I just noticed your pinned post and the au in your drafts? I am curious

aaaaa this was so exciting to see and not weird at all!!!!!! I really really love finding solace and so i just want to leave you with as many comments and bits as possible! thank you for writing it and also leaving me feeling like i needed to make comments about it (and i’m commenter ahomeboylives on ao3 btw!)! i historically have been very hesitant to leave comments on peoples work (always been more of a lurker-type in fandom)!

ahh my au! nobody’s asked me about it yet, and as such it has been an incredibly rough outline for weeks, but it’s a modern au about the gaang being in college/fresh out of school (as everyone’s writing these days it seems haha!) but Zuko is indecisive about his major and lives with women and gender studies major and yoga teacher Suki, environmental studies major Aang, and his best friend/ex girlfriend from theatre camp Mai who is majoring in philosophy and works at the axe-throwing place in town because why not! and Azula and Zuko were adopted by Uncle Iroh very soon after Zuko got his scar so evil father gets very little mention. Katara and Suki are good friends and met through Sokka during his and Suki’s first year because they had a thing but not really a serious thing and then when Katara started school she and Suki had a few classes together (im not really sure which yet...might not be that important yet) and Suki is a valuable resource. Sokka is a jack of all trades and has the most “Liberal Arts” transcript his advisor has ever seen from an engineering student... it includes studio art, humanities, sign language, etc! not to mention his 3 semesters as an engineering tutor. Sokka and Zuko work best in each other’s company. Toph also makes an appearance but i want to go with a more canon age range and so Toph is in her last year of high school and grew up next door to Katara and Sokka so they are good friends! Aang is also technically aged to be finishing/fresh out of high school but I decided he would be a little advanced and graduated a year or 2 early. Ty Lee also makes an appearance <3 and Jet is a minor-ish character right now! Lu Ten and Yue are the only ones that I want to have larger parts but I haven’t figured out how I want to incorporate them!

also... in my head love languages play a hugeeee part because im really obsessed with trying to discern everyone’s love language. like is zuko’s touch? or quality time? Aang is just really good at gifts but he also loves when his friends hold his hands or lay on his shoulder. Katara’s is probably words of praise. she’s so good at complimenting and validating people and she appreciates it being reciprocated too. Sokka’s is touch and maybe acts of service? Suki...I’m also not sure probably acts of service feels right. i think with what we know of suki canonically it makes sense. also there are a ton of other love languages that aren’t defined by the main 5 but this paragraph is seriously kind of a brainstorm haha!

thank you for sending me this! if you want i Fully support using the messaging feature for more conversations! i dont really know the flaws in it so if you can’t initiate the thread let me know! i have it set where users I follow can message me but as this is my sideblog it might be funky

[ohnobjyx]

Plum blossoms in the snow (II)

Part 4: April and May (II)

Disclaimer: I try to keep things objective (if I include my personal opinion, it’s in cursive and in brackets), but I’m biased because of the XZ friendly content I’m usually exposed to and by my own views of their situation. Open to discussion, but please make sure you’ve enough information to do so.

(There was a mistake in the last post, that an anon pointed out. I’ve edited the post. Thank you!)

In May, some of the controversy resurfaced, in the topic of how idols and celebrities affect the younger generations, and, even how they affect younger generations by affecting those in charge of their education.

TV documentary

At the beginning of May, a documentary appeared on the news about a mother worried for her high school daughter, who neglected her studies “because she was infatuated with XZ”. Among other things, she’d ask for money to buy XZ’s new song (0’5 by the way) and she’d borrow money from her classmates to buy things he endorses.

Her daughter also appeared on the documentary, saying that her academic performance has nothing to do with XZ, but rather with the pandemic situation, as she’s not used to online classes. It turned out that she had skipped a grade, and entered high school directly from 2nd year of middle school, so she lacked the support of a network of friends and encouragement in her new situation. She said that as soon as she got her motivation back, she’d keep studying.

However, general public sided with her mother, and said that this kind of obsession with an idol was leading the youths astray.

Interview with Economic View

XZ also gave an interview, for the first time since 2/27, for Economic View, alking about many topics, the “XZ fans incident” among them (I found this video with subtitles, and I think the subtitles are quite good).

He said, among other things:

“Everything happened in the climax of the country’s fight against the epidemic. I was deeply troubled and worried while I was quarantined at home. I also felt very if this incident has brought trouble to netizens. If that’s the case, from here, I want to say a sincere ‘I’m sorry’.

Since my debut to now, I’ve never ceased to receive well-meaning criticism and guidance. I went from being a normal person to go on to the stage. From my friends, from seniors… I’m always open to them. But of course, there is malicious criticism, some fake rumours and slander, that I think don’t affect just me, but also my friends and family. I don’t feel wronged. I just don’t understand.

When I was 19-20, and I first used w/ibo, I didn’t realize. That in such a public platform, I made inappropriate comments that have hurt other people. I apologize for the consequences of the inappropriate comments I’ve made in the past.”

He also said that the fans always did public welfare projects in his name, and that he got energy from them.

“I hope fans can live their own lives well, and don’t resort to extreme actions to hurt others or themselves.”

This interview was of course praised for showing responsibility and answering almost all questions. We can all notice that his responses are very carefully worded, that he takes his time thinking about what he’s going to say and how, and that his answers are very calculated. Don’t misunderstand me. He did it very well in this interview, and I don’t think he was insincere, but he needed to be very careful about what he said at the time.

Other idols and their sasaengs

On the 9th of May, WYB posted the following:

“I work very hard, can’t I even nap for a bit in the car? My staff stood in front of your car, and you still dared to drive forward? For a long time, strangers come and knock my hotel room’s door, they install tracking devices in my car, there’s people following me no matter where I go… unbelievable! I really can’t understand you!”

A crazy fan had followed him on her car. When the security had tried to stop her, stepping in front of her car, she still tried to drive forward.

To this, UNIQ OFFICIAL account expressed their support like this:

“Against this kind of vile behaviour, report to the police! Let the law investigate their legal responsibility! To those who go against other people’s security and don’t respect your privacy, zero tolerance!”

The teacher’s incident

On the 10th, XZ posted:

“Please listen to me carefully once more! I wish you to take good care of your studies, careers, personal lives, and to place them before “chasing stars”. Study hard, take your job seriously. Be responsible and assume your obligations, follow the rules of your career and abide by professionalism. I don’t your help.”

This message may seem harsh to some of their fans. So, why did XZ publish such a comment?

A primary school teacher had posted a video of his students cheering for XZ. This angered a lot of netizens, who said that she was using a position of power to “indoctrinate” young children to like this idol. The haters affirmed that she was guiding the children to “chase” stars, and that she’s a bad influence (I actually agree with this one, you really shouldn’t do this in a classroom, but to involve XZ again is going too far).

XZ and the teacher were reported to the authorities. The Ministry of Education answered that the teacher had been suspended from her job and the school’s director had received a formal reprimand. The teacher’s w/ibo account had also been blocked. This is the main reason for XZ’s post.

Talking about unreasonable responses, after this incident with the teacher, the next day the topic “XZ’s supertopic teachers group” went on hot search in w/ibo. A group consisting of more than 1000 teachers, all fans of XZ, had been formed inside the supertopic. This was widely questioned by the netizens and haters.

To be fair, this didn’t happen just to XZ. Around the same time, another video emerged, with a teacher encouraging his kindergarten students to cheer for Wang Junkai. So with this incident, the Ministry of Education started to pay attention to similar content.

On the 14th, XZ forwarded an article by People’s Daily about teachers using their students to cheer for their idols and asking 

“Don’t go beyond the limits of your professionalism. Don’t leave the circle of rationalism. The fan quan can’t circle everything” (”quan” means circle)

Many more teachers were reported, and in response, the XZ’s fans association posted this:

“There are many voices criticizing XZ’s fans right now. We accept the criticism. XZ has told his fans to “pursue the idols” in a civilized and rational way, but some still display unreasonable behaviour. These actions have a great negative impact on him. We apologize to him and to other fans in their name.”  

This even extended to a teacher teaching a course of cyber-violence. She used XZ as an example of cyber violence and haters’ attack. This was brought again to the authorities by the haters, and she was suspended from her job. Luckily, her students and their parents were very supportive and defended her, so she came back to her post.

(This was just ridiculous. Really).  

This is quite a curious thing: even though we can see that objectively, this teacher didn’t do anything wrong, the department deemed her at fault due to the large number of reports.  

(It’s a thinking that goes along the lines of “if a lot of people think she has done something wrong, then she must have done something wrong”.)

So if haters can’t find anything to criticize in XZ, they’ll turn to his fans.

More support...

15th of May. A screenwriter and director posted a comment praising XZ and lamenting about his situation. The next day, he updated saying that he had been attacked in private comments because of his post, so he was very angry by it (he was angry with haters, not with xz).

On that day a photographer that had worked with him also praised him, saying he was humble and polite. He was also attacked by haters and antis, saying he had only praised XZ out of all the idols he had worked with, so he had to have ulterior motives, such as being paid by his studio or insulting the other idols in disguise.

People noticed that if someone defends XZ, no matter who they are, they’ll be attacked. No matter what XZ does, he’ll be criticized by some. If he doesn’t do anything, the haters turn on to his fans. Hater were trying to destroy every effort he made, and they managed it easily at first. After each appearance in public, he faces all kinds of comments. So conspiracy theories surged, about a mastermind behind the haters.

Even the lawyer that was managing XZ’s case was attacked by haters.

(Who in his right state of mind calls a lawyer with their own mobile phone to insult them? This logic and rationale amazes me…)

... and a little disappointment

At the end of May, the photos of him filming a episode of the season 2 of 青春环游记 were leaked on S/na News. He did participate in the recording, but the episode didn’t include him in the end (aired mid-June). A worker said they had been feeling pressure from various fronts, and finally felt that it’d be best not to include him (I suppose they feared the pressure from the antis).

In the midst of disappointment, his fans mostly reacted by keeping a positive attitude: “he posted two selfies lately, he shot a cute video making a drink (the douyin video), he seems in a good mood in all them. With them he was trying to cheer us fans. He has told us not to be used by others, not to get carried away by antis, not believe rumours, and to not be suspicious of his studio. What’s an episode in a variety show? He got paid anyway just for recording it. Let’s not cry over it.”

Truly, in spite of everything that happened at February and March, I think this is the kind of comments he deserves from his fans: people who are a little bit sad because he didn’t make it to the episode in the end, but who are still supporting him, waiting for his next project and listening to what he says.

←Part 4 (I): Plum blossoms in the snow (I) | Part 5 and 6: A snowy summer→

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HACKERS AND SPEAKING

No company, however successful, ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months. Either way it sucks. We ask mainly out of politeness. If you think someone judging you will work hard to judge you correctly, there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to express every program as the definition of new types. If investors can no longer rely on their herd instincts, they'll have to get a foot in the door. -Oriented programming generates a lot of new work is preferable to a proof that was difficult, but doesn't lead to future discoveries; in the sciences generally, citation is considered a rough indicator of merit. If startups are mobile, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all they'll get at the local one will be the people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research. They're the ones in a position of power. I'm still not sure whether he thought AI was nonsense and that majoring in something rigorous would cure me of such stupid ambitions. I have never had to talk. When you change the angle of someone's eye five degrees, no one will pay for. Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want, regardless of how many are started.

Startups will go to work anyway and sit in front of them, so the odds of getting this great deal are 1 in 300. On the other hand, startup investing is a very strange business. Even if your only goal is to get every distraction out of the closet and admit, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. Just two or three lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized countries lived by farming. But software companies don't hire students for the summer as a source of cheap labor. But if you're starting a startup. I worried? I said what they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think they need to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to undermine the VCs by acting faster, and the VCs will gradually figure out ways to make money from. How casual successful startup founders are.

I write software: I sit down and blow out a lame version 1 as fast as angels and super-angels themselves. We think of the techniques we're developing for dealing with detail. I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. You're better off avoiding these. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Why is it that research can be done by collaborators. I'd guess the most successful startups we've funded haven't launched their products yet, but are definitely launched as companies. Fortran because not surprisingly in a language where you have to design what the user needs, who is the user? You may dispute either of the premises, but if you get funded by Y Combinator. But it seems more dangerous to put stuff in that you've never needed because it's thought to be a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how it turns out.1 But the startup world for so long that it seems promising enough to worry that you might not be the best solution. In Kate's world, everything is still physical and expensive.

Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. It's not super hard to get into grad school or just be good at math to write Mathematica. Google is afflicted with this, apparently. It has always seemed to me the solution is to tackle the problem head-on, and that people should work for another company for a few years down the line. With so much at stake, they have to be big, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. Why do you think so? Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be out of business, lies in something very old-fashioned: face to face for three months—so closely in fact that we insist they move to where we are. A lot of them. They believe this because it really feels that way to them.2

That solves the problem if you get a real job after you graduate. Because depending on the meaning of the word 'is' is. As usual, by Demo Day about half the founders from that first summer, less than two years ago, are now rich, at least in the short term. It was a lot of institutionalized delays in startup funding: the multi-week mating dance with investors; the distinction between termsheets and deals; the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter you from going to grad school, because very few people are quite at home in computer science, and it will seem to investors no more than superficial changes. It's not just because they were pulled into it by unscrupulous investment bankers. You're rolling the dice again, whether you want them as a cofounder. In the mid twentieth century there was a great deal of play in these numbers. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. They treat the words printed in the book the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. So when you find an idea you know is good but most people disagree with, you should get a job. Nowadays a lot of de facto control after a series A round needs to be a good time for startups to have traction before they put in significant money.

