It will make a great addition to any racing collector After battling with Benny Parsons for sixth and seventh position, Harry broke away just about that second draft of position three on Staff Chameleon Change Award, boss. He improved his position. Car victories. He's tied for third with Bobby Allison on the all-time list. That's not surprising, Barney, the way that Petty qualified. As Ned Jarrett told us, the top of the broadcast, Petty qualified in the first three rows and winning Petty. I'm doing so, then I'll probably still be doing it, but, you know, how long it is, the number of races I win and stuff like that has nothing to do with it. It has a keen interest in sports, so on behalf of the people on Motor Racing Network, the Daytime International Speedway President Reagan, we welcome you. Well, Ned, I'm pleased to be here. This is a real kick for me at the same time, however, having been a sports announcer myself. I'm kind of glad that I didn't have to broadcast this because I'm having so much trouble trying to sort out who's on first. Well, about the time the Air Force One was landing, just behind the Speedway here, we had a seven-car draft for the lead that just made pit stops what should be their last pit stops. That sometimes tends to break them up a little bit, but Richard Petty, who is trying to win his 200th NASCAR Winston Cup victory here today, which would set an all-time record is out front now in car number 43, and I believe you have some special ties to the owner of that car.  I won't mention which party. Okay, we'll let that go by the wayside. I'm sure that you're amazed by the speeds that you're seeing these cars run here today and the control the drivers have over them. Yes, I am, and I've noticed one thing already. I've been here only a short time, but I've noticed that if you're trying to look at the number on the car, you better look when they're down the track aways. You're not going to see it when they go by here. They're running about 200 miles an hour when they go by our position right here. This is one of the fastest points on the racetrack. You know, there was a moment out there when the Air Force One was coming in when I thought that we were over the track, and it just was one of the expressways in normal holiday traffic. Sometimes it looks that way, and I think that we should emphasize, even though these cars are going upwards of 200 miles an hour, they are specially built race cars. They're running, of course, on a specially built racetrack, and we, the folks who are listening in by radio in their cars, we wouldn't want them out there trying this on the highway. No. I hope not. Oh, no. Excuse me. I was just going to say, out there, let them stay bumper to bumper. Well, they do run very closely. Of course, drafting you perhaps have heard that term, and that is very normal, and wins many races here on this racetrack. One car running, bursting the wind open, the other car can run faster than you could normally run by himself by running directly behind the other car. That's why we see them running so close together. Another thing that we have been pleased with, President Reagan, in this sport, and back when I was driving a race car, it made me feel good to know that I was providing the American public with something besides what I felt was tough, not entertainment, because it serves as a good proving ground for the automotive and aftermarket manufacturers to improve their products, which makes better and safer cars for a highway driving question. Well, I know that that's always been one of the factors behind these great classic races, is what we learn about further improvements in automobiles, but you've just proven something else about the sport here. This is the first time you've mentioned that about racing yourself, but here you are, hailing, hardy, and healthy. Well, thank God for that. Well, I'll tell you, this car has done a good job over the years, and the rules that go into the building of these race cars, sometimes it gets in some pretty serious crashes, but because of the rules and the safety equipment that's built into the cars, the drivers most of the time are able to walk away, and thank God for that. Now, I just noticed one car that came into the pits, and I know that everyone was supposed to have had their regular pit stop. He looks as though he's got some problem. There isn't any rushing around as there normally is. That is true, and that is Kyle Petty. He's the son of Richard Petty, who is currently leading the race, because Kyle has been racing on this circuit for about four years, and you are right. Something is wrong with the car, because it's longer than normal pit stop. Now they're pushing him down pit road, so maybe he'll get back out and run, but certainly it's costing him any chance he might have a winning this race. But now you have a son of a car out here, don't you? Yes, I do. He's running his first Super Speedway event in NASCAR Whiskey Cup competition, and as we talk, Mr. President, it looks like Kyle Petty's car is being pushed off pit road and behind the wall, so that will be all for him today. Oh, wow. And it's a shame to run this near the end of the race with about 25 laps to go. He was running very well in the event here today, so we'll go back and see if we can see his dad win his 200th race here today. Would you, let's pick up the winner. You are an old sportscaster, and see if we can, Richard Petty, of course, driving the car number 43. He has, here he comes now, off a turn for the blue and red car.  Oh, wait a minute here.  I don't think that's informed anyone who's listening on radio very much about the race, but I thought they changed positions just as they went by. They certainly did, and Kale Yarber, who is running the car number 28, is gaining on Richard Petty right now, who is running out front. And you notice how high Petty runs through the wall, or through the turn up next to the wall and turns one or two, but that's his style. I'll drive it. You do see a lot of passing in this area right directly in front of us. Yes, I hadn't noticed that before.  