Climate change, population increase, pandemics, wars, maybe you know which planet I'm talking about. The last message from aliens received by Arecibo was please don't settle on the planet while you still can't handle your own. Knuth Henke is a hobby astronomer, friend of stars, and he's a volunteer at the planetarium in Bübeck. And he will be talking about the possibility to find exit planets or talk about what they're dreaming of a better world is possible. So welcome to our stage Knuth. Thank you very much for the intro. My name is Knuth and I chose astronomy or astrophotography as my hobby. Astronomy is a very broad field and I have compiled a number of topics that I would like to share with you tonight. I chose the topics of exoplanets, planets that are outside of our sun system. If you imagine what would happen if we actually managed to destroy our world and we had to look for a new one on the left, you can see. Well, former Syria, it used to be a very lively state and now it's a good place for watching stars. So I hope that during the next half hour I'll be able to give you some insight into exoplanets and the state of research. First, we will talk about what are exoplanets and how to detect them. We will be talking about two methods. There are more, but this would exceed the scope of this talk. And then we will talk about the next steps in science and what scientists are doing in order to get insights into the secrets of exoplanets and how to discover them. So let's start what are exoplanets. A definition from 2006, some of the older listeners might remember. That was the moment Pluto was no longer considered a planet. The International Astronomic Union defined criteria on what is a planet. A planet is a body that turns around a sun that has a symmetric form. So it's not square, for example, like some other objects in space. And it also has to have a clear path so that there are no bigger objects around it. And that is why Pluto was no longer considered a planet. The same would go for our moon or Jupiter or Saturn that have many more moons than the Earth. So it can't be a moon either. So what are exoplanets? That's very simple, basically. It's changed the sun with another star and then an exoplanet is short for extra solar planets. So it's out of the range of our sun. It rotates around another sun on a defined path that we can try to find. We have some examples in the next slide. So let's talk about the terms. The exoplanets are in court, that one, Pluto or Mars, but they're named after the star. They rotate around and then they get a combination of letters that are in the order of their discovery. Our sun is called Sun. So we would have Sun B, Sun C, Sun D, Sun E, which would be the planets we have in order. So this is how the exoplanets are named. And you will see that you start with one planet and then another is found and so on and so on. That has its reason and we will be talking about those reasons. So how do you find exoplanets? There are different possibilities, the nicest of which is just looking at it and seeing the exoplanets directly rotating around a star. Here we have a satellite image of the sun and you can see a device that allows the camera to see the sun in dark to make it visible. What you see here is a satellite recording from 2013. And you can see an asteroid there that is approaching the sun and then distancing itself from the sun again. And in this way a lot of satellites and asteroids that rotate around the sun have been found and it's also possible to visualize Venus. You can do that for other stars as well. I've got two examples here. On the left you can see from how to be. It rotates around the star from how. And from how to be was a very celebrated discovery.  It's not a planet. I still took it in here because the discovery was that huge. Actually it's two gas clouds that collided and now one that now have taken a path around this star. And on the left you have HR 8,799. It's 130 light years away from us and it's more than 60 million years old. And there are four exoplanets known right now that were discovered from the outside in. And on the left you can see HR 9,799 B. And you can also say C,D and E. And the recording was made by the Kepler observatory. Similar to the image of our sun. So in comparison to the planet the sun is very bright. So our sun is about one million times brighter than our earth. So that's a contrast that is very hard to visualize. It's comparable to like trying to take a photo of a mosquito next to a floodlight from a football stadium. So this only works for suns that are very weak, that are not very bright. So suns that are just starting to exist at this very moment. So this is about the direct method. The method we are mostly using is the so called transit method which is very easy. You can do it yourself using a lens reflex camera in your garden or a webcam even would work. And Harald will show you in detail how to do that and how to spot exoplanets yourself and measure them. This is a NASA illustration. NASA always makes very colorful and beautiful images. So what is happening here? There is a temporary darkening and you have to be on the same level as the rotational path. So the planets have to rotate in a way that they are positioned between their sun and our camera. And that is how you are able to see them.  And it would be very improbable for our earth to be spotted using this method. This probability depends on the size of the sun. This method can be carried out terrestrial in an observatory for example. And you also need several rotations around the sun. In the first rotation you can see there is something. In the second rotation you can see there is a certain path. And then you have a third measurement in order to confirm that it is really just one exoplanet that rotates around the sun in its year. So that takes quite some time to do that measurement. So here we have an example, I hope you see my mouse. On the top we have a planet, the small ball. And on the left we have the light curve over time. So if I start it we can see how the planet goes around the star once. And now check the light curve.  And so I got my signal. And this is what happens when we use a camera to use the transit method. Depending on the size of the star and the planet I have a difference in how much the light drops. On the right side there is a smaller planet, on the left side there is a bigger planet. And so of course the bigger planet lets the light drop further. So I can say how big is the planet compared to the sun. And it doesn't really matter how far away I am. And I can even find a very small planet with this method. What does it look like with several planets? Let's look at the light curve. I have three planets here. A big one, a middle one and a small one. First the big one and the first dip. Then the middle one, again a dip. And then the small one behind it. The curve goes further down and then back up. And you can also check that there is a small mistake here. Because of course the factor, how far it goes down and back up. This dip is ridiculous of course. But the principle stands. Okay, how does it look in reality? So we are looking at hat P7B. It's a huge planet, which 1.8 times the mass of Jupiter. And one year for it takes 2,205 days. No, 2.205 days, sorry. So it's very big and very heavy. Its star is about double the size of our Sun. And here you can see this huge dip and then the curve goes back up. So 2.2 days are one year. But on the lower here we have the average value in blue. And that's the standard brightness. And it drops a little. Then there is the eclipse. And then the dip. Then it goes up. And then there is the second dip. And so on. So ideally it's really constant. And the second dip is the reflection of the planet before the planet disappears behind the Sun. And we can see that here. And we can measure that here. And that's how we get this curve. Okay, so much for the transit method. We have a few satellites launched for that. So there's the Kepler mission in 2009. There's a sensor. You can see that on the upper right side with 42 CCDs. And in about an hour it will go down. And we were taking constant measurements. And it was discovering a lot of exoplanets. It started with four pieces. Two were surviving. And then it could also still look for 80 days. So only for very short transition periods because we need long observations to really observe also long transits. Then the next method. At the beginning it was the most successful one. It was the radial speed method. A star has a mass. A planet has a mass. And when they circle each other, then it's not the case that the star remains in place and the planet moves around it. They both rotate around the common virtual point of mass. And what we can do now is we can check the light, the star sends out. And if we then use prisms, we get the rainbow. The typical rainbow. And if we really look at the spectroscopic, the absorption lines, those are the black lines in here. And whoever paid attention in physics, these lines are specific to certain elements in the star. And they are specific to certain wavelengths. So I can say what kind of atoms are within the sun. And you all know the Doppler effect, of course. The best example is an ambulance that approaches you, passes by you and moves away. So first the sound is very high, the pitch. And then it goes down on the way away. And the same happens to the light here. So the characteristic lines in the light, they change depending on whether the star moves towards us or away from us. And using that, we can determine a speed with which a star pulls on the star. So in which the planet pulls on the star. We have a small animation again. The planet moves around the sun. And the sun moves away from us. And the light goes, has a longer wavelength. And then it moves towards us. It's a shorter wavelength. So it becomes more red or more blue. And when we have a spectrum of a star, we can tell by how the light changes in which direction it moves. So we can detect that there is something pulling on the star. And if it's one planet, then it's a perfect sine curve. If it's several planets, then we have multiple superpositioned sine curves. So we can also calculate the transition periods of all the planets. So let's check the efficiency of all the methods. The whole topic started some 20 years ago. I think 95 was the first time an exoplanet was found. And back then, many people couldn't believe that there are other planets at all. Well, no, the Earth is not unique. And the more we look, the more planets we find. And there is several methods, actually. And the most successful one at the beginning was the radial velocity method. Then there was the transit method. And it was used in many satellite missions. Of course, the microlensing method that works by how the planets can bend a light just by having gravity. I didn't talk about it. But yeah, we can see how black holes bend light, for example. And we can find patterns in that. And we can use that to measure our whole star systems in a very short time. Microlensing is very interesting. So now we are at around 5,000 exoplanets that we found. And now the important thing is to check is it really an exoplanet or not. It comes more exact. And we can now use methods to find planets around weak stars. And we were able to find big planets more easily. To find something like the Earth, you have to be very precise. But by now we can do it. And the better our instruments become, the more planets we find, of course. So now we found a planet. Now the question is, is that an Earth-like planet? Could we live there? So we are talking about the habitable zone. Primarily it's defined by the temperature and that's defined by the distance from the star. And we are carbon-based life forms, so we need water. So the question is, is this planet in a temperature range, in a distance range, so that water is a present, but also be in liquid form. So it isn't frozen over, but it's also not blown away. So we don't want an ice planet, of course. But there is water, but we can't get to