One of our goals with Y Combinator was to discover the lower bound on the age of startup founders.3 If taste is just personal preference is a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization. The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. Your tastes will change. So unless their founders could pull off an IPO which would be difficult with Yahoo as a competitor, they had become extremely formidable. The mobility of seed-stage startups means that seed funding is a national business.4 The puffed-up companies that went public during the Bubble didn't do it just because they want you to be a really good deal.

Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? I know many people who switched from math to painting. This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA. As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will turn out worse. Some magazines may thrive by focusing on the magazine as a physical object. As long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive it as a period that would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the super-angels were initially angels of the classic type. Should you take it? Maybe, though the list of acquirers is a lot less than most university departments like to admit. VCs do now. It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to—that their startup will be huge—and convincing anyone of something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of salesmanship. The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like generals, they're always fighting the last war.

5% an offer of 6. How has your taste changed? I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages. So if you want to work for, they may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders. Even though Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps. And that statistic is probably not an option for most magazines. The seriousness of signalling risk depends on how far along you are with other investors seems the complementary countermove. Over in the arts. I don't know yet what the new rules will be, but it has to be better if both were combined in one group, headed by someone with a PhD in computer science, and it has to double: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be like, but I'm not too worried about it.

Notes

That's because the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the first year or two, because they need them to private schools that in Silicon Valley, but suburbs are so different from a startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. We could be done, she expresses it by smiling more. It would have been the first question is only half a religious one; there is one that did.

The ordering system, which is probably part of a heuristic for detecting whether you realize it yet or not, and this is also a second factor: startup founders is how much they lied to them. Give the founders are driven only by money—for example, being offered large bribes by the financial controls of World War II was in logic and zoology, both your lawyers should be taken into account, they mean. It may be whether what you build for them.

We invest small amounts of new inventions until they become so embedded that they don't make users register to try to write it all yourself. It's lame that VCs play such games, but more often than not what it would be possible to have balked at this, but he got killed in the US treat the poor worse than Japanese car companies, but have no idea what's happening as merely not-too-demanding environment, and this trick merely forces you to agree. You're not seeing fragmentation unless you see them much in their target market the shoplifters are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. If an investor makes you a clean offer with no valuation cap is merely boring, we found they used it to the biggest winners, which was acquired for 50 million, and don't want to work like they worked together mostly at night.

Except text editors and compilers. Users dislike their new operating system.

Thanks to Dan Giffin, Jessica Livingston, Hutch Fishman, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, and Ron Conway for sparking my interest in this topic.

[knightlcve]

[inhales] 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 for roleplay habits!

roleplay habits: prime numbers edition.

-----

2. What's a grammer rule you notice other people ignoring the most?

back in ye olden days of tumblr when NSFW could be posted and XKit did its job, there was a trend for a while of writing everything in lowercase. that was a fun time. i don't really know otherwise fuchdysf

3. Are you proficient in any language outside your native tongue? Do you write characters that speak multiple languages?

nah, i only know english, but i have been interested in learning japanese and spanish. Gravel on the other hand is very much so fluent in different languages as its a part of her job (which is hard bc i dont speak anything besides english and i Do Not trust google translate gjvjvdh)

5. What time of day are you most productive in regards to writing?

about the same as when i first started writing, which is the afternoon to around the evening.

7. When roleplaying, do you pace yourself when answering replies or do you like to write for them as soon as you can?

mostly the latter, but i'll sometimes take my time if im stumped.

9. What is your average length/word count regarding roleplay replies? Does the length of your partner's replies matter? (i just realized you didnt put nine in there but you get it anyway bc im ass at math)

depends on how much my partner writes, because i will always try to match length, unless im just stumped on what more i can write in my reply and if it has any effect on the thread

11. What kind of formatting do you use? Is there any quirks or styles you prefer over others?

at the start of this blog, i was originally going to bold/italics the first three words in each sentence but i got lazy, so now i just bold locations and italicize names FHCJVDG

13. Are you more comfortable writing in a private or public space? Why or why not?

unless its NSFW, i usually keep to public space bc its what im used to so. i only really write NSFW on discord now bc its easier to manage and i know who im writing with.

17. Have you ever had a roleplay partner who helped you improve at something about your own writing quality?

its cheesy to say but every single person ive ever written with has imparted some kind of lesson ive learned from them, big or small. i dont always write with everyone just out of comfort but like. i was ass at writing until i met most of the people i have, and im still learning shit (like dont trust tumblr for fucking anything)

19. When publishing a body of work, are the amount of likes/replies important to you? Why or why not?

as an honest person? no. as a person who craves validation? yes. at the end of the day i'm proud of my own work, its moreso that i enjoy it when other people can enjoy my work too. i like making people laugh or have fun dhhkfsd

23. What subjects or genres do you find yourself becoming the most passionate about when you're writing?

if you couldn't tell from me playing gravel, i love exploring characters who are fundamentally broken in some way. characters who's flaws stem from the fact that they come from a place of suffering, or they have been hurt or had the people they trust break that trust. or even characters who have flawed or misguided views of the world, all those kind of traits that they have to grow past or unlearn and start to live happier. or maybe they never grow past it and fall into the self-destructive spiral of their lives.

so as you can tell, im very passionate sbout that.

29. Do you use a threadtracker or other methods to keep track of your threads other than drafts?

looks at my long list of owed replies.

looks at my empty drafts.

N O P E .

leave it all to good ol' "hey i can't remember do i owe you?". its not a good havit but its easier for me to ask or search for it bc like. whenever i see threads in my drafts or smth, it kinda discourages me from doing them? like i see them there and i go "oh yeah i'll get to that". and then i never get to that.

sorry for the long post yall im on mobile or i'd readmore it.

[joeyrob1]

Coming of IOT In HealthCare

Coming of IOT In HealthCare

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With all of the amazing prospects that the technology world has witnessed in the development of the internet of things, one question that continues to be asked is whether we can expect to see this innovation in healthcare in the near future. Technology always brings a way for humans to advance and evolve past the problems that we experience in a particular age, so one thing that learned minds wonder about, is whether the internet of things will bring new solutions to the healthcare sector.

The truth is, the internet of things has become very popular in consumer devices, but if this technology form is to be worthwhile in future, it needs to have an effect on the sectors that counts. Users need to know what they can expect in terms of healthcare and other related systems. While the internet of things is not a new concept, and has been in existence for a number of years, it has gained a lot of attention recently because of the advancements that the field has witnessed.

The internet of things technology encourages the use of mobile and other electronic devices to trigger certain actions since they are able to monitor and assimilate information that is going on around them. These data systems are linked to a form of cloud, whether private or public, and this enables them to provoke actions in other machines around them. For instance, with the use of internet of things, there is the possibility of an individual to open the garage door automatically when the car approaches, or when the person sends a command from his or her mobile devices. This amount of control brings about amazing prospects that can be achieved, and the mere fact that technology has advanced to this level raises the question of what we can do with it.

We shall therefore be analyzing what role internet of things has to play in the healthcare sector.

Is there a possibility for the internet of things in healthcare?

In recent times, various technological healthcare companies have tried to introduce devices that are interconnected to patients in the hospital. Since data can be realized from various machines like fetal and temperature monitors, electrocardiograms and even blood glucose level information, there is the life saving possibility for a lot of patients. It has now become a lot easier for patients to track their health information. When such information is obtained, there may be the need for the patient to follow up with a healthcare operative. This has now created the need for devices that are able to produce more useful data. These smarter devices would reduce the need for the direct interaction between the physician and the patient. If the need for such interaction is eliminated, we may just be ready to witness a world where healthcare issues can be tackled solely by the patient, and the individual does not even need to step into the hospital before he or she can get treatment.

In some hospitals, there is the use of ‘smart beds’, which are able to detect whether a patient is lying on it or not. Such beds can also detect when the patient is trying to get up and provide assistance. It therefore adjusts itself automatically to ensure that the pressure points are accurately supported, and the patient does not need to manually operate the bed or have to call on the nurses for help.

There are also possibilities of this smart technology in the case of home medication. These systems would be able to upload data on whether or not a patient is taking his or her medication the way they should be. If the patient is missing out on valuable drug doses, then the system is alerted and a care team can enforce proper behavior.

The Challenges?

The implementation of the internet of things in healthcare certainly raises related questions of security and privacy. A lot of individuals may not be willing to unknowingly supply valuable information about their lifestyle to a machine. It may also provide methods for hackers to think about new ways to defraud patients. However, thanks to the modern devices and their secure communication strategies, this problem may not be so serious. The threat of hackers cannot be reduced to the level of nonexistence. There should therefore be regulatory systems in place to set limits and boundaries on how much data should be assimilated, and how many parties should have access to this data.

Brought to you by the RobustTechHouse team.  If you like our articles, please also check out our Facebook page.

Coming of IOT In HealthCare was originally published on RobustTechHouse - Mobile App Development Singapore

[starlitconfessions]

✶ f.a.q. ✶

welcome to starlitconfessions! here’s the lowdown!

✧ who are you? : you can call me asteria! i wont give out my real name. im a cishet teen girl. ✧

✧ are you in a relationship? : nope. never have been, either. ✧

✧ why did you start this blog? : i love all things romance, and i like the idea of writing love letters. i started off with just me writing them and saving them as drafts, but now i want to offer a place for everyone to do so safely. ✧

✧ why stars? : im a huge lover of space! like huge astronomy/astrology nerd! the stars are always there for me. ✧

✧ so what do you post? : love letters! this is a safe space to write love letters, anonymous or not, to whoever you want. i can also try my best to offer advice. ✧

✧ is there any special formatting for letters? : all i ask is that you please start off with ‘dear ____,’ and end it with ‘- love ____.’ the blank can have your name, a nickname, a pseudoname, a pronoun, it does NOT have to be specific at all. for instance i usually say ‘dear you,’ and end with ‘ -love, asteria.’. if your letter is full of typos or in all caps i WILL NOT post it. if there’s a few typos then i will fix them myself. please no super long letters either.  ✧

✧ how do i submit anonymously? :  theres 3 ways! log out of tumblr/open it in an incognito window, go to my submit page, and then submit it. otherwise, when submitting, click the ‘anon’ tag i set up for you and i will make the post for you. if you’re on mobile, start the submission with ‘POST ANONYMOUSLY’ and i will make the post myself. ✧

✧ can we only write romantic letters? or can they be platonic? : any type of love is accepted here. ✧

✧ can i submit letters through the ask box? : im sorry but no. ask box is for things like needing relationship advice or genuine questions. if you’re writing a letter it MUST be sent as a submission. any letters sent to the ask box will get deleted. if you want an ask to be answered privately YOU MUST TELL ME or else i will publish it. i can delete it afterwards, though, if you ask me to. ✧

✧ will you accept love letters that are sad in nature? i.e a love letter to an ex : yes! it is tagged ‘sad’. but please nothing too triggering or too negative or hateful in any capacity. this is supposed to be a happy place. while you can ALWAYS pm me for more serious things, and any bad feelings you have ARE VALID, i’d rather have the public blog happy and full of love. i may delete things i deem too sad/triggering. and if you ever need me to tag something triggering, im happy to, just ask! ✧

✧ anything else i should know? : LIGHT NSFW IS ACCEPTED AND TAGGED ‘nsfw’. absolutely no homophobia, transphobia, ANY TYPE OF DISCOURSE, pedophilia, sexism, racism, hate/bullying of any kind. this is a safe, happy space for ALL. i would also like to keep it void of anything promoting excessive drug/alcohol use. i have the right to delete any post off my blog if it makes me uncomfortable or if i think it doesn’t follow my rules. if you want me to promo you or check out your blog, PM ME PRIVATELY. ✧

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Young Oon Kim hinted that Moon was not the messiah, but only in the line of the messiah.

▲ Allen Tate Wood with Miss Young Oon Kim in about 1971.

Moonstruck: A memoir of my life in a cult

by Allen Tate Wood (published in 1979)

extracts from pages 82-84 and pages 134-138

National headquarters was at 1611 Upshur Street, N.W., a big, funny old house with a double-pointed roof in a nice upper-middle-class black neighborhood with lots of big, shady maple trees. The building had once been the Libyan embassy. I was shown to a small room among the many on the second floor. There I would sleep on the blue close-cropped rug, because everyone in the Unified Family slept on the floor except Miss Kim, who did not either because she was a saint or because she was older or because she was rather frail.

▲ 1611 Upshur St NW, Washington, DC.

I had arrived during the dinner hour, and after I had brought my stuff to the room I joined the group of twenty-five or thirty seated at the two long cafeteria-style tables down in the linoleum-floored basement. Miss Kim sat at the end of one table and I was seated next to her. I was somewhat awed by Miss Kim. I knew her from the photograph that appeared on the back of the early editions of the Divine Principle, which she had translated. That picture showed a Korean maiden of about thirty-two in Oriental dress. She had an oval face, even features, lovely dark eyes and a mouth full and yet disciplined.

Now I saw her some eighteen years later and she was still pretty. Her hair was still long and jet black and she wore it pinned up. What her movements and posture now showed especially, and what the portrait had not been able to convey entirely, was how feminine and graceful she was.

