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erodasfishtacos · 3 years

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Not Your Charity Case

prompt: Harry is a frat boy - who doesn’t need sympathy from anyone. He makes Y/N feel a sense of home when they’re together. But is Harry just like every stereotypical frat boy?

word count: 6.2k

warnings: minor violence, language, deaf!harry, smutttt

other: when Harry is talking to Y/N or any other characters - it is to be noted that he is signing. When Y/N talks to Harry - she is also always signing

Let me know if you’d want to see anything else from this verse:)

+++

You were rushed - you really shouldn’t stop at the local coffee shop for a sugary, delicious mocha chip frappuccino.

Despite what people say, professors are much more lax and carefree in college.

It was about two weeks into the new semester, - your third here- and the seasons were changing - becoming autumn.

Chilled breezes, falling leaves, and vivid colors of nature made you happy.

When you arrive in line, there are two people ahead of you. A girl currently in front of the cashier and a tall male with a red and black flannel on behind her- typing away on his phone.

When she moves to the left, the broad man steps forward. His snapback facing backwards, brown curls dancing around his neck. You can’t help but notice how tall and lean he is, shoulders broad and straight.

You definitely haven’t seen him before on campus. You’d remember.

From what you can see, he shows the young girl behind the counter the screen of his phone without saying anything at all.

The raven-haired girl’s face pinches in annoyance. “We don’t accept orders like that. You need to tell me what you want.”

You’re a little surprised by both the rude cashier but also the man who doesn’t respond right away.

He attempts to show her his phone again but she shakes her head - annoyed.

You become interested in the situation when I watch him sign, a few gestures before pointing to his ears. In the most obvious form of saying “I can’t hear.”

The clueless girl gives him a blank look, “Listen, there’s a line. I don’t have time for this.”

You hoped you weren’t overstepping your boundaries when you slide up next to him, tapping him on his shoulder to get his attention.

It is a bit startling how gorgeous the boy is. He was tanned with bright green-eyes and a defined jawline that was currently clenched in frustration.

You sign, “What are you trying to order?”

He studies you for a second with hesitance before his long slim fingers begin to move, slowly as if he thinks you may be inexperienced in the form of language.

He replies, “Large coffee with a little cream and two sugars.”

You squeeze in front of him, “It is not only rude but illegal to not serve based on disabilities. Refusing an order from a deaf person isn’t moral or acceptable.”

The girl has enough decency to mumble an apology and turned bright pink, “Sorry, he doesn’t look deaf. “You roll your eyes - how can you tell that someone is deaf based on solely appearance? This girls a fucking idiot, you think.

You repeat his order to her, along with yours - sliding your debit card towards her and give her your name for the order.

The man trails behind you to the small waiting area. “Thank you,” he signs simply. You nod and return the pleasantry. The. hand him his steaming hot coffee.

“Thank you again. I’m going to be late to class, so I have to go,” he tells me, seeming a little out of place signing with a stranger.

“Go ahead, I’ll see you around.” It was the first time in a long time you’ve signed to anyone outside your family.

+++

Sipping your drink as you are only five minutes late and the class hasn’t even started yet. The man you just helped was sat in the back of the classroom, unloading his laptop.

With a little bravery, you wriggle your way through and plop into the wooden chair easily. Letting your backpack fall to the ground. Curly looks over at you with a frown, he signs, “Why are you sitting next to me?”

You blush, “I don’t know? Thought it’d be good to have someone to talk to.”

His hands are tense as he replies, “I’m not a charity case, so you can leave me alone.”

“Never said you were,” you huff when you tell him. Not appreciating how rude he was being. Signing had its own tones and expressions so to speak. For example, when someone is happy their signs and movements are different than when they’re sad or frustrated.

Harry seems to be the latter. You wrestle out your laptop to the PowerPoint that was going to be discussed today in class. You noticed Harry stared very intently at the professor to read his lips and expression.

You was surprised he didn’t have an interpreter with him but you’re sure he got special accommodations elsewhere. Even though that was absolutely none of your business.

His shoulders are tensed and he makes sure your arms don’t brush like you have cooties for the entire two hours. The nameless boy is up and out of his seat as soon as the professor shuts off the projector and turns on the lights - signaling class to be over.

Well fuck him then.

***

You don’t make the mistake to sit next him again. But that doesn’t mean you could ogle his strong muscular back and big hands.

It wasn’t your place to care but you felt twinges in your tummy when you noticed him struggling to keep up with the fast-speed class on certain days.

You were in the large, rustic library that smelled of old books and damp wallpaper. It was dead silent as people furiously studied or worked on papers due.

As you paced the shelves, you could not find the book you needed for your American Literature class. Fuck the Dewey Decimal System.

Part-time uni students probably just stuffed returned books in any open space they saw fit. But you need this book in particular, a discussion board post due by midnight and it was currently eight-thirty. They had ran out of copies at the on-campus bookstore.

After a valiant effort, you trudge up to the checkout counter. A little sign reads, “ring me if no ones here!”

You impatiently ring the silver bell. But no one comes. You give whoever is working a minute or two but nothing. Another ring it is.

Silence. No one. Of fucking course, luck is not on your side tonight.

You dramatically clunk your head onto the high counter top in front of you - groaning at the fact you may fail the assignment.

A tentative pat on your shoulder makes you snap your head up. To see the boy you’ve been constantly avoiding standing behind the checkout desk.

“Are you okay?” He asks. He had a name-tag on - Harry. He honestly looked a bit out of place. Harry appeared to be a frat boy. He was still had a boyish air about him but an intensity that was unmatchable.

He didn’t look like he would work in the library. He looked like...well he looked like he would be a beer pong referee or something.

You couldn’t see below his torso but he had a plain black snapback on and a vintage Elton John concert tee. A cross necklace dangling over the worn shirt.

You smile, embarrassed, but reply, “Just being dramatic. I can’t find a book and I was waiting here.”

There’s mirth in his eyes when he points to the bell,”Did you ring the bell?”

Your brows furrow, “I did.”

“Well I can’t hear it, I’m deaf,” he deadpans with a straight face and a dry sense of humor.

You roll your eyes, laughing nervously, “I didn’t know you were working!”

“What do you need?”

He helps you locate the book in two minutes flat before checking you out and you rushing home to finish the homework.

You felt bad ignoring your little sister’s FaceTime calls but you promised to call her back tomorrow.

***

Though once again, you hadn’t interacted with Harry since last week - you constantly found yourself studying his stoic profile or fast moving fingers.

You would never befriend Harry because you feel bad for him - like he presumed. You enjoyed American Sign Language and it actually made you feel back at home.

You’re little sister was born completely deaf. She was much younger than you - eight years old. Fifteen years apart to be exact. You learned the language along with her and your parents.

When you were at home and your sister was there - you guys tried to only sign so she didn’t feel left out. So Harry felt like home - a little despite his completely off-putting demeanor. It made you a little bit more persistent than with any other frat boy.

***

The bulletin board in your advisor’s office caught your eyes. None of the little tabs ripped off in interest.

‘Student with ASL experience and above a 3.5 GPA needed for tutoring sessions - twice weekly. $16 dollars an hour.’

After your meeting, you tugged the little scrap of paper off and tuck it into your pocket. You couldn’t know for sure if it was Harry but you didn’t know of any other deaf students in the program.

You say ‘fuck it’ and type out an email to the advisor of academic affairs and accommodations to throw your hat in the ring.

***

You don’t hear back for three days - nearly forgetting about it in the mean time. Your eyes scan quickly over the email to grant you the position. They include contact information for no other than Harry Styles.

After psyching yourself out a little and a few paces across your kitchen tiles - you text him.

Hey! I’m your new assigned tutor. Would you like to set up a time and place? As well as what kind of help you’re looking for.

The reply text comes shortly after

Hello, thank you very much. I am just in need of hearing ears. I am deaf and have a hard time keeping up with the my professor. I have begun recording the lectures in hope that you can sign then to me.

Sure thing. That won’t be a problem!

I live in Alpha Sigma on 3rd street. I have my own room. I’d rather not have the tutoring session in public. However, if that makes you uncomfortable - we can figure something out.

You take a minute to debate. You understand why this would be a task too loud for the library and why he’d want privacy. You didn’t feel like I’d be uncomfortable with him.

I saw twice a week so does Tuesday and Thursday at seven work?

Sounds great. Thank you again x

Did he know it was me? Was he expecting it to me?

***

He was definitely not expecting you. You automatically knew that by the way his friendly smile dissipated into a frown when he opened the door for you.

You attempted to look nice today without trying too hard. A loose crop top with the university’s name, a pair of tight black leggings, bulky white socks bunched at your ankles, and white sneakers. Very 80’s.

You try to keep your composure, “Hi Harry, I’m going to be your tutor.”

He slowly nods at you, huffing out a breathe of irritation before inviting you into the frat house.

You’d only been here once or twice for a party so you had no idea what the house actually looked like when there weren’t bodies and booze everywhere.

He’s walking you past a group of boys playing FIFA on the flatscreen in the living room, white claws open everywhere.

“Y/N! Hey babe!” You look over to see Niall - one of your good friends from your part-time job at the bookstore - trotting over to you guys.

The blonde pulls you into an overexcited hug. He reminded you of a cuddly, soft puppy dog most of the time.

“Are you Harry’s little tutor?” Niall coos, leaning over to pinch Harry’s cheek.

Harry- who was observing the conversation, focusing in on our lips, immediately bats his friend away. A small scowl forming on his face.

It automatically turns into a playful brawl where Niall tugs Harry into headlock. But he has no strength on the brunette.

Harry turns out of it quickly and pushes Niall to the ground. He straddles his stomach and begins to jokingly pinch and slap at him.

Niall hisses, “Ouch! You motherfucker! Big oaf!”

Then you don’t know why you find this endearing but Niall signs the word, “uncle” a few times to signal he’s accepted his lost.

The fact that they wrestle so much that Niall learned to sign how to give up made you giggle more than it should.

Harry crawls off of him, running a hand through his messy curls, his face a little flushed.

“I’ll talk to you later!” You tell Niall as your trailing behind Harry up a flight of stairs.

His room is extremely neat. A fluffy navy comfort decorated his bed with a few photos of flowers and nature on his wall. A tidy desk tucked away in the corner that had all of his school work loaded on top of it.

He chooses to sit in his desk chair, motioning for you to perch on his bed. You look at him expectantly when he pulls out the tape recorder and sets it on the surface.

He pulls his laptop into his lap and begins signing, “I need you to transcribe the lecture for me so I can follow it. We can skip through the bits where he is rambling or off topic.”

You nod, letting him know to begin whenever he’s ready. He presses the side button and the recording starts but it super unclear and garbled.

“Did you record this from your seat?” You ask, the professors words nearly inaudible and fuzzy.

“Yes.”

“You need to bring it to the front of the room. Ask Dr. Morrison to lay it on his desk before class. I can’t hear anything but static and mumbles,” You tell him.

He laughs and shakes his head. His movements rough and angry, “Of course its fucked up. I get you as my tutor and then the recorder is shit.”

You glare at him, offended as you haven’t done anything to this boy. “Excuse me? I’ve literally been trying to help since I’ve meet you. What is your fucking issue?”

“I’m not a charity case! I don’t need you to feel bad for me. I’m not helpless! You’re probably just a silly little girl who took ASL in high school because it was cool and trendy. Go back to focusing on psych.”

“Fuck you, Harry,” Your gestures getting sharper and your face sour, “You know nothing about me so don’t act like you do. I don’t feel bad for you or think that you’re helpless.” You put up a hand and tell him to not talk.

“I was just being nice because I thought you were handsome and at first, seemed friendly. It turns out you’re just like every douchebag frat boy I’ve met. What a disappointment,” You chuckle, swinging your bag on your shoulder and storm out of the room without another look.

***

The cafe was jammed packed - it was Waffle Wednesday. You had said waffles in your tray and were about to plop down on a stool when you hear your name being called.

“C’mere, come sit with us!” He hollers over the commotion of the crowd. Niall.

You’re about to decline when some dude slips behind you and snags the stool. Shit.

A bit unwillingly you slide into the booth next to Niall, cracking open your sparkling water. “Mates, this is Y/N, we work at the store together and she’s Harry’s tutor,” he tells them. “Y/N, this is Liam and Louis.”

“Hello,” you try your best to come off as friendly even though you can feel Harry’s glare on the side of your face. You ended up falling to easy conversation with the boys. Niall has a very limited ASL vocabulary but tries.

The boys are also trying to talk slower and more pronounced so Harry can watch and understand. A couple of times he taps Niall on the wrist to repeat what was going on.

Your phone begins buzzing and you apologize for the interruption. It’s your little sister, Mazie, FaceTiming.

You answer the phone with a frown, signing “Aren’t you suppose to be in school?”

Mazie looks upset, eyes a little watery. She gestures back, “I left early. I’m sick.”

“Are you really sick or where you getting bullied again?” You asks her.

Your sister hesitates before sniffling, “You already know. I hate my school.”

Mazie has had other children bully her for her disability since she started preschool and it as still happening in fourth grade.

“What can I do to help?” You frown, never wanting to see your baby sister cry.

You chat for a few minutes to help her calm down. When the phone call ends, you don’t realize that all the boys were watching you in interest. Harry in particular, keeps his focus on you with a wrinkled forehead.

“My sister’s deaf,” You tell them. The whole time you’ve been sitting with them you’ve been signing and verbally speaking to help everyone be able to be included in the conversation.

“That’s sick!” Louis says, smacking Harry’s arm. “Just like our lad Harry.”

Harry grumbles when Louis shakes him a little. It seems like the boys loved to physically interact with Harry which was endearing.

Harry allows him to for a moment before he flicks his cheek hard and laughs when Louis flinches. The conversation goes back to normal.

***

Harry jogs up to you after your group shares farewells and a few punches. You pointedly ignore him as you trek to the class you two have together so it’s not like he can’t walk this way too.

“Please, wait,” Harry asks. He walks in front of you.

“What do you want?” You huff, keeping my glare firm and directed alley at him.

“I’m sorry. I made the wrong assumption.”

“You made a lot of wrong assumptions. The fact that you think of me so lowly is sad. I’ve been nothing but nice,” You try not to focus on his large palms that curve over the caps of your shoulders.

“I’m not very trusting of people.”

You snort rather unattractively, “No kidding”

“Can we please start over?” He asks, stepping back to give you space. He didn’t realize how close he’d been standing to you until your hair wisps across his nose.

“One more chance, Styles.”

Harry lays a hand on your upper arm and squeeze lightly before signing the simple gesture of ‘thank you.’

***

It turns out Harry is very handsy and physically affectionate. It wasn’t creepy though or something that ever made you feel uncomfortable.

You were still tutoring him but you hung around the frat with Harry nearly everyday. The days you just wanted to lay in bed resulted in a grumpy FaceTime from Harry.

Harry once stated during a tutoring session, “It is easier for me to show how I’m feeling with touch than words. If I ever make you uncomfortable - please tell me and I will stop.”

You smile slyly at his words that sounded more like a question, asking if he can touch you. “I guess I’ll let you feel me up every now in again.”

He giggles and looks down wolfishly - like an entertaining thought is dancing around in his mind.

You tuck your finger under his chin to gaze at you. “In all seriousness, I give you my consent to show your feelings with physical touch. I trust you and know you won’t do anything to make me uncomfortable.”

The curly-haired brunette smiles happily, his hand cupping the side of your neck and brushing over your pulse point.

He hadn’t touched you here before and it seems like it was his first goal to do so once he got permission. You can’t help but take in a deep gasp of air. You prayed he didn’t notice but by the small lift of his lips he did.

The simple touch made a flame of arousal swirl in your lower stomach. You felt like you were about to start sweating.

“Anyways,” You clear your throat and snatch back up the recorder. It now had better quality after Harry listened to you about placement.

***

The frat house was ridiculously full of drunk college students. Everybody on the dance floor was sweaty and sticky with a variety of different substances.

Niall had invited you - so you were searching about for him. Pushing through the crowd and nobody was able to hear you say ‘excuse me.’

You finally found fresh air in the backyard where beer pong and cornhole were set up. Niall was tossing his ball across the table, trying to splash in Liam’s red solo cups.

Harry was sitting on a cushioned patio chair, watching the game commence. Maybe he was a beer pong referee after all.

He looked so fucking good tonight. He had a yellow snapback taming his curls - backwards of course. A black Rage Against the Machine shirt and his signature black skinny jeans. **

You made eye contact and were about to wave when a girl plopped down in the seat across from him.

Awkwardly you turn away, greeting the other boys and taking a seat in a lawn chair to watch them start their third round of the game.

Your eyes keep darting over to Harry who is staring blankly at the girl. She starts stroking his biceps and tracing across the tattoos like they belong to her.

Harry is attempting to let her know he’s not interested. His signs uselessly as she’s staring at his lips and not hands.

You’re moving before you know it, without another thought, you squeeze in between the two - separating them. You dramatically slide into his lap, funnily enough one strong arm wrapping happily around your middle.