it. And even in our own solar system, where we are wondering where is the water of Mars. So you can imagine finding the answer on an exoplanet is even more challenging. But still there are methods for this. So everything we are talking about now is based on quite many assumptions. But there are methods and there are reasonings. So let's look at one system. It's called Trappist 1. It's a very small dwarf star. It's 1,250,000 of the brightness of our Sun. And there are multiple planets around it, and all of them are rocky planets. We can detect that. I will get back to that later. So the habitable zone of our solar system is marked in blue, here in the upper area. So the Earth is right in there, including the Moon. Also the Mars is in there. Venus not really. It's a bit too hot. Mercury, of course, is way too hot. Water could not exist there for long. The yellow cross are exactly Earth's data. So on the y-axis we have the density, and on the x-axis we have the illumination. So how much energy enters the planet from the star? So we see the Trappist planets, B, C, D, E, F, G and H. Many of them are in the habitable zone. And yeah, we can find water on there, mostly. And for example, Trappist 1F, we assume is an ocean planet. The whole system is 40 light-years away from us. So pretty close. And considering astronomical distances, 40 light-years is a distance that we might reach one day. But of course, if I want to speed up a lot of mass, it's a bit difficult. But small masses are easier, of course, to move it there. And just assume that we managed to travel with 1 fourth of light speed, which theoretically is quite possible. We would need 160 years, which is quite possible if there are no alternatives, of course. But what does this show us? Well, before we take this path, we need to see, and we need to check, is it worth it to go there? And we need more information. So I want to mention a few frame parameters for that question. One is that we need more concrete metrics. So we need to know whether it's a gas planet, for example, the mass and density of the planet is... One of the best diagrams in astronomy is the Hatch-Pung-Russell diagram. You can see it on the right here. This red object is a real measurement of all stars within 5 million light-years of the Earth. Each dot represents one star, and the red areas are just heaps of stars on top of each other. So you can see the light of the star here. It starts very weak here on the y-axis. The x-axis has categories like temperature and type of star, and you also have the light color. The sun is somewhere in the middle. The light temperature is measured in Seoul, which is a sun strength. And all the other stars are here in the diagram. So a newborn star starts somewhere in the lower edge here, and then it becomes hotter and hotter.  There are other things to consider, for example, the weight of planets which we can measure using the radial speed method and also the diameter density. And when looking at the atmosphere, we can also do that. We have the star, we have the planet passing it, and the atmosphere of the planet gives a different wavelength of the star. And if we subtract that, we can look at the wavelength of the planet. We have WASP 39B. Here as an example, it has four days at four-day orbits. And here you can see how molecules of an exoplanet can be measured, taking an exoplanet with 700 million light-years distance as an example. So now I'm being told that our time is up. Thank you very much for listening. There's a lot of material. If you're interested in Kepler, it's also starting new missions again and again, and we're working on enhancing the measurement values. Thank you Knut. This was really fascinating. Just imagine a large room of people who are in awe and who are giving you a huge round of applause. I'm so sorry that we cannot give you this experience because we're here virtually. But the number of questions alone is very telling of how fascinating people find your talk. So we have a lot of questions, so this is why we wanted... We had to cut you short, although we would have liked to listen to more of your explanations. So the first question, the pad is still filling. Can you assume that the orbit level or the path level of all planets is always the same? No, you can't. So when a star system is spawned, it happens in an aggregation disk. So in a cloud like a typical star birthing area, and we will get back to that on our group stargazing session. So then the gas molecules come together and a disk forms. So typically, yes, the planets are usually on a plane, but it can be disturbed. For example, for us Pluto, well, the dwarf planet Pluto, it's disturbed. It's not going in the same plane as the other planets. But then, two years ago, made quite an interesting discovery. They found an exoplanet that runs backwards compared to the rotation direction of their star. So basically we know that we don't know anything. Yeah, that raises another question. If you've found an exoplanet using the difference in brightness, isn't it extremely unlikely that the planets between us and the other star? Because you said it's really, really improbable. So how many exoplanets that we miss? Yeah, quite a lot. We now assume that any star will have planets. You can just assume that. With a planet on the size of Earth, we are below 1%. On Jupiter, we have 10% chance of detecting it if it passes by the Sun. Yeah, just following up. Did I understand correctly that we can assume that any star has a planet system? Yeah, pretty much everyone. We've found them pretty much anywhere. Most stars out there are... And so 50% of all the stars we see are double star system. So it's two stars rotating around each other. And even with those, we found exoplanets. So either they rotate, they traverse each one of the stars or both of them. So basically we found everything already. And there is triple star systems, quadruple star systems and single star. Are the exception. Yeah, that explains or answers the question whether a Earth-side planet would be measurable and how we would find such smaller exoplanets. Well, it's detectable and measurable. And by now we can use the transmission method. But the chance is so low and keeps us from finding it. But our cameras are good enough to find planets that are similar to Earth. And soon, in 2026, the next satellite mission for this will start. And it specializes and concentrates on Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. We hope that this will be enough for astro-sysmology to detect volcanics on those planets. Because if we can detect eruptions, we can tell... And if we have information about the resonance frequency of a star or planet, we can tell what's happening inside it and what does it look like inside it. So we can tell a lot about what it consists of. And we can detect a lot more closely what does it look like with the planets. And AI plays a huge role as well. And I already said that planets are usually being born together with their star, pretty much always. I mean, there are planets that wander through the universe alone and are then caught by a star.  We also can tell what pressure and what temperature do I need for certain molecules. So we can check what does a star consist of, and we're working hard on that. And we try to create AI models to check what planets might be there. Yeah, before we come to the last question, just let me use the opportunity to give you an impression of what is happening here in the questions catalog, but also on Twitter. Twitter really likes your voice and thinks it's really pleasant.  People are asking that. This is actually my first talk like this. Yeah, the idea is born, isn't it? Thank you. Hopefully soon. The co-orates cloud that is limiting our solar system, can you measure it? I don't know about that. So I have another question. Would you be able to detect alien civilizations? Yeah, the question is obvious, but the question is, what is an alien civilization? We are quite human-centric as carbon-based life forms, so we are looking for methane for oxygen, both gases that don't accumulate in an atmosphere on their own and decrease over time. So if you can find those molecules, then today we assume that there must be some form of carbon-based life. Yeah, so that's what we're looking for. There could be other forms of life that are not like us. And with this topic of exoplanets, we can see that first we were always trying to extrapolate from our star system, and we were looking for rocky planets in the center and gas giants at the outside, and we made measurements and then saw that that's basically not always the case. We saw a gas planet that's giant, and it has a 2.2-day gear. There shouldn't be a gas giant there. It shouldn't be able to exist there. It shouldn't develop there. Yeah, we then checked our models and found, well, it is possible, because a gas giant will slow down on their orbit around the star, and it will turn slower and slower, and the slower it becomes, the closer it gets. Would James Webb, as an instrumentarian, be able to help you? The one that was launched recently has very fine precise instruments that also will help us with measurements, especially with spectography. So thank you again. There's a lot of positive feedback. Twitter is thanking you, not just for your voice, but also for your presentation. Maybe let me ask one question that is motivated from computer science. Claude Scheller is very well-known in computer science. I'll read the question because it's hard for me to understand. When looking for information, shouldn't you also be looking at the density of information in the sense of Claude Scheller? Can you answer that question? Unfortunately not. Well, sorry to those who raised the question. Okay, maybe about the AI models. So of course we put in everything we have concerning information. The interesting thing about the models is that they try to deduce the probable ways of planet construction or how they develop. And one of them is a conduction of heat. And Mars is rather boring because it's quite dead. There is some Vulcan activity, but basically nothing. But Venus and Earth are quite interesting. It's rocky planets that develop quite differently. And we use the same models for the... We use our models on these planets and try to check what parameters determine what. And that's what we are doing. And we are planning quite a few Venus missions to check what happened with Venus. So until 2030 there is quite a few planned. And we have greenhouse effects and we know what happened, but not exactly how. Yeah, looking at the time I want to place with one question. What are the hopes that people connect with exoplanets and how likely is that hope to fulfill? We don't have much time left unfortunately. So please remember there will be a breakout room. The link will be posted in the IRC. So if you have time we can continue the discussion. And I cordially invite you. Yeah, so we can be certain that the exoplanets Earth like exist. If you assume that each star has two exoplanets and in the Milky Way alone we have 400 million stars. A few billion galaxies. So we have a few trillion and more exoplanets. So statistically speaking that there are no other exoplanets with life. The chances are really low. So getting there is difficult. Do we have a chance to get there? So we might be able to get there in the next years. The hope is that if we build huge sunsales, solar sails and shoot on them with lasers, then we could speed up quite quickly. We could reach 25 to 30% of light speed. That would be cool. Okay. So you just demonstrated that it's more plausible that we have extraterrestrial intelligence than not. So if that isn't a good prospect for the next talk. So please remember the idea with the podcast and thank you very, very much for your presentation. I imagine that lots of being out there and thankful for your talk. And please get to the breakout room. Knut will be available for more questions. Also you can visit the observatory in Lübeck and after coronavirus is over. We will hopefully be able to offer more.