Well, this is one of the fastest points on the racetrack, and the drafting takes such an effect right in this area of the racetrack, and that's one reason that they're able to make the moves and move around the cars in front of it. One car is sticking to the pavement a little bit better than another one. That helps him in this area where the trial is. As we see, going into turn one, Kale Yarber continues to gain on Richard Petty, so it looks like we'll have a shootout down near the end of this race. Between those two drivers, they pulled away from the balance of the field. Currently running in third place is Terry Labotti. Harry Gant is in fourth place, and Bobby Allison in fifth place. And a fellow who has put on more good races with Richard Petty, David Pearson, is pulling into the pits now. The hood goes up on that car. And there's trouble on the racetrack, Mr. President. We need to give it to our turn announcer. Ken Reagan, that's straight to the wall. He spells his name R-A-G-A-M, but he does have a sign on the back of that car. Reagan's for Reagan. So I know that you appreciate that. I didn't know I had a relative out here. Of course, I found out at the Klan when I was in Ireland, and the Klan Reagan over there, every family just sort of picked out the way they'd spell the name. Well, yours has certainly become a popular one. And if you look directly across from us, Bobby Allison's pits, the car number 22, where he's pitting there, and he has a special sign for you there on the wall. It's on the pit wall. As you see the yellow stripe that goes across there, it says we love Ron. Well, I appreciate that very much. Well, I know that a lot of these fellas are so pleased to have you here today and taking part in this big Independence Day celebration. I'm just marveling at you and your ability as they come off that upper turnway over there to pick out who they are and what position at all. Well, see, I haven't. That's having lived down among them. That's right. I have an advantage on you. I've been around this business for about 30 years and know the fellas and know the colors. And really, when they get on the back stretch, the color isn't about the only way that you can pick out the car. We'll watch Richard Panty now as he comes off of turn four. And you can see K.O. Yarber and the orange car is gradually picking up on him. They have some cars that they're coming up to put a lap on. Of course, they're running faster than those cars. That will help both of them as they pick up the draft of each of those cars as they come in front of them. In other words, Petty is in number one now. Petty is in first place in the car number 43 and Yarber in car number 28. Now, they are two of the biggest winners here. Yarber has won 14 events on this Speedway. Petty has won 10. He's won two of these Firecracker races. He's won seven of the Daytona 500. The events that will be interesting to see is they come up on those two cars that they're lapping down the back stretch. Petty is able to move right up on the outside of them very carefully and get ahead of Yarber going into that turn. You know, if I were faced with the responsibility of broadcasting this net and with Petty out in front, I would just keep watching Mike Kerb down here to find out whether he was in front yet. His reaction tells us that. Yes, it certainly does. Everyone here, I think Petty has such a tremendous following that they've been waiting for him to win 200. The closest driver to him is David Pearson, who was in the pit there a moment ago. Pearson has 105 victories, but Petty has had such an illustrious career and has been so good for the sport, but he has his hands full now as Yarber continues to what we call in the sport really men, because he's gaining on it. They're reversed right now as to their previous position when we first saw them out here in that 1-2 spot. Yes, Yarber. But holding it about the same distance, but with the one who was second now first. Yes, Yarber made a little longer pit stop than Petty, and that gave him an advantage. But his car seems to be running a little bit faster right now, and he's close enough now that he can pick up the draft. We'll keep it here for just a moment, and we'll let you call that pass if he does pass it. The next time around, he should be right on his bumper as he go into turn one. He moves right in on the back bumper of Richard Petty. He's definitely in the draft as he go into that turn. So we'll see if Yarber can make the move. See how high they go off the turn. Yes. And Yarber will be trying to get a good running start down the back stretch. He might be a little too far behind this time to make the pass. He has crept up though. He's only about half the distance he was on that last lap. He's moved right in on his back bumper now. Yes. Now that's not the place to pass. If it comes off of that fourth turn, it'll either be down here or going down the back stretch. Here he is, the stark finish line. It looks like it's going to be. No. Petty was still out front, but Yarber couldn't make the pass there. Let's see as he comes off a turn two, what he can do with him there. He dips down to the low side. Petty will go high in the turn. Now Yarber drifts up right behind him, but he is definitely in the full force of the draft now.  