The pretty blonde pouts out her lips, “Is he your boyfriend?”

Before you’re able to reply, Harry signs the obvious signal for ‘yes’ to the girl. Then rudely makes the shooing gesture. She’s up with a huff and stomping back towards the house.

Harry turns you sideways on his lap so that you two can see each other’s hands, “You saved me.”

“You’re just such a stud, have to protect you,” You joke - but not really.

He raising his eyebrows and smiles, “You were jealous.” It was a statement not a question.

You blush wildly, avoiding eye contact which you know he hates. He hates anytime you cut off ways of communication.

Harry taps your lips until you look up at him, “it’s really fucking sexy when you are.” A perk of sign language. He could dirty talk just about anywhere and mostly no one would ever know.

His thumb drags on your full bottom lip, signing clumsily with one hand so you had to use context clues to piece it together “Don’t think I forgot when you called me handsome a few months ago.”

“I don’t remember, doesn’t sound like me,” You boldly lie, snickering and nipping at the top of his thumb

His eyes become a shade darker when your teeth meet his skin. He presses his thumb further in until it’s in-between your teeth. The moment is broken when Niall screams, “Styles! You’re up next!”

You and Harry become separated after you spent nearly two hours watching all these drunk boys play beer pong. Harry was ridiculously good at the game and only had to drink two cups from the table.

You had wandered back into the house where the party had died down. There were only a handful of stragglers left but mostly just the fraternity brothers and their close friends.

With a fresh alcoholic seltzer in your hand - you didn’t trust open bottles at parties like this - you gaze at Harry through the back window.

Harry was being jumped by Liam and Niall. He was snarling playfully as Liam toppled them all over into the grass. Niall tries to stand up but Harry’s hand wraps around his ankle and makes him fall right back on his bum with a girlish squeal.

Niall leans over to give Harry a wet-willy but Liam manages to throw a plastic cup directly at Niall’s forehead. Harry and the other boys dissolve in childish giggles. Faces red from laughter and liquor. You feel a smile painted fondly on your lips from watching them.

“Hey, Y/N right?” A voice interrupts from behind.

You spin to face a guy you barely recognize from a previous class you shared. You smile nonetheless, “Hi...”

“Jake, Jake from Social Constructs and Society last semester.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” You smile and allow him to talk your ear off because you struggle to say ‘no.’ He was fine, nothing special, typical business major who thought he was hot shit because his daddy owned a golf course he wanted to take you to.

It was a normal conversation until his voice gets lower as if he’s trying to be more seductive, “Want to head to a room with me?” He nods towards the staircase.

You chuckle in disbelief at his bold and forward question. “No thank you, I’m good.” You really had eyes for one person right now and he was currently cussing out Niall in sign language in the backyard before tackling him once again to the ground.

“C’mon, I can really show you a good time,” He persuades persistently, stepping into your space - causing your nervousness to spike.

“I said - no thank you,”You bite out, starting to feel scared when he blocks your way out of the kitchen and presses himself against you and the counter.

“You’re really something gorgeous, you know?” He asks, ignoring my struggles to get away from him.

“Stop touching me!” You scream, hoping Niall or one of the boys would hear your wail. He puts a hand up to your mouth to muffle you but that only results in you biting him.

“Fucking bitch!” He cries out, pulling his hand back and winding up to either punch or slap you right in the face. You prepare for the impact.

Then in a blink off an eye, it becomes a blur, a muscular figure is crashing into Jake with full force and knocking him straight into the linoleum floor with a loud crash.

It’s Harry. Broad shoulders and thick but lean tattooed biceps. He’s standing over the harasser and drops on top of him. It shouldn’t look as graceful and tactful as it does.

You’d never seen anything like this from Harry before. Once you really got to know him - he was a gentle giant who liked romantic comedies, soft blankets, and vanilla cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles.

Harry’s fist is repeatedly connecting with the dark-haired boy’s jaw with full force. The only noise is from Jake as Harry is dead silent but his eyes zeroed in on the target.

When blood begins gushing from the man’s nose - Niall and Liam decide it times to physically pull Harry up. Harry had a slight red mark on his jaw when Jake had managed one punch before being defeated quickly.

Harry signs to Niall, “Tell him.”

Niall places his foot on the dude’s chest to keep him down, “My mate wants to let you know if you touch her again we’re not going to pull him off and he’ll gladly beat you to a fucking pulp.”

Jake groans, clutching his nose to stop the bleeding, “Fuckin’ asshole.”

You were still blown away as you watch Harry’s heaving chest as he glares down at the boy. His fist clenched and knuckle bloody and swollen. Harry’s attention turns towards you. His furious expression melts into worry. You can read his face so clearly. He’s afraid he’s scared you off.

It was hard to believe you had this drop dead gorgeous frat boy defending you past midnight on a Friday night. A boy who didn’t need to hear but just to see you needed help to step in.

All your desires and lusts after the man in front of you burst like a rubber-band and the urge to have him felt uncontrollable. “Take me upstairs,” you demand quickly, arousal creeping up your spine.

He doesn’t understand you’re extremely turned on. Instead he looks like a kicked dog who’s about to get in trouble again.

Nevertheless, he takes your hand and maneuvers out of the kitchen and up the stairs until his bedroom door is closed.

Harry lips are turned down unhappily as he begins, “I’m sorry, love. I...” he pauses a moment before continuing. “I just wanted to make sure you were safe. I hope you don’t think less of me.”

You look him dead in the eye and sign, “Kiss me.”

He blinks slowly at you like he just hallucinate the gestures.

So you repeat your motions, slow and with intent, “Kiss me, touch me, do something.” No more time is wasted as he is stepping in front of you and cupping your face in his hands.

Without any hesitation now, he pressing a bruising kiss to your lips - taking your bottom one between his and sucking.

Your hands are immediately tugging at the hem of his vintage shirt, pulling apart to bring it over his head. Dark ink decorates his torso, for some reason something you weren’t expecting. A butterfly on his abdomen, two fern branches, tattoos on his side.

Harry chuckles, “This is new to me.”

Your eyes go wide and you sign, “You’re a virgin?”

Harry snorts and rolls his eyes before telling you, “God no. I mean I’ve never been able to really communicate during sex.”

Then before You can speak, he cuts in a bit frantically, “I’ve always gotten consent - not like that. I mean-“ You cut him off with a kiss - knowing he would never do anything you didn’t want.

You wanted everything from him.

“If you’d believe it, I like a bit of dirty talk when I fuck - but no one understands what I’m saying,” He tries to crack a joke but for some reason seems insecure and nervous.

“Hey,” You take his chin so he shyly meets your eye, “I can’t wait to hear it - you’ve already made me so wet.” His eyes light up like a kid on Christmas.

“You’re such a good girl,” he signs before tugging off your shirt and instantly finding your lips again. His hands are skillful as they unclasp your bra without any struggle and tosses it.

You tugs a bit as his hair to show your enjoyment as his tongue finds your nipple - lapping before taking it between his teeth. As good as it feels, you want him to feel even better.

You push him back until he’s sitting in the edge of the bed, legs spread and hands behind him on either side holding him up. Jaw clenched with arousal and restraint.

He’s pressed against the zipper of his jeans. And all you wanted to do was see him in all of his glory. You’re quick to undo the button and determined to get the finicky zipper down as well.

His fingers come beneath your chin until you’re looking at his sparkling eyes, a look of lust made his lids a little droopier and his mouth slack from heavy-breathing.

“Are you sure you want to? You don’t have to - I want to eat your pussy either way, pet,” He signs, leaning in for a slow, wet kiss.

You sign back with a pout, “Shut the fuck up.” He huffs out a laugh, letting go of your chin and wrapping a hand in your hair to keep it out of your face.

As soon as he’s helping you wriggle his briefs and jeans down his narrow hips, you’re met with the prettiest cock you’ve ever seen.

When you make eye contact with Harry, he raises a eyebrow and grins cockily, “Is it nice enough for your liking, love?”

You nod breathlessly - wasting no more time before ducking down to take him to your mouth, a slight burning in your throat from how big he is.

His hands keep ahold of your hair, thumbs pressed against your temples as you bob down his length with sloppy, warm licks.

Harry’s moaning as you pop off to kiss and suck at the underside of him, hands coming to cup and roll his balls. It is a few moments later when he taps your cheek to get your attention, one hand leaving his hair to sign that he’s close.

Your mouth speeds up, wanting to give him all the pleasure you could. Your hand coming to stroke at what couldn’t fit in your mouth, pumping quickly.

Before you know it, Harry’s rutting his hips upwards and coming with a long, deep moan from the rumbles of his chest. He’s pulling you up into his lap, pressing appreciative kisses to your cheeks and jawline.

Big hands palming at your breasts before slipping down into your leggings, brushing softly over your mound.

You whine and hitch forward to grind against his palm as soon as he cups you. He smiles widely at your desperation, pressing the heel of his palm harder against you to create more pressure.

You were already so wet and turned on that it wasn’t going to take much. The ball of your climax was burning low in your tummy. However, you wanted him to taste you like he said he would.

You sign, “I’m close. Please, I want your mouth on me.”

With that, he’s flipping you until you’re laid out on the bed. His hands tugging off your leggings and underwear with no further ado. “Holy shit,” He gestures, gazing all over your body and not stopping on one spot for too long.

“What?” You ask, fishing for the compliments you know he’s about to shower you in.

“You’ve got such a pretty pussy,” he signs, dimples popping in his cheeks and a curious finger traces your entrance before dipping in.

You lightly kick at his stomach, “Get on me.” He pouts, crooking his finger against your spot before pulling it out. Fucking tease.

Then his face is disappearing between your spread thighs and a strong lick is delivered from your clit all the way down to your bum.

Since he can’t hear you, you grabs handfuls off his hair. Tugging at the roots, scratching your nails into his scalp to let him know how good he is. So fucking good.

When you accidentally buck your hips hard against his mouth, you curse and run a apologetic hand through the locks. He doesn’t look up at you but lift a hand and signs, “Again.”

You absolutely whine, begging to ride him with determination - climax on the brink. He hums causing vibrations on the sensitive nerves. With that, your hips are meeting his tongue and you’re coming. His face dampening with your release - happy as a clam when he pops back up.

You can’t remember the sign for condom, so you sign, “Protection?” Harry understands right away, rustling through the drawer until he finds a stray packets, “It’s been awhile.”

“Same,” You gestures - watching as he slides it down his length and crawls overtop of you. He was pink and swollen - having to be a bit sensitive from just coming a little while ago.

“Ready, love?” He asks, pressing soft kisses to your jawline. You nod, reaching down to guide him in.

And you weren’t lying, it had been a while and he was big. The stretch wasn’t uncomfortable, just a lot. But his wet, open-mouth kisses made you stay grounded.

Harry’s moans were absolutely obscene as he slide all the way in before stopping to give you a moment. His arms strong, holding himself over you. The cold metal of his necklaces brushing against your tight nipples.

When you have him the okay, he begin giving you deep, hard strokes on each thrust. His noises so loud they had to be able to hear them downstairs. They were deep and low - rumbling in his chest with pleasure.

Then his hand is coming to your throat. For a wild moment you thought he was going to choke you but instead he rest it lightly, palm flat.

It takes you a moment - then it hits you.

Holy fuck. He is feeling the vibrations of your moans - erupting from your vocal cords. Feeling out the movement from your throat so he can feel how much you’re enjoying it.

You should be embarrassed but you can’t find it in you when you come again right on the spot. His fingertips nudging into the skin to feel the intensity as it wracks through you.

When you’re done riding out your orgasm, he reaches for the headboard behind you with his other hand, gripping it tightly as he begins to pound in with all his strength.

The bedframe is hitting the wall so loud that the whole house must be able to hear it. Hitting with every directed thrust until his mouth is dropping down into a long, timbred moan and he’s coming.

---

Later, when the two are you have settled for the night in the warmth of his bed. Harry seems a little nervous, once again. It takes him a moment to meet your eyes and brushes a strand of hair off your forehead.

“What is it?” You ask, tucked into his side. His body so solid and comforting.

“It’s corny,” Harry frowns, eyebrows furrowing as his eyes flash across your face.

“Tell me,” You insist, bringing his hand to your lips to kiss his fingertips.

“I feel like you were made for me. Like...we were meant to be together,” Harry signs, hesitant to share his thoughts. But it doesn’t scare you away. You can’t help but agree.

“I think so too,” You reply before pressing another kiss to his puffy pink lips.

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mikauzoran · 3 years

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Lukadrien: Your Hands Hold Home: Chapter Eleven

@lukadrien-june

Read it on AO3: Your Hands Hold Home: Chapter Eleven: Soulmates

The summer afternoon drifted by peacefully as Luka and Adrien sat up on the deck of the Liberty, basking in the warmth of the sun.

Luka was trying to figure out the bridge to the song he was writing about Adrien while Adrien lounged in a nearby deckchair reading Sailor Moon.

Luka just so happened to look up and find tears streaming down Adrien’s cheeks.

“Hey. You all right?” he called in concern.

“Oh. Sorry,” Adrien chuckled sheepishly, swiping at the tear tracks. “I’m fine. Just thinking too much and being overly sentimental.”

Luka set aside his violin and pulled his chair over next to Adrien’s.

“Hey.” He rested a hand on Adrien’s forearm. “Don’t dismiss your feelings like that. That’s your father talking, and he’s wrong.”

Adrien’s gaze dropped to the manga in his lap. “It doesn’t feel like he’s wrong, though. I feel silly.”

“Talk to me?” Luka urged gently, trying not to press too hard.

It was a fine line to walk between supportive and pushy with Adrien. He wanted Adrien to open up to him on his own terms, because Adrien genuinely wanted to confide in him.

It was difficult, however, because Adrien was used to bowing to others’ demands, and Luka didn’t want to accidentally force Adrien into speaking because Adrien thought that that was what Luka wanted.

Adrien was a people pleaser and likely to steamroll over his own boundaries if he thought it would make others happy.

“Only if you want to talk about it,” Luka added softly, giving Adrien’s arm a squeeze. “I’m here for you, okay?”

Adrien bit his lip and turned to gauge Luka’s reaction. “…Do you… Do you believe in soulmates?”

Luka blinked and thought about the question for a moment before answering honestly. “I think they’re a lovely idea. It’s nice to think that, out there somewhere, there’s someone made especially for you…but I don’t actually think the world works that way.”

“Oh,” Adrien breathed, expression carefully neutral. “Why is that…do you think?”

Luka shrugged. “I’m also kind of a rebel. I don’t like it when other people make decisions for me, so I don’t really like the idea of the universe setting me up with someone without my consent. The choice of a life-mate is probably the most important decision you can make; I want some say in that.”

“Oh,” Adrien repeated, considering Luka’s points. “I mean…I can see that, but…what makes you think that they don’t exist?”

“Life experience,” Luka answered with a sheepish smile. “I’ve been in love a couple times, and there have been a few different people I could see making a life with. I read somewhere once that there were maybe twenty different people that any given person could be compatible with, and I think that’s true. I mean, off the top of my head, I can think of two people I’d consider as ‘soulmates’ for myself.”

Adrien’s expression darkened. He could easily guess that one of Luka’s potential “soulmates” was Marinette. The other, he suspected, was XY, and the thought made his stomach roil with jealousy and hurt.

“I think the idea of soulmates is nice,” Luka continued, missing the shift in Adrien’s mood, “but I don’t believe in them. I like to think that I make my own decisions. Besides, what about people who aren’t interested in romance or relationships? Do they just not have soulmates or are their soulmates more of a queerplatonic arrangement or…?”

Luka trailed off as he noted the sour look cutting into Adrien’s face. “I’m sorry. Was that the wrong answer?”

Adrien’s head jerked up. “What?”

“Sorry,” Luka repeated. “I didn’t mean to try to shove my views down your throat. And I could totally be wrong. I’m certainly not some kind of supreme deity or anything, so who am I to say that there’s no such thing as soulmates? I didn’t mean to insult you if you believe in soulmates.”

Adrien shook his head, waving away Luka’s concern. “No. It’s fine. You didn’t insult me. I just…”

He bit the inside of his lips, eyes tracing the picture on the manga cover in his lap. “I used to think that Ladybug was my soulmate. I mean…we were supposed to be ‘two halves of the same whole’ and all that, but…”

He shook his head again, a dark smile tugging at his lips. “It was just wishful thinking. She was never interested in me like that, and the truth is that the previous Guardian just randomly picked the two of us, so it’s not like it was some grand plan of the universe or anything. It was just luck and coincidence. I was fooling myself.”

“Adrien…” Luka whispered, tightening his hold on Adrien’s forearm.

Adrien looked up and slapped on a fake grin. “Besides, there’s no hope for a relationship with her now that it turns out my father was our arch nemesis this whole time. I’m a complete failure as a hero, Luka. I was living under the same roof as Papillon, and I had no idea for half a decade. There’s no way—”

“—Stop,” Luka commanded, standing and pulling Adrien to his feet as well.

