#it's so janky sometimes especially the app | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

softispence · 2 years

Text

Normal or Not - Chapter One (Spencer Reid)

Summary: Judi Hayes thinks she's a little too much or too different for people sometimes. Maybe bumping into someone who feels the same will make her realise it's okay to not be normal.

A/N: My first post ever and first lil fic in a long while (especially posting one online). I know my writing is janky I'm just trying to work on it and can't improve without any feedback so here i am.

Content warning: brief mention of mass shootings in passing

Word count: 3.9k

---------------------

Conferences were daunting to say the least. In the reception area people were huddled together in small groups chattering about an array of topics. Of course, the event itself was the focus of many, however, within the harmony of voices, discussions of politics, family, and even gossip were passed from ear to ear. She didn’t even know where to start. Who to talk to, where to stand, how to stand. A lone pillar called her name and she found herself awkwardly leaning against it, listening to conversations she wouldn’t dare to attempt to engage in. This was how she chose to pass the time, that and checking her phone every few minutes to scroll through apps already cleared of notifications when she’d gone through exactly the same routine outside of the building. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before people were being ushered forward. She slipped into the crowd and edged onward with everyone else, the anxiety of where to sit now arising in her slowly. Chairs came into view and she followed a talkative group that seated themselves in the middle of the hall. It wasn’t even that formal of a conference. In fact, compared to some of the events she’d attended with coworkers this was pretty informal, and silently she thanked herself she had decided to choose something small and local for her first independent outing. The urge to branch out her knowledge had gnawed upon her recently. So, with the help of google, and simply knowing the right people, she’d managed to get herself into this conference on the advancements in research of mass shooters. If you asked her why that specifically she wouldn’t be able to answer. Well, she could. It just wouldn’t be very interesting because the simple reason was that it looked the most interesting (and psychology always peaked her interest).

Before she could talk herself out leaving it had started, and she was so glad she had stayed. Surprisingly, it wasn’t all facts and figures. Not that she didn’t like that aspect of research (there was a reason she’d stayed in a field dominated by numbers), but it was incredibly intriguing to hear the psychology of the perpetrators being brought into what is usually all statistics. For an hour and a half she sat captivated by each speaker that approached the podium, she herself wondering if she’d ever be able to have the courage to speak publicly like that. To speak about something she was so passionate about and then be able to discuss it so intently with others. She doubted it. For her she feared criticism. Her theories were her own, she stuck to excel spreadsheets and the conclusions drawn from them. Only she would know of the proposals her mind conjured.

Then it was over. A reserved applause filled the room and an orchestra of voices replaced it. People stood up and began to form groups, speakers approached and met the approval ready to be handed out. For a moment she sat and watched how they all effortlessly melded into their surroundings, adapting within mere seconds. Assuming this was her queue to leave, she stood and weaved through those comfortable enough to stay. She was almost at the door when she collided with another person trying to make their quick escape from the masses.

“Sorry!” She blurted out, raising her hands in some sort of surrender to her own stupidity.

The man took a step backwards, seemingly to realign himself, and then with a shake of his head said, “my fault! I was a little too focussed on the exit.” He chuckled at his own words, something that made her let out her own light laugh of affirmation. “Leaving too?” He asked.

“Uh, yeah,” she glanced back at the crowd. “Not really my thing. You know?”

“Definitely.”

He then motioned for her to walk forward and she felt herself physically deflate with relief at being in the much emptier reception. When he reached her side it was evident he felt the same way. His shoulders fell and he stopped with her whilst she took a moment to let the voices drown out.

“Here for business?” The man’s features were soft, and she let herself take him in before she answered. Brown messy curls, an aged face, yet he still looked youthful with a button nose and pursed lips.

“No, actually.” She looked down almost embarrassed. “Figured I’d see how I felt about mass shooters.” He raised an eyebrow and her words started to stumble. “Not like that- I just wanted to learn about something new. I usually only attend things that correlate with my work so I decided to go alone to some conferences to try and do some independent research.” She’d already talked too much. Poor guy probably didn’t want to know that she was on some journey of self improvement that included getting better at the job she was already perfectly fine at.

“I-I’m actually here for the same reason,” he admitted.

Her furrowed features faded, and she let out an ‘oh’. Now she didn’t feel so silly.

“Well, technically it does align with my work, but I wasn’t invited here. I like attending conferences. You get to hear research directly from the academics.” A gentle smile found his way onto his lips as he spoke, his demeanour as if he was inside his own head more than he was elsewhere.

“I thought the same thing. Wanted to hear from the experts themselves.” She hesitated slightly and then decided to say, “what do you do for work if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Criminal profiling.” The answer was quick and direct. “You?”

“I’m a crime statistics analyst.” That made him perk up. “So, opposite side of the business.”

“Actually, statistics are very helpful in criminal profiling and help us narrow down our suspect pool greatly. Most of our data is based on our own research and case studies, but I’d say our professions are more linked than you’d think.” The sudden burst of information from this man almost startled her, she’d unknowingly wound him up and he erupted like a jack-in-the-box. He spoke with his hands, pointing and gesturing with each word, obviously very passionate. He continued without fault. “You see the statistics that you release come in handy when we deal with both victims and criminals. Knowing these figures can be detrimental when paired with the psychology that goes along with them. For example, our victimology becomes more clear when we have prior knowledge of victims of the same crimes.”

She allowed herself a moment to digest his words, a slow nod beginning once the majority was understood properly. “I’ve never really thought of it that way.”

His lips rose again at her statement. Seemingly content he’d taught her something new. “You deal mostly with numbers, not psychology. It makes sense you wouldn’t perceive your work like that.”

A few people shuffled past them which they both took as a sign to continue exiting the building. Together they slipped through the double doors and down stone steps. She couldn’t help but feebly hop from the last one, landing with a pat of her boots on the sidewalk. A singular brow of his raised at her action and she winced internally. However, it didn't seem to deter him from ending their interaction.

“Doctor Spencer Reid,” he introduced himself. Hands stayed static in his pockets, instead he offered a smile.

A doctor? Instantly she wanted to ask about his phd, but figured it might be too passionate of a topic for two strangers standing on the side of the road. She flicked through possibilities; psychology, criminology, sociology, perhaps even law since he seemed the type. ‘The type’ being well dressed, seemingly smart, intimidating but in a way where you aren’t scared, just very impressed. All this and she’d been in his presence only a few minutes. Maybe it was his height that had sparked these sort of assumptions. He stood tall. Definitely over six foot. But perhaps his curls were giving that illusion. Either way she couldn’t tell.

“Judith Hayes. Nice to meet you Doctor Reid.”

“You don’t have to call me doctor.” Spencer shifted his feet which she interpreted as him being humble, but something slightly awkward lingered which made her reconsider. “Spencer is fine.”

“Judi is fine for me too. Nobody actually calls me Judith, I think I’m just so used to introducing myself by my full name at work that it’s become second nature.”

“I feel the same.” He perked up, making use of his gestures again. “Being called Doctor isn’t unusual at work but I think it introduces a bit of a power imbalance in casual situations.”

“Huh. That’s something I’ve never really considered. You’re helping me make a lot of new discoveries today, Doctor.” He scrunched his face. “Sorry!”

A comfortable silence filled the space between them. Judi craned her head to watch as more suits and pencil skirts exited the building, bustling down the stairs with academia spilling from their lips. People pulled their long coats close, the brisk autumn air enticing scarves around their necks. She adjusted her own coat, zipping up the worn yet trustworthy parka in realisation that she too was a little chilly. Her eyes fell back onto Doctor Reid. What looked to be a wool overcoat framed him nicely, it was similar to what most others were wearing, but on him it was different. Underneath it he wore a cardigan over a dress shirt buttoned all the way with a tie resting neatly at the collar. Smart.

Maybe she’d stared at his attire for too long, because when her gaze found his again he was looking at her almost inquisitively. Then his tie was her focus again, his eyes too much to look at for more than a second or so. “Are you going home now?” She asked, in a silent hope he wouldn’t mention the blatant gawking.

“Probably,” he shrugged. “I was going to get some coffee on the way back though.”

“Getting a pumpkin spice latte?” She asked with a smile. “One of my coworkers is obsessed with them, that's all she talks about. Personally, I’m not a huge fan and just prefer iced coffee, or hot chocolate if I’m cold. Tea is nice too sometimes, but I only like it cold too.”

“I’ve never tried one.” He seemed a little taken aback, as If he was a computer tab being told to close ten times over. At least he was responding. “What’s it taste like?”

“Pumpkin spice.”

“Right.”

Judi swallowed, cold fingers finding each other to touch as a partial distraction. Maybe she could salvage this. “You know, I’m actually writing a paper on arson statistics. It’s really interesting actually. I’m compiling information from all around the country to make it. It’s nowhere near done, but I’m really excited about it. Have you profiled any arsonists?”

Again he paused and Judi thought she’d really driven the nail in the coffin. Why couldn’t she just have a normal conversation? She always had to talk and ramble until she annoyed people to death-

“I have! Quite a few actually. Did you know arson is usually a victimless crime? Most of the time if a death occurs it’s accidental since arsonists derive sexual pleasure from the fire itself and if there are victims usually it has a personal motive of some kind related to the victim themself.”

A smile tickled at her lips. “I’m guessing if you’ve been involved the crimes haven’t been victimless.” He nodded at this with a sort of solem purse of his lips. “Were all the arsonists male?” She changed the topic.

“Most but not all. It’s rare but females can engage in arson, and more surprisingly arson with intent to kill.”

She shook her head in disbelief, lowering her brows as she thought about the odds, and the fact that he had met these people. “Could I join you for coffee?” The man in front of her stood static, the silence between them forcing more words from her. “You don’t have to say yes! I mean I would like it if you did, just I don’t want you to feel obliged to. You don’t even know me.”

Doctor Reid smiled. A shy smile, small and gentle. “The coffee shop I frequent is fifteen minutes from here.” He stepped forward, probably expecting her to follow, but she didn’t. Instead he turned back, deciding to clarify after noting her confusion. “Are you coming?”

“Oh! Sorry!” An embarrassed blush had already begun to cover her cheeks and instinctively her head shifted towards the ground.

They walked at a steady pace, the sounds of traffic being their backdrop for their continuing conversation. Shoes pressed crumpled leaves into the ground below, the ones still falling blowing into the coats they were huddled in. It was a mess of yellow and orange, and the coffee shop was a pleasant escape from that bitter fall ambiance. Instead they could admire changing colours and the bare trees they left behind from the comfort of a small table by the window.

Doctor Reid sipped on a coffee with cream and apparently not enough sugar since he added at least four packets, one after each sip which she realised was a test to see if it was sweet enough. Evidently it wasn’t.

On the other hand, she ordered an iced coffee with vanilla syrup and an inevitable comment was made about how she was drinking a cold drink outside of the summer months. Judi simply gave him a shrug and a small defence at how she shouldn’t be forced to drink hot coffee when she didn’t like it.

“Do you mind working in an office all of the time?” He asked at one point. Their conversation had slipped from crime and onto their actual workplaces. Well, her workplace. He didn’t seem too eager to share much about his.

