Coming up on DTNS, why Amazon suspended its contract with Parler, Panasonic's heads up display for your car that seems actually useful, and Richard Gunther brings the smarts on smart hopes. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 13, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Ling. Frogpants Central. I'm in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And as I mentioned, Richard Gunther from the Digital Media Zone joining us. Richard, good to have you, man. Good to be here. And I am calling in from the Outer Banks, North Carolina this week. Wow, look at that. So we're spanning the continent while all of us are at CES, technically. Sure, as we've been saying all week, the real CES inside of us. Yeah, we were just talking about home improvement and strategies for dealing with garbage disposals, get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Intel announced that CEO Bob Swan will step down effective February 15th after two years on the job. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware and former Intel CTO will take over as CEO of Intel. Intel executive chairman Omar Ishrock said that Gelsinger will lead Intel's transformation from being a CPU company to a company that makes multiple kinds of architectures. Bob Swan was previously CFO of Intel and his expertise lied in finance, not engineering. In December, Dan Loeb's third point hedge fund had encouraged Intel's board to explore alternatives. Please send us screen captures of every story that titles this Swan song. YouTube removed a video from the president's campaign YouTube channel for violating policies it did not name. The channel will be prevented from uploading new comments or uploading new videos for a minimum of seven days, which would end January 19th. Comments on all videos on the channel have been turned off indefinitely. AMD will begin selling threadripper pro CPUs directly to consumers starting in March. Previously, they were only available in machines like the think station. The pro line of threadripper doubles memory channels to eight doubles PCIe lanes to 128 and increases memory capacity from 156 gigabytes to two terabytes, beneficial for users that work with large data sets or need multiple graphics or networking cards. An on tech reports, three motherboards will be coming that support threadripper pro. That's good news for builders. In a presentation at CES, Samsung LSI, President NGM, Dr. Inyup Kong announced we are working together with AMD and we'll have a next generation mobile GPU in the next flagship product. Now, Samsung LSI makes the Exynos chip and Exynos was just announced. So when he says next generation mobile in the next flagship product, that probably means the Exynos that will come out next year. But we'll keep an eye on that. TikTok has made accounts for register users between the ages of 13 and 15 private by default. This limits viewing and commenting on content on content with approved followers and turns off the suggest your account to others option. Downloads of content will also be disabled entirely for these groups with downloads set to off for 16 to 17 year old users. Although those users can change that setting if they so desire. 13 through 15 can't. TikTok's video collaboration feature duets and remixing feature stitch will also be limited to users 16 and up and set to friends only as default. MSI announced a line of portable gaming laptops using the Nvidia RTX 30 series GPUs we talked about yesterday. Thanks to the new chips, the MSGS 6 6 will be able to run games in 4K. The GS 6 6 Stealth is up for pre-order now, shipping February 2nd, starting in the thousand seven hundred ninety nine dollars. MSI also added new thinner models to its mid range GP leopard line. That's coming February 5th. And if you like thin, the Stealth 15 M is 16 millimetres thick. Don't cut your finger on it. MSI says make it. It makes it the thinnest gaming laptop yet. 15 M also is using the Intel 11th gen H series along with the Nvidia chips shipping March 8th, starting at a thousand three hundred ninety nine dollars. Amazon announced it will launch a mobile only prime video subscription in India for eighty nine rupees per month. The company is launching the plan in partnership with mobile carrier bought Barty Airtel initially available only to prepaid customers with customers getting an additional six gigabytes of data as part of the subscription. You might say, well, that's not very much. But there are some limitations. Amazon is expected to offer the subscriptions with other mobile carriers soon. But for now, it will be limited to one stream at a time and delivered in standard death. This is Amazon's first standalone video subscription offering, but it's not the first. Netflix has offered a mobile only subscription in India since July of twenty nineteen. AMD told the verge it will feel more of its reference design. RX 6,800, 6,800 XT and RX 6,900 XT cards directly from its own website at sticker price to as many gamers as possible. So they're going to they're going to sell them directly. Nvidia announced its GPU supplies will remain lean through Q one, which for Nvidia ends in late April. And video says demand for the RTX 30 series is twice what it was for the RTX 20 series. And that's the problem. And video says if it notices crypto miners' demand affecting orders, it will reintroduce the CMP product that is tailored for mining uses. But it doesn't believe that segment is affecting the supplies right now. Meanwhile, US tariffs on Chinese goods are kicking in raising prices on what little cards are available in the US. EVGA, Zotac and ASUS have all raised raised their prices. Speaking of ASUS, the company announced the Chromebook CX9 that runs on Intel's eleventh gen Core i7 supports Wi-Fi 6, Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI Titan C security and meets the MIL STD 810 H US military standard for durability. No price, but it is coming to North America in Q2 of this year. New versions of the ASUS Zenbook Duo 14 and Pro Duo 15 OLED. Now angle the second screen up to be easier to use, see better. Software updates will also let you flick apps between the two screens and create specialized patterns of shortcuts, pallets even. The Zenbook Duo 14 ships this month and the Duo 15 OLED ships in April. ASUS also announced more monitors with HDMI 2.1 supports. And ASUS also announced the Zenbeam Latte projector. You might say, what is it called that? The fabric covered TV projector is the size of a large cup of coffee. That's the projector itself. It actually projects way bigger. It's meant to be moved from room to room and can project from 40 to 120 inches with 300 LED lumens of brightness coming in North America and Q2, although no price. Yeah, we should clarify, too. You can project more than just pictures of lattes. Can project any right or just very large ones. Yes, yeah, up to a very, you know, 65 inches. It's just a lot of coffee. All right, I'm just putting off talking about Amazon's response to parlor. Amazon filed a response to parlor's lawsuit alleging antitrust and breach of contract, saying it reported to parlor over many weeks, more than 100 examples of content that encouraged violence. The filing quoted 15 examples of such posts. So a lot of folks have been saying, OK, Amazon says they violated the terms. What's the evidence that they did? Amazon is now filing that evidence as part of the lawsuit. I want to warn you that you may not like hearing some of these examples. And I'm not going to read all of them, but I think it's important to hear some of those examples if you're not going to go look them up yourself.  We are going to fight a civil war on January 20th. Four militias now in acquired targets on January 20th. We need to start systematically assassinating liberal leaders, shoot the police that protect these senators right in the head after the firing squads are done with politicians. The teachers are next. Those are the kinds of posts that Amazon was objecting to that they say parlor did not take down. There were others that were targeting Jewish and black people using racial epithets that I won't repeat here. Amazon clarified in its filing that it has suspended service, not terminated it and is open to restoring service to parlor if the company's moderation policies come into compliance with AWS terms of service. We talk about it because I think it's important to know. And I was wondering, OK, how bad was it? What were they actually objecting to? And this gives us a representative sample of what they say they were objecting to. Yeah, just the only thing I would say about this is them showing examples and saying how long it took. And here are examples of what we said they didn't take down. And and that sort of thing is really, I think, healthy for what is otherwise a very free market move on the part of Amazon or anyone else deciding to do this. And I think it strikes me as extremely reasonable and totally the way this stuff should go. So maybe you don't have hideous, horrible stuff on your site or your app, and maybe you won't get pulled from places like Amazon. To me, it's like simple math, like two plus two here. And I like that they are being, you know, somewhat transparent about their reasons for reacting the way they did. That's important to me anyway. Yeah, I think I think it's it's something that I don't want to pass off. That it is it is a big deal to tell a company we're no longer going to support you. And so I'm glad that Amazon has given me or given the courts. But by giving the courts that now I get to see a little bit more of why they decided to take this this move. Well, let me tell you about a couple of doorbell announcements. You got people at your door. Good news, everyone. A couple of doorbell announcements to mention ring announced its doorbells and security cameras will start rolling out end to end encryption to users in an opt in basis today as of today. That's right. Ring videos are already encrypted. But the addition of end to end means only the customer can view them. Not ring. That's a huge change. Arlo announced its own version of touchless doorbell similar to the one you guys mentioned earlier in the week from alarm.com. Arlo's version doesn't use a welcome mat, though. Instead, the doorbell just detects when a person is close to the doorbell and rings a chime and shines a light. So the person at your door knows the doorbell has already been rung. Verges, Sean Hollister, asked the question of whether existing doorbells that already have cameras and speakers should get a software upgrade to do similar things. I don't know if I want a door. I love the idea of contactless ringing, but I don't want a door just saying, hey, we think you're there, Bing Bong. I don't know. Yeah, Tom was saying the same thing earlier. Is that the dog is going to be barking? It's a whole thing. I at the same time, there are so many security gadgets that, you know, act as a camera or, you know, just, you know, just let let let you know if someone's prowling around on your front stoop type thing that can kind of work the same way. Yeah, I don't want my doorbell to ring any time. I don't know, raccoon come sniffing around. But I might want a notification on my phone. That's a little bit less intrusive, where it's kind of the same thing.  There are kind of other ways to do that already. So this seems a little bit like clever doorbell marketing, but it will work in certain scenarios. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, you talk about this being possible today and Hollister asking the question, why couldn't this just be a firmware update? Many of the products, rings products in particular, can already do this. Rings products can detect whether it's a person or whether it's not a person. And if it's a person, it can send you a notification that there's somebody there just enough to let you know that there's somebody at the door without them even ringing it. Now, it doesn't necessarily give them any indication that the doorbell has been triggered, but I'm not convinced that these mechanisms these companies are trying are going to effectively communicate that to people anyway. This is a new interaction model and it may confuse a lot of people. So I like the idea of just using your devices with the notifications that you want. I'm not convinced is going to stop anybody from sticking their finger out and pushing that doorbell anyway.  And I don't want that to ring the doorbell. Maybe it'll be better than that. But if this is a use case, we're like, no, I'd be fine with that. If anyone gets close, close enough to my door to set off the motion sensor, I would like it to ring and that's fine. Then, yeah, I don't know why you wouldn't do it as a firmware upgrade and make it optional. Don't don't push it on on anybody. That's just a couple of the things we're seeing. Richard, what are some other home automation products that you noticed during the CES announcements? Yeah, at CES, I think we're seeing something that is a pretty common theme that a lot of people expected, that this year is going to be another year of evolution in the smart home. Last year was thrown a little bit of a curveball because of COVID. And so you saw things where like cameras didn't sell as well, but home devices did things for entertainment and exercise and stuff like that. So I think this year between the changes of life at home and things we're seeing happening in the market like standardization around this project chip connected home over IP, which is all the big players like Apple and Google and Microsoft and everybody deciding that they're going to play together and figure out how to make this stuff work together. Companies are trying to figure out how to support that. But at the same time, then they don't want to be commoditized. So they're trying to figure out how to differentiate. So you see companies like Sync, formerly known as C by GE, adding things like cameras and fan controls, trying to be your ecosystem. Go to their app, even though it will all work together. So a lot of consolidation. And that's true even in the just in terms of mergers and acquisitions. Just in the last two weeks, we already saw the announcement of Webber acquiring the company that makes June Oven. Interesting, because I have a June Oven shipping any day now. So I'm curious to see how much that gets supported going forward. Allegiant just announced that they're buying the IRG services company, You Know Me. So a lot of changes this year as the industry kind of gets itself together and in prep for a more standardized ecosystem. What about other other devices in the home? I mean, we talked about doorbells, but we've seen a couple of the colder things this week.  Exactly. Touchless everything. Right. You don't have to touch anything anymore. So Polar has things like bathroom fixtures that you don't have to touch to flush your toilet or to turn on the spigot. Supposedly they work better than the fixtures that you find at your nearby airport that none of us miss right now. The ability to turn your shower on without touching it. I'm not quite sure what benefit that has, because you probably know the people that are showering in the same space that you're using. But whatever these types of things are making more appearances around the home. LG has put out a prototype for a refrigerator that will open by voice command. So you don't have to touch the door. That's actually kind of handy, because I don't know how many times I've had to touch the handle of the door with meat hands. You don't want to do that. That's just nasty. So we are seeing changes like that. And I think in terms of stuff for the home, we're going to see the introduction of more products that make life around home easier since you're spending more time there. Robotic vacuums, a lot of interesting innovations there this year. New entertainment devices, things that are just going to make your time at home more interesting and appliances that can make day to day activities a little bit easier. Of course, my favorite of all of these way out of touch for now. But in the future someday that that Samsung robot handy that's going to load my dishwasher properly for me. I'm all about that. Yeah. There were a lot more robots. There's always robots as he is. But I felt like there were a lot more this year. None of them seem like the ones that's really going to become a mass hit. But there's more shots being taken, if you absolutely. I will say, Richard, as for that touchless turn on the shower thing. My shower, because there's it's a it's a it can be docked, but it can also be handheld, you know, when the water comes out. It's sometimes just for reasons unknown to me will kind of move since the last time I was in there. And I can't tell you how many times I turn on the shower and I'm blasted. Now, if the shower door had been closed and I was able to just be like turn on the shower at however many degrees, it would save me a fright, you know, 50 percent of the time in the morning. So it might be a specific use case, but one of those things. I like the idea. I just don't know how much that's going to cost. Well, exactly, which is why I'm not buying one. Moving on, Airbnb has canceled all reservations and is blocking the ability to make new reservations for the Washington, D.C. area next week during the U.S. presidential inauguration. The supplies to reservations made through Airbnb's hotel tonight. Website as well, Airbnb Ode's Hotel Tonight. Guests will receive full refunds and Airbnb hosts will also receive the money that they would have received if the reservations had not been canceled. So nobody really loses here. It's just that the stay can't happen. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had made a joint statement encouraging people not to travel to Washington, D.C. next week at all. So it's a move by the company that at first I as an Airbnb host who's had some challenges, all COVID related over the last almost year now.  Because they're encouraging people not to travel. But there's also airline tickets or all sorts of other means to perhaps go a long way to get there. And Airbnb is not going to cover any of that stuff. And the host getting the money is also that's new because even for COVID reasons, there have been many situations where in California, where I live and the specific county where I live and I'm a property manager inside, there were certain situations where they're like, well, the people can't travel because we don't want anybody to travel to the area and get sick or infect others. But you as a host don't get anything back. You just kind of have to deal with the to the repercussions. I assume that Airbnb is willing to eat this money because we're talking about a short amount of time, you know, a week, right? A week plus rather than, you know, a year plus. Also, it's voluntary with what Airbnb can say with Sonoma County is not our fault.  Whereas here, they're saying it's an encouragement. It's not a it's not a legal thing. You're not it's not illegal to travel to Washington, DC. So we're just going to try to be we're making a decision to do this. And and and because we're making the decision that we wouldn't have to will give you that will make you whole and let you keep that money. That that makes sense to me. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see what the hotels do here. Right. We don't know what Marriott, Hilton, IGH and the other major chains are going to do next week.  So this would be a big loss for any chain that kind of put that flag in the ground. Yeah, an announcement from from Marriott about funding and stuff, but they haven't said anything about, you know, actual day to day operations and changing during an event like this. And so you're right. That's like a really thin line for them to walk and, you know, I guess they still have time to say, Hey, we're shutting down these three hotels in the downtown DC area or whatever there, you know, whatever is possible, they could still do that. But I have a feeling probably not. I think Airbnb is in a unique a more unique position for this because that business model is just a little different. And isn't the same as a day to day sort of multi-story hotel type situation with a restaurant in the basement. Yep. So yeah. Well, and the hotels have already been on low capacity because of COVID anyway. So, you know, it's it's hard. Security in place, not at every hotel, but at major hotels, that that sort of thing is part of the deal. You know, when you're checking into somebody's house and you're finding a key in a lock box somewhere and you don't really know where you are. And and it's it's a little bit different. I think Airbnb is doing the right thing here. But in my experience with the company, sometimes these things are not as seamless as as they seem. Well, and I wonder, because of what you said about people who have already bought plane tickets or whatever, and they're not coming for the inauguration, they're coming to visit their aunt Tilly or whatever. How many of them are going to try to directly reach out to the Airbnb host and say, look, I know Airbnb canceled my reservation, but could I still stay there anyway? And we can just, you know, put it under the table. There's nothing Airbnb can do about that. No, and there would be no way to police all that stuff. There's just there's just it's just too big of a network. But yeah, if that sort of thing happens, then then you're in another world of hurt liability wise. All right, folks, if you've got thoughts about this or any of our stories, join in the conversation on our Discord, which you can do by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. GoPro released a number of new experimental camera features under the GoPro labs site. Features include motion triggers, which will start recording when it detects that the camera is moving. That way, when you're sitting there stationary trying to figure out what you want to record, you're not wasting your battery. USB power triggers that start recording when power is detected over USB. Good for like starting things up when you plug it in. But also GoPro points out that this could be used for dash cam uses, where when you start your car, the power goes to the USB. The GoPro wakes itself up. Also timed exposed locks, simpler live streaming QR code integration, bringing motion detection to all video modes. Features can be tested on the hero nine black, the hero eight black, the hero seven black and the GoPro Max. Kind of excited about this because it feels like I'm actually a little annoyed I didn't make this prediction in our prediction show because it feels like that company and companies like it, where their main focus has been, are you a snowboarder?  