The Sailor Moon manga tumbled to the deck, pages flapping.

“Just stop, okay?” Luka tugged Adrien into a hug, squeezing him tightly.

“Stop and breathe and quit being so mean to yourself,�� Luka instructed.

The tension quickly flowed out of Adrien’s body, and he melted into the embrace.

“Marinette would never rule you out as a romantic partner just because of your father,” Luka stressed, wishing he could make Adrien see reason. “And you’re not a failure as a hero. How many times do I have to tell you how amazing you are?”

“At least once more,” Adrien chuckled mirthlessly into Luka’s chest.

“You’re amazing, Adrien,” Luka insisted. “If Plagg were here, he’d say the same thing. It wasn’t your fault you didn’t know about your father. How could you know when he always kept himself shut up like he did? You hardly saw the guy. No one can blame you for what happened. Marinette certainly doesn’t.”

Adrien nodded lethargically. “Yeah. I know. I just…it’s hard not to be down on myself.”

“Yeah,” Luka whispered. “Yeah, I know, but try to hang in there and think positive.”

Adrien made a halfhearted noise of agreement.

Luka squeezed tighter. “You’re going to be okay. You’re a magnificent person, P5, and, someday, you’re going to meet someone amazing who sees how special you are.”

“…Like how you do?” Adrien inquired, pulling back just enough to catch Luka’s reaction.

Surprise flitted across Luka’s face and was then replaced by a warm smile. “Yeah. Just like how I do.”

Adrien laughed, resting his head back on Luka’s shoulder. “No one sees the good in me like you do, Orpheus.”

Luka gave in and indulged himself a little by resting his head on top of Adrien’s. “In that case, I’ll be your soulmate, if you want. I mean, if no one else is vying for the position.”

“The job’s yours if you want it,” Adrien replied in a way that implied that he thought no one in their right mind would want the position.

“It’s funny how, just a month ago, I had fans willing to literally maim and kill for a chance to get close to me…but, now, no one’s interested,” he mused.

Luka shook his head. “Well, now you know who your true friends are, at least.”

“There’s not a lot of people left standing,” Adrien observed glumly.

“But the ones who are are good ones.” Luka tried to help Adrien shift his perspective. “You’ve got Nino and Alya…Chloé, Kagami, Wayem, Marinette, Rose, Juleka… And your classmates are sticking by you, aren’t they? The people who really know you are still on your side.”

“…Yeah,” Adrien agreed, slowly warming to the idea. “I guess you’re right…. And there’s you. I haven’t lost you.”

“You’ll never lose me,” Luka promised. “…Maybe we need to have some of your friends over. I know you call and text and go places to hang out with them, but you’ve been here almost three weeks, and you haven’t had anyone over yet. You should call Nino and have bro time.”

Adrien looked up again. “Really? That would be okay?”

Luka laughed. “You see how people regularly wander in and out of this houseboat. Do you think anyone would care if you had some friends over?”

Adrien considered this for a moment. “…No?”

Luka nodded. “No. No one would care. You should see if Nino’s doing anything and have him over to hang out.”

Adrien bit his lip. “Would you hang out with us too?”

Luka shrugged. “If you want me there.”

A bright smile stretched across Adrien’s lips. “Yeah. I’d like if we could all spend time together. I’d like you to get to know my friends better.”

Luka’s eyes widened as he was pleasantly surprised by Adrien’s words. “Yeah. I’d…I’d like that too.”

“I mean, you should know them if I’m going to marry you someday,” Adrien teased, pulling away with a wink.

Luka choked. “What?”

“You know. Since you’ve volunteered to be my soulmate.” Adrien scooped up his book and stuck out his tongue as he started to make his way back below deck.

Luka stared after him for a good minute as all kinds of metaphorical fireworks went off.

It killed him when Adrien flirted.

#Lukadrien #Miraculous Ladybug #Adrien Agreste #Luka Couffaine #Lukadrien June 2021 #MLB #Fluff #Comfort #Soulmates #Slow Burn #Pining #Mutual Pining #Friends to Lovers #Writing Prompts #Mikau's Writings #Your Hands Hold Home

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dsmproleplayaccount · 3 years

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welcome to the dream smp interactive roleplay game!

happy to have you here! here’s some info about this new concept i’m trying out for fun.

disclaimer; i will not be writing any reader x character romance or overstepping cc’s boundaries; the pfp of my blog is not made by me, but was labelled free to use.

how does this work?

it’s rather simple! after you submit your initial post (it’s explained how to do that below), i reblog it with a reply writing the response by the dsmp cast and world as a whole. it’s a training experience for me to learn to write the dream smp characters as well as get better at writing and dialogue in general! i’ll attempt to keep them in character as much as i can, however keep in mind i believe every single character on the dream smp to be morally grey, not inherently good or evil, so i will write them accordingly.

you can go into this knowing literally nothing about the dream smp! if you have a friend who is clueless about the story, they can submit a post here and become part of the dream smp, learning more about the characters in an interactive way- either way, if you would like yourself / a persona of yours to join the story, that’s exactly what this whole thing is about- i will write you into the story, while you yourself control your own decisions. it’s like a game which takes you down different paths depending on what choices you make, however this has literally endless possibilities!

sounds like a pretty fun concept to me! that’s why i thought it would be cool to try this out, seeing as interactive stories are for me the most entertaining kind.

it might take a bit for me to reply, and in case (though i don’t think that would happen) that this blog happens to get flooded by submissions, i’ll most likely not reply to all of them; including ones that i don’t feel comfortable doing for whatever reason. don’t be shy to submit though, i am looking forwards to playing this w/ you guys!

and don’t feel bad for this being reader-insert! i myself don’t and will not ever read those because of personal preference; you can think of this as more of an open-world text-based fangame.

how do i enter?

to enter, you must be moderately capable at writing your own character- anything extra triggering crossing the line of what usually happens on the smp shouldn’t be included in your character’s backstory or actions, as to not endanger the mental well-being of me or possible readers.

the story itself starts when your character, someday somewhere, finds a portal. they jump into it, and spawn in the dream smp.

in the “start the game” (or submit post) section, you’ll fill out this short form:

- name, age & gender of the character - are they accompanied by any pets? - brief appearance, clothing and height - starting point (time-wise) - starting point (space-wise) - starting post (thoughts and feelings upon arrival, maybe them wandering around or interacting with objects/buildings)

as for the starting points; any time during the canon storyline is fair game, e. g. you can start your story at the beginning of the l’manberg war, during the pogtopian revolution, or during the prison arc that is currently ongoing. feel free to pinpoint very specific times to me as well; shortly after techno’s execution, right after tommy gets let out of the prison, etc.

any place should also be fine, however don’t have your character spawn for example in the middle of a battlefield or inside buildings; you’re most likely to spawn in a large and open area, for example outside l’manberg, in the village by techno’s house, or the initial spawn area.

if you have specific questions and don’t know whether something would work or not, don’t be afraid to simply send me an ask! you’re never a bother.

you can choose to have your character have forgotten everything (except their own beliefs and personality) because of jumping through the portal, or they can have a backstory; please keep those in line with the minecraft universe, i. e. things like growing up in minecraft player villages, hybrid settlements, a nether colony, or public servers like hypixel.

please no mary-sues, overpowered characters, nsfw characters or anything that seems off-limits! your character can be a furry or a mob hybrid if you want! as long as it’s not painful to write about it’s all good.

this rules section will expand depending on my experiences with this! it’s still in alpha, let’s say; don’t be afraid to ask me to specify or add something.

can i play with someone else?

since this game is basically in its demo, i’ve never done this before and have no idea how it will go, multiplayer is not available just yet! if there is enough demand, you’ll be able to play with your friends in the future, but for now it’s limited to one character.

if you have any other questions, please use the question section!

so, are you going to join the anarchist syndicate or become part of snowchester and an adoptive sibling of the underscore family?

can’t wait to see what you come up with!

either way, have a wonderful rest of your day :]

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apparentlynotreallyfinnish · 4 years

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M/M Book Recs

In addition to fic I’ve read a lot of m/m novels recently. Most of theses are books I’ve been screaming about to anyone who’s willing to listen but I thought some of y’all might enjoy them too!

The synopses are in italics. (Some are bastardized from Goodreads. Those are marked GR.) I’ve also added my thoughts on the book and some content warnings.

Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston

What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales? (GR)

Appa’s rec: 5/5 If you haven’t read this yet, this is the first one you have to pick up. The chemistry of the main characters is delicious. It’s basically a enemies-to-lovers story with awesome supporting characters and a little bit of international politics thrown in. There are some steamy sex scenes just a step below pure smut. Alex and Henry stole my heart and I will definitely be reading this book again and again.

Him - Sarina Bowen, Elle Kennedy

(also, book two: Us and a novella: Epic)

Ryan Wesley’s biggest regret is coaxing his very straight friend, James Canning, into a bet that pushed the boundaries of their relationship. Now, with their college teams set to face off at the national championship, he’ll finally get a chance to apologize. But all it takes is one look at his longtime crush, and the ache is stronger than ever. Jamie has waited a long time for answers, but walks away with only more questions—can one night of sex ruin a friendship? If not, how about six more weeks of it? (GR)

Appa’s rec: 5/5 Ryan and Jamie broke me a little. This might be my favorite m/m book ever. The first book is a smutty masterpiece and the second book is an angsty heartbreaker with a happy ending. Highly recommend even if you don’t like hockey. The audio books are amazing as well. (I’d probably listen Teddy Hamilton to read my grocery list and swoon...)

Top Secret - Sarina Bowen, Elle Kennedy

Keaton and Luke are housemates. They are in a frat together. Luke thinks Keaton is a privileged idiot. Keaton thinks Luke is a grumpy asshole. They are both running for frat president. Keaton’s longtime girlfriend wants a threesome for her birthday. Keaton goes on an app to find them a guy and accidentally matches with Luke. They start texting anonymously.

Appa’s rec: 4,5/5 There was some frat bro shenanigans that made me roll my eyes a bunch and dock 0,5 stars from my rating but other than that this book is amazing! I mean, lots of sexting, Keaton discovering his sexuality, and oh, did I mention that Luke is a stripper?! The smut is smutty and the angst is delicious. Content warning: parental abuse (mostly mental)

The Spiral Down - Aly Martinez

Henry Alexander is a famous pop star with a dark past and a very bad case of flying phobia. He’s also openly gay. After Evan Roth, a pilot, helps him through a flight and a panic attack Henry is obsessed, but Evan has his own demons that complicate their relationship to the point of breaking.

Appa’s rec: 4/5 Some solid smut, angst and a fluffy, happy ending. I highly recommend the audio book. Both readers were wonderful and I almost listened the whole thing in one sitting. I was obsessed!

Trading Teams - Romeo Alexander

Jake thought he had life all figured out. He had the perfect girlfriend, a starting position on the Varsity baseball team, and a raging social life. He was living the dream. That is, until he discovers that he’s in danger of losing his scholarship. For Kyle, college was only a formality. He didn’t need the degree, and he barely attended his classes and still passed with flying colors. Instead of sitting in class, he’d rather be chasing his true passion—designing and programming an original MMORPG game. Kyle doesn’t need a social life, and he definitely doesn’t need a boyfriend, especially because that would require stepping out of the closet, something he has no intention of doing any time soon. (GR)

Appa’s rec: 3/5 Cute jock/nerd romance with some steamy smut. Not the greatest story but a good time!

Lock & West - Alexander C. Eberhart

Lock is awkward. He can’t make eye contact, counts when he’s nervous and has to remind himself several times a day how ‘normal’ teens behave. Homeschooled most of his life, he’s resigned himself to a friendless existence at his new Atlanta high school. Until he meets West. West has everything. Looks. Talent. Money. And secrets… so many secrets. Beneath the surface of West’s perfect existence is a pain he’s buried so deep a million therapists couldn’t unearth it and he’s determined to keep it that way. He’s an actor. He can act normal. (GR)

Appa’s rec: 4/5 This is a YA romance with some heavy, heavy stuff. Only read if you can deal with a lot of angst. (CW: eating disorders, sexual abuse, rape, parental abuse and post traumatic stress disorder). There is some light smut but it isn’t as explicit as in the previous recs. I really enjoyed this book despite the dark themes.

There Goes Sunday School - Alexander C. Eberhart

In sixteen-year-old Mike Hernandez’s life, only one thing is clear: Gay is NOT okay. His family’s life revolves around the church, so Mike has resolved to spend his life in the closet. His only escape—besides the occasional, anonymous gay make-out session—are his risqué drawings.

When his sketchbook goes missing in the middle of Sunday school, Mike is sure his life is over. What’s worse, the pastor’s son, Chris, suddenly seems hell-bent on adopting Mike and his friends and he has no idea why. When an awkward confrontation with Chris leads to an unexpected kiss instead of a much-expected punch, Mike’s world is turned upside down. (GR)

Appa’s rec: 4/5 Obvious content warning for homophobia and religious guilt. This wasn’t as angsty and dark as Eberhart’s other book but there are some heavy stuff with homophobic parents and community. Some light smut. Heavy on the religion stuff. The main character is very sweet and conflicted. A good YA read if you don’t mind the religious aspects.

Heartstopper vol 1 - Alice Oseman

Charlie Spring is in Year 10 at Truham Grammar School for Boys. The past year hasn't been too great, but at least he's not being bullied anymore, and he's sort of got a boyfriend, even if he's kind of mean and only wants to meet up in secret. Nick Nelson is in Year 11 and on the school rugby team. Nick and Charlie are placed in the same form group and made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn't think he has a chance. (GR)

Appa’s rec: 5/5 This is a web comic made into books. There are three volumes out so far. I’ve read the first two. (You can find all of these on the web still and there will be more volumes.) Oh my god, this is the sweetest story ever and the drawings are adorable. A quick read that will stay with you for a long time. Light angst and a lot of fluff.

#Appa's recs #book recommendations #m/m

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tickle-her-senseless · 4 years

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Important

Hey all. Just wanted to respond to questions from members of a couple of Discord servers run by the same person following a chaotic couple of days. I’m putting all the info and screenshots (minus names, pics and locations) here, so I can just direct people to this post if they have questions.

I had been intending to just head back here to Tumblr and let the situation lie, but unfortunately the reason given by the automated bot for my ban mentioned “crossing consent multiple times”. Today, friends have been sending me worried questions relating to this, so I’m concerned that the server owner may have made a similar claim in public. Now I pretty much have to say something as that’s such a serious thing to say about someone, particularly on any kind of kink scene.

The mention of consent actually relates to the server owner. Near the beginning of the lockdown, she and I were speaking a lot, she began to tease me in DMs, I responded with a piece of writing dedicated to her, we exchanged pictures - and eventually confessed a mutual attraction. We made plans for the end of lockdown, she talked about driving through Europe and showing me her favourite places. Although her English is perfect, I began learning her language through an app as I wanted to make the effort (Brits are renowned for being lazy with languages), and kept it up every day for months, amusing her with my clumsy pronunciation on calls. Sometimes she would send me explicit comments/thoughts, although I was always nervous to initiate that kind of thing.

One day she sent a message saying that she was still coming to terms with the end of her last relationship and would need to take things more slowly, as she was finding romantic sentiments (as opposed to kinky ones) hard to deal with. Naturally I replied “Of course, in that case I’ll wait for you to initiate that stuff once you’re ready”. At some point afterwards, she sent me a message out of the blue saying “I want cuddles ❤️” and I thought “oh, this is a level she’s OK with” and responded. I think it was the following day when I tried to pick up where we’d left off (without going any further, just cuddling in bed type stuff). She reciprocated and we continued. I also (in an attempt to consider her feelings) asked her if the idea of me posting an old session video on my blog for an American friend would upset her at all. Intending to reassure her about my intentions, I mentioned ”...not wanting to tickle anyone except you and saying no to all of the other UK people on the servers who are asking about post-lockdown sessions”. I also said “I do feel a commitment to you”, which (with hindsight) was probably a foolish or misleading word to use in a purely ler/lee sense.

A week later she sent a message I didn’t immediately understand along the lines of “I thought you were going to let me initiate romantic stuff, you don’t seem to have understood me at all”. I wasn’t sure what she was referring to - the recent story I’d written for her? Use of the word “commitment”? Something else? I tried to talk with her on the phone as some wires had clearly become crossed via text, but she refused for five weeks (citing not being in the right headspace), before finally calling when I sent a message explaining that anxiously waiting to mend the friendship in lockdown by myself for over a month was having a terrible effect on me mentally, and I was going to have to “throw in the towel”, wishing her luck and every happiness.

During our phone call, she claimed that the main issue had been the fluffy cuddle messages which she took to be a serious and repeated boundary/consent violation (citing her wish to avoid romantic talk). This was the last thing I expected and really shocked me. Of course I apologised frantically, repeatedly and profusely. I also said I hoped she could see how I’d made the mistake innocently and honestly when:

- she initiated it the first time, so I assumed it was something she was happy to talk about.

- when I picked up where we left off, she didn’t say “Actually, d’you mind if we don’t today?” and continued the cuddle talk instead.

