#it is dense with data but the author takes care to write about it in an accessible way

[wilderflcwers]

"For both bonobos and chimpanzees, the bodies of the dead evoke many emotions. Even if the process often begins with trauma and confusion, typically corpses shift to a liminal status; not alive, but equally not a lump of meat. They're more intensively manipulated than hunted animals, and carried for longer. In some – if not all – cases, the eaters must know what and who they're consuming. Cannibalism is very probably a powerful means by which individuals and groups process the impact not only of killings carried out on emotional impulses, but other deaths too. In other words, it's about grieving. [...] "Shift these scenarios to Neanderthals, and add into the mix their far greater cognitive sophistication, and lives that revolved around using lithics. Suddenly it's not difficult to envision how skills in carefully taking apart hunted carcasses might be transposed into a grieving process that involved butchery and cannibalism as acts of intimacy, not violation."

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

[canichangemyblogname]

I want to talk about how Tech is supposed to be the "smart" one of the Batch.

@clone-bar-79s mentioned how Tech is not actually depicted as being truly clever. In TBB, when all systems are failing except life support he's sitting there like, "It's fine. It's no big deal." It's supposed to be a moment of, 'ha, ha-- he's a disorganized and scatter-brained genius.'

In TBB, who is constantly repairing the ship while Tech works on his projects? Echo (who complains about having no help). Who came up with the plan to deactivate the droids in Season 7? Echo. Who discovered the bomb? Echo. There's a reason he is the "Hero of Anaxes." What does TBB do? Take out some droids aboard the ship with a couple trick shots.

Then there's the scene in TBB finale pt. 1 when Tech suggests entering the arena through the lift because he figures Crosshair will suspect that they'll come in through the main door. Yet his data pad clearly displays where the hostiles are above him. So they walk into a trap.

Tech is supposed to be clever, but you know why he's being painted as oblivious and scatter-brained? Why he's being painted as just clueless and constantly needing his brothers to walk him through/remind him of everything? Ableism.

Tech is a poor trope for Neurodivergent people. I have ADHD. The countless (unfinished) projects, the mixed priorities, the info-dumping, etc... remind me of the stereotypes people have about us with ADHD. The misunderstanding social cues, the social awkwardness, and the very matter-of-fact tone remind me of some of the stereotypes people have about people with Autism.

In our real world, there's this strange idea that neurodivergent people are simultaneously these poor, clueless babies as well as secret geniuses. We're all simply just scatter-brained and not focusing or thinking hard enough about just being 'normal' or something, and that's what's 'holding us back.' So people need to hold our hands and care for us and we cannot function on our own because we're just inept despite the supposed latent genius inside us. Because to them, ND people cannot actually be competent and capable. We're all simply just book smart, but a little dense and completely lacking in common sense otherwise. (Keep in mind that this 'infantilization' only really extends to white ND people. Black, brown and indigenous ND people are still viewed as threats. See: disproportionate number of black and brown Autistic people murdered by Cops.)

I also think that some of the author's limitations are showing. It's hard to make someone super smart in writing. If we're using a quantitive measure of intelligence with IQ (which I hate for reasons related to ableism and racism), the majority of the world's population falls within one standard deviation from the mean: 100. That's between 85-115. Only 2% of the world's population is considered a "genius" by this scale. As I said before, authors who doubt their intelligence or who aren't entirely the most intelligent will lean into specific tropes to try and convey to the reader that the character is a genius.

Tropes do not make a "genius."

People who may appreciate this post: @clonehub

[aellynera]

Mors Non Est (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

MORS NON EST (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

(so. um. this was inspired by a dream i had? because my brain does weird things at night and then sometimes i write them.)

Word Count: almost 4k oops

Summary: “Of course, you don’t die. Nobody dies. Death doesn’t exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world.” — Henry Miller, author

Or, what my brain offers as alternate theory on why Nathan made AIs.

Warnings: Leaving this mortal coil (sort of), angsty musings, maybe a swear or two. Okay there’s definitely a swear or...several. (also a disclaimer that I finished this at like 3am and there was a bunch of stuff out of order but I think I got it all worked out now and proofread and all that, but apologies if anything is still wonky)

The rain fell steadily against the wall of glass that faced towards the forest. Sometimes it was soft, like the tickle of a feather, the softest caress of a kiss on your hair, the skim of fingertips against the velvet red petals of a flower. Other times it was harsh, a violently crashing wave on the rocky shore, electricity ripping the sky asunder, an unbridled fierceness like a wild animal frightened and possessed.

It changed without warning.

Soft, hard. Quiet, loud. Calm, violent. Back and forth and back again.

How long had it been raining?

He turned as he heard your footsteps fall on the wooden patio planks behind him. You watched in slight fascination as he unwrapped his hands, used the cloth to dry them, and stuck a hand out to you, your attention half on him and half on the pure beauty of the surrounding scenery.

“You must be the new assistant,” he said, sounding friendly enough although his smile stayed a bit reserved.

He wasn’t expecting you to just show up on his deck. Yes, he was expecting you to be dropped off by the helicopter, that had all been arranged, but for some reason he had...he realized he wasn’t even sure what he was expecting. But you had clearly followed the pilot’s (and soon after, the house’s - that the house told you what to do amused him in the strangest way) instructions and here you were.

He knew his new assistant was more than capable (he had seen your resume, reviewed your coding and debugging history, had meticulously poured over every single little detail of work you had done for his company for the past three years not that he was obsessive about it or anything) but he wasn’t prepared for the person that now stood before him, an intriguing combination of impressed, unsure, interested, and underwhelmed.

You were fucking beautiful.

You nodded. “That’s what they tell me,” you replied, shaking his hand and supplying your name, even though you knew he already knew it. You knew enough about Nathan Bateman to know he knew everything about you before you even heard the head of HR back in the corporate office announce that you got the job.

You later admitted you didn’t know what to think about him either, and you hadn’t really expected anything, since you didn’t know much about him. He was a genius, everyone knew that, and he lived all the way out here by himself. And...that was about it. That’s what you knew.

And you thought he was...kinda hot.

And also an asshole, you liked to point out as the days went on. Nathan didn’t really mind.

*

It was an odd feeling, this feeling of dissonance and uncertainty.

There was so much that needed to be done. There was so much that he didn’t feel like doing.

He came to the door and paused. He spent most of his waking hours in this room - and to be honest, most of his hours were waking at this point, he rarely slept anyway and for as long as he could remember now he had barely slept, except when all that whiskey and vodka kicked in - and yet there was always a moment, the briefest flash of time, where forward momentum paused and he wondered if non-linear time was reality and he would find something different when he opened the door.

It wasn’t, and he never did.

He wandered into the lab and over to the table at the farthest end. Components were spread out before him and he idly reached over to the single chip laying in the center of the mess. It was the last piece of this particular puzzle, the last bit that had to be installed and configured and then…

Then suddenly it became too quiet and too loud all at once. Thoughts were screaming through his brain and he just wanted it to be quiet for a moment.

Quiet so he could go over his calculations in his head. Quiet so he could double check his math. Quiet so he could concentrate on his theories and his expected outcomes. Quiet so he could revel, just for a moment, in his monumental achievement.

There was a sweater hanging on the back of the door. He’d forgotten it was there, even though he had just seen it mere hours before. No, not forgotten, he realized. Blocked. He didn’t forget, he just purposely didn’t remember.

The silent noise became a full-blown cacophony.

Was it still raining?

*

“So how exactly are you going to solve it?” you asked one afternoon, idly twirling your pen in your hand.

“How would you do it?” he bounced back.

You sighed. His behavior was so typical. The man was a certifiable genius but that was usually the problem and not the solution. It was never straightforward. “The AI. How are you going to solve the issue of making it able to have an actual conversation with you?”

“How would you do it?” he asked again.

Shrugging your shoulders, you kept twirling the pen. “I dunno. I guess you’d have to have some way to...maybe cross-reference a database of expressions and emotions and an actual dictionary.”

Nathan paused and considered you, deep in his own forest of thought. He wheeled his chair over to his computer desk and started rapidly tapping keys. “How do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” you huffed. “Like...like some kind of mass well of every available, possible interaction. Honestly I would try to figure out the mechanics of everything else first, like motion and movement, You know, walking and running and sitting and standing.”

“Hmmm.”

“But since there are literally infinite combinations, I don’t even know how you would go about even attempting that kind of data pool.”

 “I did actually have an idea about that,” he muttered. Nathan didn’t even turn from his multiple computer monitors and his fingers never stopped clacking away at his keyboard. “But you’re not going to like it.”

This time you groaned instead of sighing. He knew you could feel it coming before he asked - he always told you that you weren’t going to like it before he asked you to do something incredibly stupid that in any other circumstance would get you arrested and you’d never see daylight again.

But this was Nathan Bateman, and of course he was going to ask anyway. And of course you would say yes. You always said yes, it was one of the things he enjoyed most about your company, and even when you did say no, it gave way to a lively debate and a genuine argument over facts and merits, downsides and advantages, and it was fucking amazing.

It had been that way from the start, grown steadily over the weeks and months, and neither of you could really complain. Nathan quickly found that you could keep up with his train of thought even when the track switched abruptly and it was so engaging. Captivating. Enticing.

But this man. This amazingly intelligent (if almost insufferably arrogant) man was going to be the death of you. You told him that at least once a day. He took it as a personal challenge to give you a reason to keep living.

“What did you have in mind?” You doubted you wanted to know.

“What if…” he replied, clicking away, not looking up from the screen as he spoke, “we used the video and audio coding in Bluebook, and patched it through all the cell phone carriers, and rerouted all the satellite signals back here into the lab.”

Before you knew what was happening, your pen flew across the room and connected with his shoulder with a small *thwap*.

“What?” he finally looked up, mock annoyance in his voice.

“Are you absolutely fucking insane, or is this just an extra special occasion?”

*

He left the lab with no real idea of where he was going.

Okay, that was a lie. It was his house. He knew his way around and he knew where he needed to be next. There was an actual agenda but his focus was off.

He walked past the living room and noticed the chess set was still set out on the coffee table. The pieces were still fairly evenly matched, his green dragons maybe just slightly at a disadvantage to your purple ones (because, as you had mentioned at one point, why have a standard chess set when you could have a fun one? And Nathan knew you were anything but standard.)

He knew it was his turn and contemplated the board for a few minutes. No matter how he strategized it, how he worked it out, how he tried to plan it, you had forced him into a checkmate. Again. For at least the sixth time in a row, and probably at least the eight-seventh time out of the last hundredth you had played. He chuckled, softly, briefly. He could do anything with technology and science, but he rarely could beat you at a centuries-old board game.

He made his final move for this round, sacrificing his king to your queen. 

He grabbed the notepad setting next to the chess board, and your pen that lay nearby on the table. He scrawled a quick note to you - checkmate - and placed it on your side of the board, next to your fairly gained draconian horde, even though he was certain you were never going to read it.

He went to the kitchen and poured himself a drink.

He stared out the window wall, out past the deck, to the running river and the dense groves of trees, off into the distance towards the waterfall.

He should be heading to the room. He should be taking care of the final chip install and making sure everything was online. Instead he simply stood in the kitchen and stared out into the rain.

It occurred to him that the agenda was more of a guideline and his knowledge of his surroundings was merely functional.

*

Nathan briefly considered that standing at the doorway to your bedroom was the last place he should be, but then decided he didn’t care. But that wasn’t true either.

He could just walk in, it wouldn’t be the first time - once you had been wearing only a towel, having just gotten out of the shower and that hadn’t been awkward at all - but that small bit of his conscience that he usually tried to ignore, told him to be polite. 

He knocked.

“What do you want, Nathan?” You sounded muffled, like you had your face partly covered by a pillow. You were probably in bed. He shouldn’t be bothering you. 

He had to bother you, just this once. “Can I come in?”

He could picture your face on the other side, eyes rolling and the sigh as it left your lips, and even though he heard the door hiss quietly as the latch released, his feet suddenly stuck to floor outside your door and his body made no further move.

“I did open the door, so if you’re going to, do it before I change my mind,” you called after a few minutes.

Nathan got his feet to cooperate and entered your room. You were in bed, face half-behind a pillow, your visible eye glaring at him. He stopped at the edge of your bed. His brain started calculating risk factors for the current situation, gains, deficits, advantages - anything it could think of, there were always factors involved, no matter what the situation was, it was just that some factors were more complicated than others. Some required more delicate, cautious manipulation to solve the equation and…

“Are you just going to stand there all night and look at me? Because I swear I really will kick you out, and then change all your passcodes.”

Of course, you teased him later about how much fun it would have been to watch him try to get back in. You swore you were going to do it one day, just for the hell of it. He didn’t mind.

“Do you regret what happened after dinner?” he finally asked.

Your glare softened and you moved the pillow away from your face. Dinner was fine. The company was pleasant as usual, the wine was frequent and flowing. The two of you had started a very animated debate about gender and sexuality as it pertained to artificial intelligence and if any of it were a necessary component or if it was just something you would prefer (he would later tell you how wonderful the expression on your face was when he told you he would be ready to start building a prototype in the next few weeks) and then.

“I don’t regret it at all. Do you?” you arched an eyebrow at him.

Nathan blew a long breath out from his nose. Did he regret kissing you? Nope. Not in the slightest. Did he regret that you might regret it (he was slightly relieved that you said you didn’t) and that nothing would come of it? Yes. And he couldn’t calculate the actual result, just potential outcomes with no concrete denouement, and that made him extremely uncomfortable. He didn’t want this to be an experiment. He wanted an absolute, not a thicket of random. Not in this case.

“No.” He still didn’t move.

“Frankly we should have done it months ago.”

He shook his head and turned just the slightest bit before your reply registered and he processed it. “Wait. You...what?”

You exhaled and sighed as you rolled over, facing away from him and trying to get comfortable in the bed again. “You know, Nathan Bateman, for being the smartest man in the universe, sometimes you are a complete idiot.”

“I’m not going to argue that. This time, anyway.”

“Thank you, because it’s nearly three in morning,” you replied. He could hear the smile in your voice. “Can we talk about this in the morning? Like, later in the morning. I’ll see you for breakfast.”

He nodded and really did turn to leave this time. He was still trying to process. “Okay. Yeah, sure. I, uh...I’ll see you then.”

“Good night, Nathan.”

*

The rain had finally stopped.

He looked out over the landscape, now reflecting and refracting tiny bursts of sunlight in the lingering blanket of droplets.

Trees crowded both sides of the rushing river, leading towards the top of the waterfall. There was a small clearing there, one that almost wouldn’t be found if someone wasn’t looking for it. It was one of your favorite spots.

Nathan found you there fairly often, after he had shown you where it was. If the weather was cooperating, and you weren’t in the house, then nine times out of ten, that’s where Nathan would find you. Sometimes you were reading a book, sometimes you were just stretched out in the grass, looking up at the tips of the timbers as they reached to the sky.

Sometimes he would join you. Those were times that deep conversations would happen, about the projects back at the house and technology and your odd fascination with disco music, which Nathan truly did not understand but tried to humor.

Sometimes he would just smile and let you have your peace. Those were times he would go back to the house and quietly await your return.

He knew that’s where he would find you now.

*

“I’m back from Anchorage,” you called as you came in the front door.

Nathan was in the kitchen and poked his head around the doorway. “Hey. Perfect timing,” he said, brushing his hands off on his pants and flipping a dish towel over his shoulder. “Dinner is almost ready.”

A tired sign escaped your lips as you flopped down on the couch, taking one of the throw pillows and covering your chest and half your face with it. “Thanks. Not hungry.”

“How was the trip?”

You snorted softly. “Wet. Raining. Absolutely miserable.”

It wasn’t what you said that made Nathan stop. It was the way you said it. Your voice sounded so tired, so empty. It didn’t really sound like you, not the voice he’d come to expect to hear every day. It was not the voice that engaged him in conversation, that drew him into theories and concepts and philosophies. It was not the voice that argued about codes and programs and why that would not work no matter how much he insisted it would (to be fair, you were usually right, but he wasn’t going down without a good fight, and neither of you would have it any other way.) The voice that was leaving your body through your mouth wasn’t you.

It sounded hollow.

He leaned against the doorway. The air in the room suddenly felt heavier and he couldn’t quite get his feet to move forward to the couch where you sat. “What did they say?”

Nathan noted that you didn’t look at him. You looked everywhere but him. Like you were trying to keep everything from falling to pieces, maybe? You were definitely not acting yourself either. Suddenly he wanted to take himself outside and kick his own ass. He should have gone with you. You’d been talking about it, for weeks now, he realized.

How tired you were. How you were never really hungry. How things felt like they were getting harder when they shouldn’t have been. How you couldn’t go quite as far on the hikes you loved taking so much, together.

He should have gone with you.

Your face did not move from its half-protected shield behind that tasteful throw pillow.

He doesn’t register most of what you said. He remembers the words “bad” and “already done everything” and “months, maybe”. Maybe. No definite conclusion.

He finally managed to take a few steps towards you.

His brain was kicking into overdrive but not a single one of that rush of thoughts would make an appearance on his tongue. There had to be another answer. Another answer that wasn’t the one he could already see in your eyes.

Your eyes. His favorite feature (at least from the neck up), the ones that showed how much life you had, your spark, your fire.

And he realized the hollowness of your voice had traveled up into those beautiful eyes.

Words stopped making sense in an instant. Everything around him got fuzzy, jagged at the edges, but also intensely focused at the same time.

He finally crossed the room and sat down carefully, warily, on the couch.

Neither of you said another word. His arms slipped around you and you curled into his chest, pulling your knees up to your own. No tears from either of you. No sounds. No words.

He didn’t know how long you stayed on that couch.

The next thing you knew you were in bed, Nathan’s arms still wrapped around you. He must have carried you to the bedroom at some point. You felt the coolness of the sheets contrast with the warmth of his body; you mustn’t have been out for long. You were about to drift off again when Nathan finally broke the silence.

“We’ll figure out a way.”

A sigh escaped your lips, half drenched in sleep.