Like just that kind of that model is less of a it's going to be less and less of a return for them. And they need to figure out ways to do more with that brand. And I'm telling you, there's money on the table for like streaming stuff and, you know, some kind of webcam approach with a GoPro, because the quality of those things is amazing. The price isn't that bad for what you're going to get. And there's just a lot of other uses that right now they're just not great at. So them diversifying in this way is not that surprising, but also a welcome thing. As far as I'm concerned, as someone who, you know, digs that kind of stuff and wants to buy new cameras next year. Agreed. And I'm very happy to see that it's going back to the version that I have, the hero seven black. There you go. That's a good one. You remember the old ones where they didn't even have they didn't even have a screen on those things. You remember I've got one of those. Those were terrible days. Those are days I don't want to think about it anymore, but we're in a new place now. Yeah, like, what are you recording? Hard to say. That's the fun of it. You'll find out later. It was like a throwback to film days. We had to wait a week for the film to get developed. It's terrible. Anyway, let's move on. Panasonic is in the news. They showed off its heads up display for cars, which goes well beyond the typical speed and temperature. The demo laid out a blue line on the road to show where to navigate your car. Identified a bicyclist that was merging, indicated a height of a bridge that you're about to go under. Also all the time showing you how long your destination is and how far until your next turn. Oh, and your speed. That's in there, of course. Panasonic says the system updates every 300 milliseconds and eye tracking keeps the information lined up. Panasonic says the system is compact enough to work in most vehicles. Sarah, you were saying before the show today that you have some form of this, but it sounds like this is a big jump ahead of what you're doing. Yeah, it's given me more options than I have. I've got a Volvo, I've got a heads up display. It was kind of part of the package of the car that I got. And I love it. It's great. It does not have eye tracking. So if, you know, when, when I first figured out, OK, this is how I want to sit, you know, you figure out the heads up display so that it's exactly right and it'll show up. And, you know, there's not a lot of room for error. So if I'm like, I want to kind of chill on my next ride, it's going to go away unless I redo the whole thing. It's also pretty limited. There is some customization, but it's mostly speed limit. If it thinks I'm too close to the car in front of me, I'll get a little sort of like collision warning type thing. And then it'll sort of flash, like if I'm in a school zone, which is actually really helpful. Sometimes I'm like, oh, gosh, I need to slow way down. You know, I wasn't paying attention. But for something like bicyclists merging, certainly a, hey, car might be drifting a little bit, blue line, super helpful, height of a bridge, not really putting a lot of stuff on top of my car. But if I did, that might be really helpful on road trips. It's nice to be able. Yeah, yeah. It's nice to be able to just have certain options as long as of course the heads up display isn't so littered with stuff that you're looking at it more than you're actually looking outside the window in front of you. I love this. Yeah, why this was so impressive to me is this looks like things I need to see, right?  You might not notice that's a bicyclist, but now you will because you can see it. We're highlighting it. Here's the blue line that tells you where the road is. So you don't have to be looking down at a phone that's on a little thing that's gonna fall off your vent.  I see the blue line turns right up there. Great. The navigation alone makes this worth it. And for the first time, heads up display looks like something I could use rather than something that I think is kind of neat. Yeah, you made a really good point about the not having to look down at a phone that's hanging on by a ledge or hanging on by a clip or whatever because I know that's dangerous as much as we're getting a lot of good voice feedback these days and it's saying when to turn it's kind of keeping you ahead in a busy traffic filled city, it's still not great.  I'm seeing it as integrated into the world. Like that's absolutely where we want to be. Well, you might also want to be with Ubisoft who announced Wednesday that its Swedish massive entertainment studio is collaborating with Lucasfilm Games on an open world original story game set in the Star Wars universe. The game will use the snow drop engine also used in Tom Clancy's The Division. Electronic Arts has an exclusivity deal for Star Wars games that expires in 2023 but EA says it will continue to develop Star Wars games non-exclusively. Lucasfilm Games also announced Tuesday that an Indiana Jones game is in development with Machine Games. Scott, I have a hunch you're excited about this. We're very excited about this as the gaming community. I'll be their spokesman for the moment. It's exciting stuff. Machine Games known for their work on the Wolfenstein recent games. Those are excellent first person shooters. This doesn't indicate whether that Indiana Jones game would be first person or not but back to the open world Star Wars stuff. There's been a little bit of stagnation with Star Wars licensed stuff since Disney got a hold of all the licenses. They stopped their own internal studios. Disney's interactive went away and they moved everything to EA or they made deals with EA for most of their exclusive licensing to Star Wars games. They had a couple of hits in there, a couple of big bombs, some very controversial stuff with Battlefront and microtransactions and that sort of thing was all at the forefront of that mess. So it's been kind of an ugly period or an adjustment period. And what it sounds like now they're basically saying, all right, look, we've got the Lucas Games banner back. It's here and that has a lot of cache, a lot of history behind it, even outside of Star Wars related stuff. And we've got Ubisoft who makes really great maybe some of the industry's best open world games. Their open world style is very well known and respected. And the Division II, while not that kind of open world game, there's real prowess to that. And I think that that's the right team. And given that when all the other resources they have at Ubisoft though, they should be able to make a really killer open world game, which is my favorite kind of game. So I'm beyond excited about an open world Star Wars game made by a big studio like this. And it's nice to see him spurt it around a little bit, not be so exclusive to EA, if I'm honest. A simpler game for a more civilized age. I mean, really it's a chance to, for those, maybe there's some at home going, wait, open world, what does that even mean? Think Grand Theft Auto without all the crime, but Grand Theft Auto is a good example of an open world game. More comparable would be something like a modern Assassin's Creed game, which Ubisoft makes. Those are big, expansive, detailed, incredibly rich visually worlds with lots of story, lots of side quests, tons of stuff to do, huge maps. Imagine that in the Star Wars universe and you're getting close to why I'm so excited. So it's gonna be great, I hope. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. So for everything that's announced at CES, there's always someone saying, wait, that sounds really expensive. I have something that's cheaper and does the same thing. And Brendan had that exact note on the $3,000 smart doggy door that we talked about earlier this week. He says, maybe I'm missing something, but the dog door announced that CES sounds very similar to the door I've been using for a year. It's been incredible. It's the PetSafe electronic smart door, collar activated, it's for dogs and cats, comes to two sizes for smaller or larger pets. Brendan says $150 versus $3,000. If I wanted to make it smart, I could add a home kit sensor to it. Sure, I'd love some features built in or for it to use AC power instead of recharging D batteries, but otherwise it's perfect. Yeah, it's a fair question, Brendan. I sent Brendan this Verge article that goes into detail of what Chamberlain did to make the MyQ Pet Portal. I still agree with Brendan that $3,000 is way too expensive, but to be fair to Chamberlain, there's more to it than there is in the PetSafe electronic smart door, which looks like a great door and way more affordable. There's 1080p cameras that let you remotely monitor, so that the pet can ask to be let out without you being in the same room. It's encrypted video available worldwide through Amazon S3, so it's just you looking at it. It logs when your pet goes in and out. There's infrared and touch sensors to avoid the door closing on the pet. Bluetooth LE collar, so the pet can ask to be let out by sitting, so you can train it to sit. It doesn't just detect any approach. It has to show that it really wants to go out. Built to look seamless, that's one of the big things. You don't know the door is there. It's built for insulation, so it won't allow drafts. Built for security, it's difficult to break into. You have to have a pro install this, so it's easy to install because you don't do it. And it's a whole door. That's the other thing. Like you're not just buying a thing and having to put it in the door yourself. You're paying $3,000 for someone to come in and replace your door that has the MyQ door in it. So maybe we did it at a disservice by not explaining all this. I still understand where Brendan's coming from, where it's like, sure, okay, that's great if you got $3,000, but I'll go with my $150 version. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is a people door, but at $3,000, it's still really expensive for a custom people door installed. And I would argue that the sum of the parts still probably don't equal 3K. Also, I'm not entirely sure. I really want Chamberlain deciding what door decor I'm gonna have in my home. That's not, you know, I'm thinking Anderson or something like that. That would make sense. These are all fair questions, yes, absolutely. I love where like, for $3,000, it needs to look different. Darn it, works really well, but. I do give you three choices. There's a wood choice that's even more expensive than the fiber class. They all look pretty nice. But yes, Brendan, we appreciate the feedback, always appreciated. If you have any feedback like Brendan or a question or anything that we talk about on the show or might talk about in a future show, send us an email, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. We do it every day. And today they include Steve Iyer-Darolla, Chris Allen, and Mike Acons. Richard Gunther, so nice to have you back on the show. Hope CES, the remote version of CES anyway, was kind to you. Let folks know whether they can keep up with your work. Absolutely. I'm the editor out at the Digital Media Zone. That's thedigitalmediazone.com. And you can catch the shows I do Home On, which is about DIY smart home, and The Smart Home Show, which is about smart home industry stuff all in your favorite pod catchers. Very good, very good. Scott Johnson, thanks for being with us as well. As always, I don't even know how you juggle all the things that you do, but let us know a couple of places people can keep up with them. I don't know either, but there are places to go to get it. For example, if you go to frogpants.com, you'll find a podcast page that has a whole slew of podcasts that happen every week. If you heard of me talking about games today and you're like, ooh, I want more of that, there's a show on there called Core, which we do every Wednesday night, excuse me, Thursdays now. You can find the schedule for when that happens live or get it on the podcast and find out more about what I think about the Zubisoft news as well as that Indiana Jones game. Again, that's frogpants.com slash podcast. And for everything else, you can find me over on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Would you like a DTNS hat or a hoodie or a mask or a mouse pad? We got it all. It's right there at the dailytechnewshow.com store, which you get to by going to dailytechnewshow.com slash store. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. If you've never joined us live and you'd like to give it a shot, dailytechnewshow.com slash live is where to find out more. And we are back tomorrow. Back at it. Just enough, enough. That's enough. This show is part of the frogpants network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.


Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante at Wikibon headquarters. Welcome to CUBE Conversations. You know, there's a big discussion in the industry and the big data field about analytics and how to apply analytics to improve infrastructure. And a lot of people are talking about applying machine learning to make infrastructure better, to automate infrastructure, to remediate challenges and problems. We're here with Jerry Melnick, who's the Chief Operating Officer of SCIOS. And this company has a new announcement in this space. Jerry, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. So historically, SCIOS is known for their expertise in high availability. You're making a new announcement today, but give us the high level of SCIOS. So SCIOS, you know, publicly held company in Japan. We are the US subsidiary here based out of San Mateo and responsible for R&D that's going on and the sales and marketing of products in the high availability space. And, you know, we've been in this business for 15 years helping customers deliver SLAs and deliver important capabilities to their customers and users and we're making an announcement about SCIOS IQ or analytics software, which really is an extension of that line. So we do a lot of these, a dupe in big data shows. Everybody's talking about machine learning. They're talking about applying analytics. It's the machine learning is the future. SCIOS IQ, here today, here now, tell us about it. Okay, I'll tell you a little bit about where, how we came to it. I mean, we were, again, you know, our customers are high availability customers, moving critical apps into cloud and virtualized environments in a big way. That's happened over the last two or three years. Late to the party, you know, just starting that move much later, but taking advantage of the flexibility, they were used to very well defined, well constrained deterministic environments in which those applications always recover, always produce certain types of performance and they come to move it to virtualization environments and now they have the dilemma where how can they achieve the SLAs that they had in those physical environments also be able to take advantage of the value of the flexibility of the virtual and cloud environments, but they ran into a wall. And the wall, quite frankly, was about, you know, this is not the deterministic environment of physical service. There's lots of things going on, a lot of complex interactions and we saw the opportunity to help them by applying intelligence to the operations of how they're operating there beyond what we're doing today in our current HA products. So essentially you've got this black box environment when you went from a bare metal to a virtual system, but it talks about the IO blender, you really don't know what's connected to what. So that's part of the problem that you're solving, right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, you have those interactions, you have complexity, complexity that, you know, if we showed you the graph that we developed on the various interrelationships, you would see that these are really complicated systems and to be able to understand what's going on and really be able to deliver on performance, efficiency, reliability and capacity, needs of the customer is really hard. I mean, we talk to practitioners all the time in the early days and still, they were just so frustrated at the time that it would take for them to diagnose the problem, remediate the problem, they'd have to bring in their best and brightest people. Are you able to compress that cycle and simplify it so I don't need rocket scientists to solve that problem? That's right, we have the rocket scientists. We are automated that in two minutes of machine learning. That's exactly right. I mean, we looked at this problem really carefully. We talked to customers involved very much in the beginning. We realized that, you know, there were a lot of complex tools out there and exactly as you said, it was a war room. Basically when a problem would occur, a customer would call up, the database guy would get the notice that, you know, the application's running too slow. What am I going to do? And then they go into triage and triage require multiple people. So how do you simplify that? How do you understand what's going on there? And instead of using a dozen tools, use one tool to help you find where to go first so you can fix the problem and address that need as fast as possible. And that's the problem we wanted to solve very much from a real time. So simplicity was the key that we were looking at the beginning. So how's it work? Do I have to install agents? You got some other magic sauce that you're using. Now remember that, you know, we said simplicity was the key. So right after the install, no agents, you know, you're basically five minutes to download and running. It's got a simple mobile touch interface, really one click operations to get answers to very complex problems in very difficult environments, right? And then it's gathering information and learning patterns of behavior over time and becoming more and more intelligent as the operations include so it can help you figure out what's going on. And you're starting with, is that right VMware? Do you understand that? That's right. Expanding up from there. That's right, we built a platform, an analytics platform, very different from a lot of other implementations in this space. And we thought of it rather than, you know, adapting existing tools, even our clustering tools for that matter, rather than adapting those, we built a solution straight up from the bottom up where it's an analytics platform. We can acquire data sources from the infrastructure, from the application. It's built to be extensible, expandable. It's built to be very intelligent and using machine learning, not just one algorithm, but any numbers of algorithms specific to what the questions we wanted to get answered. So you've collected the data, you've integrated it, and now you can ask the questions and correlate and get responses. So am I right that the IP is not the algorithms in and of themselves, it's how you're applying the algorithms? It's really how we're putting the system together. Really three pieces, data aggregation, machine learning analytics, and then the delivery of that information in a highly consumable format in a touch mobile environment, which is touch mobile UI, which is really, you know, unprecedented in the industry quite frankly. So, and it's got to be real time essentially. That's right. That's right. We're continually learning. You know, we're observing patterns behavior. We are then looking for anomalies, reporting on those and helping you identify why there's a problem and exactly how what you need to do to fix that. So, I want to stay in the tech for a second if we can. You have patents around this? That's right. We have patents around a number of areas. You know, certainly we have technologies, really three major technology areas that we've developed here. One is our V-Graph technology, which is patent is how we provide a relationship graph using topological analysis that automatically figures out all of the various objects in the system, how they're connected, and then how they're related. Then we have machine learning technologies that we employ with a variety of other algorithms that utilize in conjunction with that V-Graph technology, figures out sort of root cause analysis and pattern analysis. And then on top of all that is our presentation technology, which we call the Psyos PERC, P-E-R-C, performance efficiency, reliability and capacity, instrumentation that deliver the goods. So that's your dashboard. That's our dashboard. Okay, yeah. And you've patented that? That's right, because of the way that we presented it. This is not a simple thresholding of CPU or memory. This is an aggregated information and that dashboard really represents four indicator lights like you would see on your car that indicate the health or quality of service that you're delivering across your infrastructure.  So, and you've patented the math behind the aggregation? Is that right? We've patented how we've put it together and we certainly are using unique techniques. You're not patting the math but there's certainly a lot of math involved, right? That's right, that's right. We're not using one super algorithm we're using a variety of machine learning and other statistical techniques. Interesting, and so there's a lot of things that sound different, but maybe you can summarize. How do you guys position this relative to the competition? Customer says okay, how are you different from everybody else? How would you summarize that? And so we're a true analytics play that's delivering the goods from the bottom all the way to the user. And we really see ourselves as an overlay where we can consume a variety of information whether it's from the hypervisor, management tools, a variety of data sources, whatever we need to really solve the problems in the area of performance efficiency, reliability and capacity. And then the real differentiation is from that very sophisticated machine learning and time understanding of your environment we can look at very specific solution and use cases where we answer very difficult questions again in complex environments. Where do you fit in the stack? So we fit sort of in between everything. We're acquiring data from the infrastructure, compute, storage and network as well as from the application environment. You are not an application performance monitoring tool. We're not a deep infrastructure tool. We really see ourselves as the thing that you pick up first to be able to understand where to look when a problem or an issue occurs and how to understand where to go next. So when I get the feedback, looking at the dashboard, it's telling me something. Take me through an example of how a customer would take action and create some kind of outcome. Sure, very simple example. So for instance, in our performance dashboard we'll see a trend analysis of performance issues. Now those issues are aggregations of anomalies that have occurred. They're not simple CPU, one CPU threshold was exceeded and we've automatically established thresholds and patterns. We understand the relationship between of virtual machines, it's networks and other virtual machines. We've watched those patterns and studied them over a period of time. And when we see an anomaly, whereby that series of objects no longer acting the way they're expected to the actor, we call it out. And we say, you know, this is an unusual behavior in your system, you need to look at it. And you can with one click look at that and we will show you the objects that are in fact impacted by this anomaly and we'll show you the root cause of what happened and why, associated with the event that caused it. So you can see within one click really what happened in that pattern. And once I know the root cause then it's straightforward action to take. And we also incorporate this notion of semi-supervised learning, which means if you know better that this anomaly isn't really an anomaly, you can train the learning set. So now we've incorporated your knowledge into ours and together, we've automated this even further. Okay, so essentially every customer who takes advantage of that capability is building their own sort of custom intelligent machine. Yeah, I mean it's for those environments, certainly. Most of the stuff, you know, it's going to run automatically. You're not setting thresholds, you're not, you know, tuning it. It's learning over time and anomalies, you know, are acquired and it's intelligence get better over time. So, and this is available as a subscription, is that right? That's right, we're licensing it as a subscription. It's an on-premise model. We talked to customers again in the process. We did a lot of interaction with customers and they told us that they were not comfortable, necessarily, with sending that data off-site. IT people really are concerned about privacy issues and security. So we decided an on-prem model was the best, at least for now, and that what we wanted to do, though, however, was deliver new functionality against those data sets as fast as we could.  When there's a new release out there, you can press that and it'll load the new software and then you're off and running again with new capability. So we're going to be evolving this software very quickly. It's available today. It's available today. So you're using the DevOps culture to deliver the updates and the code. That's right. Two-week sprints and that's right. Okay, so give us a little glimpse of what we can expect in the future in this sort of general category of technology. Sure, I mean, we're starting off, I mentioned four dimensions, performance, efficiency, reliability, and capacity. We're starting off because what our customers told us, performance was a thing we deal with every day. Help us there. Efficiency certainly is cost-related. You know, am I using my system? Can I consolidate more? Am I using too much memory? We've done a few interesting use cases. One-click analysis of what virtual machines are idle, for instance, very simple, very hard problem actually, as it turns out in very large environments. Reliability, you know, people really don't have a good way to figure out whether their system can sustain a failure or how many hosts can be failed or what the right recovery plan is in these environments. We can help with that, giving the data that we acquired. And then capacity, you know, where this really goes, we're starting off really helping the IT operations guys make sure that the thing's running. Where it really goes is it also can help the CIOs over time with capacity, planning, understanding, you know, where the costs are in my system, understanding how much an application really costs in real time, whether there's other ways in which you can deploy that application. Because we're, since we get to understand your application, what resources it uses, what impacts it has in an environment, we're in a unique position to be able to project, simulate, and recommend the best solution and where to put it. You just got the data. We got the data. All right, Jay Malthick, we'll have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the CIO-CIO announcement. Good luck and we'll be watching. Thank you. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is CUBE Conversations. Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time.