She said that because she initiated it one day didn’t mean that she wanted to continue the day after - fair enough. The difficult thing to accept was the idea that she felt so violated by the attempt to carry on the next day that she found herself frozen to the point of not being able to say “actually I’m not in the mood just now” and carried on with it, and that I was at fault regardless. She even used the word “harassing” to describe it, which I found very harsh considering my inability to read minds over hundreds of miles. Especially when I couldn’t see or hear her to pick up on body language, tone of voice etc to guess that she was saying one thing but feeling a different way. She said, word for word, “It’s like when someone’s choking you and you can’t speak, you’re literally choking me!” As someone who, as a teenager, was once choked on the ground by my own father until I blacked out and lost bladder control, I did see that as a stretch at best, but chose not to challenge it as she was upset.

I also suggested that, looking back, we probably should’ve clarified exactly what was meant by “romantic stuff” when we almost certainly had different takes on it eg. I’ve cuddled after every 1:1 session I’ve ever had, even platonic ones, purely from the angle of aftercare and a sense of having shared an experience. I was told that despite our different ages and experiences of romantic love, there was only one objectively correct definition of “romantic” - hers.

We went around in circles for over four hours - I apologised over and over while explaining how I got the wrong idea and asking her to understand and forgive, while she tearfully called me a gaslighter, a consent violator, an excuse-maker, a harasser ... eventually I collapsed into tears myself (I’m ashamed to admit), totally worn down, and she softened a bit. She finally said she didn’t believe I’d done anything intentionally, and she still wanted to spend time together in the real world. We made up, spoke warmly as friends for an hour, and I left the call exhausted but relieved. After a few days’ reflection, though, I decided against ever travelling to meet her for real, as the experience had shaken me considerably - and I figured it’d be risky to meet someone in real life when I didn’t trust her completely not to accuse me over either nothing or an innocent misunderstanding. I was still wondering how to explain this to her when things got wild on the server.

A few days ago, a Tumblr user with a stated age of 18 contacted me to say nice things about my blog, which (I hope this doesn’t sound conceited) isn’t out of the ordinary. When she told me she was English and totally new to the scene, I suggested the Discord server as a place where she might make some friends (given the large UK membership) and sent her an invite link. The rest is set out in the mega screenshot saga below, which begins in the staff chat. I’m “SwiftX”, my real name is in teal, the server owner is in blue and her friend and co-moderator is in purple. All other names and locations are in black:

Before sending the last message, I actually typed out five different versions of a counter-argument before eventually deciding to step back. Being totally dismissed and lectured by two people about British labour laws and pub ID measures by two non-Brits nearly a decade my junior was irritating, yes, but the baseless suggestion that maybe I’d done something in private with the new member and was somehow “arguing against” ensuring she wasn’t a child because of that horrified me. As if I’d allow a child access to explicit content to cover my own discomfort - and anyway, I’d done no more than exchange greetings with the girl and point her towards the server, where she was actually verified and granted access to all channels by the guy in purple, not me! After a couple of hours’ contemplation, I politely asked to be removed from the moderator staff, but a disdainful response to my request prompted me to explain it, and why I was upset. Not all of what I said was necessary to say, but all of it was true:

She immediately muted me for 48 hours - “staff disrespect and degrading comments”. Not a problem, I had work to be getting on with. Late that evening, however, her friend arrived in my DMs:

Him: ...it’s creepy that a 32 year old man is potentially teasing a minor

Me: Well I can prove I haven’t teased her, her profile says she’s 18, and the person who exposed her to explicit content was you when you verified her - despite admitting to having had doubts about her age.

Him: ...I’ll drop that subject

Moderator of the year, ladies and gentlemen 🙄 Anyhoo, later that day I received a ban notification from both servers run by this owner, citing “crossing consent multiple times, guilting and being degrading along with causing several conflicts”. I was surprised to feel a flood of relief, but the consent mention really disturbed and worried me, as I’d been under the impression that the server owner had fully accepted that the earlier stuff had been an innocent misunderstanding. Later that day, good friends of mine began sending me worried DMs questioning my record and asking if I’d been inappropriate with a bunch of people, so I’m concerned that the staff may have said something that (deliberately or not) has encouraged speculation. This post is intended to be a landing page to which I can direct anyone concerned about my character so that they they can form their own opinions.

When my follower count began to take off, I became determined to avoid any kind of rift with another prominent member of the community. It’s so frustrating to watch an already niche subculture splinter into factions over needless disputes. This is why I’ve kept names etc. out of this post. If anyone suspects they might know who the server owner is, or actually knows who she is because they’re here from Discord, I would implore them not to out or target her in any way. There are two reasons:

- I don’t want to start a flaming war, I’m desperate to move on and begin improving my mental health after an awful couple of months ... I just need to protect my reputation first.

- I don’t actually think she wanted drama ... I think her genuine perception is that I’ve said something horrible to her. That’s more upsetting than the idea of her trying to smear me, to be honest. I suspect she feels like crap too, and I don’t want to add to her mental load. I honestly hope she’s OK.

Hopefully this will reassure my friends and anyone else questioning my character because of whatever’s been said in that server. I’d also hope that my history of positive interaction here, including being on great terms with everyone I’ve ever had a session with, supports what I’m saying further. It’s a shame this had to happen, but I’m trying to think positively about what lies ahead and trust in my real friends. I’d also like to thank the other members of the server staff who’ve privately sent me messages of support and sympathy having already seen the entire exchange.

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merakiaes · 4 years

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hi, as you already know, one of your myriads of fans here. so i was wondering what would be steps to take, in your opinion, to start writing imagines/fanfics? Reading your stories makes me wanna take part in this amazing creative world, but i have no idea where to start:) i have some ideas to write, but what would be the things to consider? thank you and much respect and love♡

Oh, wow, that’s a tough question😂 I don’t think there’s anything to do other than just start🤷🏻‍♀️ You have to get your work out there and awaken the interest in order to get followers and more requests, so you should definitely go for it and write the ideas you have. There are things that make one-shots more appealing though so I’m going to try to list them down below.

- Having a nice aesthetic is probably the most important part to ME as a reader. If the post looks messy, chances are high that I won’t read it, no matter how good the fic actually is😅 A nice aesthetic can include a neat foreword section, like I write “pairing”, “requested”, “prompts”, “warnings/notes”, “wordcount” and “summary” before every fic, for example. It gives the post a certain structure. Using a gif of the character you’re writing for is also really important in my opinion. It makes it look more structured, aesthetically pleasing, and inviting. ALWAYS remember to credit the gif-owner if you know who they are, though.

- Paragraphing is BY FAR the most important thing, and that’s just when it comes to writing in general. Some people might not care but I know many people, me included, who just turn back around and go “nope” at the sight of a fic/one-shot where there is no paragraphing. It gives off a very messy vibe and makes my head hurt seeing as you have to concentrate a lot because it’s so hard to keep track of where you are in the text. I know things like that aren’t easy at the beginning for some, it wasn’t for me either, but it’s something that needs to be said so that people know what to practice.

- Insert the “read more” link after a few paragraphs so that your one-shot doesn’t take up the entire searching feed. There will be lots of people who will want to read your fic but there will also always be people who aren’t tempted and in cases like that, it’s annoying to have to scroll for your life to get to the next one.

- TAGS are the most important thing because it’s them that are going to get you promoted in the first place. Some people search for “imagine” while others search for “x reader” so I always make sure to tag the character’s every name/nickname with both “imagine”, “x reader”, “one-shot” and “fanfic” to really get my fic out there, and also the show’s name with all of the above. To further understand what I mean, check out the tags on one of my fics. DON’T tag characters that are not included in the fics with the “imagine”, “x reader” and “one-shot” tags. You’ll get a lot of haters real quick.

- Write in a word document on your computer, NOT directly on Tumblr. I’ve lost count of how many times I wrote oneshots directly on my Tumblr only to accidentally reload the page and lose everything and have to write it all again. It’s really heartbreaking when it happens and it is so time-consuming and not worth the risk.

- Not a must, but I find it easier to put out longer, more filled-out fics by writing the dialogue first and then filling in time and place, etc. If you ever find yourself with writer’s block, try this!

- Also not a must, but I find that this has helped me A LOT on Tumblr. Download the plugin “Grammarly” from www.grammarly.com. The free version doesn’t allow you all properties but it does provide you with the most important one; spelling and grammar correction. I’ve used the free version for the past 6 months now and it’s a great help when you don’t have time to fully and carefully read through your fics. Sometimes it will show the wrong things though so keep an eye out for that. It doesn’t fix all mistakes but it usually takes care of the bigger ones.

- I don’t know how you work as a person but I, myself, get really stressed out if I answer the requests, promising to write them, BEFORE I write them. Knowing that I’ve made a promise and that someone is waiting for me to post their request really pressures me and gives me unnecessary stress. To avoid this, I usually answer the request AFTER I’ve posted the one-shot. That way, I can also link the one-shot in the request so that the requestor, if anonymous, can easier find their way back.

On My Block is a fandom that’s pretty active now after Season 3 so I have no doubt in my mind that you could get requests immediately if you posted a post saying that you’re open for requests. Just specify which characters you’ll be writing for and tag all of said characters with the tags I mentioned above and I guarantee you that you’ll get requests.

If you ever decide to write for other fandoms too, it’s important to remember not to get discouraged when you don’t get much feedback on fics that are in smaller, less popular fandoms. For example, I’ve written a few one-shots for the tv-show Grimm and that’s an extremely small fandom so as you can guess, I didn’t get much acknowledgment for it. It will, naturally, be discouraging seeing as a lot of thought and time is put into the fics, but at the same time it’s only logical.

It’s also important that you know that it’s okay to set boundaries. As a fanfic writer, you provide people with alternate endings and scenarios to their favorite shows, you take time out of your spare time and put a lot of thought and energy to give them entertainment pretty much on demand and for free. Some people don’t understand that fanfiction is a privilege and not a right and will get really whiny/grumpy about the fact that you might be taking a long time to post their request. In that kind of scenario, you have the right to put down your foot and tell them off. It doesn’t make you a bad guy but rather on the contrary, you speak and stand up for all fanfic writers.

While we’re speaking of boundaries, it’s also completely fine that you make a little disclaimer saying that you would appreciate more feedback if you notice that you’re not getting any. The number of likes and reblogs/comments are always going to be uneven but sometimes readers need a little reminder that comments are appreciated, and asking for them doesn’t make you a bad person or anything like that. It’s only natural to want to get acknowledged for your art and if you ever feel like you’re not getting the attention that you deserve, point it out. Fanfic readers are really understanding and appreciative, sometimes they just forget to leave behind a comment <3

I make the mistake really often to force myself into writing even though I shouldn’t. For example, I could have a headache, be sick, tired, or just not feel like it and not have inspiration/motivation to do it. I tend to push myself into writing despite all this and take my word for it that you shouldn’t. I put waaaay too much pressure on myself and by doing that, I usually tend to grow tired of fandoms real quick so that I get left with a lot of unfinished requests that I in any other case would have loved to write, which sucks.

So don’t push yourself. If you don’t feel like writing, don’t. If writing starts feeling more like a burden and a job than a joyful experience, you’re doing it wrong.

There will also be requests that you simply don’t feel interested in, and at those times it’s really important to remember that you have no obligation to write them and that it’s alright to delete them/say no. Again, writing things that you don’t want to will make it feel like a burden and that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Writing is always supposed to feel fun and good, or you’ll burn yourself out pretty quickly.

Every writer has their proud moments and their less proud moments. If you write a fic that you’re really happy and proud of, brag about it! Lift yourself up and other people will jump on the train! And if, in a worst-case scenario, you don’t feel happy with the outcome at all, it’s okay. We all have fics that we love and hate, but just know that from a reader’s perspective, everything you do and put out is going to be greatly appreciated.

Every writer starts off somewhere so don’t be too discouraged if it goes slowly to a start. I hope my pointers are to some help even though I mostly rambled about pointless stuff😂 If you ever need help with anything or if you have more questions, my inbox is always open. I look forward to reading what you have planned, good luck!💕

#ask #advice

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bodyheartmindsoul · 5 years

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Dating diaries- Jatan (Jay) Buch

So I met up with this guy I met on Hinge the other day. We had been talking for about a week. He was nice online and in person. Polished, patient, polite. He even wore a blazer in 80 degree weather to look nice (probably the first red flag).

He ended up physically forcing me into a kiss at end, as I was trying to leave, after I repeatedly told him I didn’t want to, and kept pushing him away. He outright said he saw it as some kind of fun challenge. Later he unmatched me on Hinge before I could report offline harassment. So this is my PSA to the world about him, for what it’s worth. If by chance this helps someone else save time and stay safe, it’ll have been worth it.

Here’s the long version below

We met up for ice cream and then drinks, and he told me about how he’s looking to settle down and take it slow and really get to know someone. Overall I was enjoying his company.

He kept trying to elevate himself above other men, though. He wanted to hear my “horror stories” of online dating, to feel good about what a gentleman he was being. He was disappointed that I didn’t have much to share (actually, he ended up being on the list).

He even brought out this phone and opened my Hinge profile right there, to review what he thought of my photos. Then he flipped to the conversation page where I could see some messages with other people. Tacky. He asked if I was the jealous type (another red flag).

Towards the end of the date, he was making me uncomfortable. I’d made it clear since the beginning that I have boundaries and don’t want to do anything physical on a first date, because I take my time getting to know people. And his eyes lit up and he said that sounded like a fun challenge. I reiterated, looking him straight in the eye “you have to be okay with not getting what you want from me.” That should have been my exit, looking back. But I was conditioned to tolerate narcissism from birth (a whole other issue) and I’m still learning that having to explain healthy boundaries isn’t necessary with mature adults.

Later he starts alluding to his own narcissism. He says he’s like Tony Stark level narcissist (which isn’t extreme to me). He starts pulling out lines like “I wanna be clear, I’m not looking to be friends,” and “I really wanna kiss you,” and “I feel like you’re holding back,” even though I was completely neutral and I’d made it clear throughout the entire date I wasn’t comfortable doing anything physical. So then I wanted to leave and he took me to the subway. He insisted on getting a cab there (for all of 5 blocks) and in the cab he starts giving me commands like “come here” (in a charming voice so it didn’t sound forceful) to which I straight up said “NO” and he asked “Why not?” and I reiterated that I DIDN’T WANT TO. In the subway he said he wanted a kiss and I said no AGAIN and he started grabbing my arm from close range to pull me in (very forcefully, without appearing so to others). I kept pulling away and even pushed him towards the subway tracks at one point. But he still didn’t get the message. Then my train finally arrived and he pulled me in for a “hug” and fondled my waist and kissed my neck before I abruptly cut him off and finally escaped onto the train.

So this is not the first, or the worst, encounter I’ve had with a sociopath. I can tell he is because he had no feelings, he just used as much charm and passion as possible to cover up his lack of empathy. When I talked, his eyes only lit up when I was expressive, but otherwise he has no response to my actual character. Over the course of the date, the red flags we as subtle as possible (too subtle to justify a strong a reaction on my part without looking crazy, as they are designed). But they were there. Overall he saw my boundaries as a game, and forced a kiss even when I refused.

Next day he texts me “Hi how are you?” I ignored him for a while, then said it’s not going to work out for the above reasons. In my experience this usually makes them really defensive. It’s not that I needed him to know… I’m sure he already knew. I just wanted it to be clear to anyone else who saw the conversation, that he was not the victim at all (narcissists love to twist the truth that way). He replied “Okay no problem.” He saw no issue with having been physically forceful. That’s the clear sign he’s evil. Then he unmatched me from Hinge before I could report him for offline harassment.

In all, I’m using online dating to practice getting to know people and figuring out where my boundaries are. In the long run I’d like a committed partner but for now I’m still learning the ropes (and losing all hope). I learned from this experience that even when the flags are subtle, it’s reason enough to push back and walk away without giving any more chances.

I also wish I had reported him before letting him know it wasn’t gonna work out…Good advice for next time.

I used his full name on here in case anyone else ever meets him. People should know who to look out for. Maybe some girls are into this kind of treatment, but not this girl. And he forced me anyway. I’m working on adapting my behavior to avoid traps like this. But for anyone else, I hope this post saves them the trouble, so they can stay safe.

I’m still not sure what healthy romantic love is supposed to feel like, but I’ve been practicing identifying, and taking care of, my own basic emotional needs instead of asking for help from questionable sources. And I need to get comfortable with the fact that dating is different from socializing, in that it’s perfectly within my right to walk away immediately based on a gut instinct. Yeah, it’s rude and he may even accuse me of being crazy to cover his ass. But it’s a telltale sign when a guy has a history of “crazy exes”. Let my possible future craziness be a red herring for other women.

