#less formal questions and more like a transcribed recording

[kim-jonghyeon]

Baekho: "Out of about a hundred swings, there are about two that I like" [GQ Golf - September 28, 2022]

[source]

Firmly and clear in the distance. When Baekho swings.

GQ: Let's be honest. How many drivers have you broken?

BH: Hahahahaha, one. Just one broke.

GQ: When you were doing that tee shot and I heard that loud sound and watched the driver break into pieces, I thought I was going to meet a power golfer.

BH: So you've seen that video. Actually, people who swing well probably don't break their clubs, right? I'm bad at swinging so it broke, hahahaha. I felt a little bad then (when the club broke) but out of everyone I was with, my ball went the farthest. It didn't even hit the ground so I don't know why it broke. The driver must have been pretty worn out.

GQ: How long has it been since you started getting into golf?

BH: It's been over a year now. I started taking it seriously since summer of last year.

GQ: You mentioned in the sports variety show Sooro's Rovers (2019) that you weren't really a soccer fan. How did you come to like golf, which has a ball much smaller than a soccer ball?

BH: Just naturally. Since everyone I knew who played golf said it was really fun, I wanted to try it. I didn't know it would be this much fun of a sport. I thought, wow, this crazy tiny ball doesn't follow me at all. When I want to push it just a bit farther, it ends up going somewhere weird... With soccer, actually if someone asks me to play, I have average skills just enough to do it. Even though I like it, I don't spend time practicing to be better. Golf's different. "Oh, I really want to be better. I really want to play better." So I ended up practicing and spending my time on it, though I think it's obvious that I've gone a bit too far. It's a sport that has kind of taken over me.

GQ: People who enjoy golf all say the same thing. When it doesn't go my way, I somehow end up loving it more. Have you reached this spiritual enlightenment?

BH: It really just goes where it feels like going. And at 80, I swing about a hundred times, but only two shots come out well. I can't forget those two shots so I go for another round. Also, it's hard to look for a place to golf in Seoul, right? There are a lot of times when I had to get in my car and go somewhere far, so while driving, I get to enjoy my time with good people and eat something delicious when we're done. I love everything about that feeling. All the things I love are part of golf.

GQ: I'm curious about your opening playlist when you go on a trip. What songs do you listen to on your way to the golf course?

BH: I don't listen to songs on the way. I usually love listening to music while driving. But when I go to play golf, I don't listen to music.

GQ: That look in your eye is such a huge change. It's totally different from what you said earlier about not being too greedy or going too far.

BH: Hahaha, no, it's... I want to go there with a serious, reverent mind. You feel like going back to nature when you're in the city, right? So I want to get rid of all that man-made stuff.

GQ: Ah, to face it quietly.

BH: Yes, quietly. But I don't want to be too crazy about golf. Because I want to do it for a long time. I don't want to lose my excitement for it right away. I don't want to be too into it. I just want it to be a healthy hobby. I'm a singer, not a golf player.

GQ: Sounds good. So let's dive into more of Baekho's healthy hobby. What's your "Lifetime Best Score"?

BH: I swung a 79 once. But the next day, I hit a 100 so the 79 seemed ridiculous.

GQ: What's your average record?

BH: It foes back and forth between 80 in the latter half and 90 in the first half.

GQ: Your style of aiming seems like it's for power golf?

BH: I'm not sure about that. Because now, the thing I hear the most is "lessen your strength." It only goes where I want it to go if I ease up; it will go farther if I ease up. It seems like somehow my strength is getting in the way. I thought that no matter what, strong people will only swing far if they ease up on their strength... Anyway, I haven't been worried about my driving distance. The ball following an accurate path is my main worry.

GQ: What about the opposing forces from nearby disturbances?

BH: I'm an RC car. For example, if someone says "This ball is going to slice," it happens that way, like a remote control was telling it what to do. The people I play with can basically control me with their words.

GQ: Why do you say that so brightly?

BH: It's just funny. Golf is having fun and being comfortable with good people. I love that kind of atmosphere. Rather than having a competitive and strict game, the ball can get kind of dangerous so we try to swing safely. We tease each other and cheer each other on, that kind of thing.

GQ: Was there a particularly memorable golf day?

BH: Yes, there was. My friend's mom had just started playing golf. Since we played it and enjoyed it a lot, they asked their mom to learn, and she really did. That was the first time my friend went on a trip with their mom to play golf. I was with them when Mom stepped on the field for the first time. Moments like that are great.

GQ: Do you call your friend's mom "Mom" too?

BH: Ah! My mom is close with my friends. I'm also close with my friends' parents. My friends call my mom "Mom." I thought that was pretty nice so I followed suit.

GQ: That's great. Friends, parents, and everyone getting along and spending time together like that.

BH: It is really great. We can all do it together regardless of age, so it's really amazing.

GQ: If we use golf as a metaphor, we prepare for a new tee shot at a new hole, right? Like how you've prepared for your solo activities simply as Baekho, not as NU'EST Baekho.

BH: Hm? No, I think it's better to call it my second shot.

GQ: Really?

BH: Since the tee shot went well, the fairway is in a good spot so it feels like the second shot is going to go well, too.

GQ: So it's not like the hole is over, but the tee shot succeeded through the name "NU'EST."

BH: Right. So it feels like I'm in a good place to make the second shot. It really does. It really feels like I'm having a new start, because it's a new shot. I'm nervous and excited and anxious and worried. But somehow I feel kind of assured in my heart too. I was so happy when I promoted as NU'EST. Because of NU'EST, I've come to a good place. From this place, I can go anywhere I want to go next.

GQ: The solo album that's coming out in October seems to be the direction in which you're going. Are you also participating in all aspects of this album - writing, composing, producing?

BH: Yes. I'm working hard preparing for it. I recorded the title track yesterday, and I really like it.

GQ: Was the song you sang at your fan meeting a hint about your new album? "I, who felt change, have changed" [t/n: literal translation]

BH: Yes, that was a hint. Strictly speaking, it's one of the finished new songs. The fan meeting was decided while we were working on the album, so I wanted to reveal one of the new songs in advance at the fan meeting.

GQ: The NU'EST albums you've produced for about three years have been described as "silk." This song is like a pair of jeans that have softened after a rough washing and sanding. [t/n: i'm sorry WHO described it this way??] Though it's more natural and rough, it still has a soft strength to it.

BH: Really? That was intentional. When I was singing NU'EST songs, I had a lot of high-pitched vocals, but while I was working on this album, my intention was "Let's try to find power without high vocals." What kind of strength can I show effortlessly? I did a lot of research on that.

GQ: This solo album is like another piece of you. If you could express it through a color, what color would it be?

BH: Um... I hope it can be clear. Though the process of working on it and the way I approached it was different, it's really all just me. Then and now, I'm still the same person. So that's why I just want its color to be clear. [t/n: clear as in 'transparent'; not clear as in 'vibrant']

GQ: Just the way it is.

BH: Right.

GQ: You said that when you go for a round, you don't listen to music and face it with silence. What about the drive back?

BH: That's when I have to monitor the time. There are a lot of people like us who work at night and sleep during the day, right? So we go for a round in the morning, and in the afternoon, we have to face all the work we put off.

GQ: So you're considering that as well. You're not tired after golf?

BH: No, not at all. It's great. I feel refreshed.

GQ: What are the values you stand for while playing golf?

BH: I don't accept mulligans from my friends. (*mulligan: when a bad swing is invalidated and the player can swing again)

GQ: Why?

BH: I just hit it. I hit it just the way it is. Whether I hit it well or I hit it terribly, it's still my ball.

[this is a fan translation by a non-native korean speaker and may contain inaccuracies. it has not yet been proofread or edited.]

#i'm so sorry if i got a lot of golf terms wrong #i know nothing about golf and had to look up a lot of stuff lol #but that golf metaphor about the second shot though :((((( #i really wanted to translate this interview because i think i've only had one other baekho post on this blog so far #also THESE PICTURES??? UGH #maybe i'm just going through a heavy baekho phase but all his posts since he started promoting for his album LORD HELP ME #i just also want to say the spacing in the original article is so wack #idk if it's a stylistic choice because the interview seemed more casual #less formal questions and more like a transcribed recording #but man the spacing was part of why this took so long #baekho #kang dongho #nu'est #백호 #강동호 #뉴이스트 #translation #shanibugi trans

[detectiveangel]

post-traumatic synthesized dreamscape no. 1

this digital sound composition is an attempt to transcribe (record, mollify, exorcise) my emotions looking back on the events of last february as i experienced them.

i was living in st. petersburg as a graduate student researcher, one of the dwindling ragtag lot of americans with no family ties to russia still trying to live there, when the russian military invaded ukraine early in the morning the day after february 23rd, the federal holiday honoring military men that was once red army day. i had already given up on my dream of living in russia for anything approaching the long term and was trying to stay for just as long as i safely could as History unfolded around me. i left russia 24 hours after the start of the invasion and made it back to the u.s. safe but mentally shattered. I’d spent months navigating or avoiding tense encounters with russian migration police as weekly updates to civil law gradually made it very nearly impossible to legally reside in russia as citizen of a designated “enemy nation;” and then finally found myself alone in a windowless room with an fsb agent in the remote checkpoint by the finnish border that terrible morning. my battered psyche imploded before the questioning, which was, objectively, very mild, even began.

back in the u.s., i spent months struggling to operate my own person before i realized that i had ptsd from a war to which i had barely been a distant bystander. i started therapy and saw massive improvement after just a few months. good fortune, which saw me safely through so many close calls and near-disasters during the grinding buildup and violent lurch into fully-fledged military rule in russia, blessed me yet again.

before entering formal therapy, i leaned very heavily on intoxicating substances (alcohol in russia, marijuana in the u.s.) and movies to keep the terror at bay. my understanding of myself in this phase of my life is heavily mediated by cinema, especially cinema made or set in the wwii and early “post-war” era. this time when society’s psychic wounds were only just scabbing over and could be seen on nearly everyone who crossed a camera feels less like the past and more like a parallel present still playing out in ever-more garbled reproductions in the nightmare fantasies that govern life in the places that never healed properly from the traumas of the ‘40s. to make beautiful or joyful art has become impossible, but the need to externalize our disordered response to trauma in art is stronger than ever. our voices can no longer carry a tune, but we have all history’s old recordings to grind and reshape into new kinds of music that may somehow express the emotions no amount of time and treatment can resolve.

some notes on the recordings i used as material for this piece

during this last year of trauma recovery, i saw myself most vividly in one particular cinematic incantation of postwar psychosis co-created by a brit and an american both too young to have experienced wwii but raised in its fallout as men in societies where the publicly synthesized idea of maleness is overwhelmingly suffused with the radioactive particles still emitting from the atoms of that war. watching mickey rourke’s performance in alan parker’s metaphysically-canted neo-noir “angel heart” (1987) somehow made a narrative out of the glossolalia of confusion and pain humming at the core of my being during the strung-out spring that followed the terrible winter of ’21-’22.

in the autumn before that winter, i had found strength and solace from the encroaching fascist terror in russia in the exploration and nurturing of my own masculinity. i had long identified more with a masculine perspective than a female one, but various factors limited the extent to which i expressed this identification. various other factors led to me reaching new levels of masculine identification and expression that fall, and this was a positive, self-actualizing experience that nurtured me during the months in which i lived under increasingly dire threat of repression from a government officially opposed to the existence of queers, americans, and gender studies researchers within its borders.

months of trudging alone through seedy hotels, anxious crowds, and icy boulevards, all while looking over my shoulder for police, were bearable if i saw myself as a sort of postmodern pastiche of film noir protagonists, a hardboiled detective working an increasingly dangerous case, an existentially bedraggled man in the wrong time, space, and body muttering clever wisecracks for the benefit of none but himself and perhaps some imaginary audience of ghosts and angels. at that time i hadn’t, to my knowledge, actually watched any of the classic bogart & co. detective movies, so my metaphysical drag act was itself composed from impressions and parodies. i was, however, quite intimate with other strains of 1940s cinema (i was in the archives mainly to study a film from that decade) and though my active memory has retained nothing of “casablanca” (1942), i did see that film at a Formative Age and this would seem the most likely source of my improbable and ultimately impossible lifelong obsession with becoming a jaded-yet-romantic american expat on the fringes of europe.

lying prone in the rubble of my exploded expat fantasies back in my native california, i watched movies projected on my ceiling and in most cases enjoyed a vacation from my psychological perspective through the temporary occupation of another. but once in a while, i caught my own reflection in the kino-eye. such was the case with “angel heart,” a meticulously formalist meditation on the fractured collective psyche of “postwar” america via the methodical deconstruction of a man composed entirely of echoes and fictions masking unbearable trauma from participating in ritual human sacrifice both literally (as an occultist) and metaphorically (as a soldier in the war). as a supernatural creation bearing the souls of both perpetrator and victim of the sacrifice, his trauma response is self-annihilating – a mystical representation of the psychosis experienced by all us cogs in the war machine, one-souled or otherwise. the two souls bound up in harry angel/johnny favorite both experienced the war from a sidelined, un-masculine position: one as a section 8 discharge dismissed after a brief, traumatizing stint of service, the other as an enlisted entertainer. this allegory resonated in the contours of my imagination with incredible sonority, but i saw my reflection well before the plot unfolded, in the very first scenes of the film, in the physical demeanor affected by mickey rourke loping awkwardly through dirty manhattan snow in a wool trenchcoat. i had caught a similar reflection many times in the windows of moscow and petersburg as i trudged through dirty snow, insulating my frightened self from a hostile world with a similar wool trenchcoat and self-effacing butch affect cribbed from cinema-mediated memories of ‘20s-‘30s tough guys.

my identification with this character/performance is only one undercurrent of this noise-music composition, but it is the one i feel needs the most explication. the meanings carried by the other voices (among them those of vyacheslav tikhonov portraying an exhausted soviet agent within the ss in early 1945 berlin, leonid utesov singing the praises of his beloved odessa, and alexander vertinsky crooning an emigrant’s lament for distant st. petersburg) are more self-apparent.

2/23/2023

media sampled here:

audio from the films

“the third man” (1949)

“семнадцать мгновения весны” (1972)

“angel heart” (1987)

“black angel” (1946)

“casablanca” (1942)

song recordings

“у черного моря” (leonid utesov, 1953)

“girl of my dreams” (etta james, 1960)

“чужие города” (alexander vertinsky, 1936)

“крейсер «аврора»” (choir of the leningrad pioneers’ hall, 1982)

additionally

personal audio recordings

midi file created from the composition “песня о далекой родине” (1972) by mikаеl tariverdiev

the accompanying video was created with samples from the above-mentioned films, as well as personal recordings and archival footage from a filmed concert performance by leonid utesov in 1940.

audio edited & produced using ableton live 9

video edited & produced in windows movie maker + microsoft clipchamp

some notes on the recordings i used as material for this piece

during this last year of trauma recovery, i saw myself most vividly in one particular cinematic incantation of postwar psychosis co-created by a brit and an american both too young to have experienced wwii but raised in its fallout as men in societies where the publicly synthesized idea of maleness is overwhelmingly suffused with the radioactive particles still emitting from the atoms of that war. watching mickey rourke’s performance in alan parker’s metaphysically-canted neo-noir “angel heart” (1987) somehow made a narrative out of the glossolalia of confusion and pain humming at the core of my being during the strung-out spring that followed the terrible winter of ’21-’22.

in the autumn before that winter, i had found strength and solace from the encroaching fascist terror in russia in the exploration and nurturing of my own masculinity. i had long identified more with a masculine perspective than a female one, but various factors limited the extent to which i expressed this identification. various other factors led to me reaching new levels of masculine identification and expression that fall, and this was a positive, self-actualizing experience that nurtured me during the months in which i lived under increasingly dire threat of repression from a government officially opposed to the existence of queers, americans, and gender studies researchers within its borders.

months of trudging alone through seedy hotels, anxious crowds, and icy boulevards, all while looking over my shoulder for police, were bearable if i saw myself as a sort of postmodern pastiche of film noir protagonists, a hardboiled detective working an increasingly dangerous case, an existentially bedraggled man in the wrong time, space, and body muttering clever wisecracks for the benefit of none but himself and perhaps some imaginary audience of ghosts and angels. at that time i hadn’t, to my knowledge, actually watched any of the classic bogart & co. detective movies, so my metaphysical drag act was itself composed from impressions and parodies. i was, however, quite intimate with other strains of 1940s cinema (i was in the archives mainly to study a film from that decade) and though my active memory has retained nothing of “casablanca” (1942), i did see that film at a Formative Age and this would seem the most likely source of my improbable and ultimately impossible lifelong obsession with becoming a jaded-yet-romantic american expat on the fringes of europe.

lying prone in the rubble of my exploded expat fantasies back in my native california, i watched movies projected on my ceiling and in most cases enjoyed a vacation from my psychological perspective through the temporary occupation of another. but once in a while, i caught my own reflection in the kino-eye. such was the case with “angel heart,” a meticulously formalist meditation on the fractured collective psyche of “postwar” america via the methodical deconstruction of a man composed entirely of echoes and fictions masking unbearable trauma from participating in ritual human sacrifice both literally (as an occultist) and metaphorically (as a soldier in the war). as a supernatural creation bearing the souls of both perpetrator and victim of the sacrifice, his trauma response is self-annihilating – a mystical representation of the psychosis experienced by all us cogs in the war machine, one-souled or otherwise. the two souls bound up in harry angel/johnny favorite both experienced the war from a sidelined, un-masculine position: one as a section 8 discharge dismissed after a brief, traumatizing stint of service, the other as an enlisted entertainer. this allegory resonated in the contours of my imagination with incredible sonority, but i saw my reflection well before the plot unfolded, in the very first scenes of the film, in the physical demeanor affected by mickey rourke loping awkwardly through dirty manhattan snow in a wool trenchcoat. i had caught a similar reflection many times in the windows of moscow and petersburg as i trudged through dirty snow, insulating my frightened self from a hostile world with a similar wool trenchcoat and self-effacing butch affect cribbed from cinema-mediated memories of ‘20s-‘30s tough guys.

my identification with this character/performance is only one undercurrent of this noise-music composition, but it is the one i feel needs the most explication. the meanings carried by the other voices (among them those of vyacheslav tikhonov portraying an exhausted soviet agent within the ss in early 1945 berlin, leonid utesov singing the praises of his beloved odessa, and alexander vertinsky crooning an emigrant’s lament for distant st. petersburg) are more self-apparent.

#music #personal #noise #sound art #soundscape #trauma #ptsd #war #movies #my life in movies #film #russia #ukraine #ussr #cinema #digital music #art experiment #noise art #sound collage #audio collage #россия #украина #война #кино #музыка #video art

[baldwin-montclair]

The Unlikely Advocate - No Spindle Required (PART 2)

Baldwin’s decision to make Isobel his blood sworn daughter draws the condemnation of the witches and provokes Lady Percy, the child’s grandmother, to request custody.

Brought before the congregation to answer for his actions in the wake of Eileen’s condition, and demonstrate his suitability as Isobel’s father, he has one last card to play.

PART 1

Tags: @adowbaldwin @butternuggets-blog @sylverdeclermont @lady-lazarus-declermont @ordinarymom1 @thereadersmuse @marirable @pleasereadmeok

———

“You had no right to proceed before notifying the Congregation!” Satu lectured Baldwin, standing, not in his place of power, but in the centre as an accused.

In his place was Diana.

“I request that Mrs Bishop-Clairmont-“ Gerbert started.

“Doctor Bishop-Clairmont,” Diana interrupted, “if you wish to address me formally, you should at least do so correctly!”

“My apologies,” Gerbert sneered, “I request that Doctor Bishop-Clairmont recuse herself from this proceeding due to her familial connection with the accused.”

“There must be a de Clermont present in order to start a meeting and since no-one holding the title of de Clermont is without a familial tie to the accused, this meeting could not proceed.”

“Awfully convenient.” Gerbert interjected.

“The rules are not on trial,” Janet Gowdie gave Diana a knowing glance, “let us get back to haranguing a single father for doing what’s best for his daughter. Tell me, Mr Montclair, how old is the child in question?”

“Six, she will be seven on the tenth of next month.”

“Why did you mark her as your blood sworn daughter when she has a family already.” Janet prompted.

“Both the child’s mother and her aunt, my wife, who is the guardian chosen by this very body, were estranged from the family, it was Eileen’s wish that Isobel not be returned to them.”

“That is not a decision that can be made cross species,” Satu interjected, “the child is a witch she must be raised by witches, it is our rules!”

“Rules are rules.” Domenico needled Baldwin with his own words.

“Regardless of the actions that led to this,” Agatha spoke up, “the fact is that the child was lawfully adopted by Baldwin, it is binding, by both human and creature doctrine. She is now a de Clermont.”

“I agree,” Diana added, “the same authority that permits me to act as the de Clermont representative also makes her Baldwin’s daughter.”

“So his haste is to be rewarded?” Satu argued.

“What reward,” Baldwin snarled at her “my wife lies in a permanent coma and my daughter has lost not only her birth parents, but a beloved aunt who raised her. For my part, I had the honour of assisting in this for almost five years alongside Eileen. It was her wish that I take responsibility in the event that anything should happen to her. It happened. I took responsibility.”

“We should hear from the complainant,” Satu suggested, “bring in Lady Percy.”

“Will I have to talk?” Isobel asked Miyako as they sat in the congregation waiting chamber.

Miyako grinned playfully.

“It’s not like you to not want attention.” She teased the child who giggled at the statement.

“That’s different,” she smoothed out her brand new dress, effortlessly slipping into the serious de Clermont manner, “that’s with you and Uncle Baldwin...” she trailed off.

“What’s wrong?” Miyako noted her troubled look.

“I call him Uncle Baldwin because that’s what I’ve always called him but now, isn’t he my Dad, what does he want me to call him?”

Miyako sighed, there was no easy answer to give her.

“I think he wants you to call him whatever you feel comfortable with. The ritual we did was to make sure he can protect you, that nobody could take you away.”

Isobel nodded in understanding before a mischievous grin appeared.

“But I’m your only little sister, right?”

“Yes, I always wanted one, but you know, be careful what you wish for!” She caught the child, administering tickles which caused Isobel to giggle loudly.

“Take your hands off my grand-daughter!”

The blonde witch hissed from the door. She had two guards at her back.

Instantly, Miyako was on her feet in front of Isobel.

“Ma’am, we must proceed to the chamber!” One of the guards eyed Miyako nervously.

“Isobel, listen to me,” Lady Percy shook off the grip of the guards, “she is not your family, I am.”

“Family doesn’t do what you tried to do with yours!”

“What are you talking about?” The witch hit back.

