#the vast majority of which is entirely just flavor text

[pikkish]

Jupiter Hell headcanons. Giv.

Headcanons? Plural? HECK YEAH DON'T MIND IF I DO

^^^also putting the cinematic trailer here bc its good and more people should watch it (and then go buy the game and play it for hours and give it a good review)

anyway yes I have lots of headcanons about this game and since I'm basically the only one posting about it here on tumblr there's no one to contradict me on them. also a lot of them parallel and/or contrast with Doom headcanons, since JH is largely inspired by Doom.

For starters, the CRI isn't inherently evil like the UAC. I mean, they definitely have problems, what with the Callisto mines being run primarily by prisoner labor, and the primary funder of the CRI being the us military so their main focus is war weapons, so they're just as twisted as any major government funded war profiteering company, but they're not actively going "hee hoo lets sacrifice our own employees in cult rituals to Hell for ~SCIENCE!~" They just went "Woah whats this funny pentagram thing buried in the heart of Europa? WOAH ITS A PORTAL TO IO!! SICK WE CAN INSTANTANEOUSLY TRAVEL BETWEEN MOONS hey wait there's another one here on Io YOOOOOO IS THIS A SPACE STATION INSIDE JUPITER??? WE SHOULD TOTALLY INVESTIGATE THIS!" And then it turned out it was a portal to Hell and they accidentally started the demonic invasion. Tough luck, guys.

As for the protagonist, JupeGuy, or Mark Taggart, as is his default name for each run, I like to think that for all his flippant, snarky comments throughout the game, he's actually a relatively sane, levelheaded character, especially compared to Doomguy. This is mostly inspired by the fact that, once you get to the Dante Station levels, he stops with all the silly snarky voicelines and gets a lot more serious and solemn in reacting to things, but there are a few other points that work well with the headcanon. He uses cover when fighting, he can actually pick up a medkit and store it in his backpack for later use instead of either using it immediately or leaving it behind, he can modify and repair weapons and armor, he can gather intel on what's ahead and plan which route he wants to take based on that intel, and he doesn't just go charging at the final boss screaming ferally (unless you're playing a melee build.) He's like Doomguy's smarter, more wary cousin!

He 100% did go to The Pit on Europa, and he did pet Rexio, and now he has a funny puppy that's like five feet taller than him and will maul anything that looks at him mean. Let the man have his pet hellhound.

Also speaking of pets, solely because Doomguy has Daisy, I headcanon JupeGuy also likes small, flluffy animals, though he tends more toward birds, specifically budgies. He had a little green budgie with a yellow head named Spinach.

Ok, just one more headcanon, though this one takes a bit of explaining: there's a secret level in JH called Purgatory, and it is... punishing, both to survive, and just to get to.

First, in order to get to it, you very much have to know what you're doing. First, you have to go to a specific branch on Callisto, which is the first moon you're on. If you miss it, you're out of luck. on each floor you have to close a portal within a pretty short time limit, which usually means tanking damage from all the enemies between it and you, and again, this is early-game, so you're relatively low level and don't exactly have the stats to be tanking like that. Then, you have to close two of these portals, minimum, when at maximum, there only are three portals, and sometimes, there are only two to begin with, depending on where the branch entrance is.

So if you manage to do that, you'll be given the "Demonic Attunment" status, which... well! It's entire description is just "Unknown," so it doesn't really give you a whole lot to go on! But, if you can make it to the branch special level and successfully fight off a handful of archreavers- essentially JH's equivalent of Barons of Hell- then so long as you have a high enough rank of Demonic Attunement, you can hit a handful of pillars in the right order (an upside down star, of course) to open the portal to Purgatory, which doesn't sound so difficult in theory, but those pillars are the only cover you get from the archreavers in the entire arena, and if you accidentally bump one out of order while seeking shelter from the archreavers, then you're out of luck, you can't open the portal.

BUT, if you do get everything right, and you go through the portal, congratulations! you have a whole new set of problems to worry about! For one thing, Purgatory is jam packed with late game enemies, and you're still using early game gear, maybe with a few buffs if the loot in the Callisto Anomaly was good. For another, Purgatory is a liminal space, and going up and then right does not take you to the same place as if you go right and then up, so it's very easy to get lost. And the final icing on the cake? You gain the "Catharsis" status, the description for which reads, "You've witnessed the Purgatory. Some wounds will never heal, and you're less motivated to learn from new experiences."

How does that translate to game mechanics? the "less motivated to learn" means you permanently get 20% less experience for killing enemies, so you level a lot slower, and "some wounds never heal" means that every time you go through one of the teleporters to the next room, you permanently lose a few points off your maximum health.

So what's the reward for going to Purgatory aside from the challenge of it, fighting the secret boss battle, and unlocking the second, harder hardest mode? Well, see, Jupiter Hell is a roguelike game, so all of the loot and weapons you get are randomized. But if you know the route- and I do mean really know the route, because again, going right and up is not the same as up then right, and the health loss applies when backtracking, too- you can get your pick of any of the unique weapons in the game, of which, in a non-purgatory run that goes to all three possible special levels, you are normally only guaranteed to get one unique, and a random one that may not work at all with your build. But in Purgatory, if you can survive there and back, you can get any of them that you want.

Now, the unique weapons are great and all, but if you know what you're doing, you can beat the game without one. So what's an even more powerful weapon, or perhaps, a more powerful defense against Hell itself, that which does its utmost to rip all the joy and hope and love out of you? What could possibly let you knowingly stand against and fight Hell itself like that?

Here's where the actual headcanon starts, because my answer is apathy.

Or, the achievement of catharsis.

Knowing that you're going to bleed forever, knowing that your achievements don't actually amount to all that much, knowing that you are going to go to Hell, choosing to go to Hell, and being okay with that. Being at peace with that. Because how can you truly be affected by misery and suffering if you have already made peace with your situation?

So I think that JupeGuy figured out pretty quickly that he was fighting demons and realized he wouldn't be going home, but to Hell instead. I don't know how he knew to get to Purgatory, since, like I said, it isn't readily apparent, but you pretty much need to know what you're doing in order to get there, so it was a conscious decision on his part. He chose to go there, chose to take up the burden of eternal pain, chose to lose the joy of learning new things, the excitement of life, he chose the horrible apathy of catharsis, all so that he could fight Hell itself and stop the invasion.

And I just think that's a terrible, awful, and incredibly interesting concept, of catharsis first being a bad thing, a painful thing, that only by knowingly, willingly choosing to bear that pain forever can one gain some meager benefit.

as a last note, here is the background music for Purgatory. I think it is absolutely terrifying and also sometimes I will listen to it on repeat and think about JupeGuy.

(I had to record this myself by sitting in the level and taking a video then converting that video to mp3, because no one's put the ost up on youtube, I don't know if/where you can officially download it, and apparently JH uses a weird filetype that I could not for the life of me find a tutorial on how to rip the soundfiles for. So idk if that's its actual name or what.)

#pikspeak #jupiter hell #thank u for asking me about jh i love it so much it is such a good game #i think you in particular would actually really like it. it feel very very much like classic doom to me #albeit with more stat management and reading and such #but it actually plays so SO fast for a turn based game #and has only marginally more lore than classic doom does #the vast majority of which is entirely just flavor text #which means there is SO much room for making up your own stuff lol #ive actually been thinking about a JHxModern Doom crossover au for a while now #in which doomguy and jupeguy are brothers and end up fending off their respective hell invasions at roughly the same time #and then things get funny while dg is in argent dnur and later when jupeguy gets back to earth #im sure ill talk about that sooner or later if people wanna hear it #also it was made by a small dev team and theyre still actively updating it even a year after launch #like the full game is definitely there but the devs are still adding the stuff from like #kickstarter goals that werent initially reached in the original kickstart #and i hopped on the discord a while back and everyone there is so nice #i was actually able to reach/beat the purgatory boss bc of tips they gave me #and they have a channel for posting your death/victory logs and #even though most of the ones people put there are like their super hardcore victories #both times ive put my little medium difficulty victories in there people have congratulated me #also i see the lead dev in the discord all the time especially in the bug report channel and the design suggestion channel #helping people troubleshoot and talking with them about their ideas for the game #basically what im saying is that its a super awesome game AND the devs seem super cool too #you should definitely play it. and let me know what you think of it if you do!! #we could yell at each other about ANOTHER silly stupid space marine...!

[mtgpocketrealm]

Realms of the Plane

World Tree

The plane itself is a world tree, much like the plane of Kaldheim. Unlike Kaldheim however, the realms are rooted in place by the world tree. There are no Doomskars, they don't collide with one another momentarily, for the plane was designed to avoid that, to limit interaction between the planes as much as possible.

Excuse the bad art, it was made to illustrate the idea, in my head, the tree is far more like the world tree of Kaldheim, more a celestial force than a true tree.

Credit: Anastasia Ovchinnikova

The 'cosmos' of the plane is thin, fairly insubstantial, comprised solely of excess mana from the realms which becomes attracted to and accumulates in the core of the world tree. While within the cosmos of this world tree, you would appear to be within an iridescent outer space, the stars being the light of living planes, occasional shadows being planes devoid of life, or the forms of Eldrazi Titans as they move through the multiverse.

Isolation Barriers

Each realm is surrounded by a barrier, not designed to keep anything out, but to keep everything in. It interferes with how Eldrazi travels, proper planeswalking, and makes Omenpaths within the realms more ephemeral. The barrier for the vast majority of realms has not been changed or modified by the realm's mana, which would cause their guardians to be considered redundant, differentiate the barrier from the standard opaque grey wall, and grant the barrier generally unique capacities.

Within the world, the barriers specifically attempt to adapt to the Sliver Hive of the realm, they were designed to contain them specifically, but it just so happens that they end up containing everything else while pursuing that goal.

Not gonna lie on this one, I feel extremely proud that there were actual wall cards I found with the ability to do this, technically however though, MonoWhite does have an issue with 'Protection from White' granted by Ward Sliver.

In this part, I will also mention the day-night cycle. The cycle gives both exactly 12 hours each. the 'sun' of the realms is the core of the world tree. The night stars of the realms are the same as those seen in the cosmos of the world tree. Both of which are colored by the mana of the realm's barrier.

Evergrowing Fruits

Each realm grows in size over time, almost exclusively due to the guardians and the machines they maintain. However, the extreme realms, the all and none color identity realms, function differently for their expansions.

These 'fruits', the realms, leak vast quantities of mana, but this mana is almost entirely absorbed by the world tree, which keeps it alive and grows it in turn, expanding the plane, which gives the realms more space to grow in turn, magic allows for such impossible feedback loops. (Source: Flavor text for Empowered Autogenerator "Magic, unlike physics, has no unbreakable laws.")

This, the feedback loop, has also caused the plane to, despite the mana inefficiencies of the thirty-two realms within, avoid the gazes of Eldrazi Titans, since the mana leaks from the realms but not the plane itself.

Rings, Slices, and Layers

Pictured above is the general layout of the realms.

Rings (actual general layout top left, labeled layout top right); are general environments and terrain. Many realms follow that pattern as seen above. However, as realms become aligned to more colors of mana, rings can become smaller, more rings may appear, or rings may outright disappear.

Slices (pictured bottom left); Every realm is divided into slices of temperature, though, as realms become aligned to more colors of mana, this difference of temperature becomes less and less pronounced.

Layers (pictured bottom right); Many of the realms have enough of an underground environment for it to be mentionable. Every realm with a Sliver Hive (all of them) has at least a small portion of an underground layer, though because they are under the core of the hive, I don't feel they are generally worth mentioning specifically.

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Plane Start

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#mtg #magic the gathering #magic the card game #color theory #planes #creative writing #worldbuilding #slivers #eldrazi #phyrexian #please forgive me I am stupid #i don't know what I'm doing #i edited this #i edit after post frequently #oc #i'm bad at writing #i'm bad at tagging #mtg au

[aizenat]

Regarding claims that asexuals weren't around, I have read old documents from well before AVEN was made discussing how the community viewed asexuals as a flavor of bisexuals since both groups feel equally attracted to all genders. The difference of that equal attraction to all genders being zero for for asexuals was a later distinction. Just because the labels weren't made yet doesn't mean asexuals popped into existence when AVEN was made! (This is similar to how the lines between the lesbian and bi women communities used to be a lot fuzzier back then, with both gay and bi women being labeled under the lesbian umbrella. Labels have changed over time.)

It is indeed different from BDSM because BDSM is a fetish about how people like to perform sex and is not directly related to attraction, marriage, and other orientation-relevant topics. Your comparison makes it seem you misunderstand asexuality as a function of sexual performance rather than orientational attraction. Which is wrong. It is 100% about attraction! Within the label of asexual, people still fall on a spectrum of liking sex to not liking sex independent of their asexual lack of attraction to any gender. It is not abstinence it is not preferences in bed, it is purely the lack of ability to be attracted to others. You may have defined LGBT+ as only "same sex attraction" but plenty others in the community--dare I say the majority of the community defines it as simply not being straight and/or cis.

Asexuals get medically mistreated in similar ways to gay and trans people through attempts at conversion. Asexuals get bullied, abused, correctively raped, etc by violent homophobes for all the same reasons too. Asexuals do not perform attraction and romance to the satisfaction of homophobes. Asexuals need community for the same reasons you do. They need similar protections from discrimination against orientation. This push to exclude asexuals is a rather recent trend that helps nobody, only serves to divide a community of vulnerable people that is strongest when united.

You’re a fucking liar, and disgusting and I hope you know that. 

You don’t get to retroactively tell people how they identified. You’ve “read old documents from well before AVEN was made discussing how the community viewed asexuals as a flavor of bisexuals since both groups feel equally attracted to all genders?” Liar. You mean you’ve read RECENT articles of people analyzing texts describing bisexual people and reading that as “asexual” even though that’s not how those people identified. 

You want to know how I know you don’t know SHIT about gay history? “This is similar to how the lines between the lesbian and bi women communities used to be a lot fuzzier back then, with both gay and bi women being labeled under the lesbian umbrella.” That never happened! Lesbian/gay women identified as such, and bi women identified as bi! Back then, bi woman said they were bi with their whole chests! They didn’t go around calling themselves lesbians! They do that now! Like what the fuck revisionist bullshit are you on about? Fuck off. 

Asexuality is not a sexual orientation because by your own definition, asexuals do not feel sexual attraction. What kinda nonsense? And there is no way for an asexual to “like” sex or whatever nonsense. You guys just made that up because in our hypersexual world, you don’t know the difference between someone with a low (or, hell, a healthy) libido and an actual asexual person. 

And shame on you, and there is a special place in HELL for you, for bringing up violent homophobia and conversion therapy and corrective rapes. Are people going around writing laws forcing you to have to have sex with someone? If you ever wanted to adopt, would the agency disqualify you for being asexual? 

The medical ish is real, and obviously traumatic, but to pretend that’s on the same level as conversion therapy (seriously, a deep, dark, HOT place in hell for you for that!), is deplorable! You have obviously never been to one, been threatened to be sent to one, or even spoken with someone who went through conversion therapy to pull that out of your ass. 

This is the reason why people don’t like you idiots. You take what could be valid critiques of our society’s views towards sex (hypersexuality, medicalization of low libidos, conservative expectations of relationship dynamics that treat people as broken for not wanting or enjoying sex) and morph them into fallacies, half truths, and false equivalences. You’re literally taking the experiences of other groups of people, and trying to say they happen to the same degree, and from the same place, as what asexuals face when that is just NOT true based on reality. 

You could grow up to be an adult, quietly never get married or date, and live your entire life without having sex and no one will kill you for it. Homophobes don’t care that you’re not fucking other people. They don’t care enough to use gay panic as a defense to murder you, they don’t care enough to ban you from marrying, you weren’t ignored during the AIDS crisis, you wouldn’t have to hide the fact that you don’t have sex from colleagues for fear of getting fired from your job for it, you don’t have to worry about being sent to camps to be electrocuted or sent to mental institutions or religious conversion therapy camps. Not now, not 20 years ago, not 50 years ago, not EVER. 

You can play the “we’ve always been there” game because there have always been people who probably would ID as asexual today, but the vast majority of those people got married, had kids, and that is more due to the fundamentalist religious nature of western society, especially in America, than it would be due to homophobia. Completely intellectually dishonest. 

Don’t fucking send me any more fucking shit, and if you do, come off anon so I can block you. In fact, I’ll make it easy and turn it off so you don’t hit that button by mistake. 

I have seen and experienced first hand real life traumatic homophobia, so don’t ever in your life try to come at me with that shit. I spent years thinking *I* was asexual because I was repressing my sexuality.

And that’s the biggest issue I have you with weirdos. Talking about “you can like sex and have sex and be asexual” nonsense. I see so many kids coming up that are taking LONGER to realize they’re gay/same sex attracted because they don’t relate to the hypsersexual, porn-obsessed way sex is portrayed. And they hear THIS nonsense and think “oh, I’m asexual.” Then they grow up, get interested in sex, and have literal mental breakdowns over their identities because they made not wanting to fuck their hogwarts house badge. 

We’re not talking about grown adults who have gone through numerous experiences coming to an understanding of their sexualities. It’s a bunch of kids who don’t realize that it’s normal to not experience overt and raunchy sexual attraction, that only wanting to sleep with someone you’re in a relationship with is literally normal, and who aren’t even old enough to legally rent a car trying to tell grown adults about their lived experiences. 

Fuck off mate. Just fuck off. You’re an idiot, and if you think you’re going to convince me of your side, you’re not.

And you really want to know how you’re not LGBT. Because with all the alphabet soup terms that have come up to describe bisexuality 40392092039220 times in recent years, gay people have (for the most part) not said that these people aren’t same sex attracted. Because, despite how unnecessary, they are same sex attracted. But you lot are the ones actual homosexuals and bi people are like “nah, you lot are weird. We don’t know you.” And there’s a reason. Because this response, aside from being intellectually dishonest, historically inaccurate, and filled with logical fallacies and bad-faith arguments, was at it’s very core WEIRD. 

You’re weird. Now sod off. 

#Anonymous

[5eforgemaster]

Some Thoughts on the UA Rogue and Pushing Class Boundaries

I have to admit, when I first saw The Revived roguish archetype from the new Unearthed Arcana article, I was immediately put off by it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to tie the concept of past lives to the Rogue of all things. I just couldn’t get my head around that matchup, and I couldn’t imagine the narrative coming together in a satisfying way. But, I suppose it’s time for a hearty helping of crow- I’ve read the full subclass, and I regret my snap judgement deeply.

The first Revived feature I read was Bolts from the Grave- I was short on time, and after reading the flavor text and becoming highly skeptical, I gave the feature with the most striking name a once over. To my mind, “unleash bolts of necrotic energy from within your revived body“ read as the inherent magic of a Sorcerer, and while I do like seeing class boundaries pushed (the Circle of the Wildfire for Druids may be one of the most interesting 5e subclasses yet), I wasn’t ready to see 5e’s class distinctions break down entirely.

The Rogue is meant, in many ways, to be a ‘mundane’ class. Much like the fighter, any magic the class had through subclasses was a learned skill, not something inherent to the character. The vast majority of subclasses relate to what you do (Fighters, Wizards), what you believe (Clerics, Paladins), or perhaps what you are tied to (Warlocks, Clerics again). The only class I can think of that has subclasses based on what you are is the Sorcerer. 

Still, I took the time to read the full subclass, and I see what’s happening here. The Revived redefines a few things about what Rogues and Roguish Archetypes can be narratively:

Rogues can be ‘born’ rather than ‘made’. That is to say, the source of a Rogue’s incredible skill and versatility can be magical in nature rather than the result of experience.

Rogues don’t strictly have to be scoundrels. Until now, nearly every archetype (Assassin, Thief, Arcane Trickster, Mastermind, Swashbuckler) sounded very criminal, or at least mischievous. The outliers (Scout and Inquisitive) still leaned heavily on stealth or intrigue as themes.

(more behind the read-more)

What it does not redefine, and this is key, is what the Rogue is mechanically in a particularly extreme way. The Revived is still a character that can’t necessarily stand up in the thick of combat, is still a character whose primary contribution to the party is a versatile and potent skillset, and who wants to attack through indirect means.

Adding means of gaining access to extra skills, tools, and informating through death is extremely interesting both narratively and mechanically, but still remains within the Rogue’s expected role. Being able to cast Speak with Dead and gaining an extremely limmited version of Commune is just exciting enough to be refreshing without going completely off the rails.