Do I rock Crease Protectors or nah? Let me see if this will answer your question. This is the Chicago Air Jordan 1, also known as the $2,000 sneaker. I don't need no Crease Protectors bruh, I just rock my kicks.


Some of you I know very well, some of you I've never met before. I know these are really important and trying times for all of us and I really appreciate you being here today. I kind of dreamed up this crazy idea of getting a bunch of folks together to offer at least some kind of solace in this time. At the same time, offer what what might be very useful to all of you, which is how do I begin to write, especially in a time like this. And then I will say that for me, from my perspective, I've always gotten a particular solace from writing just taking the time to whether it's just 10 minutes or 20 minutes to jot down a few things, you know, on a tabletail napkin or on a piece of paper or just type of my computer, whatever. And in a way it's sort of a bit of a meditation a way to kind of clear my thoughts or set thoughts down that are bothering me. And so I'm glad you're all here today because it's not just, I didn't want to do something that was just me offering some kind of like series of playwriting tips I wanted to bring in. I wanted to bring in people who have their own particular journey and experiences of writing. Some of them are currently working in TV others have worked in TV on stage on film, and I'm really excited by the group of people I was able to And I hope that this is something that might continue beyond like these five weeks so if you haven't signed up for the other other writers. Those are Alvarosa Rios, Christina Quintana, Georgina Escobar, and of course Jose Rivera. You know, and it's just so glad that all of them said yes. I'm hoping that we can do, we can expand a party even further to include actors, dramaturgs, directors, designers. But for today, I just wanted to, I'm really happy that you're here. All right, I hope you're ready to write. But before we do that. I want to talk a little bit about our community. And in particular someone that we lost this weekend someone who was very dear to us her name was Diane Rodriguez. In the attachment I sent. And certainly you can look up many of the various articles about her life. I won't go into too much detail about that. But I'm dedicating this to her as well as our group. Someone that I looked up to someone I knew through at the Atrocampesino all the way up to her participation with the Latinx Theater Commons. And so I'm hoping that the series and our commemoration to her is part of this work. She set the table for us to succeed. Let us be inspired by the gifts that she gave while she walked among us. Let us give back to the world what she gave so many of us, which was a place at the table for us to create our own work, our art. And today I'd like for all of us to raise our pens or the fingers that we'll use to type with and really think of her fondly as we work together. We honor her tenacity, her love for artists, her passion for the work itself, through what we do collectively today. And after we're through, feel free that tonight light a candle raise a glass or just breathe a few breaths in her honor. And let us give thanks to the legacy that was Diane. So thank you for for allowing me to speak on on her in her life. All right. So let me set the table for what's going to happen today.  And these are designed to get you get the juices flowing in terms of like, setting down what might be like you might be on your mind or might be thinking about in terms of starting a play or just starting a screenplay, whatever you're interested in. These are helpful for me. And then at the end of the at the end of the session. We'll talk a little bit about, you know, what that was like for the process, what the process was like for you. Each writer that you'll see every week will have a very different process. So I hope that that, you know, what I'm offering is is just one particular perspective. It's mainly something that I've shared with young playwrights in terms of just getting started. So let's just go with it. How about that. But for someone to tell a little story about how this will, you know, in terms of thinking about this.  You had to cross a road or a street by yourself and I don't mean like, like in your neighborhood, I was talking about like the four late intersections where you where you live or you visited that feeling of pushing the crosswalk, walk button remembering that you had to wait for the light to change but to look around to see if all the cars have stopped will the light change that push the button hard enough with my weekly hands. The light finally changes you take shallow breaths as you step onto the asphalt still looking around to make sure your tiny self can still be seen by the drivers.  And then when you finally reach the other side that feeling of accomplishment and relief. The series is designed and curated to get us to write to turn over the soil before we plan to ask questions of yourself in order to dream up your own play. This quote Jose Rivera, who I'm sure will be embarrassed by this quote.  So this is all about giving yourself permission to write, because it's such a physical and emotional and spiritual practice. You can delve into style or necessarily structure because I think there are a lot of other writers who can do that better than me so, but I will also be able to answer questions about that if you're if you're so interested. Turn that off. Okay, you guys are ready.  Okay, so each of these will take a few minutes. Let's see here. Can you all see the screen. Make sure you're not seeing it yet. Okay, hold on. Here we go. Share screen. I have to do this every time. Ha ha. Okay. All right, for the first five minutes. This is called what didn't break you made you stronger. Write down a list of moments, accomplishments and milestones that have impacted you the most. Focus on what you've personally experienced from your perspective on right from the birth from your birth to the present. So I'm going to start a timer and we're going to write for five minutes and it's basically you're just making a list it could be a couple of words it can be a sentence. I'm going to write that story I told, I got hit by a car once, because I tried to cross the road without looking both ways. Anyway, I'll tell you about that later. But for now, begin making your list, starting now. Okay, that's been five minutes. You can finish your, your last list item or your last thought. All right. The next thing we're going to do is go ahead and take a look at your first list of moments.  If you had something in mind that you weren't able to include in the first prompt the first list that you made you can add it here.  Go ahead. Okay, about 15 seconds before we move on. All right. Okay, you have your top three. We're going to keep going. Choose one of your top three moments and write about it. And I'd like you to include any important details that matter to you. Trust your impulses and keep writing without pausing. So this is an opportunity for you to go into more detail like, you know, what happened that people that were involved places you were things you noticed. Go ahead and get that started. So I'll give you four minutes for this. Go ahead. 30 seconds. Okay, here we go. Hope you're feeling good. Maybe shake that hand out or your fingers. Take a deep breath. All right. This one gets a little trickier from your top moment you've just written about choose a character could be you could be someone else. Someone else part of this moment could be a thing. Maybe you're writing about an ice cream truck. I don't know. But describe them. What makes them them it not necessarily who they are but what they do how they operate in the world. What makes them tick. So this is an opportunity for you to really go into detail like describing someone or something. All right. Let's take another five and go. We're about halfway through our fourth writing exercise if you just joining us we're on also on how around TV. Okay, we're about 30 seconds away. Finish strong just write as much details you can. Okay, this is the last one. This one's a little bit more fun. So you're going to write something called an Abba Cedarian. It's a series of lines that your character the character you just created. That you're going to imagine them saying like, you know, lines of dialogue but each line of dialogue has to start in order of the alphabet. It's very simple, as you can see on the screen, like another day another dollar.  So start your Abba Cedarian. And just if you don't get to see that's okay but let's start writing as much as you can go.  Okay, about another minute. So if you're almost there. Going about 10 seconds and pens down. All right. Congratulations, you have just completed 25 minutes of writing.  Let me tell you what a Pomodoro is. And this actually leads to my first tip. A Pomodoro is like, you know, those kitchen timers with the with the tomato, you know that that you have in the kitchen. A Pomodoro is 25 minutes of writing followed by five minutes of five minute break. I actually don't have a Pomodoro. I actually have a timer that's in the shape of a death star, which is really awesome if you ever want one of those. But one of the things that I have found to be really helpful is to have a timer that's not associated with your smartphone. I actually have a stopwatch here. This is like my running watch. I've been able to just go if I if I know that I have half an hour. I can go to my kitchen table or I can go to a cafe, at least, you know, pre pre COVID-19. And I can write for 25 minutes. Or if you're on the bus or in the subway, hopefully. And that counts as one Pomodoro. In a way of keeping track of this. You can keep a journal or market on your calendar that you wrote a Pomodoro or two Pomodoro's you can write one in the morning you can write one in the evening. You are really a time based kind of person you really are someone that really adheres to a schedule or a calendar. This is a super effective way to to begin up writing practice to just free right to start writing script pages to start writing dialogue, whatever it might be based on some of the stuff you just did today. There's an advanced version of this. I've heard of people who blindfold themselves as they're writing so they don't look at their screen or they just turn off the screen. As they're writing, you just turn it all the way down till it's like blank. And then you can, you know, just write for 25 minutes and the whole goal is to just write until the timer goes off. You can fix everything later. There's a little bit about one of my favorite things to talk about which is the magic three, the magic three for me is if you're a beginning writer that I usually try to set a, you know, as a beginner I started with a goal of like writing a page. You know, three days a week. So, for beginners it was like I write like a page on Monday page on Wednesday and page on Friday. And then I slowly work myself up to like two pages a day three times a week. As I started to get more advanced, I started to write three days a week, three pages a day. And I want to kind of illustrate this because I think if you're not into the