“You’ll see!”

Miyako turned away to check on Isobel when the older witch summoned a fire-bolt and aimed it towards the vampire.

It was instantly deflected with a gust of witch-wind from Isobel.

“That’s my big sister you nasty, old...” Isobel hesitated, unsure if she should continue, “bitch!”

The Congregation had heard the commotion but until the doors opened, they were unsure on the events.

“Well, using offensive magic on this ground is not a great start,” Diana scowled, “do you have an explanation for yourself?”

“That vampire was upsetting my grand-daughter!”

“The grand-daughter we heard yell ‘that’s my sister’,” Baldwin started, “along with some questionable language that I will address with her later.”

He wondered where he could purchase a room sized teddy bear for the girl.

“It’s not appropriate for a witch to fraternise with vampires. Just because the covenant is no more, doesn’t mean we have to like it, bad enough my own daughter married one but she pulls my grand-daughter into this sin too!”

“I move to present my evidence demonstrating the unsuitability of this woman to be the guardian for a young child.” Baldwin continued with his case.

“What is this evidence? I have a right to know!”

“Peter Knox, your brother-”

“Oh, so my brother’s crimes are also my own? Or is it because I didn’t cave to social demand to denounce him. What he did was ill advised...”

“Silence,” Satu spoke up sharply, “your brother provided countless witches to Benjamin Fox, to be tortured, raped, forced to carry and miscarry his children until the mercy of death took them. Explain to me how that is I’ll-advised?”

“I did none of those things thusly I think you had better strike whatever evidence you have against him from my list of offences.”

“Unless you were involved,” Diana prompted, “did you offer him anyone, anyone at all?”

“N-No, of course not!” She hastily denied.

“I will continue,” Diana glared, “Knox kept a meticulous record of transcribed telephone conversations, many have been confirmed by the members in this chamber. Was there ever any conversation you might have had that could have been misconstrued by him?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she shook her head but looked decidedly less confident.

“He needs a powerful witch, Sophia would be ideal,” Diana read from a leather journal, “she would be the mother of a new race, guaranteeing the power and position of our family for eons.”

“What is that?” Gerbert asked.

“One of his transcribed calls, with Lady Percy,” Diana answered and turned to the woman, “do you remember this conversation, perhaps your response?”

The woman straightened up but remained silent.

Diana returned her attention on the book.

“Not Sophia,” Diana continued to read, “she is much too important to this family to risk on an uncertainty, what about Eileen?”

“You were going to bargain with your own daughter?” Janet Gowdie asked, the disgust evident on her face.

“Isobel was not even a factor in her decision,” Baldwin argued, “if Sophia was any less powerful she would have betrayed her, regardless of whether it would leave her grand-daughter without a mother!”

“I have heard plenty,” Satu spoke up, “and despite my distaste for the girl being raised by a vampire, I believe him to be the best placed to protect her.”

“Agreed,” Janet nodded and, along with Satu, glared at the young male wizard that had not long joined.

“Me too!” He added hastily.

“I do not,” Gerbert objected, “by all accounts the child is very powerful and the de Clermont’s already have two witch-vampire hybrids. How much power do you all want to give them?”

“As the only person here who understands and who has seen the love and care he has for the child, I must find in his favour.” Diana argued.

“I vote no,” Domenico sighed, “it’s too much power concentrated in one place. The risk of discovery by humans is too great and I believe that used to be a concern.”

“We vote for Baldwin also.” Agatha concluded.

“You are all fools, she needs a witch or her powers will become unstable.” Lady Percy hissed.

“I was raised by my aunt’s, witches, if she requires assistance with her magic, I, as her aunt will help her.” Diana answered.

“I won’t stay here and be lectured to by a traitor!”

The woman turned to find the guards directly behind her.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“You betrayed your own kind,” Diana stood, “they have the right to pursue action against you.”

She directed her words to the other witches.

“Do you want her released to your custody?”

“Yes, we need to hold our own hearing.” Janet answered definitively.

“Wait,” the newer witch objected, “what’s the sentence, what will happen to her?”

“She would be spellbound,” Satu answered, glancing nervously at Diana, “but in this case I believe it to be appropriate.”

“I’ll defer to both of your judgement,” the third witch gave a nod of approval.

“You can’t,” Lady Percy sneered towards Baldwin, “not if you want your wife back!”

“What did you say?” He glowered.

“It was a stroke of genius to keep her suspended in a magical state, she would have kept deteriorating, until I got what I want!”

“You would murder your own daughter to get the chance to pour your malice into another child?” Satu asked.

“I already have,” she shrugged, “Sophia found out what Peter was involved in and was going to expose him. It would have ruined our family name and I couldn’t allow that. You don’t understand how far I’d be willing to go to protect the Percy legacy!”

“And I thought witches were supposed to be intelligent,” Gerbert chuckled, “this one freely confessed to a crime nobody accused her of committing!”

“Shut up,” Baldwin snarled at him before turning his ire onto the witch, “you murdered your own daughter, and are willing to let another die. What of Isobel, would you sacrifice her for the good of your family?”

“No,” she spat, “my sons have power but not like Sophia. If Isobel is half the witch my daughter was, she is our future. Anyway, you are without another option, this is a negotiation. I give you what you want, you give me what I want!”

“Let me guess, the child?” Diana glared.

“Just to see her one last time.”

Baldwin laughed, a sound that surprised everyone in the room and had Diana look at him as though she questioned his sanity.

“Eileen’s power wasn’t just her magic, it was her conviction, her strength and her compassion,” he spoke with calm confidence, “but you mistook that for weakness, you thought she had less power because she didn’t channel it into what you thought was valuable! You will never see Eileen or Izzy again!”

“Her name is Isobel!” The witch shrieked.

“It is,” he remained calm, “Isobel Sophia Évelyne de Clermont and you just told me everything I need to know to save my wife!”

“Baldwin?” Diana prompted.

“The spell was never on Eileen, it was on Izzy, she knew Eileen would give up her magic and life force to save her. That’s why she wants to see Izzy, to kill both of them!”

“You have no proof of that, vampire!”

“Not yet,” he hissed, biting back the intense desire to rip out her throat, “but if anything happens to either of them, there will be nothing left of your legacy!”

“This meeting is over, we have voted and it is now up to the witches to administer punishment,” Diana looked to the three witches, “is that acceptable?”

“Yes, go, quickly, bring our sister witch back!” Janet encouraged and received a grateful nod from Diana.

“Come on!” She grabbed Baldwin by the arm, pulling him through the doors and towards the waiting area.

#baldwin montclair #a discovery of witches #adow #adow baldwin #baldwin de clermont #adow baldwin fic

[comfy-whumpee]

Dinner And A Show

Part of the Ellis AU. @lonesome--hunter, @iaminamoodymoodtoday, @wildfaewhump, @ishouldblogmore, @lektricwhump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi.

He was wearing an emerald-green silk shirt and black slacks. His shoes were polished and his hair was brushed and tied back. The ponytail was a little off centre, so that it lay over one shoulder and made a striking contrast with the shirt. He looked amazing – and the button-up sleeves hid all of his scars.

“You’re going to ace it,” Nic said as they fastened his cufflinks. “Just be confident, and don’t hesitate. Remember, this is work, not a real date. You just have to seem genuine.”

“Not a problem,” Ellis said. He briefly flashed a look of wide-eyed, guileless innocence, and Nic laughed. They laughed even as they remembered just how Ellis had come to possess that skill.

“Yeah, like that. You’ll be in control the whole time, honey.”

Ellis nodded, consulting his file one last time before setting it down on the floor. Alistair knelt there, hands holding the chain in his lap, head bent. He would be reading the file, Ellis’s strategy guide, the whole way through the outing, providing Ellis with the ability to check any detail he’d forgotten. No information would escape him. No surprises. He would be in control.

Nic kissed his cheek, and smiled. “Perfect. Go on, taxi’s waiting.”

They watched him go with a wistful smile. His back was straight and his head held high as he descended the stairs to leave. He’d never used to walk like that. He’d never been comfortable as the centre of attention. But then, they were starting to understand. The person he was day to day...wasn’t really him. He only came back to them in those private moments alone.

They hated what he was doing. They hated why he was doing it even more. He’d come out of it, one day.

For Ellis’s part, he was too busy thinking about the meeting. When he arrived, he was still thinking through information he could use. When he greeted her, he made sure his handshake was one she liked.

Handshake: Like she’s trying to crush your fingers and she wants you to do it back.

“Mr Engels,” she said, seeming impressed. “In the flesh.”

Ellis smiled sweetly. “That’s me. Pleasure, Ms Farringdon.”

She allowed him to lead her into the restaurant, and didn’t speak until they were seated. Only once the waiters were at a distance did she say, “I have heard rumours about you. You are... Different to the image I had.”

Ellis smiled a little less warmly now. He knew what the rumours about him were. Some of them, he had planted. “Let me guess. A terrifying crime lord, or Alistair’s sugar baby.”

“The latter,” she acknowledged. “They said you were... Pretty.”

He smiled again. Self-effacing, a touch embarrassed. “I’m glad you think so. But back to the pertinent topic. Why did you agree to meet me? I know you’re not on best terms with the original Engels.”

She looked to the side, prefacing her avoidance of the question. “I don’t recall any significant animosity between us.” Then her eyes returned to him and she smiled. “I was curious, of course. Alistair has worked alone for so long.”

“He has,” Ellis agreed neutrally. He looked down at the menu, considering.

Food: Hates seafood of all kinds. Hates hot food. Subtle flavours.

“I recommend the risotto,” he offered, as he selected the vegetarian ravioli for himself. “Mild flavour, delicate seasoning.”

She raised a sardonic eyebrow. “No starter?”

“Oh, naturally,” he said smoothly. “But the main course should be accounted for, when ordering the first.”

She hummed a brief chuckle. One slip, navigated successfully. He returned to looking at the drinks, until she spoke again.

“Why didn’t he come himself?”

Her tone was hardened around the edges, marked by her suspicion. There were rumours about him, yes, but she didn’t know that this was the person she’d expected to meet. He could have sent a decoy. He could be the decoy, for Alistair.

“Indisposed,” he said simply. None of her doubt was being expressed aloud, and he didn’t need to address it yet. “He sends his regards.”

She rolled her eyes. “Unlikely. He doesn’t like me.”

Alistair: ‘She’s a ruthless egomaniac who would kill her own mother for a tactical advantage.’

“He respects you,” he replied, setting his menu aside for the sake of signalling to their waiter that they were ready. “He did not think you should be subjected to dinner with him. Colleagues you may be, but friends, you are not.”

She considered that for a moment. He sat still under her blue eyes, reading his expression as best she could. He made sure to look simple, pleasant and honest, and while she wouldn’t truly believe that, the plausible deniability was useful.

She looked all the way to his shirt cuffs before looking back up. “Nice cufflinks.”

The formality was eroding. Ellis smiled, touching one. “Thank you. I hope you find dinner with me tolerable, if not pleasant.”

She propped her elbow on the table, chin resting across the back of her hand as she regarded him more intensely. Under his shirt the scars hid, and itched, and she kept looking.

Farringdon shook her head. “You don’t have to try so hard, cherub. Your partner and I have worked together enough in the past that you have some goodwill. Let’s just try to have fun.”

Ellis smiled properly, eyes bright with perfectly practised sincerity. “Let’s.”

-

Ellis closes his eyes with his hands poised over the keyboard.

Absolute silence in his home. Alistair is by the desk, waiting for an order. Nic is outside in the garden, reading under the porch. It’s raining, but Ellis had the office soundproofed a while ago. No sound in. No sound out.

He reaches for her.

Vision. Hearing. He connects himself up to her, taking in everything that she does. His hands start to move on the keyboard.

Computer, OS, email client, email address, every one that he can read down the side of her screen. Subject titles, as fast as he can type them, before she clicks off.

Email drafting. He transcribes in synchronicity with her, a second behind the movements of her body. He follows her pauses, her typos, her corrections, her edits. He is exactly as focused as she is, her words flowing onto her page and onto his without pause.

Email sent. Closed. More subject titles for what’s in her inbox. More in her sent items.

A video of horses. Even professional murderers have hobbies.

Then she checks it. Finally, she opens her phone and checks it, and he sees clearly the little GPS tracker she put on his bag when she thought he wasn’t looking - and he wasn’t, not with his own eyes, he practically handed her the opportunity. The bag is on a bus right now, and she closes the app, returning her attention to the computer.

A file. Title, date, last modified, author, and the content as fast as he can type it, which is faster than she can read it. Some distant thought recognises that the file is about him. He doesn’t pause. He will have her knowledge, all of her knowledge, and then he will know exactly what she thinks of him.

A notification on her phone pings and she looks down at it. Payment confirmation. He catches the banking app, the mobile network, the amount. She checks the GPS again, and sees its location.

She looks back at the profile of him and he types out the details of his own weekly routine without stopping to think about what it might mean until she gets up, and picks up a pre-packed bag, and takes one last look at her file and his photo and he watches her read the line about where he will be at this time of day, which he isn’t, because he’s watching her, and she heads out of the house.

She gets into her car, license plate noted, make, model, colour, landmarks around where she is driving from, street names, he can work out where she’s based later, and then she drives to his gym.

Before she gets out of the car, she checks her bag. He’s not surprised to see what’s inside.

In the pause as she looks, he writes a note to himself. Cancel gym membership.

He watches her move through the rooms in search of him. He watches her circle the property. He takes notes on how she enters and exits, how she avoids notice, the way she glances for cameras and speaks to those she passes as though she were a normal patron. He will learn from her, as he has learned from everyone in his life.

She leaves after half an hour of looking for him, bag still slung over her shoulder. She gets back into her car and pulls out a different phone. Dials a contact, and Ellis’s fingers fly to record the number.

“Hello.”

Ellis’s fingers stop.

“He wasn’t there.”

“Well, keep trying. You only have to find him once. I’m a patient man.”

The line disconnects.

Ellis opens his eyes. At the bottom of his garbled, rushed, typo-ridden document, there is a single word spelt with precision.

Harvey.

He takes a deep breath, and rests his wrists on the desk as the assassin drives home.

Harvey is trying to kill him.

#psychological whump #ellis: a whumper #my fic #whump #paranoia fuel #telepathy #failed assassination #manipulation #manipulative whumper #ellis #harvey #farringdon #nic

[pens-swords-stuff]

I feel like I should remind everyone that I actually write sometimes too — shocking, I know. So here’s a thing I wrote a long time ago, just to pretend that I’m a real Writeblr for a bit.

If there ever was a reason to be grateful, it was that Blake lives in a time where coffee and other sources of caffeine are readily available. Although it was just before 9 o'clock in the morning, she was already half-way through her second mug and a small tower of used creamers were stacked unevenly at the corner of her desk. Damn those early morning meetings; was it really necessary to gather everyone under the age of twenty-five early in the morning to discuss the implications of retweets? The Capital was full of old, decrepit people who would still use fax machines if they could. At this point, Blake was sure she was spending more time teaching her superiors how to use computers instead of her actual job.

And they said that the life of a journalist wasn't glamourous.

Her desk was full of unfinished drafts, photographs, and other piles of papers stacked haphazardly over every inch of the surface. With a sigh, Blake just piled the existing piles on top of each other to create a precarious mountain of paper to clear out some space. It was organized chaos at its finest — her desk may be a mess, but she knew where everything was... Or at least she hoped.

With a heavy sigh and tapping fingers fueled by coffee jitters, Blake impatiently waited for her computer to load web pages. Fingers automatically typed up ‘twitter.com’ into the address bar, but she thought better of it and quickly hit backspace. After lecturing a sixty-year old crusty, balding man on how to navigate the 'tweeter-sphere', she really wasn't in the mood to revisit the social media site and its apparently impossible-to-use interface.

When she logged into her email account, it was no surprise that hundreds of unread emails were blinking on the browser. 317 emails to be exact, the red bubble notification on her phone had been mocking her for days now. Wearily, Blake started clicking and manually sorting through useful emails and trash that didn't even need to be read. Passive-aggressive work memos from loud coworkers (shut up Patricia, no one cares about your lunch), junk mail (there's a sale going on in a nearby department store apparently), and death threats (only 12 emails, significantly less than yesterday) were among the ones immediately deleted without even opening.

Several rapid clicks later, her inbox was emptied of all unnecessary emails, and she could focus on what actually mattered — once she sorted through all of the false leads, that is. Days ago, Blake had published a request for the Other to contact her if they wanted their stories heard. It was a good idea in theory to gather information and first-hand accounts, but she really, really should've seen the amount of humans pretending to be the Other coming. Internet anonymity was a bitch, and a lot of trolls, people that were obsessed with the Other and bored humans who had way too much time on their hands were claiming to be special.

Somehow, Blake sincerely doubted that a real vampire or werewolf would throw in blatant Twilight or Vampire Diaries references into these emails. Just a hunch. On the off chance that they were truly what they said they were, it wasn't the type of person (could they still be called a person?) she wanted to write about. Now that article would immediately become the laughing stock of the internet. Blake's mouse hovered over the trash can icon for a long second as she fought the urge to delete the lot of them. Duty won out, just in case she was deleting important information. The things she would do for a story...

There was one email in particular however, that seemed more genuine for whatever reason. Call it journalist's intuition, or just a lack of modern (if slightly outdated) pop culture references.

Dear B. Preston, Apologies for the throwaway email address – I don’t like paper trails. I saw your call for stories from the Other in The Capital, and after serious deliberation, I have decided to express my own interest in the project. I am a vampire of not insignificant experience who would be willing to answer any questions you might have, from my condition in general to my personal history, so long as the result is anonymised. As this is uncharted territory for the both of us, and perhaps even both our kinds, I am an unsure as to whether the best medium would be in writing or an in-person interview. Whichever option you would feel more comfortable with. Obviously, dining with the stuff of nightmares isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Looking forward to your reply. Sincerely, Someone who would rather not sign his name in writing.

Blake leaned back into her office chair as she read and reread that email, thoughtfully chewing off the lipstick she had hastily smeared on so that she could claim that she cared about appearances. It was impossible to gleam whether this email rang true or not, but there was something different about this one that felt like it was worth following up on — at least the throwaway email wasn't something like totallyabloodsucker69 that she saw about three emails prior.

After quickly doing her carpal tunnel prevention hand stretches, Blake wrote out a long reply, then went back and deleted an entire unnecessary paragraph and several other snarky comments that had just slipped out. She was a professional, and should probably act as such. No need to scare off a potential vampire contact — as silly as that sounds.

Dear someone who would rather not sign their name in writing, Thank you for your response, your willingness to share your story to the public is greatly appreciated. I can promise it will be put to good use. An in-person interview probably would work best, if only to be able to say that I've confirmed that you're a vampire in person. It's far too easy for people to pretend to be something they're not online — there's simply not enough credibility over the internet. I conduct a lot of interviews over at The Daily Grind for the casual atmosphere, but I'm open to any alternatives you have in mind. I've attached my schedule to this email, let me know when you're available. And finally as a formality — and I honestly have no idea what I'm looking for — is there any way you can send me proof of your claim? As mentioned before, there are far too many people pretending to be anything other than human. Regards, Blake Preston.

Perhaps only a split-second after she hit send, a roar of "Preston, turn the radio on now!" was shouted at her from behind. Blake spun around in her chair in alarm, staring at Jones who just barged through the door with wild, panicked eyes.

"What are you——"

"Do it! Now!"

Jones didn't even give Blake another moment to respond as he flew forward to fiddle the radio to the right broadcast, not bothering to wait for the shocked journalist to catch up to his intensity. Precious few seconds were evidently lost as Jones' fumbling fingers finally managed to push the right set of buttons. Blake actually listened to On the Edge radio quite often, but an unfamiliar voice flowed through the speakers.

Think of the teenagers lost during Nick Bloodfang’s rampage: three young girls, on their way home from a party on the wrong night of the lunar cycle, left for dead. That is only the tip of the iceberg...

Though she didn't quite understand what was going on yet, Blake turned on the recording function of her phone after seeing Jones frantically gesticulated to her. Blake's brows were knit in confusion as she listened to the broadcast. Something wasn't right, something didn't feel right.

Blake's jaw dropped along with her stomach as the 'segment' ended with a human call for action. It was pathos at its finest, playing up on the fear that she knew swept throughout the humans when the Other first came to light a month or so ago. Even though the current position of most people was uncertain, tension and fear grated roughly on most humans that she knew. Jones and Blake shared a slack-jawed stare of disbelief.

This was hate speech, inciting people to violent acts because they painted the Other as mere criminals with no other purpose besides murdering innocent people.

By the time Louise's voice came back on the air, Blake snapped out of her stupor to open a brand new word document on her computer. Although the highjack had ended only seconds before, she was already replaying it on her phone as her fingers flew over the keyboard, transcribing it to the best of her ability. "I can't believe I missed the bloody beginning. Colin, did you get——"

Blake's fingers kept moving as she glanced over to her partner's desk, suspiciously empty and untouched since yesterday.

"Where the hell is Colin!?"

#undine writes stuff #for queen and country #fqac #blake preston

[airyairyaucontraire]

There’s also a problem with the skills of many of the interpreters I hear in court. I can’t tell whether this happens just because they’re not confident public speakers or perhaps because they are really more translators (working with the written word which can be revised) and not specialised in on-the-spot interpretation, but often their answers are difficult to hear and ungrammatical, sometimes to the point of being confusing as to meaning.

It’s also not unusual to hear a lawyer ask a question in English, the interpreter repeat it in the witness’ language, the witness answer in that language, and then the interpreter saying something in English that just doesn’t sound like an answer to the question that was put. Of course sometimes you get that even when everyone speaks English because a witness misunderstands the point of the question or is just being evasive (or believes the lawyer is asking trick questions and responds to what they think they’re “really” asking), but it’s worrying.

Bilingual colleagues of mine have heard factual errors in translation, and on one occasion I transcribed when the witness was bilingual and answering in English, followed by the interpreter repeating what he said in Cantonese for the defendant‘s benefit, the witness stopped and said “That’s not what I said. She’s translating me wrong.” The whole trial had to be put on hold for both interpreters working on it to listen again to the in-court recordings and check their (and each other’s) interpretations in the transcript for errors. At least they could do that!

I would guess that because of an overall shortage, the courts are often settling for interpreters who might be able to do good written translations or interpretation in a less formal and specialised setting, but do not have the appropriate skills for interpreting in a trial, and it makes it hard to have faith that either defendants or complainants who aren’t fluent in English are getting a fair court process.

[suzanneshannon]

Voice Content and Usability

We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last few decades have we begun to outsource them to the computer, a machine that shows much more affinity for written correspondence than for the slangy vagaries of spoken language.