#dating #dating apps #horror #bad date #hinge #dating stories #dating advice #narcissist #narcissism #psycho #sociopath #empathy #kiss #force

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bahrrss-blog · 5 years

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DIGITAL PROTOTYPING Malmö University -2019

DE/RE CONSTRUCT - 1st of April

De/construct. Promoting our insight into the ongoing course, this task wants us to investigate and "deconstruct" an actual GUI, recognising configuration examples of the interface. Deconstruct phase is followed by reconstruction.

Beginning with the procedure of deconstruction, I started from researching the applications on my phone, seeking around to check whether there are applications with specific capacities that are confounding, hard to enrol naturally, or just inadequately planned. That being stated, telephone applications these days have experienced a lot of cycles and update that most apps are about flawless usefulness astute other than the occasional bugs. I unquestionably experienced serious difficulties finding an application that I had serious issues with. So I decided to avoid confusion this time and go for just any app, giving myself a hard task. That I chose to look at as a challenge rather than an unsolvable problem.

I settled with the application of Instagram. Instagram is a popular application. It is structured is founded on picture sharing. What makes this application emerge is the exceedingly adaptable showcase. You can change the look of your pictures and videos, comment, explore, share, and chat, privately and publicly. In a case of private chate, this feature, probably due to a secondary role for Instagram is very locate.

The fundamental issue I'm having as I utilise this application is that as the primary GUI is made for single communication/share and not to interact.

STUDYING THE STRUCTURE OF INSTAGRAM

I generally end up experiencing considerable difficulties finding and getting to the page where you can see private messages. The application makes it easy to glance through the communities and explore but could be troublesome when you might want to rapidly access chats your friends sent you.

As an extrovert and someone who likes to communicate, this seems overly complicated for times when talking to people anywhere in the world is free of charge. I attempt to deconstruct in detail Instagram and understand why they have placed direct messages in a place where is hard to find.

These are some of the Instagrams GUI. Here you can five different pages and choose between 5 different functionalities of Instagram. Each display has its purpose. To navigate, to explore, to follow, to add new media, and your own profile.

The main issue with the page I have is, the messaging part. Insofar it is available only on the main page. So not even on your profile, nor any other page of the applications. And, to make even stuff more dislikable for me, there is no even messaging part when the application is accessed from the browser, computer or phone.

The app makes it easy to navigate through all features, such as, follow, like, add a new photo, the main page, or your own profile. However, once you find yourself in any place except on the main page, you can’t see messages being delivered. And, this, in my opinion, can be troublesome, due to a pure fact that messaging is a huge part of social networking.

It is that much complicated that Instagram even made official guidelines on their ‘’how to’’ page. You can see their guidelines on the picture under.

REI found messaging one of, if not the main reason why I use social networks, especially Instagram, it is convenient, retro, and modern way of exploring and sharing, so obstacles like one presented above, strike accords, and that's why I am talking about it. Especially as a Student living abroad, and having friends and families all over the world. I would benefit from facilitated messaging options. I will deconstruct Instagram into details furthermore down in this post. So, stay here around and keep reading.

BREAKING IT DOWN

As you can see on the image, in the right upper corner messages are placed, and on the exact opposite side, down left corner is the home page. (the little house looking alike icon)

Furthermore, I will talk about the Instagram story, in the media presented below, you can notice circles and some of them has a red outline, and some not. The red outline is to show that there is a new story published to buy the user. Once you watched the story (the circle becomes grey and moves away from the top of your notifications)The way to watch someone's story is to just simply press (and hold to pause) on the top of the story. Stories usually can’t be longer than a few seconds, and a maximum number of stories is 100 per day. Each story disappears after 24 hours, with the possibility of being stored on the profile afterwards. It will be available (hidden on the profile, meaning only visible to the owner of that profile for next 12 months, and then it is lost forever)

You can see the stories from the main page, or you can access them also when visiting the page of the person or desired agency. Also, if you desire to share it outside of Instagram you choose from pressing and choosing the option for three dots in the right corner of the media.

In order to not be too subjective, I have asked some of my colleagues to look into this and give me their honest opinions. I also asked some of my friends who are not familiar with the school project, thinking this way I could avoid bias.

Below is a deconstruction of Instagram with annotations of patterns and functions.

RE/CONSTRUCT

If you look closely to provided re-constructed xd prototype. The icon for messages is located in the bottom grid. Inheritably the bottom grid is fixed on the GUI. Hence, to access the messages will be easy and quick. As explained in deconstruct part, the messages/share feature was placed in multiplied places. Giving the cluttered look and giving a feeling of confusion to users. This design patterns can be blamed on Instagram policies to keep their platform explorative and not based it on messaging. It can be argued that Facebook came to a similar problematics, which Facebook solved by creating separate app only for messaging, But this caused the decrease of usage of the main Facebook overall. However my improved design look is minimal, it would not cause major division between messaging and sharing content on Instagram. On the contrary, it would facilitate the usage of both features.

User testing

In user testing, the general feedback I got is can be summed in three words. ´´Oh, THANK GOD´´ what users meant to say was: someone else is also feeling the same way, Some of the users mentioned that they use Instagram as calling app, video calling app. Instagram has incorporated video and voice calling together with iOS and Android, so when someone is calling on Instagram, feels like you are getting regular phone calls. Furthermore, accessing to the deaths of this calls is a bit harder. Because of the issue mentioned previously. Thus having messaging (which is call and video call) feature display on the main GUI of Instagram on the bottom fixed grid, seemed as change worth changing.

vimeo

Analysis

When starting this project, I wanted to focus only on a rather overall redesign than touching only some visual design patterns. Like messaging feature. However, the visual design does have a big impact on user experience. For the above solutions, I wanted to show how small changes can make a big impact.

The patterns, as far for the control that Instagram induces, is hard to notice. Mainly because announcements are very well integrated, it is hard to distinguish them from real person posts. It is, however, a typical iOS application pattern. It is very well adjusted with adds.

Instagram has an integrated variety of shapes in its design. Rounded, and squared icons.

The font used on Instagram is: Roboto is used along with Freight on Android. The Instagram website uses Proxima Nova for all text with Neue Helvetica and iOS Freight Sans.

On Instagram, when uploading a photo the design pattern of carousels can be noticed. You can scroll between pictures to select as many as it is allowed to upload.

This is the noticeable design patterns, I was also when user testing attempting to found more of them, but I couldn’t notice. I would need to do an in-depth analysis to find more, or maybe with any new updates of design, the new pattern will appear. Sometimes also, when we are to dwell into deconstructing.

BEYOND THE NORM - 15th of April

Questions:

What is the speculative approach? What is the critical design? How to relate this to interaction design? Should we, as designers, ignore issues of the world? Should we, as citizens, be satisfied with the world we have?

How can a designer play a role in engaging with the world most critical issues?

Check out the video called Technological Dreams Series No. 1, Robots Dunne & Raby, 2007. It talks about interactive experiences. This video has no voice-over, explaining but clearly explain the power roles that we have over the objects.

https://vimeo.com/2611597

Critical design is rather about asking a question than finding solutions or looking for the problems.

Answers:

Rather than finding a solution to current life problems, Critical design offers a step into the future and gives us feedback about where should we go further. Critical design tests wander and explore with ideas in a rather than unconventional way. Their exploration can be understood as something between reality and impossible. There is an attempt of drawing distinction between affirmative design (design that reinforces the status quo) and Critical Design - design that rejects how things are now as being the only possibility, it provides a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural and technical, or economic value (Dunne and Raby 2001)

Manifesto of the Critical Design: Design as a medium, asks, questions, social fiction, parallel worlds, functional fictions etc.

Is it even needed? Do we need art in design? Positive critique is that is pushing boundaries that might result in positive changes. Negative critique is that this type of design is just trying to make some noize and that we don’t really don’t need this design.

What to be thoughtful about is that critical design creates a space for critique.

Thoughtful design is taking into perspective, projecting scenarios and establishing the use of emerging things. Discursive design is distinguishing design field, commercial, experimental, and discursive design. What is essential in design fiction is that the object fits into its surroundings.

Relation of these designs to #IXD

Prototypes are tenuous, material and experienceable. Prototyping is aligned in order for situations to be understood.

Issues with Critical Design, it is very hard to know you are on the right path. We don’t know if we are doing a good or bad job.

In a short conclusion: Critical Desing is here to provoke, to question, to change values, to challenge the status quo, do it with great care if you adopt the techniques of critical design.

Adobe XD tutorials

Learning XD in detail has its advantages. Basic functions sometimes are not enough, it is quite a time saving when you know where something is located. Most of the things we learned in the first Adobe tutorial, I have already been familiar with, but haven’t really used them so much. For example, doing animation with xd was valuable insights. We were wireframing the news app. We created load screens, and the screens were supposed to give feedback. And the feedback was load time. I find this very funny, in times when 5G networks are to be implemented.

We created only a few screens and made the animations. But, it is interesting how this animation would look like for enormous news apps, that contain thousands of information and it is updated literally every minute. I guess this information tells how important this trick was when designing an app.

If you look closely you can see that the small dots under the titles are not all the same for each screen. This, when using the app would give the impression of time passing.

Furthermore, learning about wireframing tools, was also valuable. The thing is not only learning is enough, but this skill also has to be practised and put to use. We used already made screens, in my opinion, it is a bit limiting the creativity of the designer, but on the other hand, the time-saving aspect has to be taken into consideration. It would take much longer to make these screens from scratch. Hereunder you can see some screen I made during the XD workshop.

ANALYTICS EXERCISE -23d April 2019

After an in-depth exploration of Google merchandise store, there are few design suggestions that I could recommend for googles improvement in sales. Right under you can see chars that are visualising backing up my argumentations.

If we look closely to these numbers under. There is an enormous differentiation between mobile users and desktop users. It is certain there today in mobile purchases are common and becoming the main way of using the internet, also purchases.

This makes sense in many ways because mobile phones are always in our pockets, and we reach for mobile more often then we do with our laptops. So, I am raising the question about this issue, since Google merchandise store, has more visits from their desktop site.

Overall desktop visits are around 51 000 visits, where on phone it is only around 16000 visits.

This data, made me go and look at the mobile site of the store, and here I have found several design changes that can be applied. This, in my opinion, would give the store market standard, and boost mobile visits. Let take a look at the mobile site (check the media under). There we can see a variety of information hidden, behind the same icon. There are cluttered and not even necessary because all of the information this icon contain can be placed within one icon, or simply displayed on its own. The number of items purchased can be placed on the basked. And the icon next to towards left can be eliminated, or unified with the same icon under.

In conclusion, the site is clean from announcements, which gives it a peaceful place to do your shopping. Adding these small changes would make a site mobile friendly and it would boost visits and purchases made through the phone.

Digital Prototyping - How do speculative approaches reveal qualities of digital prototyping practice, and what are these important qualities?

To begin with, I can mention that speculative design process requires definitely more than one iteration. In my opinion, there is a need for researching the topic of choice from different angels. To understand the complexity of the design opportunity. It is practically a necessity to deconstruct the science behind the design opportunity.

In this course, the topic was drowned from the perspective of the UN sustainable goals. The pros of having to work with information like this is that is a very well researched topic. Easily accessible information online, multiple sources. All of this facilitates the process of speculation.

On the other hand, I will argue that this limits the creative process. Which many would agree, is necessary for any good speculative design process.

However, since this was the first project of speculative design, having predefined filed of work, can be taken as beneficial, then disadvantageous

Furthermore, if we would attempt to answer the following question: How speculative design is relevant to prototyping experiences in general? We can argue that relevance depends on the design aim. In this project, there was a necessity to use previously acquired prototyping skills, but the context was directed towards, information, visualising or grabbing attention overall. To achieve this our prototyping practice needed the help us come up with this design. I would argue that it help to understand speculation in design, but not to the point where the speculation was entirely clear.

For instance, the design process that my group was undertaking in this course, was clearly divided into two major ideas. Where the first idea, was a bad attempt to speculate, and a rather good attempt to solve the problems. Prototyping wasn't contributing much. On the contrary, on the second interaction, when the ideas were considered quite speculative, prototyping, especially using digital tools (such as xd) made the project harder. This is due to the fact that the initial ideas needed to be transferred to visual aspects. Thus, everything seems as constrained. With each small design implementation, the idea of speculation seemed losing its value.

Conclusively, it is worth considering, in future speculative design practices. that the prototyping practices can be arguably big constraint to the speculative design process.

To relate just argued pros and cons of the mentioned topic to the question of this essay (How do speculative approaches reveal qualities of digital prototyping practice, and what are these important qualities?) I can say the digital prototyping has visual aspects as support. Meaning, the tools digital prototyping uses are dependent by the large scale on the visual aspect. Whether we use video or just images. Having said this, and taking into consideration the complexity of the speculative design. Digital prototyping can serve to clarify this complex nature of this form of design.

To wrap up this thought, I can say, the visual aspect is (if well made) self-explanatory, and overall easy to understand (compared to other expensive mediums) therefore, this characteristic of digital prototyping can serve as an advantage when used in speculative design.

However, there are other qualities of digital prototyping that speculative design can reveal. For instance, these qualities can be reviled depending on which angle we are observing digital prototyping. If we looked at it from the perspective of humans needs, then we have to understand that people seek influence over their environments, and digital technology has traditionally extended possibilities to extend knowledge and control (Gaver & Martin, 2000).

There are examples where just simple machine intelligence was used to arranged and to shape birds' behaviour, by approximating a target tune for birds singing. This allowed could allow the different birds to be trained to take different harmonic roles in an overall composition. Hence, digital prototyping can give a man much more than even imaginable at first glance. We can argue that digital prototyping practice could allow people to extend control to the very wildlife and navigate the future of (wilderness and of nature) simply uncontrollable. Another example can be given from this course speculative design project. The project Swipe Dream, developed with my classmates, held in itself speculative understanding of the UN sustainable goal number 17. Partnership for goals. Swipe dream places serious manners such as development and many flows from developed to developing world, by using modern dating environment such as tinder. There is no-the less controversy in this project. But, it proves the point that speculative design allows (with use of digital prototyping) us to see important questions in another light, thus illuminating problematics, that otherwise would pass unnoticed.

Furthermore, when the design is used to ends that are provocative, we are bridging and constructing things. We are also telling stories through objects, which become effectively conversation pieces in a very real and persuasive sense. Through the projection of design scenarios, design fictions, and narratives of use, the designer as storyteller shifts focuses beyond efficient use, to embrace uncertainty, interpretation and meaning (Malpass, 2016).

It can be argued that speculative design holds immense importance for society. It pushes the boundaries from what we know already. It teaches us new perspectives on the stuff that are already around us. It gives purpose to things that presumably are useless. I connect us with objects around us and allows us to create better futures. Speculatively, digital prototyping shines the most in my opinion when using storytelling through film and images. And when mediums for expression is mixed. Her plays important roles in the ambiguity,

Furthermore, when prototyping in relation to the digital world, if we position design as an effective medium with the intent to construct public and engage user audiences by questioning conditions in everyday life. We need a powerful perspective for the user to understand our points. We need to achieve this critical perspective of the user or observer.Here is when digital prototyping can show it’s powered. If done correctly and with huge dedication, we as a designer can affect the direction where our society is going.

Design can push furthermore from orthodox way of thinking. If we manage to encourage the user to interpret the object, we put the user in a role that opens up for exploration, reflection and engagement. And, is it even necessary to explain how important is for every individual to fully engage in explorations of their own lives.

Conclusively, we can argue that there are multiple design approaches when it comes to speculative design. Firstly the combinations of disciplines. Design can be related to art, architecture or even philosophy. But, due to a necessity for clarity and simplicity, to my knowledge, we can narrow down speculative approaches in at least three different ones. The first sees designers reflecting on and critically questioning design practice. In this course, it was a digital prototyping design practice. Also, the second approach is based on re-thinking the design discipline. For example, rethinking if the digital prototyping is the best approach to explain certain problematics, or would is politics the best place to express concern about climate change, and so on. When we are talking about politics, to my knowledge and from what literature supporting this paper is indicating, one of the approaches of speculative design could actually be related to the overall importance of this speculation and design for society. Nonetheless, it is important to see the speculative design more as a discursive practice, based on critical thinking and dialogue, which questions the practice of design than to try to select and eliminate this practice in any other way (Malpass, 2016).

On the other hand, digital prototyping practice in too many ways can be a limitation in the ability to explore possible futures. We are all explorer, and the medium we use matters. Different strategic approaches are both desirable and necessary to achieve the best results possible in the process of exploration.

Digital prototyping is a way of thinking and expressing. It is certainly no so different from physical prototyping. But none the less, the experience digital prototyping can create, might interfere with how we think of our future and how we as mankind will continue to go about our lives. Yes, I argue of the benefits of digital prototyping, but however good and beneficial this prototyping is, it will never bring better results than feedbacks that real users give us.

In conclusion, it can be stated that digital prototyping together with the speculative design is of big importance, it gives us a modern perspective of ourselves and of the context we found ourselves in.

Literature

Gaver, B., & Martin, H. (2000). Alternatives. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’00. https://doi.org/10.1145/332040.332433

Malpass, M. (2016). Critical Design Practice: Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Engagement. The Design Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2016.1161943

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trb-reacts · 6 years

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The Raven Boys, Chapter 12

Adam wasn’t waiting by the bank of mailboxes in the morning.