“I’m doing something I enjoy so it’s not too bad. It’s not a typical office job, it’s my passion really. So, yeah the back pain sucks and my arm sometimes cramps from typing, but it’s what I do. I can’t really picture myself doing anything else.”

A slow nod overtook him. “Neither can I.” They started to fumble with their drinks, another sugar packet being poured into his. “You should keep your feet elevated. A foot rest will help keep them in the right position if they don’t reach the ground. And a lumbar back support might help if it’s lower back pain.”Judi stared at him silently, taking another sip of her drink. “It’s what the professionals recommend.”

“You know a lot of things.” The words slipped out before she had time to think about them.

“I read a lot, and I have an eidetic memory.”

It was how he casually sipped his drink after he spoke that astonished Judi. As if what he’d just said was as simple as ordering his coffee. “Are you being serious?”

He looked up in confusion. “Of course, I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Only a stutter could leave her, nothing else could form properly until she placed down her cup and took a breath. “An eidetic memory is incredibly rare and with that sort of memory recall you’re probably like a genius.”

“I am.”

“Oh.”

“Is that bad?”

“No!” Her clarification was a little too loud, and shame flooded over her as she noticed some stares from other customers. “No. It’s not bad, it's…incredible. You’re like one in a million. What’s your IQ if you don’t mind me asking?”

If shifted in his seat momentarily. “It’s 187.”

Judi sat back in her seat, a feeble attempt to absorb the fact she was face to face with probably one of the smartest people she would ever meet. Then, like she snapped out of a trance, a harsh imaginary slap hit her forehead. “God, I’m sorry. You probably get this a lot don't you. I didn’t mean to react like that, it’s just I don’t meet new people often, let alone someone as smart as you. I’m just a little excited, I suppose, but I’ll calm down now. Actually, I’ll pretend like you never told me all that. Starting now. I’ll be normal about it.”

It was her assumption that maybe he’d get up and walk out. Perhaps he’d call one of his friends and tell them about this crazy woman who gushed over his IQ and ruined his favourite coffee shop for him. Instead, he lowered his head in a sort of embarrassment, and at closer inspection Judi realised he was blushing. “Doctor Reid?” She called out, instantly realising her mistake as his eyes met hers. “Sorry!”

He seemed almost childlike, looking at her with a confused disbelief. “I’ve never really had someone react like that before.”

Suddenly, she felt like a deer in headlights. Or rather a dumb woman in the path of a genius. “What do people usually react like?”

“They think it’s weird. They think I’m weird.”

A nervous laugh slipped past her lips. “Well, they wouldn’t like me then, would they?”

He laughed at that too. They laughed together. And when their chorus subsided they sat cozy in their own company. “I don’t think you’re weird,” he said after a while.

Judi let out a scoff. “Then your IQ isn’t the only thing that’s one in a million.”

“People usually think that?” The genius flickered with confusion.

“Oh, they don’t just think it. They say it to my face.” Judi laughed and played with her straw, that entertainment fading as she carried on. “I don’t think they realise it’s a rude thing to say. Well, it isn’t really. Weird isn’t a bad thing, I know that. Just, when it’s pointed out to you so much you start to wonder if it is.”

“I know the feeling.” Their eyes met over his bittersweet drink. An understanding being shared between the two, both giving a thin smile before being distracted by their cups again.

It felt comforting to find this common ground. Judi hadn’t ever met someone else who understood this seemingly niche struggle. Sure she’d had friends who figured they were weird because they enjoyed nerdy tv shows, or went red when it was mentioned they obsessed over a celebrity twenty years older that would never know of their existence. But, while she related entirely to those things, for her it was different. For once, when she looked at Doctor Reid she felt he felt this difference too. Though despite this, she didn’t want to dwell on this inside a growingly busy coffee shop. Especially when the doctor had emptied yet another sugar into his drink and had been stirring for a whole minute.

“Do you read a lot of research papers?” She didn’t expect this to immediately grasp all of his attention, his spoon being abandoned within seconds.

“I read papers on everything. Actually, this morning I read one on aviation traffic across the west coast.”

“Why the west coast?”

“I read all the others.”

She couldn’t help but smile. “With that memory of yours you’re probably like a human Wikipedia.”

The doctor dipped his gaze. “I read a lot of articles at random for fun,” he admitted. “But, it’s mostly just in case something specific comes up during a case. Y-you never know what you might need information about. It’s precautionary.”

“I um, I read about the creation of whiteboards the other day.” The laugh she tried to hold back obviously had other ideas since it sounded Anyways.

It wasn’t that she was crushing or anything but his growing smile was adorable. Perfect teeth showed behind raised lips, his eyes narrowed with a glint, the wrinkles that tickled each corner bringing together his joy. “Whiteboards?” He laughed.

“Yes!” Every part of her attempted composure so she could explain, yet giggles slipped through every crack. “Look, it was, I was looking at whiteboards online because I wanted one and I saw the link and I just couldn’t resist. Like, why is there even a whole webpage about that? I had to read it.”

Curls swayed as disbelief shook his head, his laugh still seeping through the room. “No, I completely get that. I ended up reading about the history of couches the other day.”

Judi’s hand found her face, a feeble attempt to suppress the noises leaving her. “Okay- Okay, if we start naming off the random items we’ve both read entire histories of we will be here all day, and I will die of laughter.”

His wide eyes said it all. “I’ve read the official list of deaths caused by laughter”

“Oh my god.”

Their quiet fit only ended when they both forced themselves to sip their drinks, Judi almost choking when they made eye contact again. For someone who was a stranger a mere hour ago, Doctor Reid had undoubtedly made her day. Perhaps even her whole week. She hadn’t laughed like that in what felt like forever. It was like being with one of her best friends, and as she thought about this, she figured she had to make an excuse to see him again.

“My paper,” she started with hesitance, the doctor's gaze inducing a shudder, “do you want to read it when it’s done?”

“I- yeah, of course, that’d be great.”

Relief replaced her anxiety. Whether it was just her nerves or her painful logicality, a part of her thought he’d reject the offer. That he was simply too smart to read the words she had yet to write. “I was thinking of sending printed copies to a few people. If you want we could meet up and I could give it to you?”

This was considered by him for a split second, the gears in his brain almost visible through the flickers of his pupils. Then he reached into his bag, a worn leather satchel, and rustled around until he pulled out a small card. “My number is on there.” Across from her he held out the small paper square and she took it with slow uncertainty. Grasping it with both hands as she analysed the printed words, as if scared he’d take it back. “I’m busy with work a lot, but I will eventually text back. Though I do prefer phone calls. Technology isn’t my strong point.”

“It’s strong enough for you to figure out how to google the history of couches.”

An ironic defence rose in an array of noises. “That is different, it’s a necessity to my work and wellbeing,” he stammered. “But, if you prefer text I suppose I can work around it.”

“I’ll text you then.” Her shy grin was painful, maybe even worse than her timid agitation. “It’s probably going to be a few months or so before I’m finished though. So, In the meantime…maybe I could send you links to articles? And relevant research papers, of course.”

Doctor Reid showed his perfect smile. “T-That would be great.”

“Cool. Really cool,” Judi managed to blunder, absentmindedly feeling the card in her fingers. She slipped her phone out of her pocket to input his number, the time flicked onto the screen, her face dropped. “Oh god, I need to go. I didn’t even realise the time and I have to get back for a phone call.” Within seconds she was on her feet, the empty coffee in her hands, chest aching at the Doctor’s seeming disappointment. “I will text you,” she gestured at him with his card. “It was really nice to meet you.”

He nodded, watching her fumble with her things. “Nice to meet you too.” And as quickly as he’d met her Judi had slipped out of the warm coffee shop, striding through the sidewalk leaves with a wave in his direction.

#spencer reid #criminal minds #spencer reid x oc #spencer reid x fem!readr #spencer reid series #spencer reid imagine #crimminal minds fic #spencer reid fic

9 notes · View notes

jewfrogs · 4 years

Text

so you want to be a pirate: a guide to book acquisition

disclaimer: for legal purposes, everything i’m about to say is purely hypothetical. it would be terrible if anyone were to use the advice outlined in this post to commit any ill*gal activities.

i’ve seen a few posts on here about ways to pirate tv shows and movies, which are great, but getting books can be slightly more complicated and pose higher security risks. this guide is for people who want to get into book piracy but aren’t sure how to go about doing it. it’ll be broken down into three sections: (i) Staying Safe, (ii) Where? and (iii) How?.

i. STAYING SAFE

unlike streaming movies or shows, pirating books generally involves downloading files to your computer, which carries a higher level of risk for viruses and malware. it’s important to be mindful and keep yourself safe. one of the most important things to keep in mind is that no book will ever download as a .exe or .dmg. those are file formats for software on windows and mac respectively. if a file you download that isn’t specifically software ever comes in that format, delete it immediately, because there’s a good chance it’s a virus.

in terms of privacy and security, a vpn (virtual private network) isn’t strictly necessary for pirating, but it’s absolutely recommended. very basically, vpns protect you by encrypting your data and disguising your ip address, meaning that your activity cannot be traced to your machine or to you. there are hundreds of vpns out there; this guide by thatoneprivacysite is a great resource to help you choose one.

you’re also going to want a robust adblocker, because most file transfer sites are crawling with ads. i personally use ublock origin and find that it works super well for me; the other two most popular adblockers are adblock and adblock plus (two unconnected products). additionally, i recommend installing this anti-adblock killer script (stops most sites from asking you to disable your adblocker to continue) and adsbypasser (prevents popup windows and skips countdown ads).

finally, one of the best things you can do for your internet privacy in general is to stop using google chrome. switch to a browser that keeps your data safe and secure; you can visit this page on privacytools.io for more information. i recently switched to mozilla firefox, and i can’t recommend it enough. (as an extra step, consider not using google as your primary search engine and switching to duckduckgo instead.)

ii. WHERE?

there are a lot of websites where you can find free ebooks. the three that i use are:

forum.mobilism.org: a crowdsourced forum where users post a wide variety of ebooks, including audiobooks. two things to note: 1) you do have to make an account to search the site, but doing so is completely free, and 2) the files are hosted on outside file transfer sites and linked to on mobilism, which means you’ll occasionally find posts with dead links, which is super frustrating.

library genesis: possibly the BEST ebook website. genuinely unmatched. files are hosted on the site itself, so you never get dead links, and there are several mirrors for each file. the site occasionally goes down, but there are multiple alternate links you can use. it has sections for fiction, scientific articles, comics, and “sci-tech” (nonfiction—this is where you look if you want textbooks!)

zlibrary: i don’t use this one as often, and the search function can be a little janky, but it has an extensive library of books (mostly nonfiction or popular fiction)

i don’t personally use other ebook sites very often, but here’s a repository of piracy links made by reddit user (i know) u/Wiggly_Poop that has sections on ebooks and textbooks, in case you can’t find what you’re looking for with the three above.

iii. HOW?

understanding how ebooks work can be slightly daunting at first, so here’s a quick breakdown of the file types you’re likely to see on these sites:

.epub: “electronic publication”; this is, in my opinion, the platonic ideal of an ebook. epubs can be opened in ibooks or another e-reader app, they adjust to your screen size (and you can manually adjust font and font size), and i believe they’re compatible with screenreaders. i almost exclusively read epubs. i just think they’re neat!