Hi, I'm Dino Coombs and November's What's Neat is going to start right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is What's Neat for November 2020. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a great show. We start out the show with two scenery segments, very short segments. The first on how to make simple bushes for your layout that grow along the main line. And the second on how to make Swaharo cactus. There's beautiful plants that you see out in the desert southwest. We also have a great run-by by Steven M. Conroy in modeling ideas from above. And then James Regear does a segment where he edited the video completely from start to finish on how he installed sound and special effects lighting into a Broadway-limited trackmobile. It's a very interesting video. It's a very actually complicated project, but James makes it seem very simple and attainable where almost any of us could do that project. And with that, I'd like to thank all the folks out there that watch the What's Neat this week show that we create for YouTube, where we keep you updated every week on the newest latest news in the hobby, the greatest hobby in the world of model rariting. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this month's show, November 2020 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I want to talk about something really simple that's usually overlooked on layouts. And that's simple bushes, you know, the honeysuckle, the wild growth that we see growing trackside. And a lot of folks over the years, we've seen folks use this lichen or sometimes it's called lichen. You get this in a bag. It's usually colored green. And I've had great success using this. When I did the 2002 Wathers catalog cover a long time ago, I used this and literally created hills full of this representing bushes and trees along the main line and the hills. And lichen works really well. Another thing that we've seen folks use over the years is they've take poly fiber and then they simply sprinkle ground foam over it and they make those puffball type bushes and they decorate their entire layout with that. Well, I discovered a product a few years back made by Bachman and that is in their Scenic Escapes line of scenery. And that was these wire armatures that have got the foliage already on them. And I've used it. I've got some photographs here that I'm going to show you. It actually looks good right out of the package. And of course, these are all twisted wire bushes of different sizes with different branch structures. And again, they look good right out of the package, but I figured a way to actually make them look more improved and more realistic to represent honeysuckle and the type of stuff that we see growing here in Missouri. What I do is I take the flocking and I actually pull it right off of them. And I end up with these wire armatures and that's what you can see right here. There's various different sizes of wire armatures. And then what I like to do is I like to take the poly fiber material that Bachman poly fiber in this case and I spread it around on the armatures you see right here. Once I've got it pulled on, I simply take off little clumps and I attach it to the armature, which I'm going to do right here to the last branch that I've got to do on this bush. And you make them one at a time. And then you spray it with hairspray. I've got the old trusty Aquanet hairspray. And I spray it a little bit just to get it all nice and sticky. And then I like to cover it up with just a little bit of ground foam right out of the container. I'm going to do that for you here just to show you the way I do it. These different colors, lighter colors, darker colors, vary it out. And on the darker trees put a little bit of yellow on. And then I hit it with a little bit more hairspray. And then often what I do is I take a pair of scissors and I'll trim it out to make sure each branch has got the individual look. And what happens is I've used hundreds, probably thousands of these on my layout and in various scenes. Let me show you what I'm talking about. Here's some photographs of the bluff that I live on. And for the bluff scene, I used thousands of these to represent the type of vegetation that grew between five, eight and 10 feet tall along the right away and along the bluff. I've used it on various parts of my layout. And the final product here, some finished ones here just for an example that I stuck on this piece of foam. They last forever. If your cat or your pet jumps up on the layout and flattens them out, they're very easy to straighten and fix. They last forever. They're bulletproof. And I think it's a great way to make scenery for any type of a layout that represents the Midwest where all the deciduous green stuff is growing all the time. Plus, it would probably work good, you know, out in a Western arid area to use the smaller armatures and treat them with a different color of vegetation. So it's just a scenery tip, something I wanted to talk about on this segment of What's Neat, a very easy way to make individual wire armature bushes for your layout very quickly. And they look very realistic. They're great for foreground scenery. I think it's just a good idea and it works for me very well. So that's something I want to share with you on this three minute segment of scenery for What's Neat. Hello, this is Michael Gross and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. For this segment of What's Neat, I want to talk about cactus. And what am I talking about? I'm talking about the old Arizona, the dry Swaharo cactus, those great big tall cactus. Now when I was a kid, back in third or fourth grade, my grandparents always got these magazines called the Arizona Highways Magazine and this one is from 1958 and it was my first exposure to the great big tall cactus. And this is what I'm talking about right here. You've seen these along the Santa Fe or Southern Pacific Main Lines in Arizona and I've got a few photographs of the prototype that I'll share with you and I always thought of different ways on how to make those cactus. I've seen some folks use green pipe cleaners and simply bend them up into the shape of the plant itself and it works really well. So when surfing the internet and studying the idea, I came up with the thought of using this bakeable clay. It's called Super Sculpty Clay and you put it in the oven and you bake it and it gets hard and it's really easy to work with and it's perfect as you pull it out of the box here. You can see what it looks like for simply making Swaharo cactus. Travis Hanshrong shared with us these photographs that we featured on podcast number 72 where he used a few different types of tools to create these beautiful Swaharo cactus, different sizes.  He actually built a very beautiful diorama and he took it to a whole new level and what I'm going to show you today is a little bit more basic but it's the general idea on how to do this. And all you simply do is sit there and knead it and in this case I'm rolling it on the tabletop surface here and then you just bend it and attach it where it would belong and you form the basic shape of the cactus plant. Now of course it's soft until you bake it and this is a Swaharo cactus that I made an O scale for a project using that clay and baking it in the oven and painting it green. Now you've got to ask how did I get the furrows, those lines on the cactus like I did. I simply used a razor saw in this case and I drew the saw along the wet clay while it was still soft creating all the lines in the plant and then after it was baked I drilled a hole in it and put a needle in it so I could simply stick it in the foam and in this case use it for William's O scale photos that I did for Bachman as a simple prop. Well it's come to my attention and we learned this on the What's Neat This Week podcast a few months back where a company called ZYX Creative has come out with 3D printed Swaharo cactus in HO scale and I've got some of those right here to share with you. I've actually photographed these outside up close so you can see the great detail that went into these plants. They look absolutely convincing and they would lend themselves perfectly to any type of a desert scene. You've seen me shoot desert scenes in the past where I've shot video of trains running through the desert with the purple mountains in the far-distance background and that's the one thing that was always missing from the video shots that I did was these beautiful type of cactus that you see right here so check it out something to think about you can make your own out of clay of course you could do the old pipe cleaner trick if you wish or you can order the ones that you see before you right here by going to zyxcreative.com and get yourself some HO scale beautiful Swaharo cactus and so that's this modeling tip this minute for What's Neat. Hi I'm James Regear and for this segment of What's Neat I'm going to be talking about the project I did to update this Broadway Limited Imports track mobile to DCC with tsunami 2 sound and LED lighting. In early April James Wright posted on Facebook that Lombard hobbies in Chicago was having a clearance sale and he was considering purchasing this track mobile which was the last one they had in stock. This was the DC only version and James was looking for someone who could convert it ideally with light and sound. I saw an irresistible challenge in this project it was much smaller than any locomotive I'd attempted to date which meant I would have to learn new techniques and methods to install decoders speaker and LEDs while minimizing the spatial requirements. I sought to learn whatever I could about the prototype I visited the track mobile website which contained numerous photos of various models of the track mobile including the wide cab version that closest resembles the bli model and we talked about it frequently on What's Neat this week in model railroading there were several viewers who reached out with prototype photos and videos. After consultation with James Wright we chose the TSU-1100 tsunami 2 decoder from Soundtracks. This is the only decoder that came with the Cummins industrial diesel sound pre-installed on its GE sound set. Now George Bogatuck has been a great partner in this project giving me advice as well as helping me design a stay alive for this track mobile. I carefully dismantled the track mobile and looked for the best place to hide the decoder. The model railroad hobbyist install had made use of the channel between the wheel sets to house the decoder so I wondered if I could do the same with the TSU-1100. Unfortunately the decoder was just a little bit too wide to fit the space meaning that the cab would be the only option. This presented a new set of challenges. First hiding my work would be nearly impossible as all sides of the cab had windows. Second BLI had mounted a 0.65 ounce weight in the ceiling of the cab that I would have to remove to accommodate the decoder. Removing the weight was not a problem but I had to think about where I could replace it and there was not much space. Committing to sound meant finding a place to put the speaker. The best location that I found was in the frame of the track