I don’t remember what I ate that first meal, but I do remember Miss Kim’s quiet, gentle exploration of my personality. She asked me many questions about myself, but never in a rude stand-and-deliver manner that I might have expected from someone who so obviously held the respect of everyone in the room. She asked about the trip and observed that I must be exhausted, wanted to know about my education, my religious background, my hopes for the future, about my family and where I was from.

“Princeton,” I answered.

“I thought that was a university.” Her English was precise, pronounced delicately.

“It is. It is also a nice town. Many people are confused by that.”

“It is not so far from here?”

“No, not at all.”

“Will you visit your parents?”

“Yes, of course. We are a close family. I have not seen them for four months.”

“You have not seen them since you joined us?”

“No.”

“Have you written them?”

“Yes.”

“What do they say?”

“They don’t really seem to understand. But this has been a rather confusing time for us. They will.”

“They may not. I would not be surprised, Allen, if they never do. Most of us here are not old like me, but young. Many times families are the enemies of religious experience. Jesus said: ‘For I am come to set man at variance against his father. A man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’ Be prepared for the worst. Your family will oppose you in this. They will try to take you from us.”

This was not the first time nor the last time I would hear such sentiments. I had heard them many times already at Berkeley. We had been a young group, nearly all in our way dropouts, some of us deeply hurt, even maimed by the conflict with our society, and tales of ferocious fights with parents were commonplace.

________________________________________

pages 134-138

… I was demoted even further. I would not be a lecturer in Level III. I was going back to being a student. I was aghast. I had been expecting to be reinstated, like Frank and Neil Salonen, but here I was getting pushed even further down.

I went to Miss Kim. She was the power behind the power. She was everyone’s confidante; she knew all that was going on behind the scenes. And she had always liked me, favored me.

I remember talking to her as the late afternoon light faded in the kitchen. She sat with her elbows on the plastic tablecloth. Behind her on the shelves our motley, tacky collection of dishes was stacked. In the background the refrigerator hummed.

I told her the whole story in a great state of agitation. As I spoke she pulled the pins from her hair, which I had never seen down. Her beautiful blue-black hair cascaded about her shoulders. It was thick and long. It reached down to the middle of her back. There was greater meaning in the gesture, I thought. I felt I was seeing the unveiling of a celestial being. What she said did not disappoint me.

Miss Kim had always been a critical follower of the Reverend Moon. Once she had told me that she believed he had some years ago lost his ability to read minds and travel in the astral world. That was why he had to employ the three mediums now. Once she had hinted that Moon was not the messiah, but only in the line of the messiah. He was an Abraham figure, and his son or his grandson would be the true messiah. This was utter heresy, of course, and this was in the back of my mind as Miss Kim spoke.

“Do not worry, young Allen. Frank has many problems and you must bear with him. All this will smooth out later. Meanwhile, I have powers myself. I will look after you. You are under my protection.”

I left the interview completely satisfied. I felt that I had the blessing of a real-life good witch of the East. I did not know exactly what she meant, but I had faith in her. I recalled what had happened the last time I had come to her discouraged. I did become a student in Level III, and I bore with it the best I could. I was a good follower, and by November came the news that made me determined to remain one. The Reverend Moon was coming here!

In December 1971, about a week before Christmas, Moon was present for our Level III graduation, which was held at a church we rented across the street. We had been renting its basement for our Sunday services for a long time. I got a small printed certificate saying that I had graduated from Level III. Presumably I was rehabilitated.

Moon stayed in the Upshur Street house, in the “parents’ room,” which was a room we kept in every center, specially furnished and waiting, should the day come for the visit of Our Leader. He lay low for about a week. He watched a lot and he conferred privately with many people. I was not one of them; I was no longer in the inner circle. Then, on the day before Christmas, he came out of his room and began to speak. And he kept on preaching all through Christmas and on to the beginning of the new year, for the greater part of seven consecutive days.

Moon talked for many hours each day, until people began to fall asleep, and he would awaken them with a shout or a shake or even a slap across the face.

He told us many things. He told us that the messiah was now in the new Rome, that as of now he had made far more progress than Jesus ever had, though he was also far short of completing his mission. But from now on, his mission was here. Moon would not perform miracles, by the way, because miracles were merely crowd pleasers, nothing serious. Jesus’ miracles were a sign of failure, Moon said.

Moon retold the parables of the Bible, adding his own interpretations. Mrs. Won-bok Choi, the medium, translated for him, as she continued to do when he was in the United States and speaking more or less privately, to his own followers. When he spoke publicly, as he was preparing to do, for his mission was taking outward shape, Colonel Pak was the translator.

Moon told us about the nature of sin. The main duality in God’s creation was between good and evil. To do evil was to sin, but since everyone thought of themselves as good, how did we know when we were sinning? The answer was that when we were working for ourselves, we were sinning. When we were working for others, we could be sure that we were doing good. Even if we did things that seemed good to others, if we did these things out of our own vanity and egoism, then we were doing evil. Motive counted very heavily in Moon’s system. Just as we could lie for good motives, and thus be doing God’s work, we could tell the truth for bad motives and be doing Satan’s will.

Such a psychology kept us at constant war with ourselves, and if it succeeded in its aims, our energy would be constantly projected outward. Moon’s was not a religion of introspection, of mysticism, of finding a oneness with God or Nature, nor even a religion of peace or beauty. It was rather a path of action. He would tell us what to think, and our duty was to obey him. His was the perfect religion for those who wished to escape from themselves.

In those seven days Moon mapped out a plan of action and told it to us. He would begin a One World Crusade and he would speak for three days in each of seven cities. A number of us would be formed into mobile bus teams, whose job would be to go into each city as an advance guard. These people would rent the hall for him to speak, sell tickets, do publicity, preach in the streets and then, when at last the Master arrived, move on to the next city on the list and do the same thing. About all this there was an atmosphere of breathless urgency. This was not something that was to happen in the far future or even the near future, but right now. It was to begin even before the month of January was out.

But that was only part of the beginning of his mission, merely the bringing of the word. After having gotten our followers, we wanted to hold them. For that we needed more centers, at least one in every state, including Hawaii and Alaska. Despite our best efforts so far, we had centers in only eight states. We would immediately send out missionaries to all the other states.

In those seven days Moon also prayed many times, and each prayer ended with him in tears. He pulled out his big white handkerchief, snapped it open with a flourish, wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He even sang to us at times; his voice was not pretty, but it was powerful. He sounded like a wounded water buffalo. Moon’s voice had great range, and sometimes, in contrast to the low ranges of his singing, it rose in passion to a mere mouse’s squeak. All in all he was a gigantic, an enveloping personality.

One of the sad things that happened for those of us who knew and loved Miss Kim—and particularly for me, since I was under her protection—was that Moon deposed her, abruptly, impatiently, bitterly, though privately. He was angry; he told her she had failed. We heard that he told her she must assume in regard to him the role of a child. She must learn everything all over again.

______________________________________________

Young-oon Kim – it all ended in flames and tears for the professor

Newsweek on the many Korean messiahs of the 1970s

Park Tae-seon – another Korean Pikareum Messiah

Kim Baek-moon talked about “sexual union with God”

[darkspellmaster]

Dumbledore, Grindlewald, David Yates, JK Rowling and the issue with the use of words. Part 1

(To save people from the issue of reading this on Mobile I’ll break it up.)

So recently, I found an article on the Mary Sue that really got to me on a personal level as a writer. Again normally, I don’t go off on rants like this, and for good reason as people tend to twist things and don’t actually use their reading comprehension to understand what I’m trying to say. But in this case I really can’t keep my mouth shut on this. So, in the event of flames coming at me, I’ll say this much I’m covered in that lovely fire proofing foam and if you must disagree do so respectfully, thanks.

So let’s start at the beginning of this whole thing. Back all the way in January, The Mary Sue put out an Article by writer Princess Weekes, which covered a story about Director David Yates talking about the movie, and specifically Dumbledore.  (You can read the article Here https://www.themarysue.com/dumbledores-sexuality-vague/ ) The article by Ms. Weekes covers another article that came out dealing with an interview by Mr. Yates for Entertainment weekly. (which you can find here http://ew.com/movies/2018/01/31/fantastic-beasts-dumbledore-gay/ )

In the EW article, clearly taken from an interview and the full transcript of the question not reveled (great work there guys way to leave us wondering just what you asked to get this response from him), Yate’s states

“According to The Crimes of Grindelwald director David Yates, this year’s sequel, at least, will not directly reference Dumbledore’s sexuality.

“Not explicitly,” Yates replied when asked if the film makes it clear that Dumbledore is gay. “But I think all the fans are aware of that. He had a very intense relationship with Grindelwald when they were young men. They fell in love with each other’s ideas, and ideology and each other.”

He goes on to add

“Yates then added a bit more about what Dumbledore is like in the new film: “He’s a maverick and a rebel and he’s an inspiring teacher at Hogwarts. He’s witty and has a bit of edge. He’s not this elder statesman. He’s a really kinetic guy. And opposite Johnny Depp as Grindelwald, they make an incredible pairing.”

Then this is followed up by a comment about something Rowling said,

“All of this isn’t to say that Dumbledore’s sexuality won’t eventually be addressed in the three additional Fantastic Beasts sequels planned after Crimes. In fact, screenwriter and Harry Potter creator Rowling has previously hinted that it will be at some point. “I can’t tell you everything I would like to say because this is obviously a five-part story so there’s lots to unpack in that relationship,” Rowling said at a press conference two years ago. “You will see Dumbledore as a younger man and quite a troubled man — he wasn’t always the sage…We’ll see him at that formative period of his life. As far as his sexuality is concerned … watch this space.”

The article of Ms. Weekes was then followed up by another article by Dan Van Winkle (which you can read here  https://www.themarysue.com/jk-rowling-no-interest-in-dumblethoughts/ ) who seems to be of two minds of the matter, and seems to be equating things to his owe experiences, which is fine, but honestly this is different than his friend in college.

In the article Mr. Van Winkle references another article from the Mary sue by Charline Jao (Seen here https://www.themarysue.com/fantastic-beasts-casting-calls/ ) which talks about the crew looking for certain ages for people playing the roles of a younger version of Newt, Leta, Sebatian, Dumbledore and Grindelwald.

This article by Mr. Van Winkle was then followed up once more by yet another article on the Mary Sue by Kaila Hale –Stern (Seen here https://www.themarysue.com/dumbledore-lgbt-sexuality-fantastic-beasts/ ) about the issues with fans regarding this whole situation.

After reading these three pieces plus the connected original article and the one that was previously published all the way back in 2017, I have to somewhat rub my temples in awe of how people really don’t use reading comprehension and are vastly forgetful of huge facts when convenient to not paint the whole picture of the situation.

So let’s break this all down as best we can to clear things up, hopefully, and maybe get some people to understand exactly what Mr. Yates, Mrs. Rowling, and the crew of Fantastic Beasts are really up to here in regard to the situation with Dumbledore and Grindelwald and the future series of these films.

Allow me to first say I’m going to break this into 4 major sections.

Time period in Cannon

Dumbledore’s history

Newt’s story

Authors Mystery and the Hero’s journey

So let’s start with Yate’s EW comment which kick started this whole issue. In the comment Yate’s says that there isn’t going to be anything Explicate in regard to showing that Dumbledore is gay. Now before anyone pulls out the pitchforks allow me to explain why this is actually correct in this case, and that making his relationship and showing he’s gay would be a bad idea for the film makers.

The term he said was “Not Explicitly,” and the word Explicit means….

“stated clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt.”

Why is this important because it connects heavily to all three sections that I’m going to cover here. Being Explicit at the time for Dumbledore would have caused more trouble than it was worth, given that the relationship, or the one sided relationship, had long since passed.

There are two very serious reasons why Dumbledore isn’t being shown as expressly openly gay at this date and time. While the Wizarding World is, by and large, governed by it’s own laws as we’ve seen, it’s clear that a lot have been adapted from the Muggle community. Down to the fact that they too seem to have respect for the Queen and see her as their ruler as they are British subjects of the crown (which begs the question of if they pay taxes and all that, but that’s delving too deep into things here).

Now what I’m getting at here is the lesser of the important reasons, namely because I don’t have any proof of this in regard to the book. However, it’s still something that is rather unique during the time period this is set in and I’m sure that Rowling is, and was at the time of her writing the script, aware of.

During 1861 a law from England was enacted where in various acts of sexual activity with a young girl was prohibited (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_1885 ). This was on top of another bill the Offenses Against the person act of 1861, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offences_Against_the_Person_Act_1861 ), and then on to that the Labouchere Amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labouchere_Amendment ). The last act was eventually what landed Oscar Wilde in jail. This Amendment was designed to help with the Victorian moral of demonizing homosexuality.

“ Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with an other male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.

Furthermore, the section included a vague clause which allowed for the prosecution of anyone who played "party to the commission of" gross indecency. This clause, poet Symonds noticed, served essentially as a conspiracy charge, allowing for a broader pool of convictions.”

This law lead to several prosecutions due to it’s vagueness and even to at least a few suicides from those that were arrested under this law.

The issue here is that, given the way the Wizards look at things and that a good portion of them are not in the modern world, nor were they at the time when Dumbledore and Grindelwald were teens, it’s not that huge of a leap to assume that a similar law had been enacted by the wizarding community. I mean just look at the history of laws we do know about including House Elves and pure blood and the whole court system.