.pdf: “portable document format”; i think most people have a general understanding of what a pdf is. pdfs can be viewed on pretty much any device you can think of, including in internet browsers and e-reading apps, without the use of additional software. pdfs don’t adjust to different screen sizes or allow you to change the font size, however, which can be difficult if you’re reading on a small screen. (textbooks and such are almost always pdfs.)

.azw/.azw3: the kindle file extension. to my understanding, these can only be read on kindles. i do not have a kindle, so i know very little about them.

.mobi: another ebook format similar to epubs, but you can’t open them in ibooks (where i do my reading) so i don’t use them or know much about them. they’re compatible with kindles, calibre, and other file readers specifically designed for mobis.

you’re probably going to want a file unpacker/decompressor as well. sometimes, especially when you’re using mobilism, the file you download will be compressed (typically in the .zip or .rar formats). this reduces the size of the file and allows you to upload multiple books as one file, but they can’t be accessed directly and have to be “unpacked” first to get the contents out. i believe that both windows and mac can unzip .zip files directly (with a double-click), but .rars require another program. for windows, i recommend 7zip, and for mac, i recommend keka, both of which are free and easy to use.

and there you have it! there’s a lot i haven’t touched on here, but this is pretty much all you need to know to get started finding books on your own. the bulk of this information comes from my own experiences pirating books, which i’ve been doing for a few years now and never had significant trouble with.

if you have any questions after reading this post, feel free to send them my way!

#piracy guide #there we go!!!

126 notes · View notes

covid19worldnews · 4 years

Text

U.S. Groups Linked to CCP Influence Effort with Ambition Beyond Election

The three women appeared to be just like millions of other Americans who take to social media every day to express their displeasure at the state of the U.S. Yet there were anomalies. The women’s messages were sometimes identical to others on Twitter and Facebook. Their handles were similar and they tended to make sweeping statements putting down America and its democratic system, rather than referencing specific events. Their use of language was off too, stilted or mixing up familiar expressions—”Black people are never slaves! Stand up your high head!” read one of Jessi’s more garbled tweets. And one more thing: Occasionally, a stray Chinese-language character would slip into one of their posts or hundreds of others just like them.

That last part was especially odd—until you consider that the women weren’t actually women at all but rather bots and trolls used in a systematic campaign by groups affiliated with China to sow division and unrest in the U.S. ahead of the 2020 election. An analysis this summer of thousands of such Twitter and Facebook posts by the International Cyber Policy Center of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute described them as part of a program of “cross-platform inauthentic activity, conducted by Chinese-speaking actors and broadly in alignment with the political goal of the People’s Republic of China to denigrate the standing of the U.S.”

The fake accounts are just one example of what appears to be stepped-up activity by groups associated with China as Election Day gets closer. Over the past six weeks, for example, both Google and Microsoft have reported attempted cyber attacks linked to Beijing that targeted individuals who worked with the Biden and Trump campaigns. However, unlike Russian interference in 2016, which worked to bolster Trump’s chances of election, most of the activity stemming from China does not clearly favor one candidate over the other. Instead, it seems designed, as William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, puts it, “to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China’s interest, and deflect and counter criticism.”

Both Google and Microsoft have reported attempted cyber attacks linked to Beijing that targeted individuals who worked with the Biden and Trump campaigns NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty

Experts say the election-related activity is just a small part of a much larger and deeper campaign of influence and interference by China that’s been taking place over many years—and is a far more worrisome threat long-term. Interviews with some two dozen analysts, government officials and other U.S.-China specialists, as part of a four-month investigation by Newsweek, suggest there are myriad other ways in which the Communist Party of China (CPC) and other government-linked entities have been working, through multiple channels in the U.S. at the federal, state and local level, to foster conditions and connections that will further Beijing’s political and economic interests and ambitions.

Those channels include businesses, universities and think tanks, social and cultural groups, Chinese diaspora organizations, Chinese-language media and WeChat, the Chinese social media and messaging app, says John Garnaut, an Australian political analyst and expert on global CPC interference. Separately, Newsweek has identified about 600 such groups in the U.S., all in regular touch with and guided by China’s Communist Party—a larger-scale version of a pattern found in other countries around the world.

The scope of alleged activities is enormous, involving social and business gatherings, extensive information campaigns and building political and economic ties that can be leveraged to Beijing’s gain—recent reports of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Chinese energy company eager to connect with his father and President Trump’s secret Chinese bank account are just the latest high-profile examples that some China watchers find worrisome. There are also accusations of large-scale economic espionage. In a speech this summer at the Hudson Institute, F.B.I. director Christopher Wray said the agency opens a China-connected investigation every 10 hours and that, of nearly 5,000 active counterintelligence cases in the U.S., almost half are related to China.

Chinese authorities claim the U.S. distorts its dealings with local community groups, and vehemently deny they are interfering in U.S. internal affairs. But U.S. authorities and U.S.-China experts stand their ground. “Justice, State, the F.B.I., they’re peeling back the layers that have been hiding some of these organizations and activities” says Dean Boyd, chief communications executive at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. As he tells Newsweek, “The influencing has been going on non-stop, and it’s not happening in a vacuum. There is an election coming up.”

Sowing the Seeds of Division

If the tweets of “Jessi Young” and her friends were all you had to go on, China-linked efforts to manipulate U.S. public opinion in advance of the election might be easy to dismiss as amateurish and ineffective.

The Chinese actors involved, for instance, made no attempt to create realistic profiles for the owners of the 200 to 300 Twitter accounts involved, plus 60 or so more on Facebook. And while the messages, posted between February and July of this year, focused on important issues dividing the country, they were so crudely translated into English, without a feel for American tone or cadence, that the possibilities for engagement seemed limited.

A sampling: “‘Janky System’ is a stupid, failed system!” “Patricia Smith” tweeted, along with a photo of Americans voting. “The Trump Administration has gone so far as to sacrifice our lives to get back to work to make the Dow Jones look good that they now treat us like human beings?” “Sonia Mason” tweeted, complaining about federal response to the pandemic. “The overflow of freedom has created the situation today,” said “Laura Daniels” in response to a tweet about a report on religion by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“The Chinese are not really good at making fake social media accounts,” says Ho-fung Hung, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World. “The language is not very convincing.” In fact, the Cyber Policy Centre found that, of the 2,240 tweets it analyzed, 99 percent got fewer than two likes, replies and retweets.

But while this particular campaign may not have hit the mark, some of the broad strategies it employed are ones that China uses quite effectively in other contexts—tactics very different from the techniques that Russia has used in its election interference efforts. The social posts from Chinese actors did not have a clear partisan lean—for instance, they promoted messages in support of both the Black Lives Matter and pro-police Blue Lives Matter movements. The point was not to take a side but rather to boost divisiveness by amplifying competing, emotionally-charged view points.

Nor did the Chinese campaign typically spread disinformation. Instead it commonly shared authentic content from legitimate news sources like The New York Times and MSNBC, along with tweets from civil rights groups, that highlighted racial divisions and inequality in the U.S.

“If people in the U.S. are looking [to China] for a repeat of Russia in 2016, they will be disappointed,” says Garnaut. “That’s not what China does. They repurpose, they don’t smash.” In other words, the CPC is not out to destroy the U.S., experts say, but rather to change or subvert it from within, and foster a positive view of China, in contrast to the apparent chaos in America.

“They are very determined and very organized,” says Anna Puglisi, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former national counterintelligence officer for East Asia. “We [in America] don’t think in these ways. It flies in the face of how people in the U.S. see the world.”

While China’s influence efforts around the election have mostly centered on process vs. outcome, U.S. intelligence officials believe it’s clear the country’s leaders do have a favorite in the race. Lately Beijing has stepped up negative rhetoric about the Trump administration, harshly criticizing the White House on its statements and actions on Hong Kong and TikTok, among other things, and blasting its COVID-19 response. “We assess that China prefers that President Trump—whom China sees as unpredictable—does not win reelection,” said Evanina, the government counterintelligence director, in a statement this August. The Global Times, which is owned by the CPC’s People’s Daily newspaper, has also made it clear that China favors the Democratic candidate, saying in a recent article, “Tactically, the US approach would be more predictable, and Biden is much smoother to deal with than Trump.”

A year after his election, U.S. President Donald Trump, here with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a welcome ceremony, visited Beijing. Things have gone downhill between the two leaders ever since. Xinhua/Li Tao/Getty

Another reason China would prefer to deal with the Democrats: The Biden ranks include many people from the previous two Obama administrations, during which China made great strides on the world stage and experienced little opposition. Anti-China sentiment has heated up in the U.S. since then, as Trump very publicly addressed trade, influence and espionage problems, ensuring that China policy going forward will be more critical, no matter who occupies the White House—but it’s not clear if the Democrats are willing to challenge China quite as deeply, if they win.

Influence at the Local Level

Two particular members of the Trump entourage who have been thorns in the CPC’s side are Pompeo and his policy adviser Miles Yu, who together have led the administration’s broad pushback against China. Lately Pompeo has been sounding an alarm about a key focus of CPC activity in the U.S.— interference in politics, business and community at the state and local level.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lately has been sounding an alarm about Chinese efforts to exert influence in U.S. affairs at the state and local level. Alex Wong/Getty

In February, for example, Pompeo warned the National Governors Association at a meeting in Washington D.C. that the CPC was identifying and grooming state and local politicians who would support its interests. A Chinese think tank had already graded governors on their “friendliness,” Pompeo said. Newsweek obtained and translated a copy of the 2019 report, which labeled 17 governors as “friendly;” called 14 “ambiguous,” deemed six as “hardline” and the rest “unclear.” Pompeo told the governors, “Whether you are viewed by the CPC as friendly or hardline, know that it’s working you, know that it’s working the team around you.”

Six months later, at a meeting of economists and sociologists in Zhongnanhai, a secretive leaders’ compound in Beijing, Xi told more than a dozen top economists and sociologists that China would double down on seeking “cooperation” with U.S. politicians and business leaders at the states and local level, exactly what Pompeo had warned about. “We must actively develop cooperation with all countries, regions and enterprises willing to cooperate with us, including states, localities and enterprises in the United States,” Xi said, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

In his talk, Pompeo gave several examples that he said reflected an uptick in CPC interference at the state level. In 2019, he said, diplomats at the Chinese consulate in Houston wrote to the Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, threatening to cancel a Chinese investment in his state if he traveled to Taiwan, the de facto independent island nation that Beijing claims and says no one may have official ties with. Bryant went anyway.

In another example, Chinese diplomats at the consulate in Chicago wrote to a Wisconsin lawmaker, Republican Roger Roth, asking him to sponsor a bill they wrote praising China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wisconsin Examiner reported. Roth initially ignored the request thinking it a joke. The Chinese diplomats sent it again. Roth replied with one word: “nuts.”

