So I've been busy with games, playing a few old favorites while also working through some games I'd had my eye on and planned to maybe write about. But during all that I've also, like always, still been playing Destiny 2. Now Year 2 of Destiny 2 was mostly a huge success. With the launch of Forsaken, Destiny 2 finally moved not only beyond Destiny 1, but really became the game that most players had always hoped it would be. Destiny systems were perfected, story and lore were improved to varying degrees, and there was a large amount of high quality content implemented. During that time, there was the huge revelation that Bungie and Activision had severed their relationship making Bungie a self-publishing AAA studio. This got players excited and also gave Bungie a nice little buffer around the Eververse store that allowed them to start to monetize way more aggressively, far more aggressively than they had even under Activision. Well, I have now played a ton of Shadowkeep and I have some opinions. Probably some fairly unpopular opinions, but we're going to break this up into a few sections. Shadowkeep's campaign, its seasonal activities, Armor 2.0, and the Eververse store. And let me preface all of this with the following disclaimer. Destiny 2 is still in a good place. The game is wide, gameplay is excellent, aside from a lack of difficulty in many places, and overall, it's just a great game. There, Shadowkeep, after the logo. Disappointingly decent. I'm going to start with the two parts that I think most players will perhaps disagree with, and that's because this is all a matter of expectations. Shadowkeep, as an expansion, was acknowledged as being smaller than forsaken. This is understandable and in keeping with the same cycle that we had in Destiny 1. Rise of Iron had lots of great things, including a fantastic raid, but it was considerably smaller in scope and had a much less fleshed out story than the Taken King. While I acknowledge that, I think it's also important to recall that Shadowkeep cost the same amount as Forsaken, and so I think it is absolutely fair to compare them on a value scale. And to be clear before we get going, I'm not talking about the free-to-play value of Destiny 2. What players get for free in D2's new model is absurdly good value. You get just a mountain of extremely high-quality content, as well as one of the most mechanically satisfying shooters ever made. We are only looking at Shadowkeep here, and then the campaign, not New Light. And on that front, I mean, Shadowkeep has several really great moments, both visually and in its gameplay, but overall it just kind of disappoints. First of all, the narrative of the campaign is nearly non-existent.  Remember those ominous black triangles we saw over two years ago, at the end of the launch campaign? And then we saw them again briefly in Mara Sov's Throne World? Well, early in Shadowkeep, you're treated to one of the campaign's only really affecting moments when you come around the corner and are confronted with this.  Well, sadly, the answer is no. The entire campaign of Shadowkeep can be summed up as follows. There's a pyramid ship on the moon, it spawns old bosses, you kill those bosses, then the pyramid talks to you for a second, then it's over. There is zero narrative progression. It is almost amazing just how bad Bungie is at telling a story at this point, and I can only continue to wish they would take the ideas and stories in the grimoire and put those literally into the game. Certainly, the campaign hints at some really cool stuff, it hints at a broader and interesting story, but when we look back at five years of Destiny storytelling, I'm not sure why we should trust that it'll be all that interesting when it's actually told by Bungie. I don't think anyone can credibly argue that what's here is good storytelling. It's not hilariously catastrophically awful, it's just low effort and par for the course, takes no chances at all. And again, you cannot tell a good story if you take no chances. And unlike in every other release thus far on Destiny, there's nothing else. Shadowkeep has zero adventures. Instead, it has replayable nightmare hunts which are just below average. They're basically half strikes with almost no story and very uninteresting gameplay mechanics. Destiny 2 and its expansions had some of its very best campaign storytelling in its adventures. Most of which were extremely underrated because Bungie so botched its progression and reward system, there was no reason to play half of them. That's simply not here. Now I understand trying different things and I understand a desire to make the dev time devoted to adventures be used on something that can be better used for continuing player engagement. But nightmare hunts are simply very weak narratively and gameplay wise. They're a disappointment, not bad, just not really very good. Eris Morn is used poorly. We learn nothing about her. We don't learn why she was there in the first place, we don't learn what she was doing, how she caused all this, what she believes, who she is. Bungie is lucky that they have great animators, artists, and voice actors because the people doing the writing have contributed almost nothing to the fleshing out of these characters. Whether it's Cade 6 or Eris Morn, what we know of her is almost entirely gleaned from art design and voice acting. It's just another example of a strange refusal to ask anything about these characters. When you write a fictional character, and I say that as someone who has written many fictional characters, you need to ask yourself questions. Who is this person? What do they want? What do they fear? Where are they going? If Bungie has done this, they aren't doing it very well. We get a character and a campaign that do almost nothing to further our understanding of the universe or the ongoing narrative. Now Bungie has talked a lot about moving the story forward throughout this year, but if so they have gotten off to a very poor start. This expansion, and I'm not talking about the lore which is again excellent, but the expansion story contains perhaps 45 seconds of story? The narrative drive of the expansion can simply be explained in 45 seconds because nothing happens to nobody for no reason. A huge part of storytelling in any visual medium is setting, and as usual on that front Bungie has succeeded. The moon is a really good place base with a few major problems like public events or rare and the new vex events doesn't show up on the map for some impossible to understand reason, but anyway it's a well designed map that changes the original design enough to feel new. It looks great, the atmosphere is great, and while it lacks the secrets and kind of the sense of