mobile between the wheel sets. The speaker could fire down onto the track using reverberation from the layout for amplification. Mauser electronics had a 12 by 6 millimeter cell phone speaker commonly used for an earpiece and that would fit the bill nicely and I designed the baffle in blender. Blender is a powerful open-source software suite for 3D graphics design that is available for most platforms. Although donations are encouraged the software is free for download and use. I started off by creating a cube and setting its dimensions to match those of the speaker at 12 by 6 by 2 millimeters. Next I created a cube to represent the exterior dimensions of the speaker box. I set the speaker box depth at 4.5 millimeters. I wanted one millimeter of material on each side of the speaker at the opening of the box so I set the final exterior dimensions of the box at 14 by 8 by 4.5 millimeters. Once I had the exterior dimensions established I created a third cube to represent the speaker box's cavity or reverberation chamber. I wanted the speaker to have a footing of 0.5 millimeters on each side to prevent it from sliding too far back into the chamber on assembly. This meant a length and width of 11 millimeters by 5 millimeters. I wanted the rear wall of the speaker to be one millimeter thick. So for the final dimensions of the speaker cavity I wanted 11 meters by 5 millimeters by 3.5 millimeters. Finally with all the cubes created I stacked them in blender making sure that they were properly centered on the X and Y axes and in proper alignment on the Z axes for speaker chamber depth. I made sure that the cube representing the speaker protruded one millimeter from the front of the speaker. Once everything was properly stacked I used the Boolean Exclude function to first remove the space of the speaker from the speaker box followed by the space of the reverberation chamber and I was left with a millimeter exact image of the speaker box I had in mind. I converted the file to STL format that my printer slicer could read and after making sure that everything was aligned properly I printed the baffle on my Dremel Idea Builder. The baffle came out to be exact in its dimensions. So precise that when I press fit the speaker to it the fitting was so snug that no adhesive or additional measures to seal the fit were required. The assembled speaker itself was a perfect fit for the available space so I used double-sided tape to attach the speaker box to the back of the decoder bay on the track mobile. I then perforated the plastic bottom of the bay with a number 68 drill. For this project I needed five lighting functions including forward and reverse headlights road hazard lights and two strobes still one more than I had available then I thought about a recent project where I added a four LED prime strato-light beacon to a GP35. I accomplished this using an Atmel a tiny 13 microcontroller chip. The rotary beacon of course used a single lighting function on the decoder that was set to constant bright. There is a what's neat segment in the works for this project too. The strobe lights on a locomotive are normally controlled with one switch therefore it would be an ideal usage for the Atiny 13 chip. The microcontroller with up to six programmable pins it uses the same programming code as an Arduino and a properly configured Arduino can be used to upload that code from a computer so first I had to hash out the strobe flash sequence on the Arduino before I could upload it to the Atiny 13. I wanted to program a sequence for two LEDs so that they would each do a double flash be off for about a second and repeat. Now in a prototypical setting a pair of flashing strobes is almost never synchronized. One is always flashing at a slightly faster rate than the other. To replicate this I wanted to set the off time for one of the strobes at 950 milliseconds with the other at 1000 milliseconds. The two strobes would thus be in sync to start with but have to go through 20 cycles before being in sync again. The most basic program for Arduino is called blink. First the user chooses a pin to activate with a four line sequence of code. The first line turns the LED on, the second delays a certain amount of time, the third turns the LED off, and the fourth delays a certain amount of time. The Arduino will repeat the sequence again and again as long as it has power. We're animating a single strobe or even multiple strobes if they're on the exact same sequence, something similar to blink would suffice. On, delay 100 milliseconds, off delay 80 milliseconds, on delay 100 milliseconds, off delay 1000 milliseconds. For two strobes that are slightly offset from each other however, this does not work very well because the delay function instructs the Arduino to wait and do nothing else for the duration. Instead I had to set variables for each LED and calculate on time and off time based on millis or the Arduino's internal timer. Then using a sequence of if else statements I instructed the Arduino when to turn each LED on or off. Now this all resulted in a somewhat convoluted code, especially for a programming novice like myself. I struggled with the problem for about a day and then I finally asked my wife Allison for help. Allison codes professionally as a bioinformaticist and she had the coding figured out and running within two minutes. Once I had the desired coding working with the Arduino I created a new copy of the sequence, adjusting the pins to match what I had available on the ATiny13. I then used the instructions I found online, I'll provide a link in the article, to reconfigure the Arduino into programming mode so that I could write the coding to the ATiny13 chip. This meant soldering wires to the leads of the ATiny13, mounting it to a breadboard and connecting the ATiny13 pins to the appropriate pins of the Arduino. I flashed the coding to bring the Arduino into programming mode, connected the appropriate terminals between Arduino and ATiny13 and once I had everything set I flashed the bootloader sequence to the chip followed by the dual strobe programming I created. I then desoldered the ATiny13 and set it aside for the later installation. Some of the more technical aspects worked out it was time to prepare the model for installing LEDs. This meant drilling holes through the body in each location I wanted to install an LED. Because the body was cast metal I was sure to use plenty of oil to lubricate the drill bit. When dealing with styrene I prefer the precision of drilling by hand but metal is a much slower process to drill so I found that putting a precision chuck into the chuck of my power drill helped expedite things and make the process more tolerable. Even so I took my time eased off the pressure and let the drill do the drilling. I still broke a few bits in the process but taking a low pressure approach really helped those tiny bits last longer than expected. Using a number 78 drill bit I bored holes through the center of each headlight molding. I countersunk then each hole with the number 68 bore drilling so far into the wall as I could without going through to the other side. I stopped frequently to check my progress and make sure I was not drilling all the way through. I hope that the countersink would minimize potential contact between the exposed ends of the LED wires and body of the track mobile. I followed the same procedure for each headlight and tail light. To drill out the headlights and tail lights on the rear of the track mobile I found it helpful to remove the rear walkway and stairs. It is a separate piece from the rest of the frame held in by two pins. Gentle pressure on those pins will allow it to separate. I also removed the top step from either side of the walkway since the hole coming out of the rear tail light was in direct alignment with the top step and I did not want to drill through the steps. For the strobe lights I first used wire cutters to clip off the strobe moldings. I then drilled into the mounts with my number 78 drill bit until I came through the cab roof. For this part I was careful to make frequent stops to check my progress. Because of the thickness of the cab wall the bore on either side was nearly perfect alignment to hit the cab window moldings. I did not want to drill into the windows. Once the number 78 hole was through I followed up with the 116th inch bore through the strobe mounts. Because I had a number 78 pilot hole the 116th inch bore seemed to go a little bit quicker. As in the other countersinks I wanted to drill as far as possible without boring all the way through the cab ceiling. My idea was to have a hole deep enough to put the LEDs in at the base with 116th inch acrylic tubing cut to size to serve as the diffusers. With that it was time to begin assembling LEDs for installation. This was much like many other projects and I wired up 12 LEDs for the install all 0402 all warm white. After testing the LEDs with three volts of power I was sure to brush the LEDs and leads generously with silicone paint. I allowed the paint to set thoroughly overnight before doing anything else with the LEDs. The aim was to achieve the best possible insulating coating. Once I had allowed the silicone coating to dry I dipped four LEDs into clear red acrylic paint for the tail lights and two into clear orange acrylic paint for the hazard lights. I set these aside until they were dried to the touch which was only a few hours. Meanwhile I remounted the rear steps to the frame of the track mobile and secured it with super glue. I tinted the cab windows with several coatings of clear acrylic smoke to help obscure the electronics that would be going inside. I also mixed some paint together to match the industrial yellow of the car body. I applied it to the decoder with a brush. The goal here was to be able to feature some of the details BLI had put into the cab including the driver without having the view ruined by the electronics. I also coated any exposed metal around where I could be mounting the LEDs with silicone paint. Again I left everything to cure overnight before proceeding. Finally it was time to mount the LEDs to the track mobile. I worked with one function at a time starting with the headlight tail light functions. I initially fed the wires for the headlights and tail lights. Once there was enough wire to grasp with the tweezers I pulled them through the rest of the way. I tried to avoid using too much force in pulling the LED wires since they are definitely vulnerable to breakage and the LED solder joints themselves are notorious for falling apart. Once the wires were through I soldered the matching pairs of headlights and tail lights together into parallel. I then added a resistor to the function common from each. For the tail light pairs I used 20 kilo ohms resistance and for the headlight pairs I used one kilo ohm. I made sure that each resistor and surrounding solder joints was thoroughly covered with shrink tubing as an extra layer of insulation. I then routed the wires so that the anode and cathode wires from the headlight and tail light sets would meet toward the back of the frame where I soldered them into parallel. I made sure that the wires were snug against the sides