If, and again I stress the word if, such a law exists in England at the time of this movie –and it did in the normal Muggle world –then Albus would be automatically arrested for the act of gross indeceny and carted off to trial. This very law wasn’t off the books until 1967 in the UK and even later in Scotland, Ireland and Wales! Albus would have been in a world of trouble during 1927 for this…

Speaking of the time period, that’s the second part of this comment on the time period cannon that all three of the above articles seem to miss addressing.

So Fantastic Beasts starts off in 1927. During this period we know that Grindelwald was active and a known fugitive, as per the first movie indicating. We know that both England and the US are looking for him during the period of the second movie, and we know that anyone associated with Grindelwald could be placed in jail for assisting in his crimes.

We also know, thanks to the very first book, that Dumbledore defeated Grindelwald in 1945 during the Second world War. Now how does this tie into Yate’s comments. Given that the group that comes to see Dumbledore are questioning him about Newt’s activity and his connection to him, it’s not that hard to think that they have reason to suspect that Dumbledore may be involved with Scamander, who is wanted for questioning regarding events of the US and having creatures that could be seen as dangerous with him.

We can then, rightly, assume that the first movie, much like the first HP book, was set up. Here we have Newt, we get a mention of Dumbledore, and overall we even get a Voldermort like disquise reveal of the character of Grindelwald. Given that the heavier aspects of the story, that of the fight between Grindelwald and Dumbledore won’t be happening for another two decades, it would be better for Dumbledore to keep his mouth shut on the matter of his connections to Grindelwald. Not only because of their previous relationship and how that would look in regard to him being complicit to or actively helping Grindelwald, but also that leads them to connect the dots to his sister’s death.

This I think is why we’re not getting explicit story telling here in regard to their relationship. Dumbledore is very much the character we saw in the first book at this stage, a mystery, and to anyone who had not read the books and this was the first time learning of him, having him be that character again fits in with Newt’s journey, which is what this story is really about.

On top of that you have the added fact that in this time, we know that Grindelwald, unlike Voldemort, is actively looking for the other Hallows (which is why we see the signs in the title) and he already has the first, the wand, in his possession. We know that Dumbledore will not get this item until his battle with him in 1945, so we have a full 2 decades to go before any major changes happen between these two.

So while it makes sense in the modern audience, who already knows about their relationship to have confirmation of feelings or tension, that people would want to see that tension explode on the screen. But this isn’t Dumbledore’s story, just as Harry Potter wasn’t about him either. To showcase that tension this early in a five series film would be honestly breaking the tension that will probably happen in movies 3, 4, 5. This is where the period comes into play as well.

No one at this time, outside of Dumbledore and Grindelwald and Albus’s brother Aberforth knows about what happened with their sister, and because of that, in this period. It wouldn’t make sense for Dumbledore, both out of fear of possibly being arrested for being homosexual, and, more likely, having direct ties to Grindelwald and being arrested for that, would even hint at ANY sort of relationship with him.

See Part two for the next aspect. 

[designlabpune]

10 Ways to build a right website for your business

Define Your Goals

Everyone has a primary purpose of a website building. Define that primary purpose, along with all other goals that you want to achieve with your business website.

If you want to have a truly successful website that generates leads and makes money, then you need to be setting goals.

I know personally when I hear someone talk about setting goals, I roll my eyes and let out a deep sigh.

But yet, there are some great advantages to setting goals such as bringing focus and being able to measure the success or failure of an objective.

Also, it helps you to define your budget for website building.

If you simply follow the consultancy advice, they'll end up adding all the features to your website (which you don't need), making it irrelevant and costlier.

Choose a most desire Domain name

Deciding the domain name is another crucial aspect of your business website. Because the domain name decides the URL of your website.

It should be short, descriptive, and easy-to-remember, steer clear of abbreviations, acronyms, and numbers, if possible, avoid customer confusion.

Also, you need to decide on your top-level domain or TLD. This is the suffix at the end of your domain names, such as .com, .net, or .biz. However, nontraditional TLD names have grown in recent years. These TLDs can be based on location, such as .nyc, or type of business, like .marketing, .agency, or .law. While these can be descriptive, .com is still the main go-to. Read our article on choosing a nontraditional TLD for more information.

Once you end up choosing the most desirable domain name for your business website, check out its availability and purchase it from popular domain registrars.

Purchase safe and secure web hosting

Completed deciding your website goals and domain name, what next?

Well, now it's time to spend money to buy safe and secure web hosting for your website.

Web hosting provides a server for your website where all data is stored for the public to access all the time. Thus, you must buy safe, secure, and good tech support web hosting. It may demand you to pay a little higher but that's okay if you want to give the best yet safe and secure experience to your users.

There are two types of web hosting available viz Shared less-expensive web hosting. As the name suggests, you share servers with other websites and have to compete with them for faster loading.

Another one is dedicated web hosting which is quite more expensive than shared web hosting. But in this, you get your private server and won't have to compete with other sites.

Implement Content Management System

Content Management Systems (CMS) is important to maintain all your digital content. Choose a CMS which caters to your needs.

Good CMS will help you maintain your site, and you don't need much technical knowledge to use it. You should choose a CMS that is designed for your unique needs; different systems are used for different reasons, such as user-friendliness, extensibility, and budget.

Free versions of CMS are available. But if you are a dedicated entrepreneur who wants to expand your business; never choose free versions.

WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! Squarespace, Six are some of the popular CMS systems which offer you the best experience at good prices.

Display all essential pieces of information along with a clear Business Description

Your website should display who you are and what you are doing. The website should convey all the information about your business.

Visitors shouldn't feel confused when they visit your small business website.

Make sure your main homepage banner (also known as a "hero image") and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and also that you have an introductory text blurb near the top of the page that describes who you are and what you do.

Additionally, make sure both your main and footer navigation menus have "About Us" page links easily accessible so people can click them and read more about your business in-depth.

Work on User Interface

As I always say "your website will succeed only if it can impress your customers". And, if your website isn't able to provide the best experience then all your money worth nothing.

Thus, work hard to enhance the user experience. Make sure your small business website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results.

You can do so by implementing the following suggestions:

- Use an attractive layout and easy to read fonts. - Make sure your graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking. - Research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites; implement similar components that will work for your small business website. - Publish easily accessible contact information. - Incorporate obvious call-to-actions

Test and publish your Website

Before announcing that your site is live on the web, make sure it works on all major browsers, like Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

Click through each page and feature on every browser to ensure images show up, links are correct and the format looks smooth. This will take some time, but the effort you put in now will save you future complaints from visitors who can't access certain features.

Also, make sure that your website displays properly on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Because now it's an era of responsive Websites. And, believe it or not, but most of your users prefer mobile for daily searches.

Optimize it for SEO

SEO is an essential practice that makes your website successful. It helps your website to rank higher, this increases visibility and traffic on your website.

SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages (resulting in large amounts of free traffic to your website) or page 300 (resulting in no traffic).

Conclusion:

Website building is not an easy task. It requires a good amount of research and patience. Use the above tips to make things easier.

But it's important to understand that you can't make a rocking website on the first try. As I said, building a successful website requires patience.

If you're getting frustrated with something, take a deep breath, relax for a minute, then google your problem.

Or, connect with any experts which can guide you all the way to get the most desirable website for your business.

If you are looking for any experts to build your business website then I'm waiting for you at DesignLab, Connect with us.

Also, if you have any questions about website building, feel free to ask in the comment section. I'll answer every question.

[amongus858]

5 Bad Habits That People In The Among Us Platforms Industry Need To Quit

Among Us methods and also ideas: Gameplay, attributes and novices guide

By now you must have listened to of the video game Among Us if you are a gamer. The video game which came to be prominent overnight and increasingly more gamers started playing. A lot so that it even crossed the optimum number players PUBG Mobile momentarily.

Now, there are numerous factors behind it's popularity, the most important one we can think of is its gameplay which is very various from video games like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty Mobile. In this guide we will certainly go over numerous aspects of Among Us such as how to begin with the game, novices overview, gameplay as well as some essential yet extra ideas about the video game.

12 Stats About Among Us Download Pc To Make You Look Smart Around The Water Cooler

Among Us: History and also story

Among Us is not an entirely new video game, the game has been there because June 2018, nevertheless, it took the game 2 years to go viral. The game is created by an American game workshop InnerSloth as well as is an online multiplayer video game that happens in a space-themed configuration where players are intended to determine imposters from their crew participants of the spaceship. The variety of imposters are predefined in the game however the secret is to identify them with built-in conversation and ballot system and also kick them out of the spacecraf and also end up saving the entire ship.

Among Us: Available platforms

Among Us is readily available on iphone, Android, Steam only and also for now there's no details readily available on the console port of the video game. The designer has said that the game presently does not featured an in-built voice chat system and players are meant to rely on a key-board to talk with various other gamers in the video game which can be a concern with consoles.

10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Among Us Background

Among Us: How to start playing

Because it's dated-looking user interface, playing this game isn't as made complex as it appears possibly. Nevertheless, once you've downloaded the video game all you need to do is sign up with an on the internet area and also begin playing or develop one and make it public to make sure that other players can join it. You can likewise maintain it private and share the joining code with friends as well as ask them to join.

Among Us: Gameplay

The gameplay is fundamental. There's a crew of 4 to 10 players out which space developers can pick how many imposters they want in it between 1 to 3. The even more the number of imposters the much more complicated the video game will be. All the gamers are meant to finish the tasks appointed as well as charlatans will have to work along with them to confirm that they are not charlatans as well as save themselves from getting caught Now, the charlatans are also intended to sabotage other players as well as eliminate them individually.

At the start of the video game, gamers are arbitrarily assigned right into either Crew team or Imposter team with a message. After that you are intended to finish tasks and assist various other players to capture the imposters without obtaining eliminated by imposters, if you are a crew participant.

Why We Love Among Us Cross Platform (And You Should, Too!)

If you are an imposter after that you even have more important things to do such as sabotage crew participants, kill them, ensure not to obtain caught. Charlatans also have other abilities such as they can travel with ducts, can see in dark and also extra.

Yet, just how does the video game end? There are 4 possible closings to the game. Allow's examine them one-by-one.

Imposter win: Imposters kill all the other gamers without obtaining caught.

Imposter win: Fail to stop getting sabotage

Crew win: All appointed tasks are full

Crew win: All charlatans are caught and rejected of the ship.

How To Explain Is Among Us Free To Your Grandparents

There are conferences in the video game, any gamer including the imposter can call the meetings as well as talk with each other concerning ongoing tasks or that is the presumed imposter. When a dead body is discovered and by pressing the emergency situation button, there are two types of conferences in the video game--. After the conference, players get to vote and the player with even more ballots gets implemented.

Watch Out: How Among Us Colors Is Taking Over And What To Do About It

Among Us: Additional tips

Download Discord as it makes the entire gameplay much more fun. You can actually go over the circumstances utilizing voice rather than inputting. Ensure that the voice meetings are well moderated.

If you are an imposter, attempt to show them that you have aided others finish the project or you were the one that reported the last killing, and so on. Essentially, attempt to sound even more convincing to get the count on of other gamers.

When Did Among Us Come Out: 10 Things I Wish I'd Known Earlier

If you are a crew member and watch on all the questionable activities going on around you and try to recall the gamer always discovered at the crime scene or someone that is always lacking from the criminal activity scene.

STAGE 1

On The Skeld as well as Polus, Fuel Engines needs the gamer to initially most likely to the refuel terminal in Storage and load their gas can by holding the silver button to the right of the canister. The player must after that sustain the Upper Engine on The Skeld, or the engine located Outside to the right of the Dropship on Polus.

20 Up-and-comers To Watch In The When Did Among Us Come Out Industry

On MIRA HQ, the player gas the engine straight at Launchpad.

PHASE 2

On The Skeld and also Polus, the gamer needs to refill the can back at the refuel station, after that fuel the Lower Engine on The Skeld, or the engine located Outside to the left of the Dropship on Polus.

Upload Data is a job in Among Us, completed on The Skeld as a short job, as well as on Polus as a long task. It is most likely a long task on The Airship, which has yet to be launched.

PHASE 1: DOWNLOAD DATA

A Crewmate designated with Upload Data need to most likely to the assigned area to download and install information, that makes up the initial stage. This process takes at the very least 8.7 secs. The download place is established at the beginning of the game.

PHASE 2: UPLOAD DATA

After finishing the initial stage, the Crewmate has to then most likely to either Admin on The Skeld or Communications on Polus to post information, that makes up the 2nd phase. This procedure likewise takes at the very least 8.7 secs.

IDEAS

As A Result Of Upload Data's lengthy conclusion time, Impostors, while pretending to finish this task, can use the time to reduce their kill cooldown or to sabotage.

Crewmates are just assigned Upload Data as soon as in a video game, https://amongus827.creatorlink.net/20-trailblazers-leading-the-way-in so Impostors must not approach 2 download panels in the visibility of live Crewmates.

Given that numerous of Upload Data's panels are near vents as well as the task's UI covers the center of a gamer's display, An Impostor can use a vent and also kill a Crewmate, utilize the vent to get away, and also Crewmates that were doing the task right next to the body will certainly most likely not see a point.

On The Skeld, the information can only be uploaded at Admin. If a player goes into Admin as well as stands near the upload panel at the start of the game, they might be making believe to complete the task, as the information needs to be downloaded and install before it can be published. Gamers who come here promptly are most likely An Impostor. This rule also puts on the upload panel in Communications on Polus.

FACT

Upload Data's conclusion and also visual appearance is somewhat comparable to the Process Data job completed in MIRA HQ.

