All righty, so we have some exciting updates coming from Laurent over in Montreal. Super exciting, so thank you so much Zozo Coasters, I believe, on Instagram. I'm gonna double check that to make sure I got it right. ZozoCoaster.art on Instagram. I'm gonna link it down below as well for filming an update today. Or it was actually last week, we were just really slow getting this video out. But nonetheless, there's a lot to talk about, so I gotta get right into this. So as you could tell, Leviper, Levapier, however you wanna pronounce it, obviously isn't opening in 2021 and construction has been stalled since last year. That's super disappointing, but also makes sense. The park isn't that busy starting off this season and they were probably already forecasting that. So why start off the new season with a new roller coaster when you can open it up in 2022? Outside of Levapier, not opening this year and construction being halted, there's a new paint job to their tower observation deck ride. It is not operational, wasn't operational last year as well, but some new paint to it to make it look a little nicer in the skyline. I remember when I visited last year, that was probably one of the bigger eyesores in the park. So definitely really awesome to see them fix up this observation tower. Does make me question if that ride's gonna open up in 2022 or 2023 if they painted it. But as you can tell, it's definitely improved the skyline quite a bit. So if you're not picking up on it, LeRan seems to be going under a facelift. There's a lot of new signage and new shops under construction. Areas are closed off this season. So this area was open last year in 2020. So it's a little weird that it's not open this year. Don't know what they're gonna do in there. I know the park's revitalizing some things. We were sent some documents on some things they're working on, but I can't post those in this video. But nonetheless, we're gonna go over everything that you can see with your eyes right now. And again, LeRan's got a pretty exciting future in terms of visual upgrade. So definitely super excited to see what Six Legs does with this park moving forward. The transport ride is clearly not operational. The toboggan, almost like a, I don't know what you would call it, but the toboggan ride there, it's like similar to the fly at Canada's Wonderland. It is got a slight kind of like theming package, I guess, on its entrance and exit and around it. Not too much, but it got a little enhancements in terms of some signage, but LeMonstra is still not open as well. So this ride has been going under some maintenance, but the weird thing is from what I can understand, there isn't much going on in the ride. So there's a lot of rumors internally at the park that this could be one of the next RMCs in the chain. That will be super interesting. I don't personally have any confirmation of this, but I am hearing from people that work at the park that this is up for a possible RMC conversion down the road. And maybe that's why work on it has slightly slowed down or been non-existent. The ride has been closed for, I think, again, feel free to yell at me in the comments down below. Three seasons now, including COVID, nonetheless, the ride has remained unoperational, I guess I would say. There were signs of work when we were there last year, but very minimal and there were no one working on it. It was just, you could see where they would be working. So this is super cool. You can now get videos on, I believe they call this one Goliath. Yes, Goliath, it's slipping my mind. I haven't been on to a theme park in a while. So you can now get cool videos on Goliath and it's for purchase and it actually looks pretty cool. They have, I believe, a shot at the drop, shot going on the lift hill, one on the brake run. And I believe somewhere else, I'm not quite sure. They have rethemed their pirate ship. It looks really awesome. Super impressed with this retheming job. Definitely love the colors they chose and then that beautiful map signage they have off to the left there. So this is definitely one of the prime things for 2021 in my opinion. It looks beautiful and I can't wait to see what they're gonna do with the rest of the park. If they keep going down this road, I would love this blue brickwork to disappear as well. So if that were to disappear, that'd be awesome. They have gone cashless at the park and there are numerous stations for you to, I believe get, I don't know, like I guess like cashless cards or stuff like that.  So I'm not quite sure how it works. There's obviously a language barrier so I don't understand every bit of information that was presented to me and I really apologize for that. But if you know what it is, comment down below. But yeah, nonetheless, it's definitely, at least they're open as a theme park in Canada. So it's just really exciting. I will be going there as soon as I know for sure I won't be pulled over and my car won't be confiscated. I was gonna head up there two weeks ago. I just chickened out. I didn't wanna like risk it. So yeah, we'll head over there as soon as we know for sure that we're good to go with our car and it won't be confiscated. I'm trying to think of this anything that I missed. It's just a lot of signage upgrades. Obviously Le Vipierre isn't done. There's a lot of upgrades to their restaurants as well and a lot of restaurants are closed based off of the footage. There are new paving throughout the park so they've been focusing on the paving. Trying to think, there will be a fireworks show. There's not gonna be a fireworks competition this year but there will be a fireworks show done by Le Ronde. They're also gonna have people come to the park that maybe wouldn't be able to afford it from some of the poorer areas, less fortunate areas in Montreal to be able to come to the park one day just for them. So that's super exciting and that's really neat. I haven't seen a park do that or at least I haven't heard of a park doing that. So I just really liked that little detail that Le Ronde was gonna do this year and I definitely think that deserves some attention. I'm trying to think if there was any other information that was presented to me from the park. They are gonna have an overnight day which I really wanna try and get to. I believe there's an overnight day that they're gonna host so I really wanna try and get to that. There's an influencer day coming up at Le Ronde. I believe in the next couple of months there's an influencer day where they'll be the only ones in the park. I'm really trying, I'm making sure I didn't leave anything out. As you can tell, a lot of places closed. The park hasn't been busy, unfortunately. It hasn't been as crazy as I thought it would be. Again, I expect like Canada's 1 million to be absolutely insane. I think that's pretty much it.  I think I don't have it all in this video but just a lot of upgrades over the park and that's gonna continue into 2022 as well. So definitely super excited to see what goes on there. Hopefully you enjoyed this quick update on Le Ronde and all the things new for 2021. Thanks so much for watching guys. Have a good one, bye.