Computers have trouble because between spoken and written language, speech is more primordial. To have successful conversations with us, machines must grapple with the messiness of human speech: the disfluencies and pauses, the gestures and body language, and the variations in word choice and spoken dialect that can stymie even the most carefully crafted human-computer interaction. In the human-to-human scenario, spoken language also has the privilege of face-to-face contact, where we can readily interpret nonverbal social cues.

In contrast, written language immediately concretizes as we commit it to record and retains usages long after they become obsolete in spoken communication (the salutation “To whom it may concern,” for example), generating its own fossil record of outdated terms and phrases. Because it tends to be more consistent, polished, and formal, written text is fundamentally much easier for machines to parse and understand.

Spoken language has no such luxury. Besides the nonverbal cues that decorate conversations with emphasis and emotional context, there are also verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways: how something is said, not what. Whether rapid-fire, low-pitched, or high-decibel, whether sarcastic, stilted, or sighing, our spoken language conveys much more than the written word could ever muster. So when it comes to voice interfaces—the machines we conduct spoken conversations with—we face exciting challenges as designers and content strategists.

Voice Interactions

We interact with voice interfaces for a variety of reasons, but according to Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas, and David Griol in The Conversational Interface, those motivations by and large mirror the reasons we initiate conversations with other people, too (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-01). Generally, we start up a conversation because:

we need something done (such as a transaction),

we want to know something (information of some sort), or

we are social beings and want someone to talk to (conversation for conversation’s sake).

These three categories—which I call transactional, informational, and prosocial—also characterize essentially every voice interaction: a single conversation from beginning to end that realizes some outcome for the user, starting with the voice interface’s first greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but a conversation is not necessarily a single voice interaction.

Purely prosocial conversations are more gimmicky than captivating in most voice interfaces, because machines don’t yet have the capacity to really want to know how we’re doing and to do the sort of glad-handing humans crave. There’s also ongoing debate as to whether users actually prefer the sort of organic human conversation that begins with a prosocial voice interaction and shifts seamlessly into other types. In fact, in Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh recommend sticking to users’ expectations by mimicking how they interact with other voice interfaces rather than trying too hard to be human—potentially alienating them in the process (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-01).

That leaves two genres of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can easily have with us, too: a transactional voice interaction realizing some outcome (“buy iced tea”) and an informational voice interaction teaching us something new (“discuss a musical”).

Transactional voice interactions

Unless you’re tapping buttons on a food delivery app, you’re generally having a conversation—and therefore a voice interaction—when you order a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple. Even when we walk up to the counter and place an order, the conversation quickly pivots from an initial smattering of neighborly small talk to the real mission at hand: ordering a pizza (generously topped with pineapple, as it should be).

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s cold out there. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I get a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple?

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Alison: Large.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No thanks, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

Burhan: You got it. That’ll be $13.55 and about fifteen minutes.

Each progressive disclosure in this transactional conversation reveals more and more of the desired outcome of the transaction: a service rendered or a product delivered. Transactional conversations have certain key traits: they’re direct, to the point, and economical. They quickly dispense with pleasantries.

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Though Alison might visit Crust Deluxe with the sole purpose of placing an order, she might not actually want to walk out with a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Here, though we again have a prosocial mini-conversation at the beginning to establish politeness, we’re after much more.

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s cold out there. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

Alison: Do you have any halal options on the menu?

Burhan: Absolutely! We can make any pie halal by request. We also have lots of vegetarian, ovo-lacto, and vegan options. Are you thinking about any other dietary restrictions?

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

Burhan: We can definitely do a gluten-free crust for you, no problem, for both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas. Anything else I can answer for you?

Alison: That’s it for now. Good to know. Thanks!

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

This is a very different dialogue. Here, the goal is to get a certain set of facts. Informational conversations are investigative quests for the truth—research expeditions to gather data, news, or facts. Voice interactions that are informational might be more long-winded than transactional conversations by necessity. Responses tend to be lengthier, more informative, and carefully communicated so the customer understands the key takeaways.

Voice Interfaces

At their core, voice interfaces employ speech to support users in reaching their goals. But simply because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interaction with it is mediated through voice. Because multimodal voice interfaces can lean on visual components like screens as crutches, we’re most concerned in this book with pure voice interfaces, which depend entirely on spoken conversation, lack any visual component whatsoever, and are therefore much more nuanced and challenging to tackle.

Though voice interfaces have long been integral to the imagined future of humanity in science fiction, only recently have those lofty visions become fully realized in genuine voice interfaces.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech (TTS) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. With the advent of interactive voice response (IVR) systems, intended as an alternative to overburdened customer service representatives, we became acquainted with the first true voice interfaces that engaged in authentic conversation.

IVR systems allowed organizations to reduce their reliance on call centers but soon became notorious for their clunkiness. Commonplace in the corporate world, these systems were primarily designed as metaphorical switchboards to guide customers to a real phone agent (“Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary”); chances are you will enter a conversation with one when you call an airline or hotel conglomerate. Despite their functional issues and users’ frustration with their inability to speak to an actual human right away, IVR systems proliferated in the early 1990s across a variety of industries (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-02, PDF).

While IVR systems are great for highly repetitive, monotonous conversations that generally don’t veer from a single format, they have a reputation for less scintillating conversation than we’re used to in real life (or even in science fiction).

Screen readers

Parallel to the evolution of IVR systems was the invention of the screen reader, a tool that transcribes visual content into synthesized speech. For Blind or visually impaired website users, it’s the predominant method of interacting with text, multimedia, or form elements. Screen readers represent perhaps the closest equivalent we have today to an out-of-the-box implementation of content delivered through voice.

Among the first screen readers known by that moniker was the Screen Reader for the BBC Micro and NEEC Portable developed by the Research Centre for the Education of the Visually Handicapped (RCEVH) at the University of Birmingham in 1986 (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-03). That same year, Jim Thatcher created the first IBM Screen Reader for text-based computers, later recreated for computers with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-04).

With the rapid growth of the web in the 1990s, the demand for accessible tools for websites exploded. Thanks to the introduction of semantic HTML and especially ARIA roles beginning in 2008, screen readers started facilitating speedy interactions with web pages that ostensibly allow disabled users to traverse the page as an aural and temporal space rather than a visual and physical one. In other words, screen readers for the web “provide mechanisms that translate visual design constructs—proximity, proportion, etc.—into useful information,” writes Aaron Gustafson in A List Apart. “At least they do when documents are authored thoughtfully” (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-05).

Though deeply instructive for voice interface designers, there’s one significant problem with screen readers: they’re difficult to use and unremittingly verbose. The visual structures of websites and web navigation don’t translate well to screen readers, sometimes resulting in unwieldy pronouncements that name every manipulable HTML element and announce every formatting change. For many screen reader users, working with web-based interfaces exacts a cognitive toll.

In Wired, accessibility advocate and voice engineer Chris Maury considers why the screen reader experience is ill-suited to users relying on voice:

From the beginning, I hated the way that Screen Readers work. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually and then, and only then, translate that into audio. All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users. (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-06)

In many cases, well-designed voice interfaces can speed users to their destination better than long-winded screen reader monologues. After all, visual interface users have the benefit of darting around the viewport freely to find information, ignoring areas irrelevant to them. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Disabled users who have long had no choice but to employ clunky screen readers may find that voice interfaces, particularly more modern voice assistants, offer a more streamlined experience.

Voice assistants

When we think of voice assistants (the subset of voice interfaces now commonplace in living rooms, smart homes, and offices), many of us immediately picture HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or hear Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer in Star Trek. Voice assistants are akin to personal concierges that can answer questions, schedule appointments, conduct searches, and perform other common day-to-day tasks. And they’re rapidly gaining more attention from accessibility advocates for their assistive potential.

Before the earliest IVR systems found success in the enterprise, Apple published a demonstration video in 1987 depicting the Knowledge Navigator, a voice assistant that could transcribe spoken words and recognize human speech to a great degree of accuracy. Then, in 2001, Tim Berners-Lee and others formulated their vision for a Semantic Web “agent” that would perform typical errands like “checking calendars, making appointments, and finding locations” (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-07, behind paywall). It wasn’t until 2011 that Apple’s Siri finally entered the picture, making voice assistants a tangible reality for consumers.

Thanks to the plethora of voice assistants available today, there is considerable variation in how programmable and customizable certain voice assistants are over others (Fig 1.1). At one extreme, everything except vendor-provided features is locked down; for example, at the time of their release, the core functionality of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be extended beyond their existing capabilities. Even today, it isn’t possible to program Siri to perform arbitrary functions, because there’s no means by which developers can interact with Siri at a low level, apart from predefined categories of tasks like sending messages, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and certain others.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home offer a core foundation on which developers can build custom voice interfaces. For this reason, programmable voice assistants that lend themselves to customization and extensibility are becoming increasingly popular for developers who feel stifled by the limitations of Siri and Cortana. Amazon offers the Alexa Skills Kit, a developer framework for building custom voice interfaces for Amazon Alexa, while Google Home offers the ability to program arbitrary Google Assistant skills. Today, users can choose from among thousands of custom-built skills within both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant ecosystems.

Fig 1.1: Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home tend to be more programmable, and thus more flexible, than their counterpart Apple Siri.

As corporations like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to stake their territory, they’re also selling and open-sourcing an unprecedented array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers that aim to make building voice interfaces as easy as possible, even without code.

Often by necessity, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa tend to be monochannel—they’re tightly coupled to a device and can’t be accessed on a computer or smartphone instead. By contrast, many development platforms like Google’s Dialogflow have introduced omnichannel capabilities so users can build a single conversational interface that then manifests as a voice interface, textual chatbot, and IVR system upon deployment. I don’t prescribe any specific implementation approaches in this design-focused book, but in Chapter 4 we’ll get into some of the implications these variables might have on the way you build out your design artifacts.

Voice Content

Simply put, voice content is content delivered through voice. To preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place, voice content needs to be free-flowing and organic, contextless and concise—everything written content isn’t.

Our world is replete with voice content in various forms: screen readers reciting website content, voice assistants rattling off a weather forecast, and automated phone hotline responses governed by IVR systems. In this book, we’re most concerned with content delivered auditorily—not as an option, but as a necessity.

For many of us, our first foray into informational voice interfaces will be to deliver content to users. There’s only one problem: any content we already have isn’t in any way ready for this new habitat. So how do we make the content trapped on our websites more conversational? And how do we write new copy that lends itself to voice interactions?

Lately, we’ve begun slicing and dicing our content in unprecedented ways. Websites are, in many respects, colossal vaults of what I call macrocontent: lengthy prose that can extend for infinitely scrollable miles in a browser window, like microfilm viewers of newspaper archives. Back in 2002, well before the present-day ubiquity of voice assistants, technologist Anil Dash defined microcontent as permalinked pieces of content that stay legible regardless of environment, such as email or text messages:

A day’s weather forcast [sic], the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent. (http://bkaprt.com/vcu36/01-08)

I’d update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all examples of bite-sized content that go well beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. Microcontent offers the best opportunity to gauge how your content can be stretched to the very edges of its capabilities, informing delivery channels both established and novel.

As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space. We can glance at a digital sign underground for an instant and know when the next train is arriving, but voice interfaces hold our attention captive for periods of time that we can’t easily escape or skip, something screen reader users are all too familiar with.

Because microcontent is fundamentally made up of isolated blobs with no relation to the channels where they’ll eventually end up, we need to ensure that our microcontent truly performs well as voice content—and that means focusing on the two most important traits of robust voice content: voice content legibility and voice content discoverability.

Fundamentally, the legibility and discoverability of our voice content both have to do with how voice content manifests in perceived time and space.

Voice Content and Usability published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[ashadowcalledkei]

Well I’m still not entirely happy with this but theater work and holiday shopping have derailed me far more than I’d like lately so you know what?  good enough.  CHAPTER TIME!

This last part ends To Last the Night.  I really hope that you’ve enjoyed reading it and its predecessor.  I wanted to say one final THANK YOU~!! to everyone who’s liked or reblogged or sent nice comments because really you guys are the absolute best.  And a super special thanks to the wonderful @spacegate whose fantastic ideas, writing, and art inspired this work and whose support meant and still means more than words can say.  You are amazing!

Now the big question is; can I get anything done on my other fic?  I’m sure gonna try to.

To Last the Night

Sequel to Whispers in the Dark

Pairings: None Characters: Sans, Papyrus, Grillby, Dogaressa, Dogamy

Warnings:  none for this chapter (let’s catch up with the guardians one last time before we say goodbye)

Notes: Baby Blasters AU belongs to the wonderful @spacegate​​, I just love writing awful angst for it.

Read on AO3 here (chapters go up on tumblr first)

Chapter 14

“Door,” a voice sang out, echoed by a small, high pitched howl that rang through the apartment above Grillby's bar.  “Someone's at the door!”  

“Alright, I'll be right there.”  

The owner of both the home and the joined establishment smoothed barely visible wrinkles from his pressed white shirt as he strolled towards the front door.  He was all but certain that he already knew who was about to arrive and that they wouldn't care or even notice if he was a bit disheveled from work, but the instinct to make sure he looked presentable wasn't to be ignored regardless.  

Sans and Papyrus were already there when he arrived.  The taller of the two was all but scratching at the wooden surface, excited by the approaching sounds he heard from beyond it.  These days it was nothing new to see the pair so excited, especially Papyrus who hopped from fixation to fixation with all the energy and enthusiasm of an over-caffeinated bunny.  And yet, this everyday sight was still something wondrous to Grillby.  He'd never have imagined a life like this when he'd first met the pair, nor the dangers he'd have to face it in order to keep it.

It had been many long months since they'd escaped from what was now a lonely, burnt out shell of a house on the outskirts of Hotland.  In many ways, the incident and the disturbing sequence of events that had preceded it felt so distant.  Some days he had to remind himself that it hadn't all been some terrible nightmare or a story he'd read in a book years ago.  But then he'd notice something small, like burn marks on wooden floors or the way the children would sometimes flinch at the shadows that had once felt so comforting to them, and the reality of it all would leave him staggered.  It had been real.  The scattered snippets of memory he clung to had actually happened despite the tricks his mind was constantly trying to play on him.  And the mysterious erasure of it all was just as real.

At last Grillby heard a knock.  It was difficult trying to convince Papyrus that waiting for someone to knock before inviting them in was the polite thing to do but he was trying none the less.  He opened the door and the smiling faces of the pair he'd expected to see beamed back at him.

“Sorry to come over without calling first,” Dogaressa said.  

“Think nothing of it,” Grillby replied, “you're always welcome here.”  

The exchange was nothing short of habit at this point, something that had started as a formality and was now so practiced that the two of them said their parts automatically.  The words were different from time to time, but it was all simple variations of the same pleasantries.  It didn't really matter, yet both of them kept up the act if only as a convenient conversation starter.  

“How're the little flamethrowers?” Dogamy asked with a snicker.

Though much of their ordeal was already lost to the three adults, obscured by the haze that wiped away their memories of the mysterious and dangerous person behind it all, some important things still persisted.  The sight of the children wreathed in flame was one of them.  Burning the poison out of them had been a serious risk, and though Grillby could not recall all of the reasons he'd been forced to take that risk he was grateful that things had turned out as well as they had.  It had also resulted in some interesting temporary side effects.  Fire magic, as it turns out, likes to linger, and the pair had taken to it so well that it was weeks before the last of the colorful flames vanished from them.  Even now they were still prone to the odd, infrequent flareup.    

Papyrus crossed his arms and whined, voicing his childish displeasure at the nickname.  It only served to make Dogamy laugh harder.  Grillby nudged him a little, prompting him to remember what he'd learned about greeting people.  “We're … aah … we're … “

“we're good,” Sans said for him.  

The younger skeleton huffed and shot him a look that even Grillby knew meant 'I could have gotten it.'  But like most altercations between the siblings, the slight was quickly forgotten.  Papyrus chattered in a mix of puppy yips and trills as he dragged Dogamy towards the living room.  No doubt he was excited to show off the pictures he'd drawn the other day or share his latest 'discoveries'.  Grillby and Dogaressa shared a knowing look, somehow managing to contain their amusement.  When they looked back, Sans was gone.  He'd vanished in the blink of an eye, and if Dogamy's surprised yelp was any indication he was already back in the other room waiting for them.  

“I don't think I'll ever get used to that,” Dogaressa said fondly, looking at the empty space where Sans had just been.  

“You and me both.”  

Grillby wondered if something in the boy's magic had shifted due to his ordeal, unlocking another facet to his powers, or if he'd been capable of this all along and had simply been too secretive to show it.  He didn't think it mattered all that much in the long run.  However he'd come to possess the power, Sans was at least responsible with it.  It helped that he could only transport himself short distances, at least for now.  

Now that they were alone in the relative quiet of the hallway, Dogaressa pulled a book from one of the large, hidden pockets of her robe.  “I brought you a copy of the record.  I think at this point it's as complete as it's ever going to be.”

“Thank you,” Grillby said as he took the offered item.  It wasn't much, just an average sized journal bound in leather, but it felt heavy with the weight of the secrets it contained.  “Did you come up with any more details?”

“One or two, but I don't think they were all that important.”  

The two of them retreated to the kitchen, leaving Dogamy to entertain Sans and Papyrus in the living room.  Grillby poured his guest a cup of tea and set the steaming mug in front of her.  The journal sat untouched between them.

“Do you still remember much?” he asked, though a part of him wished he hadn't.  Even talking about the incident could be an unpleasant experience, leaving him with a dull roar of a headache that lingered until the fog once more rolled over his fractured memories.

“Not really,” Dogaressa sighed, “Dogamy and I keep reminding each other, but every day there's more pieces missing.”  She gazed down at the book, her claws tapping restlessly on the ceramic mug.  “Reading this now, it feels like it all happened to someone else.”

Grillby nodded in silent agreement.  He was grateful that the guards had each other to keep themselves grounded and remind one another of the man that reality itself seemed to want to erase.  More than that though, he was grateful that they did the same for him.  

“How about you,” Dogaressa asked once she managed to pull herself from her own tangled thoughts, “what have you got left?”

“Not as much as I'd like.  But, at least I have the boys to remind me of the important things.”

“They still remember, huh?” she said, regret barely hidden behind a sympathetic smile.

“Every part of it.”

For reasons beyond Grillby's understanding, Sans and Papyrus weren't forgetting their ordeal or the man responsible the way he and the guards were.  However, it seemed that they were alone in that unfortunate distinction.  Every other trace of the ex-royal scientist's existence was swiftly becoming lost to time.  Each record that had been uncovered was distorted at best and missing large sections of otherwise carefully preserved information at worst.  Former colleagues knew only of his reputation, having neither a name or a face to associate with the deeds left behind even if they had been present for them.  The incident in Hotland had been written off as a freak accident even after Grillby and the guards personally explained their involvement multiple times.  Even the bar's regular patrons believed that Grillby had been away on some sort of vacation during the whole ordeal despite him never saying anything of the sort to anyone.  

No one could remember the truth, only the convenient lies that had slipped in to take its place.  No one except Sans and Papyrus.  The details remained with them in startling clarity even as they vanished from the world around them.  It didn't seem fair that the ones most hurt by the former royal scientist were the only ones who could never forget him.  

“Why did that guy come for them anyway?” Dogaressa asked.  “I know he created them, though I'm still not sure how, but this?”  She briefly pressed a hand to the journal's unmarked cover.  “This was madness.  Who would go to such lengths for … what?  Revenge?”

Grillby rested his elbows on the table as he looked down at the journal.  Madness, huh?  It seemed like a fairly apt description based off what he himself could recall, and no doubt the details transcribed on those pages painted an even more twisted tale.  He didn't know what could drive a monster to do something like that, nor did he want to, but simple revenge didn't seem right.  He thought of a mysterious connection the kids spoke of in hushed, trembling whispers.  Of night terrors seen through the eyes of another and what should have been paranoid assumptions stated as absolute fact.  Of ruined souls with crystalline cores.  “I think there was some part of him in the boys.  Pieces of himself that he used when he created them.”

Dogaressa's shoulders hunched reflexively, her fur bristling as she clenched her fist around the coffee cup's handle.  “They're nothing like him.”

“That's true,” Grillby said, all too eager to agree with that sentiment, “But maybe there's something in them that's like the man he used to be.  The royal scientist that existed before all this.  If he really accomplished all that we think he did, like build the Core, then there had to be some good things about him.”

Dark eyes narrowed, not with anger but with a reluctance that the elemental could more than understand.  “If that's the case, then we know where those good things ended up.”

It was a wild theory to be sure, something he'd never consider under normal circumstances, but it fit too well with the broken pieces of the story that unseen forces had seen fit to allow them.  He wondered if they were right and the royal scientist had unknowingly sacrificed all his best qualities in the creation of Sans and Papyrus.  And now, that was all that remained of him.  Grillby didn't know if it was true, or even possible, but it was an oddly poetic thought.  

“Any luck with the name?” Dogaressa asked, shifting the topic to one that didn't make her bristle quite so much.

“Unfortunately no.”  Grillby slumped a little in his chair.  Even now, as he tried to recall that missing name and was met with only a blank space in his mind, he was beginning to feel a familiar twinge that meant a headache was fast approaching.  “When they say it, all I hear is this … static.  Even having the kids write it down doesn't work.  It just turns into nonsense.  I know they aren't doing it on purpose.  Sometimes I can even make out the first few letters.  But then … ”  He waved a hand dismissively.

Dogaressa let out a sigh, leaning heavily on the table.  “I wish I understood this.”

Grillby wished he could do more for her.  It wasn't that this didn't bother him as well, it most certainly did.  How could anyone not be distressed when their own mind betrays them like that?  But his friends, especially Dogaressa herself, were taking it much harder than he was.  He thought it might have something to do with their positions as royal guards.  The pair saw it as their solemn duty to protect all of Snowdin.  Knowing that two of their own had been snatched away and tortured by a madman they'd been unable to stop was clearly weighing heavily on them.  Even when the last details of that man had been wiped from their minds, he was almost certain that the guilt would remain, a directionless and desperate need to protect hanging over the pair forever.  

But those details and the raw horror they carried would fade.  Each passing day pulled them further and further away from their grasp, leaving them with only vague reminders that contradicted the evidence surrounding them.  Almost as if they were fighting an uphill battle against reality itself.  The royal scientist had become something unfit for this plane of existence, and so it rejected him entirely.  For a fleeting moment Grillby remembered the twisted horror that the man had become, dead eyes leaking streams of living shadow.  Then pain blossomed in his mind, magic fire flickering as the headache that had threatened him before took hold in full, and the nightmare dissolved into meaningless distress.  