I still have some issues with the subclass, especially Bolts from the Grave, and namely with the growing ease with which 5e rogues can deliver sneak attack damage*, but I can say I’ve been convinced the subclass belongs with the Rogue. I’m of the opinion that some other classes- the Sorcerer and perhaps the Paladin or Barbarian can carry the ‘beyond the grave’ theme just as well, if not better, than the Rogue, but I can’t say this doesn’t work.

I do wish they had found ways to mesh some of the Rogue’s core features with the new narrative more explicitly- it’s interesting that the skill proficiencies gained from Tokens of Past Lives and Connect with the Dead work with the Rogue’s Reliable Talent- this somewhat implies that as the Rogue grows in level, its connection with death and/or its past lives grows stronger. This is one of the pitfalls with pushing narrative rather than mechanics, I suppose, but I wonder if a simple sidebar or textbox would be enough to sell other skeptics who may not be willing to give the mechanics time to speak for themselves.

#rogue #unearthed arcana #thoughts #informal #dnd #dnd 5e #the revived

[thevalicemultiverse]

Get To Know the Muse(s) -- Alice & Victor

season:  Alice -- early spring; Victor -- late spring

color:  Alice -- blue and red; Victor -- blue

pie:  Alice -- strawberry; Victor -- apple

fruit:  Alice -- strawberries; Victor -- apples

ice cream flavor:  Alice --  strawberry, chocolate, Neapolitan; Victor -- chocolate, Rocky Road, Cookies & Cream

breakfast food:  Alice --  pancakes with syrup; Victor -- French toast and hard-boiled eggs

alcoholic drink: Alice -- Nothing; Victor -- Nothing (neither of them drink)

soda flavor:  Alice --  Dr. Pepper; Victor -- root beer

scent:  Alice -- Floral scents, catnip; Victor -- Tree scents, dog smells

flowers:  Alice -- Roses, lilies; Victor -- daffodils, bluebells

animal:  Alice -- cats, rabbits; Victor -- dogs, butterflies

movie:  Alice -- The Truman Show (I think she’d find the main character relatable, and the whole movie fascinating); Victor -- Ghostbusters (a fun sci-fi/fantasy about busting ghosts! He also likes the sequel and the reboot)

tv show:  Alice -- QI (it’s a show about weird facts and suchlike; right up her alley); Victor -- Castlevania on Netflix (I have personally not seen it, but I’ve heard good things, and it’s about vampires and kick-ass lady magic users and going up against evil -- he’d probably enjoy it)

book: For modern verses, anyway: Alice -- Monstrous Regiment from the Discworld series (she likes and relates to the main cast a lot); Victor -- Dragonsong from the Dragonriders of Pern series (he’s always wanted a pet dragon, and he relates to Menolly more than he thinks he should)

fairy tale: Alice -- Cinderella (she has a whole new appreciation for what the title character went through after Houndsditch -- also the mental image of Bumby getting his eyes pecked out by birds in the appropriate versions); Victor -- Snow White (he can’t help but feel a kinship with the princess who shares his color scheme -- plus he’s sometimes wondered if running off to a house of dwarves in the woods wouldn’t be better for him than his home life)

genre of music:  Alice -- “moody” songs (like with heavy bass beats, dark lyrics, stuff like that), but she’s also fond of parodies; Victor -- classical (especially piano numbers), big musical numbers

genre of movies:  Alice -- fantasy, comedy; Victor -- sci-fi, fantasy

genre of books:  Alice -- fantasy, mystery; Victor -- fantasy, horror

Pick one.

hot or cold: Both prefer hot

juice or soda: Alice prefers juice; Victor is more likely to get a soda

tv or movie: Both would pick movie 

movie or book: Both would pick book

late night talk shows or reality tv: I don’t think they’d like either, but if there was nothing else on, I think they’d pick reality TV -- might be more interesting, should provide plenty of opportunities to mock the television

twitter or instagram: I think both would prefer Instagram; Twitter would provide too many opportunities to annoy them

trees or flowers: Alice prefers flowers; Victor prefers trees

philosophy or psychology: Both are more into philosophy (Alice in particular doesn’t like psychology for what I hope are obvious reasons)

ocean or lake: Both are more familiar with lakes, at least in the real world; the Deluded Depths are fun in Wonderland, though!

water park or amusement park: I think they’d both prefer an amusement park, though one with water rides would be a good compromise

cats or dogs: Alice is a cat person; Victor is a dog person

fresh water or sparkling water: Both prefer fresh water

sugar or honey: In tea, I assume? I’d say both prefer sugar, though they both will eat honey

cookies or candy: Both prefer cookies (though Victor will definitely not say no to candy)

bath or shower: Alice prefers showers; Victor likes baths (even if he’s too long for most bathtubs!)

morning or night: Both tend toward night (even in verses where one of them doesn’t have to be nocturnal)

running or walking: Both like walking (particularly together); both tend to end up running from something at some point. XD

piercings or tattoos: Eh, I can’t see either of them getting either. . .but if it came down to it, I could see both going for a tattoo over piercings.

frozen yogurt or ice cream: Both prefer ice cream, but this doesn’t mean they won’t eat frozen yogurt

vanilla or chocolate: Both prefer chocolate

caramel or butterscotch: Both like caramel

art or music: Alice falls on the art side; Victor falls on the music one (though he’s also an accomplished artist, and Alice likes his music a lot)

t-shirt or button down: Alice is more likely to wear a plain t-shirt; Victor prefers a button-down

text or call: I think both prefer text -- less pressure that way, and Victor in particular finds it easier when he can do a draft or two of what he wants to say

ghosts or aliens: Both prefer ghosts (and are more likely to encounter them everywhere except my Sims game)

Have they ever.

ridden a motorcycle: Depends on the verse, but I’ve stated in the past I like the idea of Secundus!Alice getting her own steampunk motorcycle and roaring through the streets with a mildly-terrified Victor XD Most of the time, though, neither of them have.

stolen something: Again, verse-dependent -- most of the time, I’d say no for both, but the Catch Us!pair probably steal things from their victims, and just for survival purposes, while Londerland Bloodlines!Alice will occasionally pick up “vendor trash” to sell to Fat Larry. (Not so much once she starts getting money from more legit sources, though.)

eaten an entire pizza by themselves: Alice, probably not. Victor, yes. XD (Though it was over an entire night)

made a prank call: I can’t see either of them being the type, so no.

broken a bone: Somehow, neither of them have. Victor is as shocked as anyone about this. (Though he has sprained his ankle.)

fallen asleep during a concert or movie: A concert? Not to both? A movie? Not in theaters, but I can see them maybe falling asleep watching a super-late movie one night at home. (Cute mental image, actually.)

walked out of a movie because it was so bad: I personally think they’d stick it out to give it the MST3K/Rifftrax treatment (quietly) unless it properly offended them. So neither has done so yet, but it’s a possibility.

been on the phone with someone for longer than 2 hours: No, if only because I can’t think of any situation where they would have to be.

dined & dashed: Traditional form? No, neither. But Londerland Bloodlines!Alice has occasionally had to just grab a convenient person to drink from when she was low on blood. Sort of counts?

held a gun: This is verse-dependent -- the vast majority, no. But I’m sure the Catch Us pair have used guns on occasion (if their victim has one to wrestle away, anyway), and Londerland Bloodlines!Alice learned how to shoot to protect herself on the mean streets of L.A.

ding dong ditched: I can’t see either doing this -- except maybe Catch Us!pair, or Londerland Bloodlines!Alice, as some sort of distraction while they do something else. (LB!Alice is a master of Obfuscate, after all. . .)

gone skinny dipping: Nooope for both. Nope no never.

cried during a movie: Yes, though Alice generally hides it a bit better than Victor. She’ll only openly cry if she’s alone, or with people she trusts (generally Victor, add in Victoria, Emily, Lizzie, Bonejangles/Sam, Richard, and Christopher depending on verse).

smuggled food into a movie: Alice would, Victor wouldn’t -- but only because Victor can consistently afford concession prices. And to be honest, he’d probably help Alice smuggle in food if she asked.

lied to get a job: No -- if only because neither of them has ever had to (Victor of course comes from super-rich stock, and Alice generally either has a job given to her/forced on her, or picks something she knows she can get without lying)

practiced lines in front of a mirror: Victor has, for when he has to be Social with his parents -- it doesn’t usually help much, as his anxiety gives no shits about how much he practices. I can’t think of a situation for Alice to do so, but maybe if she needs to rehearse something difficult to say sometime. . .

tried to see how many marshmallows they can stuff in their mouth at once: Not as of this writing, but somehow I think they might at some point XD

been kicked out of somewhere: Yes, though for different reasons -- Alice because she was making a scene while stuck in Wonderland; Victor because his parents were making a scene and he was “collateral damage.” Oh, and I guess Victor was essentially kicked out of Burtonsville in both Forgotten Vows and Secundus. . .and then decided he never wanted to go back anyway

been on a blind date: Does a blind arranged marriage count? Actually, in more modern verses, the two sets of parents WOULD set the kids up on a date without introducing them first, so -- yeah, I guess Victor has. Alice, no. 

ghosted someone: No -- unless you count Alice disappearing from Houndsditch as such in the “Catch Us If You Can” verse. Victor’s probably been ghosted once or twice by women who didn’t wish to continue their acquaintance. Not a pleasant experience.

bragged about something they haven’t done: Victor, no. Alice. . .edge case, as she’ll brag about stuff she’s done in Wonderland, not the real world. Which, considering the stuff she can pull off in Wonderland, I say -- let the woman brag.

said i love you without meaning it: No, neither. Alice only says it when she means it, and Victor has meant it every time he’s said it.

gotten in a fight: Yes to both, though how often depends on the verse. 

fallen asleep on a bus: I can’t see either of them doing it, if only because I don’t think either would ever feel comfortable enough to fall asleep. Too many people and not exactly plush seats are not conducive to rest.

Miscellaneous.

how do they take their tea or coffee:  Alice takes her tea with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and a quick dash of milk; Victor puts so much sugar and milk into his it can barely be called “tea”

what is their ideal date: Depends on the verse, but a few favorites are going to the park on a picnic (Forgotten Vows and Secundus); either going dancing or staying at home for a private dance party (Cuddlepile); and going to the movies (Londerland Bloodlines). I’d also like for at least one skating date to happen in some verse. XD

what are some of their guilty pleasures: Alice has probably read and enjoyed some romance novels -- it’s a guilty pleasure in the sense of “Lizzie would probably never forgive me for reading these.” XD Victor, depending on the verse, has penny dreadfuls or comic books, which his mother disapproves of but he reads on the sly. He particularly enjoys superheroes and horror stories.

longest they’ve stayed up for: This would be dependent on verse, but I’m sure that both of them have stayed up at least one entire day for some reason at some point

greatest talent: For Victor, it’s definitely his piano skills -- he’s got a nice well of natural ability, and he’s put in the practice to get really good at it. For Alice, it’s storytelling -- she knows how to weave a good yarn, helped a lot by that active imagination of hers!

strange habits: Less “strange” and more “informed by her past trauma,” Alice tends to triple-check every fireplace in her current home to make sure it’s out before going to bed. Yes, it was deliberate arson that took down her family home, but she still gets antsy over leaving flame attended. She also tends to rock on her heels when in deep thought. Victor of course has his tie-pulling and general fidgeting when he’s nervous -- I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that he might have that is stranger.

first job: Alice’s would be her stint at Bumby’s -- she was maid and dogsbody in exchange for her keep and a smidgen of salary. Victor -- well, does helping his father do the books at his fish business count?

can they do a handstand: Alice probably could if she practiced enough, though I don’t know how long she could hold it. Victor could only do it against a wall, and even then he’d probably tip over after a couple of seconds.

can they cook: Yes -- they both have a baseline of “I can make a couple of edible items,” and improve from there. Victor in particular grows to like baking.

do they have allergies: Alice does not, but Victor is allergic to artichokes. Nothing life-threatening, fortunately, but it does result in an itchy rash all over his face and neck if he eats them.

do they believe in love in first sight: Alice never did -- Victor is willing to believe at least in attraction at first sight, thanks to his experiences with Victoria and Emily. He’s not sure about true love, though.

have any special talents: Well, I already mentioned playing piano for Victor, and storytelling for Alice. They’re also both quite good artists! Alice works in pencil, while Victor works in quill pen and ink. Victor is also a MASTER at climbing, thanks to finding that going vertical often helped him get away from his bullies growing up. And I’m sure Alice’s way with sarcastic comments must count too. :p

Tagged by: @hamelinbound

Tagging: Taken me long enough that I’m sure most people I would have tagged have been tagged. Take this as a general “if you want to do it, feel free!”

#~M: what’s going on here? (meme) #~M: when he was a boy (headcanon) #long post #sorry it took me so long! #just a bit more difficult when you're doing it for two characters #and some of the questions I hadn't really thought about before #I struggled with the favorite books and tv shows and movies and such for a while #and then you have to consider a good number of these are verse dependent #I think it all came together in the end though #~M: with this hand I will lift your queue

[wineschool-blog]

Sicilian Wine

https://j.mp/3yWGz0u If the idea of walking up to a sage-scented ocean breeze sounds alluring, what about sipping coffee in an ancient fruit orchard while looking out over the crystal-blue Mediterranean? The Sicilian countryside seems to exist in another timeline. A magical place, to be sure, but can any place be a paradise for long? The only thing rarer than a GPS signal is a street sign. The shepherds and their sheep are quaint only the first time they block the road for twenty minutes. And what to do with that herd of cows that keeps breaking into your pasture, trampling your garden? Table of contentsA Short History of Wine in SicilySicilian Wine Regions: Province of RagusaThe Wines of Cerasuolo di VittoriaFeatured Ragusa Wineries: COS and Arianna OcchipintiSicilian Wine Regions: Province of TrapaniThe Wines of MarsalaSicilian Wine Regions: CataniaThe Wines of Etna A Short History of Wine in Sicily In the 8th Century BCE, Greek colonists became the Island’s first winemakers. Ancient texts describe Dionysus, the God of Wine, dancing as he planted the first grapevine in Sicily. Thanks to archeologists, we know these vineyards were located in the black hills under Mt. Aetna, a still-active volcano. In time, the Romans conquered the island, and that opened Sicily to the world. These wines were traded as far away as modern-day France and Germany. Production boomed. A notable ancient wine was Marsala, a fortified wine made on the western coast. A British merchant popularized the wine in the 18th century and soon compared it to Portugal’s Porto wines. The history of Sicilian wines would likely have continued apace. Then, however, in the late 19th century, an invasive parasite invaded the vineyards, killing most vines. This was the Phylloxera epidemic, and it drew a stark red line between the 19th century and today. It was only in the last half of the 20th Century when Sicily recovered its winemaking mojo, thanks to wineries like COS, Planeta, and Ceuso. Sicilian Wine Regions: Province of Ragusa Ragusa is the most southernmost province of Sicily, situated in the Val di Noto. It is a place of rolling hills, dramatic shorelines, and ancient towns. The region’s namesake city dates back to Greek times but was destroyed by the earthquake. It was and completely rebuilt in the baroque style in the 17th century. Other important towns include Scicli and Modica. Like Ragusa, many of the buildings are in the  Late Baroque style. The other key component of these cities is their culinary and winemaking traditions. The Wines of Cerasuolo di Vittoria Cerasuolo di Vittoria is the most important appellation in Ragusa, dating back to the 7th century BCE. The name refers to an elegant refreshing style of wine. Cerasuolo refers to the light red hue of the wine. Vittoria is a city west of Ragusa and the center of the wine region. The wine is an odd –but brilliant– coupling of two native varietals, Nero d’Avola and Frappato. Nero is an intense hulk-ish red that tends to produce angry and magnetic wines. Frappato makes a light, nearly pink wine that is all about roses and ocean breezes. The wine produced within an even more restricted area will have the appellation’s term “Classico” appended. The region was awarded DOC status in 1974. In 2005, it was upgraded to DOCG, the highest level of classification in Italian wine. Featured Ragusa Wineries: COS and Arianna Occhipinti COS is the acronym of the surnames of the Winery’s three founders: Giambattista Cilia, Giusto Occhipinti, and Cirino Strano. In 1980, these young men leased a small winery and vineyard from a family member. The first vintage produced a meager 1470 bottles. Year by year, the volume increased, but so did the quality and international acclaim. Then, by 2000, they brought back an ancient Sicilian tradition: using amphorae (clay vessels buried underground) to age their wines. It’s a technique that has now been adopted across all of Italy. Their finest Cerasuolo di Vittoria is the “Delle Fontane”. It is red ruby in color, with aromas of cherry, blackberry, and currant. The flavors of fresh roses and toasted spice are alluring, and the palate is fresh, elegant, and Mediterranean. The Arianna Occhipinti story is a more recent addition to the Sicilian wine scene. Arianna is the niece of Giusto Occhipinti, of COS fame. She opened her eponymously named winery in 2004 in Ragusa. What began as a tiny one-hectare operation now spans over 22 hectares, mostly Nero d’Avola and Frappato, Albanello and Zibibbo, two local white varieties. Her top-level is the Cerasuolo di Vittoria ‘Grotte Alte’ i s aged a minimum of 32 months in massive Slavonian oak buttes. The wine is an intense ruby red color with garnet shades. The nose is fragrant, with details of sea spray, sour cherries, and oriental spices. The palate is intense and elegant, soft and round, with a persistent and salty aromatic finish. Sicilian Wine Regions: Province of Trapani Trapani is a Bronze-age commune that is still thriving in the modern era. Located on the island’s west coast, it has been a major port for two Sicilian products, wine, and salt, since the beginning of recorded history. A naturally protected inlet, Trapani has the capacity to enforce naval superiority over a vast section of the Mediterranean. Over the past two thousand years, this sickle-shaped port has been the focus of countless wars and occupations. From the Punic Wars of Ancient Rome to World War Two, this port drew dozens of ancient cultures into Sicily, only to be absorbed into the island’s culture. Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, Normans, and Spaniards have contributed to Sicily’s food and wine traditions. The Wines of Marsala Long before a wine bore its name, Marsala is an ancient city built on the ruins of an even more ancient city, Lilybaeum. The town’s economy, like much of Trapani, was based on their salt ponds and vineyards. By the 17th Century, the world’s economies were recovering from the centuries-long medieval depression. Times were good, but the local winemakers had a problem: a growing wine market was growing, but their white wines spoiled too quickly to ship. So they had started using large oak barrels to store the wine, which helped. Then they heard of a new technique developed in Portugal: fortify the wine by adding spirit to the fermenting must. At about this same time, bottled wines became a status symbol. So a bottle of new wine was born. The wine rose to fame in the early part of the 20th century, only to come crashing down just as quickly. Marsala was the only wine available during Prohibition (doctors were allowed to prescribe it). As a result, it wasn’t too long before there was more counterfeit Marsala than real. That fact, sadly, continues through today: most Marsala in American shops are pale imitations. To seek our true Marsala, look for the term “Superiore Riserva” on the label. Your mind will be blown with the flavors of toasted almonds, fresh figs, and chocolate-coated raisins. They make for great aperitifs. Sicilian Wine Regions: Catania Catania is defined by the heart of Sicily: Mount Etna, the still-active volcano that the entire island is balanced upon. Located on the Northeastern shore, the region is famous for its black volcanic soils. Its buildings are built of the same stone, and its roofs are blackened by centuries of volcanic plumes. The largest city is also named Catania and has been rebuilt dozens of times since its founding in 729 BCE. But, unfortunately, the town has been destroyed by lava flows and earthquakes, wars, and social unrest. How did a region so unlucky survive so long? It comes down to the lava flows: they are the cause of so much despair, but also why Catania thrives. Over centuries, lava rocks evolve into black volcanic soils that are fertile and life-sustaining. They are why Sicily is an agricultural wonderland. travel to Italy – panorama with villages on green hills and Etna volcano in Sicily The Wines of Etna The specialness of this region can be inferred by the fact that it was the first recognized wine appellation in Sicily (it earned its DOC in 1968), a full nine months before Marsala. This region’s essential red grape varietal is Nerello Mascalese, crafting a complex but wild wine that often feels like a confluence of wild-grown fruit and a core of intense minerality. The whites of the region include native varieties include Carricante and Catarratto. The former produces light and ethereal wines that are simple and perfect with summer fish dishes. Cattaratto is lush and intense, going toward tropical fruit infused with tarragon. This is also a place that attracts crazy European winemakers with a zeal for eccentricity. Just spend a few minutes with the wines of Frank Cornelissen, and you’ll understand. By Keith Wallace https://j.mp/3yWGz0u

[the-foxwolf]

Story through Supplements

Despite however much we love the characters, the game, or the inclusivity of the company, at the end of the day, Wizards is in the business to make money. Supplemental sets are a great way for them to squeeze out those extra dollars we might have been holding back. Either by printing powerful or otherwise hard to acquire rares and mythics (such as the Masters sets), or by making the set format specific (such as the Commander and Conspiracy), or entirely unique (such as Archenemy and Planechase). We get to enjoy the new stuff and they get to literally reap the rewards.