the track mobile as I routed them where they would not interfere with the screws needed for assembly. Once the underframe wiring was completed for the lighting I made sure that all function common wires were soldered together with a blue 34 awg bus wire. I did the same with each lighting function soldering them to the appropriate color of 34 awg bus wire. After shrink tubing the solder joints I secured the shrink tubing to the underside of the track mobile frame using super glue. I wanted to minimize movement because I knew that getting all these wires routed into the cab would create a pinch and pull on the wires and I wanted to minimize breakage. After all all of the wires had to be routed behind the motor underneath the motor hood and into the cab and all of this was a very tight fit. This left one major issue to address with the track mobile and that was its unreliable performance on turnouts. I knew I didn't really have space for a conventional stay-alive capacitor but I wondered if I might manage to cobble one together by wiring a few capacitors together and hiding them in plain sight under the frame of the track mobile. I asked George Bogotok for recommendations and he suggested I try soldering 425 volt 220 micro farad capacitors together in parallel which could provide a second or two of emergency power. Initially I thought I might be able to hide the capacitors in plain sight as oversized air tanks if I painted them into armor yellow to match the track mobile. Now as it turned out they were too bulky to look even remotely convincing and I had to remove the struts for the wheels because they would make the whole assembly too wide to accommodate. I decided to instead move the capacitors to the interior of the frame right against the motor casing and then I mounted the road wheels to the outside of capacitor. Now to make everything removable for service I decided to use hot melt to secure the capacitors and wheels to the sides of the track mobile. And because the wheels were now on the outside of the capacitors the whole effect looked much better and more convincing. The next step was to secure the decoder to the ceiling with double-sided tape. I was careful to route the wires from the strobes around the decoder. These two strobe wires of course were going to be attached to the ATiny13 chip. Whereas the decoder uses a positive function common the ATiny13 chip uses a common ground meaning that I had to wire the cathode wires into parallel and to a one kilo ohm resistor which I in turn soldered to the ground pin of the chip. I soldered the function wires from the decoder directly to that pin. I soldered the two anode wires from the LEDs to respective poles in the ATiny chip. I soldered a one kilo ohm resistor to the anode pole of the ATiny chip with the function common soldered on the other side of the resistor. It was very important to make sure that the ATiny chip did not receive too much voltage because much like an LED it would go up in smoke. That it was time for final assembly. All wires coming from the frame had to pass around the rear of the motor underneath the motor hood and into the cap. This meant that with the motor wires three lighting functions a stay alive, truck power, and a speaker I was having to feed 12 wires through a relatively narrow cavity. Making matters worse the motor hood assembly closes tight to the track mobile frame right where it meets the rear wall of the cap. So in order to allow the wires to pass through I used a file and dremel to open up a gap. Now all of this would be relatively hidden from view because it's under the skin of the motor hood. Once the wires were successfully routed around the motor and into the cap I soldered the light colored wires together making sure to cover each solder joint with shrink tubing. In order to facilitate maintenance I used one millimeter pitch headliner pin and plug sets to make the motor, track power, and speaker unpluggable. After successfully testing the track mobile it was time to close the motor hood and tighten the screws for final assembly. And then the final test where I kept my fingers crossed the test of the fully assembled track mobile on the tracks. I wanted to make sure that no wires had somehow gotten pinched as I closed that motor hood and screwed everything down tight. And with a successful test the track mobile was complete. All of the model railroad product seen in this episode of What's Neat are available through Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado or order online at mycaboose.com


Hello everyone, welcome to another video just out here chilling by this river as you can see starting to rain a little bit But I wanted to do This one so here it is Yeah, the obsessed narcissistic stalker That's the topic for today and I know I have Touched on this a little bit of the last few days as well But I'd like to go more into it now so Yeah, you may find that when you're with them They do a lot of creepy things Like they're always going for your stuff if you're out of the house, they might go through your drawers your cupboards They might search your underwear drawer As weird as that sounds it's something that they may and Yeah, they will go through your phone maybe you're in the bath or shower and You leave your phone outside They'll be going through that If you have a password on it, they will try to guess it They will go through your laptop or computer Again, they will try to guess your password If you have one on there Yeah, they'll just go through everything They'll try to find out information about you Because you have to remember the very paranoid and hyper vigilant They always think you're hiding something from them because they're hiding something from you. I just like to show this little pond here as well Got the lilies there Some flowers. I always noticed the little things like this Always seem to grab my attention really nice pink flower there Very bright colors. It almost doesn't look real, but it is and yeah, many of you are wondering What the narcissist is doing after the relationship If you've left or if they discarded you And actually If you want to know what they're doing It follows a pattern So it tends to carry on from whatever they were doing while they were with you They don't just move on and stop doing that It's an obsession. It's an addiction So they will continue Doing that even after you're gone and as I've said in some of my recent videos They will Track devices on your car They will put Spyware on your phone or on your computer surveillance cameras in your home There's no limits to what they will do and of course the old-school way is just to follow you in person On foot so by car or they will get someone else to do it for them They will get someone else to follow you around And it may be someone you know Or it may be someone you don't know. This is what I'm driving now As many of you may know C63 s. It's a great car. I'll probably have something else in a couple of weeks But for now, this is great for Traveling the only downside is the fuel. It's very expensive to run you could just Drive for maybe Three hours. That's half a tank gone but it is a Good drive and also I Came out here to see this the largest tricycle this country. It's very big It doesn't actually drive, but it looks cool. So let's go on here for a minute. And then I will Continue with the rest of the topic. Here we go This is it. This is not survivor. How about that? Yeah It's not as high up as it looks on camera, but it is pretty big Considering I think tricycles are normally quite small. I just love this little river here you go the palm trees there and The water has like a Deep green color.  I mean it's It can cause you a lot of anxiety a lot of stress I Mean most of us we have enough things to worry about in life already Then I've been to worry about something like that. Oh, yeah, I mean there's a reason why in the UK Stalking is punishable By up to 14 years in prison because people know They understand the effects that this behavior has on people Okay, it's your turn now. I want to hear from you. Let me know about your horrific experiences With stalking Harassment, let me know now down below In the comments on the live chat And I will read it out and respond to it because I know what it's like I have been Stalked myself on many occasions Especially gang-stalking which is another thing that I talk about on here sometimes They may talk about that more in the future. So, yeah, let me know down below Let me know about your personal experiences With the stalking Angie says I have a stalking now I can't figure it out yet, but I'm getting warm. Yes, it will take time to Fully develop an awareness of what is actually going on. I Remember with the gang-stalking in the early days. I was very confused as many of you know, I Considered myself to be an empath So when people were stalking and harassing me I wasn't going around pointing the finger. I'm blaming everyone. I Was looking at myself and thinking What's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? And what can I do to change it? So that people stop stalking and harassing me But of course narcissistic stalkers they will see that and they play on it It becomes a game where they keep making you think all of these things are wrong with you and you have to change it This is what narcissists do to make you feel like you're never good enough Yeah, it will take time to fully understand and develop an awareness of what is actually going on Alexander says flying monkeys Poisoning track and phone Around them fly monkeys for hire. Yeah, that's Often who is stalking you is the narcissist fly monkeys. They will enforce other people to do their bidding And the scary thing is sometimes it could be people who you thought were your friends family members They can get them on their side But that's some real betrayal there and It just makes you feel like you can't trust anyone. So yeah, it's not nice to do that, but That is something they will do Big D business says I deal with obsessed people Who are really nasty daily? I do not get a break from them very often Ah I'm so sorry to hear that big D business I know it feels to go through that well, it's like they demand all of your attention and You have no time to just focus on your own life, which can cause even more stress then Because it begins to affect everything in your life A electromagnetic bliss says they have a coworker stalker Who feels it necessary to try to catch me doing something wrong? They have flying monkeys and the company who also spy Yeah, that's it.  