“Maybe it's best that we forget.”

“But what if he comes back?” Dogaressa asked, not even trying to hide the fearful tension that the thought brought with it.  

“If even half of what we've recorded here is true, I doubt he will.  Besides, the boys said he's gone, and I believe them.”

“Now that's surprising,” she said with an amused little huff.  “Those paranoid pups really think he won't be back?”

“From what I understand, there used to be some sort of connection between them and the doctor.  I guess that must be how he kept finding them.”  It had taken a few long discussions for that particular piece of information to stick, but eventually it had.  Grillby simply had to place his focus kids rather than the man who had made them.  They spoke of a bond like an invisible thread, linking the pair of them together and tethering them to the one they feared most.  It had stretched thin, they said, pulled as if through immeasurable distance, until it could no longer be seen or felt at all.  Now only the tie between the brothers remained.  Sans had looked up at him with a rare and genuine smile, one eye socket lit up with dazzling blue, and Grillby hadn't had the heart to question his claim.  

“I think I remember something like that in the book.”  Dogaressa shook her head, letting out a frustrated growl under her breath.  “I'm even forgetting things about the pups now?”

Grillby reached across the table and gently took the mug from her clenched hands before she could accidentally crack it.  “It'll get easier.  At least, I think so.  Whatever happened back there, it's erased the doctor from our world.  The three of us remember more than we should, even with everything we've forgotten.”  And if his migraines were any indication, that likely wasn't a good thing.  He didn't know how long they could hold out against it, or if they should even try.  “Anyway, with him gone it erased that connection as well.  Sans and Papyrus can't sense him anymore.  They seem fairly confident that it means he's really gone.”

Dogaressa chuckled.  “And who are we to argue with that?”

From elsewhere in the apartment they could hear a distant thud and a young voice raised not in alarm but in shrill delight.  It sounded like Papyrus was bouncing off the walls in the living room.  Perhaps literally.  

“Should we go save Dogamy?” Grillby asked, lighthearted amusement helping to drive his headache into submission.  

Dogaressa grinned, subtle and sincere.  “In a bit.”

In a little while, they would brave the chaos of the living room to rejoin the others, completing a mismatched family of three and the friends who were as close as family to them.  They would indulge childish enthusiasm and celebrate curiosity, making the time to listen to every question, concern, and story.  They would do their best to give the children the life they deserved and pave the way for a kinder future far away from their nightmares.  

There would be time for all of it in the safety that their blood and tears had bought them.  But for now, these two friends were content to sit together in comfortable silence, the journal lying untouched between them.

#the nightmare that no one asked for #To Last the Night #Undertale fic #baby blaster au #gaster blaster au #the nightmare ends

[lancecarr]

How to Solve 10 Common Training Problems With Video

Most trainers, both formal and informal, have the same goal: to make learning that sticks.

The problem with that is, well, problems. There are tons of roadblocks that come up when you’re trying to get other people to absorb information, especially if you’re not the subject matter expert.

In this post, we examine ten pain points that video training addresses – the first of which is the time and money spent on face-to-face learning for repetitive tasks.

Problem #1: Face-to-face training is time-consuming and expensive

Thorough training for employees is entirely necessary for facilitating productivity and safety, but it can quickly become time-consuming and expensive. U.S. companies spent an estimated $70.65 billion on training in 2016 and, on average, lost 53.8 productivity hours per employee while getting them acclimated, according to Training Magazine’s 2016 “Training Industry Report.” 

In most cases, scaling back training is not viable, especially for health care, finance, government, and other strictly regulated industries. But high-quality training in less time is a real possibility and is necessary for businesses that want to curb costs and inconveniences tied to face-to-face job preparation. 

Step one is to replace certain face-to-face orientations and training with video-based learning content. In-person training occupies the schedule of at least two people at any given time – the trainee and the employee administering that training. 

Recommended Reading: The Ultimate Guide to Easily Make Instructional Videos

While nuanced functions inevitably require physical demonstrations, more universal tasks such as filling out time cards or basic, repetitive knowledge work can be proficiently communicated with a well-produced series of on-screen demonstrations and lectures. 

Moving appropriate face-to-face training to video-based training can reduce time, and therefore money. Record it once, share it as many times as you need. 

Problem #2: Schedules can be a nightmare to coordinate

Time spent in face-to-face training sessions is often preceded by an uphill battle to coordinate schedules. Additionally, training coordinators are often under pressure to complete training within tight timeframes. 

This is a struggle given how many people’s schedules need to be considered: 

HR reps responsible for administering and/or coordinating training sessions.

IT team members needed to help with demonstration setups.

Subject matter experts brought in from other departments or locations.

New learners, who are all too easily double-booked as they ramp up. 

Higher-level managers requesting to sit in on certain sessions. 

The beauty of video-based training is that it can be easily recorded at a time that is convenient for those administering the session, and slotted into trainees’ schedules without excessive coordination between multiple parties. Sessions can also be saved and shared through web-based platforms to be used later as teams grow. 

This way, nothing, and no one, falls through the cracks. 

Problem #3: Training across the globe is difficult

Training is often a national or multinational endeavor that requires extensive resources and coordination. The costs of traveling to and from different office locations, and, in some cases, renting space to hold a training session, really add up. Meanwhile, coordinating schedules around multiple time zones can quickly become a hairsplitting exercise.

Language barriers can also present problems during training seminars, requiring translators to make sure everyone gets value from the experience. 

All of this begs the question: Is the cost and complexity of global training justified? 

In some cases, yes. But often, video can be used as a substitute. For instance, when onboarding new personnel, you can use screen recording or video editing software to record webinars and training demonstrations. These videos can then be edited to include captions or subtitles, translations or even quiz questions to gauge how well viewers are learning the content. More importantly, these training assets also work as scalable and repeatable resources. 

In other words, with video, organizations can create concise, compelling reference material that employees can view asynchronously and worldwide, and captioned in their language, as needed.

Problem #4: I’ve only got one shot to capture everything I need from my subject matter expert

Video-conferencing between two or more people is a great way to share information and ideas. It is also ideal for communicating complex and technical information that may be specific to certain specialists, for instance, in medical fields. 

This is because:

The brain processes imagery 60,000 times faster than words, according to Fast Company. 

Humans retain content with imagery better than audio content alone. 

But anyone who has participated in a meeting knows the feeling of trying to pay attention while also taking detailed notes. When the person on the other side of the screen is a busy subject matter expert who is not readily available, you need to ensure you get the right information the first time around. Or do you?

Screen recording and video editing tools let users record interviews so they can be 100-percent engaged during interviews and conversations.

Alternatively, a trainee could send a list of questions to a busy Subject Matter Expert (or SME), who can answer those questions in video-format. Either way, using video for SME interviews enables the creation of a permanent multimedia resource that can be played back on-demand at variable speeds, and even annotated with markers and notes if necessary. You can even get the video transcribed to turn the audio into text if needed.

Capture, consume, annotate, repeat.

Problem #5: The brain drain is real

In his book Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance, Jay Cross compared formal training to riding a bus, where the driver takes you where you need to be, and informal training to riding a bike, where you make your own route, according to Brainshark.

Just as you might need a bus one day and a bike another, formal and informal video-based learning both have their place in the modern business. 

Formal training is effective for establishing a knowledge base for new employees. It’s also crucial for inflexible processes such as medical protocols and compliance management. Processes like this need to be exact, and therefore conveyed in a procedural manner rather than as ad hoc lessons learned. Formal training is typically given in a deliberate order, by a specific and sometimes certified trainer, within a required time frame – for example, an engineering safety procedure video series. 

Informal training happens more on a learn-as-you-go basis. For example, imagine your company has a data management system that was built in house, but the employees who built it are leaving or retiring. All of their expertise and knowledge will also leave with them, causing a void in knowledge that will be difficult to fill. Informal training can solve this through employees creating training videos around their own areas of expertise. As business processes evolve and become more efficient, employees might create video content that shares self-learned best practices. 

The great thing is, you can create both formal and informal training programs with video and screencasts easily and affordably across your entire organization. 

Problem #6: I work with smart people. How do I learn from them?

There is a lot of value in a well-produced series of onboarding videos that help employees acclimate to their roles quickly and inexpensively. But there’s also value in the organic development of a training community that employees can contribute to, and learn from, ad hoc. 

This process, called social learning, doesn’t happen formally, or at management’s request. Rather, it’s the natural outcome of democratizing visual communication tools. Case in point, if someone who is asked to explain pivot tables enough times has access to easy to use video creation tools, they might just go ahead and record a quick “How To” video. 

The second part of that is having a hub where these videos can be uploaded and shared with a relevant audience. 

With intuitive screen capture tools and a collaborative sharing platform, workplace knowledge and training can be crowdsourced. 

Problem #7: Slide decks get boring…fast

Slide decks fulfill a useful function: to organize and present content-heavy training sessions with short, bullet-point summations and visual media. 

The problem is that too many slide decks fail at the “ visual media” element by not using images or media at all. The goal of any good slide deck should be to tell a story, not to read facts and information from a screen verbatim. Part of telling that story is showing the audience something that visually communicates the message. 

One of the best ways to avoid creating a mundane or overwhelming slide deck is to include screenshots, GIFs and video clips. Presenters can visually annotate screenshots to more effectively illustrate their points. No more excessively long, bulleted lists. 

Video and animated GIFs also liven up the presentation. 

Whoever said slide decks have to be boring? 

Problem #8: Remember that training from three months ago? Me neither…

The biggest drawback of traditional, in-person training sessions and written training manuals is that it’s easy to forget the content, and hard to find it when you need it later. Instead of digging back through past notes from training sessions, what if the initial training had been recorded, and then broken into several short videos? 

The videos would serve as short, digestible content that can be absorbed quickly, but also passively. In other words, it can be watched over and over again as needed, and with very little work on the part of the employee. Just record the original training, and break it up into microvideos for anyone to watch when they need to. 

Another option is to include a table of contents for training videos, which let viewers jump to the most relevant topics in the video, depending on their needs at the time. 

Present it once, watch it once and reference it as many times as you need. 

Problem #9: So much training, so little time

Companies are taking twice as long to hire than they were just a few years ago, The Wall Street Journal noted. Understandably, managers are therefore eager to get new employees trained quickly. This means businesses are under pressure to teach employees faster in a shorter time period. 

However, managers also don’t want to leave new hires feeling unprepared to handle tasks being thrown at them – which is too often the case. According to HR Morning, approximately one-third of hires quit within the first six months of employment, and the fourth most commonly cited reason for leaving is “inadequate training.”

One way companies have sought to change this is by using video to more effectively convey information in an engaging, memorable format. According to Forrester, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch training videos than to read training documentation.

As an added bonus for employers, many video editors let you add quiz questions to check if your viewer is learning the content correctly, so trainers can keep tabs on user progress. 

With more friendly video creation tools on the market, it’s easier than ever to create engaging videos that include motion graphics, effects, and captions, rather than just a trainer talking through the content. Give the people what they want–engaging video-based training content that presents a message concisely and memorably–and they’ll be more likely to give you what you want: a shorter learning curve and a longer tenure.

Problem #10: Scaling training is complicated

Last but not least, as businesses grow and change, training must change with it to stay fresh. 

A notable benefit of using video and other eLearning media is that you can create and share more training content in less time. Rather than developing a series of slide decks, coordinating schedules and delivering multiple sessions to users, training coordinators can focus on the production of multimedia training resources that can be delivered to trainees without any of the physical presentations or scheduling challenges. 

Another big benefit of video-based training content is that you can always edit it if the content needs to be changed or updated, and then simply redistribute the updated content instead of calling everyone back together for face-to-face training. 

Additionally, video enables the sharing of knowledge, presentations, and demonstrations among employees and ensures that there’s a community for both formal and informal learning. 

Lights, camera, training. 

Ready to start solving your training problems with video? Camtasia is the best all-in-one screen recorder and video editor that’s helped millions of video-beginners quickly create great instructional videos. Try it now!

The post How to Solve 10 Common Training Problems With Video appeared first on Welcome to the TechSmith Blog.

https://www.techsmith.com/blog/solve-training-problems-video/

[oliverarditi]

A memory of speech

We speak, and sometimes we are heard. An impression remains in the memory of our auditors, and although it is not our speech, we and they treat it as such. Eventually, that recollection is occulted or extinguished, in both speaker and auditor, and for the most part, no trace remains of the utterance. This is no longer the fate of speech in the formal circumstances of the public lecture, which is probably recorded by members of the audience, and which is also likely to be the spoken counterpart to a set of lecture notes that will be freely distributed at some point; but in the past, recording was unlikely or impossible, and there was probably only one set of lecture notes, which would almost certainly be lost to posterity, even if the lecturer in question was sufficiently notable that their papers ended up in some institutional archive. It is perhaps ironic that the theorisation of language which fundamentally informs this and many other discussions, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, was the posthumously published reconstruction of a series of lectures, as recalled by two of Saussure’s students. This multiply mediated utterance, which is less significant to the modern practice of linguistics than it is to the philosophical understanding of discourse and epistemology, to social theory, to anthropology, and to the analysis of literature, projects the impression of Saussure’s speech far beyond the context of its initial production and reception, more or less by an accident of circumstance. A similar accident of circumstance has preserved a detailed trace of a series of lectures given by Jorge Luis Borges in 1966, in his capacity as professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

The lectures collected in Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature were recorded on tape by students, for the benefit of their fellows who were unable to attend, and at some point soon thereafter, painstakingly transcribed; the tapes are lost, and were presumably re-used for other lectures given by other teaching staff. The introduction neglects to mention when the transcriptions came to light, but copyright in the Spanish text is asserted from 2000, and the English translation from 2013. The introduction does give a brief account of the editing process, which was challenging in the extreme. Although the students were scrupulous in setting down exactly what was on the tape, and assuming their good faith, we can have some confidence in the accuracy of the record, they were unfamiliar with the names of English writers, the titles of English books, and indeed the English language, transcribing such terms phonetically, with often near-indecipherable results. Contextual clues and meticulous research allowed the editors to identify the works and authors cited, but it was a time-consuming process. All of which serves to emphasise how tenuous the survival of our cultural memory can be. It is not Borges’s utterance that has survived, with its many particularities of tone of voice, of the reading of the students he invited to recite certain passages, of the noise from the street outside, the temperature and humidity of the lecture hall, the mood and behaviour of the students. But this textual memory is, as the students noted at the bottom of each transcribed lecture, ‘a faithful version’.

The recovery of these lectures has not set the world of literary studies alight. Borges does not proffer any particular theorisation of his topic, let alone one which could compare to that found in Saussure’s literary revenant, and his account is unlikely to upset the established narratives of literary history. It is not the consequence of research, but simply of reading. However, the book offers a (to me) fascinating insight into an aspect of Borges and his thought that is little known internationally. His view of English literature is an entirely idiosyncratic one, which sees literally nothing worthy of detailed examination (and only three authors even worthy of mention) between the latest Old English texts and James Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson.

It was a surprise to me to learn that Borges was a scholar of Old English, one that brought him even closer to home than I already held him as one of my several literary parents. I was brought up by an Anglo-Saxonist, to a certain extent among Anglo-Saxonists, as my mother’s undergraduate training coincided with the years in which I tried to avoid attending secondary school, and the small surviving body of Old English literature has always figured as significant in my understanding of the literary universe. Borges published some translations from Old English into Spanish, and according to one anecdote he relates regarding a visit to a church in the north of England, was able to extemporise a rough translation without reference materials to hand; a full quarter of his lecture series is devoted to Old English literature.

For someone who is remembered as an author of tricksy literary conceits, and regarded as a hard-edged analytical thinker, positioned posthumously in the pantheon of twentieth-century writers alongside some of the most intellectually demanding figures in literature, Borges comes across here as somewhat of a romantic. He has a great deal of affection for nineteenth century authors such as Dickens, whose sentimentality he regards as a strength, and for those associated with the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements. He is as interested in the music of language as in its intellectual content. Borges’ love of literature is the strongest theme that emerges; there is no systematic agenda or single analytical narrative that runs through the lectures. To a large extent the story he tells seems to be the account of an enthusiastic bibliophile rather than an analytical critic, which may be surprising in the person of a professor of English Literature, but seems to me consistent with his own work, which is that of a philosopher using the medium of fiction, rather than someone with any interest in continuing or developing any established narrative traditions.

If there is any critical thesis to be discerned in this book, it is an implicit one, which can be inferred from the heavy emphasis Borges places on the affective qualities of writing, and on Old English literature; clearly Borges regarded that body of writing as important to the history English literature, something which seems to be at variance with the broad critical consensus. Perhaps a story of the aesthetic qualities of English remains to be written, one which could relate the ‘iron language’ Borges so admired in the pre-Norman corpus to the rhythms and timbres of modern prose; or perhaps such theses have already been considered and rejected in the critical literature, in which I am not particularly well-versed.

Reading this book in Sicily, where I had recently seen a striking photographic portrait of Borges in Ferdinando Scianna’s exhibition Journey, Story, Memory at the GAM, felt quite apposite. For Borges, there is an important historical hiatus in the story of English literature, at the arrival of the Normans. The same is true in Sicily, but it is the inverse of what Borges saw in writing in English. In Sicily the Norman conquest heralded the dawn of the Arabo-Norman age, in which all subsequent Sicilian culture waters its roots. In Borges’s England the defeat of Harold Godwinson is the death of writing, which continues only in French among a foreign elite to whom England is a colony, and although writing in English begins again, it is not until the eighteenth century that anything worth reading emerges. By this time it is a hybrid language, and its literary traditions are cultural hybrids, which is nothing that Borges seems to find unpalatable, but he certainly seems to value the cultural singularity of the Old English literary canon. In Sicily, whose indigenes were first colonised by the Phoenicians, culture can never appear unalloyed.

The chapters of this book are translated transcriptions of largely extemporised verbal lectures, presumably given without notes, as Borges was completely blind by the late 1950s, and as a consequence they are not quite as orderly as if they had been written. There is some to-ing and fro-ing, there are some unclear sentences, he forgets things, and recalls them later, interjecting them in some subsequent discussion. His tone of voice is clear, however; it is the same voice that can be heard in his many thought-provoking essays, treating ideas and language with the same playful affection. The book is probably best fitted to disciples and Borges ultras, but it is also an engaging tour through an alternative version of what English literature has been, and as a newly minted literary memory of a writer whose enormous reputation rests on rather few published words, it is as precious to me as it is rare.

[phanficminr]

Fifty shades of phan: chapter 1

Warnings: none

Cast: https://phanficminr.tumblr.com/post/160124305810/fifty-shades-of-phan-character-placement

Chapter 2: https://phanficminr.tumblr.com/post/161158583560/fifty-shades-of-phan-chapter-2.

Fifty shades of phan _____________________________________ I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror, Damn my hair-it just won’t behave, and damn Louise Pentland for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal, I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the tan, brown-haired boy with brown eyes too big for his face staring back at me, and give up. My only option is to run my hand through a couple times and I hope I look semi presentable.

Luoise Pentland is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu.

Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she’d arranged to do, with some mega-industri-alist tycoon I’ve never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish, and I’m supposed to be working this afternoon, but no - today I have to drive a hundred and sixty-five miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Lester Enterprises Holdings Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our University, his time is extraordinarily precious - much more precious than mine - but he has granted Luoise an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extra-curricular activities.

Louise is huddled on the couch in the living room. “Dan,I’m sorry. It took me nine months to get this interview. It will take another six to reschedule, and we’ll both have graduated by then. As the editor, I can’t blow this off. Please,” luoise begs me in her rasping, sore throat voice. How does she do it even ill she looks gamine and gorgeous, strawberry blonde hair in place and blue eyes bright, although now red-rimmed and runny. I ignore my pang of unwelcome sympathy.

“Of course I’ll go Luoise . You should get back to bed. Would you like some Nyquil or Tylenol?”

“Nyquil, please. Here are the questions and my mini-disc recorder. Just press record here. Make notes, I’ll transcribe it all.”

“I know nothing about him,” I murmur, trying and failing to suppress my rising panic.

“The questions will see you through. Go. It’s a long drive. I don’t want you to be late.”

“Okay, I’m going. Get back to bed. I made you some soup to heat up later.” I stare at her fondly. Only for you, luoise,would I do this. “I will. Good luck. And thanks Dan-as usual, you’re my lifesaver. Oh and you are wearing that” she asked judgmentally. I slightly looked down at myself then towards her and said “Okay less talking…” I thought for a moment then mimicking a spoon I continued “more eating”.

We both chuckled. Gathering my satchel, I smile wryly at her, then head out the door to the car. I cannot believe I have let Luoise talk me into this. But then Luoise can talk anyone into anything. She’ll make an exceptional journalist. She’s articulate, strong, persuasive, argumentative, beautiful - and she’s my dearest, dearest friend.

Louise’s lent me her sporty Mercedes CLK. I’m not sure Wanda, my old VW Beetle, would make the journey in time. Oh, the Merc is a fun drive, and the miles slip away as I floor the pedal to the metal.

My destination is the headquarters of Mr. Lester’s global enterprise. It’s a huge twenty-story office building, all curved glass and steel, an architect’s utilitarian fantasy, with Lester House written discreetly in steel over the glass front doors. It’s a quarter to two when I arrive, greatly relieved that I’m not late as I walk into the enormous - and frankly intimidating - glass, steel, and white sandstone lobby. Behind the solid sandstone desk, a very attractive, groomed, blonde young woman smiles pleasantly at me. She’s wearing the sharpest charcoal suit jacket and white shirt I have ever seen. She looks immaculate.

“I am here to see Mr. Lester. Daniel Howell for Louise Pentland” “Excuse me one moment, Mister Howell .” She arches her eyebrow slightly as I stand self-consciously before her. I am beginning to wish I’d borrowed one of Luoise’s formal blazers rather than wear my navy blue jacket. I have made an effort and worn my one and only jeans, my sensible brown boots and a blue sweater. For me, this is smart. I tuck one of the escaped tendrils of my hair behind my ear as I pretend she doesn’t intimidate me.

“Miss pentland is expected. Please sign in here, Mister Howell You’ll want the last elevator on the right, press for the twentieth floor.” She smiles kindly at me, amused no doubt, as I sign in. She hands me a security pass that has VISITOR very firmly stamped on the front. I can’t help my smirk. Surely it’s obvious that I’m just visiting. I don’t fit in here at all. Nothing changes, I inwardly sigh. Thanking her, I walk over to the bank of elevators past the two security men who are both far more smartly dressed than I am in their well-cut black suits. The elevator whisks me with terminal velocity to the twentieth floor. The doors slide open, and I’m in another large lobby - again all glass, steel, and white sandstone. I’m confronted by another desk of sandstone and another young blonde woman dressed impeccably in black and white who rises to greet me.