Those two attempts may have faltered in the face of pushback, but outreach often works, especially on the business level. Speaking on background, one official described the pattern: “Say you are governor of a state that has tremendous economic investments in China, or that has a good relationship with China exporting soybeans or grain. China can use that relationship,” say, by asking their political or business contacts to make calls to Washington to try and influence policy. It sounds like U.S. political lobbying, “but you have to know, it’s a foreign government playing this game,” the official says.

In other countries, this kind of interference can be even more intense—and has already led to major problems, including threats to national security. In Australia, Chinese intelligence operatives allegedly conspired to place a financially-troubled, ethnic Chinese person, Nick Zhao, in parliament as a spy, offering $1 million to fund his campaign, according to multiple reports in the Australian media last year. Zhao, in his 30s, was found dead of a drug overdose in a Melbourne hotel room in 2019. That same year, China’s Ministry of State Security was reportedly responsible for cyberattacks against Australia’s parliament and three major political parties that provided access to policy papers and emails, according to Reuters.

In Canada, a special parliamentary committee set up in late 2019 is driving a rethink on China relations amid charges of “brazen” interference. Earlier this year, a report was published that detailed activities that China, along with Russia, had engaged in: “using deceptive means to ‘cultivate relationships with elected officials and others perceived to possess influence in the political process; seek to influence the reporting of Canadian media outlets; seek, in some cases, to affect the outcome of elections; and coerce or induce diaspora communities to advance foreign interests.'”

Europe too has begun to reexamine its relations with China amid the shock of COVID-19 when, earlier this year, Beijing sent very public medical aid to struggling nations, including Italy, accompanied by propaganda presenting China as a savior and appearing to try to weaken faith in the European Union. Then in October, Sweden, spooked by a newly-adopted combative style of diplomacy that the Chinese call “wolf warrior” and the kidnapping and detention of a citizen in China, among other problems, banned Huawei and ZTE, the Chinese telecom companies, from its future 5G networks, citing concerns over “Sweden’s security.” Earlier this year, Sweden also shut down all of the country’s Confucius Institutes, a Beijing-funded program with the stated goal of promoting Chinese language and culture that many viewed as a propaganda tool. In the U.S. they have been permitted to remain open but are designated as “foreign missions.”

Medical supplies sent by China to help Italy during the pandemic were part of a propaganda effort. Xinhua/Zheng Mengyu/Getty

In some ways, the U.S., at least until recently, has lagged in experiencing the more aggressive actions that other nations have documented and in exposing infractions, when discovered. That may have partly to do with Chinese tactics, which are more careful when aimed at the key “enemy,” says Ho-fung Hung, the Johns Hopkins professor. Hung quotes a revolutionary saying by Mao Zedong to illustrate his point: “Mao said, ‘gather your best forces, annihilate the enemy one by one.’ Don’t take on the core first, don’t take on the toughest opponent first,” Hung says. “Take on the smaller and weaker ones, like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK. They have done that. The U.S. is the toughest nut to crack.”

But there are signs that the U.S. is starting to take the threat more seriously. In July, the State Department shut China’s Houston consulate over what it said was multi-year, persistent technology theft and political interference across a broad swathe of states in the south, southeast and southwest, home of many energy and medical businesses and advanced research. The Chinese government denies these activities.

While the U.S. government has not released many details of what happened, several interviewees described a pattern of espionage by diplomats at the consulate aimed at major cities in the area. “Say, you are a city manager and you have a giant medical industry, and you also have giant collaborative relationships with China, well, then that manager is dependent on China,” said one official, who spoke on background. A Chinese diplomat might then feel free to place a phone call to the manager asking for a meeting with the state governor, or approval for a business project, or to oppose a motion criticizing China for human rights violations in Tibet, Xinjiang or Hong Kong. “It’s very effective influence,” the official said.

Protesters hold up signs and flags outside of the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, on July 24, 2020, after the US State Department ordered China to close it. Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images

“Houston was not chosen at random out of the consulates out there,” said John C. Demers, an assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, in an online event in August with the Center for Strategic & International Studies. The consulate had long been a center of nationwide activity to exert political pressure and extract technology for China, several persons interviewed for this story said. In a sign of the scale of activities, F.B.I. agents also conducted about “50 interviews in 30 different cities” across the U.S., with Chinese researchers suspected of working to extract technology—”just the tip of what was going on and what we were trying to disrupt,” Demers said.

China’s Magic Weapon

To help carry out its program of influence and interference in the U.S., China relies on what Xi calls the country’s “magic weapon:” the party’s “United Front” system led by a Communist Party division called the United Front Work Department.

This is “a network of party and state agencies responsible for influencing groups outside the party,” both inside and outside China, as Alex Joske, a researcher on Chinese politics at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has written. Traditionally, outside China, the United Front has focused on overseas Chinese communities, appealing to their sense of ethnic loyalty to persuade them to “repay the motherland.” Personal benefit is often involved, with the system offering business opportunities in exchange for good will and cooperation.

Groups that are part of the system often have innocuous-sounding names, like the Chinese Overseas Exchange Association. Running parallel to the United Front is the Chinese government’s global network of “friendship associations,” under the foreign ministry. The U.S. organizations with which these groups cultivate ties may have no idea of their CPC affiliation. Pompeo, for instance, pointed out that the Governors Association had co-sponsored a U.S.-China “Collaboration Summit” with a group called the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship and Foreign Countries, which is, indirectly, tied to the United Front system. He asked the gathering, “How many of you made the link between that group and Chinese Communist Party officials?”

“The United Front is part of China’s foreign policy, part of China’s intelligence apparatus and runs interference,” says Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Tasks that it may be charged with include everything from making “friends” to outright espionage.

A government reception last month to commemorate the founding of the People’s Republic of China was organized in part by the United Front Work Department, which is responsible for influencing groups to view China and its goals favorably. Gao Jie/Xinhua/Getty

The Chinese government has frequently denied the Front’s role in overseas influence and interference operations. Yet it allocates a large amount of money to its work, indicating it is a priority. The budget of the United Front system, both at home and abroad, was more than $2.6 billion in 2019, Ryan Fedasiuk of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology says. Nearly $600 million of that was earmarked for work aimed at overseas Chinese communities and foreigners, Fedasiuk calculates. The total budget outstripped the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s, he found.

The United Front in Action

A three-day summit that took place in mid-October at the China Institute, a New York City non-profit, provides a classic example of how the United Front works. The event, titled “Finding Success in an Age of Crisis,” promised to help participants figure out how to “achieve success in the face of strained U.S.-China relations and a volatile world.”

The event featured an illustrious line-up of panelists from U.S. business, academia, technology, media, diplomacy and politics, including Rick Snyder, former governor of Michigan, and Stapleton J. Roy, a founder of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute. Yet what participants likely didn’t know: Three of the four “knowledge partners” are directly or indirectly part of the United Front.

The Beijing-based Center for China & Globalization, a think tank, is one of them. The organization was co-founded by Wang Huiyao, who is also a deputy chairman of the Western Returned Students Association, a United Front Work Department group, according to Joske, who has documented Wang’s multiple connections to the United Front. The other were the China General Chamber of Commerce USA and the China General Chamber of Commerce USA Chicago, both among the 600 or so American groups Newsweek has linked to the CPC system.

Asked for comment, the China Institute replied that it “chose to engage with these organizations because of their large memberships and connection to the issues and topics that are a priority today. We wanted to ensure they were engaged in the conversation.” In an emailed statement, the China General Chamber of Commerce–USA denied it was linked to the United Front system, saying it was “a non-profit and non-governmental organization representing Chinese enterprises in the U.S.,” with a mission “to create value, generate economic growth, and enhance cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese business communities.”

Importantly, members of the various groups identified by Newsweek, most of them ethnic Chinese, may not be aware of the organization’s ties to the China party-state. Individuals may join for a sense of community or a business opportunity. Despite that, the groups may compete to be close to the Chinese embassy and its consulates hoping to gain status and favors, says Yaqiu Wang, an analyst for Human Rights Watch in New York City. China’s diplomatic system, in turn, connects through them to local Chinese-language communities.

Some groups assist in technology transfer—acquiring technology developed by U.S. companies for use by Chinese companies—a crucial goal of the party’s influencing and interfering. The system also permeates the Chinese-language media in the U.S, shaping the information environment.

Newsweek has identified the following types of organizations as affiliated with the United Front throughout the U.S.: at least 83 Chinese hometown associations for immigrants from the same place in China; 10 “Chinese Aid Centers;” 32 Chambers of Commerce; 13 Chinese-language media brands; about half of the 70 associations for Chinese professionals in the U.S.; 38 organizations promoting the “peaceful reunification” of China and Taiwan; five “friendship organizations” and 129 other groups engaged in a range of activities such as education and culture. In addition, there are 265 Chinese Student and Scholar Associations for the approximately 300,000 Chinese students in the U.S. These are connected to CPC politics, often via Chinese diplomats, usually the education secretary in a consulate.

The groups were identified by evaluating crossover membership, regular joint activities, events indicating ideological alignment, high-level meetings that can only be obtained by being part of a CPC-trusted system and by crosschecking names, positions and cooperative events described in hundreds of Chinese-language government and party documents and Chinese state media reports as well as reports by the groups themselves. The level of influence and interference activity ranges from simple efforts to promote a positive view of China to outright espionage.

The latter was the case in late September, when a New York City policeman of Tibetan origin from China, a naturalized American citizen and army reservist, was arrested and charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. His handler in the Chinese consulate in New York City worked for the China Association for Preservation and Development of Tibetan Culture, which is part of the United Front, according to charges laid out by the Department of Justice. Allegedly the policeman spied on Chinese citizens living in the New York area to help assess their potential as intelligence sources and provided Chinese officials with access to the NYPD through invitations to police events.

The Consulate General of The People’s Republic of China in New York City. Photo by Bill Tompkins/Getty Images

Start digging, and the number of groups in the U.S. with ties to the United Front seem endless. The Committee of 100 (C100), a New York-based advocacy group for Americans of Chinese origin that was founded nearly 30 years ago with the help of Henry Kissinger, is another, according to multiple reports in Chinese-language media and United Front organizations. The website of the United Front Work Department in the Chinese city of Nanjing identifies U.S. businessman and C100 chairman H. Roger Wang as an honorary chairman of the Nanjing Overseas Friendship Association, which is a city-level branch of the United Front’s global China Overseas Friendship Association.

Upon his election to the board in 2018, Wang talked enthusiastically about key CPC projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, in which China committed to invest in infrastructure projects in nearly 70 countries. The U.S. did not join, seeing the initiative as an attempt by Beijing to project its power around the world. “There are so many areas that C100 can get actively involved in now, including the Belt and Road Initiative,” Wang said in an interview with China Daily. Xi Jinping has described C100 as a “friendly organization” and the group regularly meets with top Chinese leaders.