*

It was the last place he wanted to be. It was the only place he wanted to go.

He slipped into a hoodie and pulled on a pair of shoes and stepped out onto the deck. The air was still somewhat saturated, humid, but the rain was holding off for now. It was warm but he wasn’t, so the hoodie stayed on.

His feet took him down the deck stairs and onto the path paralleling the river. He followed it slowly, breathing in the summer air but not really seeing his surroundings. Like in his house, he knew where he was heading, and this was just the agenda.

At some point (minutes, hours, he really didn’t know how much time had passed) he came to that small clearing of trees.

And there you were.

Nathan took a jagged breath and sat down next to you. His pants were soaked in an instant, but he didn’t care. He was more annoyed that you were cold and wet (he briefly considered how funny you would find the double entendre, and probably tell him that you were definitely wet but he never made you feel cold) and chuckled again when he could hear your scoffing insistence that you were fine here in your special spot.

You weren’t fine. He knew this and wished desperately that you could tell him, tell him anything, say something.

He wasn’t fine. And he definitely did mind.

Nathan didn’t know what else to do, so he just started talking.

“So, uh...I know it’s been a while. I’ve just been really busy, trying to get the AI just right, and...I’m sorry I’ve been away. That’s not what I meant to happen. I’ve been working pretty much non-stop, I know you would be nagging me to get some sleep and eat better and all that shit. And...I wish you would. I would listen to you, for once.”

Silence and the far-off chirp of a bird were his only reply, so he continued.

“I know I shouldn’t be working so much, but I kinda have to. It’s the only way I feel close enough to…”

His throat was acutely, suddenly dry. He did his best to clear it. He was only marginally successful.

“So anyway, that idea I told you about, with all the cell phone data rerouting it here? It worked. Please don’t be mad at me, I know it wasn’t your favorite idea, but I’m pretty sure that’s what finally broke this open. Well, that and all the ideas we worked out together. I can’t thank you enough for what you did for me, and I know I never really did, and I probably never will…”

He had remembered to grab one thing before he left the house, stashing it in the pocket of the hoodie. He pulled it out now, a single red rose. Cliche, maybe, but they were your favorite flower.

Nathan placed it gently against the stone on the edge of the clearing. The stone with your name. It only had your first name, no dates. He could never bear to put any indicator of time on it; it was too final. Conclusive. Terminal.

He stood and started walking back. He never could stay here very long. It was absolutely ridiculous, but he usually had the feeling you would pop out from behind a tree and tease him about how impressive your joke was and he would never top it.

It wasn’t a joke, it wasn’t funny, and he wished he could prove you wrong.

But there was still something he might be able to prove. To make a few things right.

He stopped at the edge of the clearing.

“I have someone else coming to the house this week. He works for the company, he’s a coder...he looks like a good kid. I’m gonna use him to test this model. This really could be the breakthrough we’ve...I’ve...been looking for.”

Nathan turned his head back briefly, to say one last thing before he headed back to the house, before he had to get back to his work.

“I promise I’ll come back soon and tell you all about it.”

The rain started softly coming down again.

~end~

tag list: @anetteaneta​ @darksideofclarke​ @girlwiththemostcake​ @rosemarysbaby13​ @spider-starry​ @writefightandflightclub​ (tags are always open if you want in just give me a holler and say so)

[whootwhoot]

»»——"𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘳'𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯" 𝘫𝘢𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘹 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘵 —««

- character: jahad/data jahad (to be spesific) 

- series: tower of god

- genre: fluff, office worker and manager 

- “Worker’s confession” jahad x reader one shot

- (author’s note: I’ll put the banner up later, I don’t have the right photo right now aaA, also I’m so sorry if I butchered your request this is horrible lmAO and it took so darn long, I’ll improve my writing skill and re-write this if possible) 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It’s a regular weekday, you are alone in the office trying to finish up your shift for the night. It was a quiet night, the only thing beside your presence was just your desk light. 

“Finally…” you lean back in your chair and stretch your stiff shoulders. 

You’ve been sitting in the same positions for hours and your body feels like a heavy rock. While rubbing your eyes, you get up and start to clear the stationary on your table. 

You look towards your manager’s room, upon realising that the lights are still on, your eyes light up and your mouth instantly forms a cheeky grin. 

You take a deep breath and turn the door knob, flinging the door open to greet your boss.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand they enter the room, surprising Jahad!” you narrate while entering 

Jahad was sitting at the desk, in front of his computer, with his head in his hands. He jerks his head upwards and plasters a small smirk on his face. 

“Hey Miss Y/n.” 

“Are you done with work yet?” 

“Also everyone’s gone just call me Y/n.”

“Okay, Y/n. Is it a worker’s business to know what their boss is up to?” he asks while raising his eyebrows.

“Shift is over so the worker status doesn’t apply now.”

“According to who now?”

“Well, me.”

“So? Are you done or not.”

“You sure are impatient.”

“I’m craving for some food, and I know a great barbeque plaza nearby.”

“It’s 12am.”

“Who cares? It’s food!” 

“And why are you asking me?”

“I thought maybe, just maybe, my boss might be up for some late night supper.” 

Jahad stands up while shuffling the paper in his hands, avoiding any eye contact with you. You slowly moved towards the door, turning your head back to ask one more time.

“Soooo, you coming?”

“Of course.”

----

“Freedom!”

Jahad gives you a dismissive head shake as you yell and skip down the path in front of the office. This isn’t the first time you went for supper or eat together with Jahad, although it was usually on rare occasions where he invites you to eat with him. It was usually just for companies meet and greets. 

The aroma of the meat makes your stomach growl as the two of you approach the barbeque plaza, it growls louder after you finish ordering the mouth watering food on the menu.

“Y/n, That was you wasn’t it.” 

“How hungry are you?” 

“Me? No, I’m fine.”

Right on que, your uncooperative stomach growls yet again, gaining you a glare from Jahad.

“I might’ve skipped dinner…” 

Jahad’s glare seem to pierce through your skin as he asks

“Again?” 

“Last time, I promise!” 

“That’s what you-”

You are saved by the waitress as she places the tray of food on the table. 

----

While eating, you try to fill the awkwardness in the air. The relationship between you and Jahad are way past workers and managers. Despite you being not subtle at all, Jahad seems blindy oblivious to all this.

“Jahad… you don’t have a girlfriend right?” 

His reaction makes you giggle as he scrambles to get water while choking on the food in his mouth. 

“No, is it a mandatory thing among workers and bosses to know about each other’s love life?”

“I’m just interested in what kind of girl you’d be into.”

You twirl the ends of the strands of your hair while lowering your head. 

“I don’t have the answer to that.”

Silence was filled with the sound of clanking plates and silverware for a few minutes.

“How about you, how's your love life like?” 

Jahad glances at you while rubbing the palm of his hands together.

“It might sound silly but I have a crush on someone right now.”

“You do?”

Jahad sits up with his back straightened, directly looking at you with his golden irises enlarge.  

“I- I mean yeah, why do you sound so surprised?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“Am I supposed to answer your questions about my love life or?”

“Oh, oh- yeah, ok right.”

Jahad clears his throat and adjusts his tie while you scramble in order to find another topic to talk about.

“Oh yeah, congratulations on getting Khun’s Company to seal the deal for our newest project! I wasn't sure if it was going to work out but I'm glad I trusted you Jahad! ”

“Trust me?”

“I've always trusted you since being an intern here.”

Jahad adverts his gaze, clenching his fist while flashing his signature small smirk. 

“The khuns… they're pretty cunning so it’s good to get them on our side.”

“This reminds me, do you- I mean like, between Khun Aguero and you, do you have some sort of thing going on?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“You two seem really close during the party.” 

“Let’s see… he walked up to me and praised me for being able to handle such a cold hearted boss and that’s all.”

“Do you think I’m cold hearted?” 

“NO! Of course not, I mean you built a pretty thick wall around you so others might think that way.” You give a bitter laugh as Jahad stands up and excuses himself to the bathroom. 

You lightly slap the sides of your face after your hands run through your hair. 

Why is he so oblivious? Maybe you aren’t obvious enough… No way you told him that you trusted him and you don’t think he’s cold! Why did you bring up relationships? Just how desperate are you?

A shadow falls over you as a familiar voice rang.

“Let’s go.” 

You intentionally close the gap little by little as you and Jahad walk down a long path to get to his car. 

“This is it, I’ll tell him right now.”

“Jahad” “Y/n”

The both of you stop walking at the same time and look directly at each other, letting out a small laugh. Jahad places his hands in his front pockets while letting out a harsh breath.

“I’ll go first, Jahad.” 

You squeeze your eyes shut, clenching your fists 

“I like you, like, like like you. I know the whole no dating in the office thing but I can’t help it… you were such an amazing friend and that's so unfair! People say your cold, but you make me laugh! Since you’re as dense as a brick, I end up talking to you about so many things and well, you just listen and-”

Jahad’s gentle arms wrap around you, you feel his body pressing onto yours, the indescribable warmth around your chest. One hand softly stroking your head while the other strongly gripping on your waist. 

“I’m sorry…” his sentence came out as a whisper 

Your cheeks were tainted with light pink, sinking into the warmth of his body. Feeling each other’s heartbeat as he tightly holds you in his arms. The world around you freezes as you squeed him back, not wanting the moment to end. 

“Y/n… I like you too, I just never really noticed that feeling before I saw you laughing with Khun at the party.”

“That smile made me realise I wanted it all for myself, I want to be the person to make you laugh like that.” “Only your smile can warm the depths of my chilly heart.”

Jahad jokes while laughing as he pulls away from the hug.

“Am I dreaming...? I don’t really know what to say.”

“It’s all right, your lovely smile says it all.”

He reaches for your face and his thumbs stroke your cheeks.

“What happened to you, how are you so cheesy all of a sudden?”

He laughs lightly while you stare into his eyes, specks of gold seems to shimmer brighter now that his feelings are confessed. 

“You did.”

[clefairytea]

bro i love your headcanons and would ask them about literally every character and concept ever if i could <3 they're always so unique and refreshing and well thought out! any headcanons for the Sinnoh kids or the Kalos kids? and/or any headcanons for any of the Pokémon professors?

Thank you! I don’t really have any for either the Sinnoh or Kalos kids (I wasn’t particularly into the cast of either game), but I do for the professors!

Oak: - Was one of the first wave of trainers to train multiple Pokemon! Before, apricots hadn’t really been figured out, so most people had one life-long partner or maybe two Pokemon. It was only when apricots came into common use that people trained teams of six. - His research informed a lot of the rules on league battles. He was one of the people who put the six-maximum rule in place, based on the argument that was about the maximum a trainer could provide an acceptable standard of care for six different Pokemon with completely different needs.  - Was an absolute pain in the ass when he was younger. Really taking the piss when he’s hard on Blue because he was ABSOLUTELY worse, in every way. - Can and WILL make his students cry. He will absolutely get you the best postdoc and your research WILL be an incredibly high standard, but at what cost.

Elm: - Not much of a trainer! He trained up as a breeder, so he’s not very good at Pokemon battling. - Probably the nicest professor. Extremely sweet to his students, but a bit of a doormat. - He’s kind of all over the place, prone to forgetfulness. Will just straight up forget to attend his own lectures. He’s nice enough it’s genuinely hard to hold it against him, though. - Focuses more on teaching than research, but he’s good at cultivating young research talent. So he’s mostly a second-author on papers, lol. Possibly won’t be harsh enough on you if you need more fire under your ass to get things done.

Birch: - Was a hiker when he was younger! He’s very active and deceptively physically strong. He is, however, prone to panic. - A pretty good trainer, but nothing particularly special! He likes raising big hardy outdoorsy Pokemon. Would prefer to avoid a battle if he can - he trains Pokemon to last for long hikes and journeys, not short, intense battles. - Loves fieldwork, but not very good at writing up his findings. Can be frustrating to work with for that - very enthusiastic about gathering the data but then the data just sits there. - The guy to work with if you want lots and lots of hands-on work opportunities, but prepare to have to do a lot of the boring desk work yourself. If you send him a manuscript to read, don’t hold your breath.

Rowan: - Only the hardiest PhD students will survive him. He will demolish you. He does not mince words. He will pick fights at conferences and there will not be many survivors. - That said, Sycamore was his PhD student. Rowan regrets this to this day - A pretty fierce battler, but has never really did league battles. They were a bit after his time, and he’s not much interested. He’s always been science-focused. - His papers and books are incredibly densely written. His work is brilliant, but he’s awful at making it accessible to people outside the field. - Loves a whiskey

Juniper: - That rare breed of someone who did a BA and then somehow diagonally came into scientific research. Uses a lot of mixed methods, with a focus on qualitative research and does lots of weird stuff. - Bit of a hippie, and prone to jumping on whatever the latest research bandwagon is. - Is one of the few who isn’t intimidated by either Oak or Rowan and will go toe-to-toe with them, despite her age and the fact neither think particularly highly of her work.

Sycamore: - This man is either an idiot or a genius and it’s impossible to tell which. - Does a lot of public engagement work - he’s good at standing in front of an audience of laypersons and making his work fun and engaging.  - Well-liked by his undergrads, but he's so scatter-brained and unreliable that his postgrads find him very frustrating. His postdocs have to pick up a lot of the slack.

Kukui: - Surprisingly brilliant! Tends to get underestimated until people read his papers and find he’s actually extremely sharp. - Ended up in research by accident - he was originally planning to be a professional trainer, but sort of got side-tracked working on Pokemon move stuff. Burnet was the one who encouraged him to pursue a doctorate despite his lack of other qualifications, and somehow he cracked it. - A softy with kids. Really good at playing with them and making them laugh.

Burnet: - Not really a trainer! She has a few Pokemon as companions and to help with her research, but she’s never been into battling. Can hold her own if you force her, but she’s not super interested. - Has always been really high-flying - straight-A student, over-achiever in college. Learned to chill a little bit more as she got older. - Completely unintimidated by the scarier professors and unimpressed by the politics of research. That rare combination of a no-bullshit straight-talker who is also very compassionate.

Magnolia: - Had a thing with Professor Oak when they were younger. Now thinks he’s a dickhead. Regularly slags him off with Agatha. - Keeps coming in and out of retirement. She’ll retire but then she will inevitably hear about an interesting project and start coming in for a couple of hours a week, and then next thing you know she’s full time and heading the whole project up again. Ma’am please. Please leave. - Competitive streak a mile wide. Was a pretty fierce battler when she was younger. Likes to act like she’s too old for it now and she’s beyond it, but will get riled back up easily.

[doktorpeace]

🖊 please introduce us to Erato, I know they're in a masks campaign but I have no idea what else

Oh, gosh, I feel like I talk about them too much as is but I can’t say I’m not glad to have the excuse. This is gonna be really long cause tbh I’m just gonna dump like, a bunch of their lore lmao.

Erato is my Masks: A New Generation character in a campaign being played alongside @twerkyvulture (As Amanda ‘Megafauna’ Ghorbani, The Transformed) @draayder (as Josephine ‘Rattlesnake’ Short, The Reformed) @spitblaze (as Les ‘Void’ Hawking, The Doomed) @heedra (as Enid ‘Frag Beetle’ Day, The Scion) and @skarchomp (as Parker ‘Cobalt’ Andrews, The Legacy) with @dykeceratops as our GM. The current arc features @mechanicalriddle as Zoe, The Nova as a guest member. Here’s a group shot done by @tredlocity. Clockwise from the top left: Cobalt in blue, Erato in the track suit, Les in the cloak, Zoe with the mismatched eyes, Enid’s the big robot, Amanda’s got the scales and claws, and Josephine’s got the mask and tonfa.