“Miss Pentland ?” Blonde number two asks expectedly ,while taking off my blue jacket I answer “oh…no..I am Dan- miss Pentland is-” I get interrupted as another woman gestures forwards and says “ mr. Lester will see you now,” Blonde Number Two says. I stand rather shakily trying to suppress my nerves. Gathering up my satchel and make my way to the partially open door.

I push open the door and stumble through, tripping over my own feet, and falling head first into the office. Double crap - me and my two left feet! I am on my hands and knees in the doorway to Mr. Lester’s office, and gentle hands are around me helping me to stand. I am so embarrassed, damn my clumsiness. I have to steel myself to glance up. Holy cow - he’s so young. “Miss..mister pentland.” He extends a long-fingered hand to me once I’m upright. “I’m Phil Lester . Are you all right, would you like to sit?” So young - and attractive, very attractive. He’s tall, dressed in a fine gray suit, white shirt, and black tie with unruly dark copper colored hair and intense, bright gray eyes that regard me shrewdly. It takes a moment for me to find my voice.

Um. Actually - “ I mutter. If this guy is over thirty then I’m a monkey’s uncle. In a daze, I place my hand in his and we shake. As our fingers touch, I feel an odd exhilarating shiver run through me. I withdraw my hand hastily, embarrassed. Must be static. I blink rapidly, my eyelids matching my heart rate.

“Miss Pentland is indisposed, so she sent me. I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Lester.” “And you are?” His voice is warm, possibly amused, but it’s difficult to tell from his impassive expression. He looks mildly interested, but above all, polite. “Daniel Howell . I’m studying English Literature with luo , um… Luoise …um… Miss Pentland at Washington State.” “I see,” he says simply. I think I see the ghost of a smile in his expression, but I’m not sure. “Would you like to sit?” He waves me toward a white leather buttoned L-shaped couch. His office is way too big for just one man. In front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, there’s a huge modern dark-wood desk that six people could comfortably eat around. It matches the coffee table by the couch. Everything else is white - ceiling, floors, and walls except, on the wall by the door, where a mosaic of small paintings hang, thirty-six of them arranged in a square. They are exquisite - a series of mundane, forgotten objects painted in such precise detail they look like photographs. Displayed together, they are breathtaking.

Apart from the paintings, the rest of the office is cold, clean, and clinical. I wonder if it reflects the personality of the Adonis who sinks gracefully into one of the white leather chairs opposite me. I shake my head, disturbed at the direction of my thoughts, and retrieve Luoise’s questions from my satchel. Next, I set up the mini-disc recorder and am all fingers and thumbs, dropping it twice on the coffee table in front of me. Mr. Lester says nothing, waiting patiently - I hope - as I become increasingly embarrassed and flustered. When I pluck up the courage to look at him, he’s watching me, one hand relaxed in his lap and the other cupping his chin and trailing his long index finger across his lips. I think he’s trying to suppress a smile. “Sorry,” I stutter. “I’m not used to this.” “Take all the time you need, Mister Howell ,” he says. “Do you mind if I record your answers?” “After you’ve taken so much trouble to set up the recorder - you ask me now?” I flush. He’s teasing me I hope. I blink at him, unsure what to say, and I think he takes pity on me because he relents. “No, I don’t mind.” “Did Luoise, I mean, Miss Pentland , explain what the interview was for?” “Yes. To appear in the graduation issue of the student newspaper as I shall be conferring the degrees at this year’s graduation ceremony.” Oh! This is news to me, and I’m temporarily pre-occupied by the thought that someone not much older than me - okay, maybe four years or so, and okay, mega successful, but still - is going to present me with my degree. I frown, dragging my wayward attention back to the task at hand. “Good,” I swallow nervously. “I have some questions, Mr. Lester.” I smooth a stray lock of hair behind my ear.

“I thought you might,” he says, deadpan. He’s laughing at me. My cheeks heat at the realization, and I sit up and square my shoulders in an attempt to look taller and more intimidating. Pressing the start button on the recorder, I try to look professional.

“You’re very young to have amassed such an empire. To what do you owe your success?” I glance up at him. His smile is rueful, but he looks vaguely disappointed.

“Business is all about people, Mister Howell , and I’m very good at judging people. I know how they tick, what makes them flourish, what doesn’t, what inspires them.” He pauses and fixes me with his blue stare. “. I work hard, very hard to do that. I make decisions based on logic and facts. I have a natural gut instinct that can spot and nurture a good solid idea and good people. The bottom line is, it’s always down to good people.”

“Maybe you’re just lucky.” This isn’t on Luoise’s list - but he’s so arrogant. His eyes flare momentarily in surprise.

“I don’t subscribe to luck or chance, Mister Howell.The harder I work the more luck I seem to have. It really is all about having the right’” “You sound like a control freak.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.“Oh, I exercise control in all things, Mister Howell ,” he says without a trace of humor in his smile. I look at him, and he holds my gaze steadily, impassive. My heartbeat quickens, and my face flushes again.

And do you have any interests outside your work?“ “I have varied interests, Mister Howell .” A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “Very varied.” And for some reason, I’m confounded and heated by his steady gaze. His eyes are alight with some wicked thought. I glance quickly at Luoise’s questions, wanting to get off this subject. “You invest in manufacturing. Why, specifically?” I ask. Why does he make me so uncomfortable?

“I like to build things. I like to know how things work: what makes things tick, how to construct and deconstruct. And I have a love of ships. What can I say?” “That sounds like your heart talking rather than logic and facts.” His mouth quirks up, and he stares appraisingly at me.

“Possibly. Though there are people who’d say I don’t have a heart.” “Why would they say that?” “Because they know me well.” His lip curls in a wry smile.

“You also invest in farming technologies. Why are you interested in this area?” “We can’t eat money, Miss howell, and there are too many people on this planet who don’t have enough to eat.” “That sounds very philanthropic. Is it something you feel passionately about feeding the world’s poor?” He shrugs, very non-committal. “It’s shrewd business,” he murmurs, though I think he’s being disingenuous. It doesn’t make sense - feeding the world’s poorI can’t see the financial benefits of this, only the virtue of the ideal. I glance at the next question, confused by his attitude.

“You were adopted. How far do you think that’s shaped the way you are?” Oh, this is personal. I stare at him, hoping he’s not offended. His brow furrows.

“That’s a matter of public record, Mister Howell .” His tone is stern. I flush, again. Crap. Yes of course - if I’d known I was doing this interview, I would have done some research.

“Sorry.” I squirm, and he’s made me feel like an errant child. “Do you have an actual question mister Howell?” He asks me with a sigh.

“Are you gay, Mr. Lester?” He inhales sharply, and I cringe, mortified. Crap. Why didn’t I employ some kind of filter before I read this straight out how can I tell him I’m just reading the questions? Damn Luoise and her curiosity!

“No Daniel,I’m not.” He raises his eyebrows, a cool gleam in his eyes. He does not look pleased. “I apologize. It’s um… written here.” It’s the first time he’s said my name. My heartbeat has accelerated, and my cheeks are heating up again. Nervously, I tuck my loosened hair behind my ear. He cocks his head to one side. “These aren’t your own questions?” The blood drains from my head. Oh no. “Err… no. Luoise - Miss Pentland - she compiled the questions.”

“That explains a lot” he says. He rubs his chin in quiet deliberation, his blue eyes appraising me.

“Mr. Lester, forgive me for interrupting, but your next meeting is in two minutes.” “We’re not finished here, . Please cancel my next meeting.”

Emma hesitates, gaping at him. She’s appears lost. He turns his head slowly to face her and raises his eyebrows. She flushes bright pink. Oh good. It’s not just me.

“Very well, Mr. Lester,” she mutters, then exits. He frowns, and turns his attention back to me. “Where were we, Mister Howell ?” Oh, we’re back to ‘Mister Howell’ now. “Please don’t let me keep you from anything.” “I want to know about you. I think that’s only fair.” His blue eyes are alight with curiosity. Double crap. Where’s he going with this, he places his elbows on the arms of the chair and steeples his fingers in front of his mouth. His mouth is very… distracting. I swallow. “There’s not much to know about me"I say, flushing again. “What are your plans after you graduate?” “Well I was planning on moving to Seattle with Luoise” I reply nodding. “We run an excellent internship program here,” he says quietly. I raise my eyebrows in surprise. Is he offering me a job?

“I don’t really think I’d fit in here” I reply looking down with a dry chuckle “I mean look at me”.

“I am” he replies smirking. I gulp and stand up “Thank you for the meeting mr. Lester”

He stands up too, His long index finger presses the button summoning the elevator, and we stand waiting - awkwardly on my part, coolly self-possessed on his.

The doors open, and I hurry in desperate to escape. I really need to get out of here. When I turn to look at him, he’s leaning against the doorway beside the elevator with one hand on the wall. He really is very, very good-looking. It’s distracting. His burning blue eyes gaze at me.

“Daniel,” he says as a farewell.

“Phil,” I reply. And mercifully, the doors close.

A/N: do u guys want a second chapter

#fifty shades of phan #fifty shades #louise pentland #Danisnotonfire #amazingphill #dan Howell #Phil Lester #phanfic #fanfic #fluff #phan #phan smut

[bluewatsons]

Amelia Thorpe, Hegel’s Hipsters: Claiming Ownership in the Contemporary City, 27 Social & Legal Stud 25 (2018)

Abstract

Property is both revered and reviled. Praised for its connections to autonomy, agency, power and community, property attracts scorching critiques for its implication in exclusion, inequality and injustice. This article provides a new perspective from which to examine this dual nature of property. Drawing on fieldwork in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, property is examined in the context of citizen and community-led ‘do-it-yourself’ interventions in the urban environment. Perhaps even more than in formal planning processes, claims about ownership are central to these activities. Finding multiple forms of property at work in the city, and noting that formal legal title is often less important than more informal ownership, this article sheds new light on some of the oldest debates in property. Amongst echoes of Lockean labour-based theory, Hegelian personhood theory emerges as particularly helpful in explaining the intimate connections between property and identity, community and power in the city.

Introduction

Property, according to some, is at the heart of many of the great problems of society. From Marx through to campaigners for decolonization, property has been blamed for injustices from the exploitation of workers to the exclusion of minorities, from the dispossession of indigenous peoples to the entrenchment of gender inequality and, more recently, vast environmental degradation (Blomley, 2004; Burdon, 2015; Davies, 2007; Graham, 2011). Yet property is also highly valued and deeply desired, connected to powerful human needs for autonomy, power, belonging and community (Alexander and Peñalver, 2010; Davies, 2007). This dual character of property raises questions about the source, the scope and the strength of property rights. Where does property come from, and why do others respect property claims?

These are questions that have long troubled property scholars. In this article, I examine them through a range of informal or ‘do-it-yourself (DIY)’ interventions in the urban environment: activities like street art, pop-up restaurants and community gardens. Amidst increasing concern about the forces of neo-liberalism and globalization, the concentrations of wealth, power and property in a rapidly shrinking proportion of society have attracted heated responses. In contrast to the more direct and dramatic challenges posed by actions like squatting, the Occupy movement or the 2016 rent strikes at University College London, the practices considered here question the neo-liberal property regime in more subtle ways.

Although DIY urban interventions may seem far removed from either the theories or the challenges that animate property discourse, they provide important insights about its nature. As Andres Van Der Walt (2009) has argued, there is much that can be gained by approaching property from the margins. Unlike conventional accounts, a focus on the margins reveals the central role that both law and society give to property.

The marginal approach in this article reveals that property is multiple and dynamic, that it features in different ways for different people in different contexts, and that these shift in time and space. In DIY urban interventions, property law operates in conjunction with a more informal ‘sense of ownership’. Although distinct from legal title, a sense of ownership may provide many of the benefits sought from property in its conventional sense: inclusion, community, power and political voice. Ownership can impact formal property rights, shifting the scope and operation of legal frameworks in various ways: from triggering direct policy and regulatory changes to imposing more indirect constraints on the rights of landowners. The activities considered here thus provide further evidence of the way in which law must constantly ‘accommodate, and in certain circumstances appropriate, a vast array of meanings, logics, values, identities and cultural contexts emerging inside and outside of established jurisdictional lines’ (Darian-Smith, 2004: 546).

Beyond the particular activities in question, understanding a sense of ownership – its importance, its sources and its connection to community and to power – is valuable also for understanding property as an institution. The reasons for which a sense of ownership is sought, and the reasons for which other people respect such claims to ownership, shed light on the nature of property more generally.

The article begins with an overview of the various urban interventions on which it is based. I then discuss the claims that participants make about property in these activities, emphasizing the particular importance of a sense of ownership. This is followed by an examination of the ways in which participants understand such ownership, and particularly the ways in which it is produced. While noting echoes of labour-based property theories, the analysis reveals a much stronger emphasis on identity and relationality as the source of ownership, and in turn as central to its importance for participants and its impacts on others. The connections between property, power and community are considered in the final section. Ownership, rather than related concepts like community, is emphasized by participants because of its connection to agency and political voice. Property matters deeply.

Research for this article included semi-structured interviews over a period of 2 years with more than 65 people involved in various urban interventions in and around Sydney, Australia, Montreal, Canada, the California Bay Area, United States of America and Christchurch, New Zealand. This was supplemented by site visits with photo-ethnography and background research on practices, participants and contexts. Individuals were identified through online research, with invitations sent to participants from a range of different professions and organizations (designers, community workers, engagement professionals, officials, members of the public) as well as dates of engagement (some who had participated multiple times, some just once, some recently, some earlier). A snowball referral method and ongoing investigation yielded additional participants. Property was not specifically targeted until late in interviews, allowing themes to emerge from more open questions. Interviews were recorded and transcribed with participant consent. Transcripts were then coded thematically using nVivo software version 11.0.

Coding and analysis approximated the grounded theory approach set out by Kathy Charmaz (Charmaz, 2014), but, in line with David Snow, Calvin Morrill and Leon Anderson’s proposal, with attention given to the potential for the refinement of existing theories as well as theoretical discovery (Snow et al., 2003). Analysis was undertaken bearing in mind a range of property theories ‘more in terms of repertoires than blueprints’ (Snow et al., 2003: 193). The data and the field were revisited as certain theories emerged as particularly relevant, with the 2-year duration of research enabling the tailoring of later interviews to evolving theoretical refinements.

From Hipsters

The images below are two examples of the more than 40,000 street libraries (also known as book shares or little free libraries) now operating worldwide (Figure 1, Figure 2). Like these two, most are installed in front of a house, provided and maintained by the resident, with books taken and contributed by various members of the local community. Street libraries can be found by wandering down the street, or by searching on the website littlefreelibrary.org, an informal network for sharing advice and information about these installations. As the website explains, street libraries have been popular since around 2010 but draw on much longer traditions in their mission of ‘sharing good books and bringing people together’(Little Free Library, 2016).

Figures 1 and 2. Street libraries, Perth, Western Australia and Berkeley, California.

Street libraries are just one of many practices through which citizens and communities shape and reshape the city. Like street libraries, many of these practices are loosely connected, making use of online networks to share ideas and information. Community gardening, for example, is increasingly benefiting from organizations such as 596 acres in New York, which helps citizens to identify and access unused urban spaces in which to create parks, playgrounds and productive gardens (596 acres, n.d.). Some draw directly on international models, such as BellaStock, a practice originating in France in which communities (typically featuring large numbers of young designers) build temporary squares or villages in which they imagine and test alternative visions for the city, or Better Block, an approach first developed in Texas, in which citizens add features such as seating, trees, bike lanes and pop-up shops in an effort to catalyze more lasting change (Bellastock, 2016; Lydon and Garcia, 2015b; Roberts, 2010). Some are quite coordinated: Restaurant Day, an event originating in Helsinki, in which participants run pop-up restaurants (Hill, 2012; Human Futures, 2014), and PARK(ing) Day, an event originating in San Francisco, in which people around the world turn parking spaces into pop-up ‘parks’ (Merker, 2010), each take place around the world on identified days every year. Others are less formal, like ‘guerrilla knitting’ or ‘yarn bombing’, in which trees, street signs, bike racks and other elements of the urban environment are covered in (usually brightly coloured) woollen decorations (Figure 6; Moore and Prain, 2009), street art, from graffiti to officially sanctioned murals (McAuliffe and Iveson, 2011), infrastructure repair, in which citizens take it upon themselves to build or maintain infrastructure such as pedestrian crossings, bike lanes and ramps to improve accessibility in the local environment (Figures 4 and 5; Lydon and Garcia, 2015b; Urban Repair Squad, n.d.), or urban exploration, the practice of ‘recreational trespass’ into closed and abandoned spaces, largely infrastructure and industrial sites (Garrett, 2014b: 1). The list goes on.

The past two decades have seen a burgeoning recognition among urban scholars, policymakers and the development industry that such interventions matter to the city. Described under various labels – from ‘guerrilla’ to ‘tactical’, ‘informal’ to ‘everyday’, ‘DIY’ to ‘insurgent’ – these activities have been the subject of numerous books, exhibitions, symposia and other events (Beekmans and Boer, 2014; Begg and Stickells, 2011; Chase et al., 2008; Hou, 2010; Lydon and Garcia, 2015b). A growing number of professionals are proclaiming expertise in the deployment of these interventions, and ‘placemakers’ are now regularly engaged by municipal and state authorities as well as real-estate development teams (Legge, 2015).

Figure 3. Village au pied du courant, Montreal.

Figures 4 and 5. Do-it-yourself (DIY) chalk and painted infrastructure adjustments, Sydney.

Figures 6 and 7. Guerilla knitting, Sydney, Dance-O-Mat, Christchurch.

It is difficult to say whether DIY urban interventions are more prevalent now, or simply more visible. Street art and gardening, for example, have long and well-documented histories (Gaynor, 2006; Lawson, 2005; Lewisohn, 2008; McCormick et al., 2010). Precedents can be found for apparently newer practices also: well-before the first PARK(ing) Day, in the 1930s activists in Oklahoma City paid a parking meter and used the space to play games (Crossen, 2007). Contemporary pop-ups are often visually appealing, making them well-suited to online sharing which in turn means they are certainly more thoroughly recorded than in the past (the summer-long pop-up village in Figure 3, for example, or the washing machine converted into a set of coin-operated speakers beside an open-air dancefloor in Figure 7). Increased attention from authorities and commercial interests fits with the greater emphasis on participatory and collaborative approaches across planning policy and practice in recent decades (Clifford and Tewdwr-Jones, 2013), and with efforts to foster a ‘creative class’ as a way to enhance growth and competitiveness more generally (Florida, 2012; Peck, 2005). More cynically, such interest might be understood in the context of state withdrawal from the provision of public services, support for DIY approaches as part of the shift toward ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ and the devolving of responsibility to citizens and the private sector (Peck, 2014). Although raising many fascinating and important questions, examination of the historical, political and economic context for these activities is beyond the scope of this article.

Considering these activities together masks significant diversity, with vast differences in the aims, techniques and impacts of various activities. Accordingly, the mushrooming of groupings in the various publications and other fora outlined above – as in this article – can be critiqued for what they obscure. Some DIY interventions are conceived with a strong social and environmental justice agenda, often using language of the right to the city. For others, concerns about exclusion, displacement and gentrification are far more relevant. There is a very wide disparity between a day-long park installed as part of a marketing campaign by Coca Cola and a day-long health clinic provided to help meet the needs of a vulnerable community. Such distinctions are important, and in other work I have attempted to address them (Thorpe, Moore and Stickells, 2017), but they are beyond the scope of this article.

Treating these activities together can also be revealing. The grouping here traces connections that emerged in the process of fieldwork, in line with George Marcus’ call for a multisited research imaginary (Marcus, 1995, 2010). Many of the interviews and observations on which this article is based focused on particular activities, yet participants rarely spoke about those activities in isolation. Among other things, questions about gardens prompted answers about pop-up restaurants and the sharing economy, street parties generated discussions about street art and advocacy around cycling, PARK(ing) Day prompted responses about little libraries and infrastructure adjustments, parklets led to discussions of street modifications and music performances on the backs of trucks. Participants are almost always involved in multiple activities and discussion of one intervention invariably flowed into discussion of another, often interchangeably.

Although many of these activities are fleeting and may appear fanciful or frivolous, participants rarely understand their engagement in this way. As I will argue below, participation in DIY urban interventions is tied to understandings of property, and particularly to the connections between property and feelings of identity, agency and belonging. Ostensibly different interventions may thus be animated by very similar concerns; participants seldom see them as separate or even separable. These commonalities are the focus of this article.

Property in the City

The people who engage in DIY urban interventions are varied. Participants range from activists to public servants, children to retirees, recent immigrants to long-standing community members, students to business owners and many others. Typically, however, they tend to be young professionals. Unlike participants in more protest-oriented activities, those involved in these practices are often doing relatively well in society. As others have noted, educated, middle class, White ‘millennials’ make up the vast majority of participants in DIY urbanism (Douglas, 2015).

Even with their relative privilege, many participants in DIY urban interventions are not property owners. Despite good degrees and promising careers, many are renting (or remain in the family home) well past the age at which their parents became homeowners, unable to purchase property anywhere near the jobs and services that matter to them. This was particularly clear among participants in Sydney and San Francisco, it was apparent in other cities also. These patterns are in line with global trends: reports are increasingly suggesting that purchasing a home is not even an aspiration for many young people (Lee, 2016; McGee, 2016; Rodgers, 2015).

Yet property is an important concern for participants. In the literature and in interviews, ownership is an issue that is frequently raised. In contrast to the more direct and dramatic challenges to ownership posed by actions like the Occupy movement, ownership is raised in more subtle ways. Perhaps because of their relative privilege and career prospects, participants emphasize less adversarial ownership claims.

Although disputes about legal title do arise, these are rarely the key concern for participants in DIY urban interventions.1 More often, participants emphasized instead the importance of a more informal ‘sense of ownership’. This is an open term, encompassing various sentiments: from connection to the particular place where the activity was undertaken, to much broader feelings of connection to the neighbourhood or even the city as a whole. This is my street, my neighbourhood, my city.

Ownership is more than a matter of personal feelings. Although ownership is not the same as law, the two are connected in important ways. A sense of ownership can be understood as an expression of legal consciousness, useful in explaining the ways in which the law is experienced and interpreted (Ewick and Silbey, 1998). Ownership is a type of social practice, one that both reflects and forms social structures.