Asked for comment, Fulton Hou, a program associate at C100 emailed, “We firmly oppose any efforts by a foreign government or a political party—from China or elsewhere—to influence or undermine American society and democracy. Our dual mission is to promote the full participation of Chinese Americans in American life and to advance a constructive Sino-American dialogue.”

Is there anything wrong with that? Not on the surface, but what’s beneath the surface is harder to discern. “How to deal with China is a question everybody has to face,” says Alvin Y.H. Cheung, a research fellow at NYU’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute. “The relationship with the CPC is like any other relationship. You have to set boundaries.”

Didi Kirsten Tatlow is a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and at Projekt Sinopsis in Prague, and a journalist who began reporting from China in 1995. Cheryl Yu contributed research for this story in the U.S.

Photo Illustration by Newsweek; Source images Getty

Update, 10/27, 6:45 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a response from the China General Chamber of Commerce–USA.

https://www.covid19snews.com/2020/11/02/u-s-groups-linked-to-ccp-influence-effort-with-ambition-beyond-election/

#covid19

0 notes

suzanneshannon · 4 years

Text

Ground Rules for Web Animations

Animations can make a site stand out. Or, they can just as easily kill the experience. When working with web animations, there are a few things that could go wrong like adding animations that serve no purpose, setting durations that are too long or too quick, or not using right type of animation in the first place. Even if all of these things are done correctly, an animation style may not feel good, especially if they are not in sync with other animations or in line with the overall personality of the site.

Another important thing to note is that not all digital experiences should share the exact same animations. A marketing website might need different animations than a product website or a mobile app. Although the same basic principles of motion apply for all, there’re some nuances based on content type and screen size.

For example, say you want to make a boring form more exciting to fill out. You add some delightful animations in each step moving forward, but is that a good idea for a form you know a user needs to visit and fill often? Watching the same animations over and over could get annoying in that case.

Clearly, there are conditions and considerations that will serve animations well. In this article, we’ll discuss about adding animations into product websites. Let’s dig into that a bit and lay down some ground rules for working with them. Not so much a manifesto, but more like a baseline we can reference and sort of rally around.

First off, what’s a good situation for an animation?

When used well, an animation is almost like content — it provides context and has meaning that helps inform the user that something has happened and even what to expect next. Here are a few good situations where animation can do exactly that.

Transitioning UI blocks

This might be the most common use case for animations. When a UI block is moved from its original position, or is added or removed from the DOM, it’s a good idea to let users see that happen.

It’s easy to see the change with animation

…but it’s hard to figure out what changed without it.

Loading content

A loading animation is something we’ve all seen and encountered at some point in time! If not, a quick trip to CodePen shows you just how popular loading animations are. They’re ideal as placehholders for content, where users are not only given a hint at what to expect when the content loads, but confidence that something is being loaded at all.

Besides making the site feel fast, it also avoids janky content reflow, which can be super disorienting as elements render at different times.

Client side rendering is so interesting. Look at this janky loading experience. The page itself isn’t particularly slow, but it loads in very awkwardly. A whole thing front-end devs are going to have to get good at. pic.twitter.com/sMcD4nsL98

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) October 30, 2018

Loading placeholders are best, of course, when you know the height of content blocks ahead of time.

Hinting

This is generally a one-time animation where the point is to give users a hint for where to look or what to do next. Some UIs are complex by nature. A little glow or ripple can help guide users through the process of completing a task or calling out a particular feature.

It doesn’t have to be all up in the user’s face. Instead, a little visual hint that informs without taking over the entire experience will do just fine.

Micro-interactions

Generally used on individual elements, micro-interactions give users instant visual feedback after performing an action. They instill confidence that a performed action has taken place and that something happened as a result — all while adding a little delight at the same time.

These do not have to be fancy, like Twitter’s heart animation, but they totally should indicate some kind of feedback or response to the user’s action. Just check out how subtle — yet delightful — that is when a user does something as small as adding an item from one line to another:

It’s small, but that little bounce provides instant feedback to user’s action.

Um, ok, so what just happened? It’s hard to tell when there’s no response.

OK, so when should we avoid animations?

We’ve just seen handful of situations where animations make a lot of sense. Let’s spell out the opposite conditions where animations generally contribute very little or nothing to the user experience. In other words, they become noticeable for bad reasons and are probably best left out of the equation.

Route transitions

Yes, we usually don’t see these sorts of animations on product websites but it’s worth mentioning to understand why they don’t make sense. These transitions work better on mobile apps because of the small screen area. On desktop screens there’s much larger area to animate. To animate the whole content smoothly, you’ll require to set more duration than on mobile screen. This will simply annoy the users making them wait to see the content as they are already used to see instant content visibility on the web. And in the worst cases, route transitions can not only be distracting, but a severe accessibility concern when it comes to motion sensitivity.

On initial load of page content

You may do it in marketing websites when you want to educate users or move their focus to a particular block. For product websites, it will be again annoying to see the same animation each time users navigates between pages.

When it’s unexpected

It’s a good idea to consider a user’s state of mind while they use a particular feature. Is visual feedback expected where the animation is being used? If not, it can confuse more than it helps.

For example, checkout this calculator app. There’s nothing new in the UI pattern when numbers are entered and calculations run. Users already know where to focus. There’s no point in making users wait before they can see results or surprise them with something that provides no additional meaning or benefit.

A snappy change without an animation is perfect in this case. The button hover and active states are more than enough.

When you’re unsure how well it performs

It’s worth bearing in mind that not all devices, internet connections, and browsers are equal in the eyes of animation. Eric Bailey sums this up nicely in his deep-dive on the prefers-reduced-motion media query:

We also need to acknowledge that not every device that can access the web can also render animation, or render animation smoothly. When animation is used on a low-power or low quality device that “technically” supports it, the overall user experience suffers. Some people even deliberately seek this experience out as a feature.

The heading above that quote is a sage reminder: Animation is progressive enhancement. If we plan on using an animation — especially ones that threaten to dominate the experience — we’ve gotta at least consider a way to opt out of it and whether the experience still works without the animation. prefers-reduced-motion is the best place to start.

When the purpose isn’t clear

Lastly, I’d say don’t add animations wherever you’re not absolutely sure about the purpose it serves. Superfluous animation can be distracting and hurt more than it helps. This tweet from 2018 is still very true:

Web design in 2018 428 dependencies 142 seconds compile time 5 MB of JavaScript 0 clue as to basic UI interactions pic.twitter.com/1GAAQS4td8

— Thomas #BlackLivesMatter (@thomasfuchs) March 27, 2018

How long should an animation last?

The length of an animation is just as important as the type of animation being used. Wait too long, and the animation can appear to drag on. Go too fast, and the nice details of the animation can get lost (in best cases) or completely disorient the user (in worse cases).

So, how long should we set the duration of an animation? I’ll give you a classic answer: It depends.

The bigger the distance, generally the longer the duration

Animations (like the ones we looked at earlier) can be limited to a short duration. But if we’re taking about a massive transition where an object is traveling a long distance, we may feel it needs something a little longer to make sure things don’t move too fast. But avoid using duration longer than 400ms.

Check out this example. Notice how the content takes a little longer to transition because it has a greater distance to travel. But also notice that the it doesn’t have to last too long because the object that leaves fades into the object that enters, and the object that enters comes at a shorter distance rather than making it travel across the entire screen.

Goes to show that even big animations can be optimized in ways that make it feel shorter without getting lost in the mix.

Use a shorter duration when the user triggers the action

This is important and a common mistake. If the user already expects something to happen — and the focus is already clearly where it should be — then there’s no point in making the user wait seconds to complete what they already expect.

Instant reaction to what user is expecting

Making user wait…

On the other hand, if the change is automatically triggered by the system, a longer duration makes sense, as it will allow the user to catch up to speed with the change taking place. Think of tooltips or modals that are not triggered by the user do not require a their immediate attention.

Less distracting with subtle entrance

Too distracting with short animation duration

Enter and exit animations can have different durations

Sometimes it makes sense to keep the animation for an object that is entering view a little faster than an animation for an object that is exiting, especially when the user is expecting to see that content change.

Take the previous example of dropdown menu. When a user clicks on it, they’d want to see the menu items right away — at least, I wouldn’t have to wait to see menu items. When the user clicks, let the submenu enter quickly and then smoothly leave when it’s dismissed so that it avoids distracting the user on the way out, when it’s no longer needed.

But this does not apply for large UI blocks. On larger blocks, for most cases, a duration longer than 200ms is required. In such cases, reversing the durations and letting a block exit faster than it entered ensures it won’t block the existing page view.

Doesn’t block the page view on exit

Blocks the page view on exit

Animation duration across the product should be in sync with each other and with the brand’s personality

I’ve came across many products where one feature has really nice animations and another is simply too quick, slow or lacks any animation at all.

Even worse is when animations within the same feature aren’t in sync.

Notice how the sidebar animates when it enters view, but also how it is totally out of sync with the animation that changes the width of the main content. It feels unnatural when they aren’t in harmony.

That’s where having a style guide with thoughtful animation guidelines that can be used consistently across the experience can be a huge help.

How simple is too simple? Or how complex is too complex?

The complexity of an animation ought to be based on how frequently users are expected to encounter it, among the other things we’ve looked at so far. The more often users are expected to see it, the simpler the animation should be. This should override the previous rules of duration where necessary.

For example, the below animation would work in a main menu, but using the same staggering effect in drop-down menus across the product is just too much to take in. There is indeed a point of diminishing returns in animations, just as there is in economics.

But, hey, if this sort of complex animation is used sparingly in intentional instances, then it can be incredibly delightful!

But yes, you can be creative with the animations where there’s a decision pending at the user or while processing data. This makes waiting times more engaging, like when network breaks or a wrong passcode is submitted.

Which easing function should you use?

Ease? Ease in? Ease out? Ease in and out? Some cubic bezier curve?

The right easing adheres to the laws of physics. Disney’s principles of animation is the gold standard when it comes to that.

For enter animations, use bounce effect if you want immediate attention of the user, otherwise use a smooth acceleration (and deceleration, for that matter) that is incremental rather than linear. Bouncing should reflect gravity. Brandon Gregory’s post on natural-feeling animations provides all kinds of examples that fall in line with the laws of physics.

CodePen Embed Fallback

You can refer to this Gist by Adam Argyle for defining easings in CSS.

Lights, camera, and… intentional action!

Attention to detail is what separates outstanding animations from ordinary (or even straight up broken) ones. If you’re in the process of learning web animations or currently working on a project that calls for them, I sure hope this post can serve as a set of useful ground rules to help you get the most out of your work.

Apart from the rules, I’d also mention that good animations take time and practice. Sure, a lot of the stuff I covered here is somewhat anecdotal and based on personal experience, but that’s the result of developing an eye for animations after years of working with them. Learn, try, improve, and keep learning. Otherwise, you may end up with a collection of animations that deliver poor user experiences and even hurt the accessibility of your site.

The post Ground Rules for Web Animations appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

Ground Rules for Web Animations published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

0 notes

truemedian · 4 years

Text

Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Wait for a price drop

Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget It's not a bad phone, just a bad deal. (In the US, anyway.)