However. These supplemental sets serve an additional function for us. Join me as I discuss how Supplemental Sets help tell Magic’s Story.

(Learn from the Past: Dragons of Tarkir) (Art by Chase Stone)

Gather `Round! It’s Story Telling Time!

Introduction

As much as I despise the man, Urza’s entire story is fascinating. Unfortunately, the tale of his struggle against Phyrexia is one that is well beyond most player’s knowledge. I don’t fault Wizards for their manner of story distribution. Those were different times. 

(Urza: Vanguard) (Art by Mark Tedin)

Even I, who love sharing stories with people, find it difficult to tell the summarize the tale of of Urza  Planeswalker because it’s such a rich story with so much detail and depth. I never feel like I do the story justice. Most of Magic’s novels have now been translated into e-books. (And I strongly recommend them throughout the Urza story and up until the Time Spiral cycle. I emphasize The Brother’s War, Planeswalker, and the Kamigawa series.) But even so, Urza’s story isn’t something the majority of the MTG players know. A great loss indeed. An understandable loss, though. 

One of the best ways of Story Telling available to wizards is through the use of Supplemental Sets. Let's get started.

Recalling Characters

This is the most obvious purpose of Supplemental Sets is to recall old characters. Freylaise and Teferi are excellent examples of old, well known, beloved characters finally given a card. These are fascinating, powerful, characters who would have normally been impossible to reprint as the Old Walkers that they were. Commander has given us the chance to see these people as they were, the chance to reminisce on the stories of old, and the chance to connect younger audiences to the past. Other examples include Ramos and Sidar Kondo.

(Ramos, Dragon Engine: Commander 2017 Edition)  (Art by Joseph Meehan)

Some characters definitely need a new card. The best example? Gerrard Capashen. Sweet Sigharda did they mess that one up. The star of the show for many blocks and when they finally print him, he’s utter garbage. He definitely needs a new card. 

Whenever old characters are given new cards, it always sparks interest among the younger crowd. This gives people such as @vorthosjay and I, among others, the chance to answer questions and introduce people to stories they would otherwise never have cared to learn about. But now, with these old characters having a card, players will be casting their Commander often. Eventually, people are going to want to know who it is that they’ve been relying on for so long.

Meeting Old Friends

People like Bruce Tarl and Ludevic have existed in the lore for a while now. They, like many others, have been referenced in flavor text, card names, or even mentioned in the Magic Story, but never given a card. Which is fine. Perfectly makes sense. There will always be more names than space for characters.

Among the many characters that can be pulled from to make new cards in Supplemental Sets, Hal and Alena of Kessig are among the most demanded cards- as far as my experience has been. People like that are hard, if not impossible to get a card in any other way. Without Supplemental Sets, we would have to wait until we visited Innistrad again, there would have to be space for them as a card in the sets, and there would need to be a development hole they can fix. Even if we went back, there would be no guarantee we’d see them.

(Ludevic, Necro-Alchemist) (Art by Aaron Miller)

I consider the facet of Supplemental Sets different than Recalling Characters in that the presentation of these old friends is that we know of the character, but don’t actually know the character. We know plenty about AND we know Teferi. In contrast, we’ve heard about Ludevic, but we don’t know who he is. For all intents and purposes, Ludevic was essentially a new character to us. We just happened to have heard many things about the man, but we’ve never actually met him.

Presenting New Friends

Supplemental sets have given us the opportunity to retroactively introduce story elements. Nahiri, the Lithomancer and Ob Nixilis of the Black Oath are two examples. Unlike Meeting Old Friends, Presenting New Friends allows Wizards to give us a character on whom we know little to nothing about. From someone like Vial Smasher, we expect something explosive. We’ve actually met her in a story. Which would make her fall under the category of Recalling Characters. However, with Nahiri, all we knew of her could be summarized in a couple of sentences. Supplemental Sets gave us the chance to meet this mysterious, yet vital, character.

(Nahiri, the Lithomancer: Commander 2014 Edition) (Art by Eric Deschamps)

What makes Supplemental Sets particularly useful is that they provide a seamless outlet to introduce the characters. Trying to incorporate an old character into the modern story would be a challenge to do elegantly.  However, with Supplemental Sets, a quick biographical summary can resolve the situation. 

Clarify Misconceptions

Another utility of supplemental products is the value of retconning and clarification. Let’s look at Atraxa, for example. With a single card, the misconception many players had about Elesh Norn having killed Urabrask and Sheoldred was clarified. The Grand Cenobite took over their territory. But she didn’t kill them. With a single card, they helped clarify things. 

(Atraxa, Praetor’s Voice: Commander 2016 Edition) (Art by Victor Adame Minguez)

I can’t think of any instances in which Supplemental Sets have directly retconned anything. But the existence of Supplemental Sets provides an avenue for them in case they ever needed to.

Peek at other Planes

One of my favorite things that supplemental products provide for me is the opportunity to peek into what’s been happening on other worlds. We recently had the chance to peek back in Ravnica and see the Orzhov and the Golgari storylines develop through stories related to Mazirek and Karlov. It gave us the chance to see more of Vrazka, of Teysa, and of Tajic. The amount of conversation the simple introduction of these stories provided was wonderful. 

(Ezuri, Claw of Progress: Commander 2016 Edition) (Art by James Ryman)

In addition to allowing Wizards to give us bits of storyline that will inevitably converge, it also gives us the chance to remember things we might have forgotten. In Conspiracy 2, we saw Koth is still alive and fighting. In Commander, we are reminded how tremendously, how hopelessly, the Mirrans were defeated by the Phyrexians. We cannot forgot how terrible the Phyrexians are, or let their memory fade. Make no mistake. These things are a terrible force. One of the Big Three Villainous Entities of Magic if you were to ask me.

But also, it lets us see things that need to happen over time. Ezuri, Claw of Progress is an excellent example. We are reminded how oppressive the defeat of the Mirrans was. We see in the Conspiracy product that Koth is still somehow miraculously alive and kicking. 

Tease New Worlds

And one last function Supplemental Sets serve with respect to Story Telling is the ability of it to tease us with new worlds. People such as Sashika and Licia and Tana. When they presented Licia, people started speculating about her relation to Sashika. Worlds teased, yes. Certainly worlds to come. 

(Licia, Sanguine Tribune: Commander 2017 Edition) (Art by: Magali Villanueve)

Another place we’ve seen worlds teased is in Planechase. Places like Vyrn and Kephalai for example. Some are placed that were teased hinted at what may yet come in the future, and others of things we know for certain are coming, and some that have shout-outs to planes in older stories- such as Equilor. The oldest plane in recorded history.

Conclusion

Magic’s Story is rich and vast and had so much potential. But Standard Sets can only provide so much at a time. Those Vorthoses, like me, who crave more story can find ourselves satisfied by enjoying the supplemental sets. And, of course, Wizards gets to squeak out the few remaining dollars our pockets have after spending what we have after they squeeze us with the Standard Sets. Like the addicts we are. We hungrily consume.

That’s all I have for today. Thanks for reading. If you liked what you read, hit that “Reblog” button. For more articles and short stories from me at “Story Telling Time” hit that “Follow” button. See ya next time!

#magic story #supplemental #supplemental sets #story telling time #storytelling time #storytellingtime

[gabrielxreader]

Wings: Preen

Request: I am absolutely in love with anything having to do with the reader’s ability to see Gabe’s wings (aka soulmate fics!) Would you maybe consider doing a Winchester!reader fic like that?

A/N: I’ve read a lot of these, so I decided to take a different approach. There will be a part two!

Author: Holly

Warnings: Light swearing

Characters: Y/N, Gabriel, Castiel, Sam, Dean

Word Count: 2,371

Y/N = Your Name

Part One: Preen

            Your twin brother Adam grew up with you in Michigan, and you only saw your father once a year – twice, if you were incredibly lucky. As you grew up, you stayed close out of concern for the increasingly-erratic behavior of your mother. You made plans to meet up again and take time off to stay with her.

            You never saw either of them again, because by the time you had returned to your hometown, your mother and brother had both been eaten alive by ghouls. Sam and Dean pulled you out of the infested house in the nick of time, and since then, you traveled with them. Your hunting, however, left some to be desired – you hadn’t had your entire life to practice.

            The desire to keep you alive was what made them relax their anti-archangel rules in a special exception for Gabriel. The archangel would ride with you on long trips in the Impala on occasion, and he would pop in for at least a quick minute once you’d found a hotel. You’d text and he’d send you photographs of the most beautiful places in the world that you wished you had the money and the safety to go see.

            After killing time drinking hot chocolate in a diner, you all collected your things (Gabriel bought pie to go and Dean insisted on buying his separately) and departed to go to a graveyard. The advantage of being the littlest, and the physically-weakest, was that the boys did most of the heavy lifting while you were assigned sentry duty.

            “Still no cops,” you reported with a snicker. A lifetime of dry humor and a sudden lifestyle change revolving around death had given you an odd sense of humor, and you thought it was hilarious that you were watching for police.

            Dean slammed the tip of his shovel into the dirt and looked up out of the hole. He and Sam were standing five feet below the ground level. “Do you think this is funny?” He asked.

            You looked right into his eyes. “Yes.” You confirmed with a nod. Gabriel snorted and passed you a plate of your favorite flavor of cake as a reward.

            A huge rumble of thunder made all four of you look up. Stormy clouds were rolling in your direction, blown by hard winds from the south. The flashing of eerie, white-hot lightning made it look extra foreboding, as well as temporarily illuminated the gravestones in the cemetery.

            Sam wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Gabe,” he called, leaning on his shovel. “Why don’t you just – you know – snap out the dirt, so that we can start the fire and leave?” He suggested, his voice strained. This wasn’t the first time he had asked.

            Gabriel pretended to consider, but you knew he was going to say no. “Sorry, no can do, Gigantor.” He smirked conspiratorially at you, still stinging from a remark Sam had made about how he never took anything seriously enough to appreciate the Winchesters’ efforts in hunting. “At least this way the rain will wash away the dirt from your face.”

            “What’s going to wash the blood from yours?” Dean muttered mutinously while he dug.

            Although he feigned offense, Gabriel’s dark golden wings arched delightedly as he bantered. His long feathers were kept carefully higher than the mucky grass, but the sweeping, streamlined flight feathers of his right wing were hovering over your head protectively as the first of the raindrops began to fall. You continued to enjoy your cake, listening to them argue and giggling when appropriate, while Gabriel used his wings to shield you.

            “How come she gets to stay dry? All she did was stand there,” Dean complained as you were walking back to the car, only just noticing that you weren’t getting wet in the storm.

            You smiled at the archangel. “Gabe likes me best,” you sang tauntingly. “Probably because I’m the only one of us who’s never tried to stab him.” Sam and Dean both shared looks and winced.

            Like the vast majority of people, you had always assumed an angel’s wings would be fluffy as a kitten’s fur and as painfully bright as pure ivory. It was only when you met Gabriel that you realized you were horribly off the mark. Gabe’s were a color close to amber, but it was hard to pin it down when it kept seeming to shift and change from day-to-day, and while you knew from experience that they were soft, they were by no means delicate.

            Since you met him, he had protected you from more life-threatening situations than you could count on both hands. He used his wings to cover you in the rain as well as to block fire before it could touch you. He flew furiously from spot to spot, smiting demons with glowing eyes, disappearing and reappearing in an instant. Sometimes you wondered why someone else was called Quicksilver when Gabriel existed. On a very memorable occasion, Gabriel had taken you in his arms and bowled you over into the side of a warlock’s altar, using his wings to block a vicious curse before it could touch you.

            That wasn’t to say he only protected you, however. He had also saved Sam and Dean’s lives more than once. One thing you had noticed, and were flattered to acknowledge, was that you were the only one who was ever shielded in the rain or warmed by feathers when the heater was broken in an old motel.

            After seeing Gabriel, the first thing you did when you next saw Castiel was to fall into step beside him and question him about wings.

            “Hey, Cas, have you ever shown anyone your wings?” You had asked him curiously.

            The confused look that the brunet angel gave you almost made you forget the question. He looked so cute and surprised that you wanted to take a picture and savor the moment – usually the only one who could put that expression on his face was Dean.

            Finally, Castiel shook his head. “A human saw my wings once. It didn’t end well.”

            You scowled. No wonder he kept his wings hidden if someone had hurt them. “Bastard,” you muttered under your breath. You didn’t ask again.

            Whenever you would watch his wings for too long, Gabriel would start staring at you intently the same way that Sam stared at his computer. It made you feel like you’d done something inappropriate, so you would shift your focus and try to forget about it. Eventually, you concluded that watching an angel’s wings was kind of like someone staring at your breasts, and that was why he looked at you weirdly.

            You didn’t know how Sam or Dean managed not to pay attention to the magnificent wings. They were so awe-inspiring, even without seeing how they reflected the angel who owned them. That they had been used to defend you so many times just made you even more interested and impressed, but far be it from you to upset anyone you called a friend, so you didn’t bring it up. Sam and Dean were both weird, anyhow. If there were any two people on Earth who could completely ignore a person with wings, it would be them.

            In hindsight, you reflected placidly while letting Gabriel hold a hand firmly against your punctured side. That may have been a poor idea. You’d already been cussed out by Dean and yelled at by Sam, and now the only part of the routine left was the one where Gabriel healed you before you lost too much blood.

            His wings fluttered anxiously, trapped in the tight confines of the car but wrapped around you as best as they could be. “Every time I think I’ve seen the pinnacle of human stupidity,” he complained while you tried not to stare at the ripples of feathers. The tip of one wing batted softly at your cheek, and the agitation in his voice was belied by the concern he was showing with his wings.

            Your vision grew a little clearer as the stab wound in your side stitched itself closed in an episode of miraculous healing. You sighed in relief as you could finally take a deep breath without crying. Gabe moved his hand from your ribs and felt your forehead, sending a burst of pleasant coolness down your spine, soothing the feverish heat from the adrenaline and shock.

            In the corner of your eye, something glistening caught your attention. Feeling much better, you sat up from Gabriel’s lap and looked directly to his left wing, which had something slick sliding slowly down the feathers. It was thick like molasses, ran like syrup, and shone as if there was liquid silver dissolved in it. Many feathers were crooked, and there was a slit in the flesh.

            You had seen plenty of injuries, but in spite of everything Gabriel had suffered while being an archangelic bodyguard, you’d never seen him hurt. That, more than anything, freaked you out. “Oh my God!” You shouted, struggling to rip off your jacket as quickly as you could without slamming your elbows into him.

            Gabriel leaned back and put his hands up. “Take a breath, sugar,” he coaxed, wings flinching as he moved. It only made you more worried. “Cassie took out the rest of the renegade celestial Freudian freaks.”

            In response, you shoved your jacket up to his wing. You had never intentionally touched his wing before – it was like being shocked with static, at first, but then it felt like the perfect temperature. His feathers weren’t hot enough to be uncomfortable, but weren’t cool enough to not notice them. The liquid oozing from the cut in his wing dripped onto your hand. It was thick and hot in a way that should’ve burned – like dripping candle wax, you expected it to hurt more than it actually did.

            The entire car shook as Gabriel’s eyes glowed an alarmingly bright blue through his pupils.

            Dean slammed on the brakes. “Whatever’s going on back there, no angel-ing out in Baby!” He instructed, pulling over to the shoulder of the road.

            Sam unhooked his seatbelt and looked over into the backseat. “What are you two even doing?” He asked, exasperated, looking from your sweater to Gabriel’s pale and flushed face. The color drained out of the archangel’s face faster than anything you’d ever seen.

            “He’s bleeding!” You exclaimed incredulously, looking back to the not-blood oozing through your fingers as it soaked through your jacket. It coated your skin warmly like massage oil, and it defied the laws of gravity when it refused to fall from your skin. “Well, I mean, it’s not blood, but – maybe the angelic equivalent, I guess? Grace? I’m sorry,” you said to Gabriel, truly apologetic. You couldn’t imagine how much it might hurt to have his wing injured, and then pressed on, but you were always supposed to apply pressure to help wounds clot. “Why aren’t you healing?”

            In the blink of an eye, you were alone in the backseat and almost slipped down into the foot well. Your jacket, soaked through with Grace, landed on your lap, while some still clung onto your hand, small amounts absorbing through your skin.

            When Castiel arrived about sixty seconds later, looking haggard with his tie more crooked than usual, he got to see the wonderful sight of you looking traumatized while Sam and Dean argued over whether or not angel blood was dangerous. When Sam tried to touch your skin, he had to yank his fingers back with bright red burns on his flesh. Dean started panicking and shouting about how it was going to burn through you like acid, and while Sam was telling him to get the laundry detergent from his duffel to neutralize the acidic properties of the silver on your skin, you kept trying to tell them that you weren’t hurting. You had no explanation for the blisters on Sam’s fingertips.

            None of you realized Castiel was there until he had already assessed the situation. He cleared his throat and in his gravelly voice, he awkwardly interrupted. “I heard Gabriel beginning to ‘angel out,’” he stated, glancing at Dean uncertainly. “So I came as soon as I was able. What happened?”

            You shrugged. Sam started holding up his hand and shouting about Gabriel and the Mystery Spot, believing that it was an elaborate and malicious prank. Dean demanded that Castiel heal you immediately, ignoring your claim that you were fine.

            “I just wanted to stop the bleeding,” you said, blinking back tears of stress in your eyes. “His wing was slashed by Ethiel’s angel blade.”

            Just as quickly as chaos had descended, it was lifted. Both of your brothers had finally shut up. Castiel frowned and tilted his head.

            “You could see my brother’s wings?” He inquired, some mix of fascinated and puzzled.

            You hesitated. “Can’t… can’t everyone?” Thoughtlessly, you rested both hands in your lap.

            Dean and Sam traded dark looks that made you uncomfortable. What’s wrong with me? You almost asked. You knew that whenever someone saw things that other people didn’t, it meant something bad. It wasn’t specific to hunters and the supernatural, either.

            “Humans are incapable of perceiving an angel’s wings without being burnt from within.” Castiel shared, looking somber and serious. Even if you thought he had known how to make a joke, you wouldn’t have believed he was kidding. “That’s why the psychic couldn’t withstand seeing my true form.” What? You had thought it had ended badly because she had attacked him, but – it was the wings that were dangerous?    “Then what the hell was she seeing, huh?” Sam demanded irately, pissed off about being burned and maybe a little bit scared that something was very wrong.

            Castiel looked pensive. “I suppose…” he slowly said, then shifted, uncomfortable. “Please understand that this has never happened before.” Dean looked like he was going to hit the angel if he didn’t just hurry and get on with it. “I believe the only reason Y/N may have been able to see his wings, and touch a pure form of Grace and survive the ordeal, is that she may be his soulmate.”

#holly writes #hollykasakabe #holly kasakabe #supernatural #spn #Gabriel x reader #gabrielxreader #dean winchester #sam winchester #sister!reader #reader insert #wings #preen #series #soulmate

[ramajmedia]

How Control Actually Exists In Alan Wake's Universe | Screen Rant

Major Spoilers For Alan Wake, Minor Spoilers For Control

There is evidence to suggest Remedy's games Control and Alan Wake take place in the same universe. The latest project from Remedy Entertainment, Control, builds on the foundations of the developer's previous projects, from Max Payne to Alan Wake. The latter title, originally released in 2010 as an Xbox 360 exclusive, has a lot in common with Control, to the point where pre-release speculation suggested the games might be connected somehow, perhaps even sharing continuity with one another.

Now that Control is out in the wild, we've spent a lot of time playing the game and doing our best to uncover all the secrets of The Oldest House. The Federal Bureau of Control deals with unexplained phenomena throughout the world. It's like if The X-Files were well-funded and Fox Mulder had complete authority over its dealings. When it comes to unexplained events, few compare to the premise of Alan Wake. A psychological thriller packed with wall-to-wall action and a seeming obsession with Twin Peaks, Alan Wake involves the eponymous writer finding himself in a fight for survival when his own writing begins coming to life... And that's just the tip of the iceberg for the surreal, scary, empowering, and harrowing adventure.

Related: Screen Rant's Control Review - It's Great!

The events of Alan Wake fit the bill of an AWE, or Altered World Event, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Control. It's easy to speculate about whether or not Alan Wake and Control share a greater setting, but the proof is in the proverbial pudding, or coffee, in this case. With that in mind, Does Control Share a Universe with Alan Wake?