A sense of ownership is often likened to belonging, invoking ideas of attachment, identity, connection to place and to community (Antonsich, 2010; Mee and Wright, 2009). In line with Davina Cooper’s (2007) analysis of property more generally, a sense of ownership can be understood as having two dimensions. One is a personal, intimate feeling of being ‘at home’, a relationship between the owner and the land. The other is more political, a discursive claim or challenge to inclusion or exclusion, a relationship between the owner and the wider community. These two aspects are important to understanding both the meaning of ownership and its significance. In its sense of feeling at home, ownership can be likened to stewardship, and in turn activities such as caring for parks, gardens and public spaces, sharing with neighbours and supporting local businesses.2 In its sense of feeling part of a community, ownership is linked with agency, empowerment and political voice.3

DIY urban practices can thus be understood less as a formal assertion of (or challenge to) legal title but instead as an expression of informal ownership. Dave Meslin (2013), founder of a community group in Toronto, describes a clear link between gardening and that informal sense of ownership with its associated feelings of belonging, empowerment and agency:

The funny thing about guerrilla gardening is that as soon as you stick that spoon through the top layer of soil, it’s like putting a flag on the moon. It’s like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant too perhaps. You’re saying, ‘this is mine’. And it might be the first time in your life that you’ve actually physically altered something outside of your private space. And it’s saying, ‘this doesn’t belong to anyone else except for me’. Not more, not exclusive to other people, but it doesn’t belong to anyone else more than it belongs to me. It belongs to us and we can shape it. And I think that’s a kind of a gateway drug that opens up doors in your mind. That if you could change that, you could also change your transit system, your library, your parks, your pools.

Concerns about ownership are apparent throughout the range of practices surveyed. Interestingly, such concerns are not limited to relatively long-term interventions like gardens. Claims about ownership appear also in small-scale and short-term practices like street libraries, PARK(ing) Day and Restaurant Day.

It’s the pleasure to appropriate the street. You feel like it’s a bit, it’s close to occupied, and it’s a reflection on it’s my city, it’s my street and I want to be a human that has his space and I am asking one day in the year just to use the space differently. (Gravel, 2015)

Ownership appears even in highly transient practices like urban exploration. Bradley Garrett, an academic and urban explorer, argues that urban exploration is a process of making visible the boundaries created through practices of regulation and surveillance, of ‘tak[ing] place back from exclusionary private and government forces, to redemocratise spaces urban inhabitants have lost control over’ (Garrett, 2014b: 4). Others make similar claims (McRae, 2008: 100). In discussing his own experience, Garrett (2014a) explains how feelings of ownership emerge through practice of urban exploration:

There’s this weird thing that happens after you explore a space. Battersea Power Station is a good example of this. After I had gone in there a few dozen times I started to feel this sense of ownership over the space. And I wanted to sort of protect it and keep other people out. It’s totally ironic, right….

To Hegel (via Locke)

In interviews, participants discussed the ways in which they gained a sense of ownership. In doing so, they provide striking parallels with some of the foundational stories of property. Perhaps unsurprisingly, interviews revealed echoes of that most influential property narrative, the account of labour-based appropriation. On closer examination, however, the interviews revealed a much stronger emphasis on personhood and identity. Hegel, rather than Locke, provides a better explanation for the source and strength of ownership claims.

The idea of property deriving from labour is typically traced to John Locke (1978) who argued that private property could be produced by mixing one’s labour with the things of the external world. Locke began with the premise that God gave the world to all (men) in common, and also ‘reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience’ (1978: 26). Accordingly, there must be a means to appropriate the fruits of nature so that they can be of use and benefit to particular men. The solution, he argued, derives from the property that every man has in his own person and the work of his body (Locke, 1978: 27). By picking up acorns from under an oak or gathering apples from trees in the wood, Locke argues, ‘that labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done, and so they became his private right’(1978: 28). This was a ‘law of reason’, necessary to enable the fruits of the commons to be of use (Locke, 1978: 30). Although Locke rejected the idea that property rights derive from the consent of others (1978: 28), he did concede that the scope for appropriation was limited by the requirement that ‘enough, and as good’ be left for others (1978: 27).

Locke’s theory has been subject to intense critique, for issues ranging from problems of reasoning to Locke’s implication in histories of dispossession and inequality (Alexander and Peñalver, 2012 ; Armitage, 2004; Arneil, 1996; Davies, 2007; Macpherson and Cunningham, 2011; Nozick, 1974). Questions about the amount of labour required for appropriation (as Robert Nozick asks, would tipping a can of soup into the sea be enough to claim it?), the justification for rights of infinite duration (well beyond the time necessary to derive benefit from the commons) and the workings of the ‘enough, and as good’ proviso (particularly in respect to Locke’s allowance that money could enable accumulation beyond the labourer’s immediate needs) are particularly problematic. Yet the labour story remains powerful, and efforts to resolve these issues in alternative labour-based theories have been made by numerous scholars (Becker, 1977; Buckle, 1991; Munzer, 1990; Nozick, 1974; Waldron, 1990).

The idea of labour as providing the justification for ownership appears also well beyond this literature. Perhaps because the idea of rewarding labour ‘seems intuitively just’ (Davies, 2007: 87), the labour story can be found in many places. In claims by long-term tenants for some sort of proprietary right to remain resident in the gentrifying Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Nicholas Blomley notes, ‘Perhaps implicit here is not only the claim of dignified rest, following an active life, but that of Lockean entitlement. By mixing his labour with the land, he has made the province “ours”; it is only appropriate that we respect his modest claim to his home’ (Blomley, 2004: 95). With respect to snow-filled streets, Richard Epstein and Susan Silbey each note strong echoes of Lockean theory in discussions about rights to park in dugout spaces (Epstein, 2002: 529; Silbey, 2010). Anders Corr (1999) describes how the labour theory is used by squatters to justify proprietary rights in places from New York to the Brazilian Amazon. At Summerhill School in England, Cooper finds a striking resonance with Locke’s labour-based theory in a student’s claims for possession of part of the school grounds that he had cleared (2014: 246).

Yet property is about more than labour. With respect to the parking spots dug out from snow, for example, other issues are clearly at play: the act of digging is generally accepted as sufficient for the appropriation of the parking space in front of one’s own home. Such claims would be more tenuous, however, for acts of digging in other locations – outside another person’s home, for example. For Robert Munzer, labour plays a significant but incomplete role in justifying property. Capturing factors that people commonly value, such as effort, ability, persistence, industriousness, time spent, achievement, responsibility, leadership and motivating capacity, labour provides an anchor for other principles (Munzer, 1990: 283).

In interviews, labour was rarely raised alone. Participants described labour alongside a wide range of factors such as time, social networks, responsibility, self-expression and identity. One particularly strong theme that emerged in the way participants described the process of developing the ownership necessary for participation is the connection between labour and self-expression.

You feel like it`s yours. You love that place…and you feel good, and you say, ‘that’s mine, well not mine, but I worked on it’. So it’s mine, so you want to protect it, like it’s your child, you know? (Tadeo and Di Marco, 2015)

after they’ve worked there, and they build something there that’s permanent – they got involved in it. Like, that place they came back in their free time to water the plants or just to look at insects, or they’ll work or there’s people looking at it. And they’ve been back to those places.…if you get involved, well after that you, you like that place if there’s change.…That you’ve worked there…It’s something they built. Even if it’s given away for everyone. It’s their project so it’s, it’s still there for them. So definitely if they build something that’s permanent, it gives them, it makes the kids have, makes that they belong more than if they than just have played around, or just used the space. It’s like a bigger step to ownership of the place. (Marchand, 2015)

So, how do you get a feeling of belonging? I think it goes with the feeling of creating, of emotions through the space.…it’s about seeing it not only as a landscape that’s foreign from yourself and that you just passed through…you start belonging when you leave traces. (Dagenais-Lespérance, 2015)

Here, we see echoes of another key strand of property theory: personality as the justificatory basis for property rights. Typically traced to the work of Georg Hegel (2011), this is the idea that property is necessary for the development of identity. For Hegel, the person is merely an abstract unit of free will with no concrete existence, ‘Not until he has property does the person exist as reason’ (2011: 41). By enabling individuals to act in and to shape the external, objective world, property facilitates the embodiment of the will in objective form (Hegel, 2011: 46). Taking possession of oneself, Hegel explains, consists ‘in translating into actuality what one is in terms of one’s concept (as possibility, capacity [Vermögen], or predisposition). By this means, what one is in concept is posited for the first time as one’s own, and also as an object [Gegenstand] distinct from simple self-consciousness’(2011: 57). The necessity for private property follows from this, ‘Since I give my will existence [Dasein] through property, property must also have the determination of being this specific entity, of being mine’ (Hegel, 2011: 46).

Superficially, Hegel’s theory appears similar to that of Locke. Yet where property for Locke was necessary to enable men to benefit from the fruits of the commons, Hegel sees property in less instrumental terms: ‘property, as the first existence [Dasein] of freedom, is an essential end for itself’(2011: 45). The starting point and the means for acquisition vary also. Locke begins with property as owned by all (men) in common. Hegel, however, begins with all things as unowned, available for appropriation because of their lack of subjectivity (2011: 44). When it comes to acquisition, Locke’s owner puts himself into the object through the process of labour, with appropriation derived from the mixing of the propertied self and the object. There is no such mixing in Hegel’s theory. Rather, property emerges as part of the process of making the will objective and externalized (Hegel, 2011: 64). Further, for Locke appropriation is an individual matter: there is no requirement for consent, and the property becomes owned as soon as the labour is mixed with it. For Hegel, however, property entails a relation with others, ‘My inner act of will which says that something is mine must also become recognizable by others’ (2011: 51)

In modern property scholarship, Hegel’s theory is often referred to through the work of Margaret Radin (Alexander and Peñalver, 2012). Radin’s personhood theory draws partly from Hegel and partly from an ‘intuitive’ understanding that certain objects people possess are closely bound up with their identity (Radin, 1982, 1986). Such items – a wedding ring, a family heirloom, a person’s home – are part of the way we constitute ourselves as continuing personal entities in the world, relating to both the external environment and other people. This, for Radin, is the moral basis of property. Distinguishing between what she calls ‘personhood property’ and other ‘fungible property’, Radin argues that the moral superiority of property claims for personhood property is reflected in legal doctrines from privacy to residential tenancy to takings law (Radin, 1982: 960). Personhood explains why we have property, and why others respect it.

Ownership as a relationship to property developed through self-expression, as connected to identity and as a basic human need were strong themes in interviews. Much more than labour as work or ‘sweat equity’, participants emphasized the transformative, creative nature of their efforts, describing the places they created as somewhere they could ‘recognize themselves’ (Malthais-Tremblay, 2015; Venne, 2015).

we feel that intimacy. It`s like, at the end of the day, like, you poured a piece of your soul in that…it’s somehow, I don`t know it’s just, it’s a piece of you in there, and I think that’s the big difference in the people. (Tadeo and Di Marco, 2015)

it gave me a sense of like empowerment. It felt really good to actually have a voice.…It gives me a more personal connection to the street, because yeah, it definitely gives me a personal attachment and sense of belonging like this city, sort of belongs to me.…when you paint or you, anyone who invests in their city, I think…I think you feel more for your city and you have a deeper connection for it as opposed to someone who just uses it to get from A to B. (Gibson, 2015)

being involved and seeing it happen, seeing [your] ideas translate into something, that really gives you a strong sense of ownership because you created that change. (George, 2016)

The idea of ownership, and particularly the development of ownership through self-expression, was described as a human need. Such descriptions echo those of belonging as something for which people yearn or long,4 and studies in psychology on ownership as a fundamental human need.5 This is particularly apparent in Montreal, where the lack of opportunities to shape one’s environment during the harsh winters were understood as motivating self-expression in the city during summer (Toro et al., 2015).

The idea of expressing oneself in the environment as a human need was linked by a number of participants to home ownership. In particular, participants connected this need for expression in the city to an absence of home ownership. Montreal participants frequently mentioned the very low rates of homeownership in the city to explain very high rates of engagement in activities in public space. A need for the self-expression that ownership permits was noted by participants in other cities also:

you know if you have your own little piece of world, whether that’s you own your apartment or you own a plot of land or you own a house or whatever, you’ve got something, right. If you don’t own something, what you do have is the city. So you go into the city and you try to take some ownership somewhere, I think to satisfy some sort of human need around being able to shape your environment. You can shape your backyard, you can shape your front yard, you can paint your condo on the inside, you can do whatever you want to your apartment when you own these things. It’s a little bit more difficult when you don’t. So it’s kind of a release valve for that. (Lydon, 2014)

In contrast to Lockean labour-based property, property deriving from personhood ‘anticipates a relation to others’ (Hegel, 2011: 51). Although the emphasis in discussions (and critiques [Davies, 2007: 102; Schroeder, 1994]) of property based on personhood is typically placed on individual owners and private property, both Hegel and Radin acknowledge the importance of relationships (Radin, 1982: 977). For Hegel, property is important for both individual and social development. The process of having one’s will – one’s property – recognized by others is critical, a person can become fully developed only in the context of a community of others: ‘This relation [Beziehung] of will to will is the true distinctive ground in which freedom has its existence’(Hegel, 2011: 71).

Hegel emphasizes the importance of property not as the product of one subjective will in isolation, but in the context of a common will, which he describes as the sphere of contract. It is through contracting, Hegel argues, that ‘parties recognize each other as persons and owners of property’ (Hegel, 2011: 71). That recognition in turn provides the basis for negotiated exchanges enabling the development of moral and ethical life. The relational and communal aspects of personhood theory have been emphasized and further developed by several scholars.6

The relational aspect of property emerged strongly in interviews. For people engaged in remaking the urban environment, ownership is much more than a personal matter.

being out with your neighbours, doing any part of activity which could be like cooking or serving food, starting a collective garden, or cleaning a space, I think it gives you like a very…brick and mortar, or very physical sense of community belonging. I’ve never personally, I’ve never felt that before I’ve been engaged in that kind of activity.…I feel we’re creating something, there’s a community being created. I don’t get that feeling when I’m just sitting in my office doing research work, even if I know I’m working for let’s say sort of a greater good. I feel like you can develop it more when you’re part of a citizen led initiative, definitely and you’re on the field and you’re doing something…what matters is we’re building, creating a community. (Malthais-Tremblay, 2015)

In line with this relational aspect of property, participants consistently describe efforts to choose spots that are visible and public. Being visible and, importantly, being seen, was often a high priority in the selection of locations and in the types of activities undertaken.

It’s very high-visibility.…We spent a couple days scouting different places, along Mission Street mostly, watching how the sun moved across them…[to] really try to pick the most kind of photogenic spot. (Merker, 2014)

I chose that spot because I think it’s a very visual spot. [It] is a very, very busy little village and so there’s, you know, a lot of car traffic, there’s a lot of foot traffic and so I thought that it would be an interesting spot where you know, there’s a lot of people who are constantly going through there. (Anonymous Montreal interviewee A, 2015)

when you do that, you, you want to be heard, you want to be seen, you want the reflection. (Carignan, 2015)

Even for activities with illegal aspects like the trespass involved in urban exploration, visibility, recognition and relationality are important. Film and photography are core elements of urban exploration; documenting and distributing images of the sites visited through online sites are important parts of the process (Garrett, 2014b).

Participants also describe their efforts to involve passers-by, to engage the media, to attract attention and affirmation. Such efforts extend beyond the actual events, encompassing further efforts also to publicize activities afterwards through photos, press and social media. In discussing how their activities went, participants frequently measure success in terms of the responses they generated: how many people saw, stopped, commented, commented favourably. How much the event was taken up by media, by politicians and by others with influence.

the reaction was great. Because the people understood, understood the concept very quickly.…It was the most fun thing of PARK(ing) Day, explaining of the concept, interaction of the people. (Tadeo and Di Marco, 2015)

there’s an idea of other people seeing it that is important. Um, that when you do a graff it’s not in a very dark corner where you’re the only one knowing that you’ve put your tag. You need to have spectators looking at it and, kind of, acknowledging that you’ve left a trace.(Dagenais-Lespérance, 2015)

Most important, we do the aménagement, the design urbain around the space, but they do the PARK(ing) Day. If there is no frequence, the, the place doesn’t take the, the important, no? Even if we put a roller-coaster there, it doesn’t matter. (Toro et al., 2015)

For participation to produce feelings of ownership, it is important to be seen. Conversely, participants described feelings of failure and of a lack of ownership when people did not come to their events, didn’t engage with them or didn’t respond positively.

In this emphasis on being seen, and accepted, the distinction between Lockean and Hegelian theories is apparent. Even for Locke, property is more than a matter of labour. The inequality that followed from the enclosure of land required a further justification: for Locke, this was a belief that private property increased the ‘common stock of mankind’ by increasing productivity (Locke, 1978: 37). Justification for a sense of ownership, however, does not derive from such utilitarian calculations.

When it comes to ownership, labour through property is valued as a means to express oneself in relation to others and to obtain recognition for that expression. Participants choose to own and seek acceptance from others for that choice. Being seen, recognized and accepted are important both for the existence of ownership and for the personal meaning derived from it. The relational nature of ownership is important also to its status as something legal, as discussed further below.

Alongside the relationality of property is its temporality. Although Locke’s theory was intended to justify property rights with permanent validity, ownership as understood in Hegelian theory may wax and wane. For Hegel, ongoing occupancy – expression of the will – is necessary to maintain a property relationship (Hegel, 2011: 64, 65). As Hegel explains, without ‘use, employment or some other expression of the will…the thing [Sache] becomes ownerless, because the actuality of will and possession has abandoned it’ (2011: 64).

Radin also emphasizes the temporal nature of property. Her categories can thus shift: the wedding ring, for example, may become fungible property in the hands of a dealer (1982: 968). Because of its temporal nature, a right to property based on personhood requires active, self-conscious social membership and enfranchisement (Salter, 1987: 258). Property is not something that can be created and settled once and for all, it is instead something requiring ongoing performance and persuasion (Blomley, 2013; Rose, 1994).

when people do garage sales it’s the fact of like, I’m publicly showing that I’m making, I’m, I’m going to make the space and the space is going to be shared by others. And it’s going to become momentarily part of the city.(Dagenais-Lespérance, 2015)

It’s all about time, if you [feel] comfortable in the street and if you know the street, it’s yours.…You stay in Montreal. You do like a parcours, every day to go to work, you walk every day with that.…I’m not from Montreal, I’m from Ottawa, and I think it’s been seven years I’m here, it took me, like, three or four years before I said, “I’m from Montreal now”. Because I did exactly the same, I, I was comfortable in Montreal because I was learning about the streets, and learning about my, about getting from this point to that point, and now it’s my city because I know the streets. It’s all about knowing something. (Tadeo and Di Marco, 2015)

A sense of ownership matters. It helps to explain why people engage in DIY urban interventions, and the kinds of benefits they derive from that engagement. More broadly, attention to ownership sharpens and sheds light on some of the deeper questions about property. Understanding a sense of ownership reveals that labour is important but not sufficient. Ideas about rewarding labour or effort don’t explain why we desire property so deeply, nor why we accept other people’s claims to exclude us from their property. More fundamental issues are at stake: ownership, like other forms of property, is valued, accepted and respected because of its more intimate connection to identity and to basic human needs. The temporality and relationality of property that follows from such an understanding is an important part of that justification, as I explain below.

Community, Property and Power

In interviews, there was some debate about terminology. Some participants suggested community or connection as alternative terms to describe the relationships and aspirations at issue. However, further discussion typically moved back to ownership. Community and connection are narrower concepts that miss important aspects. Ownership emerged as a stronger priority across interviews because of its link to power. Beyond the feelings of attachment at stake in concepts of community or connection, ownership invokes agency and empowerment. Ownership gives participants the ability to shape their city.

you do feel more, yeah, like you can change things, so you feel more empowered. (Carle, 2016)

they clearly know they don’t own these things but I think they have been so, I think, successful in getting sanctioned buy-in for their activities I think that undergirds or supports their sense of belonging and right to be doing what they’re doing. (Lydon, 2014)

Just as property has long been associated with power and political voice, ownership is understood by participants as an important prerequisite for DIY urban interventions. Reflecting on a range of projects, from temporary public spaces to longer-lasting gardens, one placemaking professional described agency as central to understanding ownership:

I think sense of ownership would be that you would, you know, fight for it if it was taken away, that you would be prepared to manage and maintain it, take a leadership role in oversight of some form of the space. You’d be prepared to volunteer, you’d be prepared to be involved in decisions about it.…if you feel ownership you’d be likely to take a step towards being an active citizen in either the protection or custodianship of that space in some way, like you would your private residence, but perhaps in a more collaborative way. (Hartley, 2016)

Participants were clear that ownership is not the same as legal title. In interviews, participants provided examples in which the holders of legal title showed no sense of ownership, and investigation was required to identify who actually owned the land in question.

People can feel ownership about a place without having it by law. And that’s something you have to understand, that people need to understand. Sometimes we’re doing research about properties here.…We can find out that one—that’s amazing—one vacant lot that’s really important for people, [but] the guy who owns it had no idea what was going on.…So sometimes there’s a disconnection between the ownership of private property and the ownership of the neighbourhood. Because people own it for financial reasons and people want to use it for community reasons and sometimes there’s a big clash.(Letarte, 2015)

Those asserting a sense of ownership over such land made no claim to legal title. Often, they did not even make inquiries into it. The lack of anyone demonstrating a sense of ownership left the space open to appropriation.

However, ownership and law are not entirely separate. In emphasizing the separation between a sense of ownership and formal legal title, participants revealed a different kind of connection, and one with important consequences for agency and power in the city. As noted above, the DIY urban interventions discussed in this article are not typically understood as protests. Instead, they are seen as positive contributions to the city, described in terms of love and generosity. In contrast to activities like squatting or the Occupy movement, they tend to be undertaken by people doing relatively well in the current system. Proponents of DIY interventions are often people with good jobs and prospects, with no desire to put those at risk. Yet in distinguishing a sense of ownership and more conventional legal title, there is an element of disruption.

By asserting ownership, participants provide an implicit challenge to other forms of legal title. In some cases, this has had direct impacts on formal property regimes. There are several examples where DIY urban interventions have triggered changes in the formal legal frameworks that govern the city. In San Francisco, PARK(ing) Day and kerbside community gardens led to the establishment of formal permitting processes for the establishment of long-term ‘parklets’ and pavement parks around the city, and a new ordinance providing legal grounding for a wider range of DIY urban interventions passed into law in late 2016 (Bela, 2015; Abad, 2016). Permitting schemes for parklets and other small-scale public space interventions are now common in many cities worldwide. Participants in Better Block have had similar impacts in many places, with direct policy and regulatory changes following their temporary interventions on city streets (Lydon and Garcia, 2015a; Team Better Block, 2015).