Sponsored Links

Samsung got me. On paper, the company's Galaxy A51 appears to have everything you could want out of a $400 smartphone. A big, pretty screen. A multitude of cameras. A 4,000mAh battery. A flagship-inspired design, and a headphone jack. As an avid -- some might say rabid -- fan of ambitious midrange smartphones, I was ready for the A51 to take its place alongside other modestly priced standouts like the Pixel 3a XL and the iPhone SE. It never did.That’s not to say the Galaxy A51 is a bad phone. Samsung got a lot right here, and over a week of testing, I found it perfectly pleasant at times. Sadly, all the things the company handled well couldn't fully offset some janky, inconsistent performance: This is a $400 device that sometimes runs like a $250 one. I don’t think that's enough to make the A51 a bad smartphone, but it does make it a bad deal. Excellent design Big and beautiful AMOLED screen Flexible multi-camera system Laggy performance Camera quality is largely unremarkable Mediocre battery life Samsung’s Galaxy A51 packs a great screen, a handful of cameras, and a big battery -- what more could you ask from a mid-range smartphone? Well, more consistent performance, for one. Despite using a reasonably powerful chipset, the A51 is often plagued by slow app launches and laggy animations, to the point when it sometimes feels like a device that costs much less. Battery life wasn’t as good as we had hoped for, either. While Samsung got a lot right with the Galaxy A51, it never feels as consistently nice to use as some of truly great devices available in its price range.

Be the first to review the Galaxy A51 LTE? Your ratings help us make the buyer’s guide better for everyone. Write a review Key specs ConfigurationsThe Galaxy A51 I've been testing is a Verizon Wireless model with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. (Disclaimer: Verizon is Engadget's parent company, but it has no influence over what we say.) Sprint and AT&T also offer this version of the A51, and no matter which carrier you choose, they'll all sell you the phone outright for $399. That doesn't sound too steep, but it's worth noting that the phone can be had for less when purchased unlocked, especially if you live outside the United States. If you're serious about owning an A51, scouting out a good deal is a must: This isn't worth $400.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget Flagship styleIf there's one thing Samsung deserves credit for, it's that the A51 in no way looks like a $400 phone. With a surprisingly trim frame; an eye-catching, light-refracting finish; and some incredibly small bezels, this midrange model could easily pass for a phone that costs twice as much. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best-looking midrange smartphone out there. Just keep in mind that thanks to its display, the A51 might be a nonstarter for people with smaller hands -- it's thin but still plenty large.Of course, since this phone costs a fraction of what a flagship does, Samsung had to be judicious about balancing style and substance. Consider Samsung's choice of materials: Wrapping a phone in glass quickly makes its price tag jump, so the company used what it calls "Glasstic" for the A51's body. As the name suggests, that just means this phone has a plastic frame that sort of feels like glass if you don't scrutinize it too much. The Galaxy A51 also lacks an IP-rating for water and dust resistance, which is very common for phones in this price range. (Note: If you Google "A51 water resistance," you might see a search result from Verizon claiming the A51 is rated IP68 -- it absolutely is not.)

Chris Velazco/Engadget The rest of the phone's design is fairly standard. There's a USB-C port that supports 15W fast charging and a combination nanoSIM/microSD card tray on the phone's right side that you can use to augment the standard 128GB of storage. If you're a music fan, you'll also appreciate the proper headphone jack Samsung squeezed into the A51, since its single speaker is pretty awful. What helps elevate the A51's design is its spacious, 6.5-inch, Full HD+ Super AMOLED screen. It's one of Samsung's Infinity-O displays which, if you're allergic to marketing BS, means there's a tiny hole cut out of the panel to accommodate a 32-megapixel front camera. It’s remarkably small and would be easy enough to overlook were it not for the shiny metallic ring surrounding it -- it's almost like Samsung wants you to keep looking at it. Thankfully, the rest of the screen is typical Samsung: Deep blacks, punchy colors, and great viewing angles considering the price. Its max brightness feels a little anemic so outdoor use can be a little tricky at times, but the display is very well-suited to binging on YouTube videos while you're sheltering at home.The screen is very often the most expensive component in a smartphone, and I'm glad that Samsung went with the display it did here. It's not just easy on the eyes; it’s a great rebuttal to devices like the iPhone SE that rely on dated designs to keep costs down. Visually, the A51 is a stunner, but as my parents always used to tell me, looks aren't everything.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget In use The frustration here begins when you go to unlock the phone. There's an optical fingerprint sensor under the display, and it's... not great. When it does work, it usually takes a while to actually recognize my thumb. Too often, though, the sensor just didn't work. Normally, you'd see a bit of green whooshing around your finger to let you know the sensor was analyzing your print, but that didn't always appear. Repeated screen cleanings didn't fix the issue, and neither did re-enrolling my fingers. For your sanity, maybe just set up a PIN or an unlock pattern instead.Once I made it in, a bigger issue became obvious pretty quickly -- the A51 is noticeably laggy at times. Switching between apps frequently felt choppy, as did thumbing through pages of apps, and even just popping back out to the home screen. You know, the stuff you do every day.To be clear, this doesn’t happen constantly, and I didn’t have much to complain about when the phone was firing on all cylinders. If you're the kind of person who just wants to watch videos and maybe send a few emails to the family, you might not even notice this momentary lag. But if you're a fan of smooth, consistent performance, be prepared for some disappointment -- stuttering animations and delayed app launches are never too far away, and it gets old pretty quickly. Gallery: Samsung Galaxy A51 review photos | 13 Photos

Exactly why the A51 runs the way it does isn't wholly clear, but part of the issue probably lies with Samsung's choice of chipset. Rather than use a Qualcomm Snapdragon like most US-bound Android phones, the company ran with its in-house Exynos 9611. From what I can tell, there's not much difference between this sliver of silicon and the Exynos 9610 Samsung started using in late 2018 -- some of the CPU cores are marginally faster and it supports a wider variety of rear cameras, but that's really it. That Samsung would splurge on a great screen and use a minor refresh of a chip that was announced a little over two years ago tells you a lot about its priorities. The funny thing is, this chipset is no slouch. It falls somewhere between the $250 Moto G Power (with a Snapdragon 665 chipset) and the $470 Pixel 3 XL (with a Snapdragon 670), which is exactly what you'd expect considering how much these phones cost. The A51 benchmarks pretty well, too -- it’s nowhere near flagship level, but well in line with other US-bound devices we’ve seen in this price range. That being the case, it seems more likely that this inconsistent performance is due to a lack of software optimization that could theoretically be fixed in a future update. (For what it’s worth, Samsung wouldn’t confirm that any such updates were in the works.)In fairness to Samsung, people contemplating a $400 smartphone probably know not to expect best-in-class performance. The bigger issue here is that it’s still a considerable sum to drop on a smartphone, and the A51's balance of performance and price just doesn’t feel right.

Chris Velazco/Engadget The Moto G Power -- a phone that costs $150 less with an older chipset -- manages to run a little more consistently. And the Pixel 3a XL? Forget about it. The difference in smoothness and the overall quality of experience between these devices skews heavily in the Pixel's favor. It’s also worth noting that all three of these phones have 4GB of RAM, so it’s not like Motorola or Google had more resources to work with here. And if you’re not married to Android, there's always the iPhone SE. It's a $400 arrow aimed at Samsung's heart and runs just as well as Apple’s most expensive smartphones. Whether it's because of a heavy touch with software, poor memory management, or something else entirely, this questionable performance makes the A51 hard to recommend for the price. I had hoped that epic battery life would've sweetened the deal here, but it doesn’t. Despite packing a pretty sizable 4,000mAh (along with a mid-range chipset and a screen that only runs at 1080p), the Galaxy A51 is only good for about one full day of use. That's not awful by any stretch, but when other mid-range phones -- like the Moto G Power -- have battery lives measured in days instead of hours, the A51 can't help but feel a little disappointing.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget Plenty of camerasAt this point, the one thing that could redeem the A51 is truly excellent camera performance. Calling the phone's trio of rear cameras "excellent" would be a stretch, but in most cases, they're good enough.And that's right, I said "trio" although there are four lenses on the A51's rear. Most of the time you'll wind up using the 48-megapixel standard wide camera which, like most other phones with pixel-rich sensors, produces smaller 12-megapixel stills by default. As usual for a Samsung phone, the results feature lots of vivid colors, though pixel-peepers will notice a surprising lack of fine details upon zooming in. That’s despite Samsung’s typical -- and almost stylized -- image processing, too. Big surprise, right? Like nearly every Samsung camera before it, this one seems tuned to deliver images that look slightly nicer than reality. These are great photos to post on Instagram, but maybe not for printing and mounting on your wall. Unfortunately, even the decently wide f/2.0 aperture doesn't help the A51's main camera much in low light -- colors tend to look a little washed out, and details get smeared into oblivion. Gallery: Samsung Galaxy A51 camera samples | 24 Photos

Meanwhile, the 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It captures a 123-degree field of view with minimal barrel distortion around the edges, and its colors are even poppier and more saturated than what you'd get out of the main camera. If you're walking around and shooting photos on a clear day, those pale blue skies will turn out a little more neon than you'd expect. Since this camera is mainly meant to capture lots of attractive, well-lit space, it's no surprise that it struggles more than the main camera does in low light.Rather than a telephoto camera (which was almost certainly too expensive for a phone like this), the A51's third sensor is a 5-megapixel affair for macro photos. I've wondered in the past who spends their time bopping around and looking for very small things to take photos of, but ever since testing the OnePlus 8 Pro, I've become one of those people. It's too bad, then, that this never produced the sort of crisp, super-tight images I was hoping for. That's partially because the camera's image processing seems to iron out some of those minute details, but also because the narrow depth of field means getting everything framed up just right can take some work.And that last lens? It's for a 5-megapixel depth sensor that Samsung uses to capture data for more bokeh-filled portraits. It does its job well. I've seen more than a few phones struggle with accurately separating the subject from its background, but the A51 handles the task without much fuss. Ultimately, no matter which camera you spend the most time with, be prepared for good -- not great -- results. If getting the best overall photo is your biggest concern, you'd still be much better off with one of Google's Pixel 3As or the iPhone SE. Samsung's real edge here doesn't lay in the quality of its images so much as the flexibility that multiple cameras provide.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Wrap-upWith the Galaxy A51, Samsung tried to bring some flagship style and features to an affordable smartphone. It wasn't completely successful, but the effort is appreciated. More than anything, what Samsung really got wrong here (in the US, at least) is the phone's price. If the Galaxy A51 cost closer to $300, as it does in certain overseas markets, Samsung's strange blend of style and stymied performance would be a lot easier to swallow. As it stands, though, the A51 never feels as consistently smooth as some of the truly great devices you can get for around $400 now. Sure, the Pixel 3a XL and the iPhone SE lack the A51’s panache, but they’re just nicer to use. And hey -- if you’re really itching for a Samsung phone and have some latitude in your budget, the slightly more powerful Galaxy A71 might be a better choice. If you can find a sweet deal -- or don't mind trading an older phone in -- the Galaxy A51 isn't a bad option. Anyone who doesn't need a phone now though should wait until Google releases its new mid-range Pixel and decide. All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Comments

42 Shares Read More Read the full article

0 notes

meg2md · 4 years

Photo

Wow, so shit is really crazy. The bad news is I haven’t used any of my extra time to study. The good news is I had a very successful curriculum reform meeting two days ago (THAT I INSTIGATED) & I might actually be making a new longitudinal thread with skills in options counseling and trauma-informed care. It feels really good to have put something into motion, especially after getting rejected from so many things and having what I did get accepted to taken from me by COVID (my poster presentation at the national ACOG meeting, my scholarship to go to DC for an advocacy weekend).