So we're going to throw it back upstairs again, Mr. President. It's been a real pleasure having you here with us today for this Pepsi Firecracker 400. Well, it's a wonderful fourth of July for me, and I wish everybody a very happy fourth. We know that you look forward to greeting the winner. All right. Standing by with his crew chief on pit road is Jerry Punch. Well, we're in the middle of a celebration, Barty. You would not believe the STP crew down here. Buddy, congratulations on a super. Buddy Perry, I'm talking to the crew chief, Richard Petty. Buddy, congratulations on a super win today. Thank you very much. I just want to say one thing. We couldn't have done this. We couldn't have won 200 races without the help from STP, and the STP products were used in the car today, and we're just super happy. Mike Curb, maybe the president will run you for vice president. Well, the celebration, as you can hear in the background, Ralph Salvino, the folks from STP are here. They give the high five as the STP crew goes in the air and smacks those fists together. They will be headed to Victory Lane. Well, we'll be checking in with Bill Bowser and some of the Petty crew in Victory Lane. Richard Petty, he'll be on his way up to meet the president, receive those accolades. Anybody else? Some more people know me. I guess what the deal is. By coincidence, Richard is chairman of the Reagan-Busch Racing Committee as well, which is an exciting thing, I think, also to point out. Well, I think it is, too. That's Mike Curb making that statement. Richard, let me ask you one racing question. President Reagan asked you about that pass on the last lap. Of course, you knew that Kale was going to make that pass going into turn three. Then you had to plan accordingly. Well, see, we ran into the same thing experience. OK, I ran into the same thing in 1976. David Pearson done me the same thing, and I got back by him when he went in and went in too hard and went, I got back by him. The only thing was, David and myself crashed, and David wound up winning the race. But this time, I was a little more cautious of what's going on, even though we hit each other two or three times. The deal was, I never got by him as far as what I got by David. So the deal was, I knew that if he went in there wide open, his car wasn't going to work for me to be in exactly the right place to be able to make the turn without having to let off the gas. And I was able to do that. Then the slow car helped me, too. Because what happened, it didn't give him any room to manipulate. All he had was the wall and, you know, so from that standpoint, we just got lucky. Getting that 200 under these circumstances has to be one of the greatest things that's happened to you.  But you've got to figure now, I'm out campaigning for him, too. So maybe I can help him and Ben. I'm running 200. Then it might help his career a little bit, too. I'll be looking over my shoulder for you long about November. I'm going to be helping you bet on that. Could I get a question in here? Did I understand you to say that you bumped each other a few times? Well, a couple of times, there's a little different color sheet metal on my blue and red car than what started the race. And there's a little bit of blue and red on his orange and white car. And you imagine that at 200 miles an hour? No, I can't imagine that. The deal is we were dead side by side when we did this.  But side by side, even though you're running 200 mile an hour, the only impact is the difference between the speed of the car. If there was two mile an hour difference in the speed of the car, it'd be two mile an hour a month. But we hit each other pretty hard. I just got no answer to that. The sponsor of the car, S.T.P. Ralph Selby. I know you, Mr. President. It's a pleasure, believe me. You must be very pleased and proud and with every right to be. I've been 25 years trying to win 200 races. So you can bet we're all pleased. We're pleased you're here. And we're pleased we won the race because you're here. So we hope it helps you and us also. Thank you. Hey, of course, that's the goings on here and the president's sweet. Began his stock car career July 12th, 1958. He finished sixth in 100 mile NASCAR convertible race at Columbia, South Carolina. His first victory came in that division July 18th, 1950. Ooh, what's weird. I can tell you by itself that it can be confusing. And it was a bit of a confusing finish. I wonder, Richard, when you noticed that Hevron had left the track, the caution flag was going to come out and you had, in effect, a one lap race to the flag for the victory. Right, just to the one across the start finish line. When you're going in one direction, then when you turn it to the start finish line, you look down into the first and second corners just as far as you can see. You don't see the car sitting on the end field. And my idea is that I just fit it to the floor in this way that we get up and make it move. And when he did, he just went in the corner a little bit too far up there and started to sit. I was able to cut right beside it and then we kind of touched a couple of times by the end of the run. You weren't worried when he went past you. What? You weren't worried when he went past you there on the backstrap? Yeah, I was worried. That was the way he was going to do it. That's what he was going to do when he was going to do it. But I didn't know how it was going to come. But what happened when... States, this is the first one that's ever showed up at the racetrack. So everybody's happy. Congratulations, guys. I want to thank you guys for coming. Welcome to two grand national races. Richard, congratulations to you on this terrific occasion. Mr. President, thanks for being here. Well, we used to be here. And it's been a very exciting day. I join in congratulations. I even have a conflict of interest here because he's doing some Yolen service in a political sense. Thank you very much.