DIY urban interventions have also had more subtle impacts on property rights. There are many examples where informal interventions have gained such popular support that neither the landowner nor the local authority has been able to remove them. The Parc de Gorilles in Montreal and the Wendy Whitely garden in Sydney are two prominent examples where the ownership claims of their users and creators have been recognized by the formal landowner (Gerathy, 2015; St-Pierre, 2015).

These can be understood as examples of what Sarah Keenan describes as subversive property (2014). Drawing particularly on Doreen Massey’s relational conception of space as dynamic, heterogeneous and constitutive of social relations (2005), Keenan argues that property is an interaction between subjects and their surrounding space in which certain relations of belonging are ‘held up’ as property. These interactions are shaped heavily by previous interactions: spaces must have already interacted in a particular way so that the subject can fit and be held up as belonging there, with the result that spaces tend to entrench existing property relations. Yet because, following Massey, all spaces are to some degree unsettled, there is always the potential for spaces to be reshaped to hold up alternative relations of belonging. In this way, property can be subversive.

When a sense of ownership leads to changes in the rules or social practices governing particular properties, we can read these as examples of subversive property. When non-owners successfully claim a right to be included in decision-making with respect to property to which they have no legal title, or when a ‘park’ is created in a space usually reserved for cars, formal property relations are indeed unsettled.

It is important to recognize that such unsettling is not exceptional. There are numerous precedents for this kind of influence, from squatters obtaining legal title through adverse possession and even prompting the formation of new ways of acquiring it through homesteading laws (Dobbz, 2012; Peñalver and Katyal, 2010), to others securing limitations on the rights of property owners through heritage and conservation laws (Davies, 2012). A sense of ownership – and its enactment in temporal and relational terms – is part of what constitutes property, and part of how it can be reconstituted.

Even when ownership claims do not have such direct impacts, they remain important for property. Ownership claims remind us that property is intimately connected to core human needs and values like identity and community, and that property is sustained through ongoing performance. Claims about ownership are claims for empowerment, agency, belonging and political voice. In asserting their sense of ownership, participants provide an implicit questioning of why empowerment, agency, belonging and political voice are associated with legal title. At a time when conventional forms of property are increasingly inaccessible, the importance of alternative forms of ownership is clearly apparent.

Conclusion

Property matters. Among the various forms of property that shape the city, a sense of ownership is often a particular priority for participants in informal urban interventions. A sense of ownership is significant for property scholars also, in that it is revealing about the nature of property as an institution. The connections to labour, to self-expression and to relationships that produce a sense of ownership and, importantly, recognition of that ownership by others, help to explain property in more general terms.

A sense of ownership matters to the operation of property and to the city. Informal ownership claims can lead to shifts in formal property regimes, from transfers of legal title to the establishment of new regulatory schemes. Informal ownership claims can also provide more subtle constraints on property frameworks, limiting the scope of what title-holders can do with their land. A sense of ownership matters crucially too at a more basic human level, as something intimately connected to identity, community and political voice. With other forms of property now beyond the reach of so many, the importance of informal ownership as a source of belonging and empowerment is increasingly apparent.

Notes

Gardening has long been linked explicitly to debates and conflicts about property rights. Disputes about the ownership and control of New York’s community gardens provide a strong example (Blomley, 2005; Eizenberg, 2012; Staeheli et al., 2002).

The existence of a sense of ownership – and, particularly, its importance – has long been recognized in urban studies. Since at least the 1970s, scholars such as Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman have emphasized the benefits of local ownership of streets and public spaces, linking such feelings to lower crime rates and stronger relationships (Jacobs, 1972; Newman, 1978). In contrast to legal title, maligned in the literature for its abuse by real-estate developers and homeowners pursuing Not In My Back Yard agendas, a sense of ownership tends to be associated instead with more socially and environmentally just engagement (Eizenberg, 2012; Lachapelle, 2008).

This is in line with research in psychology emphasizing the link between ownership and engagement (Brown et al., 2014; Russell et al., 1991; Vandewalle et al., 1995). It is also consistent with scholarship connecting feelings of belonging to agency and political voice (Antonsich, 2010; Schein, 2009; Stratford, 2009).

Belonging is intimately connected to identity and one’s sense of self, and as such is something for which people yearn or long and, as bell hooks describes, may spend their lives searching for (hooks, 1999; Fortier, 1999; Probyn, 1996; Yuval-Davis, 2006).

The literature on psychological ownership emphasizes links to three fundamental human needs: efficacy and effectance, self-identity, and having a place to dwell (Brown et al., 2014; Pierce et al., 2003).

For example, Michael Salter argues that participation in collective shaping of the environment is important to the development of personality in the full sense (1987: 257). Lisa Austin argues that community relations and social networks depend, to a significant extent, on the kinds of interactions made possible by access to public spaces, and thus that personhood provides a strong basis to argue for the protection of such spaces (2010). Kristen Carpenter, Sonia Katyal and Angela Riley develop Radin’s theory in the context of lands, resources and expressions that are integral to group identity and to the cultural survival of indigenous peoples (Carpenter et al., 2009, 2010). See also Ryan, 1994; Salter, 1987; Stillman, 1980: 143.

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#community #diy urbanism #legal geography #identity #belonging #property theory #georg wilhelm friedrich hegel #john locke #property

[aretia]

Can A Holographic Will Convey Real Property?

A holographic will is manually written and deceased benefactor marked record and is an option in contrast to a will delivered by a legal counselor. A few states don’t perceive holographic wills. States that do allow holographic wills require the report meet explicit necessities to be substantial. The insignificant necessities for most states are confirmation that the departed benefactor composed the will, proof that the de-ceased benefactor had the psychological ability to compose the will, and the will must contain the departed benefactor’s desire to dispense individual property to beneficiaries.

How a Holographic Will Functions

Holographic wills don’t should be seen or authorized, which can prompt a few issues during will approval in probate court. To keep away from misrepresentation, most states necessitate that a holographic will contain the producer’s mark. Notwithstanding, the courts should decide if the will was marked in the deceased benefactor’s mark and by the testator’s hand. Penmanship specialists or individuals acquainted with the decedents’ penmanship must persuade the court that the mark was to be sure that of the perished. Problems emerge when the penmanship is ambiguous or messy. Likewise with any will, a deceased benefactor to a holographic will must be unequivocal as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or resources, for example, stocks, securities, and reserve air conditioning tallies. The deceased benefactor may likewise detail conditions for beneficiaries to meet to receive named resources.

Where Are Holographic Wills Acknowledged?

Note that state probate law eventually chooses the treatment of all wills inside its outskirts. A few states will acknowledge holographic wills to fluctuating degrees. These states incorporate; The Frozen North, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Ida-ho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

In certain states, holographic wills made inside the state are not perceived, however such wills that are made inside purviews where holographic wills are perceived are acknowledged under outside wills arrangements. All together for a holographic will to be perceived as legitimate under an outside wills arrangement where this training is lawful, the holographic will probably been made in a locale that perceives holographic wills. States with outside wills or remote confirmation arrangements incorporate Hawaii, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon, and Washington.

In New York and Maryland, holographic wills are possibly perceived in the event that they are made by an individual from the Military. In Maryland, these wills stay substantial just for one year after the deceased benefactor leaves the Military except if the person in question is no longer of sound personality under the law around then. In New York, such a will is legitimate for one year after the deceased benefactor is re-leased from the Military, or for one year after the person in question recovers a testamentary limit, whichever happens first.

Holographic wills can be alternatives to wills that lawyers create. Holographic wills do not require notarization or witnesses. This type of will can lead to problems in probate court.

How a Holographic Will Works

Holographic wills do not need to be witnessed or notarized, which can lead to some issues during will validation in probate court. To avoid fraud, most states require that a holographic will contain the maker’s signature. However, the courts will have to de-termine whether the will was signed in the testator’s signature and by the testator’s hand. Handwriting experts or people familiar with the decedents’ handwriting must convince the court that the signature was indeed that of the deceased. Problems arise when the handwriting is vague or illegible.

As with any will,a testator to a holographic will must be explicit as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or assets, such as stocks, bonds, and fund accounts. The testator may also detail circumstances for recipients to meet to receive named assets.

When you write a will by hand, it is called a holographic will. A holographic will is val-id in Utah if it meets certain requirements. Are transcribed or holographic wills legitimate?

Indeed. Manually written (holographic) wills are legitimate in Utah on the off chance that they meet certain requirements.

What do I need in a holographic will in Utah?

A holographic will ought to be totally in your own penmanship. It ought not be com-posed or composed by another person. A holographic will doesn’t require formal language. It just should be clear and straightforward. You don’t have to have any ob-servers or have it legally approved, yet you can do both in the event that you need.

Your holographic will ought to include:

• your full name and any other names you have used,

• your place of residence, a statement that the document is your will,

• your marital status,

• if you are married, your spouse’s name, the names of all your children, whether alive, deceased, or adopted,

• who is to get what, including any gifts to friends or special family members, who will be your Personal Representative (previously called the Executor, this is the person who will take care of your estate and distribute your assets after your death),

• who will be guardian of any of your minor children, and finally the date and your signature.

Is there an exceptional method to compose how I need to leave everything? No. You simply should be clear about how you need to leave things. In the event that you are leaving something to a particular individual, ensure you list their name. For instance: “I leave my rings to my little girl, Jane Smith.” On the off chance that you need your life partner to get everything on the off chance that she or he endures you, simply compose this in the will. Make a point to name who is to get your things if your life partner bites the dust before you.

In the event that everything is to be part similarly among your kids, this is all you have to compose. It is useful to state who will get every kid’s offer if any of your kids kick the bucket before you. For this situation, numerous individuals have a perished kid’s offer go to their youngsters. For instance: “if my child, John Smith, passes on before me, his offer is to be part similarly between his youngsters, Mary Smith and Robert Smith.” This is only a test ple, yet you can leave offers to whomever you pick.

What if I don’t want to leave anything to my children?

There are many different reasons why you may want to leave your children out of your will. No matter what the reason, you still need to list the names of all of your children in your will, even children who are deceased or being disinherited. This will make sure there is no confusion later on. If you want to disinherit or leave someone out of your will, write: “I leave nothing to [person’s name].” In Utah, you cannot completely disinherit your spouse.

What if I need to change my holographic will?

A holographic will should not be changed by crossing out words or lines. There are two ways to make changes:

Write a new will, or

Write a “codicil”, which is an amendment to a will.

A codicil states anything that is to be deleted and anything that is to be added. A codicil, like the holographic will, must be in your own handwriting. It should also be signed and dated and kept with the will. It is sometimes just as easy and less confusing to write a new will when you need to make changes.

Code Section – Utah Code 75-1-101, et seq.: Uniform Probate Code

Age of Testator 18 years or older and of sound mind Number of Witnesses : Signed by at least 2 individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing, testator’s acknowledgment of that signature, or testator’s acknowledgment of the will

Oral Wills are Not recognized

Holographic: Wills Valid whether or not witnessed if signature and material provisions are in handwriting of testator; last executed holographic will controls; if not dat-ed, consistent provisions are valid; inconsistent provisions are invalid.

Statutes Governing Utah’s Will Requirements: Who may make will – An individual 18 or more years of age who is of sound mind may make a will. Utah Code, 75-2-501

Execution — Witnessed wills — Holographic wills

(1) Except as provided in Subsection (2) and in Sections 75-2-503, 75-2-506, and 75-2-513, a will shall be:

(a) in writing;

(b) signed by the testator or in the testator’s name by some other individual in the testator’s conscious presence and by the testator’s direction; and

(c) signed by at least two individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing of the will as described in Subsection (1)(b) or the testator’s acknowledgment of that signature or acknowledgment of the will.

(2) A will that does not comply with Subsection (1) is valid as a holographic will, whether or not witnessed, if the signature and material portions of the document are in the testator’s handwriting.

(3) Intent that the document constitutes the testator’s will can be established by ex-trinsic evidence, including, for holographic wills, portions of the document that are not in the testator’s handwriting.

Utah Code 75-2-502

Writings intended as wills – Although a document or writing added upon a document was not executed in com-pliance with Section 75-2-502, the document or writing is treated as if it had been ex-ecuted in compliance with that section if the proponent of the document or writing establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the decedent intended the docu-ment or writing to constitute: (1) The decedent’s will; (2) A partial or complete revocation of the will; (3) An addition to or an alteration of the will; or (4) A partial or complete revival of his formerly revoked will or of a formerly revoked portion of the will.

Utah Code 75-2-503 – Self-proved will

(1) A will may be simultaneously executed, attested, and made self-proved, by acknowledgment thereof by the testator and affidavits of the witnesses, each made be-fore an officer authorized to administer oaths under the laws of the state in which execution occurs, whether or not that officer is also a witness to the will, and evidenced by the officer’s certificate, under official seal, in substantially the following form:

Demonstrating the Legitimacy of a Holographic Will in Utah After the individual who composed the will has passed away, it’s increasingly hard to demonstrate the legitimacy of a holographic will in probate court. The general pur-pose of having observers watch you sign your will, all things considered, is so that if there’s any inquiry regarding the will’s legitimacy, the observers can come to court and affirm. They can express that they heard you state the archive you were marking was your will, and that you appeared to be mindful of what you were doing and were not under the undue impact of somebody planning to acquire from you. To start with, there must be proof that the penmanship is in actuality that of the individual who has kicked the bucket. This might be provided by the declaration of individuals who were familiar with the individual’s penmanship, or if there is a contention over the will’s legitimacy, by a specialist in penmanship investigation.

What’s more, there can be inquiries concerning your expectation. Since holographic wills don’t have any observers, the conditions encompassing the marking of the will aren’t typically known. Is it true that it was extremely your will, or simply a few notes you were making as you pondered composing a proper will? Did you alter your perspective later and simply disregard the record?

Would it be a good idea for you to make a Holographic Will?

A holographic will might sound less difficult than a formal, PC created and saw one, however it is anything but a smart thought, for every one of these reasons just exam-ined. It’s constantly desirable over make a proper will, printed out from your PC and marked and dated within the sight of two observers.

In case you’re worried about security, and don’t need your observers to know the particulars of your will, don’t stress. Witnesses don’t peruse your will—all they have to know is that the report you’re marking, and which they will likewise sign, is your will.

It’s not hard to make a formal, lawfully restricting will. You can make a basic will—which accompanies nitty gritty guidelines for how you and your observers should sign it with Revive Will Maker In addition to programming or on the web.

Holographic Will Lawyer Free Consultation

When you need legal help with a holographic will in Utah, please call Ascent Law LLC [phone] for your free consultation. We can help you with Last Wills and Testaments. Living Trusts. Estate Administration. Estate Disputes. Probate Litigation. Estate Planning. Health Care Directives. Durable Powers of Attorney. And Much More. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC 8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C West Jordan, Utah 84088 United States Telephone: [phone]

Ascent Law LLC

4.9 stars – based on 67 reviews

Recent Posts

Utah County

Bankruptcy Lawyer West Jordan Utah

Can I File Taxes As Single If Married But Separated?

Crowdfunding Lawsuits

Can You Go To Jail For Not Paying Child Support?

Real Estate Lawyer Lehi Utah

Source: https://www.ascentlawfirm.com/can-a-holographic-will-convey-real-property/

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Can A Holographic Will Convey Real Property?

A holographic will is manually written and deceased benefactor marked record and is an option in contrast to a will delivered by a legal counselor. A few states don’t perceive holographic wills. States that do allow holographic wills require the report meet explicit necessities to be substantial. The insignificant necessities for most states are confirmation that the departed benefactor composed the will, proof that the de-ceased benefactor had the psychological ability to compose the will, and the will must contain the departed benefactor’s desire to dispense individual property to beneficiaries.

How a Holographic Will Functions

Holographic wills don’t should be seen or authorized, which can prompt a few issues during will approval in probate court. To keep away from misrepresentation, most states necessitate that a holographic will contain the producer’s mark. Notwithstanding, the courts should decide if the will was marked in the deceased benefactor’s mark and by the testator’s hand. Penmanship specialists or individuals acquainted with the decedents’ penmanship must persuade the court that the mark was to be sure that of the perished. Problems emerge when the penmanship is ambiguous or messy. Likewise with any will, a deceased benefactor to a holographic will must be unequivocal as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or resources, for example, stocks, securities, and reserve air conditioning tallies. The deceased benefactor may likewise detail conditions for beneficiaries to meet to receive named resources.

Where Are Holographic Wills Acknowledged?

Note that state probate law eventually chooses the treatment of all wills inside its outskirts. A few states will acknowledge holographic wills to fluctuating degrees. These states incorporate; The Frozen North, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Ida-ho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

In certain states, holographic wills made inside the state are not perceived, however such wills that are made inside purviews where holographic wills are perceived are acknowledged under outside wills arrangements. All together for a holographic will to be perceived as legitimate under an outside wills arrangement where this training is lawful, the holographic will probably been made in a locale that perceives holographic wills. States with outside wills or remote confirmation arrangements incorporate Hawaii, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon, and Washington.

In New York and Maryland, holographic wills are possibly perceived in the event that they are made by an individual from the Military. In Maryland, these wills stay substantial just for one year after the deceased benefactor leaves the Military except if the person in question is no longer of sound personality under the law around then. In New York, such a will is legitimate for one year after the deceased benefactor is re-leased from the Military, or for one year after the person in question recovers a testamentary limit, whichever happens first.

Holographic wills can be alternatives to wills that lawyers create. Holographic wills do not require notarization or witnesses. This type of will can lead to problems in probate court.

How a Holographic Will Works

Holographic wills do not need to be witnessed or notarized, which can lead to some issues during will validation in probate court. To avoid fraud, most states require that a holographic will contain the maker’s signature. However, the courts will have to de-termine whether the will was signed in the testator’s signature and by the testator’s hand. Handwriting experts or people familiar with the decedents’ handwriting must convince the court that the signature was indeed that of the deceased. Problems arise when the handwriting is vague or illegible.

As with any will,a testator to a holographic will must be explicit as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or assets, such as stocks, bonds, and fund accounts. The testator may also detail circumstances for recipients to meet to receive named assets.

When you write a will by hand, it is called a holographic will. A holographic will is val-id in Utah if it meets certain requirements. Are transcribed or holographic wills legitimate?

Indeed. Manually written (holographic) wills are legitimate in Utah on the off chance that they meet certain requirements.

What do I need in a holographic will in Utah?

A holographic will ought to be totally in your own penmanship. It ought not be com-posed or composed by another person. A holographic will doesn’t require formal language. It just should be clear and straightforward. You don’t have to have any ob-servers or have it legally approved, yet you can do both in the event that you need.

Your holographic will ought to include:

• your full name and any other names you have used,

• your place of residence, a statement that the document is your will,

• your marital status,

• if you are married, your spouse’s name, the names of all your children, whether alive, deceased, or adopted,

• who is to get what, including any gifts to friends or special family members, who will be your Personal Representative (previously called the Executor, this is the person who will take care of your estate and distribute your assets after your death),

• who will be guardian of any of your minor children, and finally the date and your signature.

Is there an exceptional method to compose how I need to leave everything? No. You simply should be clear about how you need to leave things. In the event that you are leaving something to a particular individual, ensure you list their name. For instance: “I leave my rings to my little girl, Jane Smith.” On the off chance that you need your life partner to get everything on the off chance that she or he endures you, simply compose this in the will. Make a point to name who is to get your things if your life partner bites the dust before you.

In the event that everything is to be part similarly among your kids, this is all you have to compose. It is useful to state who will get every kid’s offer if any of your kids kick the bucket before you. For this situation, numerous individuals have a perished kid’s offer go to their youngsters. For instance: “if my child, John Smith, passes on before me, his offer is to be part similarly between his youngsters, Mary Smith and Robert Smith.” This is only a test ple, yet you can leave offers to whomever you pick.

What if I don’t want to leave anything to my children?

There are many different reasons why you may want to leave your children out of your will. No matter what the reason, you still need to list the names of all of your children in your will, even children who are deceased or being disinherited. This will make sure there is no confusion later on. If you want to disinherit or leave someone out of your will, write: “I leave nothing to [person’s name].” In Utah, you cannot completely disinherit your spouse.

What if I need to change my holographic will?

A holographic will should not be changed by crossing out words or lines. There are two ways to make changes:

Write a new will, or

Write a “codicil”, which is an amendment to a will.

A codicil states anything that is to be deleted and anything that is to be added. A codicil, like the holographic will, must be in your own handwriting. It should also be signed and dated and kept with the will. It is sometimes just as easy and less confusing to write a new will when you need to make changes.

Code Section – Utah Code 75-1-101, et seq.: Uniform Probate Code

Age of Testator 18 years or older and of sound mind Number of Witnesses : Signed by at least 2 individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing, testator’s acknowledgment of that signature, or testator’s acknowledgment of the will

Oral Wills are Not recognized

Holographic: Wills Valid whether or not witnessed if signature and material provisions are in handwriting of testator; last executed holographic will controls; if not dat-ed, consistent provisions are valid; inconsistent provisions are invalid.

Statutes Governing Utah’s Will Requirements: Who may make will – An individual 18 or more years of age who is of sound mind may make a will. Utah Code, 75-2-501

Execution — Witnessed wills — Holographic wills

(1) Except as provided in Subsection (2) and in Sections 75-2-503, 75-2-506, and 75-2-513, a will shall be:

(a) in writing;

(b) signed by the testator or in the testator’s name by some other individual in the testator’s conscious presence and by the testator’s direction; and

© signed by at least two individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing of the will as described in Subsection (1)(b) or the testator’s acknowledgment of that signature or acknowledgment of the will.

(2) A will that does not comply with Subsection (1) is valid as a holographic will, whether or not witnessed, if the signature and material portions of the document are in the testator’s handwriting.

(3) Intent that the document constitutes the testator’s will can be established by ex-trinsic evidence, including, for holographic wills, portions of the document that are not in the testator’s handwriting.

Utah Code 75-2-502

Writings intended as wills – Although a document or writing added upon a document was not executed in com-pliance with Section 75-2-502, the document or writing is treated as if it had been ex-ecuted in compliance with that section if the proponent of the document or writing establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the decedent intended the docu-ment or writing to constitute: (1) The decedent’s will; (2) A partial or complete revocation of the will; (3) An addition to or an alteration of the will; or (4) A partial or complete revival of his formerly revoked will or of a formerly revoked portion of the will.