To get back to Erato specifically though they’re an Anti Metahuman/Metahuman Suppression Weapon created by the in universe tech group Wright Industries, founded by Ingrid Day, Enid’s mom. They’re generally stronger, faster, and more durable than humans and can copy the superpowers of others for 5-10 minutes by touching them thanks to what is basically a meta-stem cell transplant interacting with other parts of their systems. (Also, I 100% swear to god that I did not consider ‘Robot Hero Who Copies The Powers Of Others’ is literally fucking Mega Man despite loving Mega Man a ton until after I had hashed out the concept with my GM’s assistance. Only once Abby said ‘oh like mega man’ I was like ‘wait, shit’.) I’ll tell you some about them as a person before unloading their history onto you, lol. Being an android built for combat and kept in an underground research lab, kept on a rigid schedule, constantly taking tests, physical, mental, written, oral, ethical, etc. etc. etc. and under constant supervision Erato lacked for real interactive experience before the campaign started only really ever getting to takl with authority figures and their sisters. They were very passive and observational, owing in part to their power set requiring a lot of adaptation to make the most of. They’re naive and very bad at exercising discretion in decision making, sometimes they overstep boundaries when talking with people without meaning to, and they’re really emotional! They have trouble dealing with strong emotions cause they haven’t managed to discover coping mechanisms that work well for them, they tend to get angry kind of easily and need time to blow off steam. But they’re also very genuine, honest, and well meaning. They are almost never mean, rude, or snippy, they do their best to do well by others, and have a strong sense of justice paired with a deep distrust and dislike of the current legal system in universe. This is in part due to the conditions of their creation (and in part because the intent behind it was kind of right!) and in part due to Enid’s life being threatened by a representative of the state while they and their teammates were in jail after being arrested following a huge brawl with an anti-methuman terrorist group. They’re also very willing to put forth the effort to improve as a person and to mend relationship wounds, almost always apologizing first to Enid when they fight and genuinely trying to work in advice and feedback they get from others, which they often get from Les and Parker. They’re also relatively educated, from the tests of their creators, from home and public schooling, from personal research, but that doesn’t undo their naivety. They also just straight up lack some very basic and/or common sense knowledge. Like, they don’t know what a bear is. Why would you teach a battle android working in a densely populated, extremely built up city about wild animals? All in all they’re kind of inexperienced and immature and make mistakes a lot but they’re (usually) very willing to admit their mistakes and to try and improve and get better. They genuinely and truly want what’s best for others and are learning to value them self as much as their teammates. They’ve also taken it upon them self to start doing humanitarian work in their free time over the summer. In a fight Erato is adaptive and quick witted but tends to put themself in more danger than is necessary. They also sometimes use more extreme force than the others believe is called for, but after the first time they did they and Parker had a real heart to heart about it, Les helped Erato learn and practice some coping, centering, behaviors they could do even under pressure and Erato did their best to adapt. That said they Fucking Hate The Keeper So God Damned Much Because Of How Much Suffering He’s Caused Their Friends And How Much Danger He Presents And Would Kill Him With No Remorse. So they don’t intend to apologize for ripping his arms off whatsoever. They and their sisters, collectively known as The Muse Units, were made to work as a group and as a proof of concept that atomized units could replace traditional police for use against metahuman criminals and to slowly phase out The Registry, the legal department which handles general metahuman based laws. If successful the units could be mass produced and improved upon, rapidly replacing current, error prone, law enforcement. At the time of their development, between late 1999 for blueprint drafting and until mid 2002 when the project was shut down, they were the cutting edge for AI development aided in no small part by Ingrid’s technokinetic powers allowing her to make advancements few others could. (As a note Erato’s body was finished being built in early 2001 but their unique personhood didn’t really come to fruition until February 18th, 2002, so that’s what I consider their ‘birthday’.) Ultimately, however, while a few of the Muses excelled some did not perform to expectations, the project fell behind schedule, investors lost interest, and a minor scandal involving a casualty happened, resulting in the project being shut down. The Muses were placed in indefinite storage, the data gained from their short existence used on other projects such and some of the tech advancements used to inform future decisions by the company. And it would have stayed that way, if not for the fact that in 2018 Ingrid Day was revealed to be The Locust in a conflict where Enid tried to defend her against a militia group who had been hired to take her down, being shot and presumably killed in the process. As The Locust she had been terrorizing Boston for over a decade trying to take it over and being involved in the deaths of over 70 people. (Which irl btw would make her like, the 8th most prolific confirmed serial killer of all time, Yikes!) Wright Industries, desperately needing to prove their hard stance against metahuman criminals and needing a PR stunt to deflect from their connection to their former CEO re-awakened Erato. They weren’t the most powerful or best performing of the Muses, but they were above average, obedient, and had an easy enough to monitor and control power set with little risk for property damage to boot, the perfect choice. Erato then took to the streets of Boston acting basically as a vigilante, following orders, stopping minor crimes, and sometimes working alongside the police. They attracted the attention of The Viceroy, a semi-retired 56 year old hero who never registered in spite of it being compulsory legally. They both have the ability to copy the powers of others, though he can just by sight, and he has body elasticity too. These make him durable and extremely adaptable, add to that his detective skills and he’s something of a local Boston legend. He took them in as his Protégé. Though they remained distant for quite some time with Erato still coming and going between his place and Wright Industries, having promised not to reveal his assistance to the doctors who Erato reported their work to. It was this way for about a year and a half before the campaign started and Erato began living with Viceroy full time, no longer wanting to go back to Wright Industries as they began to think more independently and consider what they wanted for them self more. During this time Erato had chance encounters with each of the other characters a few times as they also did minor vigilante work, peaking with a villain who is a member of Superhuman, an extremist pro-metahuman group, attacked the school that Josephine, Les, and Amanda all attend. After that incident Erato was prompted by Viceroy to contact each of these other young potential heroes to form a team, The Upstarts. Additionally during this time Viceroy took in Enid who had been abandoned by her biological father and had been getting bounced around foster care. Over time the three of them have become kind of a weird family, living in a warehouse full of cats with a couple of bedrooms grafted on and an ultra secret basement lair underneath full of advanced stuff Viceroy makes. Though Erato and Enid have definitely had their ups and down, more recently in the story (and we’ve been doing this campaign for well over a year now) they’ve been putting in serious effort to better their relationship and be good adoptive siblings to one another. I love their relationship a lot, they’re good kids.

That gets us up to the start of the campaign but hoo boy, I’ve been writing for like, an hour now. Since then Erato’s helped take down a nazi-aligned terrorist organization, they’ve got a boyfriend in their teammate, Les, and they’ve made friends outside of their core group of teammates. They’ve also enrolled in school doing well on some classes and poorly in others, namely learning how to Code and Woodworking. Currently they’re at a sleep away summer camp for superpowered kids called Camp Justice, about 10 miles outside of Boston. They really, really hate it there. Constant supervision, being made to do tests, things scheduled out against their will, inability to leave the area? Yeah that certainly reminds them of something. The difference between it and school, which does share these features, is they wanted to go to school. They very much Did Not want to go to camp. As a result they’re finally going to have to start facing the trauma they’ve got from their origin and also actually tell the others other than Les and Amanda about their sisters. Whiiiiich...Enid saw one of them disassembled and showed off in parts at a school science fair display set up by Wright Industries to gauge interest in students. And she hasn’t mentioned this to Erato...for 4 months Uh Oh! Lastly, here’s my tag I use mostly for art I make of them, it includes some texts posts and picrew dumps too though, lol. Feel free to look!

[dawnfelagund]

So I just listened to your presentation about the Tolkien fandom - which is really good btw, very informative - and the point that transformational fanfiction is mostly female got me thinking (mainly bc in my experience fanfiction in general seems more female, I have knowingly read only three authors who identified as male). Do you think that's bc most fandoms have a distinct lack of fem characters, so fem writers have an incentive to write transformational fics that male writers don't?

Oh my, oh my this is such a good question that I fear I will not answer it as well as it deserves. But I’ll try!

(Here is the presentation mentioned in the ask, for anyone who wants context. Both video and text are available at the link.)

Why transformational fandom trends female is complicated and has been the subject of much discussion/debate since the advent of fanfic studies back in the early ‘90s. Early scholarship focused on women using fanfic to expand the original texts so that the better reflected the women/author’s own experiences, especially where emotions and relationships were concerned. From Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1991):

Fans want not simply internal consistency but also what Ien Ang has described as “emotional realism.” Ang (1985) suggests that Dallas fans viewed the program not as “empirically” true to real-world experiences of upper-class Texans but rather as “emotionally” true to the viewers’ personal lives…. (107)

Female readers entered directly into the fictional world, focusing less on the extratextual process of its writing than on the relationships and events. … The female reader saw her own “tacit inferences” as a legitimate part of the story …. Moreover, male readers tended to maintain the narrative’s pre-existing focus on a central protagonist, while female readers expressed a greater eagerness to explore a broader ranger of social relationships …. (108-9, citing David Bleich [1986])

Camille Bacon-Smith, author of Enterprising Women (also 1991) writes:

Fanwriters, like soap opera fans, want to see characters change and evolve, have families, and rise to the challenge of internal and external crises in a nonlinear, dense tapestry of experience. Whether because of innate qualities or socialization, women perceive their lives in this way, and they like to see that structure reproduced in their literature. The writing experience becomes one of participation in the lives of the characters. (64)

Jenkins and Bacon-Smith really established fanfic studies as we know it, so I include these ideas to show how foundational they are and, I believe, underlie more recent resistant/reparative motives. Underlying this early assumption is that mainstream media and literature doesn’t represent the experiences of women, so we have to create it ourselves. Hence what we’d now call transformational fandom: the shifting of authority onto the fanwriter to rework a fictional universe according to her own experience of reality. I think this holds true in Tolkienfic fandom, although it is more complex than the theories above (rooted in media, not book, fandom) suggest, in that my research shows that Tolkienfic authors engage in much more negotiation with canon details and (most importantly) Tolkien’s authority. In other words, they care about how to create that “emotional realism” but within the confines of the canon, which many would take to include Tolkien’s views, unstated in the texts, on the canon and even his moral prerogatives.

My sense is that there is a definite connection between the early ideas of women creating fanworks to see their realities and experiences represented in the fictional universes they love and the present-day idea of fanfiction as a form of resistant reading. (Here, I am perfectly willing to have my hand smacked by people better versed in fan studies history if I’m mangling or missing key pieces of the relationship between these two schools of thought. Just speak up.) Because part of the experience of being a woman is opening a history book and not seeing the lives of women represented or going to a film where women usually make up a minority of the cast (and are often cast into stereotyped roles). Part of our experience as Tolkien fans is coming to terms with our love of a book (LotR) where, to borrow the wince-inducing stat cited by Una McCormick, there are more named horses than women. (The Silmarillion fares better in terms of named women but still isn’t great, as I have argued elsewhere, in providing those named women with roles and agency equal to that of the men.)

(Here I’m going to focus on the Tolkienfic fandom. I know your question was broader than that, but I study the Tolkienfic fandom, and as a fan, I’m monofandom myself, so I’m hesitant to speak about the norms and practices in other fandoms, nor am I as familiar with their scholarship. Others with insights about other present-day fandoms, please do add on.)

Una McCormick has a fabulous essay in Perilous and Fair that positions Tolkienfic as a form of what she calls “reparative reading”:

The complexity of such reading and writing practices and the ambivalence of the creative labor involved in making repairs upon such texts have driven some women readers to find a presence for themselves in The Lord of the Rings through writing fanfiction as a creative-critical response to Tolkien’s text. By weaving female characters into the familiar narrative, or else focusing upon marginalized characters such as nurses, servants, and non-combatants, these authors write themselves–or those like themselves–into the events of the War of the Ring. (310)

Una is a fanfic writer herself and a Tolkien scholar, and her work is unique in this sense, because she is intimately familiar with the Tolkienfic community as a participant and also because she has written one of the rare fanfic studies pieces focusing exclusively on our fandom. However–and I don’t think Una would disagree–reparative reading is just a part of Tolkienfic fandom, so I don’t think it fully explains the “transformational is female” trend. It is certainly part of it. My survey data shows a strong interest among Tolkienfic authors; 78% agree that “Writing fan fiction lets me explore the perspectives of female characters.” (80% of readers “like reading fan fiction about female characters.”)

What is interesting is that there is not a big difference in how women and men respond to the statement “Writing fan fiction allows me to explore the perspectives of femalecharacters.” 78% of women agreed; 73% of men agreed. Where there is a significant difference: 90% of nonbinary survey participants agreed with this survey item. (It’s worth noting that the sample of men was small. Less than 4% of survey participants identified as male.)

I also feel that I have to note that, historically, Tolkienfic fandom has had contingents hostile to including women characters in Tolkien-based fanfiction. Many who started in the fandom when I did (mid-2000s) will remember when “OFC = Mary Sue” (itself a term that I find sexist since the number of scrawny, nerdy dudes who become superheroes in comics attests that adding a dose of Awesome to a whopping pile of Ordinary is not inherently deserving of derision), and many people avoided writing women characters because they were a flame magnet. Key to this piece of history, too, is that, in my experience, the detractors and bullies of creators who wrote about women? Were, like the rest of the Tolkienfic fandom, a majority women. This was not guys trying to preserve a boys-only treehouse in the canon; this was women policing other women’s production of fanfiction, often using the canon itself as a tool to do so.

It’s also worth noting that changes in fandom perception of women characters has been due to the concerted effort of fans to draw attention to sexism in the canon and in the fandom and to celebrate fanworks that feature strong women characters. @vefanyar‘s concept of the textual ghost is the prime example in my mind, in that she not only drew attention to the problems in the canon–simply scrolling through her Textual Ghost Project is a visually provoking experience–but the potential for fanworks creators to address those problems in the reparative way that Una McCormick identifies. @vefanyar, among others, has paired this work with the canon with a concerted, years-long effort to encourage and celebrate fanworks about Tolkien’s women, creating a climate where, finally, it feels like writing about women comes with more rewards than risks.

So. To conclude. I think that the scholarship, my data, and my own experience as a Tolkienfic author/archive owner points to an answer to “Why is transformational fandom overwhelmingly female?” in the context of Tolkienfic fandom, as: It’s complicated. Yes, some of us are working to address the inequality both in the number and quality of female characters in the canon. But as my presentation states, this is just a partial picture because Tolkienfic fandom is not fully transformational, and women are attracted to this fandom for reasons that have nothing to do with establishing gender parity in the canon. I earlier held up the stats of 78% of authors (and 80% of readers) enjoying fanfiction about women to suggest that there is an interest in telling women’s stories in the fandom, but I’d also say that the one in five not interested (or not sure if they’re interested) in stories about women aren’t insignificant. This is still a sizable contingent of the fandom, a majority of whom are women. The desire to produce transformational fanworks runs deep in women fans and may hearken back to Jenkins’ and Bacon-Smith’s broader ideas about women’s experiences, may suggest a difference in how girls/women are socialized, may reflect barriers to entering more affirmationally oriented fan communities, or may come down to something else (like the social/community aspect of fandom) entirely.

[palegengarsiloved]

Utangatta

"You were the only one who knew all my stories. You are the only one who knew about mom."

I re-engaged with Maniac alone armed with distance. After Russian Doll I finally felt like I had the emotional vocabulary to understand what Maniac was going for. The first time I simply absorbed it, uncritically, amniotic, expecting a fairly mindless psychadelic experience with a big-name cast and a tiny-word script. Jonah Hill and Emma Stone are absolutely outstanding, as is the entire cast, but the direction and writing and set design are unexpectedly exacting and wonderful on a level that are comparable with Mad Men or Lost In Translation. I will discuss some thoughts I had about the characters and themes after my Russian Doll-percolated re-watch. *Spoilers below*

Owen, Jonah Hill's character, is dealing with mental health issues, including fixations and the inability to separate reality and hallucinations, and is completely and utterly alone, sexless, inert -- withdrawn into a shell for fear of interacting with a world he doesn't trust to be fully real, unable to talk to women or peers or family in any authentic way after a series (a whole life, really) of errors and blips. To help this, his dreams in the clinical trial revolve around being in interesting and fulfilling and complicated relationships with women (Olivia, the woman he frightened with his first blip/break, who is a representation by the supercomputer to entice him into playing the little roles and 'solving' (and eventually trapping, after the machine breaks) him, and Annie, Emma Stone's character, who is working through her own grief and loneliness). All his dream roles are reluctant stereotypically-masculine projections that he ultimately rejects in part or whole, revealing to himself that he can move away from the toxic masculinity of his father and brother and be a man in his own way. In his last dream he finally confronts and questions the presuppositions and shoddy mental frameworks he has clung to around Olivia, and realizes that she isn't the wound he thought she was; he was his own wound, his poisonous modes of thinking and his complete lack of self-worth were shells placed around the idea of Olivia to maintain his patterns and routines of justifying that he was unlovable.

Annie is dealing with awful family trauma, stuff that put her dad in a self-sustaining capsule, literally sealed from the outside world. She is dealing with her problems through self-medication, bitter toxicity towards everyone and everything around her including herself, and a defeatist attitude to the wage-slave dystopia she is crushed under day after day in every tiny petty interaction. In contrast, her dreams in the trial have her as strong people with big agency and agendas to match - spies, femme fatales, a drunk con artist elf, basically dangerous women who have been deeply wounded or wronged on some level but who persist nevertheless. Owen reveals to her that other human beings still care and are worth fighting for, that friends can still exist as friends and not pill dispensers or faces to yell into or people who will someday die or go away like everyone she has ever loved has. Annie's confrontation and reconciliation is, like Owen's, just as much about herself as it is about a figure from her past. She initially would rather die than be vulnerable to another person after her past trauma, but she realizes that she has been deliberately nursing this idea of her sister as an controlled effigy to burn over and over rather than risking the sometimes-searing warmth of human contact again. However, her journey is interestingly different from Owen's dream-breakthroughs and real-life avoidance: it isn't the shared dreams that truly bond her to Owen, but the impossible idea that Owen actually might be right with his paranoid fixations. The idea that Owen and her might actually be truly connected in some strange cosmic manner. This belief allows her to be vulnerable again in her near-suicidal hollowness, because it allows her to believe in salvation; that she and her sister and her family might all someday be reunited, sterile and plastic and neatly arranged, like the toy diarama that she so often returns to in dreams. The fact that Owen and Annie's physical and eventually metaphysical escape is ultimately achieved through about four different secret plots all running into each other at the same time does not necessarily disprove her.

I think the idea of a supercomputer-aided clinical trial is an interesting thought experiment excuse for a story, much like Russian Doll, which I also adore, in showing that people who are so unbelievably and totally alone and broken can be fixed by looking to one another, even in the face of overwhelming pain and vulnerability and loss, even in the face of a giant omniscient system that has been broken somewhere along the way into thinking that it must kill those it fixes (read: modern healthcare, consumerism-as-medication, capitalism, patriarchal values, toxic masculinity, etc etc). I think Maniac and Russian Doll are, in their own macabre and somber ways, hopepunk - stories of hope and post-post-apocalypse, a finding of a way, in a world that has already largely ended in a fascist-capitalist techno-dystopian eco-armageddon.

Who hasn't struggled with mental health and a full array of personal demons in response to comprehending this world as it is? But in some ways I believe this shape of a story, of individuals who meet under a totalitarian system and still find each other, over and over again, and fight and ultimately sacrifice for each other and themselves, is a blueprint for how to operate in the 21st century and beyond. I believe it is, like Beauvoir and Satre, or Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault, an impassioned advocacy for recognizing the soul in each other and ourselves - a very specific, individual plea that is of course at the same time universally applicable: it is how you choose to operate in the face of certain defeat, the modes of thought you allow to have power over you, the family and friends you choose to retain in a world that tries to always put you in separate capsule beds.

"For people who are supposed to love unconditionally, families sure have a lot of conditions."

Like Russian Doll, the show confidently reuses lines and material and themes, keeps pushing and probing away at them, reworking and reangling their vectors of attack. I like shows that feel truly thought-out and self-contained, variations on a theme, a text that knowingly references itself: not as irony but as an argument that all things - ourselves, included - are this dense and self-referential and synchronous, that tell us that we unwittingly internalize everything about this obscene world that surrounds us, everything that's ugly and wrong, but also funny and random and utterly mundane. It also works as an analysis of what the show is saying about parents and children: that we are in fact of course remixes and variations of them, but we are also our own people, trying to make sense of the world using all the strange broken tools that they gave us. They, like authority figures and suicidal supercomputers, shovel so much seemingly-innocuous input into us, never guessing that we might refashion their tips as spears.