Oh no. Please tell me Adam was fine and wasn’t caught. Tell me no one hurt our sweet, elegant boy.

Actually, more properly, he’d used it as a place to turn around and head back the way he’d come. […] At the sight of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater, Adam’s father had charged out, firing on all cylinders.

Lol, oh, Gansey, turn around and head back the way he’d come. I’m also just very afraid for Adam though. If Adam’s father reacts this way to Gansey in his Aglionby sweater, just how exactly does Adam’s father react to Adam attending Aglionby?

For weeks after that, Ronan had called Gansey “the S.R.F.,” where the S stood for Soft, the R stood for Rich, and the F for something else.

Lol, something else, huh?

His watch said he had eighteen minutes to make the fifteen-minute drive to school.

It’s okay, Gansey, I’ve done 10 minute walks within 5 minutes, because I always leave the house too late and have no sense of time. I managed, though, and made it on time, with 2 minutes of lateness. Yay me.

Noah had let him leave his journal behind at Nino’s after all, and its absence was surprisingly unsettling.

I’m sorry, Gansey, but how old are you? Noah let you leave your journal behind? Have a sense of responsibility, would you, tho I would admit that I would be exceedingly upset if I lost my journal full of my writings.

And Dick Gansey II had let his son know that if he couldn’t hack it in a private school, Gansey was cut out of the will.

He’d said it nicely, though, over a plate of fettuccine.

Oh, the rich people’s version of B+?? You only got a B+?? Only Asians get the threat of a beating (semi-kidding), while rich people get the threat of a fortune taken away with they get below a B. I wonder which one is worse.

He felt the old fear creeping slowly out of his lungs.

Don’t panic. You were wrong about Ronan last night. You have to stop this. Death isn’t as close as you think.

… I would like to be reassuring and tell Gansey he’s right, except Whelk’s friend did die when they went on their quest to search for the king. And I mean, a beating and death is not that far apart for Adam, is it? I’m concerned, especially with this unexpected radio silence.

Adam must’ve taken his bike, he must’ve had work, he must’ve had errands to run and forgotten to tell him. The rutted drive down to the neighborhood was still empty. Come on, Adam. Wiping his palms on his slacks, he put his hands back on the steering wheel and headed for the school.

Gansey, I’m admittedly a little disappointed in you. School > friend? I mean, I get it, I’m a student crazy about my grade too and most of the time, the worse case scenario isn’t usually actually what happens, though, Gansey? You called him out last night, knowing that consequences would be bad if Adam was caught. You called him, asked him for a favor from one friend to another, and Adam granted it, gave it to you without much more than a second thought for his own wellbeing, because you asked. And now you leave your wait for Adam, without knowing what happened to him at all? You coulda at least went by Adam’s home to see if he is there and then walk in late to class, though I admittedly don’t know how well rich boarding schools take walking in late to class.

Ronan was head of class in Latin. He studied joylessly but relentlessly, as if his life depended on it. Directly behind him was Adam, Aglionby’s star pupil, otherwise at the top of every class that he took. Like Ronan, Adam studied relentlessly, because his future life did depend on it.

He studied joylessly but relentlessly, as if his life depended on it. Oh, me in every single one of my classes. Joyless and relentless, because my future life depends on it. Not the star pupil like Adam, though I try.

I’m also getting the Ronan/Adam vibe again. Adam, top in every single one of his class except for Latin, the only class that Ronan tries and therefore excels at. I wonder if Adam gets infuriated by Ronan, the way Ronan doesn’t care about anything including his own talent and intelligence, but shines so brightly when he does try like a light flickering to life at night.

…. Would it be a stretch if I add ‘and Adam is helpless drawn by it, like moth to flame.’? Probably, but I don’t care. Ronan probably won’t burn Adam much tho. Probably. Hopefully.

He’d originally resigned himself to taking Latin in order to translate historical texts for Glendower research, but Ronan’s proficiency at the language robbed Gansey’s study of any urgency.

I’m so both amazed by Gansey’s dedication to his reasearch to even consider learning an entire other language (i understand how tough learning another language could be, since I suck at it, even without considering reading and writing formal text in another foreign language) and amused by Gansey’s typical student laziness. I don’t need to take it? Great, not gonna bother then, thank you very much.

Ronan hissed, “Where’s Parrish?”

Oh, no. Adam!! Also, Ronan cares~

Behind Gansey, someone punched his shoulder blade and said, Gansey boy! as they trotted by. Gansey halfheartedly lifted three fingers, the signal of the rowing team.

Gansey boy! Lol. Also, Gansey’s in the rowing team? He is popular.

A few months earlier, Gansey had offered to buy Adam a cell phone, and by so doing had launched the longest fight they’d ever had, a week of silence that had resolved itself only when Ronan did something more offensive than either of them could accomplish.

I’m so… I don’t know. I understand why Adam would be like, fuck you, I’m not a charity case, but at the same time… sometimes when you see your friend struggling, it physically hurts to have the means to help and just not be allowed to help. Gansey should say stuff like, “Oh, it’ll be easier to help me contact you, which would aid us in our quest. Also, think of this as me investing in you. You can pay me back for the phone later.’ Or just… sell Adam one of his old phone for cheap, idk.

This reminds me of *spoiler if you haven’t read The Foxhole Court* Andrew buying Neil a phone and Neil looking at it like it’s the devil the first time around. Though, to be fair, Neil and Adam are in different circumstance here.

Also, I’m so amused by this: a week of silence that had resolved itself only when Ronan did something more offensive than either of them could accomplish. Glad to see Ronan’s antagonistic nature has its perks. No one can seem offensive when in comparison to me!

Thank you, Ronan, thank you.

“Lynch!” the call came again. “I’m going to fuck you up.”

Wow, that’s… a very strong sentiment. Also, wow, I just noticed but Ronan’s last name is Lynch. Lynch, as in, *give me a second to google the formal definition*

lynch /verb/:

(of a mob) kill (someone), especially by hanging, for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial.

synonyms: execute illegally, hang, kill; informal string up

“he was lynched by the mob”

Lynch, with all those good feels here. The word lynch reminds of of martyrs and I wonder why I feel like Ronan would be the martyr, despite his strong personality implying/faking that he would be the one doing the lynching.

Gansey contemplated if he could give Ronan a curfew. Or if he should quit rowing to spend more time with him on Fridays — he knew that was when Ronan got into trouble with the BMW. Maybe he could convince Ronan to …

Gansey boy!: the Mom Friend of the group.

Gansey asked, “Why are you carrying that bag? Oh my God, you have that bird in there, don’t you.”

Whoops, I forgot about the raven. How could I forget about Chain Saw!!

“If you get caught with that thing —” But Gansey couldn’t think of a suitable threat. What was the punishment for smuggling a live bird into classes? He wasn’t certain there was precedent.

Ronan, breaking boundaries and making history left and right. I feel like Ronan is the type that prompts people to make new, weirdly specific rules like, “Guys, please, place your hand over the bleaker and gently wave a bit towards you. By heavens, don’t stick it under your nose and sniff like you would with drugs and most of all, I can’t believe I have to say this, but Do Not Drink It! It’s not edible, do you hear me, and definitely do not miss your mouth and accidentally splash it all over your eyes and then knock everyone’s bleaker over and spill the contents all over someone else’s eyes! This is a Safe Zone, you hear me, and we’re gonna Keep It That Way.”

“If it dies in your bag, I forbid you to throw it out in a classroom.” “She,” Ronan corrected. “It’s a she.”

I love how Ronan corrected the impersonal ‘it’ to a ‘she’. Oh, Ronan is such a softie underneath everything.

Though there was no reason to think Whelk cared about their conversation, Gansey had the strange idea that the lifted piece of chalk in Whelk’s hand was because of them, that the Latin teacher had stopped writing merely to listen in. Adam’s suspicion really was beginning to rub off on him.

Um, Gansey dear, actuallly, Adam’s suspicion is very well founded and also, just listen to your gut instincts. Your guts Knows, alright, it Knows, Gansey.

Ronan caught Whelk’s eye and held it in an unfriendly sort of way.

Oh, I love Ronan. Stare ‘em down, Ronan, stare ‘em down.

Because he despised everyone, Ronan wasn’t a good judge of character, but Gansey had to agree that there was something discomfiting about Whelk. A few times, Gansey had tried to hold a conversation with him about Roman history, knowing full well the effect an enthusiastic academic conversation could have on an otherwise listless grade. But Whelk was too young to be a mentor and too old to be a peer, and Gansey couldn’t find an angle.

If Gansey finds it discomfiting every time he can’t find an angle to talk to someone, he would not like my awkward little life or attempts at small talks. I’ll need to know you for a full three months before I can comfortably greet you without thinking ‘Am I overstepping my boundary? Can I greet them and acknowledge them outside of where we met? Do they even remember me or find my greetings too bothersome?’ Yeah, I have lots of anxiety about lots of stuff.

Also, Gansey’s such a nerd that he finds it weird when he can’t nerd out with someone who is supposedly a fellow nerd.

Ronan kept staring at Whelk. He was good at staring. There was something about his stare that took something from the other person.

Me, covering my mouth with a hand, tear brimming my eyes as I reenact the ‘you’re doing amazing, sweetie’ meme. Probably shouldn’t be encouraging him, heavens knows Ronan doesn’t need more encouragement, but I love it when Ronan acts so... him.

And: there was something about his stare that took something from the other person. I love it!

Gansey would’ve basked once more in the odds of Ronan of finding a raven, but at the moment, with Adam missing, his quest didn’t feel like magic; it felt like years spent piecing together coincidences, and all he had made from it was a strange cloth — too heavy to carry, too light to do any good at all.

Oh, love it. Some doubts from Gansey on his quest, the what-if my faith isn’t really faith, but rather delusions? What if there really isn’t magic and these coincidence (fate, magic) really are just coincidental events that a mad man strung together thinking that they had any correlation or significance at all?

Also, I love the metaphor with a cloth!! Too heavy to carry, too light to do any good at all; I spent too much time and energy and faith on it to abandon it now, and yet what had all the time and energy and faith invested really given me in return? Only strings of nothings connected by the thin, nebulous thread of ‘coincidences’.

"You seem to have an extremely large bag today, Mr. Lynch," Whelk said. "You know what they say about men with large bags," Ronan replied. "Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?" Gansey had no idea what Ronan had just said, but he was certain from Ronan’s smirk that it wasn’t entirely polite.

So, when faced with untranslated babbles of unknown because I’m not cultured enough to be fluent in more than one language, I can never resist finding out what they mean by turning to the trusty google translate.

Before that, let me guess what he says without translating the Latin phrase and then maybe we can compare my guess to what he actually said.

Guess 1: “You know what they say about men with large bags. They have large baggages,” because symbolism is so my thing. Except Ronan’s Latin phrase ends in a question mark and I think symbolism about bags and baggages is more of my thing than Ronan’s.

Guess 2: “You know what they say about men with large bags. They have huge dicks,” because I can imagine Ronan making a dick joke here, except that’s also not a question. Ronan, what did you say????

Okay, I’m gonna cheat.

Final Guess: “You know what they say about men with large bags. They have huge dicks, amiright?” There, I got the question mark in there now. Totally showed that stupid question mark.

Answer: Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus? = You show me yours and I will show

... I’m not entirely sure what that means, so here’s another two guesses, this time on what this translated Lain phrase mean. Gee, Ronan, I like you, but you’re driving me nuts.

Guess 1: I’m totally right and it’s a dick joke. “You show me your, erm, jewels, and I’ll show you mine.” I like this one because I inappropriately like random oblique dick jokes in Latin, but also because it means Ronan is maybe not entirely straight so my ship with him and Adam might actually be able to leave the port.

Guess 2: I’m sadly wrong and Ronan is a bright diamond, meaning he’s not only shiny and awesome, but also damn sharp. (Actually diamonds aren’t the sharpest, I’m thinking about... hardness. Diamond’s the hardest of all rocks, I think, and I just compared Ronan to a diamond, so I’ll just leave that here.) Ronan is onto Whelk and he knows that Whelk’s been keeping an eye on them, so Ronan is saying, “You show me your cards, your secrets, and I might impart mine as well, including telling you about what’s in my ‘extremely large bag’.” (I really needa stop making dick jokes.)

Anyway, the second guess unfortunately sounds more plausible, though Ronan’s smirk seem to imply a bit more of the first guess. Yeah, I don’t know. Tell me if there’s an official interpretation of this or if I misunderstood?

"Being a shit in Latin isn’t the way to an A," Gansey said.

Ronan’s smile was golden. "It was last year."

Ronan’s smile was golden!! *cries* Oh, my son!! I love him so much.

Adam never showed.

And the somber reminder came back. I really, really hope Adam is okay. I miss him, and I’m sure the boys do too.

#the raven boys #the raven cycle #trc #trb #chapter 12 #this one is ridiculously long

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ghostboy-gamedev · 4 years

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Learn Log #3 - GUI

This week I studied various elements of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) including text, logos, buttons and cursors. For practice, I made a mock-up of a fantasy RPG menu which turned out alright. Apologies for the late post. I was a bit busy this past week. Hopefully this doesn’t cause a delay in next week’s post but we’ll have to wait and see!

Text and Font

To practice my font making skills, this week, I tried to make readable fonts in the smallest sizing possible. My reasoning behind this is letters might be read in large passages of text, so a smaller size will likely be required – especially for small menu spaces such as inventories.

Above was my first attempt which used 3x4 pixel letters. While many of the characters were recognisable, a good number were not. The ‘M’ and ‘W’ were utterly unreadable, and some of the characters were difficult to read, like ‘S’ and ‘X’. I decided to move up to a 4x5 size.

With this slightly larger size, I attempted to make both uppercase and lower case letters, most of which worked pretty well. While most characters such as the ‘S’, ‘E’, ‘3’, ‘Z’ and so forth benefited from the extra pixel in the Y-axis – characters were still needed an extra pixel along the X-axis. Characters such as ‘M’ and ‘W’ were still basically unreadable, and characters such as ‘T’ and ‘I’ were difficult to align along the even number of pixels. To fix this, I moved up to 5x5.

Finally! I have successful ‘M’s and ‘W’s! From this test, I really think that there are a few principals for creating nice fonts. 1) If you know or unsure about if the letters ‘M’ and ‘W’ are involved then make the canvas size for each letter at least 5 pixels wide. The same can go for characters like ‘S’ with regards to height. 2) Make the canvas size an odd number along the X-axis to better align specific letters.

With this last font set, I was also able to size the canvas for different types of characters differently. Capital letters occupied the full 5x5 canvas, lowercase letters occupied a 3x4 canvas (except for the ‘M’ and ‘W’ which had to be 5x4), and numbers and symbols filled a 3x5 canvas. I did this so readers could better distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters, and similar characters like ‘O’ and ‘0’. I’ll have to see what it’s like an actual game later, but I think it’ll be a pretty useful trick.

I do think I will be able to make larger fonts than this and size them down in the Unity engine. Even if this is the case, I think this worked pretty well as practice within tricky boundaries.

Logos

I think logos and titles are pretty crucial to a game. They plaster the cover and main menu of the screen, and I’m sure we can all think of a few memorable logos we’ve seen in games. So, now that I’d practised making text I wanted to make a banner logo for my Itch.io page. The first thing I did was a little sketching on paper before converting it to a small pixel art concept, as shown below.

The recommended banner size for Itchi.io is about 900px wide. I was not going to start here, so I decided to do my rough draft at 45x26 and detail it as I scale up. I made this draft by implementing the concepts I really wanted first and building around that. I knew I wanted to include the ‘S’ wrapped around the ‘T’, so I started there and worked my way through the logo. I also wanted to include a little ghost, so I left a space for it in the bottom left corner. Next, I wanted to add some detail and hollow out the letters, so they were white with a black outline. This is useful as it means the letters are both white and black, allowing the logo to be read on dark and light backgrounds.

To add the detail, I scaled up the previous logo by 400%. This allowed me to round out the edges and create a nice ‘blocky-but-smooth’ look. I also adjusted the ‘G’, ‘T’ and ‘S’. The original ‘S’ and ‘T’ combo made the ‘S’ seem a little bit strange, but this new version was a lot better. With the hollowed out ‘G’ I made it seem like it was beneath the ‘H’ which I thought was a nice effect. I left one of the ends of the ‘Y’ very blocky to make it seem like it had been interrupted by the T. At this point the logo was 180x104, so I scaled it up by 500% to reach 900x520 before adding more detail.

If someone were to ask me, ‘Hey, should I make a 900x520 pixel art logo dealing round edges and circles?’ I would slap them. In fact, I’ve slapped myself because I did precisely this, and it took ages. At smaller sizes, circles can easily be adjusted, viewed, or manipulated to trick the viewer into thinking they are looking at a round edge. When you need to make 4 circles, the largest being 220x220 this becomes insanely difficult. Looking back on this issue I definitely should have used anti-aliasing - I completely forgot about it if I’m honest. The ‘O’s didn’t even come out looking that great. They look quite boxy – definitely should have used anti-aliasing. I have regrets.