Hello fellow cheapskates and budget gamers, on this channel I recently talked about 10 of the best free Switch games you can go out, download and play without having to pull that old wallet out of your pocket and spend any actual cash on them. And you cheapskates seem to really enjoy that video, so how about we keep the trend going with another one, however this time you will have to pull that wallet out, but you won't have to pull out more than a crisp $5 bill because you read the title and you guessed it. All of the games on this list today are only $5, that really ain't too bad considering how fun they all truly are. And actually, funny enough, I tried making one of these videos almost exactly a year ago. Back then, I did find five really great games, so for this list to be a definitive list of the best $5 games on Switch, we still have to count those games. So when you're done here today watching this video, make sure to go and watch that other video if you want to find out more about those games because I already reviewed them once, and why would I repeat myself? Ah, but enough of the games I've already talked about before, let's start this list by talking about a recent addition to the eShop library and that game is Daggerhood. Make sure you smash that subscribe button and click that bell and also hit the like button while you're going down there and let's get started. Oh man, really? My phone's ringing right now? Jordan Fringe? Hello? I was just watching your video with Kim? Isaac? Isaac? Really? Would? Really? Shouldn't you be editing this video like, oh I don't know, right now rather than calling me?  You do realize that they have a course on Accent Reduction American Pronunciation Made Easy, right? Ya, ya-al. Ya-al. Ya-al. Ya-al. Ya-al. Okay, clearly this ain't working, ya'll, but it's not like any of you guys are gonna be trying to learn how to do an American accent anyway. There are so many things on this site that you can learn. Skillshare is an online learning community for creators with more than 25,000 classes in design, business, video editing, video production, and more. You can even learn how to create gaming content for YouTube if you wanna start your own channel. The premium memberships give you unlimited access so you can join the classes and communities that are right for you. And just like last time, the first 500 of you to go down to that description, click on my special secret link, we'll get two months of Skillshare free, which means you can save your money for these $5 games that I'm already trying to help you save money on anyway. What would you do without me? But speaking of those $5 games, let's go back and talk about them. If you're looking for a Celeste-like experience on the Switch, but you don't wanna pay a Celeste-like price, then Daggerhood might be the game for you. Visually, the similarities speak for themselves. The gameplay though differs quite a bit thanks to the instant transmission dagger mechanic. As you would expect by throwing your dagger, you can mince up any enemy that stands in your way, but as you might not expect, you can also teleport to your dagger at the touch of a button. This gives Daggerhood a completely different feel to its platforming mechanic than any other game I've played in this style. Each level has five treasures for you to collect, as well as a fairy, which you only have a limited time to reach before it disappears. Where in Celeste we had huge levels to explore, with branching paths and hidden rooms, Daggerhood keeps it simple, with very small levels that will only take you moments to complete once you have mastered that level. I'm not saying you jump into every new level fresh and you finish it in a moment. What I'm saying is once you've died several times and you get the hang of it, you can blast through these pretty fast. The challenge of course comes in trying to acquire all the collectibles and getting to the exit as fast as possible to get that three star rating we all crave. Oh, and the boss battles are pretty cool. This is honestly a game I would expect to cost about $10, so seeing it for five is a great deal. You know what's really cheap? Canned peas. But if you don't like canned peas because of the mushy mouth feel, you might like this pea because it's awesome. Awesome pea. Awesome pea starts the same way many of our favorite NES games started. Title screen, start game, just like that. No story, no words, no instructions, no nothing.  Start platforming and enjoy the game. Games like this are just refreshing for me sometimes. When you just feel like picking up a game and playing it without having to prepare your mind and soul to become invested in some groundbreaking story or try to kick start your brain and learn crazy new gameplay mechanics. Nah, not here, you just play the game. The game's visuals tug at my nostalgic heartstrings big time. Clearly I have never played this game before and yet it feels like I'm driving down memory lane and reliving an old favorite title, especially when I see that overworld map. It doesn't help my nostalgia that the entire game has scan lines, making you feel like you're playing it on an old CRT TV and the visuals themselves look like every great Game Boy game I ever owned. It's a very simple platforming game where you have to collect coins and avoid spikes, but it has some very solid gameplay and I just find it ever so charming. So even though it's technically $5.99, that old marketing point where it looks like $5 but it's actually $6, I'm allowing it on this list because it is a fun budget game, around $5. It's not the hardest platformer you'll ever play. It presents a challenge sometimes, but the most part it's just an enjoyable experience. Actually, we've had a lot of the best cheap Switch games released recently on the Switch and I've already jumped on them and talked about them in other videos, but I can't make this list and not mention these games, especially Downwell because it might actually be my favorite budget game on the Switch. Just in case you missed it, this is what I said about Downwell recently. At just $2.99, Downwell is absolutely worth the price and then some. Just like Bayonetta, you have gun boots that pack a huge punch, that keep you afloat for just a moment while you blast away at any enemies or bricks directly below you. Downwell is so simple in design, from its 8-bit visuals to its gameplay mechanics, but its fast-paced action is hard to put down, making it a perfect pick up and play a few rounds kind of game, which is exactly what you want on the Switch. The further down into the Darkwell you fall, the harder and weirder the enemies become.  