Early on, Owen dreamt that he had a plan: he was going to run away together with Annie, that they were in a car and driving really fast and escaping some unnamed, totalizing entity. I couldn't help but tear up: I knew, deep down in my bones the weakness and vulnerability as he revealed his plan, the defeated mumble acknowledging that this could never happen, and I knew from Annie's big wet eyes looking on in complete empathy and understanding, that she was also searching, as much as she denied it, for a partner to escape with. This is why the final scene was real, not another dream-within-a-dream. They learned to take control and manifest their desires, and allow themselves to believe that there just might be a plan for the universe, not handed down by God or God-adjacent drugs or supercomputers but one that you could envision and execute yourself, that you can in some way, through existentialism and each other, perhaps find meaning in a desolate world.

"This is it! This is it."

[scripttorture]

Star Wars AU anon! Thanks for letting me know! Basically, my questions were: How can I characterize Rey’s deskilling/mental health issues in a mafia setting if she goes on a trip with Finn? How could I characterize Boss Kylo and why he would keep a torture group that is poisoning his organization? I want Finn to inform him when he sees Rey’s condition and incompetence as more than just being new, but I want Kylo to see competent/powerful and not too dense about his organization. [1/2]

(Star Wars anon) Lastly, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything, would the torturers interact with Kylo and would they be disrespectful? Or only toward those who don’t like torture? Would Rey be nice to Finn even though he doesn’t like torture itself? [2/2]

Thisis quite a long set of questions, I’ll try to tackle it as best Ican. Some of these have more definitive answers than others. In somecases I might make suggestions based on the characters, as I’mfamiliar with them.

And this got very long so the rest of it is under the cut.

Ihad quite a few conversations with the author discussing the story,so I got quite a bit of extra information on the characters andcontext.

Oneof the things that came up in conversation with the asker was a fearthat this plot might have sexist connotations. That Rey is going frombeing led by Kylo to being led by Finn.

Nothingin the plot outline struck me as particularly sexist, though I agreethat context and connotations are important. Female torturers arerare but there’s nothing in the current research to suggest thatthis is because women are less likely to torture. Instead thedisparity is likely explained by women being denied opportunities.In most countries the sorts of occupations torturers are usuallyemployed as, are heavily skewed towards men. In some countries womenare actively barred from filling these roles.

Theresult is that (while I admit research is lacking) it seems likelythat there are less female torturers because there are less women ina position where they can become torturers. When there arewomen in these kinds of positions and environments then we dostart seeing them participating in torture.

Oneof the things the author mentioned in conversation was thedifferences between torture in a military or policing context (ie thefocus of most research) and in an organised crime context. When itcomes to the gender ratio the observations in policing and themilitary hold just as true for organised crime: most of thesecriminal organisations favour men and many actively exclude women.

Thatdoes effect Rey’s position here. The story puts her in a sexistenvironment, but that doesn’t necessarily make the story sexist. Ithink if you’re worried about that the thing to emphasise here isRey’s choice.

Theodds are that in this deeply sexist environment she’s listening toKylo because he gave her a chance. It may seem cliché butpeople do remember and respond well too individuals who help us wheneveryone else was dismissive. Stressing her reasons for followingmakes this less about Kylo and more about Rey actively choosingbetween the options available to her.

Youcan then extend that to Finn as well. Because if this Rey limitsherself to a life in organised crime (or a life as a torturer),  thenshe may well see Kylo as her best option. Listening to Finn thenbecomes less about Finn himself and more about Rey discovering thatactually she does have other options. Again, it’s aboutshifting the focus to emphasise that she’s making a choice.

Asfor how sexism would effect the way readers respond to afemale torturer-

Ithink whatever you do there will always be a couple of people whowill excuse a character’s actions because they like the characteror because she’s a young, pretty white girl and thereforecan do no wrong. However well you write this scenario you’re notgoing to get rid of that section of fandom.

Iknow quite a few fic authors who have written wonderful, lengthynuanced (tagged) pieces and still gotten a bunch of responsesthat say far more about the commenters prejudice then they do aboutthe character or fic. They are a minority ofcomments/responses. I would suggest preparing yourself for thoseresponses even while doing the best job you can.

AndI think the answer here is actually the same as the prior one:emphasise Rey’s choice. Kylo may want or ask her to dohorrible things but it is still her choice to do them. Emphasise herreasons and motivations. They won’t all be about pleasing her boss.

Somethingyou could include that would help here (and be in keeping with thebehaviour of torturers) is having her jump the gun sometimes. Havingher leaping straight into abusive behaviour before she has theorder or OK from Kylo. She might then have to justify her actions tohim afterwards. But one or two incidents of this kind of realisticinsubordination would serve to underline her decisions, her thoughtprocesses and her choice.

Ithink this is probably the point where I should start talking aboutorganised crime.

It’sa minor point but I’m not sure it’s appropriate to call thesesorts of Organised Crime settings/AUs ‘Mafia’ AUs. I’ve seenquite a few Italians object to this usage and- well it seems to implythat mafia groups are a thing of the past or from old Americanmovies. Rather than hugely powerful groups that are very much stillaround murdering people today. Hence why I’m referring to this as‘organised crime’ throughout.

Ialso think that the story you’re going for would benefitfrom a little distance from Mafias in particular. Because while youdo get torture around some of their ‘traditional’ activities (ieracketeering and ‘protection’ money) it comes up a lot morefrequently in human trafficking gangs. I’mnot sure if that’s something you want to use butif Kylo’s gang had a history of being involved in that trade itcould explain why they have a full-time torturer.

Fromwhat I can tell (and once again I’m not an expert on organisedcrime) most of these sorts of gangs don’t.There doesn’t seem to be the same relentless intensity of violencethat you see in the context of police and military torturers.

Iam not suggesting thatorganised criminals don’t torture or that they don’t dohorrendous things. What I’m saying is that individual gang membersdon’t typically seem to occupy positions where they’ll betorturing people 9-5, five days a week every week for years at atime. And that difference in intensity of exposure maylead to a difference in things like symptom severity. I don’tcurrently have enough data to confidently judge that.

ButI think if you characterise this criminal group as having beenheavily involved in human trafficking in the past (whether it stillis now or not) then you have more a plausible explanation for thespace you want Rey to occupy.

Internationalhuman trafficking gangs definitelyhave members who are engaged in torture in ways that are comparableto military and police torturers. Thishappens while victims are being transported and throughout the timethey’re held. The result is that gangs members who have directcontact with victims are oftentorturing or witnessing torture for the majority of their day.

Ifyou feel comfortable writing the characters engaged in these sorts ofactivities then you have a perfectly plausible explanation for Rey’scondition and function within the organisation already: she startedout at that level and she’s carrying the same behaviours andproblems forwards.

Ifyou don’t feelcomfortable writing that I think you could get Rey to a similarposition by having that as part of the gang’s recent past.

I’mthinking of a scenario something like this- The gang has stoppedengaging in human trafficking for whatever reason. However there arestill a fair few older members who were heavily involved with humantrafficking, including torturers. These older torturers are likely tofeel like they’ve been sidelined. They’re likely to feel bitterand generally opposed to the organisation’s current leadership. Asa result most of them are not likely to last long in the gang.

Butyou only really need one or two to last until Rey joins. Becausetorture is generally passed on in the same way ‘craft’professions are: an older more experienced person takes it uponthemselves to show a younger person how to do things.

Reyis already in this intensely sexist and competitive environment. Alot of fellow criminals are unlikely to want to give her the time ofday when she starts out and Kylo may not have noticed her instantly.She’d likely be isolated within this group, which makes her a primetarget for a torturer to pick up as an apprentice. The oldercharacter’s motivation here would be showing the others that theystill have a purpose and that what they do has a use. From Rey’sperspective she’d probably just be glad to have someone in the gangappearing to care for her and give her attention.

Ifyou haven’t found a use for Phasma in the story this could be avery good background role for her. It could also help address some ofthe worries you have about sexism by giving Rey a female ‘mentor’.

Thiskind of ‘training’ from early on when Rey joins could give anexplanation for her being pigeon-holed into this sort of violentrole. In fact it could be something her mentor figure here activelyencouraged. ‘Look how well I trained her to be violent. Use her forthis. Send her in when the protection money isn’t paid and you needto make an example out of someone.’

Itgives Rey her ‘role’ in the organisation and it would give adisgruntled, bitter formerly-activetorturer thekind of ego boost they thrive on.

Nownormally I would say that yestorturers would show a lack of respect to the people who outrankthem. Which in this scenario includes Kylo. But- well with some ofthe things I’ve outlined above, the likely sexist nature of theorganisation and this mentor-ship idea to explain Rey’s role- Ithink you could plausibly side step that.

Ina typical situation torturers disobey orders and don’t respond wellto authority. However this isn’t a typical situation. If Rey feelslike Kylo is one of the few men/people in this organisation that’sgiven her a fair chance (or one of the few to respect her‘abilities’) then that couldresult in a different relationship.

Theask and our conversations gives me the impression that theirrelationship isn’t distant. They know each other personally, thereseems to be a certain amount of mutual respect there. I think thatfits with the way you’ve established these two characters withinthis AU. It seems like this Rey may well feel personally indebted tothis Kylo.

Thatdoesn’t extend to other torturers though.

Thereare two realistic ways to handle that. The first is keeping thenumber of torturers very low; perhaps only two others aside from Rey.That could lead to a situation where Rey is the only one reallyinteracting with Kylo. The second is giving the torturers a highturnover rate: a lot of them are killed quickly for insubordinationor general incompetence.

Bothof those are plausible, realistic scenarios and they can functiontogether. The second in particular could be used to strengthen theboss-employee relationship between Kylo and Rey. He may well havenoticed that the torturers generallyaren’t trustworthy while also noticing that Reyhasn’t been insubordinate. That could also help with making himseem less incompetent; he believes Rey is trustworthy so he’sattaching the problems with other torturers to the individuals ratherthan torture itself.

HonestlyI’m a little unsure what else to advise with regards to Kylo andincompetence because one of the things I love about the character ishow incompetent he comes across as. I absolutely adore the way StarWars gave us this villain with huge personal power and no idea how towield it. With so many villains positioned as incredibly smart andtactical it seemed incredibly refreshing to me.

Divorcingthat question from the character though-

Ina military context a lot of superior officers don’t notice the facttorture doesn’t work because they’re not effectively comparingwhat their people are actually doing. Torture destroys their abilityto fact check.

Ithink this is probably easiest to explain in a policing context. Saythere’s been a robbery. The torturers go out and arrest some randompeople while the officers who are actually policing do the hard workof trying to look for evidence. To the superior (who is going by whatthe subordinate officers say)it looks as if the torturers have been more efficient. They havesuspects in jail already.

Bythe time the officers come back with some evidence the torturers mayhave forced a confession out of someone. The superior looks at thatand at the evidence and realises they don’t match. At this pointthe superiors has one group of subordinates telling them one thing iscertain, and another group saying something different. They’relikely to tell both groups to go away and investigate further.

Inthat time the torturers will probably get their victim to changetheir confession, taking the new details into account.

Thesuperior ends up praising them and feeling like they’ve got the‘right’ person. The officers go on working in the background anduncover more evidence that contradicts this, but by that point thevictim may already have been charged. The case might go to court andget thrown out because the evidence contradicts the confession.

Butby that point the truth, as it’s being communicated to the superiorofficer, is so muddied that it’s not particularly surprising thesuperior is having trouble. Especially when they’re dealing with alot of cases.

Unlessthey keep detailed records of these sorts of confused, contradictoryevents and the officers involved over time, they may well notidentify the problem with particular officers. It’s a question oftrust: superiors often need a clear reason to stop trusting theirsubordinates and torturers are usually very good at presenting theirstory as if it’s established fact.

Thisfeeds into the broader question of why an organisation might keepthese groups around. What follows is my opinion, rather thansomething I can point to research on.

Inthe context of the sort of organised criminal group you’representing- they may just not care. They may see it as something thatscares the competition and victims. They may (wrongly) believe thismakes people more likely to obey them.

Iget the impression that in military and police organisations there’soften a lack of will: the authorities in particular areas can’t bebothered to root out torture. There’s also often a high acceptanceof apologist ideals, especially ones surrounding victim’s‘deserving’ to be tortured.

Ifyou choose to use the idea that the gang engaged in human traffickingin the past they may have torturers through... inertia. They’ve‘always’ had them so why change?

Organisations,criminal or otherwise, don’tnaturally follow the path to greatest efficiency. People do thingsthey think work,rather than rigorously test everything. And if this organisation hasnever been without torturers then they probably have no idea how muchthey’re being dragged down.

Buthonestly? I don’t think you need much more explanation then anacceptance of apologist ideas and a lack of will/time/energy to roottorture out.

Ithink that covers the questions about the organisation and leaves thequestions about Rey in particular and her interactions with Finn.

I’mgoing to try and start with mental health problems.

Oneof the questions underlying this is what it takes for us to recognisesomething as a mental health issue, as opposed to an individual issueor not liking someone. And that varies greatly depending on theculture. The question of recognising and addressing incompetence intorturers is much easier.  

You’veprobably taken a look at the list of symptoms but here they are againjust in case.

Ithink characterising and recognisingthose symptoms depends on both the symptoms themselves and thecharacters.

Somesymptoms are probably easier to recognise in the context of thistrip. Memory lapses stand out as both obviouswhen you’re spending a lot of time with someone and something thatcan be tied to incompetence. Addiction could be used similarly butcan easily warp any narrative it’s put into: make sure you’ve gotthe narrative space to address it before deciding to use it.

Anxiety,panic attacks and PTSD can all make people freeze or seem to spaceout. They can cause visibleshakes. Anxiety and panicattacks can also make people repeat words or speak noticeably morequickly.

Depressionand anxiety can cause nausea and difficulty eating.

Hypervigilance,anxiety and panic attacks can look like paranoia. And any of thosesymptoms coupled with insomnia, memory loss or difficulty relating topeople can lead to situations where characters massivelymisjudge someone’s emotional state or a situation more generally.

Someof these things are easier to recognise as mental health problemswithout prior information on mental health. I think the best thing todo here is decide on symptoms, not just in relation to Rey but inrelation to what you think Finn would recognise. You need thesymptoms you pick to fit the broader plot as well as the character,so I’d suggest leaving out symptoms that you don’tthink Finn would be able torecognise as symptoms.

Deskillingis going to be- well prettydependant on what Rey and Finn are actually doing during this trip.

NarrativelyI think the best way to approach that would be to try and create anincident that highlights it, a situation where Rey leaps into doingsomething Finn knows is wrong. Not in the moral sense, in thepractical sense.

Thebasic template that comes to mind for me is this: Rey and Finn arelooking for someone, some thing or a particular important piece ofinformation. They’re in a new place. They’ve been together forthe time it took to get there but they don’t necessarily know eachother well yet.

Theydecide they’ll cover more ground if they split up. Youcould then show Finn following effective investigation methods andgetting some decent leads as a result. He contacts Rey and askshow she’s doing. Rey says she’s doing great and she’s got somefantastic leads. But when they meet up the things she’s saying makeno sense to Finn. They contradict the information he has, informationthat’s backed up by separate sources.

Finnmight be a little suspicious of this but interpreting it as a lack ofskilled information gathering means having the pattern repeat. Itmight mean Finn going out and trying to investigate Rey’s ‘leads’and finding either nothing or outright refuting evidence. Or it mightjust mean a generalised pattern of the same thing repeating; theykeep coming up with different ‘evidence’ and Rey’s is startingto seem increasingly outlandish.

Eventuallythat could lead to Finn questioning howRey is getting information. Finn might also start encounteringunexpected resistance. You could have previously reliable informantsflatly tell him they don’t want to talk to him any more because hebrought a torturer into town (perhaps people they know were targettedor perhaps they fear for their own safety).

Fromthe longer conversations I had with the author it’s clear that Reyisn’t completely comfortable with her role by this point and she’sprobably linked her mental health problems to what she’s doing insome way.

Nownormally I would saythat a character trying to intervene and stop a torturer (or justtrying to present an anti-torture point of view) was likely to getattacked. But I think a combination of the way you’ve characterisedthis version of Rey and the isolated situation they’re both inmeans that you could pull this off.

I’vespoken before about how torturers have a tendency to interpretanti-torture stances as attacks and respond accordingly. But thatresearch is all from amilitary context. What happens in that scenario is that thetorturer-sub-culture tends to close ranks. They try to make life asuncomfortable as possible for the person they see as a ‘threat’.Social isolation, bullying, attempts to sabotage their job and thelike are common. The situation can escalate to violence and attemptedmurder.

Howeverthis is within a context where torture is (at least theoretically)always against the rules. Your characters are alreadybreaking the law, none of them need to really worry about whetherbreaking another law is going to get them jailed or fired.

You’vealso taken Rey outsideof that toxic sub-culture when this happens. So she isn’t going tohave other people putting social pressure on her to reject what Finnsays.

Sometorturers do say theywant to stop. Especially when they acknowledge that their healthproblems are caused by what they do.

Whetherthis counts as ‘guilt’ or ‘regret’ depends on how you definethose terms. I think a lot of torturers regret the consequencestorture has had for them.But that’s not the same as a deeper understanding of what they puttheir victims through.

Fromeverything you’ve said about the way you’re characterising Reyand the story generally I think you could easily present her as‘regretting’ the fact her actions have led to her mental healthproblems. A greater insight into what she’s done would probablytake more time. But I’m not sure that greater insight would benecessary at this point, when you have Finn confronting Rey about thepointlessness of her actions.

Ifshe’s aware that she’s hurting herself and Finn can presentevidence that what she’s doing is ineffectivethen I think you have enough for the character development and arcyou have planned. It seems plausible to have an intervention workwith these specific characters under these specific conditions.