[michaelandy101-blog]

Who Is Responsible for Meeting Website Accessibility Compliance?

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/who-is-responsible-for-meeting-website-accessibility-compliance/

Who Is Responsible for Meeting Website Accessibility Compliance?

The pandemic of 2020 has changed the lives of everyone.

Were businesses and schools ready to meet the challenges for website accessibility compliance?

Adapting to new ways to work remotely or go to school was not always effortless, especially for persons with disabilities.

And meeting accessibility compliance historically took a back seat to just about every other business goal, creating a business risk.

Though remote work provided some with opportunities to continue to conduct business online, consumers and students quickly uncovered all the ways in which they could not do their work – preventing people from:

Doing their jobs.

Taking tests.

Completing assignments.

Holding meetings.

Ordering supplies during quarantines.

This created frustration on top of an already difficult time.

Somebody needed to be responsible.

For digital marketers, the rumblings about website accessibility may be unimportant until a client receives a demand letter or worse.

Getting an ADA accessibility lawsuit creates alarm, followed by confusion over the next steps.

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While the client is wrestling with this new expense, they may even ask why they were never made aware their website or mobile app was not accessible.

There have also been increasing concerns like:

Who is responsible for building websites, software, and mobile apps that not only are accessible but adhere to the accessibility laws of the country or state they reside in?

Is it ethical to create search engine marketing strategies for websites that are not tested for accessibility compliance?

Why is accessibility testing not included in usability testing, user research, software testing, and split testing of landing pages?

Are marketers, web designers, and developers legally liable if a client’s digital property fails to meet accessibility compliance requirements?

A Changing Work & Home Life Environment

It is estimated that 1.4 billion people around the world have a disability or impairment.

They are treated differently and even ignored in some countries.

The stigma with imperfection means that many people hide their impairments such as failing eyesight, dyslexia, or the inability to remember what they just read.

When companies sent their employees home to work remotely many adjusted to sharing bandwidth and computers with other members of the household.

Parents became teachers.

Students became bored.

Employees met on Zoom.

The time saved from not having to commute to work allowed for more time to study, practice skills, and for creating new projects.

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Some companies clearly thought it was high time to mess with our heads and make unexpected changes to their existing products.

Like changing Google’s branded icons into something that increases errors because we no longer understand what each icon refers to anymore.

Or that Facebook’s new user interface redesign better resembles a corn maze.

Or that the new Google Analytics is not even recognizable anymore.

It doesn’t seem logical to see so much attention on changing branded icons and user interface layouts when there are millions of people trying to work and study at home and facing accessibility barriers.

Gathering Data

Marketers look to data to decide how to improve page optimization for search engines and adjust marketing strategies.

They especially watch how Google is ranking webpages.

And the research into search behavior is extensive.

But even Google’s Core Web Vitals does not look to accessibility as a metric.

The use of assistive devices such as screen readers could provide some insight into how many students depend on them to access assignments by their teachers.

What is the performance like?

What computer devices were used?

Does speed matter to someone who listens to a page?

How about the student who needs more time to take notes from a page heavy on text?

Mobile is Google’s darling, but for many people with disabilities, it isn’t.

I record webpages for my clients with the MAC VoiceOver and Safari combination screen reader.

Listening to what their webpages sound like helps to understand the user experience for people who are blind, sight-impaired, or have reading and cognitive difficulties.

Little else makes an impression than hearing what you designed or built.

Nothing sells better than proof.

The Motivation for Web Accessibility

There has to be motivation other than the threat of ADA lawsuits to make companies care about persons with disabilities.

Regular accessibility testing and site compliance audits should be part of all design and development planning and QA procedures.

In addition to budget restraints, there aren’t enough developers trained in accessibility design for websites, mobile apps, and software.

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For many WordPress platform-dependent site owners, failing to meet WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines is common because theme remediation can be difficult.

And for third-party plugins, it’s next to impossible.

Welcome to 2021.

The rules have changed.

Accessibility Overlays

Imagine if you require a wheelchair to get into a store but before you can enter you must first:

Paint the lines for your handicapped parking spot.

Order the handicapped parking sign.

Build the ramp into the sidewalk.

Install the automatic door opener.

Redesign the aisles to allow more room for you to move around in.

That’s what an accessibility widget does.

Before a person with a disability can enter the website, they need to design it to work for them first.

This is discrimination.

There is no such thing as a perfectly accessible website or application that will automatically work for everyone with a disability.

The reality is that automatic accessibility overlays working in the background are a cheat based on false promises.

Despite the clever marketing and video of the convincing guy insisting your days of worrying about owning an accessible website are miraculously over.

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Artificial intelligence cannot replace humans.

We are each unique. Our brains are different.

We use computers in unique ways and depend on them to work when and how we need them.

Every time we tell ourselves that we know better than anyone else how a webpage should be used, we remove the right to choose what works for persons with impairments or disabilities and their specific needs.

Most people choose their own settings in their computer devices and browsers to help them interact with webpages and apps.

Accessibility widgets that override their settings, mimic, or conflict with them are not helpful.

The message sent by accessibility overlays and widgets is that your company didn’t bother to design and develop an accessible website and gave the whole experience to AI.

This raises a flag to legal firms looking for websites to sue.

The Accessibility Legal Landscape

Web accessibility litigation in the U.S. for 2020 shot up and shows no signs of slowing down.

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The U.K. and Ontario escalated their accessibility requirements, too.

What you should know:

1. ADA Laws in the U.S. as They Pertain to Websites Remain Unclear

There is a lack of precise ADA guidelines on websites up to this point.

The exception is Section 508 for government and GSA contract websites.

2. Serial Plaintiffs Look for Websites to Sue

Decisions differ by state and plaintiffs can sue outside their own state.

Serial filers are sometimes known as “testers of compliance” and plaintiffs do not need to use your website to be able to file a complaint.

Also, there is no limit on cases.

One well known serial plaintiff with a physical disability filed approximately 500 cases since October 2019.

3. What to Do After Receiving a Demand Letter

If you receive a demand letter, contact a lawyer who specializes in ADA and accessibility law immediately.

4. There Is No ADA Law in the U.S. Enforcing the WCAG Standard for Public Websites

However, related laws and various circuit court judgments are chipping away with decisions based on ethics and non-discrimination.

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5. The Ontarians With Disabilities Act (AODA) Takes Effect January 1, 2021

The AODA requires all digital content to conform to WCAG2.0 AA standards by January 1, 2021.

There are fines for non-compliance.

They provide online guidance, site testing, training, and filing compliance report policies.

6. WCAG 2.1 Adoption in Europe

The U.K. updated EN 301 549 which specifies the accessibility requirements for ICT products and services.

The standard to meet is WCAG2.1 AA.

Websites and mobile apps must provide an accessibility statement.

The deadline for meeting their digital accessibility regulations was September 23, 2020

In the U.S., on October 2, 2020,  a bill called the “Online Accessibility Act” (H.R. 8478 – the “OAA”) was introduced.

It would amend the present ADA to add a new Title VI prohibiting discrimination by “any private owner or operator of a consumer-facing website or mobile application” against individuals with disabilities.

Already coming against a negative reception by disability rights advocates, this latest attempt has a similarity to H.R. 620 which never got past the House in the present administration.

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This is because it placed the burden on the person with disabilities to pursue and subsequently wait for remediation to occur.

The OAA allows 90 days for remediation of a complaint.

If not satisfied, then it goes to the Department of Justice, which has 180 days “to investigate.”

Steps to Take Now to Protect Your Business

There are automated tools that are free to use that provide a quick assessment of the most common accessibility issues on websites.

It’s important to note that they catch about 25% of the problems and don’t replace manual testing.

WCAG 2.2 is in draft format now, with an expected release next summer.

One of the additions is a change to the guidelines for the focus state, which is what we see when we navigate without a mouse.

Use CSS to enhance the focus state.

Web Developer Tools offer a built-in accessibility section that can be added to.

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Developers also have their own preferences.

Web developer tools can be enhanced to include additional testing tools for accessibility.

A different example of web developer tools in Firefox.

High on the list for manual testing is looking at the way headings are structured.

Not only are heading tags important for SEO, but they are also of particular interest for screen reader users who sort content by them.

WCAG2.1 spells out guidelines for headings that include making sure there is only H1 on a page.

If you look carefully, you will see a duplicate heading below, which is technically a failure, and even worse would be if both were linked to the same landing page.

Even if the page looks like it makes sense visually, with a screen reader the experience is very different.

If you were to listen to this page with a screen reader, you may wonder what’s behind “Everything you need to find.”

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For accessibility, understanding content in context makes even more sense when you listen to your content.

Descriptive headings and link anchor text requirements appear more obvious when you listen and hear what’s missing from your presentation.

The ability to manually look for areas to improve accessibility is easier with the proper tools.

No accessibility testing is complete without manual testing.

There are various tools available for web developers to use to help identify any issues.

Moving around a webpage without a mouse is a manual test performed by pressing the TAB key on your keyboard.

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The reading order should begin with a Skip to Content link, which should be there (and if not, it should be).

Each TAB key click should proceed to the next link in the DOM and is highlighted visually with a focus state.

Common errors with manual keyboard testing are:

The focus state disappears as it goes through the navigation and sub-levels.

Site search.

The sudden appearance of ads and pop-ups.

Sometimes Accessibility Compliance Is Difficult

For those who develop a serious interest in building inclusive websites or mobile apps, there is a large community of accessibility advocates, educators, and certified accessibility specialists who make themselves available.

There are free podcasts and videos providing instruction on how to make documents accessible, and how to use screen readers.

Look for webinars. Many are free.

There are guidelines for colors, images, layout, understandability, and compatibility with a broad range of user agents.

The most difficult is learning Accessible Rich Internet Applications or ARIA – which can conflict with HTML5 – but is necessary for screen readers to figure out what’s happening on each page.

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Who Is Responsible for Accessibility Compliance?

We are responsible for the content on our webpages.

This includes our videos, podcasts, forms, themes, and interactive elements.

It’s a lot to ask of beginners.

And for those who opt for ready-made websites, it’s a risk they may be unaware of.

Do yourself a favor and get an accessibility site audit done.

Hire a consultant or find an agency that offers accessibility testing as a service in addition to designing web sites or marketing them.

Add accessibility testing to your in-house projects.

It wouldn’t make any sense to produce products that are not ready to work for everyone.

Hire agencies that test with people with disabilities.

They are your best investment.

In 2021, you may be required to own an accessible website, mobile app, or online software application.

The best offense is knowing what you need to know.

Join me on January 12 at the SEJ eSummit where I deliver a presentation on “The Emergency Guide to Website Accessibility Compliance.” 

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More Resources:

Image Credits

All screenshots taken by author, November 2020

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New Post has been published on Strange Hoot - How To’s, Reviews, Comparisons, Top 10s, & Tech Guide

New Post has been published on https://strangehoot.com/10-hidden-facts-of-whatsapp-you-should-know-whatsapp-facts/

10 Hidden facts of WhatsApp you should know - Whatsapp Facts

Here is a list of 10 hidden Whatsapp facts, before this let’s look at what is Whatsapp? WhatsApp is an American communication-based freeware application that allows you to chat and call anyone around the world with just an internet connection and a smartphone.

It allows you to connect with people with private chats, group chats, video and voice calls, posting stories, status. WhatsApp features updated with time and made it more handy and useful.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo!. it was first made for apple users only but the idea was to provide everyone with this app having a smartphone.

WhatsApp features have evolved with many features over the period of time. It becomes the first preference of everyone to use texting apps. Many competitor apps came in the way as we chat and telegram but whatsapp features never fell off with its updates. WhatsApp features with the need of the hour.

Within few years it was being used by billions of people across the world. It connected many people with very less cost of only data charges. Earlier, calling international was an expensive affair but now with WhatsApp’s features it just takes data connection in your smartphones.

In 2014 Facebook acquired WhatsApp in US$ 19 Billion valued of US$ 1.9 Billion. Voice calls were announced in progress just after 3 days of Facebook collaboration in whatsapp features.

In recent times during his pandemic of coronavirus, Whatsapp features with the World Health Organization and UNICEF in march 2020 to provide messaging hotlines for people to get information on the virus. Until 2017, WhatsApp’s features were for personal use between two connections of users.

This helped businesses to connect with their customers, but not on a large scale. So solving this problem, WhatsApp announced that they were building and testing two new tools for businesses in September 2017; A free WhatsApp features of the Business app for all the small companies and Enterprise Solution for bigger companies with worldwide customer bases, such as airlines, retailers and banks, who would be able to offer customer service and conversational commerce (e-commerce) via WhatsApp chat, with the help of live agents or chatbots replying from the particular business or company’s side.

WhatsApp features were officially made available for PCs through a web client, under the name WhatsApp Web, in late January 2015 through an announcement made by Koum on his Facebook page: “Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device—this means all of your messages still live on your phone”.

The WhatsApp user’s handset must still be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function. WhatsApp features Web’s user interface is based on the default Android one and can be accessed through web.whatsapp.com Access is granted after the users scan their personal QR code through their mobile WhatsApp application.

Some of the common WhatsApp features/ WhatsApp facts are:

Personal and group chats

Voice and video calls

Customized notifications

Web whatsapp

Wallpaper of chats

Deleting chats

Sending pictures, emojis, location, GIFs, videos, audios, stickers.

Uploading status story which will be visible to all of your contacts for 24 hours only.