dread and wonder that the dreadnought had or the awoken home from Forsaken, it's still a well designed map. Still it feels hollow and it is empty. I have a feeling that this ties into serious instancing issues, but holy crap there's just like nobody on the moon. All the other planets are still full, but the moon is utterly empty, it's annoying. Either way, the entirety of the campaign on the moon is very very short, maybe four or five missions. A few spectacularly good loss sectors, which these are really great loss sectors, they should all be this awesome, and a couple of strikes. It will be done with all of this shockingly fast, it's not even 20% the size of Forsaken. It feels significantly shorter than Rise of Iron, like half the size of Rise of Iron. It is much closer in scale to Warmind with a larger map than any of the other large expansions in the franchise. I'm already hearing people typing in the comments, well that's because a large part of the package is tied up in seasonal events and changes to progression and gear. Well, aside from the fact that people who pay nothing get all of the progression and gear changes, there are problems with those systems as well. Seasonal content Alright, look, I get it. Not everything has released on this front yet. And I haven't done the raid yet, I'm doing it this week, but check it out. I am positive the raid is awesome, because Destiny's Raids range from the best ever co-op content to amazingly best in class co-op gameplay. Destiny Raids are amazing. They are the best co-op content ever on a console, and even in the PC space there is very little like it outside of hardcore progression raiding in WoW. But aside from the raid, which should be awesome and always is awesome, seriously, the three raids from Forsaken are fantastic, each one is just perfect. But other than that, there's just not all that much here. The new Vex offensive event is decidedly mediocre. I mean, it's fine, I guess? It's just not really all that good. Last season had the Menagerie which was a really great match made activity for the most part. Outside of Heroic which wasn't match made for no reason at all, but we'll get back to that. Anyway, it was something that finally introduced raid mechanics to the general player base. It was diverse, interesting, fun, and surprisingly challenging actually. Outside of the fact that you could not fail, which was a crazy, crazy design decision, but we'll leave that out too. Warmind had escalation protocol which was really great in its own way. Vex offensive, this will be a theme here. Is it bad? It's just really average. Sort of low effort outside of its environmental art.  A heroic version of Nightmare Hunts and Vex offensive will be good because these activities are way too easy, and are therefore kinda boring. But even if they're harder, these two modes are just kinda boring. I'm already basically done with them. The new Nightfall system is fairly fun. It makes them difficult enough to feel like you're not on autopilot, and it finally at least has some matchmaking on the lower levels. Though again, for some absolutely asinine, pointless reason, the higher tiers do not have it. Either way, at least they have begun to address this issue, but even there, the Nightfall or deal is one strike on repeat. The seasonal content added simply is not all that good. It's not garbage, it's just kinda average, and feels, again, fairly low effort. There's just not enough mechanically here, especially after the triumph that was the Menagerie. PvP Bungie rejiggered their matchmaking for Shadowkeep, and for the first time I played some comp here. And I did shockingly well, like I went 15-4 in 19 matches. Beyond that, matches feel like I'm actually playing people near my skill level, which is awesome. Destiny 2's PvP isn't a pretty nice spot, aside from being flooded with heavy ammo all the time, which is just awful. I'm not sure why Bungie insists on so much heavy ammo being in every match, but it is what it is. If you liked the Crucible, a solo comp queue has improved it. If you didn't, a heavier emphasis on skill-based matchmaking, meaning like more than none, has made most modes more welcoming. As a game ages, its PvP becomes more and more hostile to newcomers. Go play Titanfall 2, or Counter-Strike Go for the first time today. You will not have fun, I promise you. Destiny 2 was rapidly approaching this cliff, as the only people left playing PvP were people who had played hundreds and hundreds of hours of it and had gotten very, very good at Destiny's very specific pace of play. For the first time in D2's history, I have been playing a lot of Crucible, and I've been enjoying it as much as a person like me possibly can. I'm basically incapable of enjoying anything that I lose. It's a crutch I bear, I understand, but being matched against similar skill players has made it at least bearable. And finally, switching over to the mouse and keyboard full-time, I will admit that's probably a part of it. Armor Failed Point O Alright, perhaps the biggest focus of Shadowkeep's marketing was the move to Armor 2.0. Some of the problems with this system will be addressed in the Eververse Store section. But even leaving aside those issues, Armor 2.0 is a failed system that fails to fix any of the problems it was nominally created to address. Build Diversity, Build Freedom, Cosmetic Customization. Those are the three areas that Armor 2.0 was meant to improve, and it improves precisely zero of them. Let's start with Build Diversity and Freedom. During the run-up to Shadowkeep, Bungie kept talking about playing the way we want to play, to quote them, building your perfect monster-killing guardian. So imagine my surprise that Armor 2.0 is, undoubtedly, and literally, more restrictive and offers less Build Diversity than the system it replaced. Listen, Destiny needed to improve its armor system. It has always been half of a loot game that should have mattered but did not. They also needed to improve the RPG aspects of the game, but they've gone about this all wrong with Armor 2.0. Here's something that got me excited, okay? Look at this. Bungie has been very, very, very careful about subordinating its RPG aspects to its FPS aspects. And that's a smart call when you have the best FPS mechanics in the business. Still, the game is an RPG down under its shooty bang bang, and one of the huge disappointments with D2 at launch was rather than carefully expand its RPG systems, Bungie actually just removed all of them. Armor perks were gone so that armor could be sold in the Eververse without being queues to pay to win. Stats that affected cooldowns were switched out for imperceptible armor recovery and mobility ratings. Like seriously, mobility did not even affect your sprint speed. With Shadowkeep, Bungie rightly started bringing back some RPG to Destiny 2, and they did that not by reimagining the stats in the game, but by basically just combining the two games together. All armor pieces randomly roll with six different stats now, the three stats from Destiny 2 and the three stats from Destiny 1. The total number of stat points that come on a piece of gear is random, and the appearance is random.  