Initially, Control is its own, self-contained story, but the lore documents littered throughout the world show off the true scope of the universe at hand. Incidents involving Altered Items, Altered World Events, and Objects of Power happen all over the world, and extensive paperwork can be found all over the game world, shedding some light on these mysterious occurrences.

Fairly early on, a document can be found explaining an altered item which should look familiar to fans of Alan Wake: a coffee thermos. Players of that 2010 game surely remember the grueling optional task of collecting 100 such thermoses scattered all over the game world. Altered Items look like ordinary objects, like a cup, a floppy disk, a refrigerator, etc, but they possess unique traits that make them special, or even dangerous. This particular Altered Item, as described by the document, the aptly titled Thermos Procedures, is a blue coffee thermos whose coffee is always "refreshing and strong, no matter its quality before being poured into the item."

At first, this seems like an innocent Easter Egg meant as an acknowledgement of Remedy's past, but reading on reveals greater meaning, further connections which transcend mere fanservice. Control's Alan Wake references aren't just winks and nods; they're a full-on plot thread!

The Thermos Procedures paper is more than just an Easter Egg. The document states it was found in Bright Falls, Washington. The town is said to be the site of an Altered World Event involving a man named Alan Wake. Obviously, this is a clear reference to the events of that game, in which Alan Wake becomes embroiled in a supernatural surreal mystery, thus confirming that Alan Wake is part of the greater universe of Control.

The document has another tantalizing detail: Alan Wake was considered for the Prime Candidate Program. The story of Control shows that Prime Candidates are people whose supernatural acumen is such that they are in the running to be the Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. Dylan Faden was Candidate P6, while player character Jesse Faden (Dylan's sister) is Candidate P7. A bit of investigation in the Prime Candidate Program section of Containment reveals Alan Wake himself was considered to be a potential choice by the Bureau to be a future director, but those plans came to naught, since Wake disappeared after the Bright Falls incident. According to the report, Wake dived into Cauldron Lake and was never seen again.

The events of Alan Wake's DLC chapters and standalone expansion, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, are thus inferred to all take place within Alan's time trapped in The Dark Place at the end of the original Alan Wake. Control states that a monitoring station was established at the lake, but the lack of any documentation afterwards suggests Alan is still trapped in his mysterious limbo.

It's established early on that former Director Zachariah Trench can communicate, or at least send one way messages, to Jesse. He's dead, but his essence still exists, and is often projected into the game world, visible only to the current director, Jesse. If Alan Wake and Control exist in the same universe, there is evidence this version of the afterlife is possibly connected to The Dark Place from Alan Wake. The story of Alan Wake, among many other things, involves the title character's efforts to rescue his wife from The Dark Place. In the end, he does, but at the cost of putting himself in her stead. The game, and all its DLC, end with Alan trapped in The Dark Place.

For all the Easter Eggs and clues it's provided to lore sleuths, the Thermos Procedures document still has more to give. In addition to the aforementioned information, the provocative paper also offers up the location of the Thermos itself: Floor 05, Unit 05 of the Panopticon. This isn't just flavor text to add immersion; Jesse can actually go there. She has to use Levitation to bypass a large gap, but she can go there and find two Altered Items and a pair of documents. One Item is, of course, the thermos, but the other is far more exciting. It's a Typewritten Page, and looking at it triggers a vision of Alan Wake himself, seemingly communicating with Jesse from The Dark Place. The visuals are eerily similar to the way Trench communicates from beyond the grave.

Could Trench and Wake be in the same place? Is it somehow connected to the mysterious Astral Plane or the numerous Threshold events throughout The Oldest House? Thresholds events are described in Control as alternate dimensions seeping through into our reality, and The Dark Place of Alan Wake is referred to as a Threshold in the Bright Falls Supplement document in Control. Is the afterlife simply another dimension of existence? Or is the entire multiverse nothing but fiction made manifest through a mix of the supernatural and pure willpower?

Just when things start to make sense, a new clue arises that throws everything out of whack. A common fan theory for Alan Wake was that the events of the game were all a fiction created by Thomas Zane, a poet and fantasy author. Variants on the theory suggest Alan Wake himself is a fictional creation of Zane, made real by his writing, or even vice versa, that Zane was written into existence across time and space by Alan Wake.

The audio recording found in Control, "Jesse Therapy: Polaris," possesses certain... Implications. Jesse talks about a poem by Thomas Zane, "Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle illuminated." It's a quote from Alan Wake, attributed to Zane. However, the therapist claims there is no poet named Thomas Zane. She says there was a European filmmaker who moved to the United States in the 1960s by that name, but Thomas Zane is not an accomplished writer in the universe of Control.

What does it mean? If Alan Wake and Control exist in the same universe, why isn't Thomas Zane a known entity in Control? Is Control set in a parallel universe where Zane isn't an acclaimed poet? Then where is Jesse from? Perhaps, if Zane is a figment of Alan Wake's imagination, his existence ceases to be while Wake is trapped in The Dark Place. The Therapy tape ends with a cryptic note from the doctor, who insists no progress can be made until Jesse can get a grip on "What's real and what's imagined."

But there's more. Maybe Remedy games are set in a vast multiverse, but said multiverse is based on human imagination, rather than science fiction. During optional conversations with Dylan, who has been deeply corrupted by The Hiss, he can tell Jesse of his dreams, of other realities. He talks about a figure named "Mr. Door," who shows him other realities. One, in which a writer creates stories about a cop. Another in which the cop is real. Alan Wake wrote the Alex Casey novels, stories of a hard-boiled New York City cop. Alex Casey was clearly based on Max Payne, to the point where Payne's actor, James McCaffrey (who also voiced Thomas Zane and Zachariah Trench), plays Casey in a brief cameo as a direct tribute to his role as Payne. Thomas Zane and Alan Wake are both trapped in The Dark Place. Maybe all of existence, all of the Remedy games to date, chronicle their attempts to write a scenario into existence that saves them from their unhappy fate. This is further hinted at when Dylan muses, of the various universes glimpsed in his dreams, "Maybe it's all a dream," followed by the ominous statement: "Maybe it's all real."

Remedy games are written in such a way that they have a definitive story to tell, but also a lot of grey space for fans to draw their own conclusions. Jesse and Dylan are brother and sister, but they both have unisex names and Jesse has knowledge (of Thomas Zane) that doesn't seem to exist in her universe. Are Jesse and Dylan the same person from two different universes? For this reason, is Jesse herself an Object of Power? Another of Dylan's dreams shows himself as a single person, Jesse Dylan Faden. Was Jesse Dylan somehow broken up into two people, Jesse and Dylan? By whom, and for what purpose?

Like in the best fiction, the search for definitive answers only leads to an exponential increase in questions. The lore of Control, and of the potential Remedy multiverse, is not a shallow lake, but a deep ocean. The answers aren't easy to find, if they're there at all, but it's worth diving in to experience for oneself the richness and depth of the storytelling water provided by Sam Lake and his team at Remedy. One thing's all but assured: Remedy has big plans for the future of Control and Alan Wake.

More: Control's Ending, Explained

Control is available for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

source https://screenrant.com/control-alan-wake-universe-easter-eggs-crossover/

#screenrant

[overseer2020]

Crimeworld: What IS IT??!!

Crimeworld is Part I of a planned four-part custom Magic: the Gathering block. It takes place on a mysterious plane called Ethra [Blogger’s note: I hadn’t given the name before now because I wasn’t sure how much to reveal about this plane. But I suppose I have to call it something, right?] where resources are limited despite the vastness of The City, The Outskirts and The Desolation.

First, let’s talk geography. At what most would consider the center of this world is The City. Comprised of various villages, fiefdoms and settlements all expanding into one another, a central government has arisen mere centuries ago, unifying these disparate clutches of civilization. This melting pot of races, cultures and ideas has resulted in what many have termed an Industrial Revolution. Steam power, the internal combustion engine (and maybe firearms?) have all come into being in the last hundred years or less, creating a reality (in Part I) that closely resembles the United States circa 1930s-1940s. Only with Orcs and Elves running around.

Before we continue to discuss geography, technology and socio-political development on Ethra (in Ethra?), I nearly forgot to introduce the elephant in the room. You see, for thousands of years, Ethra has been a world bereft of Magic. Only recently (say, in the last fifty years or so) has Magic been a part of every day life for the Citizens of Ethra. No one quite knows how or why the oldest stories that exist are looking more and more like historical records instead of the fanciful fiction of an ancient, superstitious past. Even the longest lived of the sentient races of Ethra have no living knowledge of Magic. This world will have to learn how to harness it, wield it and survive its use from scratch.

So, now that we understand a brief history of Ethra’s current status and that the sprawling megacity at the center of events accounts for the majority of Ethra’s useable land (and sea) mass, we can talk about The Outskirts. Beyond the City Limits, the wilder areas are collectively known as The Outskirts, though they are a wide ring of vastly diverse terrain. There are open plains, tall mountains, strings of islands, murky swamps and even some dense forests. 

The Archipelago is home to seafolk who often trade their culturally unique items with The City and maintain a thriving tourism business. 

The Farmsteads* provide as much food for the Citizens as they need comfortably, but their flat lands are easiest for expansion efforts. 

Many metalworks and industrial endeavors are carved into the Molten Mountains*, the most famous of which is Mt. Daeraz, the Impossible Peak*. 

The Grey Forest is home to many naturists and feral animals. It is an exciting place to visit, but incredibly dangerous for the underprepared.

No one in their right minds lives in The Marshlands*, a place of poison and decay, death and despair. However, should one have need of her, there are tales of a knowledgeable recluse who guards her library jealously. Or perhaps there exists an entire family of hermits who just want to be left alone. Details are scarce and most disregard these swamp dwellers as varying degrees of insane anyway.

I hadn’t intended to go into detail about The Outskirts, and I’ve used up my allotted daily word count, so I’ll wrap up the geography lesson tomorrow.

Next Time: What’s beyond the Outskirts?

* [Blogger’s note: I came up with these terms as I am writing this, which is perfect because I do need more lore to fill in the flavor text holes.]

[terabitweb]

Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Doug Olenick

Since the 1950s, the Cavendish banana has dominated the world market. Its thick skin makes it easy and stable to transport, and its flavor and seedlessness give it broad appeal. But the Cavendish banana’s lack of seeds is fast becoming its downfall. Without seeds, the Cavendish banana cannot reproduce naturally. It must be cloned. This lack of genetic diversity in the world banana crop has resulted in a monoculture that leaves the Cavendish incredibly vulnerable to disease. Indeed, banana plantations are rapidly succumbing to a fungus known as Tropical Race 4 – a new strain of the Fusarium fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel, the banana that dominated the world before 1950.

While the woes of the Cavendish and the Gros Michel before it bear obvious lessons for global agriculture, they also carrying a warning for the cybersecurity industry: lack of diversity can make everyone more vulnerable to threats.

An industry ripe for consolidation?

Ask any analyst, reporter, or financial observer, and they’ll tell you that the security market is ripe for consolidation. For years, security vendors have proliferated, buoyed by high valuations and ever-expanding enterprise security budgets. While this rush to innovate has resulted in better and more sophisticated threat defenses, it has also created a complex web of tools which already overworked, overwhelmed, and understaffed security teams must manage.

This tool sprawl is one reason that so many in and around the security industry believe that an era of consolidation is coming. According to ESG Research, 66 percent of businesses are actively working to consolidate their security portfolio.

But it’s not the only indicator. A recent spate of acquisitions have amplified the M&A hype. Splunk acquired Phantom, BlackBerry acquired Cylance, Cisco acquired Duo and more recently, Verizon and Comcast made forays into the market with the purchase of ProtectWise and BluVector, respectively.

An Appealing Proposition

For many in the security industry consolidation holds a lot of appeal, and they cite the cloud industry as a perfect example of what consolidation can offer.

A decade ago, cloud was the newest, hottest market. Definitions were loose and valuations were high. But as the market has consolidated, it has stabilized around three major players — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — each of which has its own constellation of associated vendors. It has created continuity and consistency, and made it easier for organizations to plan an intelligent migration strategy.

So the thinking goes: consolidation worked in the cloud, why not in security? After all, security vendors today claim they do just about everything. Why not leverage a security platform that encompasses everything, offering a one-stop-shop, silver-bullet solution for enterprise security?

Why Not? Because that’s bananas

Let’s go back to the Cavendish for a moment here. Monoculture might have made it incredibly easy and cheap to grow billions of bananas to feed global demand, but it also proved to be the banana’s Achilles heel. Rather than having to adapt itself to a variety of banana genes, the Tropical Race 4 fungus only had to figure out one.

Now apply that logic to cybersecurity. If every organization uses an identical or nearly identical set of security tools, breaking into one means breaking into them all. And once threat actors figure out how to break in once, they’ll have the keys to every organization. Just like Tropical Race 4 is burning through the Cavendish banana population, a single cyber threat could take down a vast number of organizations.

In the case of cybersecurity, heterogeneity of defense systems is itself a defense.

Have your bananas and eat them too

At this point, you might be starting to think this is a zero-sum game. Either suffer an endless proliferation of security tools, or adopt a homogenous security framework that potentially exposes the organization to greater risk. The good news is that, with some organizational collaboration, you can have your bananas and eat them too.

For security teams, collaborating with other parts of the IT organization can actually improve security posture and reduce tool sprawl. Increasingly, we’re seeing customers take a cross-functional approach to tool consolidation, looking at how various IT operations tools can be leveraged by security, and how security tools can be used by IT operations. In this case, consolidation can mean reducing the number of tools used across the entire organization, rather than relying on the security industry to merge into a one-size-fits-all solution.

This collaborative approach also creates opportunity to leverage other parts of the organization to improve security posture through smarter processes and practices. While DevOps and IT Ops may never be threat hunters, their domain expertise may well provide insight and understanding that can improve overall security operations.

Some Final Food for Thought

Consolidation is positioned as the inevitable route in security — but it doesn’t mean it’s the right route. In security in particular, diversity and innovation are themselves some of the strongest defenses we have. We should continue to foster and encourage the upcoming generation of healthy cyber start-ups, and look for cross-functional ways to integrate next-generation technologies.

There are too many strong vendors. There’s too much market need. And there’s too much progress to be made. We need more bright, forward-looking minds working to solve today’s cybersecurity challenges – not fewer. Just ask the bananas.

Jeff Costlow, Deputy CISO, ExtraHop

The post What cybersecurity can learn from bananas appeared first on SC Media.

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Go to Source Author: Doug Olenick What cybersecurity can learn from bananas Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Doug Olenick Since the 1950s, the Cavendish banana has dominated the world market.

#SC Magazine

[foxhenki-blog]

The Sun King's Princess

Welcome to the first installment of my new project, the Myconomicon. We all know the benefits that psychedelic mushrooms have on magical practice and general health and wellbeing. I feel that we are leaving a lot on the table, however, by not exploring the esoteric / alchemical powers of the rest of this vast kingdom. That is what the Myconomicon will seek to do, to explore the kingdom of mushrooms and to reveal the archetypes and magical tech inherent in the vast majority of non-psychedelic fungi.

This is an anti-imperialist exercise, at its core. Take, for example, this quote from the introduction of Chanterelle dreams, amanita nightmares:

“Our [mycophobic] beliefs have deep roots in British culture, in the words of British mycologist William Hay in his 1887 book — British Fungi, ‘the individual who desires to engage in the study of wild mushrooms must face a good deal of scorn. He is laughed at for his strange taste by the better classes, and is actually regarded as a sort of idiot… No… hobby is esteemed so contemptible is that of the fungus Hunter or toadstool eater.” (Marley, xxi)

Mycophobia is a disease of the intellectually colonized.

The Myconomicon is a grimoire, and a grimoire needs spirits, such as the Russian King Borovik, the ruler of the mushroom kingdom (Marley, 6). Borovik isn’t our principle daimon, however. The top spot is reserved for the Old Woman of the Woods, herself, Baba Yaga. ‘Chantrelle dreams…’ (among many other texts) cites her influence when it states that:

“In one [folktale], Baba Yaga captures and intends to eat a hedgehog sitting atop a mushroom and eating another mushroom. The hedgehog convinces Baba Yaga that he can be more useful in other ways, and changes into a small boy who leads the hag to a magical sunflower… In another legends, Baba Yaga puts the hero in touch with magic creatures (spirits), Lesovik and Borovik, who live under a mushroom and provide the hero with magical gifts… Whether depicted as benign or malevolent, Baba Yaga often appeared with mushrooms.” (Marley, 7)

Russia, as a nation, is one of the most mycophillic people on the planet. It is safe to assume that Baba Yaga, their High Empress of the Dark Arts, is not only concerning herself with a psychedelic toadstool but with the entire spectrum of useful mushrooms. For this quality alone, we can heretofore assume that Baba Yaga is the principle spirit of the Myconomicon.

Mushrooms can be communicated with. The ancients whispering to them and asking where their brothers and sisters might be hiding (Marley, 72), as one example. Mushrooms are spirit-forms. Mushrooms are, in fact, the perfect spirit-form for chaos magic. Anna Tsing, cohort of Donna Haraway and the author of the book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, states that:

“The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift and a guide when the controlled world we thought we had fails.” (Tsing, 2)

Mushrooms are a model for exploiting chaos. She goes to note that:

“When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matzoh talkie mushroom.” (Tsing, 3)

Making it clear that if we are to survive the swift approaching apocalypse of dominant Western culture and adapt well to the new surroundings, that mushrooms are our best guide.

I was once chastised by a powerful wizard for taking what was he viewed as a ‘devotionalist’ approach to mushrooms. I would like to counter any further arguments in that vein with a few notes from our recent past as cultural beings. Our ancestors, those that we already pull so much of our magical tech from, gathered around mushrooms and treated them with much devotion. Elio Schaechter, in his work, In the Company of Mushrooms, points out that some of the earliest human settlements around the Lascaux caves in France — those brought to the masses through Werner Herzong’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, are in areas that are still today rich in wild mushrooms. He goes on to assert that all European countries attribute magical and spiritual powers to mushrooms (Schaechter, 4), and again, that is all mushrooms, not just the Amanitas. The author also states that:

“Mushrooms and truffles (pitriyot and kemehim in Hebrew) are mentioned together several times in the Talmud… According to the Babylonian Talmud (Berakoth 40b), eating mushrooms is not to be preceded by reciting the blessing reserved for vegetables; rather, a more generic prayer is called for: ‘Blessed art Thou O Lord, our God King of the universe, by whose word everything is created’ The reason for this difference is that mushrooms are not ordinary plants because ‘they do not draw their nourishment from the ground but from the air,’ which explains why they possess no true roots and ‘are fed by other plants.’” (Schaechter, 5)

What this says to me is that the prayer to mushrooms addresses God directly, and not the ‘spirit’ of the plant. Another interpretation for this could be the mushrooms are a direct extension of the divine or the cosmic. Meanwhile, traveling from Babylon to Michoacan, we find the belief that mushrooms aren’t plants, or of the plant kingdom, but are instead considered ‘flowers of the earth’ by the indigenous peoples there (Schaechter, 6). This is a similar sentiment, that mushrooms are a physical manifestation of the creator, of Mother Earth. Further South, the Yanomamos have one word for eating meat and mushrooms and another for eating all other things (Schaechter, 24). The mushroom is flesh, it is, like the jaguar, an entity possessed of a spirit.

Our first spirit form is a princess and a direct descendant of Helios. She is commonly referred to as Agaricus blazei Murrill, the Royal Sun Mushroom of Brazil. The princess has, until relatively recently, enjoyed an existence free from human contact. Brazil is by-and-large a mycophobic country. The consumption of mushrooms being restricted to small ethnic enclaves (typically Japanese) or sometimes to those of higher status whose cultural education has exposed them to mycophilia (Dias et al, 546). This Princess is from a place where mushrooms and their consumption are connected directly to class. Further, it is stated that there is no use of mushrooms in Brazilian traditional medicine (Dias et al, 546) and that what interest there is now, is directly related to our spirit-form and her work. With Mycophobia in Brazil extending into traditional healing rituals and their vast herbal lore, which could be due to class and colonialism, as the indigenous peoples of the area no doubt had some mushroom lore, we see that the colonized mind often has mycophobia as one of its more overt symptoms. Agaricus blazei positioned herself to be carried to the mycophylic culture of Japan (there being a great number of Japanese, both foreign and native born, in Brazil) where she could continue her journey to heal the world with her magic and, in turn, come back and break the colonized minds of her home.