Thank you, German. It's a delight to be here today and to have the opportunity to cross some of the many many different exciting areas of research in the university. I thought for today what I would do is tell you a little bit about an area of research that's occupied me mostly over the last 10 years having been originally trained as a pediatrician and come to research rather by accident. I'll tell you a little bit about the problem of low glucose is in newborn babies. How the story of our research has evolved over the last 10 years or so and then a little bit about how it really happened, which isn't quite the way one would normally present it. So why low glucose is in newborn babies? Because they're really really common and if the glucose levels are low enough for long enough in newborn babies, that can cause brain damage. Because glucose is the major fuel for the brain. Babies have big brains.  At least that's the principle.  Mothers go up and down so do the babies. But with events happening around the time of birth glucose levels go up with stress and you can see this is around the time of birth. There's a very wide range and the levels are generally high and then somebody comes along and cuts the cord. So you've stopped the supply of glucose across from the mother. Glucose consumption hasn't changed because the brain still needs to work. So glucose levels fall and they fall very dramatically reaching a low point somewhere around one to two hours of age and then in most babies they get themselves sorted out. They stop pretending they're a fetus. They start to make their own glucose. Indeed, they start to feed and glucose levels come back up. But they take two, three, sometimes four days to get up to adult levels and in the meantime some of them get into trouble. And this dotted line is a level at which we often define low glucose levels and you can see a lot of babies go down below that level for quite a long period. So the problem with low glucose in babies is that you can't tell it's there without doing a blood test. Babies can't tell you they feel grotty. They can't tell you about their symptoms. So you have to measure blood glucose levels. So we end up measuring glucose levels in lots and lots of babies. In fact, turns out to be about a third of all births are at risk of low glucose levels. And although we do that, we don't actually know for any individual baby how low is too low for this baby. And so we end up treating babies at an arbitrary threshold. And we do think that repeated or prolonged episodes might be problematic. And then we don't actually know what to do when we treat them. So that we surveyed about 10 years ago all units in Australia and New Zealand who look after these babies and we said if you have a baby like this or like this, what would you do? And you can see that there's all sorts of things people might do which really means we don't know what to do. So everybody has their own view, including not treating them at all. So that led over a long period of time to the sugar baby study led by Deborah Harris, who was a PhD student at this university. And we said could you treat low glucose levels with dextrose gel? This is a high concentration sugar gel rubbed into the baby's cheek. Would that be more effective than a placebo gel with a feed in reversing low glucose? And the short answer is it was. And in this trial, which we published at the end of 2013, you can see the incidence of treatment failure. Glucose not coming up. Was substantially reduced in the babies who got dextrose gel. And more exciting, the incidence of being admitted to an neonatal intensive care unit needing to be separated from their mother to have intravenous, to have a drip to treat their glucoses was markedly decreased as was the rate of formula feeding. Now the thing I was most worried about is whether we would stuff up breastfeeding by giving these babies dextrose gel. It was entirely possible that the babies would think dextrose gel was a good idea and they didn't need to feed and we would stuff up their breastfeeding and that would be a bad thing. It didn't happen. In fact, we improve breastfeeding. I thought very exciting. I think what it did was simply reverse the low sugars. So it took the pressure off the mothers. The babies fed better because they felt better. We didn't admit them to intensive care. So we didn't separate the baby from the mother and breastfeeding went much better. Very exciting. We were tremendously excited by this finding. We recommended that this might be first-line treatment for this group of babies. As I said, we published at the end of 2013. It's now the middle of 2016. So 18 months later, there are publications, publications from different parts of the world saying, guess what? They found the same thing. Admission rates fell, breastfeeding rates improved. Those of you who know anything about the slowness of medical practice to change anything will know how miraculous this seems to me. It's tremendously exciting. So with good evidence, a simple, cheap, effective treatment can be introduced into practice quite quickly. And we found that perhaps the most exciting part of that study. The other study I'd like to tell you about is the child study. And like many good researchers, it started with a good hypothesis that turned out to be totally wrong. So the straightforward hypothesis was that the outcomes, the development of children at two, ought to be related to the severity, duration, and frequency of low glucose concentrations in the newborn period. It was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, I thought, and we started this study because we had over 600 children, all born at Waikato as it happened, who we had collected data on carefully, prospectively. We'd measured them very accurately. We'd looked after them. And we'd also included continuous glucose monitoring, which is not normally used clinically. And that gives you a reading every five minutes on what's happening to the baby's glucose. But that data was not available to the clinicians because you download the data at the end of the monitoring period. So it didn't change what people did in practice. They just did the usual thing with monitoring blood glucose. So within that study, there are babies who never got hypoglycemic because they were at risk and they didn't get low levels. There were those who did get low levels and were treated. And there was a smaller number who got low levels that we didn't know about because they were only detected on the continuous monitors and therefore were not treated. And we hunted these kids up and down the country and we saw them all at two years. And we said what was the relationship between development at two and glucose levels in the newborn period? And the short answer was there wasn't one.  That happens to be a lot. So there is no relationship between these outcomes. These are the mean and 95% confidence intervals and these measures of performance at two. But undaunted and because we'd extracted enough money from the NIH, we saw them all again at four and a half. Which is a miracle in itself because the HRC would never have funded us to see them at four and a half. And at four and a half, there is a relationship and there's a dose response. So here, for example, are the different outcomes, visual motor difficulty, executive function. This is related to severity, none mild severe, none mild severe. And the same is true of frequency, none, one or two episodes, three or more episodes. So it turns out to my great surprise that five years later, the hypothesis is in fact supported by the data. It's just it got stuffed up along the way, which is a good reason to hang in there and to keep looking if you think it ought to be there. And perhaps most alarming from a clinical perspective was this finding at two years. The red ones are the children who had some problem at two and the blue ones are the children who didn't. This is the continuous monitoring data, so it measures every five minutes over the first 48 hours. And what you see in all children is the ones who ended up having a problem at two actually had higher, not lower, glucosees in the newborn period. And that was even more marked in the babies who had low glucosees in the newborn period. So if you started low and then went high, you did much worse in our study. That's quite important. It's led to me to all sorts of hot water because the American Pediatric and Endocrine Society, who are terribly powerful in this area, last year published a recommendation that all newborn babies should keep their glucosees above four, above four after day three. And we're going, um, maybe not. It's an ongoing debate, but it does show the importance of the discussion. So what are we doing now? We're busy writing a new ground application, of course. We're always writing new ground applications, but we now really do think we should see these children again. And that the oldest one turns nine at the end of this year. But of course, nobody would give us any money until we'd done the study and shown there was something there to look at. So we're now aiming to look at them at nine. And we're writing the applications and piloting the protocol because we can't wait until we've got the money, or they'll be ten by then. We're doing a trial of dextrose gel to prevent low sugar levels. If it works to treat, could it work to prevent those changes and prevent that damage? We're doing a randomized trial of implementation strategies. How do we get people to actually use dextrose gel now we've shown it works? And that's been a very interesting project. About half of the units in New Zealand are now using it, and we're busy trying to get that up. I've been co-opted on to international steering groups where we might think about doing a different trial as to what level we should treat, and we're going opportunities in the commercial world for other treatments in this area, because the Americans have woken up to the fact that something is happening down in New Zealand that might be useful to them. So all sorts of surprising things come out of what started off as a very simple question. How did it really happen? It wasn't like that at all, of course. It was an important problem. One third of all babies getting a blood test when we don't actually know how to treat them or whether the treatment makes a difference. And I'd been interested in it since I was a student. But I wouldn't have actually got into this research at this time if I hadn't had a very pushy master's student, who having done her masters kept coming back saying, I really want to do my PhD, give me something that's interesting and important clinically. And I kept saying, I think you should work with somebody else, and I think you should come up with a different approach. And she kept coming back until I eventually said, well, here's a really big one if you really want to get into this. And it grew from there. Determination in the sense that you can't wait till you've got the money to start the study. None of this wouldn't have happened if we hadn't said, alright, this is what we want to do. We better get on with it, figure out a way to do it, and figure out how to get the money and the people and the support afterwards. And I have time and time again met people who say, if I get the money, I'll do the study. I think the only way to get it done is to say, we're going to do the study, where is the money? When I wrote the application for the funds to do the two-year follow-up, there were two areas where I had not a clue. I knew that I needed somebody who knew how to do the detailed analysis of the continuous glucose monitoring. Those every five minutes. You end up with many thousands of points. And I had not a clue how to do that. And all of the literature at the time said that vision was the thing that was most affected by low glucose levels, and I had no idea how to measure vision in two-year-olds. Not many people do, I have to say, but I didn't have a clue where to start, so I knew. But I already started seeing the children in piloting the study and writing the grant applications. And there were two things that made a huge difference. One was a stray advertising journal that crossed my desk. You'll get them. Here's our new journal. Please read it and subscribe. And I picked it up on its way to the rubbish bin. I looked at the front and it was a bioengineering journal and it was a whole issue on continuous glucose monitoring. So I looked through the table of contents and one of the authors lived in Christchurch. So I phoned him up. So that's how we got into continuous glucose monitoring. Not carefully planned. The other was what I call a reluctant cocktail party. I went to an event, a drinks event at the university, somewhat reluctantly because I was DVCR and I had to go and I wasn't really that interested, but I got talking to this really interesting young man who turned out to be a vision scientist who got very excited about the idea of measuring vision in two-year-olds and developed all the methodology that we used and is still collaborating with us ten years later. So don't avoid the cocktail parties and do talk to people. It helped that I had contacts around the world because I'd been going international meetings for years. I would never have got the NIH grant without knowing people to know who to ask. And those international contacts are terribly important and they're really important over a long period of time. You never know quite how they're going to be important. This turned out to be useful years after I met some of these people. And, of course, there's a fantastic team. We've now had more than 50 people working on these projects over the last ten years and I just get to come and talk about it, but they really do all the work. Thank you very much.