You have doubled the stats that players are looking for and brought a tier system back. That is pushing it pretty far, but it could be fine as long as the system feels like it really affects your gameplay. It does not. Destiny 2 heavily nerfed all cooldowns with Shadowkeep. So rather than feel like you're creating something new, the system feels like grinding back to where you were. It is very possibly the correct choice in the long run, but right now, it feels bad, man.  To feel like you're playing Destiny, you have got to hyper-specialize in super generation. And frankly, with super as being the most powerful thing in the game, that seems like the clear best build. The more you get your super, the better, and almost all modes outside of raids where their use is actually tactical and strategic in a way that it simply is not anywhere else outside of the hardest PvE encounters. Now while all that is debatable, what I just said, maybe you think there are a million great builds, that's not actually the main problem with this system. The problem with Armor 2.0 is two-fold. Well threefold, but the other fold is folded into the next section. First off, the cost to upgrade is high, like really high. And Bungie has quintupled down on currency bloat. There are like 700 currencies and upgrade materials in Destiny 2. So many that your inventory page is constantly filling up. It is needlessly complex. When a far better system had already existed in Destiny 1, upgrading gear should be tied directly to completing gameplay tasks. Have one single material that you earn from doing harder difficulty encounters. So if I want to take my armor from 1 energy to 6, I'd have to do a 5 energy upgrade activity like a nightfall or a raid or whatever, some comp matches. As it stands, it is painfully slow to actually be able to make builds. And even slotting in mods can be expensive, from 500 to 5000 glimmer just to put a mod on or switch it out. Which just straight up dis-incentivizes playing around with the system. I don't see the harm in as much freedom as possible. I don't see the harm in being able to experiment. Why would I ever try a new build when it might cost literally 25,000 glimmer for something if I'm going to need to pay 25,000 glimmer to change it back if I don't like it? So in practice what does this mean? It means players are going to apply the mods that they are already used to using because they know that's an investment that will not be wasted. Don't get me wrong, glimmer is everywhere. But still, 25,000 glimmer is quite a bit of playtime. An hour or more probably. When you add in the insanely high cost to upgrade the energy required to even slot mods in the first place, upgrading even one piece of gear is ridiculously expensive. And you could do all that only to have a piece dropped with a higher total stats literally 30 seconds later. Once again, high costs tend to mean that players will not engage with a system until they are sure that their spending will pay off. It is a puzzling design decision and another in a long line of decisions that seems to confuse not wanting to engage with a system because it's time prohibitive with meaningful build decisions. These are different things, man, they're not the same thing. And the biggest problem is one that became immediately clear as soon as this system was unveiled. One that players at once spotted as a big problem. One they told bungee would be a big problem and which is, yep, a big problem. You see, the whole point of this system according to bungee was encouraging build variety, character depth and choice. But armor 2.0 doesn't let you slot any mod anywhere. Instead, armor has an elemental affinity that literally does only one thing. The affinity system does not have an actual gameplay role. It doesn't mean you can choose to focus on void affinity to have a different experience. It just splits the mods randomly amongst three types. So, did you like to run Hand Ganon, SMG and LMG and had ammo and reload perks for those three weapons before?  This system did nothing but make builds that were previously possible impossible. It took things away.  And not only roll with that stat count, they'll have to be distributed in the way you need. On top of that, you now also have a two in three chance that even if all of those things line up, the piece can be totally useless because it's the wrong color. It adds a mountain of pointless RNG on top of another mountain of RNG. It is objectively a more restrictive system than the one it replaced.  Again, just to be clear, Bungie said over and over that the purpose of these changes was to drive player choice, to make the RPG side of Destiny matter. Even if these systems need to be simple, so as not to interfere with the game's bread and butter badass shooting, they still need to feel like they aren't hostile to the player. It is simply impossible to look at this system and see any goal other than one. It is beyond obvious that the elemental affinity system is just a massive grind increase. And that's not necessarily a terrible thing. I love to grind for a perfect stat roll, man. But I don't want to grind for an arbitrary color on that stat roll.  There's not one single argument in its favor. None.  Not that bad is not an argument for a system. It's a thing you say when you break your nose falling down the stairs, but at least your leg didn't break too. There is no actual benefit to the player or build to have this system. It is pointless and shitty and an entirely predictable issue that was pointed out to players months before release. It has to change. And the cherry on top of all of this is that exotic armor also rolls with an affinity. So you can literally get an exotic piece that is used to buff sidearms that has a 67% chance of not being able to accept sidearm mods. It is insane. The exotic issue is so toxically awful it needs to be hot-fixed. It is mind-blowing that it even got shipped. As for the system itself, it's not good enough. Plain and simple. Try again. Microtransactions. Alright, we're wrapping up here, but we have to talk about Eververse. I am not a microtransaction activist. As I have aged, I've come to understand that businesses need to make money. I do not begrudge Bungie making money as long as it