She was discovered in Piedade, in the state of São Paulo, by the Japanese researcher Furumoto and when arriving in her adopted home of Japan, she was given the name Himematsutake. Research into her properties only continued while Furumoto was alive, however, and after his death the spirit-form found her journey stalled until she was able to find more suitable subjects in the form of Japanese businessmen, who then funded research into her anti-tumor magics (Dias et al, 546). Her Japanese name, ‘Himematsutake’ breaks down to ‘Hime,’ meaning Princess. We can infer that the Royal Sun Mushroom (her common name in Brazil [and also a brand name with capitalist interests attempting to control her journey]) is regal, female and youthful in her characteristics. The later co-opting of her journey by several business interests connect her, archetypally, to the exploitation of young women by capitalism.

The Princess of the Sun King evolved inexplicably during her journey. It is known that the original mushrooms found by Furumoto had an aroma and flavor that was so strong that they were difficult to consume. Somewhere in the journey to Japan, however, they developed a more pleasant smell and a lighter coloration and grew to a larger size (Dias et al, 546). This is evidence that the Princess of the Sun King evolved to match the tastes of her new chosen home and culture, Japan. How else do you explain her shedding of her feralness and matching the aesthetic and culinary tastes of the Japanese, so that her popularity could spread?

Today, Agaricus blazei Murrill is produced at a rate of 660,000 lbs of dried body annually and is consumed by at least 500,000 individuals daily for her antitumor, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, liver protecting, antidiabetic, antihyperlipidemic, antiatherosclerosic, antiallergic and immunomodulating effects (Wang et al, 1-2)

She is, in true princess fashion, an expensive mushroom to grow and so research continues to find a way to provide her with her optimum environment (Firenzuoli et al, 4). When she lived in the wild, she was a litter-decomposing fungus that was often found on forest edges and in manures. Today, as we will see in a bit, her journey continues on enriched composts and various pasteurized substrates (Firenzuoli et al, 4). She also enjoys being young and has engineered her gifts to only come forth once she has aged. Once her cap has opened and her fruiting body is more mature, the nutraceuticals contained inside of her have the strongest concentrations of ‘beta-glucans’ (Firenzuoli et al, 5), sugars found in her cell walls.

Remember back when we mentioned that after her chosen human, Furumoto, joined her in the spirit world, that her journey paused and was only picked back up due to a thirst for anti-cancer medicines? It is reported that originally, her beta-glucans were not toxic to tumors and only through further cultivation did tumorcidal properties evolve (Firenzuoli et al, 6). This is more evidence of the spirit-form evolving to meet the expectations of the humans studying it, learning their needs and meeting them. Moreover, these antimutagenic effects can be accessed by us through as simple a method as leaving the dry fruiting body in water at room temperature for a couple of hours (Firenzuoli et al, 6).

If you are interested in assisting the Sun King’s Princess with her journey, and in turn, receiving the benefits of her magic for yourself, you can easily obtain your own culture of Agaricus blazei Murrill. Research has shown that she can be moved to fruit using the same composting method that is used for the cultivation of the common button mushroom, but as a ‘devotionalist,’ I would council you to work to give her the offerings that she prefers. She has been reported as happily colonizing the spent mushroom substrate where Oyster mushrooms had previously grown, and that vermicompost is preferable to her (Gonzalez, Abstract). She has also been shown to prefer at least a 30% mix of nyjer seed in her substrate (Gonzalez, 1332). She might take awhile to spawn, 60 days in some cases, so be prepared for a long petition for her manifestation. The Princess of the Sun King rewards patience, however, and is known to produce a second flush some 110 days after spawning, as well (Gonzalez, 1336). She also has been shown to enjoy a bed of rice straw as her primary substrate with additives such as calcium carbonate, rice bran, diammonium phosphate and gypsum. Most importantly for this subtropical royalty, is the temperature that you keep her at, for both mycelia and fruiting bodies prefer a temperature of 77˚F with a relative humidity of at least 90%.

As the daughter of the Sun King, Himematsutake is the sister to Circe — and all of the other daughters of Helios. Any rituals or incantations proper to her can be adapted for this spirit form as well. If one is interested in pulling this spirit-form into one’s life and doesn’t know where to begin, the Myconomicon provides the following sigil to assist with her manifestation:

Her sigil is also good for the banishing of capitalist enslavement of young girls either through trafficking or corporate branding campaigns. It is also beneficial for bringing oneself into alignment with her healing properties and for mentally preparing the way for fighting cancer, diabetes, hepatitis, viruses, and general allergies and inflammation.

Sigil courtesy of Ghostly Harmless’ Sigilizer

References

Dias E S, Abe C and Schwan R F (2004) Truths and myths about the mushroom Agaricus blazei. Scientia Agricola (61, 5). pp 545 - 549

Firenzuoli F, Gori L and Lombardo G (2008) The medicinal mushroom Agaricus blaze Murrill: Review of Literature and Pharmacy-Toxicological Problems. eCAM (5, 1) pp 3 - 15.

Gonzalez Matute R, Figlas D and Curvetto N (2011) Agarics blaze production on non-composted substrates based on sunflower seed hulls and spent oyster mushroom substrate. World Journal of Microbiological Biotechnology. (27) pp 1331-1339.

Jatuwong K, Kakumyan P, Chamyuang S, Chukeatirote E and Hyde K D (2014) Optimization condition for cultivation of Agaricus subrufescens hybrid strains. The 26th Annual Meeting of the Thai Society for Biotechnology and International Conference. pp 244-252

Marley, G. A. (2011). Chanterelle dreams, amanita nightmares: The love, lore and mystique of mushrooms. White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green.

Schaechter, E (2014) In the company of mushrooms. Harvard University Press

Tsing, A. L. (2017). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Wang H, Fu Z and Han C (2013) The medicinal values of culinary-medicinal royal sun mushroom (Agaricus blaze Murrill). Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine pp 1-6

The mushroom Image is from Linda Bryan Sears and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

#Agaricus blazei Murrill #Himematsutake #Royal Sun Mushroom

[technicalsolutions88]

If you’re a UX designer you won’t need this article to tell you about dark pattern design. But perhaps you chose to tap here out of a desire to reaffirm what you already know — to feel good about your professional expertise.

Or was it that your conscience pricked you? Go on, you can be honest… or, well, can you?

A third possibility: Perhaps an app you were using presented this article in a way that persuaded you to tap on it rather than on some other piece of digital content. And it’s those sorts of little imperceptible nudges — what to notice, where to tap/click — that we’re talking about when we talk about dark pattern design.

But not just that. The darkness comes into play because UX design choices are being selected to be intentionally deceptive. To nudge the user to give up more than they realize. Or to agree to things they probably wouldn’t if they genuinely understood the decisions they were being pushed to make.

To put it plainly, dark pattern design is deception and dishonesty by design… Still sitting comfortably?

The technique, as it’s deployed online today, often feeds off and exploits the fact that content-overloaded consumers skim-read stuff they’re presented with, especially if it looks dull and they’re in the midst of trying to do something else — like sign up to a service, complete a purchase, get to something they actually want to look at, or find out what their friends have sent them.

Manipulative timing is a key element of dark pattern design. In other words when you see a notification can determine how you respond to it. Or if you even notice it. Interruptions generally pile on the cognitive overload — and deceptive design deploys them to make it harder for a web user to be fully in control of their faculties during a key moment of decision.

Dark patterns used to obtain consent to collect users’ personal data often combine unwelcome interruption with a built in escape route — offering an easy way to get rid of the dull looking menu getting in the way of what you’re actually trying to do.

Brightly colored ‘agree and continue’ buttons are a recurring feature of this flavor of dark pattern design. These eye-catching signposts appear near universally across consent flows — to encourage users not to read or contemplate a service’s terms and conditions, and therefore not to understand what they’re agreeing to.

It’s ‘consent’ by the spotlit backdoor.

This works because humans are lazy in the face of boring and/or complex looking stuff. And because too much information easily overwhelms. Most people will take the path of least resistance. Especially if it’s being reassuringly plated up for them in handy, push-button form.

At the same time dark pattern design will ensure the opt out — if there is one — will be near invisible; Greyscale text on a grey background is the usual choice.

Some deceptive designs even include a call to action displayed on the colorful button they do want you to press — with text that says something like ‘Okay, looks great!’ — to further push a decision.

Likewise, the less visible opt out option might use a negative suggestion to imply you’re going to miss out on something or are risking bad stuff happening by clicking here.

The horrible truth is that deceptive designs can be awfully easy to paint.

Where T&Cs are concerned, it really is shooting fish in a barrel. Because humans hate being bored or confused and there are countless ways to make decisions look off-puttingly boring or complex — be it presenting reams of impenetrable legalese in tiny greyscale lettering so no-one will bother reading it combined with defaults set to opt in when people click ‘ok’; deploying intentionally confusing phrasing and/or confusing button/toggle design that makes it impossible for the user to be sure what’s on and what’s off (and thus what’s opt out and what’s an opt in) or even whether opting out might actually mean opting into something you really don’t want…

What advertising hell on earth is this? Damn right I’m going to block all I can .. what do these defaults even mean? #DeceptiveByDesign pic.twitter.com/KRY2ECPA5R

— Privacy Matters (@PrivacyMatters) June 28, 2018

Friction is another key tool of this dark art: For example designs that require lots more clicks/taps and interactions if you want to opt out. Such as toggles for every single data share transaction — potentially running to hundreds of individual controls a user has to tap on vs just a few taps or even a single button to agree to everything. The weighing is intentionally all one way. And it’s not in the consumer’s favor.

Deceptive designs can also make it appear that opting out is not even possible. Such as default opting users in to sharing their data and, if they try to find a way to opt out, requiring they locate a hard-to-spot alternative click — and then also requiring they scroll to the bottom of lengthy T&Cs to unearth a buried toggle where they can in fact opt out.

Facebook used that technique to carry out a major data heist by linking WhatsApp users’ accounts with Facebook accounts in 2016. Despite prior claims that such a privacy u-turn could never happen. The vast majority of WhatsApp users likely never realized they could say no — let alone understood the privacy implications of consenting to their accounts being linked.

Ecommerce sites also sometimes suggestively present an optional (priced) add-on in a way that makes it appear like an obligatory part of the transaction. Such as using a brightly colored ‘continue’ button during a flight check out process but which also automatically bundles an optional extra like insurance, instead of plainly asking people if they want to buy it.

Or using pre-selected checkboxes to sneak low cost items or a small charity donation into a basket when a user is busy going through the check out flow — meaning many customers won’t notice it until after the purchase has been made.

Airlines have also been caught using deceptive design to upsell pricier options, such as by obscuring cheaper flights and/or masking prices so it’s harder to figure out what the most cost effective choice actually is.

Dark patterns to thwart attempts to unsubscribe are horribly, horribly common in email marketing. Such as an unsubscribe UX that requires you to click a ridiculous number of times and keep reaffirming that yes, you really do want out.

Often these additional screens are deceptively designed to resembled the ‘unsubscribe successful’ screens that people expect to see when they’ve pulled the marketing hooks out. But if you look very closely, at the typically very tiny lettering, you’ll see they’re actually still asking if you want to unsubscribe. The trick is to get you not to unsubscribe by making you think you already have. 

Another oft-used deceptive design that aims to manipulate online consent flows works against users by presenting a few selectively biased examples — which gives the illusion of helpful context around a decision. But actually this is a turbocharged attempt to manipulate the user by presenting a self-servingly skewed view that is in no way a full and balanced picture of the consequences of consent.

At best it’s disingenuous. More plainly it’s deceptive and dishonest.

Here’s just one example of selectively biased examples presented during a Facebook consent flow used to encourage European users to switch on its face recognition technology. Clicking ‘continue’ leads the user to the decision screen — but only after they’ve been shown this biased interstitial…

Facebook is also using emotional manipulation here, in the wording of its selective examples, by playing on people’s fears (claiming its tech will “help protect you from a stranger”) and playing on people’s sense of goodwill (claiming your consent will be helpful to people with visual impairment) — to try to squeeze agreement by making people feel fear or guilt.

You wouldn’t like this kind of emotionally manipulative behavior if a human was doing it to you. But Facebook frequently tries to manipulate its users’ feelings to get them to behave how it wants.

For instance to push users to post more content — such as by generating an artificial slideshow of “memories” from your profile and a friend’s profile, and then suggesting you share this unasked for content on your timeline (pushing you to do so because, well, what’s your friend going to think if you choose not to share it?). Of course this serves its business interests because more content posted to Facebook generates more engagement and thus more ad views.

Or — in a last ditch attempt to prevent a person from deleting their account — Facebook has been known to use the names and photos of their Facebook friends to claim such and such a person will “miss you” if you leave the service. So it’s suddenly conflating leaving Facebook with abandoning your friends.

Distraction is another deceptive design technique deployed to sneak more from the user than they realize. For example cutesy looking cartoons that are served up to make you feel warn and fluffy about a brand — such as when they’re periodically asking you to review your privacy settings.

Again, Facebook uses this technique. The cartoony look and feel around its privacy review process is designed to make you feel reassured about giving the company more of your data.

You could even argue that Google’s entire brand is a dark pattern design: Childishly colored and sounding, it suggests something safe and fun. Playful even. The feelings it generates — and thus the work it’s doing — bear no relation to the business the company is actually in: Surveillance and people tracking to persuade you to buy things.

Another example of dark pattern design: Notifications that pop up just as you’re contemplating purchasing a flight or hotel room, say, or looking at a pair of shoes — which urge you to “hurry!” as there’s only X number of seats or pairs left.

This plays on people’s FOMO, trying to rush a transaction by making a potential customer feel like they don’t have time to think about it or do more research — and thus thwart the more rational and informed decision they might otherwise have made.

The kicker is there’s no way to know if there really was just two seats left at that price. Much like the ghost cars Uber was caught displaying in its app — which it claimed were for illustrative purposes, rather than being exactly accurate depictions of cars available to hail — web users are left having to trust what they’re being told is genuinely true.

But why should you trust companies that are intentionally trying to mislead you?

Dark patterns point to an ethical vacuum

The phrase dark pattern design is pretty antique in Internet terms, though you’ll likely have heard it being bandied around quite a bit of late. Wikipedia credits UX designer Harry Brignull with the coinage, back in 2010, when he registered a website (darkpatterns.org) to chronicle and call out the practice as unethical.

“Dark patterns tend to perform very well in A/B and multivariate tests simply because a design that tricks users into doing something is likely to achieve more conversions than one that allows users to make an informed decision,” wrote Brignull in 2011 — highlighting exactly why web designers were skewing towards being so tricksy: Superficially it works. The anger and mistrust come later.

Close to a decade later, Brignull’s website is still valiantly calling out deceptive design. So perhaps he should rename this page ‘the hall of eternal shame’. (And yes, before you point it out, you can indeed find brands owned by TechCrunch’s parent entity Oath among those being called out for dark pattern design… It’s fair to say that dark pattern consent flows are shamefully widespread among media entities, many of which aim to monetize free content with data-thirsty ad targeting.)

Of course the underlying concept of deceptive design has roots that run right through human history. See, for example, the original Trojan horse. (A sort of ‘reverse’ dark pattern design — given the Greeks built an intentionally eye-catching spectacle to pique the Trojan’s curiosity, getting them to lower their guard and take it into the walled city, allowing the fatal trap to be sprung.)

Basically, the more tools that humans have built, the more possibilities they’ve found for pulling the wool over other people’s eyes. The Internet just kind of supercharges the practice and amplifies the associated ethical concerns because deception can be carried out remotely and at vast, vast scale. Here the people lying to you don’t even have to risk a twinge of personal guilt because they don’t have to look into your eyes while they’re doing it.

Nowadays falling foul of dark pattern design most often means you’ll have unwittingly agreed to your personal data being harvested and shared with a very large number of data brokers who profit from background trading people’s information — without making it clear they’re doing so nor what exactly they’re doing to turn your data into their gold. So, yes, you are paying for free consumer services with your privacy.

Another aspect of dark pattern design has been bent towards encouraging Internet users to form addictive habits attached to apps and services. Often these kind of addiction forming dark patterns are less visually obvious on a screen — unless you start counting the number of notifications you’re being plied with, or the emotional blackmail triggers you’re feeling to send a message for a ‘friendversary’, or not miss your turn in a ‘streak game’.

This is the Nir Eyal ‘hooked’ school of product design. Which has actually run into a bit of a backlash of late, with big tech now competing — at least superficially — to offer so-called ‘digital well-being’ tools to let users unhook. Yet these are tools the platforms are still very much in control of. So there’s no chance you’re going to be encouraged to abandon their service altogether.

Dark pattern design can also cost you money directly. For example if you get tricked into signing up for or continuing a subscription you didn’t really want. Though such blatantly egregious subscription deceptions are harder to get away with. Because consumers soon notice they’re getting stung for $50 a month they never intended to spend.

That’s not to say ecommerce is clean of deceptive crimes now. The dark patterns have generally just got a bit more subtle. Pushing you to transact faster than you might otherwise, say, or upselling stuff you don’t really need.

Although consumers will usually realize they’ve been sold something they didn’t want or need eventually. Which is why deceptive design isn’t a sustainable business strategy, even setting aside ethical concerns.

In short, it’s short term thinking at the expense of reputation and brand loyalty. Especially as consumers now have plenty of online platforms where they can vent and denounce brands that have tricked them. So trick your customers at your peril.

That said, it takes longer for people to realize their privacy is being sold down the river. If they even realize at all. Which is why dark pattern design has become such a core enabling tool for the vast, non-consumer facing ad tech and data brokering industry that’s grown fat by quietly sucking on people’s data — thanks to the enabling grease of dark pattern design.

Think of it as a bloated vampire octopus wrapped invisibly around the consumer web, using its myriad tentacles and suckers to continuously manipulate decisions and close down user agency in order to keep data flowing — with all the A/B testing techniques and gamification tools it needs to win.

“It’s become substantially worse,” agrees Brignull, discussing the practice he began critically chronicling almost a decade ago. “Tech companies are constantly in the international news for unethical behavior. This wasn’t the case 5-6 years ago. Their use of dark patterns is the tip of the iceberg. Unethical UI is a tiny thing compared to unethical business strategy.”

“UX design can be described as the way a business chooses to behave towards its customers,” he adds, saying that deceptive web design is therefore merely symptomatic of a deeper Internet malaise.

He argues the underlying issue is really about “ethical behavior in US society in general”.

The deceitful obfuscation of commercial intention certainly runs all the way through the data brokering and ad tech industries that sit behind much of the ‘free’ consumer Internet. Here consumers have plainly been kept in the dark so they cannot see and object to how their personal information is being handed around, sliced and diced, and used to try to manipulate them.

From an ad tech perspective, the concern is that manipulation doesn’t work when it’s obvious. And the goal of targeted advertising is to manipulate people’s decisions based on intelligence about them gleaned via clandestine surveillance of their online activity (so inferring who they are via their data). This might be a purchase decision. Equally it might be a vote.

The stakes have been raised considerably now that data mining and behavioral profiling are being used at scale to try to influence democratic processes.

So it’s not surprising that Facebook is so coy about explaining why a certain user on its platform is seeing a specific advert. Because if the huge surveillance operation underpinning the algorithmic decision to serve a particular ad was made clear, the person seeing it might feel manipulated. And then they would probably be less inclined to look favorably upon the brand they were being urged to buy. Or the political opinion they were being pushed to form. And Facebook’s ad tech business stands to suffer.

The dark pattern design that’s trying to nudge you to hand over your personal information is, as Birgnull says, just the tip of a vast and shadowy industry that trades on deception and manipulation by design — because it relies on the lie that people don’t care about their privacy.

But people clearly do care about privacy. Just look at the lengths to which ad tech entities go to obfuscate and deceive consumers about how their data is being collected and used. If people don’t mind companies spying on them, why not just tell them plainly it’s happening?

And if people were really cool about sharing their personal and private information with anyone, and totally fine about being tracked everywhere they go and having a record kept of all the people they know and have relationships with, why would the ad tech industry need to spy on them in the first place? They could just ask up front for all your passwords.

The deception enabled by dark pattern design not only erodes privacy but has the chilling effect of putting web users under pervasive, clandestine surveillance, it also risks enabling damaging discrimination at scale. Because non-transparent decisions made off of the back of inferences gleaned from data taken without people’s consent can mean that — for example — only certain types of people are shown certain types of offers and prices, while others are not.

Facebook was forced to make changes to its ad platform after it was shown that an ad-targeting category it lets advertisers target ads against, called ‘ethnic affinity’ — aka Facebook users whose online activity indicates an interest in “content relating to particular ethnic communities” — could be used to run housing and employment ads that discriminate against protected groups.