whole like if you don't like the pressure of time, having like a certain amount of pages to write is really super helpful. And I'll sort of go through the next page because ironic illustrate something that makes sense for those of you who are math nerds. If you write a page a day for three days a week. You know you can pick any day you want. You can write a 10 minute play in three weeks a festival play, six to 10 weeks a full length, 10 to 14 weeks, fully played 15 to 20 weeks. So you could write one of each in a year. As you can, as you go along, you can see that the more pages you write in each of those three days and I'm really only talking about working like, depending on how fast or how slow you write, if you just complete a few pages. It takes you an hour. That's really just three hours of your week in order to to be productive. As you get higher into like three pages, three days a day, you can see that you can actually write four to five fully plays a year. And then, as you get more, the whole thing is really about building a habit and building repetition. Some days, I know that I'll be able to crank out nine pages. Some days, I can barely get through one page. That's totally fine. If it all balances out in some way, whatever level you set and I suggest that you start at the level that's comfortable for you. Then that's great. Even if it's just a paragraph to begin with on your first day. That is perfectly fine. And if this sounds really intimidating all of a sudden I just want to illustrate like when you're writing a play script or when you're writing a screenplay. There's a great deal of white space. The number of pages sounds intimidating but don't worry about it. So here's a lot, you know, oftentimes dialogue is separated by a lot of white space around what you're writing. So here's a, here's a, here's a play inspired by one of our participants Herbert.  I wasn't talking about you. That's not what I heard. Well, you heard wrong, Baboso. And so it allows you to space it out so you could have stage directions and dialogue. Another example, which I, you know, I've included hyperlinks to the scripts of these plays, you know, take the time to, there are a lot of places online where you can read screenplays. So here's a little, a little snippet from Jojo Rabbit, which won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. You can see that a page isn't necessarily stacked like line by line by line. There's a lot of great. There's a lot of room to to include description include dialogue. So, as you learn how to format, and I don't have a fancy writing program like final draft or anything I just use word. That it's something that you can begin to look at. So now before we get into Q&A, I do want to talk about what do I do with all the stuff that I just wrote. So take, I want you to take your lists, the as a Baderian, the character you just created. And I want you to really focus on and I will share this with you. I'll share this PowerPoint with you all in a separate email. I want to answer these questions just in a, you know, in a few lines or a few sentences or a paragraph, ask the question, what does this character want? What is in their way? And what will they have to sacrifice or give up in order to get what they want. And I think if you start to have the have that conversation on the page. You know, you really start to investigate your character, then you'll be able to find out what makes them tick, you'll be able to kind of find out who are the who they are and what what do they want in life. And then, I don't think a play is ever really interesting if they get the thing that they want, but they didn't lose something in order to get it. I think that's something that's often very missing from, from, from plays, but the whole point is to write that first draft. I think getting that first draft done, no matter how messed up it is no matter how many grammar and spelling mistakes you make. The whole point is to get it all on the page and the real gift and the goal that you're giving yourself is that you can go back and you can rewrite and edit. You can't fix, you can't fix a thing that's incomplete, if that makes any sense. I learned that kind of the hard way, just when I was writing my first play, and it was just like, I kept trying to change it as I went along and it just was like, you know, I kept losing at Jenga. So I hope this is super helpful for you all. I just want to conclude by talking about what is a play script and what it, what it serves for you, because I think from my perspective. Writing a play is, is, it operates on three levels. One is that, and this is really important is that it's an object of literary creation. This is something that will last forever. Once you have it, it's yours. It's yours to share with the world. It's yours that there's a bit of a permanence.  It's something that you needed to say in this moment. The second thing it is, is that, of course, any script is a blueprint. It's only a blueprint for a performance. It's like architectural drawings. And the whole point of theater and also working in television and film is that the blueprint is really like the beginning of like the collaboration. And what you're providing is like your own series of prompts to share with an array of potential collaborators in order to stage or film a performance. And the last thing that it is, it's that it's a cultural document. I can't tell you how much it meant to me that when I was coming up in theater, I didn't know where to find inspiration until I found this book called Shattering the Myth.  And now, in 2020, we have a plethora of plays to to pull from the library or we can download or order and it's just been like this explosion of work. And to me, it's like these are like what the ancestor, you know, I sort of look at a play by like Miguel Pinheiro or Dolores Prida or Maria Irene Fornes and I go, this is like their legacy. This is their cultural document. It's like take it and use it to inspire you. So I hope that, you know, that you'll take the opportunity to look at some of the links which actually link directly to the plays and you get a chance to read, not only for just how to format a play but also just to be inspired by it. Okay, I'm going to exit out of this PowerPoint. There we go. I think you should be able to see me again. Awesome. Alright, I'm like, I hope this was helpful for you. I, if there's anything you want to talk about at all. I'm here for the next, you know, 15 minutes to talk about anything and everything you want. I hope you'll come back and see you'll you'll check out some of the other offerings that the other writers are coming in with and, you know, all of them will be different, it won't be all writing it could be just a Q&A. So just, you know, let me know. We have one question from the chat maybe want to start there. But the way that we will be taking questions in person is go ahead and raise your hand in zoom you can do that down at the bottom. Hit that participant button, you'll be able to see where you can raise your hand if you have a question go ahead and raise your hand, and I will unmute you and it is time and while all y'all are figuring that out. We're going to start with a question from Armando Latista. How do you build a play from one scene. So you have a scene and to share or talk to you about stories that you would like to share. And then also I can, I can It's not like I can talk. Thank you for this. It's such a gift. So yeah, so I have a scene that I wrote actually from like a pump similar to what you have been offering here, and it came out with the scene and it feels like a juicy scene. And but I'm like, okay, what do I do with the scene now and and it's sort of using other resources like a Shakespearean play. And I'm trying to kind of do a play within the play a bit but I'm sort of stuck on. Okay, there's this thing kind of like what you're talking about what does the character want. There's a sacrifice that they have to make and they're sort of dealing with this other character and they're sort of stuck there. But I don't know how to expand. I don't know where that scene lives beginning middle and some sort of like, it wants to grow, but I don't know how to give it the water needs. Yeah, it's just something that is something that you're interested in expanding into a full length, like a 10 minute, 10 minute play, at least characters that you love and definitely want to continue their journey.  But it seems like it wants to be something more full length. I mean, I think I'm revolving around themes of what is it to be a Latin X, like Afro Latino artists a performer, a performer like an actor. You know, I came from that world. And what is it to deal with that and how we still deal with like the discrimination, the micro aggression, things like that but then what is it to deal with like old works like a, you know, Shakespeare, which, you know, is respected and lauded and I do to an extent but it's ambivalent for me because he also wrote racist stuff. He also messagenistic work. And how do you sort of tackle some of that work as you're trying to like, make your way through this characters trying to make his way through, make his break, right, but then has to deal with this work as well and sort of like, is it growing by doing this work or is it just sort of like being a menstrual show like a modern menstrual show. So there's some of the things I'm revolving with with with this. So to answer your question, I like them. And I'm sort of like attracted to them. And I just don't know what. Yeah, I don't I don't know yet from that point. You know, a couple of things that I like to, I like to do is to use sometimes I'll take a character that I, you know, I've been, you know, I've been writing and and I'll give them, I'll just give them sort of like an inner monologue like just having a conversation with themselves, like am I doing the right thing.  And if it's not an inner monologue. You can take, you know, but sometimes you can take inspiration from Shakespeare, you can write a soliloquy where you're actually having a dialogue with the audience so it's sort of like, Hey man, I have a question for you all. You know, I've been thinking about this but I'm not sure if this is like the right thing I'm doing, you know, so another way is to just actually open it up to like, you know, having a conversation to who you see your potential audience member being. The third thing is that, you know, nobody's perfect. And I certainly know that that that that it. But for me, I don't think any characters that all that interesting if there isn't something that is like annoying about them.  