doesn't feel predatory and the current store, while overpriced, isn't loaded up with pay-to-win or character unlocks or loot boxes. It's fine. What's not fine is that ALL of the cosmetics are now basically locked there. Listen, if you ask fellow players about MMOs, I think you will find a shocking number of Destiny 2 players are former WoW or Guild Wars or Eververse peeps. The director of the game is famous for being a hardcore progression raider in World of Warcraft back in the day. Anyone who has played in MMO, an unhealthy amount, knows that cosmetic customization is a tremendous part of the genre's appeal, especially when those cosmetics are gameplay status symbols. The coolest mounts and armor and weapons in World of Warcraft were always gotten from rare raid drops. People afk'd in cities just to show that shit off, and even after WoW started selling mounts, they were never the coolest ones and they never stopped having the best looking stuff locked behind the hardest or grindiest gameplay systems. Bungie's other big selling point on Armor 2.0 was the fact that cosmetic customization would now be a thing. Players kind of assumed that the new universal ornament system was going to be an increase in diversity of looks. Players thought it was going to be a transmog system of sorts. I can't tell you how many people were psyched to go get old raid or AP armor so that everyone could start looking different. People were so excited to be able to make their armor look how they wanted. Especially with the intense increase in grinding for a good build, it was even more likely that players would be wearing ugly mismatch sets so the possibility of having your perfectly rolled but mismatched and ugly armor look like your favorite raid set? That is literally something that players have been begging for since Vanilla Destiny 1. And that is what most people thought they were getting. It's not what we got. Instead, the universal ornament isn't a transmog system. It's not a gameplay system at all. It's a straight up microtransaction system. The only sets, only sets that are universal ornaments are eververse armor sets or battle pass sets. Which means there are very, very few. There are no ornaments earned through gameplay at all. That's annoying. But beyond just being annoying, it's actually made the fashion game in D2 worse than it has ever been before. Because there are double the amount of stats and now random stat rolls and also a 67% chance that any armor piece is useless because it's the wrong color for your build, it is now functionally impossible to ever assemble a full set of armor that both looks good and fits your build. It is literally simply impossible. You need to raid 50 or 60 times to even have a tiny chance to build a full set that has the high stats, is rolled rightly and is the right affinity for what you want. So this means that players will simply not have full sets anymore ever. And that leaves players with two choices. Wear ugly, mismatched armor that you don't like or wear that same armor with one of the five ornaments that don't symbolize anything other than, hey, I had 15 bucks to give Bungie so I'm allowed to look like everyone else. It is so awful that one can only assume it is completely on purpose to drive microtransactions. But if this is the system that they want, they would need to drastically increase the amount of ornaments on offer or sell the ability to make any armor set an ornament. The new season pass armor ornament is awesome, but because it's one of a tiny handful that most players will have, it's going to be worn by everyone. I don't want to look like other players. This is actually precisely the opposite of what customization means. It's about individualizing, about looking unique. Finally, even leaving aside that your choice is now to look weirdly mismatched and ugly or look exactly like everyone else, when you have Eververse as the only place to earn these ornaments, your game has lost something fundamental to the genre. Fashion is a primary driving force in loot games, especially in multiplayer online games. When the best fashion is no longer earned, but only bought, you have neutered half of your reward system and left hundreds of awesome designs in the past. Again, I've got no issue with Bungie selling Eververse sets. In fact, I've got no issue with them selling Eververse ornaments that are super awesome. I would love to buy them, but I do have a problem with only Eververse having ornaments.  It sucks and it's a mistake for the game and it might make them some money in the short run, might make them some money in the short run, but it'll suck the life out of their game in the long run, guaranteed. And I'll say it one more time, if they had put in the microtransactions store an item for, say, $2 that allowed you to turn any armor piece into an ornament, it would sell like hotcakes.  If I could make any raid armor set into a universal ornament, yeah, I'd buy that. And then you'd be getting Bungie money, driving differences in the way players look and still keeping the gameplay reward of fashion. As it stands now, you don't have that. You can buy the cool armor from Bungie or wear your good rolled mismatched garbage. Wrapping up. Okay this came off very negative I know. I don't really like the new seasonal stuff.  It is a step back. But you know what? I don't hate Shadowkeep. I don't like Shadowkeep, but the game is in a really good place otherwise. Gameplay systems feel tight.  I rate Shadowkeep as meh. Is it worth the money? I guess. It's no rise of iron or taking king or forsaken, but the game still feels good and there's enough going on to not feel like you've been ripped off.  Most of it is only decent though.  Bungie has listened to feedback to improve the game. They took a small step here towards RPG depth and fumbled it, confusing grinds with depth. But I think they will adjust it in the coming months. I'm sure there will be better modes coming. I didn't like the reckoning either, but I loved Menagerie.  So should you buy it? Well, if you're not already a player, by all means get the free to play version. It is a great shooter and if you're a committed player, you already own it. I more made this because I just don't think it's all that good and it feels like the first misstep in a while and even though we might be tempted to just cut them some slack after so many successes, that would be a mistake. When something isn't all that good, players need to make sure the developers hear that. There's no chance for improvement otherwise. Alright, I got a video on Code Vein coming up, then a video about the nature of their political spectrums, then other things I assume. Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.