More recently the major political ad scandals relating to Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns targeting the US and other countries via Facebook’s platform, and the massive Facebook user data heist involving the controversial political consultancy Cambridge Analytica deploying quiz apps to improperly suck out people’s data in order to build psychographic profiles for political ad targeting, has shone a spotlight on the risks that flow from platforms that operate by systematically keeping their users in the dark.

As a result of these scandals, Facebook has started offering a level of disclosure around who is paying for and running some of the ads on its platform. But plenty of aspects of its platform and operations remain shrouded. Even those components that are being opened up a bit are still obscured from view of the majority of users — thanks to the company’s continued use of dark patterns to manipulate people into acceptance without actual understanding.

And yet while dark pattern design has been the slickly successful oil in the engines of the ad tech industry for years, allowing it to get away with so much consent-less background data processing, gradually, gradually some of the shadier practices of this sector are being illuminated and shut down — including as a consequence of shoddy security practices, with so many companies involved in the trading and mining of people’s data. There are just more opportunities for data to leak. 

Laws around privacy are also being tightened. And changes to EU data protection rules are a key reason why dark pattern design has bubbled back up into online conversations lately. The practice is under far greater legal threat now as GDPR tightens the rules around consent.

This week a study by the Norwegian Consumer Council criticized Facebook and Google for systematically deploying design choices that nudge people towards making decisions which negatively affect their own privacy — such as data sharing defaults, and friction injected into the process of opting out so that fewer people will.

Another manipulative design decision flagged by the report is especially illustrative of the deceptive levels to which companies will stoop to get users to do what they want — with the watchdog pointing out how Facebook paints fake red dots onto its UI in the midst of consent decision flows in order to encourage the user to think they have a message or a notification. Thereby rushing people to agree without reading any small print.

Fair and ethical design is design that requires people to opt in affirmatively to any actions that benefit the commercial service at the expense of the user’s interests. Yet all too often it’s the other way around: Web users have to go through sweating toil and effort to try to safeguard their information or avoid being stung for something they don’t want.

You might think the types of personal data that Facebook harvests are trivial — and so wonder what’s the big deal if the company is using deceptive design to obtain people’s consent? But the purposes to which people’s information can be put are not at all trivial — as the Cambridge Analytica scandal illustrates.

One of Facebook’s recent data grabs in Europe also underlines how it’s using dark patterns on its platform to attempt to normalize increasingly privacy hostile technologies.

Earlier this year it began asking Europeans for consent to processing their selfies for facial recognition purposes — a highly controversial technology that regulatory intervention in the region had previously blocked. Yet now, as a consequence of Facebook’s confidence in crafting manipulative consent flows, it’s essentially figured out a way to circumvent EU citizens’ fundamental rights — by socially engineering Europeans to override their own best interests.

Nor is this type of manipulation exclusively meted out to certain, more tightly regulated geographies; Facebook is treating all its users like this. European users just received its latest set of dark pattern designs first, ahead of a global rollout, thanks to the bloc’s new data protection regulation coming into force on May 25.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg even went so far as to gloat about the success of this deceptive modus operandi on stage at a European conference in May — claiming the “vast majority” of users were “willingly” opting in to targeted advertising via its new consent flow.

In truth the consent flow is manipulative, and Facebook does not even offer an absolute opt out of targeted advertising on its platform. The ‘choice’ it gives users is to agree to its targeted advertising or to delete their account and leave the service entirely. Which isn’t really a choice when balanced against the power of Facebook’s platform and the network effect it exploits to keep people using its service.

‘Forced consent‘ is an early target for privacy campaign groups making use of GDPR opening the door, in certain EU member states, to collective enforcement of individuals’ data rights.

Of course if you read Facebook or Google’s PR around privacy they claim to care immensely — saying they give people all the controls they need to manage and control access to their information. But controls with dishonest instructions on how to use them aren’t really controls at all. And opt outs that don’t exist smell rather more like a lock in. 

Platforms certainly remain firmly in the driving seat because — until a court tells them otherwise — they control not just the buttons and levers but the positions, sizes, colors, and ultimately the presence or otherwise of the buttons and levers.

And because these big tech ad giants have grown so dominant as services they are able to wield huge power over their users — even tracking non-users over large swathes of the rest of the Internet, and giving them even fewer controls than the people who are de facto locked in, even if, technically speaking, service users might be able to delete an account or abandon a staple of the consumer web. 

Big tech platforms can also leverage their size to analyze user behavior at vast scale and A/B test the dark pattern designs that trick people the best. So the notion that users have been willingly agreeing en masse to give up their privacy remains the big lie squatting atop the consumer Internet.

People are merely choosing the choice that’s being pre-selected for them.

That’s where things stand as is. But the future is looking increasingly murky for dark pattern design.

Change is in the air.

What’s changed is there are attempts to legally challenge digital disingenuousness, especially around privacy and consent. This after multiple scandals have highlighted some very shady practices being enabled by consent-less data-mining — making both the risks and the erosion of users’ rights clear.

Europe’s GDPR has tightened requirements around consent — and is creating the possibility of redress via penalties worth the enforcement. It has already caused some data-dealing businesses to pull the plug entirely or exit Europe.

New laws with teeth make legal challenges viable, which was simply not the case before. Though major industry-wide change will take time, as it will require waiting for judges and courts to rule.

“It’s a very good thing,” says Brignull of GDPR. Though he’s not yet ready to call it the death blow that deceptive design really needs, cautioning: “We’ll have to wait to see whether the bite is as strong as the bark.”

In the meanwhile, every data protection scandal ramps up public awareness about how privacy is being manhandled and abused, and the risks that flow from that — both to individuals (e.g. identity fraud) and to societies as a whole (be it election interference or more broadly attempts to foment harmful social division).

So while dark pattern design is essentially ubiquitous with the consumer web of today, the deceptive practices it has been used to shield and enable are on borrowed time. The direction of travel — and the direction of innovation — is pro-privacy, pro-user control and therefore anti-deceptive-design. Even if the most embedded practitioners are far too vested to abandon their dark arts without a fight.

What, then, does the future look like? What is ‘light pattern design’? The way forward — at least where privacy and consent are concerned — must be user centric. This means genuinely asking for permission — using honesty to win trust by enabling rather than disabling user agency.

Designs must champion usability and clarity, presenting a genuine, good faith choice. Which means no privacy-hostile defaults: So opt ins, not opt outs, and consent that is freely given because it’s based on genuine information not self-serving deception, and because it can also always be revoked at will.

Design must also be empathetic. It must understand and be sensitive to diversity — offering clear options without being intentionally overwhelming. The goal is to close the perception gap between what’s being offered and what the customer thinks they’re getting.

Those who want to see a shift towards light patterns and plain dealing also point out that online transactions honestly achieved will be happier and healthier for all concerned — because they will reflect what people actually want. So rather than grabbing short term gains deceptively, companies will be laying the groundwork for brand loyalty and organic and sustainable growth.

The alternative to the light pattern path is also clear: Rising mistrust, rising anger, more scandals, and — ultimately — consumers abandoning brands and services that creep them out and make them feel used. Because no one likes feeling exploited. And even if people don’t delete an account entirely they will likely modify how they interact, sharing less, being less trusting, less engaged, seeking out alternatives that they do feel good about using.

Also inevitable if the mass deception continues: More regulation. If businesses don’t behave ethically on their own, laws will be drawn up to force change.

Because sure, you can trick people for a while. But it’s not a sustainable strategy. Just look at the political pressure now being piled on Zuckerberg by US and EU lawmakers. Deception is the long game that almost always fails in the end.

The way forward must be a new ethical deal for consumer web services — moving away from business models that monetize free access via deceptive data grabs.

This means trusting your users to put their faith in you because your business provides an innovative and honest service that people care about.

It also means rearchitecting systems to bake in privacy by design. Blockchain-based micro-payments may offer one way of opening up usage-based revenue streams that can offer an alternative or supplement to ads.

Where ad tech is concerned, there are also some interesting projects being worked on — such as the blockchain-based Brave browser which is aiming to build an ad targeting system that does local, on-device targeting (only needing to know the user’s language and a broad-brush regional location), rather than the current, cloud-based ad exchange model that’s built atop mass surveillance.

Technologists are often proud of their engineering ingenuity. But if all goes to plan, they’ll have lots more opportunities to crow about what they’ve built in future — because they won’t be too embarrassed to talk about it.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2yZFvhP Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

[sheminecrafts]

WTF is dark pattern design?

If you’re a UX designer you won’t need this article to tell you about dark pattern design. But perhaps you chose to tap here out of a desire to reaffirm what you already know — to feel good about your professional expertise.

Or was it that your conscience pricked you? Go on, you can be honest… or, well, can you?

A third possibility: Perhaps an app you were using presented this article in a way that persuaded you to tap on it rather than on some other piece of digital content. And it’s those sorts of little imperceptible nudges — what to notice, where to tap/click — that we’re talking about when we talk about dark pattern design.

But not just that. The darkness comes into play because UX design choices are being selected to be intentionally deceptive. To nudge the user to give up more than they realize. Or to agree to things they probably wouldn’t if they genuinely understood the decisions they were being pushed to make.

To put it plainly, dark pattern design is deception and dishonesty by design… Still sitting comfortably?

The technique, as it’s deployed online today, often feeds off and exploits the fact that content-overloaded consumers skim-read stuff they’re presented with, especially if it looks dull and they’re in the midst of trying to do something else — like sign up to a service, complete a purchase, get to something they actually want to look at, or find out what their friends have sent them.

Manipulative timing is a key element of dark pattern design. In other words when you see a notification can determine how you respond to it. Or if you even notice it. Interruptions generally pile on the cognitive overload — and deceptive design deploys them to make it harder for a web user to be fully in control of their faculties during a key moment of decision.

Dark patterns used to obtain consent to collect users’ personal data often combine unwelcome interruption with a built in escape route — offering an easy way to get rid of the dull looking menu getting in the way of what you’re actually trying to do.

Brightly colored ‘agree and continue’ buttons are a recurring feature of this flavor of dark pattern design. These eye-catching signposts appear near universally across consent flows — to encourage users not to read or contemplate a service’s terms and conditions, and therefore not to understand what they’re agreeing to.

It’s ‘consent’ by the spotlit backdoor.

This works because humans are lazy in the face of boring and/or complex looking stuff. And because too much information easily overwhelms. Most people will take the path of least resistance. Especially if it’s being reassuringly plated up for them in handy, push-button form.

At the same time dark pattern design will ensure the opt out — if there is one — will be near invisible; Greyscale text on a grey background is the usual choice.

Some deceptive designs even include a call to action displayed on the colorful button they do want you to press — with text that says something like ‘Okay, looks great!’ — to further push a decision.

Likewise, the less visible opt out option might use a negative suggestion to imply you’re going to miss out on something or are risking bad stuff happening by clicking here.

The horrible truth is that deceptive designs can be awfully easy to paint.

Where T&Cs are concerned, it really is shooting fish in a barrel. Because humans hate being bored or confused and there are countless ways to make decisions look off-puttingly boring or complex — be it presenting reams of impenetrable legalese in tiny greyscale lettering so no-one will bother reading it combined with defaults set to opt in when people click ‘ok’; deploying intentionally confusing phrasing and/or confusing button/toggle design that makes it impossible for the user to be sure what’s on and what’s off (and thus what’s opt out and what’s an opt in) or even whether opting out might actually mean opting into something you really don’t want…

What advertising hell on earth is this? Damn right I’m going to block all I can .. what do these defaults even mean? #DeceptiveByDesign pic.twitter.com/KRY2ECPA5R

— Privacy Matters (@PrivacyMatters) June 28, 2018

Friction is another key tool of this dark art: For example designs that require lots more clicks/taps and interactions if you want to opt out. Such as toggles for every single data share transaction — potentially running to hundreds of individual controls a user has to tap on vs just a few taps or even a single button to agree to everything. The weighing is intentionally all one way. And it’s not in the consumer’s favor.

Deceptive designs can also make it appear that opting out is not even possible. Such as default opting users in to sharing their data and, if they try to find a way to opt out, requiring they locate a hard-to-spot alternative click — and then also requiring they scroll to the bottom of lengthy T&Cs to unearth a buried toggle where they can in fact opt out.

Facebook used that technique to carry out a major data heist by linking WhatsApp users’ accounts with Facebook accounts in 2016. Despite prior claims that such a privacy u-turn could never happen. The vast majority of WhatsApp users likely never realized they could say no — let alone understood the privacy implications of consenting to their accounts being linked.

Ecommerce sites also sometimes suggestively present an optional (priced) add-on in a way that makes it appear like an obligatory part of the transaction. Such as using a brightly colored ‘continue’ button during a flight check out process but which also automatically bundles an optional extra like insurance, instead of plainly asking people if they want to buy it.

Or using pre-selected checkboxes to sneak low cost items or a small charity donation into a basket when a user is busy going through the check out flow — meaning many customers won’t notice it until after the purchase has been made.

Airlines have also been caught using deceptive design to upsell pricier options, such as by obscuring cheaper flights and/or masking prices so it’s harder to figure out what the most cost effective choice actually is.

Dark patterns to thwart attempts to unsubscribe are horribly, horribly common in email marketing. Such as an unsubscribe UX that requires you to click a ridiculous number of times and keep reaffirming that yes, you really do want out.

Often these additional screens are deceptively designed to resembled the ‘unsubscribe successful’ screens that people expect to see when they’ve pulled the marketing hooks out. But if you look very closely, at the typically very tiny lettering, you’ll see they’re actually still asking if you want to unsubscribe. The trick is to get you not to unsubscribe by making you think you already have. 

Another oft-used deceptive design that aims to manipulate online consent flows works against users by presenting a few selectively biased examples — which gives the illusion of helpful context around a decision. But actually this is a turbocharged attempt to manipulate the user by presenting a self-servingly skewed view that is in no way a full and balanced picture of the consequences of consent.

At best it’s disingenuous. More plainly it’s deceptive and dishonest.

Here’s just one example of selectively biased examples presented during a Facebook consent flow used to encourage European users to switch on its face recognition technology. Clicking ‘continue’ leads the user to the decision screen — but only after they’ve been shown this biased interstitial…

Facebook is also using emotional manipulation here, in the wording of its selective examples, by playing on people’s fears (claiming its tech will “help protect you from a stranger”) and playing on people’s sense of goodwill (claiming your consent will be helpful to people with visual impairment) — to try to squeeze agreement by making people feel fear or guilt.

You wouldn’t like this kind of emotionally manipulative behavior if a human was doing it to you. But Facebook frequently tries to manipulate its users’ feelings to get them to behave how it wants.

For instance to push users to post more content — such as by generating an artificial slideshow of “memories” from your profile and a friend’s profile, and then suggesting you share this unasked for content on your timeline (pushing you to do so because, well, what’s your friend going to think if you choose not to share it?). Of course this serves its business interests because more content posted to Facebook generates more engagement and thus more ad views.

Or — in a last ditch attempt to prevent a person from deleting their account — Facebook has been known to use the names and photos of their Facebook friends to claim such and such a person will “miss you” if you leave the service. So it’s suddenly conflating leaving Facebook with abandoning your friends.

Distraction is another deceptive design technique deployed to sneak more from the user than they realize. For example cutesy looking cartoons that are served up to make you feel warn and fluffy about a brand — such as when they’re periodically asking you to review your privacy settings.

Again, Facebook uses this technique. The cartoony look and feel around its privacy review process is designed to make you feel reassured about giving the company more of your data.

You could even argue that Google’s entire brand is a dark pattern design: Childishly colored and sounding, it suggests something safe and fun. Playful even. The feelings it generates — and thus the work it’s doing — bear no relation to the business the company is actually in: Surveillance and people tracking to persuade you to buy things.

Another example of dark pattern design: Notifications that pop up just as you’re contemplating purchasing a flight or hotel room, say, or looking at a pair of shoes — which urge you to “hurry!” as there’s only X number of seats or pairs left.

This plays on people’s FOMO, trying to rush a transaction by making a potential customer feel like they don’t have time to think about it or do more research — and thus thwart the more rational and informed decision they might otherwise have made.

The kicker is there’s no way to know if there really was just two seats left at that price. Much like the ghost cars Uber was caught displaying in its app — which it claimed were for illustrative purposes, rather than being exactly accurate depictions of cars available to hail — web users are left having to trust what they’re being told is genuinely true.

But why should you trust companies that are intentionally trying to mislead you?

Dark patterns point to an ethical vacuum

The phrase dark pattern design is pretty antique in Internet terms, though you’ll likely have heard it being bandied around quite a bit of late. Wikipedia credits UX designer Harry Brignull with the coinage, back in 2010, when he registered a website (darkpatterns.org) to chronicle and call out the practice as unethical.

“Dark patterns tend to perform very well in A/B and multivariate tests simply because a design that tricks users into doing something is likely to achieve more conversions than one that allows users to make an informed decision,” wrote Brignull in 2011 — highlighting exactly why web designers were skewing towards being so tricksy: Superficially it works. The anger and mistrust come later.

Close to a decade later, Brignull’s website is still valiantly calling out deceptive design. So perhaps he should rename this page ‘the hall of eternal shame’. (And yes, before you point it out, you can indeed find brands owned by TechCrunch’s parent entity Oath among those being called out for dark pattern design… It’s fair to say that dark pattern consent flows are shamefully widespread among media entities, many of which aim to monetize free content with data-thirsty ad targeting.)

Of course the underlying concept of deceptive design has roots that run right through human history. See, for example, the original Trojan horse. (A sort of ‘reverse’ dark pattern design — given the Greeks built an intentionally eye-catching spectacle to pique the Trojan’s curiosity, getting them to lower their guard and take it into the walled city, allowing the fatal trap to be sprung.)

Basically, the more tools that humans have built, the more possibilities they’ve found for pulling the wool over other people’s eyes. The Internet just kind of supercharges the practice and amplifies the associated ethical concerns because deception can be carried out remotely and at vast, vast scale. Here the people lying to you don’t even have to risk a twinge of personal guilt because they don’t have to look into your eyes while they’re doing it.

Nowadays falling foul of dark pattern design most often means you’ll have unwittingly agreed to your personal data being harvested and shared with a very large number of data brokers who profit from background trading people’s information — without making it clear they’re doing so nor what exactly they’re doing to turn your data into their gold. So, yes, you are paying for free consumer services with your privacy.

Another aspect of dark pattern design has been bent towards encouraging Internet users to form addictive habits attached to apps and services. Often these kind of addiction forming dark patterns are less visually obvious on a screen — unless you start counting the number of notifications you’re being plied with, or the emotional blackmail triggers you’re feeling to send a message for a ‘friendversary’, or not miss your turn in a ‘streak game’.

This is the Nir Eyal ‘hooked’ school of product design. Which has actually run into a bit of a backlash of late, with big tech now competing — at least superficially — to offer so-called ‘digital well-being’ tools to let users unhook. Yet these are tools the platforms are still very much in control of. So there’s no chance you’re going to be encouraged to abandon their service altogether.

Dark pattern design can also cost you money directly. For example if you get tricked into signing up for or continuing a subscription you didn’t really want. Though such blatantly egregious subscription deceptions are harder to get away with. Because consumers soon notice they’re getting stung for $50 a month they never intended to spend.

That’s not to say ecommerce is clean of deceptive crimes now. The dark patterns have generally just got a bit more subtle. Pushing you to transact faster than you might otherwise, say, or upselling stuff you don’t really need.

Although consumers will usually realize they’ve been sold something they didn’t want or need eventually. Which is why deceptive design isn’t a sustainable business strategy, even setting aside ethical concerns.

In short, it’s short term thinking at the expense of reputation and brand loyalty. Especially as consumers now have plenty of online platforms where they can vent and denounce brands that have tricked them. So trick your customers at your peril.

That said, it takes longer for people to realize their privacy is being sold down the river. If they even realize at all. Which is why dark pattern design has become such a core enabling tool for the vast, non-consumer facing ad tech and data brokering industry that’s grown fat by quietly sucking on people’s data — thanks to the enabling grease of dark pattern design.

Think of it as a bloated vampire octopus wrapped invisibly around the consumer web, using its myriad tentacles and suckers to continuously manipulate decisions and close down user agency in order to keep data flowing — with all the A/B testing techniques and gamification tools it needs to win.

“It’s become substantially worse,” agrees Brignull, discussing the practice he began critically chronicling almost a decade ago. “Tech companies are constantly in the international news for unethical behavior. This wasn’t the case 5-6 years ago. Their use of dark patterns is the tip of the iceberg. Unethical UI is a tiny thing compared to unethical business strategy.”

“UX design can be described as the way a business chooses to behave towards its customers,” he adds, saying that deceptive web design is therefore merely symptomatic of a deeper Internet malaise.

He argues the underlying issue is really about “ethical behavior in US society in general”.