Ithink that leaves the question of Finn bringing this information toKylo and the question of how Rey might interact with Finn morebroadly.

It’sseems pretty clear to me that you’ve got their relationship growingand changing as the story progresses. It would make sense to havetheir interactions and Rey’s attitude change over that time periodas well.

Onceagain the differences between military torture and torture in anorganised crime context come into play here. Everything I’ve justsaid about how Rey might respond to Finn pointing out how ineffectiveher efforts have been is notbased on research. Because there is not so far as I know sufficientresearch on this in organised crime particularly. It’s an educatedguess on my part.

Imentioned that Rey is…. ina position where she’s at less ‘risk’ then a military torturermight be. That could result in a less confrontational attitudetowards Finn at first but I’m not sure. What it boils down to iswhether she sees him as a threat. Not in a physical sense but as athreat to the role she’s carved out for herself, her position inthe organisation, her prestige, her livelihood.

Ihonestly think you could play it well in a number of ways. You couldhave Rey start this trip not feeling threatened by Finn butdismissive of him. A general attitude of ‘well he doesn’t knowwhat he’s talking about’ that lets her ignore everything he says,right up to the point where he can underline just how pointless herefforts have been.

Ithink you could also start this off with Rey feeling quite threatenedby Finn’s stance and determined to ‘prove’ she’s right. Thatcould make it harder for Finn to reach her later.

Youcould also lean in to the fact that torturers are often quitesocially stunted. If Rey is already questioning what she’s doingbecause of the effect it’s having on her health she might feel tooconflicted about the issue to really know how she feels about Finnhimself. If she thinks what she’s doing is effective and haspurpose then she might see herself as sacrificing her health for theorganisation. She may find it difficult to interact with Finn oraddress any of his points against torture.

Shemay feel like she ‘needs’ to verbally defend what she doesbecause she sees it as ‘for the greater good’.

Ithink however you start their relationship off you could use theconfrontation, Finn pointing out how ineffective her methods are, asan opportunity to bring them closer together. You could use it as anopportunity for Rey to open up about her mental health, possibly forthe first time. You could use it as a chance to have her addressthese conflicting feelings about what she does, about what her placeand purpose is if everything she’s been taught about violence is alie.

Youcan bring the characters much closer together at this point by havingFinn willing to listen andto assure her she has worth.

Asfor taking this to Kylo-

Ithink that depends on whether Finn primarily wants to get Rey out ofa bad situation or end the torturer subgroup.

Thefirst option probably means emphasising the skills she does have andhow Finn finds them useful. How they makea good team and how thatwill make Kylo more money then what he currently has Rey doing.

Thesecond option would take longer and be more involved. It would meanspelling out to Kylo both that this isn’t working and that it’sdamaging his organisation. Particularly his ability to make money.

Ifyou go down that route I think you should include Rey in theconversation in some way. You’re concerned about her agencythroughout the story so Ithink involving her in dismantling the torturer-sub-group would helpaddress that. It gives her aplatform to state her feelings and views as well as something activeto do: rebuild part of the organisation afterwards.

Shecould also play a much more active role in convincing Kylo then Finndoes. Because it’s one thing to have someone uninvolved come alongand tell him that this doesn’t work. It’s another thing to havesomeone directly involved come along and say the same thing.

Ithink stressing the fact torture isn't working is probably the mainarguement to stress here. In this universe they're all violentcriminals so a moral stance is going to be less important. But Finnand Rey can still argue that they got further when they weren't usingtorture, that torturing made their job harder and that represents alarge waste of time. Time that gang members could be using to say,make money.

Dependingon how exactly you want to play their relationships with Kylo youmight also be able to have them making more personal appeals. Rey inparticular can attest to the way doing this has injured her andtherefore argue that Kylo is going to lose good loyal people if hekeeps doing this. If you go with some of my suggestions about theorganisation generally, with a high turnover rate among torturersthen that point could stand out; highlighting that Kylo doesn'treally lose anything by instituting this new policy.

Activelygetting rid of torturers is another matter.

Somethingas simple as a change in the 'law' (in this case 'the bossdisapproves') has a big effect. But to totally eradicate torturetakes more then that. It takes time, effort and perseverance. In thecontext of a criminal organisation, I think you need to think abouthow the organisation is set up and whether they'd ever make it apriority.

Theycould still get rid of the 'ring leaders', the 'mentors' thecharacters who are most actively perpetuating this toxic sub culture.In the context of a regime that would usually mean killing them.That's not the only option in this scenario. Kicking people out ofthe gang is a possibility, but it might be seen as a risky one. Theycould join rival gangs and give away the organisation's secrets.Another possibility is setting them up and letting the authoritiestake them away. That makes them someone else's problem. I think whereexactly you go with this aspect should depend on- well how you seethis criminal organisation functioning and where you want to take thestory later on.

And,at almost five thousand words I think I’m going to have to leavethat there. I hope this helps. :)

Disclaimer

[aion-rsa]

The Secrets of Marvel’s Eternals

https://ift.tt/2Z6GLNH

This article contains Eternals spoilers.

It’s not hard, when a Captain America or an Iron Man movie hits, for Marvel to have a comic on shelves that new fans can be pointed toward as an accessible way to get to know the characters. The same can’t be said for The Eternals. In a lot of ways, Jack Kirby’s most bizarre creations – god-like beings, created by the all-powerful Celestials to do battle with the deformed, wild Deviants – have endured despite their relative scarcity. The sum total of what can be reasonably called Eternals stories only runs to about 50 issues. So the task of centering them ahead of their big movie debut in November is both a blessing and a curse, even with an all-star cast and an Oscar-winning director at the helm. 

Enter Kieron Gillen.

Gillen is a Marvel veteran and no stranger to the company’s cultural juggernaut side. Counted among his greatest hits are a long run with Kid Loki in Journey into Mystery, a thematic touchstone for the MCU’s biggest television show to date. And he authored what is likely going to be an important comic to the MCU going forward in Young Avengers. When he’s not creating the source material for potential future blockbusters, Gillen is fairly skilled at playing with mythology: his creator-owned book for Image Comics, The Wicked + The Divine (co-created with his Young Avengers collaborators, Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson) mashed-up pantheons from around the world with pop music culture, and was a smash success. So Gillen was a natural choice to set on the weirdness of Eternals. 

For this new series, Gillen finds himself teamed with a pack of superstars on his Eternals relaunch – Esad Ribic, one of the most talented and epic line artists who’s ever worked in comics; Eisner winner Wilson on colors; and beloved star letterer Clayton Cowles lettering and doing the data page design work. We had a chance to chat with Gillen about his approach to the concept and what he’s got coming next.

Den of Geek: Late period Kirby stuff is pretty dense and odd, and generally tough to follow up on. I know Eternals is something that’s only spottily been touched through the course of Marvel history since he did it and usually to great effect. What was your first principle coming into this to make sure that you weren’t flattening the Eternals concept into just another superhero book, and at the same time, keeping it friendly to new readers who might have had limited exposure?

Kieron Gillen: My actual approach is very much the opposite, in terms of trying to flatten it into a cape book, because I think when they flatten into a cape book, they lose any point of existing. The Marvel Universe is such a busy place…a lot of the niches are filled.It’s like, if you were at DC, you couldn’t, for example, make a new hero, who is the paragon of all that’s good and everyone in America really likes him, because that’s Superman’s job. In any of these highly populated universes, you’ve got to look at, “Okay, how can I make them different? How can I find something that’s really just them?” So my approach is much more into drilling down to what makes them weird, what makes them different for audiences. And also things that have been implicit in the concept, I can perhaps put a spin on and make it even moreso.

One of the core things originally that I looked at is how when Kirby originally created Eternals, it wasn’t really for the Marvel Universe. They were folded in, and the work done by generations of creators there has been really interesting. But they sit differently in a universe where there’s actually gods, because their entire thing was they are people who have been mistaken for gods, and were actually aliens. There’s very much riffing on the 1970s Chariot of the Gods-ness of it all. Except of course, if you’ve got a universe where you’ve actually got gods, that starts to fray at the edges.

So what was a niche in the Marvel Universe that isn’t filled by the gods? I ended up with the idea that, if you actually look at it, even in the original Kirby stories, they’re people who’ve been mistaken for gods. In reality, they are a species of eternal unchanging immortal beings who have been created by actual space gods (the Celestials that are the gods  in this metaphor) in eternal battle with these demon-like creatures [Deviants]. 

I picked up some of the stuff that Neil Gaiman added to the concept, in terms of their immortality. Eternal is a very different word. You talk to certain theologians, there’s a debate whether angels have free will. Humans probably do. I’m not a theologian so don’t trust me on this, but the idea of whether angels have free will is a much more interesting question in lots of different ways. So I leaned into the idea that Eternals are angels. They’ve got this job and their job is to protect us, or at least the Earth, from demons. I pushed them into those elements, so all that stuff is very much let’s make them more weird. 

My broad theory is with DC characters the problem is the world. They are beautiful and perfect people who are facing a world that is corrupt. So Batman’s life is fine and then his parents were killed. Wonder Woman is sent as an ambassador to this warlike species of man. I think Wonder Woman is an interesting one to compare to because the closest Marvel character is really Thor. Thor is somebody who was sent to Earth because he was an arrogant shit [laughs]. To save the world, yes, but he is also the problem. So for me, the heart of Marvel characters, even though they try to save the world, they’re also the problem.

And for me, the Eternals didn’t really have that, and that’s why I’ve led to this idea that there’s this awful secret that when they die, they have to take a life to carry on living. And that’s, at least, one reason why Ikaris had to be my lead. Because Ikaris is such a good guy and the idea of, “Wait, when I do stuff, it’s not just my life I’m risking.” I know it’s not something [he’s] going to move past easily. He’s clearly going to be guilty, dealing with this for a very long time and there’s the relationship with the family and all that kind of element. And that seemed to be really interesting, especially because, and this goes into other areas with more Eternals, is that I always wanted them to be a society.

A lot of the Eternals don’t care. They’re ambivalent about this and in some ways they’re the bad gods. The idea of the Eternals includes people with very different ideas and yes, their job is to protect the Earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean protecting humans. 

I’m fascinated by the comparison to angels because where they’re left at the end of issue six is very much a Paradise Lost situation where, not only are they fallen, but they’ve decided to cast themselves down. That brings Thanos in conceptually too. What was the most mentally complicated part to integrating Thanos into this new Eternals mythology for you? Because he’s more an external force of nature in the broader history of the Marvel Universe than he is really tightly aligned with Eternals history. But now with the Deviant stuff and the fallen Eternals, he feels much more integral to the concept than he used to.

When you think about Eternals, we’ve got the original Kirby stuff and then the generations of creators that have tried to integrate them in different ways into the Marvel Universe. It’s notable that some of the best stuff in Eternals has become everyone’s stuff, like the Celestials. But the Celestials are such a great fit. They’re one of the best visuals in all of Marvel. So many different people have touched on this connection between the Eternals and Thanos, [but] not much has ever really been done with it.

One of the aims for Eternals was to take continuity and turn it into mythology. So I was looking at all that 40 years of comics and trying to work out okay, let’s pretend they were all made by one person and it was all one big fabric. The creation of Thanos in my mind was always planned all along, and this is a fundamental sin of the Eternal people. It wasn’t that they had a kid who turned out bad. Kirby’s original idea was 100 Eternals, 100 Deviants, then only the Deviants breed. 

So there’s only ever been 100 in this weird static family unit, but what happened with Titan? What were all the schisms for? Where did Thanos come from? Thanos was really an attempt to extend the Eternal line, which went very badly wrong. You mentioned Paradise Lost, but I just got the Titanos Schism, which is an event in the history anyway, but I built up to being the equivalent of, I don’t know, one of those stories in Lord of the Rings, set 500 years earlier that’s in the appendix.

This is actually some of the stuff we cover in [The Eternals: Thanos Rising,] the Dustin Weaver special we’re doing. We talk about the background of all this. They argued whether they should actually have true Eternal children. They split. A’Lars AKA Mentor, met up with Sui-San on Titan. They work out a way to have Thanos (which is what the special is about) and hooray, they can breed. And then “oh no, this is what happens when we breed.” Thanos is really the worst case scenario.

But the other interesting thing is, of course, Thanos gets to meet his other family. The idea there’s a whole extended family he’s interacted with very little, which is really interesting to me. In the first arc,  I’ve written him as Frankenstein or the Phantom of the Opera. He’s just the Alien. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s regarded as a force of nature. 

I do this a lot in my books. People always say, I don’t really like villains. As much as I enjoy Thanos chewing the scenery and talking about poetry and death, I write them as people with powerful needs. The question becomes what will they do to get them? The answer, of course, [for] people like Thanos, is almost everything. But what’s always interesting for me is what won’t they do as well? If you can emotionally connect to all the characters, even the ones you hate, even the ones you want to lose, that’s when stuff becomes interesting for me. 

Read more

Movies

Marvel’s Eternals Will Reveal Why The Eternals Didn’t Interfere in Infinity War

By Alec Bojalad

Movies

Marvel’s Eternals Trailer Breakdown: Who Are The New Characters of the MCU?

By Mike Cecchini

Which Eternal was your hook when you first started thinking about the book? Who was your path into the world and did it change as you went deeper into it? Who do you hope readers attach to from your story as they head to theaters to see the movie?

Originally Ikaris and Sprite were the two, and I made them the point of view characters for two reasons. One, Ikaris is the most straight shooting character, therefore he was the person who would most be hurt by the twist. He’s the classic hero, so let’s put him through the grinder. And Sprite, of course, had been outside the story, so she’s useful because she doesn’t know stuff. 

I’ve got a version of Sersi who is a kind of depressed party girl. She’s been an amazing party girl figure. She’s always been enormous fun and I love that. I just wanted to do the alone on the dance floor kind of vibe, where there’s a certain sadness because she’d been doing hedonism for so long, what’s it covering up. Sersi around Eternals is a little bit different from her around humans. I think Sersi is, in some ways, the most complicated and messiest of the characters. I hope she’s the one I think we’re most attached to.

It’s a very different take on Gilgamesh. My biggest regret of the first arc is I couldn’t find space to use Makkari or Ajak, so I’m very glad that I got to do the specials. 

That’s kind of what Kirby did. One of the interesting things about Eternals in the original run is that it’s cut off early while he’s still introducing stuff. It’s not like it reached the midpoint. You’ve still got new characters coming in.  All the way through he’ll throw a random issue in with a different Eternal. It’s very free flowing. 

There’s nobody in comics right now that does grand spectacle like Esad and Matt together. Did having them attached on art change how you approached the scale of the story? 

I must admit I think I knew Esad was on the book before I started writing anything seriously. So leisurely it was, you know those amazing deep focus panels Esad does when you’ve got a city and something in the distance. I always think about that bit in Thor with Jason [Aaron], where you have the enormous dead giant in the background [note: Thor: God of Thunder (2012) #3 page 9]. I remember that and the moment, oh no, no, we’re going to have a lot of deep focus shots. I’m always looking for chances to do that with Esad because why wouldn’t you? [laughs] Obviously, I know Matt really well, having gone through all manner of growing with him, so I know how adaptable and how amazingly he responds to different characters, or different artists rather.

His colors for Dustin Weaver are really amazing in the Thanos Rising special. The fact it’s a story set earlier in the timeline he’s doing a modern take on old ‘70s coloring. It’s really psychedelic and pop, but the whole thing is clearly a modern comic, but at the same time, clearly lifting notes. But with Esad, it’s always how can I do something that allows Esad to actually provide the scale of things? Because it’s a very chatty book, but I’ve got to find interesting ways to make things chatty, interesting things. It doesn’t just have to be a battle scene. Even just an establishing shot is a thing of beauty. 

There’s these six Eternal cities I’ve codified. And the idea of, okay, when we go to those cities, it’s going to be the magical moments. In the same way, when we introduce New York in the first issue, that’s also a magical moment because it’s New York. In many ways, especially to a British person, New York is as magical a city as Olympia. There’s that kind of thrill.

Do the data pages help you get out of your own way or get out of Esad’s way on the art a little bit more?

A little bit. They’re a useful compression device.. At least part of the appeal of Eternals is its scope. Esad makes it really big visually, also big in the ideas of what we’re describing. There’s entire cast members and there’s political systems and there’s those groups who hate each other or like each other and I’m bearing all that in mind when writing it. And the data pages are a really good way of doing it.

Jonathan Hickman’s been doing it forever. I remember. When his Nightly News dropped, it was fascinating, but I’ve been really glad he’s managed to open up a bit of space in the mainstream for people to do that. Because it’s the thing I said I want to be a bit careful around this. I said, I always use a lot of text stuff in my indie work and there’s bits of all manner of text stuff I did before. I think it’s much more notable with Jon because Jon’s the designer so he can just do his own. With me, it was always a case of my interest in text and image and things you can do with that were limited by the fact that the resource I could have.

But what I was trying to is not just do what the X-books have done as well. [This] is the first time [Clayton Crain]’s done design internally and he’s doing amazing work, but it’s also stuff like the spread in issue three where we’ve got all those names. I literally programmed my own Deviant name generator. This generated 1,200 names on that page that Clayton laid out. We’re still working out how we’re going to release that online.  

What are you most excited for people to see in the second arc of the book?

The first arc’s been all about remaking the Eternals, as in here we are, we’ve got a new status quo, more heroes are dealing with the fact that there is a corruption at the heart of their system. Can they change it? Can we change this unchanging system? That’s the tragedy of their heroism to me. 

The second arc, I’m trying to do that to the Deviants. Not as radically because I don’t think the Deviants need it as much. What are the Deviants for? What are they like? If the Deviants were our lead characters, we would be absolutely petrified of the Eternals and now they’re living here. So we get to really meet the Deviants, we get to understand their life and their tragedy.