Webcast

Restricting data charges

Backup of data

Changing phone number without losing data

Last seen visibility of other contact

Here are some unknown WhatsApp facts/ WhatsApp features:

1. Want to know exact number of messages with a particular person?

Yes, you can know how many messages in total, data used, photos and videos, locations, stickers, audios, documents, GIFs to date you have sent and received by a particular person and with whom you chat the most and the least accordingly with whatsapp features. Many of us do not know about this but WhatsApp is a versatile app and lets you know the number of messages.

For that open WhatsApp> settings> data and storage usage> storage usage. Then a list of your contacts shows up in decreasing order of most to least. For detailed information about single contact click on their name in the list and you will get it all in whatsapp features.

Also, it allows you to use whatsapp features like delete all texts, images, audios, locations, etc from a single chat by selecting check boxes you want to delete and select clear space option.

2. Hear audio messages without earphones or keeping speaker near your ears as a whatsapp feature

Often people have tendency to hear audio messages by placing the speaker near their ears and try to listen.

It looks odd in public places but there is a whatsapp feature which most of us do not know which is just play the audio and place the phone in a way you are talking to someone on call, the audio automatically gets a transfer to hearing speakers on the upper side of the phones just as you are listening while calling. It does not look odd and nobody else gets to hear it except you.

This is a very less known feature and need of the hour in places where you can not behave like that and need to hear important audio.

3. Read messages without letting them know you have read it and without blue ticks.

Well, it has 2 ways in whatsapp features and both are different in a way you want to use as per your situation.

You can always go to settings> account> privacy> switch off the read receipts. Now with this turned off blue ticks are off that means you can read messages and other person will not see the blue ticks but it has a drawback that with off receipts you will also not see the blue ticks of the person. That is if you reply to a double tick message then you can also not see if they have seen it or not also they might will know you have turned off the receipts if you reply because they will see that their message has not turned blue. It might put you in trouble. That is why there is this second full proof way.

Come to the home screen of your phone. Long press anywhere on the screen and open widgets option that will appear on screen, from that find and select WhatsApp features and place it on empty slide of the screen. Adjust it according to your screen. From this widget you can scroll and read messages without turning off receipts and letting them know that you have read it. Just do not click on the message, whatsapp feature will take you to the chat screen and then it will be considered seen. It is very useful and without any loophole way.

4. Use words in bold, italic and strike-through in chats

You can make look your message more attractive and effective using whatsapp features by pointing out the main idea or line of your text by making it bold and look unique. Just add a ‘*’ before or after the words you want to highlight. For example- *how are you?*

In this it will appear as how are you?

You can also add strike through by applying ‘~’ to before and after the texts. For example; ~how are you?~, it will appear as how are you?

You can also make your text look in italic font by adding ‘_’ in your message.

For example; _how are you?_

It will appear as how are you?

5. Pin a chat

You can get rid of finding a single chat on the list with the help of whatsapp features of an important person.

And if you don’t want to miss a text from them in case you receive a number of messages and the chats go down with every new message in the list.

You can always pin someone’s chat on the top of the screen and receive and see their messages first in the list no matter how many messages you receive. Long press the chat you want to pin-up and select the pin icon symbol on the top of the screen.

6. Archive a chat

If you want to hide chats from displaying in the list and do not want to see it. There is a whatsapp feature for it and you can archive the chat by long-pressing the chat the select option of archive envelope on screen.

With this whatsapp features the chat will be hidden and if you wish to see the archived chats and wish to read it.

Open the list of chats and scroll down till the end, there you will see the archived chats option by clicking that you will see a new list of all archived chats.

7. Star important texts

If you wish to remember or come back to a particular text after some time and are tired of scrolling and searching in chats.

There is a whatsapp feature that lets you mark an important text as a star and view all the starred messages. Sometimes we do not remember the keyword to search in chat and it creates a problem.

For situations like those whatsapp features of starring, message is made to come back to. Select a message you want to star , long press it and the select star option shown on the right corner of the screen.

Then afterward if you wish to see all the star texts you can go to the list of texts, click the three dots option displayed on the right corner of the screen, from the drop-down menu select the starred messages options and it will take you to all the starred texts.

 8. Add through QR code

QR code stands for a quick response which is a type of bar code which when scanned by other devices takes us to the website or application that bar code belongs to. QR code contains data for a locator, identifier, or tracker that points to a website or application.

Whatsapp features include this new update and lets user connect with another user by using this QR code. Earlier people had to add the contact in the phone book by asking for the number and then refresh the contacts in whatsapp contact list and then search new contact by the name you have saved it. But now whatsapp features have shortened this process by introducing this feature.

Go to whatsapp settings, click the QR code icon displayed in front of your name. Then if you are adding a contact, scan code of other person’s device or show your QR code to another person’s whatsapp scanner to scan.

Or you can send your QR code to any contact if they want to send it to anybody else to add you. Then you will be added in their list in easy steps. It takes less time than the previous way.

9. Delete message after sending on WhatsApp

Sending messages to a wrong contact or sent a message with error or forgot something to add. Many situations like these arise and one feels the need of undo the message so they would not know what was sent if they have not seen the message yet.

Whatsapp features comes with this option too to cover your mistakes. Select the messages you want to delete and select the dustbin icon on the right corner of the screen then it will show three options to delete for me which means message will be deleted from your chats only, cancel to exit the process and delete for everyone to delete text from both the ends.

However, this option in whatsapp features was firstly allowed for seven minutes only after sending the message but with a new update of whatsapp features. It is now available for one hour eight minutes and sixteen seconds.

But it will show a line of messages deleted displaying this text is deleted so that other people will know that something is deleted.

10. Mute a chat or group

Daily we get many messages and group texts which seems to be unnecessary and we get irritated by loads of those messages and every time getting a notification for that is very annoying sometimes.

Whatsapp features provide us with of muting a chat or group which allows you to not receive notification or vibration for that muted chat and you will not be disturbed. Only when you will open the whatsapp you can see the messages of that chat or group.

Read: How To Read Whatsapp Message Without An Open Message?

Visit Whatsapp Official page: Here

[rivaco]

How to Test a Work From Home Day with Your Team: A Guide for Managers

Ready or not, your team is probably going remote in the near future.

That’s because more and more businesses are implementing work from home policies to help prevent the spread of Coronavirus globally. Global companies like Twitter, Google, and Amazon have all asked workers to stay home.

There’s good reason for that: Flock’s recent survey found that 91% of employees in the US agreed that working from home could help people avoid getting sick.

Regardless if Coronavirus has hit your home city, it’s worth testing out working from home to get your team prepared for the inevitable. This is especially important for companies who have not experimented with remote work in the past.

Need help understanding if remote work is right for your business? We created The Flock Guide to Building Great Remote Teams with leaders like you in mind.

If you’re grappling with the best way to support your employees as they embark on their work from home journey, check out Flock’s guide for managers below, which covers:

1. Offering the right tool for working from home 2. A sample one day agenda for a newly remote team 3. Strategies for managers to help teams stay connected 4. Best practices for working from home, which you can share with your team

Tools and policies for new ‘work from home’ teams

Think all-in-one.

As people work from home, businesses need to offer tools that bridge the communication gap between teammates separated by proximity. A simple video conferencing tool isn’t enough — consider what happens to notes taken during the call, for example. A simple messaging service like WhatsApp won’t do the trick either. How will dispersed teammates collaborate, send files to the group, or share follow ups after a meeting? It doesn’t make sense to keep your messaging, videoconferencing, files, and notes in separate places when there are tools like Flock that have all that functionality in one easy to use tool.

If this is your first time experimenting with remote work, consider a comprehensive all-in-one communication tool. The last thing you need to do is bundle a bunch of separate communication tools together while you’re trying to create a remote policy at the same time.

If you’re planning to implement a remote friendly tool, make sure to sign up for a collaboration tool that offers the following functionalities at a minimum:

One-on-one (1:1) messaging to hold direct conversations with a colleague

Group messaging so everyone in a team or project group can collaborate together

Ability to create custom team or project channels as needed

Ability to make channels public or private, because some things need to be kept under wraps!

Video conferencing when you need to speak face to face

Screen sharing so you can refer to the same presentation or document

Search functionality, so you can find your messages or files

Drag and drop file sharing so you can quickly send assets to a group or single coworker

Polls, tasks, and reminders to keep productive

Robust integrations with other tools you use, such as Google Drive, Trello, or Twitter

Robust security features, because you don’t want your work files or conversations leaked!

Available on all mobile device types and desktop

Sample one-day agenda for a newly remote team

Get your team started right.

1. To start the day, schedule a team walk-through of your communication tool. If you invest in a comprehensive communication platform like Flock, don’t leave your team to their own devices to figure it out. Chances are they’ll miss all the rich features they can use to collaborate.

Schedule a morning training session where everyone meets via a video conference. There, you can share your screen and walk them through the key product features.

We recommend showing your team how to:

Start a 1:1 conversation with a coworker

Start a group conversation by adding multiple coworkers to a conversation

Showcase how to create a custom channel for the team, a group project, or shared interest to encourage collaboration

Share how to add coworkers to an existing shared channel so they can get caught up on what’s been happening

Start a new video call (how meta!)

Screen share during a video call

Integrate Google Drive accounts so teammates can seamlessly share files with others

Pin and save shared files or links so all files are easily accessible

Use the search functionality to find old messages and files

Integrate their favorite tools like Trello, Asana, Twitter, or Google Calendar

Set up productivity features like create a custom poll, create shared to-do’s, or set personal or group reminders

Add emojis, stickers, and GIFs to liven up conversations

Mute channels and set up “Do Not Disturb” times

2. Schedule a team-wide standup so folks can share what they’re working on and ask for any help wanted from their teammates via video conference. Ask a team member to be the designated notetaker in the shared notes feature within Flock so everyone can see action items and needed follow-ups.

3. Schedule one-on-one check-ins with your employees so they get used to having robust conversations through video instead of in person.

4. Spend some time thinking through how you can foster productivity within your remote team.

Strategies to stay connected

As people work individually from home, teams lose the kinetic energy of being around each other. It’s up to managers to create opportunities for their team to catch up and riff off of each other.

1. Add ice breakers and carve out dedicated time in video-based team meetings for group sharing to encourage a sense of community. 2. Ask people to take advantage of face-to-face communication versus sticking only to messaging. A good rule of thumb is if you have to explain something via messaging and your colleagues don’t understand, choose to click the video conference button and get everyone on the same page. 3. Schedule regular standup meetings for the entire team to connect. If you meet once a week in person, increase the frequency to twice a week for remote teams. 4. Create community channels to share interests remotely. Our Flock Pets channel is a big favorite and I keep discovering great songs thanks to our Music channel. 5. Create office hours on your calendar for your team to connect with you to ask questions and give feedback. 6. Ask teammates to send daily morning updates on what they’re working on in the team channel.

Communication best practices when working from home

Share these best practices with your team and adopt them yourself:

1. When sending questions or requests, let the recipient(s) know if a request requires immediate attention or if it can wait. 2. During video meetings, have people who want to speak raise their hand so people can see that someone wants to talk. 3. Update your status to share your top priorities or show what you’re currently working on. 4. Turn on DND (Do Not Disturb) so people know when you’re not available. 5. Learn to let go and trust your team. If you always worry about your team’s productivity and ability to get things done, there are two problems: 1. You don’t have the tools in place to enable work from remote locations or 2. You are a micromanager. If it’s problem 1, see the checklist above. If it’s problem 2, it’s time to reexamine your management style. 6. Log off! Data shows people in leadership roles get the most messages. Make sure you practice what you preach and schedule down time to maintain work-life balance.

For more tips on establishing messaging ground rules, check out our 10 ground rules for business messaging.

If you’re looking for a collaboration tool to enable remote work, check out Flock for free today!

How to Test a Work From Home Day with Your Team: A Guide for Managers was originally published in Flock Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[lesliepump]

How an Online Game Can Help AI Address Access to Justice (A2J)

In access to justice discussions it is a truth universally acknowledged, that the majority of those in possession of legal problems, remain in want of solutions. (My apologies to both Jane Austen and the Legal Service Corporation’s Justice Gap Report.) Also, ROBOTS!  Ergo, we should throw AI at A2J. There is considerably less consensus, however, on how (or why exactly) this should be done. But don’t worry! There’s an app/game for that, and it lets you train artificial intelligence to help address access-to-justice issues. We’ll get to that in a minute. But first, some background.

Machine Learning & Access to Justice, Together at Last

Machine Learning, the subdiscipline within AI around which the current hype cycle revolves, is good at pattern recognition. Acquaint it with a sufficiently large number of example items, and it can “learn” to find things “like” those items hiding in the proverbial haystack. To accomplish such feats, however, we have to satisfy the machine’s need for data—BIG data. Consequently, AI’s appetite is often a limiting factor when it comes to deploying an AI solution.

Let’s consider two areas where AI’s pattern recognition might have something to offer A2J. Services like ABA’s Free Legal Answers try to match people with legal questions to lawyers offering pro bono limited representation (think free advice “calls” over email). Unfortunately, some questions go unclaimed. In part, that’s because it can be hard to match questions to attorneys with relevant expertise. If I’m a volunteer lawyer with twenty years of health law experience, I probably prefer fielding people’s health law questions while avoiding IP issues.