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Hi, I got a name 840 here, so I got a comment from Drew Fraser, he posted on my video regarding the Port Arthur Massacre and the new movie Nitrum, which is about the Port Arthur Massacre. So I got a bunch of comments and unfortunately YouTube's algorithm just automatically deleted Drew Fraser's comment without me getting to see it. And Star Lion comments, I didn't hear you use the word Tasmania once, have you ever lived there? I've never lived there, I've never been there. Maybe ask the people who live there how they feel about Nitrum or the Port Arthur Massacre. Okay, I'd be happy to ask them but I don't think it has that much to do with my reaction to this 2021 movie Nitrum. So the Port Arthur Massacre, that was an event that took place in 1996 and 35 people were murdered and 23 others were wounded and the murderer of Martin Bryant, Led Gorty, was given 35 life sentences without the possible parole and the movie Nitrum is primarily about Martin Bryant prior to the massacre. We're having a fair dinkum thunderstorm right now, I mean lightning unbelievably loud, very exciting. So Drew Fraser says, look, I listened to your confident rejection of the conspiracy theory that Martin Bryant was convicted wrongfully of the Port Arthur Massacre, then decided to look out the Joe Viles book mentioned by one of your listeners on the live stream. Spent several hours this morning reading the book, Viles convinced me that it is a mistake to suppose that Martin Bryant was guilty on the basis of the story told in either the Nitrum movie or the mainstream media. Even a quick reading of the forward to Viles book will provide you with a concise statement of the facts of the case which cast serious doubt on the official narrative. So I have not read this Joe Viles book and from what I've read about Joe Viles, it doesn't seem like reading his work would be a good use of time. So for example, the first crime scene, the Broad Afo Aro Cafe in less than a minute, the shooter left 20 people dead. Okay, in a total of no more than 30 minutes at six crime scenes, 35 people were shot dead. Is it really likely the young man with an IQ of 66, no firearms training could achieve such a kill rate or a higher ratio of kill to wounded? Few trained combat shooters could accomplish such a feat of marksmanship. I don't know anything about that. I just don't, I am not aware of any evidence that would convince me that the Port Arthur Mascare is some kind of sigh up or conspiracy theory. But Drew Fraser says, taken as a whole Joe Viles book presents a powerful primer facie case, primer fashion case for Martin Bryant's innocence. Remember as well, there was no trial, which the prosecution case was tested before a jury his conviction was based upon a guilty plea. Attained only months after constant pressure to confess, even though he was isolated from his family for months, Martin Bryant maintained his Indians innocence.  True. Your casual rejection of the listener's suggestion, you should check out the Viles book may have a negative influence on other people. Good challenge, but I just don't know of any cases where these supposed sigh ups, that there's any substantial evidence that any of them have actually taken place with regard to mass shootings. You're suggesting to your audience that it matters not whether there might have been a credible case for the defense case that was effectively suppressed during the summary proceeding that led to Martin Bryant's conviction in the year since I've never known situation like this sort of mass shooting that would turned out to be a sigh up. So that's my reaction. Drew Fraser says, I put it to you that you are to Martin Bryant and others who may believe in his innocence to take seriously the case for his defense in the charge of perpetrating the port of the massacre. Your conspicuous failure to do so in this video is not the act of the responsible citizen conscious of the effect of his actions or inactions on others. So who is this Joe Viles character? So last name is spelled V-I-A-L-L-S. So this is why I can't take anything that Joe Viles writes seriously. He believed that the 2004 Asian tsunami was a joint CIA massade operation. OK, so that giant 2004 Asian tsunami, he thinks it was a joint CIA massade operation.  So he also claims that the death of Diana Princess of Wales was a Zionist plot and he links the CIA massade to the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial. And he claims that he claims that the port of the massacre was an Israeli operation. All right, I think this is ludicrous. So he claims that it was a misdoveem counterterrorism unit of the Israeli Defense Force who carried out the port of the massacre. There's no evidence for that. That's ludicrous to claim that the 2004 Asian tsunami was a CIA massade plot is ludicrous. That's just nuts. That's that's insane. So we just don't have any evidence for any major mass shooting that somehow it's a sigh out by the government.  So he's a private invest. He was a private investigator. He died in 2005. And he claimed that the American Airlines Flight 77 did not really crash into the Pentagon. He claimed that it was an Israeli LL flight. The CIA is currently redirecting an asteroid to take out half of humanity. So vile theories are received support among many Muslim factions in Indonesia, which treat his theories as as fact. So he has theories about the Bali bombing. But I guess it was the work of massade. So everything's the work of massade, according to Joe Viles. So he lived from 1944 to July, 2005. He lived in Perth, Australia. So he claimed that the Port Arthur massacre, the terror attacks in Bali and Jakarta and the 2004 Asian tsunami were all the work of Israeli and American secret agents. And he claimed that he wrote these reports in the interest of public safety and the death of Princess Diana. OK, Princess of Wales. It was a Zionist plot. OK, it's just I just find it impossible to to take someone like this seriously. So he claims that Zionists were nooking downtown Beirut. They're everything, essentially everything evil that's happening in the world is the fault of the Zionists, the massade and the CIA working together. Hard to take that sort of argumentation seriously.