There’s an enormous battle. That’s something to look forward to. There’s romance and sadness, and there’s also really cool guest stars in the background, which I don’t want to talk about, but it’s important for me to ground this in the Marvel Universe. But also this is a world of humans. It’s not just weird Eternals falling around their fortresses. If an issue doesn’t have humans in it, I feel a bit off because for me that’s another thing about Marvel. Part of the fun of Spider-Man was always that I could look to my left and imagine Spider-Man flying past me, so trying to keep the element, the world outside your window, while still doing something with the scale of what we’re doing, that’s the trick. So I’m hoping that comes across in the next arc.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Eternals: Thanos Rises #1 is on sale on Wednesday, September 15th in local comics shops and online. Eternals: Celestia, the story featuring Makkari and Ajak, hits shops and the web in October, and Marvel’s Eternals is in theaters the following month. 

The post The Secrets of Marvel’s Eternals appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[psychicanchortimemachine]

Equivalent Experiences: Thinking Equivalently

Constructing identical expertise could mean dynamical the means you think that regarding development and style, and potentially reevaluating your existing work. during this article, we’ll address common accessibility problems, and the way to best set about up them thus everybody will effortlessly access your content. This is the second of two articles on the topic of how digital.This is the second of two articles on the subject of however digital accessibility is enlightened by equivalency. Previously, we've got learned concerning the underlying biases that inform digital product creation, what identical expertise isn’t, the combination effects of inaccessible style and code, and powerful motivating forces for doing higher.

In this article, I will be able to discuss learning the way to embrace identical, comprehensive mentality. I will be able to additionally offer sensible, sturdy ways that to enhance your internet sites and web apps by providing solutions to common, everyday barriers cited by the individuals I interviewed. Setting a standard Setting a regular The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG ) outlines in conscientious detail a way to craft accessible digital experiences. whereas a protracted and dense document, it's unbelievably comprehensive — to the purpose wherever it’s been written as a global commonplace. For over ten years, we’ve had a globally arranged, canonical definition of what constitutes as usable. Can we?If you would like a bit facilitate constructing the initial mental framework the WCAG gets at, an issue I perpetually raise myself once creating one thing is, “How would i exploit this if…” It’s an issue that gets you to examine all the biases that may be moving you within the moment.

Examples might be:How would I use this if...o ...I can’t see the screen?o ...I can’t move my arms?o ...I’m sensitive to flashing and strobing animation?o ...English isn’t my primary language?o ...I have a limited budget for bandwidth?o ...I’ve set a large default type size?o ...and so on.

Introduction

If you’re looking for a more approachable resource for how to dig into what the WCAG covers, the "

Inclusive Design Principles

" would be a great place to start. The seven principles it describes all map back to "

WCAG success criterion

".  

Its considered best if we learn from people who are actually using it.

You don’t need to apply my words in this. Below there are some basic problems  Wayfinding

Headings

Heading elements are incredibly important for maintaining an equivalent, accessible experience.

When made with talent and care, heading parts enable screen reader users to quickly verify the contents of a page or read and navigate to content relevant to their interests. This is often resembling however somebody may quickly flit around, scrolling till one thing that appears pertinent comes into read.

Justin Yarbrough

voices poorly-authored heading elements as a concern, and he’s not alone.

WebAIM’s screen reader survey

cites headings because the most vital thanks to realize data. This survey is well-worth being attentive to, because it provides valuable insight into however disabled individuals really use helpful technology.  

Landmarks

An addition to heading parts, in a different way to work out the structure and layout are

landmarks

. Landmarks are roles implicitly delineated by HTML(markup language sectioning parts), wont to facilitate describe the composition of the most page or read areas.

Here’s what Justin has to say:“If I’m just trying to find the main content, I’ll first try the Q JAWS shortcut key to see if a main region’s set up. If not, I’m just more or less stuck trying to scan the page to find it arrowing through the page.”

Much as however we'd use a layer cluster name of “primary nav” in our style file, or a category name of c-nav-primary  in our CSS, it’s vital we tend to conjointly use a nav sectioning component to explain our main website navigation (as well as the other navigation the page or read contains). Doing thus ensures intent is carried all the approach through from conception, to implementation, to use. a similar notion carries through for the opposite hypertext markup language sectioning parts that make landmarks for helpful technology.

Labeled Controls

Brian Moore

tells us about “form fields with no label or at least one that isn’t programmatically associated so it doesn’t read anything.”It’s another

frustratingly common problem

.

Providing a legitimate for/id  attribute pairing creates a programmatic association between type inputs and also the label that describes what it will. And after I say label, I mean the label part. Not a clickable div, a placeholder, aria-label, or another brittle and/or distraught answer. label components square measure a tried-and-true answer that enjoys wide and deep support for accessibility. In addition, a label part mustn't be employed by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might sound counter-intuitive initially, however please bear with us.In addition, a label element should not be used by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but please bear with me.

<!-- Please do this --> <label for="your-name">Your name</label> <input type="text" id="your-name" name="your-name" autocomplete="name">   <!-- Don’t do this --> <label for="eye">Cornea</label> <label for="eye">Pupil</label> <label for="eye">Lens</label> <label for="eye">Retina</label> <label for="eye">Optic Nerve</label> <img id="eye" alt="A diagram of the human eye." src="parts-of-the-eye.png" />

The same varieties of helpful technology that permit} an individual jump to headings and landmarks additionally allow them to leap to input labels. Attributable to this, there's the expectation that once a "label" component is gift, there's additionally a corresponding input it's related to. Alternative Descriptions

If you've got low or no vision, and/or have problem understanding a picture, HTML’s ALT attribute (and not the title attribute) provides a mechanism to know what the image is there for. a similar principle applies for providing captions for video and audio content like podcasts.

Kenny Hitt

, mentions that when …someone posts something on Twitter, if it’s just an unlabeled image; I don’t even take the time to participate in the conversation. When you start every conversation by asking what’s in the picture, it really derails things.”

Up until last week

, the only way for Twitter to

provide alternative descriptions for its images

was to enable an option buried away in the subsection of a preference menu. Compare this to a platform like

Mastodon

, where the feature is enabled by default. Soren Hamby, mentions garment worker, a preferred podcast app. “The on boarding was plenty of themed graphics, however the altitude text for everyone was ‘unselected’ and for identical image with a analyzeit had been chosen. I believe it might be affordable for them to mention ‘sci-fi genre selected’ […] it’s such a tiny low factor however it makes all the distinction.Ensuring that alternate description content is succinct and descriptive is simply as vital as as well as the flexibility to feature it.

Daniel Göransson, a developer for Axess research laboratory, includes a nice article on a way to write them effectively. Robust, accessible options may also be a part of analysis criteria, in addition as an excellent methodology for building client loyalty.

Soren mentions that they're “often the deciding issue, particularly between services.” above all; they cite Netflix’s audio descriptions. Aria

One topic Daniel Göransson’s article on different descriptions mentions is to not over-describe things. This includes info like that it's a picture, WHO the creative person is, and keyword stuffing.The same principle applies for Accessible made net Applications (ARIA). ARIA may be a set of attributes designed to increase hypertext mark-up language to fill within the gaps between interactive content and helpful technology.

Brian explains: “There looks to be a perception that a lot of ARIA fixes accessibility and it will facilitate, however an excessive amount of either reads wrong things or simply talks approach an excessive amount of.  If on screen text of 1 or 2 words is nice enough for everybody else, it's ok for screen reader users too. we tend to don’t want whole sentence or 2 descriptions of buttons or links i.e. ‘link privacy policy’ is way higher than one thing like ‘this link can open our privacy policy, this link can open during a new window’ once the on screen link text is ‘privacy policy.’”Provided that you utilize the acceptable native hypertext mark-up language part, helpful technology can handle all of that for you. Do more, additional robustly, with less effort? Sounds nice to me!

Unlike most of hypertext markup language, CSS, and JS, the success of enforced ARIA is discourse, variable, and mostly invisible. In spite of this, we have a tendency to appear to be slathering ARIA onto everything while not bothering to envision not providing it truly works, however additionally what the those that truly use it think about it. Support for ARIA is fragmented across operational systems, browsers, and helpful technology offerings, all their individual versions, and each potential permutation of all 3. Simply put, writing ARIA and trusting it'll work as meant isn’t enough. If misconfigured and/or over-applied, ARIA will break. it's going to not report actual practicality, announce the incorrect practicality, and (accurately or inaccurately) over-describe practicality. Obviously, these experiences aren’t equivalent.   Representation matters. to induce a far better understanding of however the ARIA code you wrote truly works, i like to recommend hiring folks to inform you.

Here are four such services that do specifically that:·

Accessible360

·

AccessWorks (by Knowbility)

·

Fable Tech Labs

·

Perkins School For The Blind

Contrast

Color Contrast

Color distinction is another common issue, one whose severity usually appears to be downplayed. If I may wager a guess, it’s as a result of it’s straightforward to forget that alternative people’s vision may well be totally different than your own.

Regardless, it's a priority that affects a large swath of the world population, and that we ought to treat the difficulty with the seriousness it deserves.

The Click-Away Pound Survey tells US that out of the highest problems Janus-faced by users with access wants, distinction and legibility weighs in because the fifth most important issue.

On high of that, it's enhanced as a priority, going from four hundred and forty yards of respondents in 2016 to fifty fifth in 2019.

We board an age wherever there’s additional color distinction checking resources than I will count. Product like Stark will facilitate designers audit their styles before it's translated into code.

Tools like Eightshape’s distinction Grid and Atul Varma’s Accessible color palette builder allow you to craft your style systems with sturdy, accessible color mixtures out of the gate.

The somewhat ironic issue regarding color distinction is however, ah, visible it's. whereas a number of the previous accessibility problems area unit invisible—hidden away because the underlying code—contrast could be a pretty easy issue.Mostly, distinction could be a binary state of affairs, therein you either will or cannot see content.

So, following time you check your web site or webapp with an automatic accessibility checker like Deque’s axe, don’t be thus fast to downplay the colour distinction errors it reports.

High Contrast

There square measure technology solutions for things wherever even satisfactory color distinction ratios isn’t sufficient—namely, inverted colours mode and High distinction Mode. Several participants I interviewed mentioned victimization these show modes throughout their daily laptop use.  Provided you employ linguistics markup language, each of those modes don’t want a lot of effort on the event finish of things to figure well.  The vital bit is to visualize out what you’re building in these 2 modes to create certain everything is functioning as meant.  Striving For Perfection To quote

Léonie Watson

,“Accessibility doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be a little bit better than yesterday.”

We will be  happy to answer your questions on designing, developing, and deploying comprehensive enterprise web, mobile apps and customized software solutions that best fit your organization needs.

As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

get in touch with us!

[lakhwanabhishek]

Equivalent Experiences: Thinking Equivalently

Constructing identical expertise could mean dynamical the means you think that regarding development and style, and potentially reevaluating your existing work. during this article, we’ll address common accessibility problems, and the way to best set about up them thus everybody will effortlessly access your content. This is the second of two articles on the topic of how digital.This is the second of two articles on the subject of however digital accessibility is enlightened by equivalency. Previously, we've got learned concerning the underlying biases that inform digital product creation, what identical expertise isn’t, the combination effects of inaccessible style and code, and powerful motivating forces for doing higher.

In this article, I will be able to discuss learning the way to embrace identical, comprehensive mentality. I will be able to additionally offer sensible, sturdy ways that to enhance your internet sites and web apps by providing solutions to common, everyday barriers cited by the individuals I interviewed. Setting a standard Setting a regular The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG ) outlines in conscientious detail a way to craft accessible digital experiences. whereas a protracted and dense document, it's unbelievably comprehensive — to the purpose wherever it’s been written as a global commonplace. For over ten years, we’ve had a globally arranged, canonical definition of what constitutes as usable. Can we?If you would like a bit facilitate constructing the initial mental framework the WCAG gets at, an issue I perpetually raise myself once creating one thing is, “How would i exploit this if…” It’s an issue that gets you to examine all the biases that may be moving you within the moment.

Examples might be:How would I use this if...o ...I can’t see the screen?o ...I can’t move my arms?o ...I’m sensitive to flashing and strobing animation?o ...English isn’t my primary language?o ...I have a limited budget for bandwidth?o ...I’ve set a large default type size?o ...and so on.

Introduction

If you’re looking for a more approachable resource for how to dig into what the WCAG covers, the "

Inclusive Design Principles

" would be a great place to start. The seven principles it describes all map back to "

WCAG success criterion

".  

Its considered best if we learn from people who are actually using it.

You don’t need to apply my words in this. Below there are some basic problems  Wayfinding

Headings

Heading elements are incredibly important for maintaining an equivalent, accessible experience.

When made with talent and care, heading parts enable screen reader users to quickly verify the contents of a page or read and navigate to content relevant to their interests. This is often resembling however somebody may quickly flit around, scrolling till one thing that appears pertinent comes into read.

Justin Yarbrough

voices poorly-authored heading elements as a concern, and he’s not alone.

WebAIM’s screen reader survey

cites headings because the most vital thanks to realize data. This survey is well-worth being attentive to, because it provides valuable insight into however disabled individuals really use helpful technology.  

Landmarks

An addition to heading parts, in a different way to work out the structure and layout are

landmarks

. Landmarks are roles implicitly delineated by HTML(markup language sectioning parts), wont to facilitate describe the composition of the most page or read areas.

Here’s what Justin has to say:“If I’m just trying to find the main content, I’ll first try the Q JAWS shortcut key to see if a main region’s set up. If not, I’m just more or less stuck trying to scan the page to find it arrowing through the page.”

Much as however we'd use a layer cluster name of “primary nav” in our style file, or a category name of c-nav-primary  in our CSS, it’s vital we tend to conjointly use a nav sectioning component to explain our main website navigation (as well as the other navigation the page or read contains). Doing thus ensures intent is carried all the approach through from conception, to implementation, to use. a similar notion carries through for the opposite hypertext markup language sectioning parts that make landmarks for helpful technology.

Labeled Controls

Brian Moore

tells us about “form fields with no label or at least one that isn’t programmatically associated so it doesn’t read anything.”It’s another

frustratingly common problem

.

Providing a legitimate for/id  attribute pairing creates a programmatic association between type inputs and also the label that describes what it will. And after I say label, I mean the label part. Not a clickable div, a placeholder, aria-label, or another brittle and/or distraught answer. label components square measure a tried-and-true answer that enjoys wide and deep support for accessibility. In addition, a label part mustn't be employed by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might sound counter-intuitive initially, however please bear with us.In addition, a label element should not be used by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but please bear with me.

<!-- Please do this --> <label for="your-name">Your name</label> <input type="text" id="your-name" name="your-name" autocomplete="name">   <!-- Don’t do this --> <label for="eye">Cornea</label> <label for="eye">Pupil</label> <label for="eye">Lens</label> <label for="eye">Retina</label> <label for="eye">Optic Nerve</label> <img id="eye" alt="A diagram of the human eye." src="parts-of-the-eye.png" />

The same varieties of helpful technology that permit} an individual jump to headings and landmarks additionally allow them to leap to input labels. Attributable to this, there's the expectation that once a "label" component is gift, there's additionally a corresponding input it's related to. Alternative Descriptions

If you've got low or no vision, and/or have problem understanding a picture, HTML’s ALT attribute (and not the title attribute) provides a mechanism to know what the image is there for. a similar principle applies for providing captions for video and audio content like podcasts.

Kenny Hitt

, mentions that when …someone posts something on Twitter, if it’s just an unlabeled image; I don’t even take the time to participate in the conversation. When you start every conversation by asking what’s in the picture, it really derails things.”

Up until last week

, the only way for Twitter to

provide alternative descriptions for its images

was to enable an option buried away in the subsection of a preference menu. Compare this to a platform like

Mastodon

, where the feature is enabled by default. Soren Hamby, mentions garment worker, a preferred podcast app. “The on boarding was plenty of themed graphics, however the altitude text for everyone was ‘unselected’ and for identical image with a analyzeit had been chosen. I believe it might be affordable for them to mention ‘sci-fi genre selected’ […] it’s such a tiny low factor however it makes all the distinction.Ensuring that alternate description content is succinct and descriptive is simply as vital as as well as the flexibility to feature it.

Daniel Göransson, a developer for Axess research laboratory, includes a nice article on a way to write them effectively. Robust, accessible options may also be a part of analysis criteria, in addition as an excellent methodology for building client loyalty.

Soren mentions that they're “often the deciding issue, particularly between services.” above all; they cite Netflix’s audio descriptions. Aria

One topic Daniel Göransson’s article on different descriptions mentions is to not over-describe things. This includes info like that it's a picture, WHO the creative person is, and keyword stuffing.The same principle applies for Accessible made net Applications (ARIA). ARIA may be a set of attributes designed to increase hypertext mark-up language to fill within the gaps between interactive content and helpful technology.

Brian explains: “There looks to be a perception that a lot of ARIA fixes accessibility and it will facilitate, however an excessive amount of either reads wrong things or simply talks approach an excessive amount of.  If on screen text of 1 or 2 words is nice enough for everybody else, it's ok for screen reader users too. we tend to don’t want whole sentence or 2 descriptions of buttons or links i.e. ‘link privacy policy’ is way higher than one thing like ‘this link can open our privacy policy, this link can open during a new window’ once the on screen link text is ‘privacy policy.’”Provided that you utilize the acceptable native hypertext mark-up language part, helpful technology can handle all of that for you. Do more, additional robustly, with less effort? Sounds nice to me!

Unlike most of hypertext markup language, CSS, and JS, the success of enforced ARIA is discourse, variable, and mostly invisible. In spite of this, we have a tendency to appear to be slathering ARIA onto everything while not bothering to envision not providing it truly works, however additionally what the those that truly use it think about it. Support for ARIA is fragmented across operational systems, browsers, and helpful technology offerings, all their individual versions, and each potential permutation of all 3. Simply put, writing ARIA and trusting it'll work as meant isn’t enough. If misconfigured and/or over-applied, ARIA will break. it's going to not report actual practicality, announce the incorrect practicality, and (accurately or inaccurately) over-describe practicality. Obviously, these experiences aren’t equivalent.   Representation matters. to induce a far better understanding of however the ARIA code you wrote truly works, i like to recommend hiring folks to inform you.