I mean anyone should know that that is wrong But of course they do justify it and that's the same with any abuser really is that they always have an excuse They've always got some reason for why they do what they do Well, that doesn't excuse it. It doesn't matter what the reason is My phone has suddenly gone really dark. So it's hard for me to read these messages now I'm not sure why these iPhones do that. I don't know if anyone else has that issue or is it just mine there's a lot of comments about No friends Can't trust anyone sad, but that's really a Common thing these days that people say is that They have no real friends No one that they can really turn to No one that they can trust It's sad, but I understand I think the reality is that these days a lot of people Are just in it for themselves. We see it all on social media people just Seem to be more focused on Just broadcasting themselves And how great they are How great their lives are? And actually connecting with people We seem to have lost the connection in the world today And I think that's the real problem and now it's all about popularity and relevance and And That alienates a lot of good people Because sometimes a good person who you can trust is not going to be Everything that you want them to be I mean if you're looking for someone to To be there for you to help you They might not always look like James Bond. That's just the reality of it They might not always look like how you want them to look they might not have tons of money They might not be everything that you want them to be and that's that and I'm not saying that for Just the people here, it's just people in general need to understand that This is the idea that people have in their heads You know, they want this perfect person to come and rescue them Or they're looking for a perfect person that they can come and rescue it goes both ways and No one's perfect We have to accept that people do have flaws It's just social media and society has ingrained this thing in our heads Well, you're either this or you're not it's like if one person just does One little thing wrong Then suddenly they're no good People make mistakes If someone makes a mistake that doesn't mean you shouldn't trust them anymore Unless it's like a repeated pattern and you know they're going out of their way to betray you then I can understand Yes, of course Like with what we're talking about here Narcissistic stalkers, I mean it's clear that you should you should definitely not trust them That's the last thing you should do You should be very cautious around them But that doesn't mean that you should stalk them. No, that's definitely not something you should do Trust is a big thing. It can take years to build trust with someone And yet that trust can be broken In an instant it can be gone and then it can be very hard to get that trust back It can take a long time But if you have broken someone's trust and you really care about that person and you want to be there for them Then you will be willing to take things slow. You won't rush it. You will wait until they're ready Just give them time, but at the same time you should observe what they're doing in that time as well To know whether or not you should trust them Don't just listen to a person's words. Watch their actions Their actions will tell you who they are The things they do in their spare time That will tell you who they are The people who they spend time with You have to observe all of these things But yeah, these narcissistic stalkers are out there and they're watching you so Be aware of that and protect yourself Maybe keep your social media accounts private. Be careful when you're accepting any requests be aware But there may be trackers or spyware on your phones and your cars Be aware of that. You never know what they're doing these days. There's so many gadgets Technologies become so advanced now. So you just never know Don't let it make you paranoid Don't over think about it because that will be Even more damaging to you Than the actual Stalking. This is an important thing to remember as well is that Your own thoughts Can end up destroying you If you let it play on your mind, so even if they are stalking you don't let it get to you Don't think too much about it Remember this video is not to provoke fear in anyone This is just to make you more aware You don't want to become hyper aware Because then that will affect you so don't let it get inside your head Don't let it affect you Remember this is their sickness not yours It's meant to affect them and drive them insane make them crazy and obsessed You're not the one who's meant to become obsessed and paranoid So don't let it get in your head. Yes, they may be watching you Yes, they may be following you and that may affect you But don't let it dominate your thoughts to where you are then Affecting yourself more than that affecting you Because for many of them that's their end goal They want to get you to the point where you become your own worst enemy you're affecting yourself More than that affecting you So that they don't even have to do anything anymore They could just watch you destroy yourself That's the ultimate goal for many of them So don't let it get to that point anyway I'm back in the car and I'm gonna start driving again now Onto the next place so Thank you all for joining me 91 live viewers, please give this video a thumbs up if it resonated and I'll catch you again in the next one


Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TFNN. Stuttered for a moment. It's 2 p.m. Eastern time. It's Fed Day. We're getting a decision as we speak. The numbers are going to roll in. I got the chart up here, and you're seeing a little bit of an oscillation in both directions. The market awaits the news, and higher we go for a few minutes, folks. We've got the S&Ps up by two points right now off of that number. S&Ps right now trading at $45.86. That's down by 10 points on the session. We get the NASDAQ 100 off by 97 points. You get the Dow right now flat and the Russell positive by 7. You're going to see some volatility, man. It's going to be coming. Some of the quotes already hitting the newswire, we'll call it. So they hike by 25 basis points. Some of the quotes there, the FOMC will continue to assess additional information. Shouldn't be a surprise, right? What have you been saying on my program in the morning? We get two FOMC's data before the September meeting. No matter what gets said here, and boy, the market seems to always take away, whether it's a hawk or not or a dove, we get two FOMC's of data that's coming down before the September meeting, two FOMC's of retail sales, two FOMC's of inflation data in there. Yeah, they will continue to assess additional information market right now. I'm not sure what to do, man. Market basically flat off of that news number with the S&P's trading flat right now. You take a look at notes and bonds. We take a look at yields. You got the tenure right back to where we were. These are one minute bars that we're looking at to try and see the volatility as we're getting into it. Yeah, 111.25 with the tenure markets basically flat. Takes it in stride, man. The Fed pauses. They're going to continue to assess the information as it comes in. You have a target rate right now of five and a quarter to 5.5%. And the market catches a slight bid now. Boy, it's going to be interesting, man. I'm going to be coming back here for the first half hour. Okay, I'll do a couple segments. We'll break down some of the moves as we get the market action on the heels of this Fed interest rate hike. Five and a quarter to 5.5%, man. Quite a risk-free rate of return on a short-term basis. We jump over to the two year right now. ZT is that symbol. A little bit of higher price lower yield on the two year, actually. Markets digesting the news. And then we're going to have Chairman Powell's press conference live on Tiger TV coming up in a half hour at 2.30. So stay tuned, folks. I'm coming back live right now. We'll have Chairman Powell live at 2.30. We got my dad, Tom O'Brien coming up live at three o'clock. It's Fed Day. We got a hike. It's expected. Chairman Powell coming up. I'll be right back, folks. Stay tuned. The reality is that navigating financial markets can be risky. Markets can be chaotic and difficult to understand.


It's so hard to even feign excitement at this point to get through an intro, but I'll try Netflix's back with another exclusive film that definitely is gonna be great I have no reason to doubt anything they put out on that platform. It's just stellar all around Kevin Hart's in this one. It's called lift a generic title fit for a king and it really is perfect because this movie is about as generic as you could possibly get across the board with actors Who put a little effort in a script that doesn't even bother to make sense and one viewer who miserably wasted his Sunday afternoon watching it Let's get into lift This is a bad movie just getting that out there right away, but I do want to give some Recommendations if you like heist films. I'm a big fan of the genre myself I would recommend inception if you want to see a heist of the mind I'd recommend the old-school Oceans 11 with George Clooney not so much Oceans 12 That movie's trash Oceans 13. I think kind of pulls things back But at that point I was already gone from the franchise Inside Man is a solid flick. I'm a huge fan of snatch with Brad Pitt directed by Guy Ritchie Great quirky comedy heist film and of course we got heat bank robbery heist classic heat is Phenomenal, but we're here today. We're talking about lift I'd rather watch Oceans 8 it is managing to get the job done Whereas lift only manages to get another exclusive offer Netflix so they can say hey look We got a funny man Kevin Hart not being funny in this movie He's supposed to be the straight man of the picture. That's different. We have Sam Worthington in this For a little bit Sam Worthington anybody show of hands who knows who that is He's only the lead star of two Avatar movies and yet no one really knows the guy. It's incredible Vincent D'Onofrio doing anything for you. He's in the movie for a little bit I'm not really sure what the point of his character is He seems to be kind of underutilized, but that kind of goes with all the cast see lift is one of those flicks where everybody's a Specialist at something you have a safe cracker. You got the getaway driver. You have The guy that puts on disguises occasionally. That's D'Onofrio's character But those people are all very one-dimensional kind of throw away extras This is really about Kevin Hart's character Cyrus and his girlfriend Abby. Well, they only had a five-day fling a Short weekend fling.  He's a thief and he's one of the best in the business He and his team steal art across the globe and they pump up the value and then sell it back for a hefty sum And when this movie starts out with this is gonna be spoiler-free and not because I'm worried about spoiling the movie But I legitimately can't remember anything about it and I just finished watching the thing It is so nonsensical and all over the place I really couldn't make heads or tails of what was going on in the plot Which is a testament to a really solid script and the fact that I'm kind of an idiot But it's mostly the scripts fault here We get to know their skill set at their first little gig when the movie fires up It's at an auction they're selling off different arts the artists are actually there one of which is a prominent artist Who is releasing an NFT that you can like go inside of or something and look at for 30 seconds and they capture your image It was all kind of convoluted to be honest and seemed unnecessarily complicated He's there wearing a mask because he's artsy and eccentric and whatever and the bidding starts and it's all kind of a ruse This movie did come out like two months ago And even then I feel like it was dated by about a year or two on the NFT side of things is that even are those even a thing still? I don't hear anybody talk about them, but that might be a rich person situation I have no nothing about anyway It kind of sets the table for what's to come as we find out how Cyrus and his crew work how things are a little bit More complicated than stealing an NFT They want to do more with it get more bang for their buck sort of thing and so yeah You know, it's your traditional by the numbers sort of situation. You see the team in action They're then proposed with some other conflicts that they have to overcome They have one big final mission they have to do to get out in this case Cyrus's ex-girlfriend Abby's back in the picture and she says hey Interpol needs you guys to do this mission for us where you're gonna have to hijack ten tons of gold from a bad guy Who's transferring it via plane over to his estate?  