Utah Code 75-2-503 – Self-proved will

(1) A will may be simultaneously executed, attested, and made self-proved, by acknowledgment thereof by the testator and affidavits of the witnesses, each made be-fore an officer authorized to administer oaths under the laws of the state in which execution occurs, whether or not that officer is also a witness to the will, and evidenced by the officer’s certificate, under official seal, in substantially the following form:

Demonstrating the Legitimacy of a Holographic Will in Utah After the individual who composed the will has passed away, it’s increasingly hard to demonstrate the legitimacy of a holographic will in probate court. The general pur-pose of having observers watch you sign your will, all things considered, is so that if there’s any inquiry regarding the will’s legitimacy, the observers can come to court and affirm. They can express that they heard you state the archive you were marking was your will, and that you appeared to be mindful of what you were doing and were not under the undue impact of somebody planning to acquire from you. To start with, there must be proof that the penmanship is in actuality that of the individual who has kicked the bucket. This might be provided by the declaration of individuals who were familiar with the individual’s penmanship, or if there is a contention over the will’s legitimacy, by a specialist in penmanship investigation.

What’s more, there can be inquiries concerning your expectation. Since holographic wills don’t have any observers, the conditions encompassing the marking of the will aren’t typically known. Is it true that it was extremely your will, or simply a few notes you were making as you pondered composing a proper will? Did you alter your perspective later and simply disregard the record?

Would it be a good idea for you to make a Holographic Will?

A holographic will might sound less difficult than a formal, PC created and saw one, however it is anything but a smart thought, for every one of these reasons just exam-ined. It’s constantly desirable over make a proper will, printed out from your PC and marked and dated within the sight of two observers.

In case you’re worried about security, and don’t need your observers to know the particulars of your will, don’t stress. Witnesses don’t peruse your will—all they have to know is that the report you’re marking, and which they will likewise sign, is your will.

It’s not hard to make a formal, lawfully restricting will. You can make a basic will—which accompanies nitty gritty guidelines for how you and your observers should sign it with Revive Will Maker In addition to programming or on the web.

Holographic Will Lawyer Free Consultation

When you need legal help with a holographic will in Utah, please call Ascent Law LLC [phone] for your free consultation. We can help you with Last Wills and Testaments. Living Trusts. Estate Administration. Estate Disputes. Probate Litigation. Estate Planning. Health Care Directives. Durable Powers of Attorney. And Much More. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC 8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C West Jordan, Utah 84088 United States Telephone: [phone]

Ascent Law LLC

4.9 stars – based on 67 reviews

Recent Posts

Utah County

Bankruptcy Lawyer West Jordan Utah

Can I File Taxes As Single If Married But Separated?

Crowdfunding Lawsuits

Can You Go To Jail For Not Paying Child Support?

Real Estate Lawyer Lehi Utah

from Michael Anderson https://www.ascentlawfirm.com/can-a-holographic-will-convey-real-property/ from Divorce Lawyer Nelson Farms Utah https://divorcelawyernelsonfarmsutah.tumblr.com/post/190092002035

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Can A Holographic Will Convey Real Property?

A holographic will is manually written and deceased benefactor marked record and is an option in contrast to a will delivered by a legal counselor. A few states don’t perceive holographic wills. States that do allow holographic wills require the report meet explicit necessities to be substantial. The insignificant necessities for most states are confirmation that the departed benefactor composed the will, proof that the de-ceased benefactor had the psychological ability to compose the will, and the will must contain the departed benefactor’s desire to dispense individual property to beneficiaries.

How a Holographic Will Functions

Holographic wills don’t should be seen or authorized, which can prompt a few issues during will approval in probate court. To keep away from misrepresentation, most states necessitate that a holographic will contain the producer’s mark. Notwithstanding, the courts should decide if the will was marked in the deceased benefactor’s mark and by the testator’s hand. Penmanship specialists or individuals acquainted with the decedents’ penmanship must persuade the court that the mark was to be sure that of the perished. Problems emerge when the penmanship is ambiguous or messy. Likewise with any will, a deceased benefactor to a holographic will must be unequivocal as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or resources, for example, stocks, securities, and reserve air conditioning tallies. The deceased benefactor may likewise detail conditions for beneficiaries to meet to receive named resources.

Where Are Holographic Wills Acknowledged?

Note that state probate law eventually chooses the treatment of all wills inside its outskirts. A few states will acknowledge holographic wills to fluctuating degrees. These states incorporate; The Frozen North, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Ida-ho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

In certain states, holographic wills made inside the state are not perceived, however such wills that are made inside purviews where holographic wills are perceived are acknowledged under outside wills arrangements. All together for a holographic will to be perceived as legitimate under an outside wills arrangement where this training is lawful, the holographic will probably been made in a locale that perceives holographic wills. States with outside wills or remote confirmation arrangements incorporate Hawaii, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon, and Washington.

In New York and Maryland, holographic wills are possibly perceived in the event that they are made by an individual from the Military. In Maryland, these wills stay substantial just for one year after the deceased benefactor leaves the Military except if the person in question is no longer of sound personality under the law around then. In New York, such a will is legitimate for one year after the deceased benefactor is re-leased from the Military, or for one year after the person in question recovers a testamentary limit, whichever happens first.

Holographic wills can be alternatives to wills that lawyers create. Holographic wills do not require notarization or witnesses. This type of will can lead to problems in probate court.

How a Holographic Will Works

Holographic wills do not need to be witnessed or notarized, which can lead to some issues during will validation in probate court. To avoid fraud, most states require that a holographic will contain the maker’s signature. However, the courts will have to de-termine whether the will was signed in the testator’s signature and by the testator’s hand. Handwriting experts or people familiar with the decedents’ handwriting must convince the court that the signature was indeed that of the deceased. Problems arise when the handwriting is vague or illegible.

As with any will,a testator to a holographic will must be explicit as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or assets, such as stocks, bonds, and fund accounts. The testator may also detail circumstances for recipients to meet to receive named assets.

When you write a will by hand, it is called a holographic will. A holographic will is val-id in Utah if it meets certain requirements. Are transcribed or holographic wills legitimate?

Indeed. Manually written (holographic) wills are legitimate in Utah on the off chance that they meet certain requirements.

What do I need in a holographic will in Utah?

A holographic will ought to be totally in your own penmanship. It ought not be com-posed or composed by another person. A holographic will doesn’t require formal language. It just should be clear and straightforward. You don’t have to have any ob-servers or have it legally approved, yet you can do both in the event that you need.

Your holographic will ought to include:

• your full name and any other names you have used,

• your place of residence, a statement that the document is your will,

• your marital status,

• if you are married, your spouse’s name, the names of all your children, whether alive, deceased, or adopted,

• who is to get what, including any gifts to friends or special family members, who will be your Personal Representative (previously called the Executor, this is the person who will take care of your estate and distribute your assets after your death),

• who will be guardian of any of your minor children, and finally the date and your signature.

Is there an exceptional method to compose how I need to leave everything? No. You simply should be clear about how you need to leave things. In the event that you are leaving something to a particular individual, ensure you list their name. For instance: “I leave my rings to my little girl, Jane Smith.” On the off chance that you need your life partner to get everything on the off chance that she or he endures you, simply compose this in the will. Make a point to name who is to get your things if your life partner bites the dust before you.

In the event that everything is to be part similarly among your kids, this is all you have to compose. It is useful to state who will get every kid’s offer if any of your kids kick the bucket before you. For this situation, numerous individuals have a perished kid’s offer go to their youngsters. For instance: “if my child, John Smith, passes on before me, his offer is to be part similarly between his youngsters, Mary Smith and Robert Smith.” This is only a test ple, yet you can leave offers to whomever you pick.

What if I don’t want to leave anything to my children?

There are many different reasons why you may want to leave your children out of your will. No matter what the reason, you still need to list the names of all of your children in your will, even children who are deceased or being disinherited. This will make sure there is no confusion later on. If you want to disinherit or leave someone out of your will, write: “I leave nothing to [person’s name].” In Utah, you cannot completely disinherit your spouse.

What if I need to change my holographic will?

A holographic will should not be changed by crossing out words or lines. There are two ways to make changes:

Write a new will, or

Write a “codicil”, which is an amendment to a will.

A codicil states anything that is to be deleted and anything that is to be added. A codicil, like the holographic will, must be in your own handwriting. It should also be signed and dated and kept with the will. It is sometimes just as easy and less confusing to write a new will when you need to make changes.

Code Section – Utah Code 75-1-101, et seq.: Uniform Probate Code

Age of Testator 18 years or older and of sound mind Number of Witnesses : Signed by at least 2 individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing, testator’s acknowledgment of that signature, or testator’s acknowledgment of the will

Oral Wills are Not recognized

Holographic: Wills Valid whether or not witnessed if signature and material provisions are in handwriting of testator; last executed holographic will controls; if not dat-ed, consistent provisions are valid; inconsistent provisions are invalid.

Statutes Governing Utah’s Will Requirements: Who may make will – An individual 18 or more years of age who is of sound mind may make a will. Utah Code, 75-2-501

Execution — Witnessed wills — Holographic wills

(1) Except as provided in Subsection (2) and in Sections 75-2-503, 75-2-506, and 75-2-513, a will shall be:

(a) in writing;

(b) signed by the testator or in the testator’s name by some other individual in the testator’s conscious presence and by the testator’s direction; and

(c) signed by at least two individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing of the will as described in Subsection (1)(b) or the testator’s acknowledgment of that signature or acknowledgment of the will.

(2) A will that does not comply with Subsection (1) is valid as a holographic will, whether or not witnessed, if the signature and material portions of the document are in the testator’s handwriting.

(3) Intent that the document constitutes the testator’s will can be established by ex-trinsic evidence, including, for holographic wills, portions of the document that are not in the testator’s handwriting.

Utah Code 75-2-502

Writings intended as wills – Although a document or writing added upon a document was not executed in com-pliance with Section 75-2-502, the document or writing is treated as if it had been ex-ecuted in compliance with that section if the proponent of the document or writing establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the decedent intended the docu-ment or writing to constitute: (1) The decedent’s will; (2) A partial or complete revocation of the will; (3) An addition to or an alteration of the will; or (4) A partial or complete revival of his formerly revoked will or of a formerly revoked portion of the will.

Utah Code 75-2-503 – Self-proved will

(1) A will may be simultaneously executed, attested, and made self-proved, by acknowledgment thereof by the testator and affidavits of the witnesses, each made be-fore an officer authorized to administer oaths under the laws of the state in which execution occurs, whether or not that officer is also a witness to the will, and evidenced by the officer’s certificate, under official seal, in substantially the following form:

Demonstrating the Legitimacy of a Holographic Will in Utah After the individual who composed the will has passed away, it’s increasingly hard to demonstrate the legitimacy of a holographic will in probate court. The general pur-pose of having observers watch you sign your will, all things considered, is so that if there’s any inquiry regarding the will’s legitimacy, the observers can come to court and affirm. They can express that they heard you state the archive you were marking was your will, and that you appeared to be mindful of what you were doing and were not under the undue impact of somebody planning to acquire from you. To start with, there must be proof that the penmanship is in actuality that of the individual who has kicked the bucket. This might be provided by the declaration of individuals who were familiar with the individual’s penmanship, or if there is a contention over the will’s legitimacy, by a specialist in penmanship investigation.

What’s more, there can be inquiries concerning your expectation. Since holographic wills don’t have any observers, the conditions encompassing the marking of the will aren’t typically known. Is it true that it was extremely your will, or simply a few notes you were making as you pondered composing a proper will? Did you alter your perspective later and simply disregard the record?

Would it be a good idea for you to make a Holographic Will?

A holographic will might sound less difficult than a formal, PC created and saw one, however it is anything but a smart thought, for every one of these reasons just exam-ined. It’s constantly desirable over make a proper will, printed out from your PC and marked and dated within the sight of two observers.

In case you’re worried about security, and don’t need your observers to know the particulars of your will, don’t stress. Witnesses don’t peruse your will—all they have to know is that the report you’re marking, and which they will likewise sign, is your will.

It’s not hard to make a formal, lawfully restricting will. You can make a basic will—which accompanies nitty gritty guidelines for how you and your observers should sign it with Revive Will Maker In addition to programming or on the web.

Holographic Will Lawyer Free Consultation

When you need legal help with a holographic will in Utah, please call Ascent Law LLC [phone] for your free consultation. We can help you with Last Wills and Testaments. Living Trusts. Estate Administration. Estate Disputes. Probate Litigation. Estate Planning. Health Care Directives. Durable Powers of Attorney. And Much More. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC 8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C West Jordan, Utah 84088 United States Telephone: [phone]

Ascent Law LLC

4.9 stars – based on 67 reviews

Recent Posts

Utah County

Bankruptcy Lawyer West Jordan Utah

Can I File Taxes As Single If Married But Separated?

Crowdfunding Lawsuits

Can You Go To Jail For Not Paying Child Support?

Real Estate Lawyer Lehi Utah

Source: https://www.ascentlawfirm.com/can-a-holographic-will-convey-real-property/

[divorcelawyergunnisonutah]

Can A Holographic Will Convey Real Property?

A holographic will is manually written and deceased benefactor marked record and is an option in contrast to a will delivered by a legal counselor. A few states don’t perceive holographic wills. States that do allow holographic wills require the report meet explicit necessities to be substantial. The insignificant necessities for most states are confirmation that the departed benefactor composed the will, proof that the de-ceased benefactor had the psychological ability to compose the will, and the will must contain the departed benefactor’s desire to dispense individual property to beneficiaries.

How a Holographic Will Functions

Holographic wills don’t should be seen or authorized, which can prompt a few issues during will approval in probate court. To keep away from misrepresentation, most states necessitate that a holographic will contain the producer’s mark. Notwithstanding, the courts should decide if the will was marked in the deceased benefactor’s mark and by the testator’s hand. Penmanship specialists or individuals acquainted with the decedents’ penmanship must persuade the court that the mark was to be sure that of the perished. Problems emerge when the penmanship is ambiguous or messy. Likewise with any will, a deceased benefactor to a holographic will must be unequivocal as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or resources, for example, stocks, securities, and reserve air conditioning tallies. The deceased benefactor may likewise detail conditions for beneficiaries to meet to receive named resources.

Where Are Holographic Wills Acknowledged?

Note that state probate law eventually chooses the treatment of all wills inside its outskirts. A few states will acknowledge holographic wills to fluctuating degrees. These states incorporate; The Frozen North, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Ida-ho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

In certain states, holographic wills made inside the state are not perceived, however such wills that are made inside purviews where holographic wills are perceived are acknowledged under outside wills arrangements. All together for a holographic will to be perceived as legitimate under an outside wills arrangement where this training is lawful, the holographic will probably been made in a locale that perceives holographic wills. States with outside wills or remote confirmation arrangements incorporate Hawaii, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon, and Washington.

In New York and Maryland, holographic wills are possibly perceived in the event that they are made by an individual from the Military. In Maryland, these wills stay substantial just for one year after the deceased benefactor leaves the Military except if the person in question is no longer of sound personality under the law around then. In New York, such a will is legitimate for one year after the deceased benefactor is re-leased from the Military, or for one year after the person in question recovers a testamentary limit, whichever happens first.

Holographic wills can be alternatives to wills that lawyers create. Holographic wills do not require notarization or witnesses. This type of will can lead to problems in probate court.

How a Holographic Will Works

Holographic wills do not need to be witnessed or notarized, which can lead to some issues during will validation in probate court. To avoid fraud, most states require that a holographic will contain the maker’s signature. However, the courts will have to de-termine whether the will was signed in the testator’s signature and by the testator’s hand. Handwriting experts or people familiar with the decedents’ handwriting must convince the court that the signature was indeed that of the deceased. Problems arise when the handwriting is vague or illegible.

As with any will,a testator to a holographic will must be explicit as to named beneficiaries and receipt of property or assets, such as stocks, bonds, and fund accounts. The testator may also detail circumstances for recipients to meet to receive named assets.

When you write a will by hand, it is called a holographic will. A holographic will is val-id in Utah if it meets certain requirements. Are transcribed or holographic wills legitimate?

Indeed. Manually written (holographic) wills are legitimate in Utah on the off chance that they meet certain requirements.

What do I need in a holographic will in Utah?

A holographic will ought to be totally in your own penmanship. It ought not be com-posed or composed by another person. A holographic will doesn’t require formal language. It just should be clear and straightforward. You don’t have to have any ob-servers or have it legally approved, yet you can do both in the event that you need.

Your holographic will ought to include:

• your full name and any other names you have used,

• your place of residence, a statement that the document is your will,

• your marital status,

• if you are married, your spouse’s name, the names of all your children, whether alive, deceased, or adopted,

• who is to get what, including any gifts to friends or special family members, who will be your Personal Representative (previously called the Executor, this is the person who will take care of your estate and distribute your assets after your death),

• who will be guardian of any of your minor children, and finally the date and your signature.

Is there an exceptional method to compose how I need to leave everything? No. You simply should be clear about how you need to leave things. In the event that you are leaving something to a particular individual, ensure you list their name. For instance: “I leave my rings to my little girl, Jane Smith.” On the off chance that you need your life partner to get everything on the off chance that she or he endures you, simply compose this in the will. Make a point to name who is to get your things if your life partner bites the dust before you.

In the event that everything is to be part similarly among your kids, this is all you have to compose. It is useful to state who will get every kid’s offer if any of your kids kick the bucket before you. For this situation, numerous individuals have a perished kid’s offer go to their youngsters. For instance: “if my child, John Smith, passes on before me, his offer is to be part similarly between his youngsters, Mary Smith and Robert Smith.” This is only a test ple, yet you can leave offers to whomever you pick.

What if I don’t want to leave anything to my children?

There are many different reasons why you may want to leave your children out of your will. No matter what the reason, you still need to list the names of all of your children in your will, even children who are deceased or being disinherited. This will make sure there is no confusion later on. If you want to disinherit or leave someone out of your will, write: “I leave nothing to [person’s name].” In Utah, you cannot completely disinherit your spouse.

What if I need to change my holographic will?

A holographic will should not be changed by crossing out words or lines. There are two ways to make changes:

Write a new will, or

Write a “codicil”, which is an amendment to a will.

A codicil states anything that is to be deleted and anything that is to be added. A codicil, like the holographic will, must be in your own handwriting. It should also be signed and dated and kept with the will. It is sometimes just as easy and less confusing to write a new will when you need to make changes.

Code Section – Utah Code 75-1-101, et seq.: Uniform Probate Code

Age of Testator 18 years or older and of sound mind Number of Witnesses : Signed by at least 2 individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing, testator’s acknowledgment of that signature, or testator’s acknowledgment of the will

Oral Wills are Not recognized

Holographic: Wills Valid whether or not witnessed if signature and material provisions are in handwriting of testator; last executed holographic will controls; if not dat-ed, consistent provisions are valid; inconsistent provisions are invalid.

Statutes Governing Utah’s Will Requirements: Who may make will – An individual 18 or more years of age who is of sound mind may make a will. Utah Code, 75-2-501

Execution — Witnessed wills — Holographic wills

(1) Except as provided in Subsection (2) and in Sections 75-2-503, 75-2-506, and 75-2-513, a will shall be:

(a) in writing;

(b) signed by the testator or in the testator’s name by some other individual in the testator’s conscious presence and by the testator’s direction; and

(c) signed by at least two individuals, each of whom signed within a reasonable time after he witnessed either the signing of the will as described in Subsection (1)(b) or the testator’s acknowledgment of that signature or acknowledgment of the will.

(2) A will that does not comply with Subsection (1) is valid as a holographic will, whether or not witnessed, if the signature and material portions of the document are in the testator’s handwriting.

(3) Intent that the document constitutes the testator’s will can be established by ex-trinsic evidence, including, for holographic wills, portions of the document that are not in the testator’s handwriting.

Utah Code 75-2-502

Writings intended as wills – Although a document or writing added upon a document was not executed in com-pliance with Section 75-2-502, the document or writing is treated as if it had been ex-ecuted in compliance with that section if the proponent of the document or writing establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the decedent intended the docu-ment or writing to constitute: (1) The decedent’s will; (2) A partial or complete revocation of the will; (3) An addition to or an alteration of the will; or (4) A partial or complete revival of his formerly revoked will or of a formerly revoked portion of the will.

Utah Code 75-2-503 – Self-proved will

(1) A will may be simultaneously executed, attested, and made self-proved, by acknowledgment thereof by the testator and affidavits of the witnesses, each made be-fore an officer authorized to administer oaths under the laws of the state in which execution occurs, whether or not that officer is also a witness to the will, and evidenced by the officer’s certificate, under official seal, in substantially the following form:

Demonstrating the Legitimacy of a Holographic Will in Utah After the individual who composed the will has passed away, it’s increasingly hard to demonstrate the legitimacy of a holographic will in probate court. The general pur-pose of having observers watch you sign your will, all things considered, is so that if there’s any inquiry regarding the will’s legitimacy, the observers can come to court and affirm. They can express that they heard you state the archive you were marking was your will, and that you appeared to be mindful of what you were doing and were not under the undue impact of somebody planning to acquire from you. To start with, there must be proof that the penmanship is in actuality that of the individual who has kicked the bucket. This might be provided by the declaration of individuals who were familiar with the individual’s penmanship, or if there is a contention over the will’s legitimacy, by a specialist in penmanship investigation.

What’s more, there can be inquiries concerning your expectation. Since holographic wills don’t have any observers, the conditions encompassing the marking of the will aren’t typically known. Is it true that it was extremely your will, or simply a few notes you were making as you pondered composing a proper will? Did you alter your perspective later and simply disregard the record?

Would it be a good idea for you to make a Holographic Will?

A holographic will might sound less difficult than a formal, PC created and saw one, however it is anything but a smart thought, for every one of these reasons just exam-ined. It’s constantly desirable over make a proper will, printed out from your PC and marked and dated within the sight of two observers.

In case you’re worried about security, and don’t need your observers to know the particulars of your will, don’t stress. Witnesses don’t peruse your will—all they have to know is that the report you’re marking, and which they will likewise sign, is your will.

It’s not hard to make a formal, lawfully restricting will. You can make a basic will—which accompanies nitty gritty guidelines for how you and your observers should sign it with Revive Will Maker In addition to programming or on the web.

Holographic Will Lawyer Free Consultation

When you need legal help with a holographic will in Utah, please call Ascent Law LLC [phone] for your free consultation. We can help you with Last Wills and Testaments. Living Trusts. Estate Administration. Estate Disputes. Probate Litigation. Estate Planning. Health Care Directives. Durable Powers of Attorney. And Much More. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC 8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C West Jordan, Utah 84088 United States Telephone: [phone]

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from Michael Anderson https://www.ascentlawfirm.com/can-a-holographic-will-convey-real-property/