Luckily the other letters turned out much better. I did adjust the ‘Y’ also as previously the logo read ‘Ghosty Boy’ rather than ‘Ghost Boy’. This did make the canvas 840x520, but I don’t think it’ll be a noticeable change. I’m pretty happy with it, especially after all the time it took. I may revisit the logo at another time (especially to fix up those ‘O’s).

Above is the final logo, I added the pattern used in my profile picture (slightly desaturated to make it easy on the eyes) to the insides of the letters and called it a day (or 3 days. I hate the letter ‘O’).

Buttons

So, we’ve got our game’s font and title, what we need now are some buttons for interacting with the menus. To practice making button sprites, I decided to make link buttons for social media sites. I started by making the designs of the buttons, as shown below.

I started with small, white 9x9 designs of each social media sites’ logo on a background of their associated colour. I wanted the buttons to be small (to be put on the sidebar of a website) and completely circular. The Itch.io logo could not fit onto the small size, so I made a rough-looking videogame controller instead.

I then expanded these designs into a larger 13x13 circle which I would later turn into the button. Not much happened in this step but this.

And the buttons were done! I shifted the logos of each button upwards before adding a shadow and highlight line on the bottom. Buttons require some sense of depth or separation from the background to show that they can be interacted with. This is really all that’s needed, but more detail can be added to make the button look more appealing.

I added a shadow around the back of the buttons to emphasise the edges of the buttons, separating them from background. I then added some more detail to the highlight to make the button seem shiny and draw attention to it. By alternating between highlights and normal tones, the button appears metallic. Finally, I changed the white logos to a light yellow so the white didn’t seem too bright.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the buttons look. The colours on the Itch.io button are a bit desaturated which conflicts with the metallic look. This is due to the colours of the actual logo being quite desaturated. If I were to return to it, I would change it to be pink or orange to capture a similar colour but make the button as bright and eye-catching as the others.

Cursors

There’s not much to talk about in regards to cursors. The default cursors of PCs and Macs are pretty good, however, adding a custom cursor image to a game makes it look really cool I think – even if it’s just a simple adjustment. I tried my hand at making some cursors. The circular points make fitting cursors for shoot games as they’re reminiscent of a gun scope. The hand cursor is a little tricky to do in a small space and might not be worth it as cursors need to be small. Like I said regarding text - if Unity has an option to scale down cursors that will make things much easier. These are some simple ones, but I’m sure there could be more eccentric designs even within these cursor shapes.

Assessment

So, for this week’s learning assessment, I wanted to make a mock-up fantasy RPG menu based on the items I made last week. This was definitely not a lazy excuse to use the same colour palette and 100% a sincere artistic decision.

The first thing I started with was the buttons. It is crucial a menu’s buttons are clear and easy to read so they should dictate the size and presentation of the rest of the screen. I really liked the scroll item from last week, so I decided to make the buttons scrolls. This made the addition of depth more complicated, but I think I did an alright job by adding a shadow bottom right of the scroll.

For the text on the buttons, I wanted to delve into the fantasy aspect and use rune-like letters. I had to tread a fine line between clarity and the desired aesthetic of the letters which took a lot of trial and error, but I think I got there in the end.

I then scaled up the buttons to add some further detail to the scroll and the runes. I thought the plain white background looked pretty bland so I decided to make a background.

I made a mountain range as a background for the menu and changed the text of the ‘PLAY’ button to an outlined red. I kept the background quite simple as this week’s topic was interfaces, and I was concerned that a detailed background might distract from the interface elements. I turned the ‘PLAY’ red because I wanted to give the impression that the option was being selected. I had ample empty space to the left of the screen, so I decided to create a logo for the game to fill that space.

[photo]

After some more trial and error with different rune letters, I created this logo giving this fake game the title ‘Mt Doom’, inspired by the mountain range background. The rigid rune style really gave the title a more menacing feeling which was good. The ‘O’s used looked a bit weird as I had trouble turning them into a rigid rune style. I increased the size of the logo to add more detail and popped it into the menu screen.

The extra detail made the runes look a bit nicer. The ‘O’s were still off but did fit the rest of the font a little better after adjustment. My biggest concern was how out of place the whole logo looked. This was quite clearly because of the pure white colour used for the letters. I could change this to the white within the colour palette; however, this colour was used in the background, so I decided to match the selected button and use the colour red for the logo.

The red made the logo really pop while fitting in with the rest of the piece. Additionally, some light shading on each of the letters made letters stand out even more. I also moved the black outline of the text slightly to the right to make it feel more like a shadow rather than just an outline. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like the logo had a grand enough presence for its purpose and menace to shine through. To fix this up, I digitally resized the logo by approximately 133.33%. Now, digital resizing really works well for stuff like 200%, 500%, 1000% and so on because it just adds pixels. However, a resize of 150% means you are resizing the image by 1 and a half-pixel which is not possible. This creates jagged, messy lines – but I decided to give it a shot because why not?

To my surprise, the sizing was perfect, and the messy lines actually worked somewhat with the aesthetic. The shading did get messed up a bit, and if I were to do this again I would go back and adjust the shading, but overall I actually think it improved the piece. Finally, I decided to add a cursor, a watermark and social media buttons into the piece, as shown below.

This watermark and the social media buttons do look a bit out of place in the piece, but I think that works in their favour. It draws attention to them and makes it clear that these are not part of the game or menu. This is particularly useful as those social media sites will open an external tab so showing they’re not part an internal part of the game is important.

Looking back on this piece, I do wish the background had more detail. Initially, I didn’t add it so the interface was clear and this may have worked. Still, the fact the background is very simple makes it aesthetically different and distracting. Also, while the scrolls were a nice concept, they could be designed to have more depth and a better select state. Overall, what I took from this practice is that this design process of ‘Buttons to Background to Logo’ is quite useful, but I do need to make adjustments as I go through each stage in the process.

Conclusion

That concludes week 3 of learning pixel art. In week 4, I will be diving into environments starting with grass, trees, bushes and some other features of nature. I’m really excited to build pixel art environments, and I think I’ll enjoy it more than this week as I got a bit sick of making letters over and over again.

My learning and this blog post wouldn’t have been made possible without these fantastic resources. Go check them out if you wanna learn some stuff about pixel art!

Creating A Pixel Art Font by TutsByKai

How to Make a Pixel Logo by TutsByKai

Pixel Art 101: Buttons by Pixel Pete

How to Animate a Button by TutsByKai

How to Make Pixel Art Cursors by TutsByKai

#pixel art #pixel #pixel aesthetic #video games #gamedev #game dev #learning #learn

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livingmybestfictionallife · 7 years

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Next Door

Anon Request (from before my blog was deleted and I had to start over): the reader start to avoid Seb, bc she likes him (always had liked him) a lot of angst bc he have no idea why she’s avoiding him and the end is up to you Warnings: none that I caught

Sebastian had always been a huge part in (Y/N)’s life and vice versa. Moving from Romania to Austria and then to the United States had left a physical toll on Sebastian as a child. Coming to the US speaking little to no English and being thrust into public school in some of the most crucial formative years of an individual’s adolescence, a chubby Romanian kid who didn’t know English very well was bound to stick out. At first he hated his new school and refused to get up most days. It wasn’t until his mother forced him to play outside with the neighbor’s kids that he started to meet people. Still self-conscious about his diction and appearance, he started to go places with the kids who lived next door. The brother was a few years older than Sebastian and the sister was a year younger. He recognized the girl immediately–she had been sitting at the same lunch table as him for about a week now and he had slowly began to realize that it was the reject table, saved specifically for outcasts and losers. He never knew why (Y/N) sat at the table; she always seemed to have friends to talk to and people who wanted to be around her and she was nice to almost everyone.

Slowly, he started to grow more comfortable with his ability to communicate in English and even gave up trying to convince his mom to let him change his name to Christopher in order to fit in better. He continued to sit at the loser’s table for a while, but at least he had (Y/N) there to keep him company. Their friendship continued to grow throughout middle school and into high school. They had survived school together, but with the next step in life came good-bye.

She never told him how much she valued their friendship or how proud she was with all he accomplished or how much she truly cared about him; instead she smiled, wished him luck and the two diverted onto their own paths in life. He went to Rutgers and she went to Princeton, he pursued theatre and she studied the classics. After a while she occasionally caught wind of his name on television and then in movies, but any real contact was lost. Figuring her childhood attraction to him was just puppy love and nothing more than a simple crush, she distracted herself with the life around her. She dove into her career, casually dated, and kept in touch with Sebastian’s mother, whom she had grown close to throughout her adolescence.

Finally, she had been given the opportunity she was waiting for: an interview for a teaching position at The New School for Drama. Her parents had moved away from New York shortly after she graduated high school, but she still considered it her home. She wanted to go back and teach kids what she loved as a kid. Somehow, Sebastian’s mother learned she was coming back into town and insisted they get together for lunch, to which (Y/N) agreed. They set a date and time for their get together and that was the last thing (Y/N) had heard from the woman.

When the day of their lunch came, she sat at a small wooden table draped with a white tablecloth beside a large, floor to ceiling window in a sparsely populated cafe. She had gotten distracted by the people walking by on the street and didn’t notice when someone sat down in the seat across from her until they spoke. “It seems my mother tricked both of us,” the voice laughed. She turned to see Sebastian all grown up in his new found fame sitting across from her with a smile on his face.

“It seems that way,” she replied with a laugh. After catching up, discussing their lives, and informing one another about their families, it was time to part ways once again.

A few days later, (Y/N) received a call from the school she interviewed with saying she had gotten the job. Within a week she was in a new apartment in a secluded building not far from her new workplace. There was just one downside to her situation: her next door neighbor.

She had lived in the building for nearly half a year before she met the person who lived on her left. In reality she should have been more suspicious when Georgeta offered to help her search for apartments, but she didn’t expect the woman to lead her to being her son’s next door neighbor! Sebastian hadn’t been home in months due to filming in Atlanta, but when he returned home to see the quirky homemade decorative wreath (Y/N)’s grandmother made for her hanging on the door beside his, he was shocked. After dropping his luggage in his bedroom he quickly threw on a clean t-shirt and went to introduce himself to his new neighbor.

Sebastian and (Y/N) had gotten used to living next door to one another again and began to get comfortable in their current situation–sometimes too comfortable. They had keys to the other’s apartment mostly for the convenience of (Y/N) watching his place while he was gone for months at a time filming, but also just in case of emergencies. She didn’t lock her door much when she was home and Sebastian would frequently walk over and drop in when he heard her tv on or after she texted him to come over. The fluidity of their presence in one another’s apartment became so common for them, they failed to realize the many boundaries they crossed.

It wasn’t until (Y/N) invited one of her girl-friends over for dinner and a movie that the awkwardness of what she and Sebastian had was brought to her attention. She and her friend, Sadie, were dressed in their night clothes; she wore a large baseball style shirt that hung just below her butt and a pair of short nylon shorts, barely visible under the shirt, and Sadie had on a tank top and a pair of pajama pants. (Y/N) was standing in the kitchen pouring her friend, a glass of wine when the door clicked open and in walked Sebastian. “Hey frumoasa,” he greeted with the pet name he had given her shortly after they met. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had company,” he apologized and waved to Sadie as he slipped behind (Y/N), allowing one of his hands to trail her waist as she continued to pour the drink. “I forgot my phone charger here last night,” he explained while unhooking the cord from the wall plug beside her stove and then stepping out from behind her and gave her a quick hug from behind. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”

“Of course,” she replied and set down the bottle and glass to grab the door on his way out.

“Good, see you then, frumoasa,” he called out to her before ducking back out into the hallway and the door clicked shut behind him. (Y/N) turned back to her friend who stared at her in utter confusion.

“Okay, what the hell just happened?” Sadie quickly asked.

“What do you mean?”

“When did you plan on telling me you were sleeping with Sebastian Stan?” Sadie gasped.

“What the hell?” she gasped. “No! I’ve known Sebastian since we were like thirteen or so! We’re just friends.”

“Just friends?” she scolded. “The casual dropping in, leaving something at your place as an excuse to come back, the subtle hinting at whatever things ensued between the two of you last night, grasping you by the waist, that’s not ‘just friend’ material.”

“You’re reading into things again, Sadie,” (Y/N) shrugged off her friend’s opinion. “What did we say about that?”

“Oh please,” she huffed, “Crayola doesn’t even make the shade of red your face turned when his fingers grasped your side.”

“Seriously, Sadie, shut up,” she hissed, “the walls are thin. He’ll hear you.” The two hurried into the master bedroom where (Y/N) poured half a glass of wine down her gullet. “Okay so maybe I have an itty, bitty, tiny crush on him,” she admitted.

“That’s adorable,” Sadie cooed. “For how long?”

“Twenty years,” she replied, to which Sadie legit sent a spray of white wine into the air and watched it dissipate as if fluttered toward the ground. “I’m lame, I get that, but I didn’t think I was spit-take-worthy-lame.”

“You’ve had the hots for this guy for twenty years and haven’t told him?” she gasped again. The rest of the night continued along the same lines to the point that (Y/N) decided changes needed to be made. She couldn’t go on pretending like the geographical and emotional closeness she had with Sebastian wasn’t as important as it was. Since that dorky Romanian kid showed up in her class, she had gone out of her way to make sure he felt welcomed. She was the new kid at one point in her life too and no one made her feel included, so when Sebastian arrived not knowing anyone and barely knowing English, she wanted to make him feel as though he had someone to call a friend. She abandoned her friends to sit at the outcast table with him, she told her mom about the new boy in her class that no one would talk to and that she wanted to make him feel better, and she was excited to know that the shy new kid was the boy who had just moved in next to her.

All those years of proximity had lead to a sense of comfort and ease around Sebastian so much to the point that when she’s with him, she forgets that she’s not actually with him. As much as she hated to admit it, things had to change. She started locking her door during the day and would only watch tv on low volumes. She’d turn right when leaving her place so she wouldn’t have to pass Sebastian’s apartment and she would time her departure and arrival home with the times she knew he would be out of his apartment. Anything she could do to avoid seeing him, she did, no matter how ridiculous.

At first Sebastian just thought she had gotten busy or taken on a heavier workload, then he started to get concerned. Was she sick? Had he done something to upset her? He had known her well enough to understand that occasionally she just needed her space, but two and a half months of radio silence was excessive, even for her. He was scheduled to return to Atlanta for more filming in less than a month and he didn’t want to leave the city without explaining to her that he would be gone for a while, incase she decided to come around again.

Stan: Hey frumoasa, is everything okay? (sent 3:42 pm)

Stan: I wanted to get together again before I go back to Atlanta (sent 4:01 pm)

Stan: Are you home? Do you want to come over? (sent 4:17 pm)

Stan: Text me something so I know you’re okay (sent 4:25 pm)

Stan: You’re starting to scare me (Y/N) (sent 4:33 pm)

Stan: That’s it, I’m coming over (sent 4:37 pm)

Stan: Your door is locked and I can’t find my key to your place (sent 4:39 pm)

Stan: Please let me in (sent 4:40 pm)

Her phone was going off every other minute with messages from Sebastian, but the only way to get him out of her system was to purge him, so she turned her phone on silent and left it on the coffee table in the living room. She heard a frantic pounding on her door and knew it had to be him. She shifted under the covers in her bed and almost got up to open the door given how rushed and panicked he sounded, but relaxed when he finally stopped. She tried to lay down and rest her mind by reading in the sun’s setting light when a rapid tapping noise sounded from her bedroom window.

She jumped and tossed her book as she ran to inspect the source of the noise. Just outside her window on the rickety, rusted fire-escape sat the man she was doing everything to keep her mind off of. He sighed heavily at the sight of her and pushed his long, floppy hair to the right.

“What are you doing?” she chastised him as he adjusted his crouched position on the fire-escape.

“I had to make sure you were okay,” he stated. “I’ve been trying to contact you for weeks, (Y/N). What the hell?!”

“I just got busy,” she lied. “And you couldn’t just text me that you were busy?” he snapped as he gripped the railing so tightly his fingers started to ache.

“It must have slipped my mind,” she lied again.

“Slipped your mind?” he stammered. “We were hanging out every day for months and then all of a sudden, nothing. You could have at least said ‘hi’ every now and then!”

“Hi!” she shouted through a mix of frustration and sorrow, not sure if she was fighting back tears or fighting back cursing.

“Great! It’s nice to know that if I want to see my best friend I have to risk my life on this damn thing to get a simple ‘hello,’” he grumbled. “Can I at least come inside? You know I hate heights!”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, her voice barely audible.

“Okay, what’s gotten into you?” he snapped. “First you were all excited to be living net to me and now it’s like you’re trying to get as far away from me as possible! What did I do?” She could see the glare of the sun’s rays reflect off his eyes and she realized keeping her distance from him would be impossible.