Hello everyone, today I wanted to talk about a topic that normally our resident astronomer Jared Head would be talking about, and that's Hayabusa-2 and its mission to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid this summer. Well Hayabusa-2 has taken its first image of that asteroid, and that's what I wanted to talk about today. This is your space pod for Tuesday, March 6th, 2018. Hayabusa-2 was launched on December 3rd, 2014 aboard an H-2A rocket, and it's a follow-up to Japan's first Hayabusa spacecraft, which rendezvoused with a near-Earth asteroid called Itukawa in 2005, and returned samples of that asteroid to Earth in 2010. And it was the first spacecraft to ever do so to return samples from a near-Earth asteroid to Earth, although the sample size was much less than expected, only a couple of grains of dust. However, Hayabusa-2 aims to address all the different weak points that were identified in that mission and return a bigger sample back to Earth. The probe still has over a million kilometers to cover in order to reach its target in June for a one-and-a-half-year exploration mission that will see the spacecraft dispatch a series of landers and an impactor, while also making contact with Ryugu itself to scoop up sample material and return that sample to Earth in December of 2020. The first optical images of Ryugu, only appearing as a really small speck of light there, have been taken by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on February 26th just this past week. And Ryugu is a 920-meter sea-type primitive body that is hoped to hold a treasure trove of scientific information that hopefully will have all the different preserved records of the early days of the formation of the solar system. And with that sample, we'll hopefully be able to advance that science even further. The asteroid was officially named Ryugu on October 5th of 2015, and its name refers to a Japanese folktale called Ryugu-jo, which means Dragon's Palace. The Dragon's Palace was a wonderful and magical palace at the bottom of the ocean, where the hero of the story, Urashimetaru, was brought by a turtle, and when he returned from that palace, he brought back with him a mysterious box, which, just like Hayabusa-2, will bring back a capsule with samples to Earth. Now, Hayabusa-2 was designed with ion engines to perform multiple long burns and adjust its course in its heliocentric orbit, and get a gravity assist from an Earth flyby and adjust its course as needed for the eventual rendezvous with a Ryugu in early June this year. Now, aside from the primary sample collection and return system that the space tax will have, it's also going to be dispatching four landers, the 10-kilogram mascot lander built in Europe for an in-sudo study of surface composition and properties, and three Minerva landers that were similar to a Minerva lander that was on the first Hayabusa spacecraft, which are going to deliver imagery and also have temperature measurements of the asteroid, and all the landers are going to make several hops across the asteroid's surface to take those different measurements at different locations, and another payload is going to be an impactor that's going to be deployed towards the asteroid and use high explosives to generate a really high-speed impact that's hoped to expose enough material so that it would be easier to collect a sample with Hayabusa-2 later, and there's going to be a deployable camera that hopefully will be used to document that impact of the penetrator, and here's just one other really cool time-lapse image that was taken by Hayabusa-2 on December 3rd of 2015 during its Earth flyby maneuver, and if everything goes according to plan, the return capsule should land in Australia, so hopefully everything goes well with this and we're going to see just in a couple of months what this asteroid's going to reveal, but don't forget if you haven't already to check out our last week's show, which we had Max Hope talking about launcher systems, and it's going to be a really interesting interview that we had for that, so definitely check it out, and be sure to check out every live show that we have every Saturday at 1800 coordinated universal time. Like, subscribe, and share these videos with your friends, and if you can support us on patreon.com or makersupport.com, but until the next time I see you guys keep moving onwards and upwards, and don't forget, add Astra to the stars.


It took me four tries over as many years to finally finish Breath of the Wild. Every time I started a new game, I just ended up getting bored.  And after finishing Breath of the Wild, I could see what people love about it. And I could see all the interesting design aspects and I could even say it was a pretty good game. I enjoyed much of my time with it, but I also had a mountain of complaints about things that I think are just downright bad. After finishing Tears of the Kingdom last Saturday, I'm ready to make a video talking about how good this game is that almost certainly also has way more complaints than the universal 10 out of 10 treatment this game is getting. In many ways, Tears of the Kingdom feels like a direct response to many of the criticisms I had with Breath of the Wild. And it's those changes that make Tears of the Kingdom a much, much better game than the original. So I do think there's just a ton of stuff to praise with this game, but there's also an awful lot of stuff I really didn't like about it. So today, I'm going to go over everything that is great and everything that is just kind of terrible and try to figure out what I actually think about this game. After the logo. What a sequel should do. There's always the question of how much needs to change for a sequel to feel worthwhile. Doom Eternal is one of the greatest sequels ever because it keeps the core idea behind the first game, but fundamentally changes so much of the combat that it feels like an entirely different thing. But other great sequels like Neo 2, Dark Souls 3, The New God of War, are more like slightly improved iterations on the design. My floor for a sequel is that issues from the previous game are at least improved a little bit. The new AC games don't feel like anything that's been particularly improved along the way. There have been changes for sure, but for every small change that's positive, there's another that's negative. As I've said, I don't really think it's debatable that Breath of the Wild is a well made game, obviously. It's definitely not my cup of tea in many ways, but it is carefully designed with a ton of stuff to love. I actually didn't really plan to play Tears of the Kingdom, but when I saw some of the trailers with the fuse mechanic, I became intrigued. I have a ton of complaints, both big and small, with Breath of the Wild. But one of my biggest issues was that I found the game repetitive and simple, and I found the puzzles so barebones and generic that they felt like a huge waste of my time that I was forced to slog through in order to get enough stamina to make the game playable. With all that said, after I got enough stamina, I did enjoy Breath of the Wild enough to finish it, but there were just so many issues from the combat to shrines to exploration that it just kind of confuses me that it's considered one of the greatest games ever. All that's just to let you guys know where I'm coming from before we talk about Tears of the Kingdom. In my opinion, Breath of the Wild was a game with a really cool physics system held back by a massively empty map, boring easy puzzles, pointlessly slow exploration, and well below average combat. A good game, you know, may be a great game, but hardly an all-time masterpiece. Now, let's go over Tears of the Kingdom and talk about the ways it is significantly better than the first game, while still sharing a few of that game's big flaws and adding a couple more. We'll break this down into a few sections for the sake of clarity, seeing as how the map itself is one of this game's biggest improvements, let's start with exploration. It didn't take long to realize that one of my biggest issues with the first game has been solved in the sequel. Breath of the Wild had your standard open world towers like every other one of these games, you know, you climb it to unlock the map. While there was some basic gameplay involved with this, it was for the most part pretty boring stuff, on par with Far Cry 3, that kind of thing. You push up on the stick, and you get to the top, and then you look around, but the view was so restricted that you didn't find all that much from up there, and jumping down from the towers didn't get you much distance at all. Tears of the Kingdom vastly improves this. First of all, several have like little puzzles or mini-quests required to get inside of them, but more importantly, instead of slowly and annoyingly climbing the towers, you're blasted up into the air, and it's like really insanely high into the air. Not only is this just more interesting, it's one of the biggest examples of an important change between the two games. The first game, for all of its absurd size, was actually really empty. Tears of the Kingdom is not empty.  People have pushed back in the comments sometimes on my repeated complaints about how boring Breath of the Wild can be, but it's a simple fact, man, that you spend like 95% of your time walking up and down hills in that game. This is no longer a problem. I can't stress enough how frictionless the exploration is in this game. The simple change of launching players 40 miles into the air from the towers totally changes the exploration. In the first game, the glider is just a slow way to fall. In Tears of the Kingdom, the glider is now seriously the primary way you move across the world. No matter where you're going, it is always easiest to just go to a tower and launch yourself up. It just so happens that I did the Rito Village dungeon first, and the ability that gives you a gust of wind is another one of the hugely impactful changes to this game. As you fall, you can spot multiple shrines and tag them, and often you can just coast on over to them. In fact, you can often launch yourself from one tower all the way over to the next tower, which like massively decreases the amount of pointless wandering. And the exploration itself is far more rewarding because you're almost never just walking for minutes in between places. In the first game, you'll see something from the top of the tower and then spend like 5 minutes slowly walking to that spot with literally nothing happening in between. In Tears of the Kingdom, you can't walk 90 seconds without finding something. A cave or a world boss or a different shrine. And then there's the underground areas that are just packed with enemies and resources.  