Of course the team is gonna be like hey. No. No.   I will just say from this point forward I didn't know what the hell was happening.   It looks like a video game. I Looked back at Harrison Ford in Air Force one obviously a dated film and even that final scene Where Air Force one smashes into the ocean? It looks so bad. It looks bad then But the rest of the movie is just you know an action film on a plane. It's visceral It's real looking it's by the numbers sure But it at least has some stakes to it and it has some things have some realness Nothing feels real in this movie in the slightest even when they're on the plane The thing is so wide it felt like they're just on a soundstage in a single room And when they showed the outside of the plane, I thought I was playing Grand Theft Auto 5 I just or a plane simulator not a very good one It just looked terrible if I were to compare this to another movie in the same ilk I would say it's close to now you see me if you like now you see me This might be up your alley I think that movie is dumb as shit and it goes way off the rails in the second half But I can at least look at now you see me and say alright. I get why people would like this. It's combining magic It's combining action and suspense and the heist angle that it's got a little thing going for it Lift has nothing going for it It's just generic across the board and thinking Kevin Hart could be the straight man in this was just nonsense He's he's great as like a side character a supporting funny guy But putting him in a role that someone like George Clooney really is good at as like the oceans 11 guy The you know the real expert dude who's pulling up the cufflings and really getting his hands dirty. No That's not the role for Kevin Hart. I would talk about the other supporting actors But they just don't really have anything going on. There is the safecracker guy. That's supposed to be the wild card He's like the he's like the fun guy. Yeah, let's do it. Let's go on come on But that's about it. He's just a glorified cheerleader at the end of the day.  They're they're on top of each other They're spinning and flipping around. There's digital messages on the bottoms of them It's just asinine and completely ridiculous what this movie is to me is like a lot of other movies released on Netflix these days an hour and 45-minute flick that you put on in the background while you're doing the dishes or while you're sitting on your phone You go to the bathroom and you might even forget that the movies on that's how completely generic it is I don't think that this is meant to be taken seriously as a real movie like a lot of the films that come out by this Studio nowadays. I think it's just product for their platform and because a lot of general audiences now don't watch films like they used to It's almost unfair for me to even review this from the standpoint of a guy that just likes watching films because I'm sitting there like Tossing and turning and going oh my god. This movie is not good.  It's just it's kind of unfair to myself and so when I think about who is watching Lyft Why is it recommended on Netflix and says there's 3.8 million people watching it this week? I have to imagine it's the grandma who just says oh, I like Kevin Hart Let's put this on while I do my puzzle and it's just in the background and that wasn't bad I couldn't tell you anything about the movie But there it is or the mom who's got four kids running it out of the door So she just puts it on in the background while she is putting groceries away and dealing with Tommy's scraped knee or some stupid Crap or the dad who works from home on his computer and he's like yeah, let's just throw this on looks like a fun time And he's not really watching it's just there. This is the kind of movie for them It's not the kind of movie for probably you or I who's actually interested in sitting down and watching a story and watching actors Interact with each other and watching some high octane action and some fun mystery and intrigue. No, it's just by the books crap Oh, there's little reveals thrown out and even if you think about it for half a second They don't make sense and no oceans 11 and some of those other movies you can break them down and tear them apart too The difference is they feel like real movies with real characters and Interactions and quippy lines of dialogue and fun scenarios. This is like the the Walmart version of that It's not real.  All right, there you have it My thoughts on this movie. Let me know leave a comment below if you liked it or hated it or thought Yeah, Netflix. No, thanks. I'm out. Please like the video subscribe if you haven't there's a super Thanks icon down below the video where you can say had I love the review Here's a couple bucks keep doing what you're doing Patreon YouTube join memberships. They're all here. They're all available and just make sure to subscribe and hit that notification Bell and I'll be on my merry way. All right.  Take care


Hey guys, Realistic Gaming here and today we're going to be playing Luigi's match in 3. I'm pretty excited to play this because I haven't played this in like since the GameCube days which is a long time ago so let's begin with this gameplay and see how this goes. What do we have here? There's an RV pulling up. Oh it's Toad. There's a lot of Toads in the RV. Oh we got Mario and the Princess. Uh oh. It's a bit of a bumpy road as we can see. Oh nice he dropped the ball. Oh there's Luigi. He woke him up. Oh and there's a doggy. Okay he has a note. I can't read scribbles. This doctor might have wrote him that note huh? It's a nice dog. Oh it seems like we have arrived at the mansion. Here we go. Poor Toads are carrying more luggage than they would they can handle. He's pretty strong. And there's Luigi. He sounds funny. That is one nice looking building. All right so we have arrived to the mansion and let's see what awaits us. Dude this place is humongous. Well so it seems like they were waiting for us already. Oh and we started already okay so let's walk up to the counter. Why does he walk so slow? Okay press X. So we talk to this guy. Welcome guests to the last resort. Are you ready to check in? Um yes. And who is this? Guests welcome to the last resort. My name is Helen Gravely and I am the owner of this hotel.  Well thank you for having us in your wonderful hotel. You almost be very tired. Come on and allow me to show you to your rooms. Oh don't need to worry about your luggage. Our exceptional staff will take care of it for you. Okay so she talks weird. She doesn't even speak English. You're our VIPs after all. We've prepared a first-rate experience for you. All the trappings of luxury. Shall we get going? All right well let's go. Let's see what she has prepared for us here. Look how Mario always says like his lines. Let's go. Oh my god how many floors are here. Okay enough we go to the fifth floor. Mario Luigi and Peach Rooms are over here. We prepared rooms for you Toads as well. I hope you enjoy your stay. I dare say you'll remember it for the rest of your lives. Oh my god okay that's a little skeptical of what she just said but let's just continue on. Okay so we're going into our rooms. Okay nice. Some nice looking room in here. There's a basket of fruit over here. There's roses everywhere. Oh what? That thing just came out of nowhere. They're gonna shake my hand or something. Okay let's check the wardrobe. Oh my god. Okay so there's like these trap springs everywhere. All right let's go grab our luggage. Time to rest. Yeah let's get a little rest. I wonder what he has in there. The flashlight. Okay so it seems like Luigi's getting ready to take a nap. What is that? A diary or a book? Dude he just fell asleep. He opened the book and fell asleep. Oh man. All right so that's that. It's almost for Luigi reading. He didn't even read the book. He just touched it and fell asleep. Uh oh. Seems like Peach is in trouble. He's all shaken, scared. Oh this is where the fun begins huh? Oh look there's like a scary crow out there. I wonder if those things still pop out. Oh and they're like scary now. Okay let's see what this turned into.  My god for Luigi he must be terrified. Let's go check on Peach. Oh this is a restroom. There's a giant rat hole in there. Okay what is that? Bones? Okay I guess there's nothing in here for us. Can we move the curtain? Okay we can open this. What about the toilet? Dude oh my god. All right let's get out of here Luigi. Before you have a heart attack man. Okay so how do you get out? All right there's the door. That's a little tricky. What is that? It's like an aura or something. Oh that was like the darkness overtaking the hotel. All right so we heard Peach scream. Here's her luggage. Dude how many bags does she need? My god. All right let's check the mirror. Nothing here. Let's keep going down the hallway.  What about Mario? Let's see if Mario's in the room. Oh my god what happened in here? Okay so it seems like Mario. Is he stuck in here? There's pizza on the floor. Dude this whole room is trashed. All right here's something going on over here. The window's open. Okay just a gust of wind. All right let's check the wardrobe. Nothing scary? Okay nothing scary. Okay so it seems like everybody's in trouble. We have to get to the bottom of this. It's okay Luigi I'm a little terrified for you man. Okay let's get around this. No we can't get around this. Can you jump? All right there you go. Whose room will this be? Okay this is Peach's room. Is she in the restroom? Can we move this? Okay we can't. My god there's a lot of them in there. Poor Luigi. All right so there's nobody in the rooms. Where did everybody else go? Seems like somebody's operating the elevator. Oh it's the owner. Wait she's like a ghost form isn't she? Well well well if it isn't my most esteemed VIP. I was just on my way to see you. Is your room living up to your expectations? Does it scream good taste? Screams a little more than good taste man. Oh I can barely contain myself. You have no idea how much I wanted you to set my invitation. Why is that? I'm sure that you're wondering.  