The deceitful obfuscation of commercial intention certainly runs all the way through the data brokering and ad tech industries that sit behind much of the ‘free’ consumer Internet. Here consumers have plainly been kept in the dark so they cannot see and object to how their personal information is being handed around, sliced and diced, and used to try to manipulate them.

From an ad tech perspective, the concern is that manipulation doesn’t work when it’s obvious. And the goal of targeted advertising is to manipulate people’s decisions based on intelligence about them gleaned via clandestine surveillance of their online activity (so inferring who they are via their data). This might be a purchase decision. Equally it might be a vote.

The stakes have been raised considerably now that data mining and behavioral profiling are being used at scale to try to influence democratic processes.

So it’s not surprising that Facebook is so coy about explaining why a certain user on its platform is seeing a specific advert. Because if the huge surveillance operation underpinning the algorithmic decision to serve a particular ad was made clear, the person seeing it might feel manipulated. And then they would probably be less inclined to look favorably upon the brand they were being urged to buy. Or the political opinion they were being pushed to form. And Facebook’s ad tech business stands to suffer.

The dark pattern design that’s trying to nudge you to hand over your personal information is, as Birgnull says, just the tip of a vast and shadowy industry that trades on deception and manipulation by design — because it relies on the lie that people don’t care about their privacy.

But people clearly do care about privacy. Just look at the lengths to which ad tech entities go to obfuscate and deceive consumers about how their data is being collected and used. If people don’t mind companies spying on them, why not just tell them plainly it’s happening?

And if people were really cool about sharing their personal and private information with anyone, and totally fine about being tracked everywhere they go and having a record kept of all the people they know and have relationships with, why would the ad tech industry need to spy on them in the first place? They could just ask up front for all your passwords.

The deception enabled by dark pattern design not only erodes privacy but has the chilling effect of putting web users under pervasive, clandestine surveillance, it also risks enabling damaging discrimination at scale. Because non-transparent decisions made off of the back of inferences gleaned from data taken without people’s consent can mean that — for example — only certain types of people are shown certain types of offers and prices, while others are not.

Facebook was forced to make changes to its ad platform after it was shown that an ad-targeting category it lets advertisers target ads against, called ‘ethnic affinity’ — aka Facebook users whose online activity indicates an interest in “content relating to particular ethnic communities” — could be used to run housing and employment ads that discriminate against protected groups.

More recently the major political ad scandals relating to Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns targeting the US and other countries via Facebook’s platform, and the massive Facebook user data heist involving the controversial political consultancy Cambridge Analytica deploying quiz apps to improperly suck out people’s data in order to build psychographic profiles for political ad targeting, has shone a spotlight on the risks that flow from platforms that operate by systematically keeping their users in the dark.

As a result of these scandals, Facebook has started offering a level of disclosure around who is paying for and running some of the ads on its platform. But plenty of aspects of its platform and operations remain shrouded. Even those components that are being opened up a bit are still obscured from view of the majority of users — thanks to the company’s continued use of dark patterns to manipulate people into acceptance without actual understanding.

And yet while dark pattern design has been the slickly successful oil in the engines of the ad tech industry for years, allowing it to get away with so much consent-less background data processing, gradually, gradually some of the shadier practices of this sector are being illuminated and shut down — including as a consequence of shoddy security practices, with so many companies involved in the trading and mining of people’s data. There are just more opportunities for data to leak. 

Laws around privacy are also being tightened. And changes to EU data protection rules are a key reason why dark pattern design has bubbled back up into online conversations lately. The practice is under far greater legal threat now as GDPR tightens the rules around consent.

This week a study by the Norwegian Consumer Council criticized Facebook and Google for systematically deploying design choices that nudge people towards making decisions which negatively affect their own privacy — such as data sharing defaults, and friction injected into the process of opting out so that fewer people will.

Another manipulative design decision flagged by the report is especially illustrative of the deceptive levels to which companies will stoop to get users to do what they want — with the watchdog pointing out how Facebook paints fake red dots onto its UI in the midst of consent decision flows in order to encourage the user to think they have a message or a notification. Thereby rushing people to agree without reading any small print.

Fair and ethical design is design that requires people to opt in affirmatively to any actions that benefit the commercial service at the expense of the user’s interests. Yet all too often it’s the other way around: Web users have to go through sweating toil and effort to try to safeguard their information or avoid being stung for something they don’t want.

You might think the types of personal data that Facebook harvests are trivial — and so wonder what’s the big deal if the company is using deceptive design to obtain people’s consent? But the purposes to which people’s information can be put are not at all trivial — as the Cambridge Analytica scandal illustrates.

One of Facebook’s recent data grabs in Europe also underlines how it’s using dark patterns on its platform to attempt to normalize increasingly privacy hostile technologies.

Earlier this year it began asking Europeans for consent to processing their selfies for facial recognition purposes — a highly controversial technology that regulatory intervention in the region had previously blocked. Yet now, as a consequence of Facebook’s confidence in crafting manipulative consent flows, it’s essentially figured out a way to circumvent EU citizens’ fundamental rights — by socially engineering Europeans to override their own best interests.

Nor is this type of manipulation exclusively meted out to certain, more tightly regulated geographies; Facebook is treating all its users like this. European users just received its latest set of dark pattern designs first, ahead of a global rollout, thanks to the bloc’s new data protection regulation coming into force on May 25.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg even went so far as to gloat about the success of this deceptive modus operandi on stage at a European conference in May — claiming the “vast majority” of users were “willingly” opting in to targeted advertising via its new consent flow.

In truth the consent flow is manipulative, and Facebook does not even offer an absolute opt out of targeted advertising on its platform. The ‘choice’ it gives users is to agree to its targeted advertising or to delete their account and leave the service entirely. Which isn’t really a choice when balanced against the power of Facebook’s platform and the network effect it exploits to keep people using its service.

‘Forced consent‘ is an early target for privacy campaign groups making use of GDPR opening the door, in certain EU member states, to collective enforcement of individuals’ data rights.

Of course if you read Facebook or Google’s PR around privacy they claim to care immensely — saying they give people all the controls they need to manage and control access to their information. But controls with dishonest instructions on how to use them aren’t really controls at all. And opt outs that don’t exist smell rather more like a lock in. 

Platforms certainly remain firmly in the driving seat because — until a court tells them otherwise — they control not just the buttons and levers but the positions, sizes, colors, and ultimately the presence or otherwise of the buttons and levers.

And because these big tech ad giants have grown so dominant as services they are able to wield huge power over their users — even tracking non-users over large swathes of the rest of the Internet, and giving them even fewer controls than the people who are de facto locked in, even if, technically speaking, service users might be able to delete an account or abandon a staple of the consumer web. 

Big tech platforms can also leverage their size to analyze user behavior at vast scale and A/B test the dark pattern designs that trick people the best. So the notion that users have been willingly agreeing en masse to give up their privacy remains the big lie squatting atop the consumer Internet.

People are merely choosing the choice that’s being pre-selected for them.

That’s where things stand as is. But the future is looking increasingly murky for dark pattern design.

Change is in the air.

What’s changed is there are attempts to legally challenge digital disingenuousness, especially around privacy and consent. This after multiple scandals have highlighted some very shady practices being enabled by consent-less data-mining — making both the risks and the erosion of users’ rights clear.

Europe’s GDPR has tightened requirements around consent — and is creating the possibility of redress via penalties worth the enforcement. It has already caused some data-dealing businesses to pull the plug entirely or exit Europe.

New laws with teeth make legal challenges viable, which was simply not the case before. Though major industry-wide change will take time, as it will require waiting for judges and courts to rule.

“It’s a very good thing,” says Brignull of GDPR. Though he’s not yet ready to call it the death blow that deceptive design really needs, cautioning: “We’ll have to wait to see whether the bite is as strong as the bark.”

In the meanwhile, every data protection scandal ramps up public awareness about how privacy is being manhandled and abused, and the risks that flow from that — both to individuals (e.g. identity fraud) and to societies as a whole (be it election interference or more broadly attempts to foment harmful social division).

So while dark pattern design is essentially ubiquitous with the consumer web of today, the deceptive practices it has been used to shield and enable are on borrowed time. The direction of travel — and the direction of innovation — is pro-privacy, pro-user control and therefore anti-deceptive-design. Even if the most embedded practitioners are far too vested to abandon their dark arts without a fight.

What, then, does the future look like? What is ‘light pattern design’? The way forward — at least where privacy and consent are concerned — must be user centric. This means genuinely asking for permission — using honesty to win trust by enabling rather than disabling user agency.

Designs must champion usability and clarity, presenting a genuine, good faith choice. Which means no privacy-hostile defaults: So opt ins, not opt outs, and consent that is freely given because it’s based on genuine information not self-serving deception, and because it can also always be revoked at will.

Design must also be empathetic. It must understand and be sensitive to diversity — offering clear options without being intentionally overwhelming. The goal is to close the perception gap between what’s being offered and what the customer thinks they’re getting.

Those who want to see a shift towards light patterns and plain dealing also point out that online transactions honestly achieved will be happier and healthier for all concerned — because they will reflect what people actually want. So rather than grabbing short term gains deceptively, companies will be laying the groundwork for brand loyalty and organic and sustainable growth.

The alternative to the light pattern path is also clear: Rising mistrust, rising anger, more scandals, and — ultimately — consumers abandoning brands and services that creep them out and make them feel used. Because no one likes feeling exploited. And even if people don’t delete an account entirely they will likely modify how they interact, sharing less, being less trusting, less engaged, seeking out alternatives that they do feel good about using.

Also inevitable if the mass deception continues: More regulation. If businesses don’t behave ethically on their own, laws will be drawn up to force change.

Because sure, you can trick people for a while. But it’s not a sustainable strategy. Just look at the political pressure now being piled on Zuckerberg by US and EU lawmakers. Deception is the long game that almost always fails in the end.

The way forward must be a new ethical deal for consumer web services — moving away from business models that monetize free access via deceptive data grabs.

This means trusting your users to put their faith in you because your business provides an innovative and honest service that people care about.

It also means rearchitecting systems to bake in privacy by design. Blockchain-based micro-payments may offer one way of opening up usage-based revenue streams that can offer an alternative or supplement to ads.

Where ad tech is concerned, there are also some interesting projects being worked on — such as the blockchain-based Brave browser which is aiming to build an ad targeting system that does local, on-device targeting (only needing to know the user’s language and a broad-brush regional location), rather than the current, cloud-based ad exchange model that’s built atop mass surveillance.

Technologists are often proud of their engineering ingenuity. But if all goes to plan, they’ll have lots more opportunities to crow about what they’ve built in future — because they won’t be too embarrassed to talk about it.

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[wineschool-blog]

Sicilian Wine

https://j.mp/3yWGz0u If the idea of walking up to a sage-scented ocean breeze sounds alluring, what about sipping coffee in an ancient fruit orchard while looking out over the crystal-blue Mediterranean? The Sicilian countryside seems to exist in another timeline. A magical place, to be sure, but can any place be a paradise for long? The only thing rarer than a GPS signal is a street sign. The shepherds and their sheep are quaint only the first time they block the road for twenty minutes. And what to do with that herd of cows that keeps breaking into your pasture, trampling your garden? Table of contentsA Short History of Wine in SicilySicilian Wine Regions: Province of RagusaThe Wines of Cerasuolo di VittoriaFeatured Ragusa Wineries: COS and Arianna OcchipintiSicilian Wine Regions: Province of TrapaniThe Wines of MarsalaSicilian Wine Regions: CataniaThe Wines of Etna A Short History of Wine in Sicily In the 8th Century BCE, Greek colonists became the Island’s first winemakers. Ancient texts describe Dionysus, the God of Wine, dancing as he planted the first grapevine in Sicily. Thanks to archeologists, we know these vineyards were located in the black hills under Mt. Aetna, a still-active volcano. In time, the Romans conquered the island, and that opened Sicily to the world. These wines were traded as far away as modern-day France and Germany. Production boomed. A notable ancient wine was Marsala, a fortified wine made on the western coast. A British merchant popularized the wine in the 18th century and soon compared it to Portugal’s Porto wines. The history of Sicilian wines would likely have continued apace. Then, however, in the late 19th century, an invasive parasite invaded the vineyards, killing most vines. This was the Phylloxera epidemic, and it drew a stark red line between the 19th century and today. It was only in the last half of the 20th Century when Sicily recovered its winemaking mojo, thanks to wineries like COS, Planeta, and Ceuso. Sicilian Wine Regions: Province of Ragusa Ragusa is the most southernmost province of Sicily, situated in the Val di Noto. It is a place of rolling hills, dramatic shorelines, and ancient towns. The region’s namesake city dates back to Greek times but was destroyed by the earthquake. It was and completely rebuilt in the baroque style in the 17th century. Other important towns include Scicli and Modica. Like Ragusa, many of the buildings are in the  Late Baroque style. The other key component of these cities is their culinary and winemaking traditions. The Wines of Cerasuolo di Vittoria Cerasuolo di Vittoria is the most important appellation in Ragusa, dating back to the 7th century BCE. The name refers to an elegant refreshing style of wine. Cerasuolo refers to the light red hue of the wine. Vittoria is a city west of Ragusa and the center of the wine region. The wine is an odd –but brilliant– coupling of two native varietals, Nero d’Avola and Frappato. Nero is an intense hulk-ish red that tends to produce angry and magnetic wines. Frappato makes a light, nearly pink wine that is all about roses and ocean breezes. The wine produced within an even more restricted area will have the appellation’s term “Classico” appended. The region was awarded DOC status in 1974. In 2005, it was upgraded to DOCG, the highest level of classification in Italian wine. Featured Ragusa Wineries: COS and Arianna Occhipinti COS is the acronym of the surnames of the Winery’s three founders: Giambattista Cilia, Giusto Occhipinti, and Cirino Strano. In 1980, these young men leased a small winery and vineyard from a family member. The first vintage produced a meager 1470 bottles. Year by year, the volume increased, but so did the quality and international acclaim. Then, by 2000, they brought back an ancient Sicilian tradition: using amphorae (clay vessels buried underground) to age their wines. It’s a technique that has now been adopted across all of Italy. Their finest Cerasuolo di Vittoria is the “Delle Fontane”. It is red ruby in color, with aromas of cherry, blackberry, and currant. The flavors of fresh roses and toasted spice are alluring, and the palate is fresh, elegant, and Mediterranean. The Arianna Occhipinti story is a more recent addition to the Sicilian wine scene. Arianna is the niece of Giusto Occhipinti, of COS fame. She opened her eponymously named winery in 2004 in Ragusa. What began as a tiny one-hectare operation now spans over 22 hectares, mostly Nero d’Avola and Frappato, Albanello and Zibibbo, two local white varieties. Her top-level is the Cerasuolo di Vittoria ‘Grotte Alte’ i s aged a minimum of 32 months in massive Slavonian oak buttes. The wine is an intense ruby red color with garnet shades. The nose is fragrant, with details of sea spray, sour cherries, and oriental spices. The palate is intense and elegant, soft and round, with a persistent and salty aromatic finish. Sicilian Wine Regions: Province of Trapani Trapani is a Bronze-age commune that is still thriving in the modern era. Located on the island’s west coast, it has been a major port for two Sicilian products, wine, and salt, since the beginning of recorded history. A naturally protected inlet, Trapani has the capacity to enforce naval superiority over a vast section of the Mediterranean. Over the past two thousand years, this sickle-shaped port has been the focus of countless wars and occupations. From the Punic Wars of Ancient Rome to World War Two, this port drew dozens of ancient cultures into Sicily, only to be absorbed into the island’s culture. Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, Normans, and Spaniards have contributed to Sicily’s food and wine traditions. The Wines of Marsala Long before a wine bore its name, Marsala is an ancient city built on the ruins of an even more ancient city, Lilybaeum. The town’s economy, like much of Trapani, was based on their salt ponds and vineyards. By the 17th Century, the world’s economies were recovering from the centuries-long medieval depression. Times were good, but the local winemakers had a problem: a growing wine market was growing, but their white wines spoiled too quickly to ship. So they had started using large oak barrels to store the wine, which helped. Then they heard of a new technique developed in Portugal: fortify the wine by adding spirit to the fermenting must. At about this same time, bottled wines became a status symbol. So a bottle of new wine was born. The wine rose to fame in the early part of the 20th century, only to come crashing down just as quickly. Marsala was the only wine available during Prohibition (doctors were allowed to prescribe it). As a result, it wasn’t too long before there was more counterfeit Marsala than real. That fact, sadly, continues through today: most Marsala in American shops are pale imitations. To seek our true Marsala, look for the term “Superiore Riserva” on the label. Your mind will be blown with the flavors of toasted almonds, fresh figs, and chocolate-coated raisins. They make for great aperitifs. Sicilian Wine Regions: Catania Catania is defined by the heart of Sicily: Mount Etna, the still-active volcano that the entire island is balanced upon. Located on the Northeastern shore, the region is famous for its black volcanic soils. Its buildings are built of the same stone, and its roofs are blackened by centuries of volcanic plumes. The largest city is also named Catania and has been rebuilt dozens of times since its founding in 729 BCE. But, unfortunately, the town has been destroyed by lava flows and earthquakes, wars, and social unrest. How did a region so unlucky survive so long? It comes down to the lava flows: they are the cause of so much despair, but also why Catania thrives. Over centuries, lava rocks evolve into black volcanic soils that are fertile and life-sustaining. They are why Sicily is an agricultural wonderland. travel to Italy – panorama with villages on green hills and Etna volcano in Sicily The Wines of Etna The specialness of this region can be inferred by the fact that it was the first recognized wine appellation in Sicily (it earned its DOC in 1968), a full nine months before Marsala. This region’s essential red grape varietal is Nerello Mascalese, crafting a complex but wild wine that often feels like a confluence of wild-grown fruit and a core of intense minerality. The whites of the region include native varieties include Carricante and Catarratto. The former produces light and ethereal wines that are simple and perfect with summer fish dishes. Cattaratto is lush and intense, going toward tropical fruit infused with tarragon. This is also a place that attracts crazy European winemakers with a zeal for eccentricity. Just spend a few minutes with the wines of Frank Cornelissen, and you’ll understand. By Keith Wallace https://j.mp/3yWGz0u

[theinvinciblenoob]

If you’re a UX designer you won’t need this article to tell you about dark pattern design. But perhaps you chose to tap here out of a desire to reaffirm what you already know — to feel good about your professional expertise.

Or was it that your conscience pricked you? Go on, you can be honest… or, well, can you?

A third possibility: Perhaps an app you were using presented this article in a way that persuaded you to tap on it rather than on some other piece of digital content. And it’s those sorts of little imperceptible nudges — what to notice, where to tap/click — that we’re talking about when we talk about dark pattern design.

But not just that. The darkness comes into play because UX design choices are being selected to be intentionally deceptive. To nudge the user to give up more than they realize. Or to agree to things they probably wouldn’t if they genuinely understood the decisions they were being pushed to make.

To put it plainly, dark pattern design is deception and dishonesty by design… Still sitting comfortably?

The technique, as it’s deployed online today, often feeds off and exploits the fact that content-overloaded consumers skim-read stuff they’re presented with, especially if it looks dull and they’re in the midst of trying to do something else — like sign up to a service, complete a purchase, get to something they actually want to look at, or find out what their friends have sent them.

Manipulative timing is a key element of dark pattern design. In other words when you see a notification can determine how you respond to it. Or if you even notice it. Interruptions generally pile on the cognitive overload — and deceptive design deploys them to make it harder for a web user to be fully in control of their faculties during a key moment of decision.

Dark patterns used to obtain consent to collect users’ personal data often combine unwelcome interruption with a built in escape route — offering an easy way to get rid of the dull looking menu getting in the way of what you’re actually trying to do.

Brightly colored ‘agree and continue’ buttons are a recurring feature of this flavor of dark pattern design. These eye-catching signposts appear near universally across consent flows — to encourage users not to read or contemplate a service’s terms and conditions, and therefore not to understand what they’re agreeing to.

It’s ‘consent’ by the spotlit backdoor.

This works because humans are lazy in the face of boring and/or complex looking stuff. And because too much information easily overwhelms. Most people will take the path of least resistance. Especially if it’s being reassuringly plated up for them in handy, push-button form.

At the same time dark pattern design will ensure the opt out — if there is one — will be near invisible; Greyscale text on a grey background is the usual choice.

Some deceptive designs even include a call to action displayed on the colorful button they do want you to press — with text that says something like ‘Okay, looks great!’ — to further push a decision.

Likewise, the less visible opt out option might use a negative suggestion to imply you’re going to miss out on something or are risking bad stuff happening by clicking here.