All of Hyrule was like living in Seattle. There's still rain in this game, but you can now make potions to mitigate the slipping and you'll get some anti-slip armor and it just like rains way less often outside of a couple of zones.  All of these changes, big and small, add up to a game where exploring the map is actually fun in a way, to me, the first game simply was not. It's faster, it's more efficient, and there's easily three times as much stuff to do in the world. It's so much more dense than the first game, I almost always ended up sidetracked for my original destination. And to me, that is the sign of a good open world game. This is what Elden Ring did so well.  It's just an annoying time waster in between actual gameplay. Tears of the Kingdom is a tremendous improvement over the first game when it comes to exploration and that's important because that's what these games do best. Shines and Dungeons. Probably my biggest disappointment with Breath of the Wild is how simple all of the Shines are. While a couple had interesting puzzles, the vast majority were almost comically short, little puzzles that felt like a massive waste of time. One of the best ways to demonstrate this is that in the first game, I ended up only getting about 9 hearts and 2 rings of stamina before just beginning the game because the Shines were basically a chore I was required to complete to be able to climb more than 10 feet and not be one shot killed by blue enemies. It wasn't something I wanted to do, it was something I had to do to be able to beat the game. Then the four Divine Beasts ranged from like really good to not so good while also being extremely short. And the Divine Beasts boss fights were so easy and simple it almost felt like they were barely bosses at all. A couple of them I beat and was like oh really that's it, okay that's a huge chunk of the game that felt like massive downgrades from every previous Zelda game. I've been playing Zelda since the very first one released, I got that when it came out and the puzzles and Shines and Breath of the Wild felt like massive downgrades from every previous Zelda game.  Let's start with the Shines. In Tears of the Kingdom I fully upgraded my stamina and ended the game with something like 25 hearts because A, the Shines are way easier to find because of how the map towers work and more importantly, B, the Shines themselves are actually enjoyable. Instead of being tiny little rooms with obvious and rigidly prescribed solutions, the Shines and Tears are often quite big featuring multiple puzzles in each one. And because I almost created freedom as present in the skills that Tears gives you, I found myself consistently solving puzzles in ways the game did not seem to intend. They were simultaneously more challenging and less frustrating because they didn't revolve around figuring out exactly how the developers intended you to solve them. Instead, you're given this ridiculously huge set of tools and allowed to just make your own solution. And thank God there are no motion control puzzles in this game which is great because those are so horrendously terrible and motion controls just need to stop being a thing, please they are awful. They are just awful. Then the Sage dungeons are just light years better than the Divine Beasts. Each one has a lengthy approach that serves as its own navigation and combat puzzle and the dungeons themselves fully commit to the game's core design idea of giving you a bunch of tools and letting you figure it out. They're so free-form, many of them feel like they literally do not have an intended solution at all and the bosses are just massively better as well. They're all interesting set piece fights with complex mechanics and really great themes. Every single one is memorable. I played Breath of the Wild like a month before this game and I don't even remember any of the Ganon fights. They're that mediocre. I'll remember the boss fights here for a long time because they're that memorable. You're not just like fighting Ganon four times. You're fighting cool creatures that thematically fit in a way. Breath of the Wild's boss fights just don't. A tremendous improvement in every way and legitimately excellent stuff. Totally unique. The one thing that I genuinely loved about Breath of the Wild was its amazing physics interactions. I accidentally discovered that you can make fire choo-choo jelly by dropping regular choo-choo jelly near a fire.  I had the same reaction the first time I accidentally lit the grass on fire all around me or when I saw a monster get struck by lightning or when a monster froze himself by accidentally killing an ice enemy when trying to hit me. Those moments elevated Breath of the Wild from yet another boring big-ass open world game into something totally unique. The issue is you still spent like 95% of your time walking around a boring open world doing boring puzzles. Tears of the Kingdom takes those brilliant moments of physics interactions, which are easily the very best thing about the first game and designs the entire experience around them. Tears of the Kingdom makes Breath of the Wild look like an early prototype. Tears of the Kingdom is literally physics interaction, the game. And it all works preposterously well. So well it is like an indictment of every other development studio.  And yet in over 100 hours, I don't think I encountered a single bug. The game is absurdly polished aside from its framerate. But even there, it's amazing.  Diffuse mechanic is totally transformative in general as a gameplay mechanic. It has some flaws related to the way the menus work. But we'll get to that later. Simply from the mechanics itself, it's pretty much like nothing else in games. The puzzle and exploration implications for being able to take any objects and fuse them together is just amazing. Vehicle building is pretty interesting and the battery upgrades add an entirely different part to progression. But it's actually what you can do with arrows that had the biggest impact on the game for me. While we'll talk about the actual combat soon, the one thing about it that's legitimately great is using the fuse mechanic on arrows. Every item can be added to an arrow to add damage. But a shockingly huge variety of items have actual interactions. And all those interactions makes the resource gathering actually useful instead of a pointless waste of time. The water arrow clears a waste slime. Ice arrows freeze water. Fire arrows and pine cones makes an updraft to get up into the air. Wings increases range. Eyeballs guaranteeing crits. It's just like an amazing system. There's just so many more too. And the weapon fusing system makes monster parts far more valuable and actually incentivizes killing enemies. There was like literally no point to killing enemies in the first game. You could sell their parts, but money was already easy to come by. And you didn't even need it as you could find everything in the world. And combat was not good enough to be worth doing on its own. But now you improve your weapons not by progressing further into the game and waiting for better things to drop. Instead, you make high powered weapons by killing high powered enemies. As a result, killing strong enemies is always worth your time. In Breath of the Wild, you were seriously hurting yourself by fighting. Anytime you fought higher tier enemies, you came out of it with less resources than when you went in. That is totally solid tier because higher tier enemies drop higher tier parts to make your weapons better. And the toughest enemies almost always drop multiple parts. What this all adds up to is that Tears of the Kingdom improves on most of my biggest complaints with the first game. Breath of the Wild's best systems are massively improved as the map and physics and freeform exploration is wildly better. Its shrines are massively better. The dungeons are massively better. As a result, the game is just tremendously better than the first one. And that is awesome. It does not, however, mean that Tears of the Kingdom is a perfect masterpiece because there are several things the game does as poorly as the first game, such as combat. It's bad. It's just bad. Now it's time to start the bitching, but it's important you understand that the mountain of bitching you are about to hear does not negate the legitimately amazing stuff this game does, but it does matter. And it does impact the overall quality of the game. No modern game does everything perfectly, aside from Doom Eternal and Sekiro, obviously, but every other game aside from those two does have flaws. I don't need to combat in games to be great. All right, the new Star Wars game is really very good, even though the combat is only decent. The same goes for the last of us.  But I have to say, I find the combat and Tears of the Kingdom to be extremely poorly done, just on a basic design level. It does improve on the combat from the first game in several ways, but not enough and not in the places that matter most. One of the biggest problems with the first game is the pitiful enemy and encounter variety, and Tears has improved on that, which is appreciated. But with a system that is so limited, even more enemies would have been better. The one place that the game has really improved the combat is archery, but the melee combat that makes up the vast majority of the fighting has serious issues. This is an entire systems problem from the way that Link controls to the way the enemy movesets work. If there's one thing I'd hoped they would have really iterated on from the first game, it was this. But sadly, the melee combat is basically unchanged. Link has only a few things he can do in combat and all of them have problems. Link can do an attack. He can do a charge attack. He can block, he can parry, and he can dodge. The only one of these mechanics that actually works is the standard attack. Link's charged melee takes such an absurd amount of time to pull off and Link can stagger it out of any action by any attack. So it's basically never worth it to even bother trying it. Link's blocking works fine enough, but any enemy that's actually dangerous enough to bother blocking is usually able to break your stance and destroy your shields in one or two hits. Link's dodge and perfect dodge is just like broken. The controls themselves are clunky and sticky and the actual perfect dodge window seems like weirdly random. After over a hundred hours and playing the first game, I still cannot figure out exactly what the game requires to consistently get a perfect dodge. And while parrying is fun, the reward isn't even worth the effort. This isn't Dark Souls where a parry is rewarded with a critical strike. A parry staggers an enemy, sure, but hitting an enemy also staggers them. Blocking an enemy staggers them, hitting them with an arrow staggers them. So while I parried every so often just for fun or against bosses, it's actually basically another fairly pointless skill. All of this is made so much worse because the enemies in the game have some of the most poorly designed move sets you will ever see.  