Here are four such services that do specifically that:·

Accessible360

·

AccessWorks (by Knowbility)

·

Fable Tech Labs

·

Perkins School For The Blind

Contrast

Color Contrast

Color distinction is another common issue, one whose severity usually appears to be downplayed. If I may wager a guess, it’s as a result of it’s straightforward to forget that alternative people’s vision may well be totally different than your own.

Regardless, it's a priority that affects a large swath of the world population, and that we ought to treat the difficulty with the seriousness it deserves.

The Click-Away Pound Survey tells US that out of the highest problems Janus-faced by users with access wants, distinction and legibility weighs in because the fifth most important issue.

On high of that, it's enhanced as a priority, going from four hundred and forty yards of respondents in 2016 to fifty fifth in 2019.

We board an age wherever there’s additional color distinction checking resources than I will count. Product like Stark will facilitate designers audit their styles before it's translated into code.

Tools like Eightshape’s distinction Grid and Atul Varma’s Accessible color palette builder allow you to craft your style systems with sturdy, accessible color mixtures out of the gate.

The somewhat ironic issue regarding color distinction is however, ah, visible it's. whereas a number of the previous accessibility problems area unit invisible—hidden away because the underlying code—contrast could be a pretty easy issue.Mostly, distinction could be a binary state of affairs, therein you either will or cannot see content.

So, following time you check your web site or webapp with an automatic accessibility checker like Deque’s axe, don’t be thus fast to downplay the colour distinction errors it reports.

High Contrast

There square measure technology solutions for things wherever even satisfactory color distinction ratios isn’t sufficient—namely, inverted colours mode and High distinction Mode. Several participants I interviewed mentioned victimization these show modes throughout their daily laptop use.  Provided you employ linguistics markup language, each of those modes don’t want a lot of effort on the event finish of things to figure well.  The vital bit is to visualize out what you’re building in these 2 modes to create certain everything is functioning as meant.  Striving For Perfection To quote

Léonie Watson

,“Accessibility doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be a little bit better than yesterday.”

We will be  happy to answer your questions on designing, developing, and deploying comprehensive enterprise web, mobile apps and customized software solutions that best fit your organization needs.

As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

get in touch with us!

#b2bsales

#b2bservices

#b2b ecommerce

#b2b seo

#Ecommerce

[secretcupcakesublime]

Equivalent Experiences: Thinking Equivalently

Constructing identical expertise could mean dynamical the means you think that regarding development and style, and potentially reevaluating your existing work. during this article, we’ll address common accessibility problems, and the way to best set about up them thus everybody will effortlessly access your content. This is the second of two articles on the topic of how digital.This is the second of two articles on the subject of however digital accessibility is enlightened by equivalency. Previously, we've got learned concerning the underlying biases that inform digital product creation, what identical expertise isn’t, the combination effects of inaccessible style and code, and powerful motivating forces for doing higher.

In this article, I will be able to discuss learning the way to embrace identical, comprehensive mentality. I will be able to additionally offer sensible, sturdy ways that to enhance your internet sites and web apps by providing solutions to common, everyday barriers cited by the individuals I interviewed. Setting a standard Setting a regular The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG ) outlines in conscientious detail a way to craft accessible digital experiences. whereas a protracted and dense document, it's unbelievably comprehensive — to the purpose wherever it’s been written as a global commonplace. For over ten years, we’ve had a globally arranged, canonical definition of what constitutes as usable. Can we?If you would like a bit facilitate constructing the initial mental framework the WCAG gets at, an issue I perpetually raise myself once creating one thing is, “How would i exploit this if…” It’s an issue that gets you to examine all the biases that may be moving you within the moment.

Examples might be:How would I use this if...o ...I can’t see the screen?o ...I can’t move my arms?o ...I’m sensitive to flashing and strobing animation?o ...English isn’t my primary language?o ...I have a limited budget for bandwidth?o ...I’ve set a large default type size?o ...and so on.

Introduction

If you’re looking for a more approachable resource for how to dig into what the WCAG covers, the "

Inclusive Design Principles

" would be a great place to start. The seven principles it describes all map back to "

WCAG success criterion

".  

Its considered best if we learn from people who are actually using it.

You don’t need to apply my words in this. Below there are some basic problems  Wayfinding

Headings

Heading elements are incredibly important for maintaining an equivalent, accessible experience.

When made with talent and care, heading parts enable screen reader users to quickly verify the contents of a page or read and navigate to content relevant to their interests. This is often resembling however somebody may quickly flit around, scrolling till one thing that appears pertinent comes into read.

Justin Yarbrough

voices poorly-authored heading elements as a concern, and he’s not alone.

WebAIM’s screen reader survey

cites headings because the most vital thanks to realize data. This survey is well-worth being attentive to, because it provides valuable insight into however disabled individuals really use helpful technology.  

Landmarks

An addition to heading parts, in a different way to work out the structure and layout are

landmarks

. Landmarks are roles implicitly delineated by HTML(markup language sectioning parts), wont to facilitate describe the composition of the most page or read areas.

Here’s what Justin has to say:“If I’m just trying to find the main content, I’ll first try the Q JAWS shortcut key to see if a main region’s set up. If not, I’m just more or less stuck trying to scan the page to find it arrowing through the page.”

Much as however we'd use a layer cluster name of “primary nav” in our style file, or a category name of c-nav-primary  in our CSS, it’s vital we tend to conjointly use a nav sectioning component to explain our main website navigation (as well as the other navigation the page or read contains). Doing thus ensures intent is carried all the approach through from conception, to implementation, to use. a similar notion carries through for the opposite hypertext markup language sectioning parts that make landmarks for helpful technology.

Labeled Controls

Brian Moore

tells us about “form fields with no label or at least one that isn’t programmatically associated so it doesn’t read anything.”It’s another

frustratingly common problem

.

Providing a legitimate for/id  attribute pairing creates a programmatic association between type inputs and also the label that describes what it will. And after I say label, I mean the label part. Not a clickable div, a placeholder, aria-label, or another brittle and/or distraught answer. label components square measure a tried-and-true answer that enjoys wide and deep support for accessibility. In addition, a label part mustn't be employed by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might sound counter-intuitive initially, however please bear with us.In addition, a label element should not be used by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but please bear with me.

<!-- Please do this --> <label for="your-name">Your name</label> <input type="text" id="your-name" name="your-name" autocomplete="name">   <!-- Don’t do this --> <label for="eye">Cornea</label> <label for="eye">Pupil</label> <label for="eye">Lens</label> <label for="eye">Retina</label> <label for="eye">Optic Nerve</label> <img id="eye" alt="A diagram of the human eye." src="parts-of-the-eye.png" />

The same varieties of helpful technology that permit} an individual jump to headings and landmarks additionally allow them to leap to input labels. Attributable to this, there's the expectation that once a "label" component is gift, there's additionally a corresponding input it's related to. Alternative Descriptions

If you've got low or no vision, and/or have problem understanding a picture, HTML’s ALT attribute (and not the title attribute) provides a mechanism to know what the image is there for. a similar principle applies for providing captions for video and audio content like podcasts.

Kenny Hitt

, mentions that when …someone posts something on Twitter, if it’s just an unlabeled image; I don’t even take the time to participate in the conversation. When you start every conversation by asking what’s in the picture, it really derails things.”

Up until last week

, the only way for Twitter to

provide alternative descriptions for its images

was to enable an option buried away in the subsection of a preference menu. Compare this to a platform like

Mastodon

, where the feature is enabled by default. Soren Hamby, mentions garment worker, a preferred podcast app. “The on boarding was plenty of themed graphics, however the altitude text for everyone was ‘unselected’ and for identical image with a analyzeit had been chosen. I believe it might be affordable for them to mention ‘sci-fi genre selected’ […] it’s such a tiny low factor however it makes all the distinction.Ensuring that alternate description content is succinct and descriptive is simply as vital as as well as the flexibility to feature it.

Daniel Göransson, a developer for Axess research laboratory, includes a nice article on a way to write them effectively. Robust, accessible options may also be a part of analysis criteria, in addition as an excellent methodology for building client loyalty.

Soren mentions that they're “often the deciding issue, particularly between services.” above all; they cite Netflix’s audio descriptions. Aria

One topic Daniel Göransson’s article on different descriptions mentions is to not over-describe things. This includes info like that it's a picture, WHO the creative person is, and keyword stuffing.The same principle applies for Accessible made net Applications (ARIA). ARIA may be a set of attributes designed to increase hypertext mark-up language to fill within the gaps between interactive content and helpful technology.

Brian explains: “There looks to be a perception that a lot of ARIA fixes accessibility and it will facilitate, however an excessive amount of either reads wrong things or simply talks approach an excessive amount of.  If on screen text of 1 or 2 words is nice enough for everybody else, it's ok for screen reader users too. we tend to don’t want whole sentence or 2 descriptions of buttons or links i.e. ‘link privacy policy’ is way higher than one thing like ‘this link can open our privacy policy, this link can open during a new window’ once the on screen link text is ‘privacy policy.’”Provided that you utilize the acceptable native hypertext mark-up language part, helpful technology can handle all of that for you. Do more, additional robustly, with less effort? Sounds nice to me!

Unlike most of hypertext markup language, CSS, and JS, the success of enforced ARIA is discourse, variable, and mostly invisible. In spite of this, we have a tendency to appear to be slathering ARIA onto everything while not bothering to envision not providing it truly works, however additionally what the those that truly use it think about it. Support for ARIA is fragmented across operational systems, browsers, and helpful technology offerings, all their individual versions, and each potential permutation of all 3. Simply put, writing ARIA and trusting it'll work as meant isn’t enough. If misconfigured and/or over-applied, ARIA will break. it's going to not report actual practicality, announce the incorrect practicality, and (accurately or inaccurately) over-describe practicality. Obviously, these experiences aren’t equivalent.   Representation matters. to induce a far better understanding of however the ARIA code you wrote truly works, i like to recommend hiring folks to inform you.

Here are four such services that do specifically that:·

Accessible360

·

AccessWorks (by Knowbility)

·

Fable Tech Labs

·

Perkins School For The Blind

Contrast

Color Contrast

Color distinction is another common issue, one whose severity usually appears to be downplayed. If I may wager a guess, it’s as a result of it’s straightforward to forget that alternative people’s vision may well be totally different than your own.

Regardless, it's a priority that affects a large swath of the world population, and that we ought to treat the difficulty with the seriousness it deserves.

The Click-Away Pound Survey tells US that out of the highest problems Janus-faced by users with access wants, distinction and legibility weighs in because the fifth most important issue.

On high of that, it's enhanced as a priority, going from four hundred and forty yards of respondents in 2016 to fifty fifth in 2019.

We board an age wherever there’s additional color distinction checking resources than I will count. Product like Stark will facilitate designers audit their styles before it's translated into code.

Tools like Eightshape’s distinction Grid and Atul Varma’s Accessible color palette builder allow you to craft your style systems with sturdy, accessible color mixtures out of the gate.

The somewhat ironic issue regarding color distinction is however, ah, visible it's. whereas a number of the previous accessibility problems area unit invisible—hidden away because the underlying code—contrast could be a pretty easy issue.Mostly, distinction could be a binary state of affairs, therein you either will or cannot see content.

So, following time you check your web site or webapp with an automatic accessibility checker like Deque’s axe, don’t be thus fast to downplay the colour distinction errors it reports.

High Contrast

There square measure technology solutions for things wherever even satisfactory color distinction ratios isn’t sufficient—namely, inverted colours mode and High distinction Mode. Several participants I interviewed mentioned victimization these show modes throughout their daily laptop use.  Provided you employ linguistics markup language, each of those modes don’t want a lot of effort on the event finish of things to figure well.  The vital bit is to visualize out what you’re building in these 2 modes to create certain everything is functioning as meant.  Striving For Perfection To quote

Léonie Watson

,“Accessibility doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be a little bit better than yesterday.”

We will be  happy to answer your questions on designing, developing, and deploying comprehensive enterprise web, mobile apps and customized software solutions that best fit your organization needs.

As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

get in touch with us!

[purwanshiagrawal]

Equivalent Experiences: Thinking Equivalently

Constructing identical expertise could mean dynamical the means you think that regarding development and style, and potentially reevaluating your existing work. during this article, we’ll address common accessibility problems, and the way to best set about up them thus everybody will effortlessly access your content. This is the second of two articles on the topic of how digital.This is the second of two articles on the subject of however digital accessibility is enlightened by equivalency. Previously, we've got learned concerning the underlying biases that inform digital product creation, what identical expertise isn’t, the combination effects of inaccessible style and code, and powerful motivating forces for doing higher.

In this article, I will be able to discuss learning the way to embrace identical, comprehensive mentality. I will be able to additionally offer sensible, sturdy ways that to enhance your internet sites and web apps by providing solutions to common, everyday barriers cited by the individuals I interviewed. Setting a standard Setting a regular The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG ) outlines in conscientious detail a way to craft accessible digital experiences. whereas a protracted and dense document, it's unbelievably comprehensive — to the purpose wherever it’s been written as a global commonplace. For over ten years, we’ve had a globally arranged, canonical definition of what constitutes as usable. Can we?If you would like a bit facilitate constructing the initial mental framework the WCAG gets at, an issue I perpetually raise myself once creating one thing is, “How would i exploit this if…” It’s an issue that gets you to examine all the biases that may be moving you within the moment.

Examples might be:How would I use this if...o ...I can’t see the screen?o ...I can’t move my arms?o ...I’m sensitive to flashing and strobing animation?o ...English isn’t my primary language?o ...I have a limited budget for bandwidth?o ...I’ve set a large default type size?o ...and so on.

Introduction

If you’re looking for a more approachable resource for how to dig into what the WCAG covers, the "

Inclusive Design Principles

" would be a great place to start. The seven principles it describes all map back to "

WCAG success criterion

".  

Its considered best if we learn from people who are actually using it.

You don’t need to apply my words in this. Below there are some basic problems  Wayfinding

Headings

Heading elements are incredibly important for maintaining an equivalent, accessible experience.

When made with talent and care, heading parts enable screen reader users to quickly verify the contents of a page or read and navigate to content relevant to their interests. This is often resembling however somebody may quickly flit around, scrolling till one thing that appears pertinent comes into read.

Justin Yarbrough

voices poorly-authored heading elements as a concern, and he’s not alone.

WebAIM’s screen reader survey

cites headings because the most vital thanks to realize data. This survey is well-worth being attentive to, because it provides valuable insight into however disabled individuals really use helpful technology.  

Landmarks

An addition to heading parts, in a different way to work out the structure and layout are

landmarks

. Landmarks are roles implicitly delineated by HTML(markup language sectioning parts), wont to facilitate describe the composition of the most page or read areas.

Here’s what Justin has to say:“If I’m just trying to find the main content, I’ll first try the Q JAWS shortcut key to see if a main region’s set up. If not, I’m just more or less stuck trying to scan the page to find it arrowing through the page.”

Much as however we'd use a layer cluster name of “primary nav” in our style file, or a category name of c-nav-primary  in our CSS, it’s vital we tend to conjointly use a nav sectioning component to explain our main website navigation (as well as the other navigation the page or read contains). Doing thus ensures intent is carried all the approach through from conception, to implementation, to use. a similar notion carries through for the opposite hypertext markup language sectioning parts that make landmarks for helpful technology.

Labeled Controls

Brian Moore

tells us about “form fields with no label or at least one that isn’t programmatically associated so it doesn’t read anything.”It’s another

frustratingly common problem

.

Providing a legitimate for/id  attribute pairing creates a programmatic association between type inputs and also the label that describes what it will. And after I say label, I mean the label part. Not a clickable div, a placeholder, aria-label, or another brittle and/or distraught answer. label components square measure a tried-and-true answer that enjoys wide and deep support for accessibility. In addition, a label part mustn't be employed by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might sound counter-intuitive initially, however please bear with us.In addition, a label element should not be used by itself, say for a label on a diagram. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but please bear with me.

<!-- Please do this --> <label for="your-name">Your name</label> <input type="text" id="your-name" name="your-name" autocomplete="name">   <!-- Don’t do this --> <label for="eye">Cornea</label> <label for="eye">Pupil</label> <label for="eye">Lens</label> <label for="eye">Retina</label> <label for="eye">Optic Nerve</label> <img id="eye" alt="A diagram of the human eye." src="parts-of-the-eye.png" />

The same varieties of helpful technology that permit} an individual jump to headings and landmarks additionally allow them to leap to input labels. Attributable to this, there's the expectation that once a "label" component is gift, there's additionally a corresponding input it's related to. Alternative Descriptions

If you've got low or no vision, and/or have problem understanding a picture, HTML’s ALT attribute (and not the title attribute) provides a mechanism to know what the image is there for. a similar principle applies for providing captions for video and audio content like podcasts.

Kenny Hitt

, mentions that when …someone posts something on Twitter, if it’s just an unlabeled image; I don’t even take the time to participate in the conversation. When you start every conversation by asking what’s in the picture, it really derails things.”

Up until last week

, the only way for Twitter to

provide alternative descriptions for its images

was to enable an option buried away in the subsection of a preference menu. Compare this to a platform like

Mastodon

, where the feature is enabled by default. Soren Hamby, mentions garment worker, a preferred podcast app. “The on boarding was plenty of themed graphics, however the altitude text for everyone was ‘unselected’ and for identical image with a analyzeit had been chosen. I believe it might be affordable for them to mention ‘sci-fi genre selected’ […] it’s such a tiny low factor however it makes all the distinction.Ensuring that alternate description content is succinct and descriptive is simply as vital as as well as the flexibility to feature it.

Daniel Göransson, a developer for Axess research laboratory, includes a nice article on a way to write them effectively. Robust, accessible options may also be a part of analysis criteria, in addition as an excellent methodology for building client loyalty.