There is someone I truly adore. He's the inspiration for some of my greatest ideas. Like inviting you here. I'm such a huge fan of this. That is why it's so wonderful that I get to introduce him to you. You that is right Luigi. I hope you're ready. Okay what is she talking about? Oh no it's King Boo. Wow what a surprise Luigi. It's a me King Boo. That old coot had me locked up tied in his lab. But guess what? I got out. The hotel owner here was just dying to meet me. So she busted me out pretty lucky huh? Anyway I didn't think that you'd actually show up here. I was ready though just in case. In fact my vengeance is nearly complete. Oh no. Okay what do I mean by vengeance? Glad you asked. I'm trapping you and everyone in your little vacation party in frames. Oh there. There Luigi. It'll all be over soon. It's time for a family reunion boob-yah. Oh god so this guy is the madman. What is ghost? King Boo. He trapped everybody else already. Okay this isn't good guys. Oh and there's one more frame of course. I saved it especially for you. Stay right there and put on your best terrifying face Luigi. This game is over. Oh no run Luigi. Why isn't he moving? All right there you go. Oh god now we're being chased. Okay run run. Oh my god. He's knocking everything over. Okay we cannot afford to stop because he will catch us. Better jump in there Luigi before it's too late. Oh down the hatch we go. Oh what? That was just the intro. That was pretty cool. Luigi's Mansion 3. Oh and there's the true south of the hotel. Okay so the hotel was just like it was like covered by like this magic that made it seem like it was an actual nice hotel. But in reality it's a haunted hotel. Pretty crazy. Oh the dog. Okay so it seems like we're in the storage room or something. All right I see some things shining over here. Can we grab them? How do you grab those? I guess you can't. Oh some coins. Oh rubber ducky. Oh it's just some towels Luigi. Wait how do you prone? There's some coins down there. I don't know let's keep going. Dude you are not going to find Mario anytime soon Luigi. Oh there's something in here. Oh all right he just goes through the walls. He's digging through the trash. Oh look there's like a scary figure right there in that frame. All right let's keep going this way. This is a note. I don't think we can get that. Okay we got some bar. Can we open this no? Okay sweet. Okay so I think we have to get this open so we can go in there. Okay let's go back down this way. See a button here. Oh great that thing is busted. Okay what do we do now Mr. Luigi? Let's go on this side. Those are some giant rats. Oh look there's a car. Can we use this thing? All right so there's nothing over here. Why does the car keep moving? Oh god. He was hiding in the engine. Sweet. Now that's what we're talking about Luigi. Now he's happy. Hey Luigi got some moves. Okay you hold it. Then you let it go. Oh all right so you like charge it up. All right we're getting the hang of this. Okay so that pushes them. Oh my god all right. Comfortable with what you learned. Um yes you just flew up. All right so let's go back this way. Maybe we can go towards that gate now. Okay let's go in here. Okay there's a door. Oh let's get those coins up there. Why is that shaky? Okay and here's the oh okay so we hit the switch with the light blast. Okay the door's opening. I wonder what's behind this thing. Let's go check it out. Oh what's this? Oh just a lot of coins. It's like a vending machine. All right so do we go up or do we go down? Okay enough we go. Oh let's get this right here. It feels like we can't grab it. All right whatever let's keep moving. Can we actually call the elevator? I don't know we should go in there. Might be a little risky. Oh no. Okay so there's Mario Toad, Peach and Luigi. They're all crossed out. Uh oh. Oh there's ghosts? Dude they're like blocking us in here. They're boarding out the door. The dog's scratching his butt. They scared him away. Oh for Luigi Run. Uh oh. What? They trapped us here. Where did we see the light beam at him? Oh he's just frozen out.  See how he likes this. No don't run in the way. Uh oh where'd he go? No. Oh all right does his dog do anything? Oh he holds him. All right doggies do something. Okay so he sort of helps us out. It's pretty neat. No we let him go too soon. Come on help me out doggie. No. All right we gotta spam A. Oh my god we're like we're slaughtering this ghost. There's another one. Uh oh this can't be good. He just called for reinforcements. Oh great so now there's multiple of them. Come on charge it Luigi. Okay we got this one here. Now we gotta pull away. We gotta pull them back. Oh we're actually getting both of them. Oh nice we defeated them. Okay that wasn't too bad. All right nice job Luigi. We have defeated our first ghost enemies. Oh the phone's ringing. Should we answer this? What they're just laughing at us. Okay oh look you can use a pumpkin. How do you shoot this?  So we can shoot pumpkins that's pretty cool. All right let's have our pumpkin gun loaded. Wait we have to hit the switch with liping with that right? Where are you going buddy? All right let's see if we can aim for that thing right there. I don't think we can. It's too high up. There's a key back there. Okay let's go towards the big giant door. Oh the key's down there. How do we get it? Okay so it seems like we have to get the key behind here. Oh can we just go in here? No we can't. All right that'll work. How can we grab it? Come on it's like dangling. We almost got it here. Okay we can't seem to get it unhooked. All right let's hit the switch first. Maybe this will help us out. Or not. We'll just find more stuff. That is a lot of money. All right see X here. Okay but the big question is how do we get that key? Oh we can just grab it.  I mean hopefully this is the key right. It has to be. Okay let's see what's behind giant door number one. Oh god. All right let's see what this picture is all about. It seems like he got trapped in there huh? Okay I guess we'll just follow you. Great now we need to find another key. It's like a dressing room or something. Oh there's a switch or a vault. What? There's a switch right there. Is it right behind this? Just so we can't see it. Okay there you go. It turned off for some reason. Okay and the key was behind there. Okay let's take this. All right now we can go open that door that was locked. Oh no there's a ghost. Dude he's putting up wallet poster signs for us. Oh no run Luigi. Oh great now we have to fight these dudes. No wrong way Luigi turn around. Okay we can't let them run we got both of them. Wow okay seems like we're getting the hang of this pretty good. All right let's take all the money we can gather. Okay let's go in this room before we hit on. Oh no it's blocked. All right so let's go to that door that we saw earlier. Let's take down those posters man so they won't know who Luigi is. Oh I look okay. Well there's like a chest back there. Okay we can't move all these things out of the way. All right whatever let's continue. He frightened Luigi. All right let's see what's inside of this safe. It's like some sort of glowing object. Oh it's like an enhancer for the light. What it's like a magical light. Oh it brings like the pictures to life or something. Oh sorry all right dude that is crazy. So it takes whatever's in the image and it brings it to life. Why is there a golden spider back there? Is he in the van? Sorry he's like above us. I don't know but we just got that thing. Okay so let's get out of here. Okay maybe we're gonna get this guy out of the frame. Okay so we just rescued this guy which was trapped inside of that frame. All right so he knows who we are. Okay hold that thought. Now isn't it the time to catch up what matters is you'll do nicely. Come on Luigi get me out of here now. I wonder how long he's been trapped in here. This hotel is filled with a brim with. This hotel is filled to the brim with ghosts. Let's make a run for it. Well was that all of your friends have been captured? And you just kind of abandon them here you say. They're the same as ever I see a bit of a handful. Well I mean they are his friends he just doesn't want to leave him behind. Okay but I have Professor Alvin Gad have an idea. First things first Luigi we have to get to my car. Luigi take me there. Wait can we even get out of this place? Okay so we have the Poltergust G. Oh okay so his car was where we found it. All right so now we got to take this guy back to his car. Take a look over there. All right let's make a run for the elevator before the ghosts get us. I like the way they both run terrified. Wait do I have to shoot this? Why isn't the elevator working? I'm sorry for the atmosphere you got. Now let's press the button that's why it wasn't working. All right let's hop in here and hopefully it takes us straight to the garage. Down to the garage. Of all the someone has removed all the other buttons. What is going on? A mystery for later I suppose. Go ahead and give that B when it push. Okay let's see if it takes us straight to the garage. It didn't seem like any of your friends were trapped on the second floor. They must have been taken to one of the floors higher up in the hotel which means yeah we're gonna need some elevators buttons. Okay great so now we need to find the elevator buttons which we're stolen or ripped out of the elevator. Okay so we're back down here. Where is his garage? I mean his car. He believed us back this way. Oh poor Luigi. All right um I believe the garage is in here. Okay nice. Uh oh there's a ghost butler. Dude he just left us. Oh what is going up? Oh he's throwing luggage at us. Come on Luigi we can fight this guy. No okay let's trap him. Nope you're not getting away from me buddy. Oh great there's more than one. Oh it's still the same one. No not the luggage. All right can you stop moving so I can hit you with the beam of light? Oh he blocks it with the luggage.  Oh he hit me with the luggage too. All right now you're not getting away this time. Okay we can't let this guy throw more luggage back at us. Where is he at? He's hiding. Oh there he is. He's trying to get close so he can hit me with that. All right nice you missed. Now he's running all right we got him. Oh what's going on? Oh what are those? What are those glowing things? All right let's go see what these are. Oh the buttons. The elevator. Okay so we found the first and fifth floor. Oh those are definitely the elevator buttons. I would have never guessed the ghosts would have taken them. I mean they're the only ones here besides us. But they're only two. Maybe are the other ghosts out there with the rest of the buttons? No matter let's go to my car. I've got something very interesting that I want to show you. Okay so I've at least seen the elevator have like many buttons and we only have two. So we have a long way to go. All right let's see what he has in his car that we missed here. Oh what is that? He definitely does not want us to touch it. Nothing is definitely doing something. Stay back Luigi. Oh it's like a portable house or something. Luigi's in shock. He's all surprised. You can't believe what he just saw before his eyes. So it's like a portable lab. That's pretty cool. All right you guys well this was part one two Luigi's mansion three and make sure to tune in for part two.