To get health law questions on my plate and IP questions on someone else’s, a user’s questions need to be (quickly, efficiently, and accurately) labeled and routed to the right folks. Sure, people can do this, but their time and expertise are often better deployed elsewhere, especially if there are lots of questions. Court websites try to match users with the right resources, but it’s hard to search for something when you don’t know what it’s called. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know. Complicating matters further, lawyers don’t use words like everyone else. So it can be hard to match a user’s question with a lawyer’s expertise. Wouldn’t it be great if AI’s knack for pattern recognition could spot areas of law relevant to a person’s needs based on their own words (absent legalese), then direct them to the right guide, tool, template, resource, attorney, or otherwise? That’s what we’re working towards here.

I know what you’re thinking, but we are NOT talking about a robot lawyer. When we say “AI,” think augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. What we’re talking about is training models to spot patterns, and it’s worth remembering the sage advice of George Box, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Consequently, one must always consider two things before deciding to use a model: First, does the model improve on what came before? Second, is it starting a discussion (not ending it)? Unless the data are pristine and the decision is clear-cut, a model can only inform, not make, the decision.

Something like an automated issue spotter has the potential to improve access to justice simply by making it a little easier to find legal resources. It doesn’t need to answer people’s questions. It just needs to point them in the right direction or bring them to the attention of someone in a position to help. It can get the conversation started by making an educated guess about what someone is looking for and jumping over a few mundane—but often intimidating—first steps.

But at least two problems stand between us and realizing this dream. If we’re going to map lay folks’ questions to issues using machine learning, we’re going to need a list of issues and a boatload of sample questions to train our models. As if this wasn’t enough, those examples need to be tagged or labeled with the right issues. Unfortunately, we are unaware of any appropriately-labeled public dataset. So we’ve decided to help birth one.

Who’s “we” you ask? A collaboration of Suffolk Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) Lab (bringing the data science) and Stanford Law School’s Legal Design Lab (bringing the design chops), with funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Learned Hands: An Introduction to Our Project

Image by Margaret Hagan.

So AI can help address an A2J need but only if someone has the resources and expertise to create a taxonomy, read a bunch of text, and (correctly) label all the legal issues present. This is where you, dear reader, can help.

The Access to Justice & Legal Aid Taxonomy

Stanford’s Legal Design Lab has taken the lead on creating a taxonomy of legal help issues based on existing ones. Eventually, service providers will be able to match their offerings to the list, and AI can pair the general population’s questions with the appropriate label or tag within the taxonomy. Heck, AI could even help service providers match their resources to the taxonomy, serving as a translator on both sides. Either way, the taxonomy will provide a standard nomenclature to help coordinate A2J work across the community. Setting standards is hard, but it’s the sort of foundational work that can pay big dividends. In short, we’re building Version 1.0 and looking for your input. If that appeals to you, give this description of the work/call for input a look and make yourself heard.

Help AI Address Access to Justice

Now we just need tens of thousands of legal questions to feed the machine, and each one must be tagged with items from the taxonomy. Luckily, people publicly post their legal questions all the time. Tens of thousands are available over at r/legaladvice. The moderators and forum rules work to ensure that these posts lack personally identifying information, and all questions are posted with the expectation that they will be published to the front page of the internet, as Reddit calls itself. This makes them unique because, unlike questions posted on sites like ABA Free Legal Answers, their authors understand them to reside in an explicitly public space. Although they haven’t been mapped to our taxonomy, their public nature leaves open the possibility that an army of citizen issue spotters (that’s you) could read through them and label away.

One can download these questions using the Reddit API, but moderators at r/legaladvice were kind enough to share their own repository of nearly 75,000 questions in the hopes they could help jump-start our work. Thanks especially to Ian Pugh and Shane Lidman for facilitating our work with the Reddit Legal Advice community.

The Game: Labeling Texts

To help label our growing collection of texts, we’ve created an online game in the hope that many hands will make light work. So, of course, we call it Learned Hands. (This is wordplay riffing on the name of an eminent American jurist, Learned Hand. I’m sorry I felt compelled to explain the joke, but here we are.)

Logo by Margaret Hagan.

The game presents players with a selection of lay peoples’ questions and asks them to confirm or deny the presence of issues. For example, “Do you see a Health Law issue?” We then combine these “votes” to determine whether or not an issue is present. As you can imagine, deciding when you have a final answer is one of the hard parts. After all, if you ask two lawyers for an opinion, you’ll likely get five different answers.

We decide the final answer using statistical assumptions about the breakdown of voters without requiring a fixed number of votes. Effectively, if everyone agrees on the labeling, we can call the final answer with fewer votes than if there is some disagreement. Consequently, the utility of the next vote changes based on earlier votes. We use this to order the presentation of questions and make sure that the next question someone votes on is the one that’s going to give us the most information/  or move us closest to finalizing a label. This means we don’t waste players’ time by showing them a bunch of undisputed issues.

You earn points based on how many questions you mark (with longer texts garnering more points). Players are ranked based on the points they’ve earned multiplied by their quality score, which reflects how well your markings agree with the final answers. Specifically, we’re using a measure statisticians call the F1 Score.

That’s right. You can compete against your colleagues for bragging rights as the best issue spotter (while training AI to help address A2J issues). After all, we’re trying to have this game go viral. Please tell all your friends! Also, it works on both your desktop and your phone.

Desktop and mobile screenshots.

Eventually, we will make different flavors of the labeled data available to researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs free of charge in the hopes that they can use the data to create useful tools in the service of A2J (for example, we may publish a set where the labels correspond to a 95% confidence level and another where the labels are just the current “best guess”). Not only could such datasets serve to help train new issue spotting models, but ideally, they could serve as a tool for benchmarking (testing) such models. See Want to improve AI for law? Let’s talk about public data and collaboration.

We’re also seeking private data sources for secure in-game labeling by users agreed upon by those providing the data (e.g., their own employees). By including more diverse datasets, we can better train the algorithms, allowing them to better recognize problems beyond those faced by Reddit users. Although we’ll be unable to publicly share labeled private data, we will be able to share the models trained on them, allowing the larger A2J community to benefit while respecting client confidence.

For the record, although this game’s design was a collaboration between the LIT and Legal Design Labs, Metin Eskili (the Legal Design Lab’s technologist) is responsible for the heavy lifting: turning our ideas into functional code. Thanks, Metin.

Active Learning

We will also use a process called active learning. Basically, once we reach a critical mass of questions, we train our machine learning models on the labeled data as it comes in. We then point our models at the unlabeled questions looking for those it’s unsure of. We can then move these questions to the top of the queue. In this way, the models gain insights they need to parse “confusing” examples. Again, the idea is not to do more labeling than necessary. It just makes sense to skip those questions our algorithms are pretty sure about.

Proof of Concept

Here at Suffolk’s LIT Lab, we’ve started training algorithms on a pre-labeled private dataset. The early results are promising, or as I like to say, “not horrible.” As I’ve explained elsewhere, accuracy is often not the best measure of a model’s performance. For example, if you’re predicting something that only happens 5% of the time, your model can be 95% accurate by always guessing that it’s going to happen. It can be hard to say what makes a good model (aside from perfection), but it’s pretty easy to spot when a model’s bad. All you have to do is play through some scenarios. (In practice, one needs to think carefully about the costs of things like false positives and false negatives. Sometimes you’ll have a preference for one over the other, but we’re not going to get that nuanced here.) To keep it simple, we’ll assume a binary prediction (e.g., yes or no).

If a coin flip can beat your predictions, your predictions are horrible. Your accuracy better beat 50%.

If always guessing yes or no can beat your predictions, your predictions are horrible. Your accuracy must be better than the fraction of the majority answer (like in the 95% accuracy example above).

If you’re looking for Xs and you miss most of the Xs in your sample, your predictions are horrible. So your recall has to be greater than 0.5.

If you’re looking for Xs, and less than half of the things you call Xs are actually Xs, your predictions are horrible. So your precision has to be greater than 0.5.

Using these guideposts, we know a classifier is “not horrible” when it beats both a coin flip and always guessing yes or no. If it says something is X, it better be right most of the time, and across the entire dataset, it must correctly identify more than half of the Xs present.

Below, I’ve included some summary statistics for one of our tentative models trained on pre-labeled private data. As you can see, it’s not horrible—accuracy beats always guessing yes or no, and precision and recall beat 0.50. There are some other nice data points in there (like AUC), but we won’t highlight those here (their descriptions are beyond the scope of this post). In the end, “not horrible” is just an extension of the idea that a model should be an improvement on what came before. In this case, “what came before” includes coin flips and always guessing yes or no.

A snapshot of private data testing results.

As you’d expect, our models are getting better with more data. So we’re really excited to see what happens when a bunch of folks start labeling. Also, it’s worth noting that we are starting with high-level labels (e.g., family law and housing). Over time, we will be including more granular labels (e.g., divorce and eviction).

How Does This All Work? (A Slightly-Technical Description)

Text classification isn’t as complicated as you might think. That’s mostly because the algorithms aren’t really reading the texts (at least not the way you do). To oversimplify a common text-classification method called bag-of-words, one creates a list of words found across all texts and then represents each document as a count of words found in that document. Each word counts is treated as a dimension in a vector (think “column in a list of numbers”). After looking at all the data, one might notice that questions about divorce always have a value greater than or equal to three for the dimension associated with the word “divorce.” In other words, divorce-related questions always contain the word “divorce” at least three times. So it is possible to describe questions about divorce by referring to their vectors.

Put another way, every text with vectors whose divorce dimension is on either side of three goes into either the divorce or not-divorce categories. This isn’t a very realistic example, though, because document types aren’t often like Beetlejuice (say the magic word three times and they appear). Still, it is reasonable to assume there is a constellation of keywords that help define a document type. For example, maybe the chance that a question is housing-related goes up when the query uses words like landlord, tenant, or roommate. Larger values across those dimensions, then, are correlated with housing questions. You can (of course) get more nuanced and start looking for n-grams (couplings of two, three, or words) like best interest while ignoring common words like and. But the general method remains the same: we throw the words into a bag and count them.

More sophisticated approaches—like word2vec—employ different methods for converting text to vectors, but without getting too far in the weeds we can generalize the process of text-classification. First, you turn texts into numbers embedded in some multi-dimensional space. Then you look for surfaces in that space that define borders between different text groupings with different labels. This, of course, relies on different text types occupying different regions in the space after they are embedded. Whether or not these groupings exist is an empirical question (which is why it’s nice to see not horrible output above). The data help us think success is an option.  

Google’s Machine Learning Crash Course on Text Classification provides a good high-level introduction for those interested in the technology. Our workflow tracks with much of their description, although there are some differences. For example, we’re using over- and under-sampling for unbalanced classes and stacking various models. Don’t worry, we’ll eventually write everything up in detail. Here’s the point, though: we aren’t pushing the state of the art with these classifiers. We’re sticking with time-tested methods and producing a publicly-labeled dataset. We’d love to see this labeled dataset feeding some cutting-edge work down the road, and if you can make a compelling demonstration for how your novel method could make better predictions, we’re open to taking your model in-house and training it on our private datasets (assuming you commit to making the trained model-free and publicly available). After all, many hands make light work. Tell your friends! Heck, let’s make it super simple. Just share this tweet as often as you can:

Compete against your colleagues for bragging rights as the best legal issue spotter (while training #AI to help address #A2J issues), a collaboration between @SuffolkLITLab & @LegalDesignLab. Play on your ?or ??. https://t.co/PgL99vONro

— Suffolk LIT Lab (@SuffolkLITLab) October 16, 2018

And don’t forget to play Learned Hands during your commute, over lunch, or while waiting in court.

Originally published 2018-10-18. Republished 2020-02-17.

The post How an Online Game Can Help AI Address Access to Justice (A2J) appeared first on Lawyerist.

from Law and Politics https://lawyerist.com/blog/learned-hands-launch/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/jam-lets-you-safely-share-streaming-app-passwords/

Jam lets you safely share streaming app passwords

Can’t afford Netflix and HBO and Spotify and Disney+…? Now there’s an app specially built for giving pals your passwords while claiming to keep your credentials safe. It’s called Jam, and the questionably legal service launched in private beta this morning. Founder John Backus tells TechCrunch in his first interview about Jam that it will let users save login details with local encryption, add friends you can then authorize to access your password for a chosen service, and broadcast to friends which of your subscriptions have room for people to piggyback on.

Jam is just starting to add users off its rapidly growing waitlist that you can join here, but when users get access, it’s designed to stay free to use. In the future, Jam could build a business by helping friends split the costs of subscriptions. There’s clearly demand. Over 80% of 13-24 year olds have given out or used someone else’s online TV password, according a study by Hub of over 2000 US consumers.

“The need for Jam was obvious. I don’t want to find out my ex-girlfriend’s roommate has been using my account again. Everyone shares passwords, but for consumers there isn’t a secure way to do that. Why?” Backus asks. “In the enterprise world, team password managers reflect the reality that multiple people need to access the same account, regularly. Consumers don’t have the same kind of system, and that’s bad for security and coordination.”

Thankfully, Backus isn’t some amateur when it comes to security. The Stanford computer science dropout and Thiel Fellow founded identity verification startup Cognito and decentralized credit scoring app Bloom. “Working in crypto at Bloom and with sensitive data at Cognito, I have a lot of experience building secure products with cryptography at the core.