of that view showing the Spartan operations beginning and inflation of the antenna. The antenna is now inflating, nitrogen gas being expelled into the antenna. Just below Spartan is the northern Mexico and southern California. And Debra Houston, if you could sweeten up the camera view to give us the entire antenna, we'd appreciate it. Debra is about 450 feet away from the Spartan in the inflatable antenna. The antenna itself 50 feet in diameter. And Debra, thanks. Below the Spartan is it passes over the southwest, the Grand Canyon now. Inflation of the antenna occurred right on time. Experiment operations with it will continue now until about 10.13 a.m. central time when it will be jettisoned from the Spartan.  So that part of it is working, we're still troubleshooting the TV. We copy. Spartan and Debra are now crossing above the Appalachian Mountains as they continue across the United States. Spartan is about 530 feet away from Debra at this point. This course will continue to take it across the U.S. and off the east coast, the coast of Virginia. Endeavour Houston will be handing over in two minutes. We copy, Bill. The timer is now in mission control and onboard Endeavour are counting down toward the end of inflatable antenna operations. The jettison time for the antenna when it will be jettisoned from the Spartan satellite. That's up coming down about an hour and 25 minutes. Just prior to that, Endeavour will fire its jets to maneuver away from the vicinity of the Spartan and not retrieve the satellite until tomorrow morning. This view showing the satellite itself, the satellite measuring about 50 feet in diameter. The booms between it and the Spartan satellite are about 92 feet long. Spartan now crossing off the coast over Washington, D.C. Spartan a distance of about 700 feet from Endeavour according to ground tracking information. Below again now another in the chain of Canary Islands. Endeavour Houston we have good downlink TV again that looks like a pretty good rate going there. It's rotating relatively quickly. It's also rotating about as long as the antenna is rotating and Spartan is kind of following a little bit. Copy, Kurt. It's a pretty spectacular view from down here. We sure appreciate the opportunity to look over your shoulder. The inflatable antenna and Spartan are rotating slowly at a rotation starting when the antenna was inflated. The antenna's dimensions are about 50 feet in diameter. The struts that attach it to the Spartan are about 92 feet long. The inflatable antenna is a study of inflatable space structures that could save a great deal of cost in saving weight of objects placed in orbit. The weight of the entire antenna system attached to the Spartan is only about 132 pounds. And we copy and we can see that. This view live from Endeavour again as Endeavour continues across the Gulf of Mexico coast. Now above the coast of Louisiana near Morgan City, Louisiana. Endeavour heading off the coast now near the Mississippi Delta.


you rather be trapped in a romantic comedy with your enemies or trapped in a horror movie with your friends? A lot of people would say that they're the same people. They're playing. So what are you going for then? Oh no. Because you say you're with your friends but then what if your friends are all being made in the horror film? Yeah. Whereas in the rom-com, you get to like tell the people who don't like you to rant. True. I mean not literally because I mean that would be a different film. Well that's a different film. You know you could use your aplomb then. That's the aplomb. Yeah. Right I think. You might be a guilty chance of staring in the face. It could be and you know no one wants to miss them or the gilded edge which Dave went for first which again is it could be a different thing. Very interesting. Dave what would you be going for in that scenario romantic comedy with your enemies or horror movie with your mates? Likewise for me rom-com all day long. Yeah. I don't like horrors either.


Hello everybody, it's a real pleasure to be giving the second webinar in our Connecting with NAL Soundbytes webinar series. Today I'm going to be talking about the Adult Hearing Loss Research Programme and I want to give you an overview of some of the work that we're doing, give you a bit of a taste of it and talk about what's really important for us in terms of the research. Some of you will know that I moved from the UK to Australia to work for NAL just over a year ago and today I'm going to be talking about the research that's been carried out over the last year. So you can see here the Department of Geological Science that I lead and these are all the research audiologists and the names that you see here are the research audiologists who have contributed to the research that I'm talking about today. One of the really great things about working at NAL is the multidisciplinary approach that we take and so we work very closely with the engineering department which is headed by Jorge Mejia and also the behavioral science department which is headed by Liz Beach. So this is a schematic of the Adult Hearing Loss Programme. Our aim is to drive outstanding people-focused research and to promote excellent evidence-based outcomes to improve quality of life for adults with hearing difficulties. So this is our main, our aim here at the Centre, Healthy Hearing, Healthy Aging. And there are three research themes which are part of the programme showing the red triangles. First is Connected Health, then Outcome Measures and Special Populations. And then depending these research themes are some of the NAL competencies that contribute to the research and have been developed over the last couple of years. So we have a number of competencies that feed into the research we do but the projects we're talking about today, these are primarily behavioral insights, human technology interaction and big data and machine learning. So the goal of the work that we do now is to create impact. So create impact in terms of improving the lives of people who have hearing loss. And we can do this in a number of different ways. We can create tools and questionnaires that can be used by audiologists and patients to measure their outcomes and look at the effects of different interventions. And we can also influence clinical practice guidelines to help provide an evidence-based for clinical practice. There are a number of guiding principles that guide the research that we do in the adult hearing loss research programme. First off is applying theory to the work that we do. So what you can see here is the ICF framework, which many of you will be familiar with. And the research that we do tends to sort of sit more in the participation part of the framework, although we do more work recently looking at the personal factors part of the framework. In terms of theory and health behaviour change, we know that's really important in a lot of the work that we do. So again, we're increasingly using a health behaviour change theory to help guide some of the work we do, and in particular the ConV model, which is shown here. In terms of research priorities, it's really important that the research that we do is the most important research because there's so much that we can do. Now has done some work over the last couple of years using design thinking principles to identify what the research priorities should be, and some of that has fed into the work I'm talking about today. And this complements really nicely some research priorities that are identified by other methods, for example, the