And weirdly enough, despite being so sedentary, I actually feel better about my body than I have in a long time. I think it’s partially because I actually bought groceries so I haven’t been eating like shit, but I’ve also been trying to work out 5-6x/week in my apartment. Simple things, like a 30-day push-up challenge and a 30-day butt challenge (lmao). I’m also doing 8 minutes of abs with random workouts generated by the free version of a janky abs app. I’ve mostly been inspired because a couple of my friends and I started playing the Sims 4 (and made all our IRL friends into sims) and she made mine fit - so now I can’t let my sim get fit and me get fat LOL

It helps to keep me calm. I go through bouts of anxiety where I’m positive I have COVID and have given it to all my friends. I’m also worried about my dad (diabetic, >60 yo, hypertensive, obese), my mom (>60 yo), my grandparents (90 yo), and my boyfriend (general surgery intern with ASTHMA). ALso the uncertainty with Step 1 (originally scheduled for 6/8 but unclear if Prometric will still be open) and third year (will my clerkships be delayed? What will happen to the current M3s? Will they have to put off matching for a year and join my cohort, making it harder for me to match? Will this go on long enough that my own aways will be canceled?)

There’s nothing much I can do but to keep checking in with my loved ones and trying to stay sane. It works sometimes and other times it just doesn’t. I’m all over the place

#medblr

0 notes

yuumitrash · 7 years

Text

Sibzy and Rain Play: 500 in 1 NES

Hello, everyone! Sibzy here, and I'm bringing you some of the best and most fun gaming content from this side of the Internet! Today I'm bringing you a hilarious gem from Asia: The bootlegged AS HELL NES 500 in One! I found this particular listing on the Wish app for $28, with about $10 for shipping. It took about 3-ish weeks to get it in, and when I did, boy was it worth the wait. Upon going back, I can't find the particular listing for the one I bought, but you can search 'NES' and it will pull up several different listings. The actual console itself is really close to the actual Nintendo product that was released; it's slightly smaller and the controller plugins are like the original NES rather than the new USB versions. It didn't come with a HDMI connector, just the old school RWY connection, so if you have a newer TV without these ports, you HAVE to buy a converter.

Upon plugging the console in, it immediately powers up to the title screen. Unfortunately for me, I had to have both controllers plugged in to play it, and took me about 5 minutes to figure it out. After the fact, I discovered that the A and B buttons don't confirm choices; they scroll up 50 games. The 'Start' button confirms your choices. The up and down arrows go, well, up and down. I played around with it for a little while by myself, but didn't quite feel comfortable playing by myself so I brought on my friend Rain. She and I live a few houses away from each other, and she's pretty much my best friend. She was my test player for this round, and I took notes (and not a lot of pictures, which was a fail on my part). I walked myself down there, plugged the console into their TV, made some tea and hunkered down in preparation for a long few hours of digging through 500 games. *we didn't go in order and I'm listing them in the order in which we played them, with the number followed by the title of the game.*

109. Galaga

This one was actually pretty fun. It was the original game with all the original sounds, controls and 2 player functionality. We played if for a while before we started to realize that no, the difficulty wasn't bumped up, the controller was stiff and really awkward. The button control was also off. What I mean by that is that we would push the button and there would be the slightest delay. This is a common thing we found with all the games: the controls are stiff and slightly unresponsive. While we were playing this one, we found that the cables are REALLY sensitive to being jostled (just like the original, go figure). So that was a fight the ENTIRE night.

49. Street Fighter

Lawd. Nope. This isn't EVEN REMOTELY the same game. The graphics are all janky, the controls don't work, the music sounds like a drill is piercing your earholes, and it was pretty much unplayable. It gave the same 6 characters, just different colors. Rain and I laughed and laughed. I guess it would be fun to prank your friends with if everyone is drunk, but I don't recommend the pain. It also has 2 player functionality.

13. SnowBros

I have never even heard about this one, actually. I had to do some research, because for the life of us we couldn't figure out how to play the damn thing. Supposedly you're supposed to shoot snow at enemies to roll them off the platform, but we mashed all the buttons and couldn't figure it out, so we gave up. The intro was a million years long and almost unskippable, and the soundtrack is goofy as hell. This is one we probably will revisit, especially since it boasts 2 player functionality.

1. TMNT

This is the actual TMNT game. It's in Japanese, sadly, so if you don't know how to read that you'll be lost, especially if this is your first time playing. But the music is good, the controls are the same despite sticking, and it's still literally the hardest game on the planet.

98. Dig Dug

This is also the original game! It brought both of us back with a really big wave of nostalgia. The controls were still the same, and the sticking buttons actually HELPED us. We played this one for an hour.

123. Mahjong 2P

This one...we couldn't play. It was all in Japanese and while Rain had the basic knowledge of the actual game, she couldn't figure this one out. She still played it several times to try and beat the computer, but she couldn't figure out her score or what she was doing. I think this one has 2P but...we didn't test it that far.

125. Mario Bros.

This one is the original game. Rain hadn't played this one before, so she was having a bit of a hard time figuring it out. This one also has 2P functionality! We had a lot of fun with it but decided to move on to another game for the sake of time.

135. Pac-Man

This is true to the original game, but it just didn't seem like it was. It could have been because at this point we were getting tired of sitting in front of the TV with a sticky controller and janky wiring. The bad controls were really obvious. It was so hard to change directions abruptly and we died a million damn times.

165. Flappy

This one...was weird, but in a good way. We had never heard of this one before, so I looked it up. We actually really liked it. The soundtrack was really cute, and you had 3 options. It was a puzzle game, so it took us a while to figure out what we were supposed to do. The hit boxes are pretty weird, and we only made it through a couple levels before we decided to play our last game. This is one we definitely would love to revisit.

192. Super Mario

This is the real game, as well. Sometimes it glitches and starts you at 1-2 instead of 1-1 but it's the same game. The controls kinda suck when you're getting screwed over by Goombas, but it's okay. It was worth it. Since this was the last game we played, we played it for a couple hours. It was just as fun as it was back then.

We could only stomach about 10 games before we both needed to stop before Rain's husband wanted to kill us, so for the next post we'll pick 10 more and this time I won't fail so hard and forget to take pictures.

If you want to follow Rain, her tumblr is: ginger-wuv.tumblr.com

If you want to follow Sibzy, her tumblr is: redditaddictedraver.tumblr.com

Thanks to Geeky Gorgeous for publishing this post, and I hope to hear from you all again! Leave me comments, suggestions, tips, tricks and requests either through GG or my tumblr!

2 notes · View notes

cryptswahili · 5 years

Text

Living on Bitcoin Day 6: An Artist, a Dev and a Moon Boy Walk Into a Bar…

This is the fifth instalment of reporter Colin Harper's "Living on Bitcoin" experience in San Francisco. Find out what happened to him earlier on Day 1 , on Day 2 , on Day 3 , onDay 4 and on Day 5.

On day six I woke with a renewed sense of energy. My last two days in San Francisco were booked up with plenty to do, and yesterday’s purchase had reinvigorated the experiment’s sense of purpose.

That morning I wrote, paid Kashmir back for the breakfast (she got into her Coinbase account) and set out for two days of Bay Area shenanigans that would include meeting a local crypto artist, getting tipsy with bitcoin and sleeping (and sailing) in the East Bay on a boat that threatened to capsize.

Around 1:00 p.m. I caught an Uber into the Financial District to meet up with Dustin, a multi-talented developer who had responded to a Reddit thread I made leading up to my week here. He invited me sailing, but the weather was sketchy — it had been raining for the better part of my time in San Francisco and there were winds and storms in the forecast — so we decided to meet at Digital Garage, a coworking space on Market Street that accommodates many cryptocurrency projects.

I was loitering in the lobby when he passed me, and we registered who the other was immediately. Big, tall, bearded with long, blonde hair, a tremendous smile and goofy disposition, he crossed from the other end of the lobby to greet me.

He’s got the hair, the beard, the “No worries, dude” vibe. We’re going to get along great.

We did.

As we entered the working space, I was pleased to see a cryptograffiti original on prominent display, which added an air of authenticity to both his presence in the space and to the San Francisco crypto community for supporting a local, industry-specific artist.

Posting up at a table in the working space, we hit it off and began jumping from one crypto topic to the next. Turns out, he’s a lone-wolf dev who’s building a hardware wallet with bluetooth-enabled mobile controls — not unlike Ledger’s own Nano X, I suggested. He hadn’t heard of it before.

“Well, they might have the bluetooth, but I doubt it’s trustless and multi-sig,” he tells me, going on to say that he knows of no other trustless hardware wallet. Interest piqued, I surveyed his app and the hardware wallet prototype, which he’s also building himself.

“You’re just a one-man band, aren’t ya?” I remarked, impressed, after learning that he was building everything himself.

He’s a bit of a crypto OG, it seems. He’s been in the space since 2011 and hangs around the Bitcoin Core internet relay chat (IRC), where he says he’s been humbled on a few occasions. I asked for his veteran perspective to help explain why I couldn’t find any more stores in the area that accept bitcoin. He suggests that it’s intertwined in the same trend that has made Silicon Valley so banal to him.

“Bitcoin has really exacerbated the aspects of Silicon Valley I don’t like,” he admits. “It has an appreciation for altcoins or stablecoins, but not really for bitcoin, hard money. I think there’s this culture in San Francisco that just idolizes what investors like, what’s new. I heard someone say Silicon Valley is about new things — bitcoin isn’t new anymore.”

Everyone’s just looking for “the next big thing” or “the next Bitcoin.” They’re not going to find it, was more or less his view, and he believes that the focus shouldn’t be creating something new but improving what we already have.

“I’ve heard it said that the East Coast owns things while the West Coast makes things,” he theorized, “and if that stereotype were true I could see more people taking bitcoin.

“I think the challenge is that the majority of people don’t understand security stuff. The people who buy these don’t understand half of it. The challenge is teaching them,” he said, broaching the evergreen topic on the “how-tos” of adoption.

Our conversation was kinetic and animated as we touched on a wide range of crypto-related topics. I’m not surrounded by developers much in Nashville (especially not crypto/blockchain ones), so the opportunity to talk to one who knew the ins-and-outs (and knew them real well) left my curiosity welling with streams of new, if half-hatched, bitcoin applications and infrastructural ideas.