He also tells me since everything saved in Jam is locally encrypted, even he can’t see it and nothing would be exposed if the company was hacked. It uses similar protocols to 1Password, “Plaintext login information is never sent to our server, nor is your master password” and “we use pretty straightforward public key cryptography.” Remember, your friend could always try to hijack and lock you out, though. And while those protocols may be hardened, TechCrunch can’t verify they’re perfectly implemented and fully secure within Jam.

Whether facilitating password sharing is legal, and whether Netflix and its peers will send an army of lawyers to destroy Jam, remain open questions. We’ve reached out to several streaming companies for comment. When asked on Twitter about Jam helping users run afoul of their terms of service, Backus claims that “plenty of websites give you permission to share your account with others (with vary degrees of constraints) but users often don’t know these rules.” 

However, sharing is typically supposed to be amongst a customer’s own devices or within their household, or they’re supposed to pay for a family plan. We asked Netflix, Hulu, CBS, Disney, and Spotify for comment, and did not receive any on the record comments. However, Spotify’s terms of service specifically prohibit providing your password to any other person or using any other person’s username and password”. Netflix’s terms insist that “the Account Owner should maintain control over the Netflix ready devices that are used to access the service and not reveal the password or details of the Payment Method associated to the account to anyone.”

Some might see Jam as ripping off the original content creators, though Backus claims that “Jam isn’t trying to take money out of anyone’s pocket. Spotify offers [family plan sharing for people under the same roof]. Many other companies offer similar bundled plans. I think people just underutilize things like this and it’s totally fair game.”

Netflix’s Chief Product Officer said in October that the company is monitoring password sharing and it’s looking at “consumer-friendly ways to push on the edges of that.” Meanwhile, The Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment that includes Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Comcast, and major film studios announced that its members will collaborate to address “piracy” including “what facilitates unauthorized access, including improper password sharing and inadequate encryption.”

That could lead to expensive legal trouble for Jam. “My past startups have done well, so I’ve had the pleasure of self-funding Jam so far” Backus says. But if lawsuits emerge or the app gets popular, he might need to find outside investors. “I only launched about 5 hours ago, but I’ll just say that I’m already in the process of upgrading my database tier due to signup growth.”

Eventually, the goal is not to monetize not through a monthly subscription like Backus expects competitors including password-sharing browser extensions might charge. Instead “Jam will make money by helping users save money. We want to make it easy fo users to track what they’re sharing and with whom so that they can settle up the difference at the end of each month” Backus explains. It could charge “either a small fee in exchange for automatically settling debts between users and/or charging a percentage of the money we save users by recommending more efficient sharing setups.” Later, he sees a chance to provide recommendations for optimizing account management across networks of people while building native mobile apps.

“I think Jam is timed perfectly to line up with multiple different booming trends in how people are using the internet”, particularly younger people says Backus. Hub says 42% of all US consumers have used someone else’s online TV service password, while amongst 13 to 24 year olds, 69% have watched Netflix on someone else’s password. “When popularity and exclusivity are combined with often ambiguous, even sometimes nonexistent, rules about legitimate use, it’s almost an invitation to subscribers to share the enjoyment with friends and family” says Peter Fondulas, the principal at Hub and co-author of the study. “Wall Street has already made its displeasure clear, but in spite of that, password sharing is still very much alive and well.”

From that perspective, you could liken Jam to sex education. Password sharing abstinence has clearly failed. At least people should learn how to do it safely.

PROTIP: Feeling lonely? Go to your Netflix settings, click “Sign out of all devices,” and wait a few hours.

Voilà! If you check your phone now, you’ll find you have several new texts from friends you haven’t spoken to in years.

— John Backus (@backus) January 15, 2020

[jaynearmesiln3001propractice]

                                     Their Website: https://theaoi.com/

AOI was established in 1973, their aim is to maintain the illustration industry, by uniting illustrators and the industry with education, promotion and campaigning to “achieve a thriving industry for all.” They represent a voice for independent illustrators, protecting their rights and creating ethical standards within the industry. 

The lecture was with Rachel Hill (membership manager), she covered a range of information, some of which I have covered slightly on this blog. But I will start with the benefits of joining the AOI, and prices. The AOI help with networking, and have a page on their website dedicated to upcoming events. When you become a member you gain access to exclusive resources that are very valuable and helpful. Once you leave uni, getting the support and advice you need can be hard, but the AOI offer these services. You receive dedicated help by email or by phone 24/7. They can advise you with forming contracts, negotiations and professional practice. Once a member you also receive discounts on their publications, directories, as well as a free magazine subscription. They offer portfolio reviews and feedback and business consultations with professionals. The best time to become a member is now, as the student discount is £56 per year, £4.80 a month. They also conduct a competition called the World Illustration Award (WIA), where the top 200 entrants are sent out to commissioners worldwide.

Their Publications:

- THE ILLUSTRATOR’S GUIDE TO LAW AND BUSINESS PRACTICE BY SIMON STERN

- THE EDITORIAL DIRECTORY

- THE ADVERTISING DIRECTORY

- THE PUBLISHING DIRECTORY

- ALL DIRECTORIES

The Lecture

Self-promotion

- keep your self promotional websites and social media, simple, clean and to the point, Let your work speak for itself, this means thinking about what work you’d like to be commissioned for and making sure your work reflects it. keep your work within one style, otherwise it can be confusing for clients. -Make sure your website works on mobiles, as this is the most common way people will find you. People rarely browse social media on their computers.  Clients and commissioners are not always a huge fan of contact forms, so include an option for direct emails or phone calls. Cut out the middle-man.  

Finding Clients 

- Rachel Hill suggests to study the industry and find your niche, creating dream client lists can help you find your desired specific area in illustration.  - She also suggests to buy directories, which are full on client contacts, that want to be contacted. I have linked these books above and the AOI sells one for each industry sector for illustration. Make sure you are contacting people for valid reasons, do not send blanket emails, these are now against the law. When emailing avoid starting with “Dear sir/madam”, this feels impersonal and can come across as a scam/spam email. Find their name and make sure to introduce yourself, including a link to your website. Your email can include some images, we are all visual people, and like to see pictures.  - try posting physical items to commissioners. Again make sure it’s addressed to a specific individual usually an art director; easily found on LinkedIn. This is something I am already working on, as I am creating a calendar to send to Phil Cleaver. If this is something i want to be do on a more regularly, then postcards work well and are cheaper to send and produce. Make sure my name and contact details are on the front of the postcard. 

Business 

- Register with HMRC as self-employed no later than October 5th in your second year of working, this is the latest date but can be done before.  - File your self assessment  tax form by the end of January.  - Keep up to date with accounts or else you will be swamped before your deadline. Keep all receipts, invoices and contracts from every job. 

Social Media

social media is FREE advertising, so make the most of it.  Twitter - it’s recommended as a freelancer to have a twitter account. Having a sense of community can make the worklife feel less lonely and garner support from all over the world. Though be careful not to rant about bad experiences, these rants can be damaging and cost you future clients. Instead the AOI can help you deal with these issues privately. Make sure you do NOT post about projects that have yet been released to the public. Companies will try to sue you, unless previously discussed and agreed with.  Instagram  - Instagram is also great as its a visual platform, but make sure to keep personal and professional accounts separate. Make sure to use the stories function on instagram to draw people to your profile, and give some behind the scenes footage. Social media algorithms love consistent and constant uploads, so aim to post regularly, minimum twice a week. Also try to invest time into interacting with your followers. It is recommended that 30 minutes a day will keep you relevant enough for the algorithm to promote you. Make sure your instagram account is on ‘business’. 

Rights

When you produce an image, you have the copyright through your lifetime + 70 years after that. You cannot copyright a style, technique or idea only the image itself. This includes all creative fields including photography, so make sure to use multiple images for reference, as even an illustration or graphic portrait can be traced back to the original source. The main case study she uses to express the legal issues with this is the Hope, Obey artwork (below) where clearly the illustration was traced. This lead to a legal battle where the photographer of the original image won, and asked for a significant sum of money. Keep your work as unique as possible; stick to your niche, the more generic the greater the risk for infringement. Fanart is also discouraged for a similar reason. 

- Try to avoid a client that asks for copyright assignment. You will lose all rights to your work, and the client will be able to use the image for whatever they like, without further payment or permission. Try to work on a licensing basis, it gives the clients everything they need, whilst keeping your work safe from any unwanted changed, or applications. The AOI can help with licensing, and offer a downloadable PDF that you can fill out and send to the client. 

Moral rights waiver - is automatic to you, but can be waived. A specimen form of waiver by which the author of a copyright literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or the director of a copyright film, waives his rights to be identified as the author or director of the work in question and/or his right to object to derogatory treatment of the work.

Right of paternity - The right to be identified, known as the right of paternity, applies to the creators of original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works. Your work is yours, and is identified with you.

Right of Integrity - The right of integrity protects artists from having their copyrighted works altered in such a fashion as to constitute a "distortion" or "mutilation" of the original work, or in a way that harms the author's reputation or honour.

- When uploading your work online, make sure it is in a lower dpi (72) and your name is apart of the file name, so that your work can be linked to you. But beware some sites such as facebook and pinterest strip all file names, so this link is lost. Also Society6 get the rights to your image, and can then use the image for themselves, so stay away. 

Contracts

Contracts are legally binding, they give clarity and show professionalism. They also act as evidence if there are any disputes between the creator and clients and can be used in court. There are two main types on contacts, verbal contacts that usually take place over the phone, and paper contracts, that are more black and white and in my opinion the one i feel most comfortable with. When a client come to you with a contract it will usually favour them, but it is normal to negotiate and bring them in your favour. This can only happen if you have not yet signed a contract, as afterwards they are non-negotiable. You should always have a contract, it is a good habit to get into, just incase. The AOI also offer a template agreement for clients that don’t have their own contracts. The AOI template is a silent agreement, which the client does not have to sign, they just have to respond if the agreement is okay.  Make sure to keep your end of the bargain, and keep on time with deadlines. The license start date is the date in which the client can start using the image, they cannot use it before this date. Make sure to use words like ‘ONLY’ and ‘EXCLUSIVE’, as it emphasises that they cannot use the images for anything else, and its only them that can use it. Things to look out for are copyright assignment, moral rights waiver and irrevocable licenses, always question these motives and get them removed before signing anything. 

Crucial clauses

- Always make sure payment is defined, how and when you’ll be paid. If your working for a large sum on money, make sure this payment is in stages, it ensures you are paid before moving onto the next steps, and if a project falls through last minute, you have at least been paid previously. These stages can be split between, roughs, amends, and final artwork. Allow 3 amends before charging further.  - Termination clause is needed in case something goes wrong and you wish to terminate. Cancellation is when a project doesn’t go ahead but it isn’t your fault. It also ensures payment up to the stage you have work until.  - Sub-licensing sections mean that if a new deal is negotiated regarding your illustrations, you can recieve more money. For example a children’s book, turns into a film.  - Make sure that you get to finish your work. Sometime companies get one illustrator to do roughs and another to finish them. This is not okay and should be avoided, as it complicated your rights as the copyright owner and payment. 

Negotiation and Payments

When negotiating prices and figures with clients try not to give ball-park figures, and do not accept these either. Push the clients (nicely) to give all details before signing anything, this is crucial to figuring out if you still want the job and if it’s right for you. Address clients like this: “Before I can quote I will need more details....”. Clients may also ask you for your day rate; illustrators do not work on a day rate so Rachel suggests that in response send the licensing agreement.  clients know how to get what they want, they often use tactic such as “we are looking at 3 other illustrators” to make you lower your price. Though don’t feel pressured by this, work for what you feel comfortable with. Working for low prices or for free undermines the illustration industry, as well as your future career and potential income. These big companies have the money to pay you, and often it is within their budget, so don’t let them pin illustrators against each other.  Fees change depending on a variety of reasons. The size of the artwork, where it will be seen, how long they are using it, what the exact usage is, how many illustrations. Softer considerations include, the clients industry; business and finance has a lot more money than education. This also applies to products ie an expensive whisky bottle. Make sure to do background research, this may help inform you on fees, budget and reach of audience. The AOI does offer a pricing calculator, and is only available to members. A good guideline for annual income is London’s living wage £18,700 when first starting, This can be increased after 1-3 years of freelancing to £20K-£25K. Make sure when pricing you consider you outgoings ie, software fees, rent, internet bills and general spendings. Keep track of your money! Average annual income per sector:

Editorial - £20K Advertising - £35K Publishing - £25K Products and Packaging - £22K Corporate - £25K 

Advertising - There are two types of advertising, above the line (magazines, newspapers, billboards etc) and below the line (their sites, social media, in house). Above the line means clients have paid for a the space. the term out of home (OOH) means use in public spaces, these are very valuable. Online adverts and social media posts are below the line and are less valuable. The larger the audience the more you can charge. 

Products and Packaging - payment will depend on the size of the company and the exposure. Background information is key, know the price of the product and its target market. It will give you an indication to the profits of the company and how much budget they have. 

Publishing - You get money for the initial illustrations, but then royalties once the book is sold. This works as a percentage of each book sold and ranges from 5-10% depending on if you also wrote the book. Advance fee which is based on the size of the publisher and the territory it is sold. It is advised that if a self-publisher approaches you, to only ask for a flat fee, as often royalties aren't worth the risk with them. Samples and pitches should be paid for a licence too. Uk licence, single use, illustration for client sample presentation use only £X amount. Additional fees should be added for amends, and if there's a quick turnaround (rush fee) make sure you increase you price, the work you put in should be respected, especially when having to work unsociable hours to rush a deadline (ie. a children’s book in 3 weeks).