“We just got too close.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked again, his voice starting to exhibit agitation at their conversation and anxiety for being perched on the fire-escape like a wounded bird. “Can I please just come in?” Reluctantly she slid the window open further and backed away, resting again on her bed. “Thank you,” he replied with a sassy tone before closing the window and turning to face her. “What do you mean we got too close?” he asked as he leaned into the office chair she had poking out from under her desk.

“We were too familiar with one another and too open with well everything and too be honest, I don’t want to open myself up to you only to face rejection.”

“What do you mean rejection?” he asked, refusing to take his eyes off of her. “I like you a lot, Sebastian,” she said. Her voice escaped her lips sounding weak and timid, like she had a knot in her throat and was fighting to keep her true emotions back which caused her words to come out squeaky and fragile. “I like how close and familiar we got with one another, but I want that to be real. I want a relationship and I don’t want our closeness to be jeopardized when you find someone taller or prettier or better to be with.”

Sebastian migrated to the bed, took her hands in his and pulled her chin up so that his eyes could meet hers. A smile curled onto his face as he crouched beside her so close he could count the freckles that dotted the bridge of her nose. “ Hey,” he called as she tried to turn her eyes away from him. “ Hey, (Y/N), look at me.” His smile pierced her heart and a tear started to stream down her cheek. “Do you know what frumoasa means?” he asked her. She shook her head and wiped away another tear that swelled in the corner of her eye. “I started calling you frumoasa because I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and I keep calling you frumoasa because you continue to be the most beautiful person in my life. Please don’t shut me out, beautiful.” She extended her arms and wrapped them around his neck as his slithered around her hips and pressed her tightly against his body. “If you want me to be yours, then I’m yours, sound like a plan?”

“Sounds like a plan, Stan,” she giggled through the light streaks of tears that flushed over her face. Sebastian rolled his eyes at her and grumbled at her wordplay.

“Just for that terrible joke,” he muttered as he kicked off his shoes and then flopped into her bed, “I decided I’m going to stay here tonight.”

“But this is my bed,” she protested with a fake pout on her lips.

“But I’m too lazy to walk all the way home,” he sighed in exaggeration while pulling her down to lay beside him.

“You’re too laze to go next door?” she laughed and curled up beside Sebastian as he placed a kiss on her forehead.

“Yep. I may never go next door again.”

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sam-hunt-creativetech · 7 years

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Semi-Permanent 2017

Semi-Permanent is a conference that brings together the creatives, the designers, the future thinkers and some of the biggest businesses in the world. I was lucky enough to have received tickets through work to attend this massive global event and I am grateful.

Through this event I got to meet a lot of new and impressive people, learn a lot and also re-inforce some ideas I already have and/or have forgotten/lost touch with over time.

I spoke to a few of the speakers in depth after the main talks at the after party and will not include those conversations within this blog post. I will save them for a seperate post with more specific topics of interest.

Finally, the text to follow may not be as structured as I set out to begin with as it may turn into a brain dump halfway through.

Lucy MccCae

She pushes the boundaries and tries everything that comes to her mind. She won’t hesitate in doing what she loves and through this creates amazing things. She is inspirational to idea of trying something no matter how obscene it may sound, no matter how many people say you shouldn’t. Just do it.

A lot of the work she does, starts with putting herself in the possibly dangerous situation, to try those weird things that everyone says is a bad idea. She has a passion for the human body and science fiction where she attempts to bridge the gap.

An interesting idea is that we can only go so far, and when that day comes the only way is ‘Remove limbs to improve yourself’. An eye opening statement made during one of the QnA sessions where someone makes a note that we can only run as fast as the best scientist and medical team can make us go - once we hit our limit the only way to surpass our limitation is through removing that limb and swapping it to an advanced feat of technology. (This QnA might have been with Nicholas)

I was left with a powerful idea from her talk: Design with vulnerability. Make yourself vulnerable with your design, put yourself into hard situations (or the users shoes) to really understand the problem. Later on Michael Parekowhai has a similar quote except with a different basis: Don’t draw the tree until you have climbed the tree.

My overall thoughts from here basically sum up to just try everything, the only way you’ll know it wont work is if it doesn’t. You’ll never know if you don’t try it.

Erik Klimczac

Eric showed us how beautiful data can appear and how it can yield new insights when taken from a csv or excel file and into a 3D view. In Uber’s case: visualising their cars on a map and then adding a 3D element gives the data more meaning and clarity.

It also gives the data a fun and creative feel which subconsciously can make you start thinking about fun and creative ways of working with the data.

Not only did he talk about data but he spoke about the most important things of creating a more inspiring service (through using the data of course) He said that there is more than just observing users there are three extremely important aspects to cover when designing anything:

Combining these with the data which can make some of this clear is key to designing great products.

Natasha Jen

Natasha Jen is a partner and designer at the legendary design firm Pentagram.

Natasha spoke a lot on working with clients, some do’s and don’t’s. She also talked about going through a re-brand. Many different ways of engaging the clients in the re-brand leads to more success.

Nicholas Kumada

Sensory Design Director – Windows Mixed Reality

Exiting things are here and even more exciting things are coming. Microsoft are working on some extremely exciting products that are upcoming - one of these being the ability to meet in the same room. This works through either AR or VR (which he said a new headset is on it’s way).

youtube

The main focus on this talk was where mixed reality and AI is heading, and the possibilities that are soon to be a reality.

Below are a few snaps of some of the powerful slides and conversation points that he presented and that resonate with me.

When speaking about the future of this technology he initially referenced HYPER-REALITY with it’s eye tracking advertisements (”Can’t see your friend”) and complete mess which he said is a really scary thought of where the future could be. Ready Player 1 is another piece of media - this time text - that he references as a good read - also speaks to the other sort of a scary VR future where people spend most of their time in “OASIS” through VR suits and the lot at the expense of being apart of the real world and making change they escape it.

When speaking about this the MC then made the comparison to a few years ago where it was about having your head in a book and how the only thing that has changed between us escaping this reality is the technology we use to do so.

Overall though, he is optimistic for the future and mixed reality as the goal is to connect you to the place you’re in and the people around you - it’s not about blasting advertisements at you. It’s about that collaboration model.

“Taking responsibility of where we are developing and taking the future is up is paramount. What we create now, the generations below us will use. Take the car for an extreme example: extremely helpful and makes life so easy however now we are dealing with massive pollution problems globally. We can only try to anticipate as many pit falls as well can and nothing is ever perfect first time, that is why we iterate.”

Instrument

Instrument validated a lot of ideas and some assumptions I had when it comes to designing products. As a design / creative agency they get all sorts of clients and questions and they too shared some details about how to effectively work with them and create the best products.

Hector Ouilhet

I didn’t get that much from Hector. The main thing I took from his talk was that he likes to draw dinosaurs and loves his children. I did however, get a sense of designing with purpose. Always have purpose behind everything you do.

Michael Parekowhai

Michael was an interesting guy. He really pulled through the idea that you can do it if you put the effort in. A key saying that I took away from his talk was this: “Don’t draw the tree before you have climbed it”. The meaning I took from this is don’t try to design or do something unless you have taken steps to experience it and understand it. Sure, you can look at something and design it, but it won’t be as strong as if you experience it first hand.

Sissel Tolaas

Sissel was a really interesting person. She has a love for the sense of smell and when she first spoke I got put off by her over exertion about how smell is the only thing that matters. However, I did take a long away from here and a new way to think. I will write a seperate blog post about the conversation I had with her after the event.

Amber Cartwright

People. People are what matter. Always keep people the main focus of anything you do. If you forget the people, you forget the success (I made that one up). One of the things she loves is the people that her product enable and the positive change it can make such as allowing people to keep their houses.

Mark Gowing

Mark really likes graphic design. I cannot remember much of what he said now but I do remember something he likes to do: create a new typeface for each product he creates. It’s a really unique approach and loves what he does. Design systems are a big passion for him: and from what he said, proved how powerful they can be when used on large projects with multiple people.

Hayden Cox + Guests

Hayden, a surfer with a passion. He grew up in Australia and for his Design and Technology class had to do work placement. He mentioned that his boss asked for his paper on the second to last day after making him clean the toilets all week and replied to his boss, I don’t care about the hours, I’m here because I want to learn how to create boards. His boss felt really bad and he went home, bought all of the tools he’d need to create his own board and just tried it. He got as far as he could remember from observing everyone until he got stuck and called his old boss for help, who accepted to help him. Today, he is creating one of the best performance boards and has gone through many hardships, many times of running out of money and many risks. Without them, he wouldn’t be here today.

I love ugly

A passionate guy who just wants to make his kids proud. He founded the ILU brand and has gone through many hardships. He’s had banks call him up and given him a week to give them half a million dollars and many more hardships. His talk was extremely powerful and inspirational with the key message just do it, everything will work out in the end. Follow your dreams.

Great questions to ask with everything you do

Ben Johnston

He finds gaps in the markets and creates opportunities through it. He shows how it’s ‘easy’ to start with a stupid idea and then make big dollars through it.

That’s all

I have missed a few people from this post - mainly because their points are similar to some of the others I have mentioned above. Overall takeaways from SP is that it was well worth the time - and if you do have the time to read through all of the little stories and personal take aways you’ll see how there were some amazing people and ideas presented that weekend.

#SPAKL #SPAKL2017 #Singularity

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thomasreedtn · 7 years

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Garden Update: Calling, Planting and Growing an Ecosystem

I’ve had an interesting week in and around the garden! The groundhog “training” continues, with one of the groundhogs content to munch on clover and behave in a very respectful manner. The other groundhog has behaved more like a teenager: “You’re not the boss of me! I’ll eat whatever I want and like it!” Opening and closing the dining room window startles him back into his hidey hole, but this guy was determined to get into the backyard bed.

On Wednesday just past dusk, really too late for a groundhog to be munching my backyard plants, I saw him lumber into the backyard bed. I thought this was perhaps poetic justice, since he would become great horned owl bait at that hour; however, the great horned owl informed me that the dog run wire from previous owners has created a no fly zone for predatory birds in that area, effectively turning the shed and backyard bed into a free for all. The red tailed hawk chimed in, as well, so that wire’s coming down this weekend. I don’t want to trap or have this groundhog killed. I just want the hawk and owl patrol to keep him in line.

In any case, on Wednesday just after dusk, I decided to see what this “whistle pig” would do. (They actually do whistle. More on that later.) I won’t embarrass my two pepper plants back there by taking photos of their completely denuded stalks, but suffice to say, I now have a clear understanding of the devastation one groundhog can wreak on plants. It was borderline apocalyptic. That morning, I walked to the dangerously nearby nursery and bought a bunch of groundhog and deer repellent plants. I put most up front and few of the bargain ones and known repellents like lavender in the back.

Well! Now I know why the list is so specific. It’s not all Coreopsis. There’s a reason for the specific “threadleaf Coreopsis.” My dollar bargain no longer looks like a bargain at any price:

It still looks better than the peppers, though! Anise hyssop also took a surprising hit, but el chubbo left some leaves. I’m not terribly mad, because I’ve been using the backyard bed as a testing ground. So far liatris, the large sedum, cosmos, peppermint, nettles, threadleaf coreopsis and lavender remain untouched. In keeping with his perfect timing, the groundhog devoured my pepper plants immediately after I considered putting just one veggie bed out back filled with pepper plants. He appears to be quite telepathic, this woodchuck, so I decided to use that to my advantage.

A friend who has been trying to give me his (very often puking) cat, joked that “Jiji could take him.” I declined, but went outside to explore. I found an apparently purposeful hole in the fence and thought about having David patch it up, in case critters moved from the backyard to the much yummier buffet of the front yard. Not that groundhogs can’t dig, but why make it easy for them? I had just texted David about repairing the hole when who walks through the hole and creeps along the back hedge? A cat. A very large cat — much bigger than Jiji, LOL!

This is where things got interesting. The naughty chubster came out of his hidey hole and started munching clover. All of a sudden, he stood on his hind legs and looked towards the hedge. The cat had begun stalking him. I’ve seen this cat before, but never on groundhog patrol until my friend and I started joking about that. The cat creeped all along the backyard spruce, and the groundhog got mighty nervous, at which point, I telepathically said, “THIS is what happens when you eat my pepper plants! THIS is what happens when you destroy things in MY yard. We can live in peace with you eating grass and clover, or we can duke it out, but I will win, little man. You need to behave.”

The cat continued to watch him from the spruce while I watched him from the window. He stared at me and after several repetitions of my message, I got a distinct impression of, “Arggh, would you please SHUT UP?!” At which point I said, “I want you to get the message. That no fly zone is going down. That makes you hawk bait. And owl bait. And now you’re cat bait. Behave, and we won’t have any issues.”

Amazingly, he nodded, then slinked towards his hidey hole with his head down, scurried past his hole, squished himself behind a pot of mint and continued to walk towards the back of the shed where the cat stood. Nothing happened, but he disappeared for a good 12 hours. When he returned, he did not move out of his hole. He just looked around, and I gave him a mental reminder of the rules. “OK, OK, I get it, shut up!” Other than eating the rest of the pepper fruits his two rodent teeth marks had made inedible to me, he’s done no more damage. I bought a nice nepeta (catmint) as a reward for the heroic kitty and put it right near the hole, along with more lavender.

Yesterday afternoon he popped out just to scratch himself but not move around the yard at all. This morning, he grabbed a bunch of grass in his mouth and ducked back down the hole for a snack. The mysterious arrival of the cat right after discussing cats as groundhog patrol underscored the continued call and response from the animal kingdom and makes me ever so cautiously optimistic that –despite warnings otherwise from every single gardener I’ve asked, local and otherwise — we may be able to coexist with respect instead of a mandatory relocation by trap or “flight.” When he behaves like the other one, I rather like this guy, but boundaries seem to be up for review and enforcement everywhere these days.

Meanwhile, I’ve got 1.5 tons of soil on order for a Monday drop off, in order to fill two more Big Bag Beds up front, as well as 10- and 20-gallon Smart Pots for up front and alongside the back hedge patrolled by the kitty. Two aronia berry bushes, three blueberry bushes (super sale on two of them), and a cranberry bush arrived yesterday:

… and I’ve got a bunch of perennials on order, including more rhubarb, some sea kale seeds (as well as a request for more starts from a local permaculture person), and numerous other Crazy Plant Lady goodies. Just the arrivals of the pollinator plants/repellent plants has dramatically upped the diversity in our yard. Bright, fragrant bloomers and mammal repellents tend to be the same thing since deer and groundhogs get sensory overload from too much scent, whereas bees and butterflies love them.

Just as I wondered about getting the catmint as a reward for the kitty, I heard a tapping on the bathroom window. A praying mantis “reporting for duty” reminded me that yes, the Universe has my back, and yes, please do reward the helpers:

That shed bed will soon have so much more color and fragrance, but even now butterflies and dragonflies are zooming all over the backyard. The front yard is beginning to resemble a small, regional airport, unlike the “O’Hare” of our Goshen yard, but still a major uptick in just a few days. Pollination of tomatoes and cucumbers has gone way up in recent days, and I’ve already eaten two ripe tomatoes with more on the way:

I’m so glad I’ve decided to complete the circle around the weeping birch tree by adding another 50-gallon and 100-gallon Big Bag Bed, plus at least 4 more 10-gallon Smart Pots for perennials and herbs. The ones pictured below are growing well despite only getting about 6 hours of direct sun, cobbled together throughout the day.

(Check out this sunflower who came along or the ride! I hadn’t planned to bring any, but this stowaway has earned a spot by the mailbox once I get my soil delivery.)

The new spots receive much more consistent sun, but they’re on greater display. I wanted to see how things progressed before committing to them. For now, I’ve got beautiful and repellent perennials staged approximately where the new beds will go. These plants will surround the edges while the veggie crops grow inside and among them. At least, that’s the plan!

The circle will continue around the tree with four more 10-gallon Smart Pots on the side facing our front door. These plants seem to love the Eastern and Southeastern exposure:

Near the collard on the right, you can see my one sea kale cutting from Goshen trying to take root. Poor thing has had a few transplants but does seem to like this spot better if I can get him to recover. If not, hopefully some of the seeds and/or cuttings I’ve arranged for will thrive. We do love our sea kale, and it’s sooooo pretty, too!

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report that the weeping birch appears to be making a recovery. A week of rain, runoff from garden watering and a whole community of new plant friends seem to have rejuvenated this very struggling tree. Here’s the current view from our living room, with the birch to the far left:

The ground cover needs some major weeding, and I’ve got more strawberries to plant while the drastically chopped back (by previous owners) holly begins to regrow. I’ve got shade blooming and deer repellent astilbe on order, and I’m pondering some other friends. It still feels quite manageable, and I’m excited about discerning and nurturing this “right sized garden” that makes our house and yard feel like home, while (hopefully) showing what’s possible even in and around existing landscaping.

As my Aunt Kath and Uncle John — who will visit soon — say, “To more love!”

Indeed.

from Thomas Reed https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/garden-update-calling-planting-and-growing-an-ecosystem/

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