You will find more than you expect in the world, from shops where you can buy helpful items or hidden caves filled with relics. And after every stage, you get to pick a power-up or if you're lucky, get some health back since your hit points carry over level to level. This game is not easy. It took me more attempts than I would like to admit, just to get to the fourth level, so bring your A game or prepare to go down. And now for a game I haven't talked about before, Toki Tori. Toki Tori was originally released on the Game Boy Color, and let me tell you, there is a reason that since then, it's been re-released on Android Wii, PS3, Wii U, the 3DS, and now, the Switch. And that reason is, wait for it. It's a good game. Didn't really have anything extra for that. What did you expect? But now, it's looking better than ever with a fresh coat of paint. The sequel to this game, Toki Tori 2, released on the Switch a while back and did so well, they decided to bring the original to the system too and make it cheaper, about five bucks worth of cheaper. In each of the 80-ish levels, it's your job to collect all of the eggs, which is a pretty cute premise, a little chicken going around, saving these little eggs from harm until you get to the end of the game and you hit the credits and you see this. It's just kind of sad. Moving very quickly along, let's talk about the gameplay mechanics. Taking a page from the Prince of Persia book of tricks, you can rewind time if you screw up, which is not only used for if you die stupidly, but also as a key mechanic to help you complete puzzles.  And I'm not sure where this tiny little chicken is keeping these massive blocks, but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy that I wanna mess with, so I'm not gonna ask any questions. Please don't turn me into an omelet. I know I said I don't like repeating myself, but I can't in all good consciousness make this list and not talk about Gunman Clive. I fell in love with this game and recently I found two excuses to talk about it on the channel. And now we're in a third, a third and final excuse to talk about this game. When I cover this many eShop games, there's gonna be some overlap. So let's take one final look at Gunman Clive.   And speaking of the platforming and the shooting, this game plays very similar to the Mega Man series. You'll have to face platforming challenges like the ground falling away underneath your feet at a moment's notice or maybe Tetris blocks raining from the sky as you struggle not to get trapped and squished between them. There are so many unique platforming concepts just like this as you play and it constantly keeps you on your toes. And obviously the bosses won't go down without a fight. You better learn those attack patterns and learn them fast or you're gonna find yourself getting very frustrated.  I am almost positive that many of you when you saw that title and clicked on this video, you came here hoping to see Astro Bears. And I know that because Astro Bears is beloved by so many Switch players already. It's just one of those games that always, always gets suggested to me to talk about. And despite the fact that it's only five bucks and consistently goes on sale for around a dollar, I never actually got around to playing it until now. And yeah, no, I completely understand it now.  I judged a book by its cover and didn't think I was gonna enjoy it. I enjoy it. It's great. Let's talk about it. It's so incredibly simple in concept but such fun to play with a friend or even three friends. If you have three friends, I personally, I don't, not nearby anyway. So I've done the two player with Kim. It was good. It's essentially Tron, but with bears and in space, so what's not to love?  And all you need to worry about is not running into the other player's colored line. And if you haven't played Tron, just think old school snake.  It is really easy to become super competitive with rounds becoming nail-bitingly close. Ducking, jumping, weaving and squeezing between enemy lines. And the rounds are so short. It's super easy to keep on challenging each other to just one more round. A perfect party game and for the price you cannot go wrong. Plus, as I said, this game just seems to always be on sale. I'm actually only realizing this now even though I already wrote out this entire video yesterday, the games on this list are super varied, which is awesome. I don't think there's really any overlap in game style. And that goes equally so for the next game on this list, which is One Strike. Another game I talked about very recently, so let's take a quick look at it. For only $4.99, this is another cheapy cheap game worth the price. You have three difficulty settings, easy, medium or hardcore and trust me, you'll want to start on easy. As the name of the game would suggest, you get hit once, you die.  