I don't think I could stand to write like a character that was like me on the page. So, you know, it's just, you know, I have, but I think about that in terms of like, Okay, what what is something that is that that, you know, that that gets under people's skin. You know, when when with whatever they're doing or whatever they're saying, what is it that, you know, because not everybody's going to like like everything that that this person is saying or doing. So I think setting up setting up sending yourself up to begin either an exercise where you're writing about their inner thoughts, or they're having a conversation with the audience, or they're just in another like seeing in themselves with another person or that same person. But something has changed. It's super useful to just keep writing, you know ways is like put them in different situations, put them in different like, I don't know, there's that you want to try to build stakes, wherever them, you know, might be where they have to make a decision. I don't know if that's helpful but you know, and I want to give folks the opportunity to, to ask questions but I, you know, anything you want to ask me you can also just reach out to me via my website and I'm happy to talk to you about, you know, other ideas. That's just, thank you. Next we have. Yeah. Can you hear me. Yes. Hi, how are you doing. Hi, I see you. Um, what's up. I'm good, I'm good. Say hi to Megan and so true me. My question is, most of the plays I've written have been anywhere between three to six characters. And now most of my ideas are now anywhere between 10 to 15 characters. And I'm kind of struggling with how to write that big scope play with that many people and that many stories, or that many intersecting things so I'm curious as to how, and you've done this this before so I'm curious as to how you approached big plays, big cast plays. Yeah.  You know, one of the, one of the questions that we're asking ourselves is like, oh, like what are going to be the resources available to have in terms of having like a large cast. I, in a way, I've sort of had the opposite problem, which is, I started like huge. And then I've kind of like started to trim down the thing, you know, like, eliminate characters. I, I find what's really great about, at least from my perspective, having done a lot of Shakespeare, I mean, sort of like taking inspiration and cues from Shakespeare but also at the same time. From the other compass, you know, it's like, you had actors who could play multiple roles at any given time now if you have like 15 characters all on stage at the same time that's a whole different thing.  I always say that when, when you're first writing, write the big epic play, write as many characters as you need to, and then, you know, go back and really do a breakdown. Just, you know, whether it's like cue cards or through even Excel and just go, okay, this is what it looks like right now or have someone that I don't know if you have an assistant or maybe one day you will have an assistant. Where you can have them look at it and go, okay, if you know you can look at some of the disparities of like, okay, we can't have this actor be in this scene because of this or whatever. Yeah, just do the thing. And sometimes you can solve itself in that way. Sometimes it's just a rearrangement of scenes that that kind of solved that problem. But I think primarily it's like to really think about like, you might want to just keep in mind that it may be super difficult to have anything more than 10 characters these days, except if you're going to do a zoom reading, which we can do like any time. But at least having the reading and doing that can actually help solve those problems too. Yeah, because like most it's not that like, it's not really about the actors is just about like the writing part of it is like I have a 15 character play that can be eight actors, but it's more of like, how do I actually write a 15 character play. Like, I've never done that before. So I'm like, I have no concept of how to write it itself. And like, keep everyone like, and keep all the story points intact. So that's the thing I'm kind of struggling with. Yeah, so you have an idea for like 16 characters. Yeah. Okay, that that's, that's for me. So this is not about this is I'm not talking about structure but I'm going to talk about structure now, because, because of you. No, it's okay.  I start to structure the scenes that they're in, in such a way, I think having a structure before you start writing, in terms of like where those characters are it's going to be super helpful. I think that's the best way to do that. I did that with an adaptation of a book that I that I'm working on now called the Revolution of Evelyn Serrano. And there's, there's like over 25 characters. But it the way that it happened sequentially was super important to outline before I even started writing it down. So I think struck like creating like an outline through index cards through characters is going to be the most helpful thing. Yeah. You're welcome. Who else I see her. We have another next question is from Julia so that you are unneeded. Hi, I'd like. Oh my gosh, hi. Okay, so my question is because I mainly have been writing a lot in Spanish. My question has been a lot. I've been adding a lot of regional slang and regional things from from the border or from like specific very specific location wise. And I'm wondering how does that translate when the place getting a little bit more tight, or when you're working with actors that are not from same community or your workshopping, the, the fact that I'm adding too much slang maybe. Oh, I don't know if there's ever such a thing as too much slang. I mean, you want to be as true and authentic to, to the language as possible. Yeah, I see what you mean, are you talking maybe specifically about where you are now and, and like, not having like the right. Like Puerto Rican's play Mexicans. Yes, and especially because I'm writing a lot from like, from my background in Ciudad Juarez. So there's very like, that's that border, border language, that pocho, pocho talk that sometimes it may not translate well when you're working with different communities. And then, and then, I don't know, that's, that's my question, I think, I think it's a figurating out as you go but also how to stay true to what, what do you want the characters to talk about talking about that cultural. You put it really well in words cultural documentation of, of the region that you're from or that you're writing from. Yeah, this is really a, like a super important issue.  That being said, I really strive on the, on the side of like, stay true to your vision and authenticity in the writing. And, and if you want that, then you have to take the steps and I know that sounds like a lot of work on your part. But you have to take the steps in order to make sure that that whenever you're having a reading or a workshop or even a production that that you're very clear about what the dialect is and how it sounds and providing those resources are having a dramatic, provide those resources for that production. I remember doing El Paso Blue many years ago in Philadelphia and I had a Puerto Rican cast. And I literally just had to like sit down and say like, this is how you say it. This is how this is the inflection. This is the, you know, this is what that means. It's not a lot of work. But if you can take as, if you're just trying to figure out what the dialect is in the, in the, if you're just trying to find out like, this the sound right.  In terms of like, is there too much slang.   Just write the thing that that matters to you, right in the most authentic voice possible, if it matters to them in terms of like what they're saying then write it because if it if they need to say it in that dialect in that language, for God's sake, put have them say it in that language. If they can't say it in any other way, then, you know, put it down on the page, the rest will take care of itself. And, you know, hopefully you'll find like really good collaborators, you have a whole bunch of people on the screen here who are listening to you, and they're all nodding, and they're all raising their fists and they're going like, yeah, girl, just write, like, just do it. So, I encourage you to to follow your heart in that. Thank you. You're welcome. Time check is one oh two, we can absolutely go over a little bit if you want to take a couple more questions. Yeah. So, wrap this up. Yeah. Yeah, if you if you can't hang that's okay but we'll you know we'll go a little bit further. That's fine. Absolutely. The next question is from Andrew Valdez you are unmuted and if you'd like to turn your video on we would love to hear. To bear to bear with the hat. Hello. There you are. There you are. So, my question is, I've been reading Edward Albee's seascape, and I'm really interested in writing from the perspective of like hyper magical realism, but I haven't found anything that has been written by like a Latinx artist that goes into like hyper magical realism. And I'd like to know if you know if there are any like sources that I should look into or writers that I can find for some of that inspiration, because I know there's a lot of magical realism. I'm looking more so like real like, I don't know, this couple fight amongst each other, and then all of a sudden a lizard men come in and teach them more about their relationship. Yeah, tell me why what what is what what fascinates you about like magical realism and and and what do you what is it that that that intrigues you about writing in that particular style. I'm just curious. I just am fascinated with telling stories through like alternate realities and alternate characters. Things that you that leave a lot to be desired would have like a lot of undertone underneath them. Like, I'm a huge fan of like sci fi and a huge fan of like the dragons and the mythical stories and like stories from way back when how they're applicable to today, but they use this fantasy element that kind of gives us just enough space between us and what has happened before.  I wouldn't necessarily call it magical realism but there's a there's definitely like different spiritual planes that take place in his work. There's this isn't necessarily Latin X where there's like a, I think it's on Amazon Prime it's called undone and it's like it's a it's it's rotoscoped animation and it's, you know, the lead is a is a Latina actress. I can't remember her name off the top of my head but she was she was in a lead a battle angel like you can. I don't know if that name rings bell but yeah, regardless of that. That particular that particular series was all about like a mixed Latin X and Anglo family and an accident in which she she has an accident in which afterwards she's able to communicate. You know, on a different spiritual plane with her, her deceased father. And, you know, there's all kinds of mystery involving that that might be like a really interesting thing to look at. The thing I do want to say about magical realism is that in a way it's not really magical at all to me. The, the idea, as it came from literary fiction is the idea that that the, that the, that the mundane was magical and that the magical was mundane. But you know, like in a way it's like, for me it's like, oh yeah there's a fairy like hanging out on the tree.  