The horrible truth is that deceptive designs can be awfully easy to paint.

Where T&Cs are concerned, it really is shooting fish in a barrel. Because humans hate being bored or confused and there are countless ways to make decisions look off-puttingly boring or complex — be it presenting reams of impenetrable legalese in tiny greyscale lettering so no-one will bother reading it combined with defaults set to opt in when people click ‘ok’; deploying intentionally confusing phrasing and/or confusing button/toggle design that makes it impossible for the user to be sure what’s on and what’s off (and thus what’s opt out and what’s an opt in) or even whether opting out might actually mean opting into something you really don’t want…

What advertising hell on earth is this? Damn right I’m going to block all I can .. what do these defaults even mean? #DeceptiveByDesign pic.twitter.com/KRY2ECPA5R

— Privacy Matters (@PrivacyMatters) June 28, 2018

Friction is another key tool of this dark art: For example designs that require lots more clicks/taps and interactions if you want to opt out. Such as toggles for every single data share transaction — potentially running to hundreds of individual controls a user has to tap on vs just a few taps or even a single button to agree to everything. The weighing is intentionally all one way. And it’s not in the consumer’s favor.

Deceptive designs can also make it appear that opting out is not even possible. Such as default opting users in to sharing their data and, if they try to find a way to opt out, requiring they locate a hard-to-spot alternative click — and then also requiring they scroll to the bottom of lengthy T&Cs to unearth a buried toggle where they can in fact opt out.

Facebook used that technique to carry out a major data heist by linking WhatsApp users’ accounts with Facebook accounts in 2016. Despite prior claims that such a privacy u-turn could never happen. The vast majority of WhatsApp users likely never realized they could say no — let alone understood the privacy implications of consenting to their accounts being linked.

Ecommerce sites also sometimes suggestively present an optional (priced) add-on in a way that makes it appear like an obligatory part of the transaction. Such as using a brightly colored ‘continue’ button during a flight check out process but which also automatically bundles an optional extra like insurance, instead of plainly asking people if they want to buy it.

Or using pre-selected checkboxes to sneak low cost items or a small charity donation into a basket when a user is busy going through the check out flow — meaning many customers won’t notice it until after the purchase has been made.

Airlines have also been caught using deceptive design to upsell pricier options, such as by obscuring cheaper flights and/or masking prices so it’s harder to figure out what the most cost effective choice actually is.

Dark patterns to thwart attempts to unsubscribe are horribly, horribly common in email marketing. Such as an unsubscribe UX that requires you to click a ridiculous number of times and keep reaffirming that yes, you really do want out.

Often these additional screens are deceptively designed to resembled the ‘unsubscribe successful’ screens that people expect to see when they’ve pulled the marketing hooks out. But if you look very closely, at the typically very tiny lettering, you’ll see they’re actually still asking if you want to unsubscribe. The trick is to get you not to unsubscribe by making you think you already have. 

Another oft-used deceptive design that aims to manipulate online consent flows works against users by presenting a few selectively biased examples — which gives the illusion of helpful context around a decision. But actually this is a turbocharged attempt to manipulate the user by presenting a self-servingly skewed view that is in no way a full and balanced picture of the consequences of consent.

At best it’s disingenuous. More plainly it’s deceptive and dishonest.

Here’s just one example of selectively biased examples presented during a Facebook consent flow used to encourage European users to switch on its face recognition technology. Clicking ‘continue’ leads the user to the decision screen — but only after they’ve been shown this biased interstitial…

Facebook is also using emotional manipulation here, in the wording of its selective examples, by playing on people’s fears (claiming its tech will “help protect you from a stranger”) and playing on people’s sense of goodwill (claiming your consent will be helpful to people with visual impairment) — to try to squeeze agreement by making people feel fear or guilt.

You wouldn’t like this kind of emotionally manipulative behavior if a human was doing it to you. But Facebook frequently tries to manipulate its users’ feelings to get them to behave how it wants.

For instance to push users to post more content — such as by generating an artificial slideshow of “memories” from your profile and a friend’s profile, and then suggesting you share this unasked for content on your timeline (pushing you to do so because, well, what’s your friend going to think if you choose not to share it?). Of course this serves its business interests because more content posted to Facebook generates more engagement and thus more ad views.

Or — in a last ditch attempt to prevent a person from deleting their account — Facebook has been known to use the names and photos of their Facebook friends to claim such and such a person will “miss you” if you leave the service. So it’s suddenly conflating leaving Facebook with abandoning your friends.

Distraction is another deceptive design technique deployed to sneak more from the user than they realize. For example cutesy looking cartoons that are served up to make you feel warn and fluffy about a brand — such as when they’re periodically asking you to review your privacy settings.

Again, Facebook uses this technique. The cartoony look and feel around its privacy review process is designed to make you feel reassured about giving the company more of your data.

You could even argue that Google’s entire brand is a dark pattern design: Childishly colored and sounding, it suggests something safe and fun. Playful even. The feelings it generates — and thus the work it’s doing — bear no relation to the business the company is actually in: Surveillance and people tracking to persuade you to buy things.

Another example of dark pattern design: Notifications that pop up just as you’re contemplating purchasing a flight or hotel room, say, or looking at a pair of shoes — which urge you to “hurry!” as there’s only X number of seats or pairs left.

This plays on people’s FOMO, trying to rush a transaction by making a potential customer feel like they don’t have time to think about it or do more research — and thus thwart the more rational and informed decision they might otherwise have made.

The kicker is there’s no way to know if there really was just two seats left at that price. Much like the ghost cars Uber was caught displaying in its app — which it claimed were for illustrative purposes, rather than being exactly accurate depictions of cars available to hail — web users are left having to trust what they’re being told is genuinely true.

But why should you trust companies that are intentionally trying to mislead you?

Dark patterns point to an ethical vacuum

The phrase dark pattern design is pretty antique in Internet terms, though you’ll likely have heard it being bandied around quite a bit of late. Wikipedia credits UX designer Harry Brignull with the coinage, back in 2010, when he registered a website (darkpatterns.org) to chronicle and call out the practice as unethical.

“Dark patterns tend to perform very well in A/B and multivariate tests simply because a design that tricks users into doing something is likely to achieve more conversions than one that allows users to make an informed decision,” wrote Brignull in 2011 — highlighting exactly why web designers were skewing towards being so tricksy: Superficially it works. The anger and mistrust come later.

Close to a decade later, Brignull’s website is still valiantly calling out deceptive design. So perhaps he should rename this page ‘the hall of eternal shame’. (And yes, before you point it out, you can indeed find brands owned by TechCrunch’s parent entity Oath among those being called out for dark pattern design… It’s fair to say that dark pattern consent flows are shamefully widespread among media entities, many of which aim to monetize free content with data-thirsty ad targeting.)

Of course the underlying concept of deceptive design has roots that run right through human history. See, for example, the original Trojan horse. (A sort of ‘reverse’ dark pattern design — given the Greeks built an intentionally eye-catching spectacle to pique the Trojan’s curiosity, getting them to lower their guard and take it into the walled city, allowing the fatal trap to be sprung.)

Basically, the more tools that humans have built, the more possibilities they’ve found for pulling the wool over other people’s eyes. The Internet just kind of supercharges the practice and amplifies the associated ethical concerns because deception can be carried out remotely and at vast, vast scale. Here the people lying to you don’t even have to risk a twinge of personal guilt because they don’t have to look into your eyes while they’re doing it.

Nowadays falling foul of dark pattern design most often means you’ll have unwittingly agreed to your personal data being harvested and shared with a very large number of data brokers who profit from background trading people’s information — without making it clear they’re doing so nor what exactly they’re doing to turn your data into their gold. So, yes, you are paying for free consumer services with your privacy.

Another aspect of dark pattern design has been bent towards encouraging Internet users to form addictive habits attached to apps and services. Often these kind of addiction forming dark patterns are less visually obvious on a screen — unless you start counting the number of notifications you’re being plied with, or the emotional blackmail triggers you’re feeling to send a message for a ‘friendversary’, or not miss your turn in a ‘streak game’.

This is the Nir Eyal ‘hooked’ school of product design. Which has actually run into a bit of a backlash of late, with big tech now competing — at least superficially — to offer so-called ‘digital well-being’ tools to let users unhook. Yet these are tools the platforms are still very much in control of. So there’s no chance you’re going to be encouraged to abandon their service altogether.

Dark pattern design can also cost you money directly. For example if you get tricked into signing up for or continuing a subscription you didn’t really want. Though such blatantly egregious subscription deceptions are harder to get away with. Because consumers soon notice they’re getting stung for $50 a month they never intended to spend.

That’s not to say ecommerce is clean of deceptive crimes now. The dark patterns have generally just got a bit more subtle. Pushing you to transact faster than you might otherwise, say, or upselling stuff you don’t really need.

Although consumers will usually realize they’ve been sold something they didn’t want or need eventually. Which is why deceptive design isn’t a sustainable business strategy, even setting aside ethical concerns.

In short, it’s short term thinking at the expense of reputation and brand loyalty. Especially as consumers now have plenty of online platforms where they can vent and denounce brands that have tricked them. So trick your customers at your peril.

That said, it takes longer for people to realize their privacy is being sold down the river. If they even realize at all. Which is why dark pattern design has become such a core enabling tool for the vast, non-consumer facing ad tech and data brokering industry that’s grown fat by quietly sucking on people’s data — thanks to the enabling grease of dark pattern design.

Think of it as a bloated vampire octopus wrapped invisibly around the consumer web, using its myriad tentacles and suckers to continuously manipulate decisions and close down user agency in order to keep data flowing — with all the A/B testing techniques and gamification tools it needs to win.

“It’s become substantially worse,” agrees Brignull, discussing the practice he began critically chronicling almost a decade ago. “Tech companies are constantly in the international news for unethical behavior. This wasn’t the case 5-6 years ago. Their use of dark patterns is the tip of the iceberg. Unethical UI is a tiny thing compared to unethical business strategy.”

“UX design can be described as the way a business chooses to behave towards its customers,” he adds, saying that deceptive web design is therefore merely symptomatic of a deeper Internet malaise.

He argues the underlying issue is really about “ethical behavior in US society in general”.

The deceitful obfuscation of commercial intention certainly runs all the way through the data brokering and ad tech industries that sit behind much of the ‘free’ consumer Internet. Here consumers have plainly been kept in the dark so they cannot see and object to how their personal information is being handed around, sliced and diced, and used to try to manipulate them.

From an ad tech perspective, the concern is that manipulation doesn’t work when it’s obvious. And the goal of targeted advertising is to manipulate people’s decisions based on intelligence about them gleaned via clandestine surveillance of their online activity (so inferring who they are via their data). This might be a purchase decision. Equally it might be a vote.

The stakes have been raised considerably now that data mining and behavioral profiling are being used at scale to try to influence democratic processes.

So it’s not surprising that Facebook is so coy about explaining why a certain user on its platform is seeing a specific advert. Because if the huge surveillance operation underpinning the algorithmic decision to serve a particular ad was made clear, the person seeing it might feel manipulated. And then they would probably be less inclined to look favorably upon the brand they were being urged to buy. Or the political opinion they were being pushed to form. And Facebook’s ad tech business stands to suffer.

The dark pattern design that’s trying to nudge you to hand over your personal information is, as Birgnull says, just the tip of a vast and shadowy industry that trades on deception and manipulation by design — because it relies on the lie that people don’t care about their privacy.

But people clearly do care about privacy. Just look at the lengths to which ad tech entities go to obfuscate and deceive consumers about how their data is being collected and used. If people don’t mind companies spying on them, why not just tell them plainly it’s happening?

And if people were really cool about sharing their personal and private information with anyone, and totally fine about being tracked everywhere they go and having a record kept of all the people they know and have relationships with, why would the ad tech industry need to spy on them in the first place? They could just ask up front for all your passwords.

The deception enabled by dark pattern design not only erodes privacy but has the chilling effect of putting web users under pervasive, clandestine surveillance, it also risks enabling damaging discrimination at scale. Because non-transparent decisions made off of the back of inferences gleaned from data taken without people’s consent can mean that — for example — only certain types of people are shown certain types of offers and prices, while others are not.

Facebook was forced to make changes to its ad platform after it was shown that an ad-targeting category it lets advertisers target ads against, called ‘ethnic affinity’ — aka Facebook users whose online activity indicates an interest in “content relating to particular ethnic communities” — could be used to run housing and employment ads that discriminate against protected groups.

More recently the major political ad scandals relating to Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns targeting the US and other countries via Facebook’s platform, and the massive Facebook user data heist involving the controversial political consultancy Cambridge Analytica deploying quiz apps to improperly suck out people’s data in order to build psychographic profiles for political ad targeting, has shone a spotlight on the risks that flow from platforms that operate by systematically keeping their users in the dark.

As a result of these scandals, Facebook has started offering a level of disclosure around who is paying for and running some of the ads on its platform. But plenty of aspects of its platform and operations remain shrouded. Even those components that are being opened up a bit are still obscured from view of the majority of users — thanks to the company’s continued use of dark patterns to manipulate people into acceptance without actual understanding.

And yet while dark pattern design has been the slickly successful oil in the engines of the ad tech industry for years, allowing it to get away with so much consent-less background data processing, gradually, gradually some of the shadier practices of this sector are being illuminated and shut down — including as a consequence of shoddy security practices, with so many companies involved in the trading and mining of people’s data. There are just more opportunities for data to leak. 

Laws around privacy are also being tightened. And changes to EU data protection rules are a key reason why dark pattern design has bubbled back up into online conversations lately. The practice is under far greater legal threat now as GDPR tightens the rules around consent.

This week a study by the Norwegian Consumer Council criticized Facebook and Google for systematically deploying design choices that nudge people towards making decisions which negatively affect their own privacy — such as data sharing defaults, and friction injected into the process of opting out so that fewer people will.

Another manipulative design decision flagged by the report is especially illustrative of the deceptive levels to which companies will stoop to get users to do what they want — with the watchdog pointing out how Facebook paints fake red dots onto its UI in the midst of consent decision flows in order to encourage the user to think they have a message or a notification. Thereby rushing people to agree without reading any small print.

Fair and ethical design is design that requires people to opt in affirmatively to any actions that benefit the commercial service at the expense of the user’s interests. Yet all too often it’s the other way around: Web users have to go through sweating toil and effort to try to safeguard their information or avoid being stung for something they don’t want.

You might think the types of personal data that Facebook harvests are trivial — and so wonder what’s the big deal if the company is using deceptive design to obtain people’s consent? But the purposes to which people’s information can be put are not at all trivial — as the Cambridge Analytica scandal illustrates.

One of Facebook’s recent data grabs in Europe also underlines how it’s using dark patterns on its platform to attempt to normalize increasingly privacy hostile technologies.

Earlier this year it began asking Europeans for consent to processing their selfies for facial recognition purposes — a highly controversial technology that regulatory intervention in the region had previously blocked. Yet now, as a consequence of Facebook’s confidence in crafting manipulative consent flows, it’s essentially figured out a way to circumvent EU citizens’ fundamental rights — by socially engineering Europeans to override their own best interests.

Nor is this type of manipulation exclusively meted out to certain, more tightly regulated geographies; Facebook is treating all its users like this. European users just received its latest set of dark pattern designs first, ahead of a global rollout, thanks to the bloc’s new data protection regulation coming into force on May 25.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg even went so far as to gloat about the success of this deceptive modus operandi on stage at a European conference in May — claiming the “vast majority” of users were “willingly” opting in to targeted advertising via its new consent flow.

In truth the consent flow is manipulative, and Facebook does not even offer an absolute opt out of targeted advertising on its platform. The ‘choice’ it gives users is to agree to its targeted advertising or to delete their account and leave the service entirely. Which isn’t really a choice when balanced against the power of Facebook’s platform and the network effect it exploits to keep people using its service.

‘Forced consent‘ is an early target for privacy campaign groups making use of GDPR opening the door, in certain EU member states, to collective enforcement of individuals’ data rights.

Of course if you read Facebook or Google’s PR around privacy they claim to care immensely — saying they give people all the controls they need to manage and control access to their information. But controls with dishonest instructions on how to use them aren’t really controls at all. And opt outs that don’t exist smell rather more like a lock in. 

Platforms certainly remain firmly in the driving seat because — until a court tells them otherwise — they control not just the buttons and levers but the positions, sizes, colors, and ultimately the presence or otherwise of the buttons and levers.

And because these big tech ad giants have grown so dominant as services they are able to wield huge power over their users — even tracking non-users over large swathes of the rest of the Internet, and giving them even fewer controls than the people who are de facto locked in, even if, technically speaking, service users might be able to delete an account or abandon a staple of the consumer web. 

Big tech platforms can also leverage their size to analyze user behavior at vast scale and A/B test the dark pattern designs that trick people the best. So the notion that users have been willingly agreeing en masse to give up their privacy remains the big lie squatting atop the consumer Internet.

People are merely choosing the choice that’s being pre-selected for them.

That’s where things stand as is. But the future is looking increasingly murky for dark pattern design.

Change is in the air.

What’s changed is there are attempts to legally challenge digital disingenuousness, especially around privacy and consent. This after multiple scandals have highlighted some very shady practices being enabled by consent-less data-mining — making both the risks and the erosion of users’ rights clear.

Europe’s GDPR has tightened requirements around consent — and is creating the possibility of redress via penalties worth the enforcement. It has already caused some data-dealing businesses to pull the plug entirely or exit Europe.

New laws with teeth make legal challenges viable, which was simply not the case before. Though major industry-wide change will take time, as it will require waiting for judges and courts to rule.

“It’s a very good thing,” says Brignull of GDPR. Though he’s not yet ready to call it the death blow that deceptive design really needs, cautioning: “We’ll have to wait to see whether the bite is as strong as the bark.”

In the meanwhile, every data protection scandal ramps up public awareness about how privacy is being manhandled and abused, and the risks that flow from that — both to individuals (e.g. identity fraud) and to societies as a whole (be it election interference or more broadly attempts to foment harmful social division).

So while dark pattern design is essentially ubiquitous with the consumer web of today, the deceptive practices it has been used to shield and enable are on borrowed time. The direction of travel — and the direction of innovation — is pro-privacy, pro-user control and therefore anti-deceptive-design. Even if the most embedded practitioners are far too vested to abandon their dark arts without a fight.

What, then, does the future look like? What is ‘light pattern design’? The way forward — at least where privacy and consent are concerned — must be user centric. This means genuinely asking for permission — using honesty to win trust by enabling rather than disabling user agency.

Designs must champion usability and clarity, presenting a genuine, good faith choice. Which means no privacy-hostile defaults: So opt ins, not opt outs, and consent that is freely given because it’s based on genuine information not self-serving deception, and because it can also always be revoked at will.

Design must also be empathetic. It must understand and be sensitive to diversity — offering clear options without being intentionally overwhelming. The goal is to close the perception gap between what’s being offered and what the customer thinks they’re getting.

Those who want to see a shift towards light patterns and plain dealing also point out that online transactions honestly achieved will be happier and healthier for all concerned — because they will reflect what people actually want. So rather than grabbing short term gains deceptively, companies will be laying the groundwork for brand loyalty and organic and sustainable growth.

The alternative to the light pattern path is also clear: Rising mistrust, rising anger, more scandals, and — ultimately — consumers abandoning brands and services that creep them out and make them feel used. Because no one likes feeling exploited. And even if people don’t delete an account entirely they will likely modify how they interact, sharing less, being less trusting, less engaged, seeking out alternatives that they do feel good about using.

Also inevitable if the mass deception continues: More regulation. If businesses don’t behave ethically on their own, laws will be drawn up to force change.

Because sure, you can trick people for a while. But it’s not a sustainable strategy. Just look at the political pressure now being piled on Zuckerberg by US and EU lawmakers. Deception is the long game that almost always fails in the end.

The way forward must be a new ethical deal for consumer web services — moving away from business models that monetize free access via deceptive data grabs.

This means trusting your users to put their faith in you because your business provides an innovative and honest service that people care about.

It also means rearchitecting systems to bake in privacy by design. Blockchain-based micro-payments may offer one way of opening up usage-based revenue streams that can offer an alternative or supplement to ads.

Where ad tech is concerned, there are also some interesting projects being worked on — such as the blockchain-based Brave browser which is aiming to build an ad targeting system that does local, on-device targeting (only needing to know the user’s language and a broad-brush regional location), rather than the current, cloud-based ad exchange model that’s built atop mass surveillance.

Technologists are often proud of their engineering ingenuity. But if all goes to plan, they’ll have lots more opportunities to crow about what they’ve built in future — because they won’t be too embarrassed to talk about it.

via TechCrunch

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