research recommendations from the NICE guidance on hearing loss in the UK. Using involving public and patient-centered research is really important because we know that if we involve end users in the research, we get outputs which are much more related and aligned to the end users needs, and that's really, really important. And then finally, it kind of goes without saying the research that we're doing has a very patient-centered approach. So I'm going to talk about one of the first, one of the research themes, one of three. The first one is connected health, and we've got a number of different projects in this area which are led by David Allen, Jeremy Pan, and Taegun Yang. And they'll all be presenting more on the detail of the research I'm going to talk about over the next couple of months. So what we have here is the varying different types of mobile tech that can be used in connected hearing health and can be used to self-manage hearing loss and hearing aids. So we're using all these different tools in the research that we'll be working on at the moment now. What we want to do is to design tools and methods that can be used all the way along the patient pathway. So most of you will be very familiar with this where people become aware they have hearing difficulties, they take action, get the hearing assessed, have some kind of intervention, often hearing aids, and then there's ongoing support. So we're looking at having an end-to-end digital pathway. Now, one of the things we know that although there's been research on connected health for at least a decade, there's actually been fairly slow uptake of connected health practices in clinical practice. And so I'm trying to increase the uptake of connected health is one of the games of one of our projects. So I've referred to a PPI patient and public involvement earlier. In Australia, this is called a community and consumer involvement. And this is where we bring patients and audiologists and we involve them really right from the very outset of the research to help guide the research questions that we're asking. So the important thing is that the patient, the public and the healthcare professions are working with the researchers, not for us. So you may have heard the expression not about us without us. So that's very much the approach that we're taking. And the reason for embedding PPI at the heart of the research is that it can help address some of the mismatch that we often see in research where the needs of the users are not met by the research agendas. So by involving patients in helping us set the research agendas, we're hoping to be aiming to overcome that. And we also know that PPI ensures that the research that is done is aligned to the patients and the end users needs. So what is it that patients and audiologists want want and what works? So we've currently got four connected health projects currently being carried out. I'll talk you through them very, very briefly, but as you can see we're covering across the whole of the patient journey. So the first one is looking at barriers and facilitators to connected health. And the idea of this project was to increase uptake of connected health within clinic. As a project looking at pre-assessment, so before people even come into the clinic, and the aim of this is to better prepare patients and audiologists for the hearing assessment deployment for for the assessment and the intervention parts of the journey. We're carrying out a project looking at in-person versus remote services. So what we found with COVID is because there's been a real need because of such distancing to minimize face to face contact, there've been many more remote services developed. It's a great opportunity to be able to look to see whether the outcomes delivered by remote services are the same or different to those that delivered in the conventional in-person services. And our fourth project is looking at post-fitting and we're looking to improve support and increase motivation and make sure that people know what it is that they need to do once they've had their hearing aids or their intervention. So I've mentioned this idea of increasing uptake of connected health. And I came across this schematic a couple of weeks ago. And I kind of think it sort of says it all really. The COVID pandemic has really transformed the way that we run remote services. And we can see this really, really nicely in this figure here. So this is from one of our projects and what you can see has got months along here. The red line is the number of people who had COVID-19 in Australia. And you can see there was a really sharp increase throughout March and then it leveled off. But what's really, really fascinating is on the project that we're doing at looking at the trying to improve or increase the uptake of telecare sort of a smart smartphone connected to hearing aid and app. What we can see is that round about January beginning of February, we started to implement some interventions to try and improve uptake. And there was some improvements shown. But as soon as the pandemic started to take hold, we saw that the uptake of services, uptake of the telecare app, pretty much mirrored that of the COVID infections. So as I said before, social distancing requires us to have fewer face-to-face clinic appointments. And what's really important is that good quality remote services needed now more than ever. And the research that we're doing is going to be contributing to that. So I'm going to leave Connected Health now move on to the second research theme that I mentioned, which is African Maceous. And this is a talk about a project that's led by David Allen. So within the Australian Hearing Health Care, there are no national guidelines on what outcomes should be used, why, how, and when. And really this is no different to many, many other countries. This is a project that's being funded by the Department of Health and specifically to look at outcomes that are measured within the Hearing Services Program. So this is a program where hearing health care is provided free to many of those people who are eligible. And so it's probably the closest you get to the UK National Health Service. So we're looking at trying to improve outcomes in the Hearing Services Program. This really came about from a roadmap, the roadmap of hearing health that was produced by the Department of Health in 2019. And one of the aims of that was to try and standardize national reporting appearing loss and to establish a national database. So the overall aim of this project is to develop and deliver recommendations on evidence-based, patient-focused outcomes to measure the success of the Hearing Services Program. So this is really a schematic of how we've gone about it. So we started off by carrying out some scoping workshops to find out what professionals in the public thought was important in terms of measuring outcomes for hearing rehabilitation. There is no consensus on what outcomes should be used. So we've run two Delphi reviews, which are consensus activities. And we did start it off with a Delphi review of professional stakeholders. But what's really, I think what's really exciting about this project is that we're also doing a Delphi review of clients and publics. So we're making sure that clients, public, patients are at the heart of this particular project. And then shortly we're going to be carrying out a national survey on what people are currently doing in terms of outcomes. All of this work will be together into some consensus workshops that we'll