They attack so rarely that you'll stand there for like five or ten seconds waiting for them to attack so you can dodge. But you quickly realize there's no reason to do that when you can just mash the attack button to hit them instead. In fact, you can just spam attack and lock the enemies into a never ending loop of knockdowns. No single normal enemy is even close to a threat.  But here, again, the way the game works means you're always better off just running around in a circle, mashing the button. If it's pointless to dodge or parry against single enemies because it's more efficient to just mash the button and it's pointless to dodge or parry against multiple enemies because you'll be swarmed with attacks while you sit there waiting an eternity for an enemy to attack then the combat always just devolves into button mashing. Listen, man, I don't need every game to be hard and I don't need every melee combat system to be Neo or Sekiro. But this game would be massively improved with simple iframes on dodge instead of the barely functional system that is here. And the game would be far better having enemies attack way more often and having that be how the game pushes difficulty instead of the difficulty being how many monsters the game can cram into an encounter to turn it into a massive clusterfuck. And that is how combat works.  And this is a great example of the difference between difficult and frustrating. Tears of the Kingdom's combat is ridiculously easy. It is basically impossible to die once you get more than five hearts.  And you're always better off just gritting your teeth and taking the hits. And every fight against multiple enemies is both a certain victory and also an annoying slog. But you know what? So what, right? You have access to nearly infinite amounts of healing, which incidentally brings us to what I consider to be both of the game's greatest flaws. How are the controls like this? Both of the new Zelda games have an enviable amount of things the player has to deal with. There's excellent exploration puzzles, and then there's combat. There's an absurdly complicated cooking system that ties into the game's gathering system, which ties into the game's exploration system, which also ties into mitigating the game's status effects system. That's amazing. The fact that the game has light survival systems that includes cold and heat and stuff like that is really cool. The fact that the exploration requires stamina and battery power means progression is heavily tied to exploration, which is awesome. And the fact that you heal using food means that rewards for exploration are always important. So it sounds like all of these systems are nearly perfect. Aside from suffering from one critical flaw, almost every single problem you encounter in both of these games has the same solution. Open the menu. Cold. Open the menu. Hot. Open the menu. Add a stamina menu, health menu, battery menu.  Tears of the Kingdom can be so impressively designed, man. You constantly find yourself thinking, wow, how come this feels so much more ambitious than anything else? But then you take damage and you find yourself literally having to pause the game, open the menu, sort the total mess that is this game's UI, and then eat to heal and then unpause the game and keep going. I don't think it's possible to even exaggerate how insanely terrible that is. Now you might be thinking, OK, smart guy, how do you propose to fix that? Well, first of all, how about something super simple like the food menu defaults to being sorted? Why do I need to resort the menu every single time I open it? Ask yourself this, man, why would you ever want the food menu to not be sorted? Like, why the hell would I ever be like actually game? I would prefer all the food to be randomly arranged if you don't mind. In fact, why don't we just leave it like that? And I'll kind of just sort it every so often as needed. Like, how can the game be so insanely well designed here? And then this stupidly designed here. But that's not even a real solution, actually.  How about this? See this radio menu here? See, see how could easily have a few more things on it. And while we're at it, why is the map on the radio menu? Why is the camera on it? Dude, the map opens when you press select. Why would I ever need to open it with the radio dial? In fact, having it there is literally an inconvenience as the select button is one press to open. And the radio menu is one press, then aim, then press again to open. So there's no reason to ever open the map with the radio menu. Why is it there?  So the radio dial now heals, which would vastly, vastly improve the combat just by itself without even trying to fix all of the other issues that games combat has. I mean, one of the best ways I can explain it is this. Listen, man, you will constantly need to attach it to your arrows. And this is one of the game's very best features. This is like downright genius. OK, this arrow fusing mechanic, it's amazing.  So, you know, you'll be using this system a lot. And that looks like this. Right now, someone is about to type, you can sort that menu, bro. Yeah, I know. But what I don't know is what that even does. It feels almost random. How could a development team this amazing go through the entire development and nobody said, hey, guys, why don't we let the player set five items as favorites in this menu? And those will always be the first five items to attach to arrows. I mean, I thought of that like 15 minutes into the game. So what the hell? Then there's the total disaster that is the sage powers. Listen, these things are actually quite useful. The one that gives you the gust of air is so important that I feel legitimately bad for anyone who didn't get lucky and go there first like I did. Then the lightning and rock ones are good for both combat and mining. The water dudes are useless pieces, but 75 percent of those abilities are just fantastic design that are not only amazing gameplay additions that give the combat much needed variety and flair. They're also crucial quality of life upgrades.    How on earth did they arrive at the idea that you need to run up to these idiots and talk to them to use the skills? There was no other idea. Why aren't they on the radio menu or say, hold radio menu and then D pad over once or any number of button combos that would have worked like L, B and X or whatever, man. It's like absurdly goofy to run in circles trying to talk to these morons in a fight. I can't tell you how many times I'd want to use one of these abilities in combat only to find them literally running away from me.  It's so catastrophically bad, it's actually kind of funny.   Again, the obvious solution here is to hold the radio menu button and then D pad over to the skills. I mean, it's obvious. Amazing that this is the way it is that you have to walk up to these people and talk to them.  And this hilariously terrible control scheme just reinforces a core problem with the game, which is that the controls are horrendous. And Nintendo thinks they're so damn smart that you're not allowed to remap the buttons. Listen, I know this is how Japanese games used to be. I've been playing games for a long time. I'm an old dude who once owned a 2600 as a kid. But check it out, man, Nintendo has lost. The bottom face button is except in menus. And the right face button is go back in literally 99.99999 percent of games. This is how it works, but not here. Why? Why do I have to completely relearn several decades of muscle memory for just this game? What is gained by doing things differently than everyone else? Why is the jump button so stupidly mapped?   How about I am permitted to realize your scheme is trash and change it to the standard control scheme used in every game for the last 30 years?  Does it totally ruin the game? No, of course not.  Clearly and obviously not.  It is a design that has no benefit. At very best, it's no issue for a player. At worst, it pisses me off every 40 seconds for 80 hours. Why? And as with every game ever, I refuse to continent's people who ever defend developers who do not allow button remapping. There is quite literally no defense for it at all. No legitimate argument can possibly be made for the position that the player should not have the core basic functionality of remapping all control inputs.  To be honest, they never really were. Right from the first game, you had to be old enough to have some patience to play these things. And anyone who can't be trusted with the ability to remap buttons can't be trusted to solve puzzles.  Are you trying to waste my time? This is the last thing we'll go over. Tears of the Kingdom is ridiculously huge. It is just absurdly packed with super high quality content.  Then there's the Sky Island, which is like 20 hours of amazing stuff. Then there's the underworld. I played this game, I don't know, like probably close to 100 hours. And I swear to God, I ended up exploring like 30% of the underground area. This game demands a tremendous investment in time. And you can't even play other games at the same time because you need to lock in on the crazy controls. I went back to Jedi Survivor a few times and it took like half an hour just to remember which button closes the menus. Thanks, Nintendo. What I'm saying is that a game that demands so much time and has so much amazing stuff really, really doesn't then need to waste a bunch of my time. But Tears does, in fact, waste so much of your time. I cannot believe how terrible the dialogue system is here. Why do I have to slowly go through like five dialogue boxes for a single paragraph? Why is it so slow to take a horse out? Why does the horse guy give me the same useless tutorials about horses even 80 hours into the game?  All of the shrines have you walk up and press a button. Then there's a little cutscene. Then you walk into the door. Then there's a loading screen. Then there's a little cutscene. Each one of those hundred plus shrines you will do will waste like seven seconds of your time as you mash the button to skip the pointless watch link. Slowly walk in cutscene. Every tower demands you watch the same cutscene of Link being hooked up to the contraption. Every conversation takes like five times longer than it needs to, which leaves you mashing the skip button over and over. Why isn't the dialogue box just bigger so I don't need to skip each individual line of dialogue rather than waiting for it to slowly scroll out? You cook so much food in this game and the cutscene will need to be skipped several hundred times throughout this game. Hundreds of times. You'll have to wait for the pop-up to show you what you've cooked. Then press B to dismiss it. Like five hundred times you have to do that. Why? At the end of every single shrine, you walk up and have to skip a cutscene, then wait for the pop-up to very slowly appear, then dismiss that, then skip the next cutscene. Answer me this, man. Is there even one person in the universe who wants to watch the post-triang cutscene more than once? Now, explain to me if anyone on Earth wants to watch this post-triang cutscene for the hundred and thirty seconds time. Why is it even here?  