There is seven different fighters to choose from, each of which have different weapons and fighting styles. Believe it or not, with just having a forward dash, back dash block and one attack button, it still takes quite a while to master each fighting style of the characters. In one life mode, just like in real life, you only got one. You can't get hit by any of these fighters even once and I'm telling you that's not easy, even on easy. There is also arcade and team duel mode as well as tournament mode for up to eight players, AI or real people. Again, it's another game that's just so simple in design and gameplay and yet as soon as you block that first attack and then land the killing strike, you'll watch your opponent fall and then realize I just want to keep on killing. All right, so I just said that this list is full of very unique and different games and that couldn't be any more true for this next one which is not only unique for this list but it's unique for gaming in general. I have never seen a game quite like this. Let's take a look at Peace Death. Peace Death is a very simple and yet as I said, very unique game. You play as the Grim Reaper himself deciding the fate of those that pass through into the afterlife. And how do you make your decisions by judging people based on how they look? Excuse me, is it still 2019? You can't assume my afterlife? Well, actually in this game, you can. As the Grim Reaper, this is your probation period at work to determine whether or not you are actually qualified for the job. So every screw up, every mistake, every wrong person sent to hell or incorrect person sent to heaven over the next seven week period, there could cost you your job.  Early in the game, your choices will be obvious.  Adoi. But as you progress, making that choice will become harder and harder. A character might be hiding their true identity, like maybe they have horns under their hat or are standing in a pool of blood that's easy to miss. Also, you're able to test them, see if they're willing to change and let go of that gun they're holding or if they're committed to their life of sin. Testing people and making the right choice accordingly can be tough, as well as having the option to send some people to purgatory. Honestly, in this game, I'm mostly impressed by the sheer amount of sprites they design. Sure, it's only a $5 game and a simple concept, but the amount of time it must have took to design all of these characters. And each of them really stand out and are unique enough to make every choice feel more difficult than the last.  I mean, that's your prerogative. You might get fired, but hey, you had a good time doing it. You know, making this list of $5 games and that other list of free games on the Switch, I found something really interesting in that the free games were more often than not, more grand in scale, these huge open world games. They were more graphically impressive. They could do a lot more and you could arguably sink a lot more time into the free games than these ones that you actually have to pay for. While all of these games are really great and I had a ton of fun with them and absolutely worth the price, you can't tell by looking at them they're a $5 game, right? It's a budget title and you can see that. You're paying for a budget title but you're getting a good time. I don't know. For me, it's an interesting food for thought. I'm not trying to say anything. I just think it's really curious going from that list to this list and seeing how different the games are and seeing the budget cheaper, shorter games being the ones you have to pay for while the bigger is the ones you get for free. With all that being said, if you liked this video or you learned a little something, make sure you have flip all over that subscribe button. Smash like on the video as well while you're down there. Maybe even leave a comment with what great games you've been playing lately. Speaking of free, you know what else is free? My pit stains.


Hello, Moz readers. My name is Dana De Tommaso. I'm president and partner at Kickpoint, a digital marketing agency based in Edmonton. But if you're in Seattle, I'm just across the water, just outside Victoria, British Columbia. What I'm going to be talking to you about today is GA4, everyone's favorite subject. July, real soon now, you really need to upgrade to GA4. And it's not really an upgrade, the data doesn't transfer over. But anyway, there's lots of fun, interesting features in GA4 that were kind of an universal analytics, but now they're better. And one of the features that I don't think people are using enough or maybe think that they're just for ads is audiences, which is why this is called GA4 audiences, not just for ads, slices at dices, truly a miracle machine. But really what audiences do is they help you segment stuff. So I've written out a few options here, what you should understand about audiences. And what I would encourage all of you to do after watching this video is go into GA4, just try making some audiences. You can remove them if you don't like them, but experiment with it because you really can't hurt anything by making audiences. It's not going to ruin the data or something. They are totally harmless. So go ahead and try some audiences after I've given you these options of what you can do. But of course, watch me to the end first. So what are GA4 audiences? You may remember in our favorite tool, universal analytics, that there were segments. So audiences are segments basically on steroids. They have a lot more options available to them and they're built from criteria you set like segments were, but there's a lot more options in terms of that criteria that you set. And I don't think necessarily when people built segments, they really went into the advanced section a lot. So basically GA4 audiences are the advanced section plus more. Now the other thing with audiences that was not in UA is they can be time based. And this part is really cool and I think because it's so interesting that a lot of people are using it to its full potential yet, because I don't think we've really put our heads around like this is what we're going to use this for. So one of the