be running in a couple of months' time with both professionals in the public, with the aim being, as I said, to provide recommendations to the Department of Health. Now I'm not able to give you any results at the moment, but I do want to share a couple of snippets because this is really fascinating. So we've had at least one round of each of the two Delphi reviews. And what the results are showing is that there are many domains that are being suggested by professionals that they think are important and are not currently captured by existing standard outcome measures. So for example, measures or domains such as well-being, social isolation and loneliness. And for the when we look at the Delphi review of the patients, although we see some similarities in the domains between the professionals and patients, what's really interesting is that there is some marked differences of what they think is important. So for example, that hearing loss impacts less on the family is one domain and that they can have more control over their hearing. So as I said, this research is continuing for another three months and we'll be talking about the results as they become available. The third and final research theme I'm going to talk about today is on special populations and we've got two different populations in this group. One is unilateral hearing loss. And this is research that's being led by a power of charity. And both power and ingrid have just started working on doing some work in aged care. But of course, the pandemics really got in the way of that. We were going to if I were just starting to do some work from a quarry university to start looking at doing some surveys in care homes. So I'm going to just say a bit about the unilateral hearing loss work that we've done with a study that was done last year. And what's really interesting about this project is that and it's been able to, we've been able to use some of the new methods and technologies and techniques that NAL has developed over the last few years. One of those is looking at the NAL DCT, the Dynamic Conversation Test, which really gives a measure of what it's like to have realistic conversation. So the materials were recorded in real world environments and we can play them in the 41 speaker and the son of chamber. So this is a larger picture of it. It's a huge Anacoke chamber with 41 speakers to really give an idea of real world sound all around you. So one of the other tests we did was looking at collecting outcomes using ecological momentary assessment. So we're looking at real world, real time measures of what people think the impact of unilateral hearing loss is. And then finally, we've been looking at cognition, so looking at working memory. And we found for all these three tests that the people of unilateral hearing loss have performed more poorly than those who had normal hearing. And then the final method that we use was looking at head tracking. So just how much people of unilateral hearing loss had to move their heads in terms of being able to pick up what was being said. So there were two speakers, one at 25 degrees and one at 40 degrees from the midline. And we can see that our normal hearing population here was able to pretty much target fairly closely where the sound was coming from. And this was done by having a head tracking camera on the top of the head for the unilateral hearing loss group. And this has been normalised for the side of the poor ear. You can see that they've had to move they have to move their heads a lot more to be able to tune in to find out where the sound was coming from. And again, not surprisingly, we see a really significant difference. So it's really giving us some understanding of some of the unique issues that are relevant to unilateral hearing loss. And we have another project that we're currently developing a proposal that we'll be looking to start in a couple of months time. In terms of our other population, which was aged care, so this is looking at hearing related communication in care homes. As I said, this research has been put on hold because of the pandemic. But we're going to be using some of the research priorities that were identified and some of the work that I did when I was in Nottingham. We know that hearing loss is complex, dementia is complex, care homes are complex. So the work that we did used a real synthesis approach, which aims to look at very complex situations. This involves looking at the literature and involving people who are really key to the situation. In this case, we involved audiologists, care home managers, people who work in care homes, family of people who are in care homes. And we ended up with five different research priorities that will start to pick up and investigate when the pandemic dies down. So that's really a whistle stop tour of the adult hearing loss program. And what's really exciting is that we have a whole bunch of other projects that we're currently developing. So I just really sort of scratched the surface on some of the work we've been doing over the last year. We've probably got about four or five really, really exciting projects that we just went to get signed off or we're just finishing the proposals for that. We maybe I'll even be able to give a webinar on those and towards the end of the series. So look out for some really great, exciting, relevant research for both people with hearing loss and hearing health care professionals. And finally, I just want to go and say that as you will have probably gathered, it's really important for us that we work with people with hearing loss and also hearing health care professionals. We've recently just started hearing health care professional database where people are interested in helping us with our research we can sort of have all together in a database and we can call upon when we've got different projects. And this means mainly being focused on Australian audiologists, but we're really, really happy to have people internationally and take part in our research. And you can see some of our research, particularly the Connected Health, we can take much wider than just Australia. Paola is Paolin Chetis and leading on this, so either drop Paola an email if you're interested or you can use a QR code here to get directly into the database and into your details. So what's coming up next in terms of the adult hearing loss we search? So we've got a number of different webinars by the project leads here. So David's going to be talking about the outcome measure studies, some of the connected health studies and talk about future trends. Jeremy is going to talk about the pre-assessment project, so looking at preparing people appropriately taken is going to be talking about our post-fitting project, which is looking at motivation and providing the best information for people following an intervention. Paola will be talking about the unilateral hearing loss research we're doing and talk about some connected health guidelines that we've developed. And finally, I'm going to be talking about some work that I've done over the last couple of years and which is very relevant to the work that we're doing here, looking at smartphone connected hearing aids and remote technologies. So finally, I'd like to thank again the Department of Geological Science, absolutely great bunch of people to work with. Thank the Department of Health who fund NALS research. And also to thank Hearing Australia, who we partner very closely with and we're working with on a number of projects and who help fund some of our research.