This ethos is everywhere in the game. And once you start noticing it, it just like builds up on your shoulders. A tremendous weight of frustration. Every NPC conversation is so painfully and pointlessly slow. Every time you level up and buy a heart is so slow.  Breath of the Wild story is pure garbage.  Tears of the Kingdom actually has a very good story in there. And it puts a big glowing picture on the ground to let you know where it is. Awesome. But then you have to like slow walk over the entire area to find one tiny pool that only appears when you walk near it. Why? How is that interesting? Walking like 500 yards slowly to try and find one spot. I just, I mean, that's horrendous man. Why? And while the story is decent, it leaves massive holes that I would have liked filled in. And why on earth is it told out of order? The second cutscene I got was Ganon killing the Queen. I literally saw that one before I saw almost anything else. It kind of hurts the pace of a story when a main character dies in the second cutscene before you even see them speak. Surely it would have been better to have the 12 story cutscenes be in order, right? This is in Pulp Fiction or Memento, man, Zelda. It's a very simple, basic story with high quality cutscenes told out of order for no reason at all. It kills it. That's just a terrible decision that I don't even understand. Why would you actually have a decent story but ruin it by having the player stumble upon it out of order? Shouldn't the writers decide what order I get the story rather than the blind luck of where I go first?  Speaking of which, the progression in Tears of the Kingdom is eventually masterful in its ability to smooth out the game. But even there, there are issues.  It takes hours to make the game feel playable. I lived with a bunch of one hit kills because getting extra stamina is mandatory for making this game even tolerable. Once you get that second ring of stamina, the progression is basically perfect. But holy hell, man, that first 10 hours are miserable. I would prefer the game's default stamina to be two rings because, my God, it is so boring and annoying to only be able to sprint for two seconds and climb like 10 feet. And another thing, Tears is insanely freeform. While you get much better direction in this game than the annoying zero hand holding you get in the first one, I still find it annoying that you can end up in weird situations where you get the parry tutorial like 55 hours in. I went directly to Rito, just, you know, randomly. I just went that way. And I ended up doing all the game's basic tutorial type shrines like dozens of hours in, which then feels like a huge waste of my time. Surely actually assigning the shrines chronologically is a better idea, right? Wouldn't it be better to make certain that the first five shrines are the combat tutorials or make it so an early quest directs you to those or don't have the tutorials in the shrines? I mean, I don't want to have to slog through extremely simple shrines like that 80 hours in. I do understand that this creates all sorts of different follow on issues in the design, but this game often feels strangely balanced depending on which direction you happen to walk first. I don't know, that's probably the least of my issues. But still, it's a thing and there's a bunch of other stuff like that. All this is to say the tears of the kingdom is an impressive game.  I almost broke my thumb mashing the skip button every time a pointless cutscene of Link walking played and every NPC had me grating my teeth being like Jesus Christ.  I'm about to fight the final boss, dude. Wrap it up. So here's the bottom line. I don't make these videos to convince any of you to change your mind. I make these videos to give my opinion and then to talk to people in the comments. I love it when I have an unpopular opinion and then I find that a bunch of other people feel that way too. And I also love it when people disagree with me and point out a mistake I made. This whole essay isn't trying to convince anyone that tears of the kingdom is a bad game. Even if it was, I wouldn't be able to do that, but the game is not. In fact, it's one of the most impressive things you'll ever play. It's just light years better than the first game. It vastly improves exploration, puzzles, dungeons, sidequests, and even the combat, while still pretty terrible, is slightly less terrible, slightly. But again, it just kind of annoys me that none of these flaws are even mentioned anywhere. Like, you'd think that this game was absolutely perfect and could not be improved by the way it's written about. But the combat is bad. The NPC Tylog is both bad and terribly implemented. The UI and quality of life stuff is miserably bad.   Just even having average melee combat would make this game so much better. So Tears of the Kingdom is definitely an amazing game full of innovative design. It improves an awful lot of stuff, but it also suffers from baffling issues at its core.  I can't believe it. I don't understand how that's a thing and why it seems like I'm the only person in the world pissed off about it. I don't understand. No one else has annoyed at that. No one else is like, come on, dude.   I refuse to believe it. Surely I'm not the only inpatient person in the world. I hate this guy, man.    Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.


Guys, I'm going to talk about procrastination in this video. I have a question and if I'm getting the question right I hope I am the question is When we're putting off important work or We're not working towards a goal that we have that we've decided is important for us There are seems to be blocks in the way of us following through in those on those goals And the question is is it are those blocks real? I think this is what the question is saying at least are those blocks real or are the blocks that we create in our mind and The answer to that I would say is that they're the blocks that we create are almost all mind made So it's to do with the stories we tell ourselves About the work that we're interested in doing and want to pursue So that's basically one of the things that I did in the Procrastination course that I made recently. It's a systematically looked at all of the blocks to actually get in over procrastination and those blocks are about the way we frame the work that we have to do and In terms of how important we think the work is Essentially if you just start to question some of those ideas you have about The project that you're engaged on or your inability to take action or how hard it is or Framing it said that it's going to be difficult or a challenging thing to overcome if you start to question some of those core beliefs that we have or those Assumptions or myths or blocks Then the problem just goes away So it's not about a character flaw you have it's not about you being lazy or defective somehow Or it's not something that another system you learn is going to fix That's not going to be what it is that helps you get past procrastination in Decision or in action It's very simply just look at the blocks. I'm creating the mental blocks I'm creating and start to inquire start to challenge them With the goal of never feeling overwhelmed never feeling stressed Taking care of myself making this process as enjoyable for myself as is possible And you'll find that your motivation just goes way way up. It's about taking care of yourself it's about having fun and enjoying it and Seeing daily consistent progress towards your goal when you have that feeling of I'm making progress Even if it's small on a day-to-day basis that all gathers pace and you start to build momentum and you start to see positive feedback So the question about whether these blocks are real or not. I would say the blocks certainly feel real When we experienced them when we're lying on the couch and we just don't want to take action and we can't understand why But in truth, they're just assumptions. They're about the stories. We've been told about what it means to be productive what it means to be an effective productive person and how we associate that with being a good person and What if it was a lot simpler than we were told it was and What if we start to feel alive when we start to make consistent steps in the right direction the direction that we know we want to move and Seeing it is easy and achievable So I hope that answers that question and if you have any other questions, you can send them to me my procrastination course is available now on the website and it's designed to Basically help you move through all these blocks and it's moving out of the old paradigm of You got to work harder. You have to hustle. You have to grind push yourself all the time To take it in a little bit more deeper to take it to a place where you're developing self-awareness and self-compassion for yourself and Making progress on your goals and actually achieving your goals rather than Staying in indecision for too long. So you can check that out on the website if you're interested and Thanks for watching today's video. You can like this video subscribe if you if you enjoy the content and I'll see you next time