things you could do, for example, is I want to know how many people have watched 3 plus videos in a 30-day span. Or you could say, I only want people in this audience who came to the site via this email and put something in their cart within one hour. That is something you could not do without some serious, serious kung fu in universal analytics. So again, GA4 audiences, it's super easy to do that. You can do time-based audiences, which I really enjoy. The other thing you can do with GA4 audiences is you can use them as reports. You can use them as reports within the GA4 interface. They're also available in the GA4 API. So you can export them out of GA4 and do interesting things with them in other tools, which I'm going to talk about when I get to the column that I'm currently standing in front of. So you can even use them in the real-time reports, which I think is really fun because I'll create an audience and then I'll go look in the real-time and make sure that people are actually starting themselves into the audience in real-time if I'm working with a client that has a high volume in a full website. And it's really neat to see people sort of sort themselves into audiences. It's neat for me. Maybe you are not as nerdy as I am. Maybe you'll not find that as fun. Anyway, they're neat. So how can you create them?  And then you click on create an audience. That's the simple part. The hard part is how are you going to create this audience? So there's three different things you can do. You can do dimensions, which are groupings of things. So a dimension, if you're not familiar with the term, is something like the countries that people who came to your website or the pages that they viewed. Those are dimensions. The next thing is metrics. And metrics are the numbers. So this was this many page views or this many sessions. That's a metric. And then the third thing can be based on events. Events are technically dimensions, but they also kind of live outside of that a little bit, which is why I separated them out. So for example, in GA4, you may have heard that everything's an event. Well, for example, a page view is an event called page underbar view. If somebody clicks on a video and it's a YouTube video built in, it will work. You would have an event video underbar start. And that event would have parameters such as which video they were viewing, where they paused it, how far they got through the video. So all those kinds of things are available to you when you're creating these audiences. Now, one important thing about audiences, they do not backfill. Okay? You can't create them like segments you could in UA.  That is not going to work.  So make sure to create them the minute you think of them. Typically we have a tab in our spreadsheet we use for our analytics plans called GA4 audiences and myself and our team and our client brainstorm. All the possible things we might want to capture in an audience. And then we set that up right away when they're setting up their GA4. So I'd recommend doing that and as you think of new audiences, just add them. Again, as I said, you can get rid of them later if you don't like them. And at least you're backfilling them now instead of three months from now saying, oh, if only I'd set up that audience three months ago, future you would have been so happy. So don't wait on setting up audiences. The other thing too with audiences, you can have static audiences or dynamic audiences. Static audiences are this thing happened at some point. And so this person is now in this audience. Like at some point they viewed a video. Dynamic audiences are this thing is happening right now. So this person has done this thing. And if they're not in the dynamic audience, then they're outside of it. So they're either in or they're out just like high school. And so for a dynamic audience, you can choose whether or not you want to have dynamic or static. And that is going to depend on the kind of audiences you create as well. This part I think is probably not as useful right now. I think more features are going to get added to static versus dynamic in the future. So I don't know if you'll use that part right away. Okay, don't worry about it. Just know that it's an option for future. Now the last part that I really enjoy about audiences is using triggers for audiences. So you may see a checkbox. We create an audience that will say trigger an event. And so what will happen is an event will be created when someone becomes a member of the audience. And this is really useful for things like say conversions. You can use it for conversions because any event can be a conversion. Just FYI, don't set page views as conversions. I know you'll have 100% conversion rate then, which might look great to your client. But like, come on, don't do that. So you might want to set an audience as a conversion or you just might want to know how many times this thing happened. So for example, we have one client who wants to know when people have viewed at least three of their videos all the way to 100%. They're a training company. And so in that case, we fire an event to say X number. And then they would say this week, this number of people got through module one or this number of people watched three videos in full. And that way it's a nice, easy way in the reporting to say, you know, 80% of people who started module one actually completed module one this week, next week, the week after that. So creating audience triggers is really neat. And I have AUD under bar written here because we always prepend any event name for our audiences triggers with AUD dash. So you know that it came from an audience trigger as opposed to something that was measured on the website directly. So for example, if it was somebody starting a video, then we would have AUD under bar video start, for example. So it's