Yes, to the world, the characters that you're creating so that you're not kind of imposing anything that's like, it's got to be, you know, this or whatever. Yeah, there's no reason to explain why the fairies are fairies. Yeah, right. Explain is like what their problem is, or like how they are living in this world now. Yeah, I really think you should be reading Jose Rivera's plays. And I, you know, like clap tectonics or the promise or, or even Marisol, which is like, yeah, I was just in Marisol. And you know what I'm talking about so it's like, it's that idea that this world is just a little bit different, a little bit skewed. It's almost like you're writing 2050, you're writing about like the year 2050 and what what is that going to be like. Yeah, and I'm more concerned about like, it may be the way you were saying it may be the year 2050. But all of that is like the backdrop to what the story is right now. It's like an asset, more so than like the central focus of the story. Yeah. Interesting. I don't, you know, I don't know it's just, it's, I'm intrigued by what you're, what you're, what you're attempting to do. And then maybe take a look at those things and be inspired by that. I also included a link in the thing that I sent out called lessons from the screenplay, which is love that YouTube channel. And in some of those, some of those YouTube like excerpts really tell you like how filmmakers really kind of explore that in terms of like how they structure the play and what what it takes to really guide the audience to like that kind of world versus something that's like more realistic. Yeah. And I think some of those might be really instructive. Thank you so much. You're welcome. All right, thank you. I have a few more. So I've got Larissa, you are unmuted. Hi. Hi. So my question is, I am an actor and I'm starting to, well, I'm trying to write and something that I've always struggled with is that I plan too much. So I don't know at what point, if it's procrastination, I don't know at what point it turns into procrastination for writing, or when the planning is actually helpful to the planning because most of the workshops that I've taken on writing, just say to write and just write, just write, just write and I do that. And yet I feel like I lack structure but then I start thinking about the structure and it's too much structure and then I get stuck. So is there a sweet spot in there. Yeah, you're in the feedback loop. That is really, that is fascinating. You know, I'll go back to, well, I haven't really talked about it, but I've experienced both of what you're, you're going through now, which is, I have written something that had absolutely no structure. I just kept writing until it finished and I had no idea how it was going to end. I've also been in this situation where I've like planned the whole thing and I've, you know, written the thing and it's not exactly what, you know, what I wanted. It's always tricky to find the balance. I think what always helps me and maybe helpful for you is that I try to give myself like, like I try to give myself like a beginning, a middle and an end. And, and what's key about that is that you have to commit to the end. I think the hardest thing for all writers to do is to commit to the ending that you've like decided on. This is going to end with the, I don't know. This is going to end with the couple eloping in the back of a bus. But, but, but they're not sure, you know, what the future holds. And I'm describing the end of the graduate, which is like one of the best endings ever. But because that the ending feels, you know, usually the end of a play is like the beginning of another thing. And it's found when I've written a draft of something that I find like the first half of my play is actually just me trying to like, Oh, that that the first half of this play is just all exhibition. Yeah, one of the things that someone told me was like, and I think this was Steven Deets was a playwright and I took a workshop with him and he said, Alright, write your first draft or write the thing that you need to write. Cut it in half and start in the middle. The whole idea I know that sounds like insane. The idea was, or at least that the lesson he was trying to impart was that everything usually starts in the middle of something. Oh, right.  But like sometimes writing the thing and then like shopping it off. What we're doing with our like Corona haircuts. It's just like, just, it's just like, just cut it.  You just start a new document and you just start from there and see what happens. So I hope that's helpful having an ending, and then like throwing away like the beginning of where it feels like, Oh, I'm just talking about like who they are and what they're doing. Yeah, you don't need that. Everybody just wants to get to the heart of like, what's happening right it's like the beginning of train spotting where it's just like Iggy Pop. And they're like running it's like, okay, they're running but where are they going. Clearly it's like, you know, the play the movie itself goes back to what they're running from eventually.  Um, so it's just a great, you know, it's a great way to start a movie or start to play it's just like your middle of an argument and it's like what like we're, you know, what's going on. Yeah, hope that's helpful. And just really quick to kind of on the ending part of the question. I know what the ending what I want the ending to have thematically or kind of like the idea but I don't know how to create an event from that idea how to distill an actual event from the theme or the. Yeah, the idea of what I want to reach if that makes sense. Can I ask you a follow up question to that. Yeah, it's just like, what, what's the feeling you want the audience to have at the end. Like what do you want them to, to like, do you want it to be hopeful, do you want it to be like, do you want it to be, do you want like a single tier from every audience member when the lights. Yes, yes, yes, yes, more on the hopeful side of the one tier but yes. Yeah, but you know that's um, whatever I think it's really important to really visualize what that mood is rather than theme like what the mood is and try to as best as you can encapsulate that on the page. I didn't include this in the in the in the PDF but it was like I just watched like this little short Pixar movie called bow. You know the mom with the dumpling.  How did they do that, but they're like super good at like encapsulating a feeling that they want the audience to feel at the end of that, which was incredible like poignant sadness but at least like, like there's hope right to it's like the families reunited again in some way. I hope I'm not spoiling them, but if you get to see like bow it's really good. It's probably online you can probably see it but anyway, go for the go for what you want the audience to feel and then try to encapsulate that. Thank you so much. One more. Yes, so you are unmuted. Hi. Hey, I'm happy to be here. I, my question was a little more about collaborating than about the actual writing process. Great. Hold on one second. Oh, you're muted. There's another room. There's all kinds of excitement happening. Look out folks. So this is going to be our last question we are about to wrap up we will be back next week with another playwright. I believe you have everybody's contact information. So if there are any further questions conversations. Any, any more questions that people have. Is it all right if people reach out to you. Absolutely. And just to give you just to give you a little bit of a preview. So, is going to talk. He, he is just a brilliant playwright who's worked mostly primarily through theater for young audiences and adaptation but I think he's focusing on adaptation. So if there's a particular story or work that you're like dying to like translate for the page. I've done this before I've learned how to like reach out to authors to get permission and underlying rights and I can talk a little bit about that. But if you really want to like also get that extra like tool set of tools to like how do I adapt. Like an existing story, then I would definitely sign up for a lot of things. Yes, I'm ready. Sorry about that. I wanted to know I guess sort of I'm in a place right now where I'm not sure how to pick the people that I collaborate with. How do you build a team, especially like, I guess, to me it seems like every team has to be kind of specific to the project. It's the best team for a project, whether you're self producing or whether it's just like a table read or whether it's like creating a playwright group of friends that give each other feedback like how, what's the best way to sort of like start finding your people and knowing when they are your people and knowing when they're not. That's a super good question. And, in a way, cultivating that is a really important skill as a as a theater maker and as an artist. You know, sometimes it takes a it takes a lot of it takes it just takes a lot of like experiences to in order for for you to feel comfortable with particular people or or particular companies, whatever that may be. Because part of what you're looking for is, is this is the is the vision I'm trying to create for either a script or a collaboration going to be supported in a very particular way. The only way to really do that to find the right collaborators to be very specific about what you want in a collaboration and in the vision you're trying to tell. So a lot of it is on you to be as as clear and concise as possible. I would I would I would ask my directing students or even directing students to, to tell me exactly what the story was, and what they hoped they would essentially what what they, I hope that the message, you know what the message was exactly that they wanted to convey to an audience. And, and you almost have to find, you know, the one of the great things about directing and playwriting is that it is that you really want to come to the table with the very strong idea where as many strong ideas as you can. So that you're not putting upon your potential collaborators like an expectation of like, Oh, well what do you think because it's their job as collaborators to support your vision. You find collaborators that also have like exciting ideas that they can bring to the table. That's really great for any and all collaboration. For me, it's, I also try to go like a basic baseline for a finite collaborator is like kindness. Life is too short to find to work with with jerks in and if someone is not being supportive or isn't offering constructive criticism that's that's in a way is helpful to you.  I firmly believe that you'll find the right people and some certain projects may not be right for certain people but look to your particular circle that you have now whether it's like your your your fiercest fans, the ones who will like do anything for you. And then the ones like beyond that circle is like, Oh, these are people are really interested in working with because I like their work or what their style is. Maybe I can talk to them about my piece and see what kind of conversation I can have about working with them so it's a little tricky.  Basically, you just have to like them. Okay, there's a thumbs up from someone that's awesome. Thank you so much that was super helpful. I appreciate it. Oh, you're welcome. All right. That was that was like an hour and 20 minutes that was awesome. Thank you all for joining us. I hope you'll be joining us for the other for the other upcoming sessions. All right, thank you all so much. Thank you. Gracias everyone. This was really awesome. It was so lovely to meet you and feel free to reach out. If you if you'd like via my website or my email that I sent out.