Welcome back to my channel. So today I had a few things I wanted to tackle just organizing a couple parts of my kitchen and also taking down some winter decor. I'm just honestly tired of seeing it. I'm ready for just kind of a fresh neutral decor until spring hits. So one of the first things I did is I got rid of my Christmas soaps that were by my sink and I'm using this one from Grove. They actually have a hand soap as well but this is the dish soap and I've been using it for the last couple days because this was filmed a few days ago and it is amazing. So as always there's a link in the description bar for you guys to get a lot of free products with your first order from Grove. So this was the biggest area I really needed to tackle was like our food storage. I really don't have a pantry so it's always a challenge for me to figure out how I'm gonna store our food. And there was a lot of things to be honest that were in there for a very long time so I was looking for outdated stuff and stuff that we just simply don't use. There's a lot of that as well. So I washed this out and put out some of it back in that I wanted to organize and put into jars and things. Well I moved on to the next cabinet so I didn't leave it like that. I just put the food back in there for the moment. And then I went to this cabinet and got out all of these canisters. I used to do a eating style that was a little bit different. It had a lot of extra ingredients that you needed for different kinds of recipes and things and I don't eat that way anymore. So this stuff has literally been sitting in my cabinet for months, a very long time, and just needed to be taken care of. And I didn't want to use this organizational system with these big jars for now. So I just washed them all up and took them down to our canning shelves in our basement. And if you keep seeing the camera moving it's just my little ones. They were moving my tripod around while I was washing these jars up. And then I took everything down to my canning shelves and started to put everything into jars that I wanted in the cabinets. Things we use on a regular basis. And the way I decided to label these I debated on getting a labeler but then I realized that if you use a permanent marker it actually stays on pretty decently and you can wash the jar and just scrub it off with some dish soap. So I decided to go with that method just because I had a permanent marker and it didn't have a label maker and didn't really want to take the time to go to the store to get one. So this is what I decided to do and I think it'll work best just because then as I change things out of these jars I can just wash it off and use something different. And then I have this bin in the other cabinet where I'm putting all of those bags and some other bins like you see with these baking ingredients that I moved around. I just decided to put the baking ingredients into jars instead of having them inside of those little cubies and then I can use those for snacks and other things like that. So this had been a pretty big mess. I'm not going to lie. And as you can see I have a magnetic system on the door but I just needed some bigger jars to put my stuff into. So I decided to do a mixture of the magnetic things on the door and jars. And this cabinet has been a catch-all. It's been a really big mess. I had all of my tumblers down in there and it just they were just getting thrown in there and they were not being kept orderly. So I decided to put them in a bin and we'll see how that system works. And then I went back to this kind of catch-all cupboard and just weeded out things that we really were not using. There was a lot of small appliances that I wasn't using that are getting shipped off to the thrift store. And so I just decided to put everything in here that yeah that we actually use. And then down in here there was jars.  So I just weeded all of those random things out. And then this was the next day. And this is my coffee bar which I do use for a good amount of storage as you're gonna see. And again it was just getting dumped around. You know how it is with your kitchen. It feels like about every six months you have to go through reorganize get rid of things you're not using. It's just a very constant thing to keep up with. So again I went back to the jar idea. I'm really thinking this is gonna work out well just because I have so many jars. And as I need to put some away or add some to where I'm storing jars for different ingredients or things that are floating around that need a place to go I think it's gonna be my most flexible solution. So I'll let you guys know I'll keep you updated on whether or not I feel like it's working well for my kitchen. And again just putting away a lot of winter decor getting ready to just go into a neutral season for a little while. And then I just kind of went through these drawers. They were pretty much cleaned out as far as decluttered but there was a few things that needed to be pulled out and sent off to the thrift store so I just weeded those things out. Okay you guys so I'm just gonna show you what all I got done. I took the winter decor out of here. I'm just simplifying everything until spring decor hits. So everything's just very simple looking. Same with everything over here. Just very clean and simple looking. So I'm gonna show you what I did. There are some areas I did not hit just because they're pretty much organized. If you guys want to go back and look at my last kitchen organizational video you can probably see what I did. But up here I just have a lot of space where if I want to put more things in jars I can. And I just used the marker on everything. And then things that didn't fit in a quart sized jar. I actually put a second one behind it just because that was the best solution for what I was doing. And then this here has my canned goods in it. And yeah this stuff is just very very very simplified. There was a lot of stuff that we weren't using or that was pretty much out of date. And so that's why it looks very empty over there. And then up here I just left space for my cereal boxes and bags. I feel like that those things always need space. And I'm always trying to shove them in. And I decided to just dedicate this whole cabinet up here to doing that so that we're not having traffic jams constantly. And then this was my biggest biggest tackle that I had. I went through here and I had had kind of like chalkboard labels on all of these. I ripped them all off and I'm using just the Sharpie idea. The same with the glass is that it does come off if I just like scrub it really good or use a Mr. Clean eraser. So I got baking things up here. These little guys actually hold my like flavorings and stuff. And then everything else I put into jars and labeled.  The whole entire container when I buy it doesn't fit in these. So it was great to have stuff that would fit into like have a jar that everything would fit into. Okay.  And I decided I'm going to actually transfer that stuff to the closet that's in our bathroom. So that's going to be another organizational video at some point. So now I just have these two bins. One of them holds like tea and coffee like carriers, tumblers and things like that. And then this one was desperately needed. It's just their cups and then all the lids. And it was just a disastrous mess in here and just needed to be put into like one container. The next cupboard there's nothing up there yet. I didn't really know what I wanted to put up there. But this rack thing right here and then the one in here they're both from Ikea. Just if you guys are curious. So I put the girls bowls and plates and their bowls and plates are from Target. I'm going to try to answer as much of this stuff as I can so that I'm not getting comments and questions and you guys just know. So yeah so that's all put in there because what was happening is I was trying to put all this stuff and their cups in this area and it was making quite a jam up. And then you guys saw me move these plates back over here. They were in the dining room and then these are just bowls and plates. This is stuff we use on the regular basis. And I did not get this cleaned up yet. It is a winter decor piece but I'm going to be doing like a neutral decorating video I think of like just what I'm decorating with for between winter and spring. And then this is just the cups that I use on a regular basis every day. And down here I moved some things around and just got rid of stuff. I mean I got rid of like our waffle iron. Just some other things. So there is the blender, a pitcher, my regular crock pot. I do have an Instapot which I store in the closet by our front door. And then just kind of went through and got this stuff that I really do use on a pretty regular basis and got them out of this Lazy Susan over here. I really do not like Lazy Susan. I don't know if you guys do but I really don't like them. They're very inconvenient and I actually almost left this just completely empty but I found a use for it. It's not going to look pretty but I am just putting like lids and jars in here because they I need a place for them to go whenever they haven't made it down to the canning shelves in our basement. And sometimes I mean I do use these for drinks and things. So I just needed something where it doesn't I mean I have a lot of space and I can just stick them all in here and if one falls off it's not a big deal. It just yeah it worked out really well for that. Then down here everything stayed pretty similar to what it was. I do have some space that's open now. I love my Command Hooks. Under my sink I have my silicone bibs that I use for the girls hanging on Command Hooks. Here I have the pot holders and then in here is just like my cutting boards and a couple dishes.  I had brought in like that shelf that was corrugated metal and I brought in a lot of metals during winter time and so I'm just cleaning that out. So this is kind of my neutral of what I'm going to do for the moment. And this dresser was something I got for $5 at a yard sale and I've repainted it a couple times. It does need repainted right now because there's coffee stains and stuff up here. But down here is if you guys saw is just kind of where I keep ziplocks and then on the bottom I keep containers. I just kind of weeded some things out. I didn't really change like how it was organized but I did change the top drawer. And in here I have an empty space and then extra coffee cups and this is mainly tea making stuff like in here is the honey and cinnamon sticks and then my different types of tea that I use on a regular basis. My collagen I mix into my coffee when I'm drinking coffee. So I just yeah just got it very simplified. I'm really happy with it. I love love love minimalism. So yeah this is where I'm gonna leave you guys with the state of the kitchen for now. Like I said I'm gonna be doing a decor video very soon of just like kind of neutral decor. And I'll just point out a couple things here really quick. That picture came from my grandma. This towel because I get questions about stuff all the time is from the Target dollar spot. The big cutting boards from Ikea. These guys are actually from Michaels. The rod they're on is from Ikea though. This is from the Target dollar spot. This is from Amazon and if I can remember I'll link this for you guys. The jute runner because it's a very good price. The last I checked. Those are just a couple things in here. The tension rods from Walmart. I've had that question. These are actually like flower sacks hanging up there and the little stand with my soap on it is from Hobby Lobby. So I hope that you guys enjoyed this video. If you're new to my channel don't forget to hit the subscribe button. Give this video a like for me and I'll see you in my next video.