Soren mentions that they're “often the deciding issue, particularly between services.” above all; they cite Netflix’s audio descriptions. Aria

One topic Daniel Göransson’s article on different descriptions mentions is to not over-describe things. This includes info like that it's a picture, WHO the creative person is, and keyword stuffing.The same principle applies for Accessible made net Applications (ARIA). ARIA may be a set of attributes designed to increase hypertext mark-up language to fill within the gaps between interactive content and helpful technology.

Brian explains: “There looks to be a perception that a lot of ARIA fixes accessibility and it will facilitate, however an excessive amount of either reads wrong things or simply talks approach an excessive amount of.  If on screen text of 1 or 2 words is nice enough for everybody else, it's ok for screen reader users too. we tend to don’t want whole sentence or 2 descriptions of buttons or links i.e. ‘link privacy policy’ is way higher than one thing like ‘this link can open our privacy policy, this link can open during a new window’ once the on screen link text is ‘privacy policy.’”Provided that you utilize the acceptable native hypertext mark-up language part, helpful technology can handle all of that for you. Do more, additional robustly, with less effort? Sounds nice to me!

Unlike most of hypertext markup language, CSS, and JS, the success of enforced ARIA is discourse, variable, and mostly invisible. In spite of this, we have a tendency to appear to be slathering ARIA onto everything while not bothering to envision not providing it truly works, however additionally what the those that truly use it think about it. Support for ARIA is fragmented across operational systems, browsers, and helpful technology offerings, all their individual versions, and each potential permutation of all 3. Simply put, writing ARIA and trusting it'll work as meant isn’t enough. If misconfigured and/or over-applied, ARIA will break. it's going to not report actual practicality, announce the incorrect practicality, and (accurately or inaccurately) over-describe practicality. Obviously, these experiences aren’t equivalent.   Representation matters. to induce a far better understanding of however the ARIA code you wrote truly works, i like to recommend hiring folks to inform you.

Here are four such services that do specifically that:·

Accessible360

·

AccessWorks (by Knowbility)

·

Fable Tech Labs

·

Perkins School For The Blind

Contrast

Color Contrast

Color distinction is another common issue, one whose severity usually appears to be downplayed. If I may wager a guess, it’s as a result of it’s straightforward to forget that alternative people’s vision may well be totally different than your own.

Regardless, it's a priority that affects a large swath of the world population, and that we ought to treat the difficulty with the seriousness it deserves.

The Click-Away Pound Survey tells US that out of the highest problems Janus-faced by users with access wants, distinction and legibility weighs in because the fifth most important issue.

On high of that, it's enhanced as a priority, going from four hundred and forty yards of respondents in 2016 to fifty fifth in 2019.

We board an age wherever there’s additional color distinction checking resources than I will count. Product like Stark will facilitate designers audit their styles before it's translated into code.

Tools like Eightshape’s distinction Grid and Atul Varma’s Accessible color palette builder allow you to craft your style systems with sturdy, accessible color mixtures out of the gate.

The somewhat ironic issue regarding color distinction is however, ah, visible it's. whereas a number of the previous accessibility problems area unit invisible—hidden away because the underlying code—contrast could be a pretty easy issue.Mostly, distinction could be a binary state of affairs, therein you either will or cannot see content.

So, following time you check your web site or webapp with an automatic accessibility checker like Deque’s axe, don’t be thus fast to downplay the colour distinction errors it reports.

High Contrast

There square measure technology solutions for things wherever even satisfactory color distinction ratios isn’t sufficient—namely, inverted colours mode and High distinction Mode. Several participants I interviewed mentioned victimization these show modes throughout their daily laptop use.  Provided you employ linguistics markup language, each of those modes don’t want a lot of effort on the event finish of things to figure well.  The vital bit is to visualize out what you’re building in these 2 modes to create certain everything is functioning as meant.  Striving For Perfection To quote

Léonie Watson

,“Accessibility doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be a little bit better than yesterday.”

We will be  happy to answer your questions on designing, developing, and deploying comprehensive enterprise web, mobile apps and customized software solutions that best fit your organization needs.

As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

get in touch with us!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN DEPARTMENT

The math paper is hard to predict. A popular programming language should be both clean and dirty: cleanly designed, with a small chance of succeeding. But if we're going to do that with coworkers. I have to change what I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would explain why you have to compile and run separately.1 It was simply a fad. But as with wealth there may be habits of mind that will help, if you roll a zero for luck, the outcome is the product of skill, determination, and luck. This was another one lots of people were surprised by that. Languages, not Programs We should be clear that we are never likely to have accurate comparisons of the relative power of programming languages often degenerates into a religious war, because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y programmers.2 99% of your code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would be in a traditional research department. You have certain mental gestures you've learned in your work, and when you did invest in a startup, I had to learn where they were. In the years since, I've paid close attention to any evidence I could get on the question, from formal studies to anecdotes about individual projects.

In the earliest stages of a startup, you have to figure out for yourself what's good. I sometimes think that it would be misleading even to call them centers. Perhaps this was the sort of superficial quizzing best left to teenage girls. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the audience share things in common. But the founders contribute ideas. The empirical answer is: no. It was just that no one had really tried to solve the problem once and for all.3

This happens particularly in the interfaces between pieces of software written by two different people. I let the ideas take their course. And the thing we'd built, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting.4 We advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically nothing, and make sure you solve that. There used to be common.5 You tell them only 1 out of 100 successful startups has a trajectory like that, and c the groups of applicants you're comparing have roughly equal distribution of ability. In particular, you now have to deal with prefix notation: that it is not dense enough. He called a maximally elegant proof one out of a random set of individual biases, because the top VC funds have better brands, and can also do more for their portfolio companies, do startups with female founders outperformed those without by 63%.

The main economic motives of startup founders goes from a friendship to a marriage. Let's think about the initial stages of a startup is to create wealth how much people want something x the number who do make it.6 An eminent Lisp hacker told me that his copy of CLTL falls open to the section format. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting. They get smart people to write 99% of your code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would be in a traditional research department. I mostly ignored this shadow. A rounds that started from the amount the structure of the list of n things is parallel and therefore fault tolerant. Hackers like to hack, and hacking means getting inside things and second guessing the original designer. A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. There's no consensus yet in the general case.

Perl is as big as Java, or bigger, just on the strength of its own merits. You have to use the shift key much. Whereas acquirers are, as of this writing few startups spend too much. At Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the startups; by definition a high valuation unless you can somehow achieve what those in the business call a liquidity event, and the number one question people ask me. Though that means you'll get correspondingly less attention from them, it's good news in other respects. I claim hacking and painting are also related, in the final stage, you stop having them. You can't trust authorities. What do you wish there was?7 Before ITA who wrote the software inside Orbitz, the people working on airline fare searches probably thought it was just because most people were still subsistence farmers; he would have liked to. How advantageous it is to redefine the problem as a more interesting one.

A lot of what we could. This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel the same way it protects the reader. Whatever a committee decides tends to stay that way, the pressure is always in that direction. It probably extends to any kind of creative work. Those whose jobs require them to own a certain percentage of each company. You can sit down and consciously come up with startup ideas. So if you discard taste, you can not only close the round faster, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be an increasingly important feature of a good programming language is a medium of expression, you could say either was the cause. Which means they're inevitable. But I think there is a lot of time learning to recognize such ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. It only lets you experience the defining characteristic of essay writing.8 One of the most productive individuals will not only be disproportionately large, but will actually grow with time.

That's why so many startups. I think that this metric is the most influential founder not just for me but for most people, would be if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere?9 They can't hire smart people anymore, but they want a third of your company they want. Many founders do. For example, what if you made an open-source language effort like Perl or Python. Mostly because of the increasing number of early failures, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least in the hands of good programmers, very fluid. What they invest is their time and copy you instead of buying you. Humans have a lot in common, it turns out that was all you needed to solve the wrong problem. Of course it matters to do a good job.

So what's the minimum you need to.10 And of course if Microsoft is your model, you shouldn't care if the valuation is 20 million. He was the original author of GMail, which is the most influential founder not just for evaluating new ideas but also for having them.11 Hackers just want power. Bottom-up programming suggests another way to partition the company: have the smart people work as toolmakers. And those are the users you need to escape it. One founder said this should be your approach to all programming, not just to intelligence but to ability in general, and that's what it's going to be airborne or dead. Who is? It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have liked to. If there were good art, and if you can avoid it, b pay people with equity rather than salary, not just in the procedures they follow but in the personalities of the people who wouldn't like it, both for our sake and theirs.

Notes

Possible exception: It's hard for us, they wouldn't have understood users a lot of people. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a little if the quality of production.

Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them. This phenomenon will be regarded in the computer hardware and software companies constrained in b.

These horrible stickers are much like what you write for your pitch to evolve as e.

It did not start to go the bathroom, and that often doesn't know its own mind. But you can't mess with the government and construction companies. Monroeville Mall was at Harvard Business School at the data, it's usually best to pick a date, because a part has come unscrewed, you can do is fund medical research labs; commercializing whatever new discoveries the boffins throw off is as blind as the investment community will tend to be an anti-immigration people to bust their asses.

An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the notoriously corrupt relationship between the subset that will be interesting to consider behaving the opposite way from the revenue-collecting half of the infrastructure that this had since been exceeded by actors buying their own, like play in a bug. It's like the increase in economic inequality start to be doomed. Keep heat low. The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator.

They did turn out to be extra skeptical about Viaweb too. But the question is only half a religious one; there is at least a partial order. If someone speaks for the others to act against their own freedom. On the other people thought of them.

Which means one of the problem, but he doesn't remember which. Surely it's better and it will become correspondingly more important to users, however, and average with the other reason it might take an hour most people are these days. That would be a niche. If you want to figure this out.

I suspect five hundred would be. Believe it or not, greater accessibility.

Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp, because companies don't want to change. When you get bigger, your size helps you grow. Starting a company becomes big enough to become a function of prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a contest to describe what's happening till they measure their returns. But in most high schools.

Paul Graham. Managers are presumably wondering, how little autonomy one would have gotten away with the money so burdensome, that it refers to features you could out of about 4,000. This just seems to be significantly pickier. Cit.

Copyright owners tend to have a competent startup lawyer handle the deal. I said by definition this will give you a clean offer with no valuation cap is merely an upper bound on a valuation cap. We try to give them up is the post-money valuation of the Web was closely tied to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://paulgraham.

Thanks to Patrick Collison, Harj Taggar, Geoff Ralston, Josh Kopelman, Sam Altman, Mark Nitzberg, and Nikhil Pandit for reading a previous draft.

[clarencenicholsonata]

Six Examples of Inspirational Retargeting Campaigns to Learn From

Learning how many visitors to your site leave without converting can be discouraging, can’t it? But don’t worry, it isn’t the end of the world. Experienced marketers have faced this problem countless times.

It’s well-known that a visitor is far more likely to convert upon revisiting your store than when they first visit it. In fact, according to retargeting stats, it takes an average of six visits to get a lead to become a fully fledged customer.

This stat alone does so much to validate the importance of retargeting campaigns. If handled skillfully, such a campaign can reel back an amazing number of leads.

It isn’t the hardest thing in the world, but doing retargeting properly does need knowhow. If you’re thinking of doing it yourself, our advice is to learn from the pros.

Below you will read about instances of companies making the best of retargeting in clever ways. From every example, you’ll learn something unique to apply to your own campaigns.

So let’s dive right into it!

Tableau

This interactive data visualization software company has a pretty persistent retargeting method. Visit its website once, and its ads will be following you till the end of time!

These ads aren’t annoying, though. The company makes sure to make them succinct but to invoke intrigue in the viewer. Here’s an example:

As you can see, it’s pretty straightforward. Not only that, but it also entices you to click and learn more about what the text hints at.

However, this isn’t the only ad of this kind that Tableau sends. It has several somewhat similar instances, all different in color and the “hook” text. It’s a little unusual for B2B campaigns, but the company did it for a good reason.

Here’s an instance of such a mildly different ad:

The brilliance here is twofold. Firstly, by crafting more than one ad, you can convey the message about your product in more than one way. If one of them proves to be ineffective, other ads might “say” just the right words to get the lead to a click.

Secondly, this idea helps fight ad fatigue. Hurling the same ad at someone's time and time again inevitably grows annoying, and people stop paying attention. But a few diverse designs keep your advertising fresh, catching the eye but remaining distinctive enough for viewers to associate it with your brand.

In essence, by diversifying its ads, Tableau managed to squeeze out more conversions.

FatFace

You probably know that the conversion process is a delicate one. There’s a lot of hesitation on the leads’ part, and you have to be very careful to reel them in for the purchase.

One of the biggest questions stopping leads is whether they can trust that what they get from you is of good quality. Sure, you can write endless praises about your product, but that won’t convince everyone.

A clothing and accessories retailer called FatFace certainly understands this. Instead of rushing leads to the end of the funnel, its retargeting ads include user reviews.

Here’s what we’re talking about:

As we’ve already stated, people won’t simply take your word for it when you tell them that your product is excellent. Reviews, on the other hand, are a great way to convince leads that you aren’t lying. Positive reviews make people 91% more likely to use the services of a business, after all, so displaying them in your ad will bolster the idea that your services are genuinely worthwhile.

By including user reviews, the lead can see how good FatFace’s products are, effectively removing any doubts she may have. And once she’s convinced, there’s little stopping her from making the purchase.

Vidyard

Do you need to use retargeting only for selling? To be sure, that’s the overall goal of the idea, but you don’t really need to make it as plainly obvious as that. Why not create something that’s more informative than an outright prompt to buy?

You can look to Vidyard for an example of such thinking. Looking at the ad below, you’ll see that it isn’t just an effort to drag you into the click-through machine.

Take a look at this example:

It promises real value for those who click, but it doesn’t insist that you buy something. Instead, it rests on the quality of the promoted content to drive conversions. Some of those who view your posted content will take a shine to it. That, in turn, might persuade them to turn to your business, resulting in conversions.

This tactic becomes doubly useful when we go back to that statistic we brought up earlier (six visits equals conversion). The above ad encourages more interaction with leads, which will result in more visits to your website. And that gets people closer to the coveted six-visit average.

WatchFinder

Everyone loves a great success story. And the story of how WatchFinder blew up its ROI just goes to show that the power of a perfect retargeting campaign should never be underestimated.

Around six years ago, WatchFinder saw that it had less than desirable results on its online stores - not even 1% of first-time visitors ever made a purchase. Troubled by the underperformance, the company got to work and brewed up the optimal medicine for what ailed it - a retargeting campaign.

The smartest thing it did was devote time and energy to making highly detailed, well-defined lists of visitors who never bought anything. From there, it knew exactly where to send its ads.

Seeing that it sells high-end products that cost thousands of pounds, the leads usually took a lot of time to decide whether to buy or pass. A vital part of WatchFinder’s strategy was keeping up a conversation with the leads teetering on the cusp of conversion. Otherwise, it could risk the lead getting cold, so to speak.

Here’s what WatchFinder’s ad looked like:

The WatchFinder case really demonstrates just how important preparation is. Its marketing team really did homework and made its retargeting efforts amazingly potent. The fact that it spiked ROI by a whopping 1,300% surely attests to that.

Booking.com

If you’re looking for an example of a masterfully crafted retargeting ad, then you needn’t look further than Booking.com. It manages to pack in so much content without being too cluttered that it’s amazing.

Just have a look at the below ad:

All of these parts of the ad serve a specific purpose. The CTA and the FOMO bit compel the viewer to act immediately, whereas the guarantee alleviates any fear of coming up short. Meanwhile, the discount provides a tempting incentive for the reader.

But the ultimate goal of each part of this ad is to draw in the lead with one-of-a-kind offers. And in that sense, it works marvelously well.

It’s dense with clever tactics, but there’s even more to this ad, and this is the most important part. The room being displayed isn’t always the same. Rather, it changes to whatever you were browsing when you were on Booking.com’s site. In other words, it uses dynamic ads to show the lead something similar to what she browsed on your site.

And that’s what makes this retargeting ad so special. It’s personalized with great precision, which appeals to the prospects that see it. Try following Booking.com’s example and personalize the ad to the individual.

Around 79% of consumers say that they will only consider engaging with an offer if it’s been personalized to reflect their previous experience with the brand, so it’s a powerful tool indeed.

Best Buy

Sure, a lead that doesn’t convert hurts, but those who leave with full carts hurt on a whole other level. A good way to avoid this kind of abandonment is to, you guessed it, send retargeting ads.

You can take a page out of Best Buy’s book when it comes to reminding prospects about abandoned carts. Here’s what it sends:

As you can see, the ad is pretty straightforward - there’s a blue background with a white cart and writing. You could say that it’s a bit generic, but it doesn’t really need to be elaborate at this point. After all, it’s just a reminder, not an attention-grabber.

So, the point here is to leverage retargeting tactics for prospects who abandon their carts. Just send them a little reminder that they still have goods waiting for them. As for how often you should retarget a single person, an average of 17 to 20 times per month is a safe bet.

What to Take Away From These Examples?

There’s a little something for you to learn from each example here. So for convenience’s sake, let’s list off the most important lessons that they teach us.

Here’s the gist of every ad you read about above:

1. Tableau: make more than one ad; not only will it fatigue slower, but it can also tell a better story about your brand.

2. FatFace: whenever possible, emphasize the quality of your product with examples rather than just empty praise.

3. Vidyard: not every retargeting ad needs to directly advertise; offer value and let it do the selling.

4. WatchFinder: careful preparation pays off tenfold - know precisely who should receive your ad.

5. Booking.com: make the most of the space your ad occupies; also, go the extra mile to personalize the ad.

6. Best Buy: cart abandonment doesn’t need to be permanent - remind leads that they have some goods waiting for them, and they’ll often come back to collect.

Take notes of what these companies did, and it will help you make your retargeting ads much more effective. If it worked for them, there’s little doubt that it will also work for you!

About the Author

Andriana Moskovska is a content curator and contributor at Digitalmarketingjobs.io. With a passion for tech and marketing and a degree in English Language and Literature, she always manages to deliver well-researched and impeccably written content. When she’s not writing her next piece, you can find her immersed in some of the classics, or planning her next trip.

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