We talked crypto assets insurance (a concept which we both had previously hatched complementary business models for), his conceptualization that the network serves users and not miners (he believes that “hashing wars” are irrelevant, since, ultimately, the users will decide which chain they buy in to) and his surprising penchant for interacting with some of the space’s most prodigious and controversial celebrities without knowing who they are.

At one point, he had left his laptop at the Crypto Castle only to retrieve it, unmolested, from the same couch he left it on a month later, though he didn’t really know who Jeremy was. I brought up Brock Pierce and his benevolent-or-parasitic (depends on who you ask) ventures in Puerto Rico. When Dustin was still involved in the Valley’s tech party scene, he was acquainted with him before either even knew about bitcoin.

“Ohhh, that’s Brock Pierce. I know him — I just didn’t know his name. We used to party a lot 10 years ago. That’s hilarious.”

Everyone knows everyone in this industry, and the degrees of separation between connections is often slim. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but with Bitcoin.

He would reaffirm this observation throughout our talks. For instance, he had applied for Coinbase back in 2013, a job he didn’t end up getting — though Armstrong’s consolation prize was pretty nice.

“He gave me a bitcoin,” he said, smiling and holding up his hands like he was holding something ethereal. “It was like 34 bucks then.”

The literal token of gratitude for being one of Coinbase’s first applicants.

That would have been sometime in 2013, maybe even right before Hill’s article. Funny, he was probably up for the position of Coinbase’s third employee.

I ordered some pad thai for lunch on Uber Eats, tried to manage some work but was ultimately distracted by my on-going, engaging conversations with Dustin. He’d agreed to go with me to the Bitcoin meetup at Stookey’s that night. To kill time until then, we decided we would give BitPay an office visit. I wanted to ask them about the decreasing presence of bitcoin-accepting merchants in the bay area, and see if the trend was national and global.

I called the office but only succeeded in leaving a voicemail, so we decided that running the errand on foot would give us our best shot. BitPay has two offices listed on Google. One was, no doubt, a mailing address but we had no way of figuring out which one.

The rain-soaked walk was made easier thanks to our umbrellas (Hans had graciously loaned me his, a feeble but functional black pocket umbrella). On our way, we took a detour so that I could try out a bitcoin ATM.

The experience wasn’t as gratifying as I had hoped, mainly because it didn’t feel like actually buying bitcoin — it was more like buying credit or a coupon for bitcoin, the opposite of what I had been doing all week: using bitcoin to buy credit and coupons in the form of gift cards.

The Coinme ATM was located in something of a mall a block over from the Moscone Center. I decided to use cash, but upon using the machine, any chance of anonymity was promptly thwarted.

First, it asks you to insert your ID, followed by a request to take a picture to verify that identity (that I would have to basically do know-your-customer (KYC) verifications twice to buy bitcoin with cash was anathema to me). After this it asked me for my phone number and email address, which I found ironically less intrusive after having to be photo identified. When all this was done, it printed a slip of paper with a username and password, along with a URL at which I could access the $10 worth of bitcoin I had bought.

Cool, I can’t even access it yet and don’t even hold the keys. Certainly different from when Hill used a makeshift, trustless prototype at Internet Archives in 2013 before the first crypto ATMs had been produced. Back then, it was just a computer and a cash box, which any employee could use to withdraw or deposit bitcoin for cash. Same concept, but more anonymous, easy and endearingly janky (you had to trust people not to steal cash from it, though).

The disheartening and borderline frustrating experience (it felt a bit cheap, a normal monetary transaction service masquerading as a crypto one) was aggravated when a Ramen vending machine 20 yards away teased cryptocurrency as a purchasing option, only to qualify the payment as “Coming soon!” at checkout.

We went on with our search for BitPay, but it was ultimately fruitless. At the first location, our call on the building’s outside directory went unanswered. At the second, we were told that BitPay no longer occupied space in the building, so we decided to pack it in.

Fighting the wind that had whipped up in our mile or so walk, we took refuge in an Chinese food joint that Dustin was fond of. We split a helping of kung pao chicken, which I repaid in bitcoin. Dustin had become an IRL intermediary through which I could enjoy those elusive dining-in-with-bitcoin experiences.

Dinner finished, we found our way to Stookey’s, an intimate, cooly lit bar that could comfortably seat maybe 30 people. We were fashionably late and took a seat at the rightmost end of the bar. I was unpleasantly unsurprised to discover that no one else had shown up for the meetup yet. For the first 30 minutes, we were the only ones, it seemed, a disappointing situation that was becoming par for the course in a week of almosts.

But it was also a win. I got to spend my bitcoin again, this time on a delicious pisco sour (a Peruvian, egg-white cocktail with a pisco base, bitters and limes) and enough beer and other cocktails to get a buzz on and cringe at the thought that the prices were not too far off from Nashville’s own.

Striking up a conversation with a wispy black-haired guy who “is kinda a tech geek,” Dustin asked him if he was there for the meetup. He said no, admitting that he was a bit skeptical of the whole thing. He rehashed an old misperception that I’ve heard from numerous naysayers, and the fact that I’m forgetting it now is either a testament to the cocktails’ potency or to the fact that most arguments against bitcoin (especially from the underinformed) have all been packaged into a nebulous hodgepodge of complaints that, in their ubiquity, have begun to resemble each other).

Dustin and I hit it off with one of the bartenders, who showed a greater-than-average understanding of crypto — so much so that he had educated opinions on forks, proof of work vs. proof of stake, and Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade. He’s been invested for two-and-a-half years, though he had been tuned into the market and started conducting due diligence two years before that.

I asked if any of the crypto-focused co-owners were around so I could grill them. One of them, a close friend of his, was sojourning in Mexico, as one does when crypto rich. Our bartender was a more-than-adequate stand-in for my questions, seeing as he’d been at the bar for two years, so I asked him if he’d noticed a drop-off in Bitcoin meetup interest.

“They go up and down. We’re in between,” he said, conceding that they had been considering scaling the meetups down from weekly to quarterly.

He also shared his personal experience of the hassles that come with accepting bitcoin, particularly in times of network bloat. “Fees were getting ridiculous on BitPay,” he told me. “A $14 cocktail becomes a $24 cocktail and people don’t want to pay.”

“How many people pay in bitcoin, would you say?” I asked him.

“A few, mostly during the meetups obviously. Every now and then, someone will be a few drinks in, realize we take it and then want to pay that way.”

After about an hour, I turned to my left to observe a room whose patronage had thinned out in tandem with the vanishing contents of our glasses. With the room cleared, I could make out two dudes having an enlivened conversation two seats down from us: one, tall and thin-ish; the other, shorter and bulky, with blond hair.

“I think that’s Dan Held,” I told Dustin, referring to the blond character. True to form, Dustin didn’t seem to know who Dan was, showing the willful introversion of a man who is more preoccupied with the code of the industry over its personalities.

I went over and introduced myself, thanking Dan for an op-ed he had recently submitted to Bitcoin Magazine and telling him a bit about my experiment. I related it back to Kashmir Hill’s own, where he was featured in the final day of her 2014 excursion.

Dan invited me to get coffee the next day, but I said it would be tricky given my schedule. I would be busy in the morning and evening, and I had plans to meet up with cryptograffiti, a San Francisco-based crypto artist, in the afternoon.

He gave a half-cocked smile and nodded to the man he had been talking with.

“No way, seriously?” I said, shocked at the serendipity.

“Yeah, that’s me,” the tall man responded with a grin.

With introductions made, we talked a bit, and I learned (not to any surprise) that the artist was a maximalist of sorts.

“Bitcoin is my baby,” he said with the simultaneous seriousness and self-aware waggishness of a true believer.

Like Dustin, cryptograffiti was an OG. Always jumping at the chance to glean another point of view, I relayed the frustrations that had obstructed my week on bitcoin, and I asked why there were so few people at the meetup.

“People stopped going to meetups because the focus had changed. It was too financial. People started shutting you down if you knew what you were saying,” he said.

It’s all wrapped up in the paradigm shift the crypto community has experienced since 2013, he believes. Like Dustin, he thinks the altcoin boom exposed how mercurial community attention can be and diverted much of the excitement for bitcoin toward the industry’s new and shiny offspring.

“It’s cool to be contrarian. Everyone is looking for the next thing.”

Dustin joined the conversation, along with another meetup latecomer: a short, spiky-haired Ethereum “moon boy” with wide, distant eyes whom I had met at the conference and who claimed he had conceptualized a “decentralized, global supercomputer” in high school before Ethereum had even existed.

Sure thing, bud.

The meetup, while small, felt profound. It was small, but it was also quality and included a diverse sample of the industry’s many players. It was eclectic and intimate, much like the “Bitcoin at $100” meetup that Hill was a part of. Only ours was smaller, something I would not have anticipated when I started this.

But there was probably a greater diversity of professional specializations in the industry at this meetup: a one-man developer team who seemed to personify Bitcoin’s open-source nature, a Texas boy who had become one of the crypto space’s most recognized entrepreneurs, a San Francisco-based DJ-turned-artist whose crypto-themed artwork sells for five figures (yes, really), a Nashville-based journalist who didn’t know squat about Bitcoin until 2017 and was thrilled just to worm his way into this milieu, and the Ethereum moon boy who did brand relations for an Ethereum-built project.

Bitcoin and crypto had all given us the opportunity to pursue passions and careers within the industry.

Even if its use as an IRL payment has regressed, the impact of the network has been far reaching — the industry is more active than ever. This thought enlivened me.

Dustin had offered me a bed on his boat for the night, something I wasn’t about to pass up, especially with a few drinks in me. It was across the way in Berkeley, so we took the BART. I paid Dustin for a ticket and then a 15-minute drive from Oakland put us at the harbor.

The boat’s exterior gave the impression of a modest and relatively well-maintained sailboat. Below deck, the haphazard displacement of various sundries and provisions presented the habitat of a man who probably had the madness to create things few people could.

The night winding down, we decided to watch/play Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch on Netflix. The choose-your-own-adventure movie’s interactive nature gives a new dimension to Black Mirror’s typical rabbit-hole examination of technology and human frailty. We had both watched it before and wanted to see what different endings we could get.

Even if tenuous, the connection between the protagonist's struggle to create a choose-your-own-adventure game (it’s also glaringly meta, like a lot of Black Mirror’s concepts) in the seminal days of the video game industry and my own struggle to spend bitcoin became apparent.

What alternative endings, universes, paths had I not confronted, found or gone down in the course of my own adventure? Maybe I’d missed some opportunities where I could’ve used my bitcoin. Or maybe this was the most optimal path: I had met Held and cryptograffiti at a meetup and was about to sleep on a boat, owned by a developer whose myriad and disparate interests and lifestyle were like something out of a book.

What other endings are out there? I thought to myself, the boat gently rocking to the bay’s swaying tide.

It was an easy and comfortable sleep.

As Kashmir Hill did in her original journey, Colin is accepting BTC tips to help him along the way.

Tip jar: 3CnLhqitCjUN4HPYf6Qa2MmvCpSoBiFfBN

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

0 notes

ellahmacdermott · 5 years