Hi, I'm Sergio and I'm here today to show you how you can use that SDI and video routing system within the larger TV studio so you can access all the cameras within our live streaming room for a live streaming project or anything else like that. So right in this little section you'll see that we do have four SDI tables, a green, a black, a red, and a blue, these three cables are connected to HDMI to SDI converters and then these get routed downstairs to our basement and then ultimately to the computer in our live streaming room. So when you pull up Vmix in that computer and you have cameras plugged in here, you can access the cameras within the studio in that room. So these three HDMI to SDI converters are connected to HDI cables, so we do have three drops within the studio. One of them is right over here. You can use this cable plug it in and it'll show up over in Vmix. There's one in the back right by the curtain system over here. And lastly the last one is up top here. Sometimes it's hanging, sometimes it's coiled up and that's the last drop. So yeah, you've got three different HDMI cables that you can plug into and then that those cameras would show up on Vmix. And that's it. So thanks for watching. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to let us know. Thank you.


I'm sure that most of you know or at least have heard about Arthur. If you're living under a rock, then let me give an explanation to you. It's a Canadian-American animated TV show on PBS about the lives of a young artvert named Arthur Reid, his friends and family and their daily interactions with each other. The show premiered in 1996 and is still making new episodes to this day, going on to be the second longest running cartoon in the US, behind The Simpsons and has become one of the highest rated shows on PBS Kids. I first watched this show when I was a kid back around 1998 and quickly became a big fan of it. The animation was good, the plots were great and the characters were pretty likable, except for some like BW. However, season 16 was where things kinda started going downhill for me. The classic traditional animation was replaced with new flash animation, which felt pretty stiff compared to the more vibrant former. The new characters were introduced such as Ladonna Compson and her younger brother Bud, who both felt like pretty original opposites of Arthur and D.W. to me and some of the characters' relationships started falling apart. One of my least favorite episodes from this era of Arthur was, So Funny I Forgot to Laugh, because not only was Arthur out of character in this episode for bullying Sue Ellen, he didn't get as much harsh punishments. Anyways, enough with that introduction, let's get to the real subject of this story. I was on the way to home from my work as a janitor at the PBS headquarters one day when I noticed a USB drive on the ground. Curiously, I picked up the USB drive and went into my car to go home. When I got home, I plugged the USB drive into my computer and a single folder came up named ArthurSeason16.zip. There were a few MP4 files in that folder, consisting of full episodes of Arthur from Season 16. However, two of these files caught my eye. Those files were named ArthurSeason16episode10a.mp4 and ArthurSeason16episode10a.mp4, respectively. Curiously, I opened the first file and little did I know that it was a big mistake. As the file started playing, the intro to Arthur started playing, with that familiar catchy tune of Believe in Yourself. The intro was normal, no distorted music, no creepy changes, none of that. When the episode started and it was so funny I forgot to laugh, one of my least favorite episodes like I said before. However, my curiosity let me watch the episode and it was perfectly normal. Until it got to the end. After the part where Arthur became displeased at Suelle in declining his apology to her, it showed a scene of the Reed family's TV display in the title screen of a parody of the original 1991 Sonic the Hedgehog game named Manic the Hedgehog. It then showed Arthur playing the game on a console that looked like the Mega Drive slash Genesis. It then showed Suelle in knocking on the front door of Arthur's house. Jane then opened the door, asking what Suelle in was here for. Suelle in then answered saying that it was none of her business and went inside the house to where Arthur was playing Manic the Hedgehog. Suelle in then asked Arthur to apologize to her, but Arthur said, Not right now. Suelle in then growled in frustration as Arthur said, I've got to pee now, so see you. Arthur then stopped playing and went upstairs to pee. Suelle in then looked around the room for something to kill Arthur with when she spotted the Mega Drive-like console under the TV. Suelle in then said, Ah-ha! and pulled out the console, as she said. If he believed me, then I'm gonna bully him back. Arthur then went downstairs to the den where the console was and said, Hey Suelle in, I'm... Arthur then paused as she saw Suelle in slowly walk up to him with the console he was playing on. Arthur then said, Ah, Suelle in? Suelle in continued walking to Arthur with the console in her hands. When Suelle in was close enough to Arthur, she slowly lifted the console up in midair as Arthur said, Wait, what are you doing? Suelle in then started violently hitting Arthur with the console as Arthur screamed in agony. Arthur told Suelle in to stop and give him another chance, but Suelle in said, Too late, there's no going back now. Blood then started to come out of Arthur's head and nose. At this point, I was in disbelief and shocked. Why was Suelle in doing this? Sure, it was out of character for Arthur to bully her, but this was way too out of character, even for a character like Suelle in. Suelle in then started smashing Arthur's face with the console. Blood was splattering on the console and on the floor, and Arthur's glasses were being shattered, causing lots of blood to run out of Arthur's face. Brain matter and guts were also flying out of Arthur's face. At this point, I was starting to feel nauseous. Suelle in then proceeded to rip open Arthur's torso with the console, with blood and guts coming out. Suelle in then finally decapitated Arthur with the console. Suelle in then walked out of the den. Arthur was then given a shot of Arthur's dead body, mutilated, with tons of blood running down, brain matter and guts scattered on the floor. Glasses shattered, torso ripped open and head cut off. The shot was so horrifically nauseating that I almost puked. It then showed David in the kitchen putting some macaroni and cheese on a plate. He then exited the kitchen and walked into the den as he said. Arthur, dinners. It immediately cut to an outside shot of Arthur's house at night with David screaming in the background. It then showed two police officers handcuffing Suelle in as one of the police officers said. Suelle in, you're under arrest for one count of murder. Suelle in then said. But I'm not the bad guy, Arthur. One of the police officers then interrupted Suelle in by saying. Do not give me that excuse. As the two police officers carried Suelle in out of the house, it then showed David standing with Jane and D.W. as the former said.  D.W. then ran away from David and Jane as she cried over Arthur's dead body. I'm sorry, Arthur. I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have been so annoying to you. I regret it. D.W. said as she cried heavily over Arthur's dead body. Jane then went up to D.W. and said. Cheer up now, D.W. I know it's hard to use someone like Arthur, but please try to get over it. D.W. then said. Okay. As Jane, David and D.W. left the den, leaving just a shot of Arthur's dead body on the screen, fading away after a short while. The episode then ended there. I just looked at the screen, now completely devoid of what I watched. How can someone mess up such an innocent kid's show like this? I took the USB drive out of my computer and put it in one of my bedroom drawers. I didn't want to destroy it, though. I still own the USB drive, although I refuse to watch the contents that are on it again. I'm also not gonna take any screenshots or footage of this alternate ending, since I don't want to get into any legal trouble with PBS and the other companies that own Arthur. If you know anything about this alternate ending, please let me know, since I would like to have closure on this.