like the video start event, but it's related to an audience specifically. Okay, I move over here. Now, what do you use audiences for? Boy, I could do like half an hour of different possible audiences you can create, but I don't have an hour. So here's some ideas of audiences that you should start with. One of the things that I always encourage customers to do is if they have a login. So let's say they're a SaaS product, like Moz, for example. And on the Moz website, when you go there, there's a login button. You could take anybody who clicks on that login button and then say, this person is probably a current customer because they're trying to log in. Or even better, if you do have analytics behind your login, then you can insert them into the audience of current customers if they've ever accessed a page that they can only access when they log in. The advantage of this is then you can say, you know what? We already sold these people. They're not going to convert. And then when you are looking at your conversion rates for different pages or campaigns or whatever it might be, you can exclude the people who are never going to convert because you already sold them. You're not going to sell them more. But if you have, say, an add-on package or something else, then you could take the people who are already current customers, the people who could only buy the add-ons because they already have the base package, and then look at them specifically away from everyone else when you're considering those conversion rates. So at a minimum, I would say, if there's a way you can differentiate on your website between people who've already bought your stuff and people who haven't bought your stuff, people who are members versus non-members, if you're, say, a not-for-profit organization, those are great ways to separate out those two, so you don't need to be confusing yourself with conversion rates. One of the things that we've used this for actually is for a convention center, which during COVID they weren't as busy. We still set up their GA4 anyway. And one of the things that we look for is they serve a lot of different audiences. They serve, for example, the people who are going to events. They serve the people who are booking a meeting. They serve the people who are booking a wedding. So the people who are booking a wedding will probably look at the booking a wedding page. They might also look at the events coming up. People who are booking a meeting will look at the booking a meeting page and the events coming up. But people who are going to an event are only going to look at the events page. more than half of their traffic are people going to the events page and nothing else. So when we're looking at their sales and we're saying how are your wedding sales, we're only looking at people who went to the wedding page. We're only evaluating based on that wedding audience. We're only evaluating based on that meeting audience. And then we're just, we're not ignoring them. It's not important for their conversion rate to see the people who looked at the event page. So that's one way you can really segment out audiences to make your marketing more effective and really focus it down to what matters. Other stuff you can do, you can evaluate content. So, as I mentioned earlier, we have a client who wants to see people who are finishing their videos. So for example, even if it's not a learning platform, if you have video content in your website, create an event based on people who've looked at three plus videos on your site. Maybe just started them or got halfway through. It's up to you how you want to set that up. But then look at that audience versus everybody else and then look at the conversion rate. Maybe people who watch your videos are more likely to convert. And if that's the case, put your videos in more places. It's a really great way to evaluate how different pieces of content, different CTAs, different blog posts, for example, can really contribute to getting more people to do the thing that you want them to do. You can also build persona groups. So for example, like thinking back to the convention centers and example of personas, but also if you have different tools that you sell that are to a different audience. And actually I'll just use Moz here as an example. You've got MozPro, you got MozLocal, for example, you have Stat. Those are three very different audience groups. And so you would have audiences of people who are probably gonna be pro customers, probably gonna be local customers and probably gonna be stat customers. And then that way you're only focusing on each individual audience as you evaluate the conversions for that particular product. And that's a really important way, again, to focus in on what's most important instead of being like our conversion rate 0.1%. But that's because we were counting everybody who went to the blog and never went to anything else. So we're interested in our product. Or we're counting everybody who's already converted, right? Just get that out of there. Focus on who you could potentially sell to as opposed to literally everyone who's ever been on your website ever. And then you can also compare audiences. So as I mentioned, you can say people who do this are more likely to convert. That means you have to have an opposite audience. So you could have people who only complete one video, or you could say people who get to 50% of this video versus people who get to 10% of this video. I wanna compare those two audiences to see part of me which audience was better. And so I think that that's also a really effective way to compare, do we need to take that last half of the video and slap it up faster? Is there something like that pre-roll? You know, when you watch a movie trailer and they've got like the trailer compressed in the first five seconds, do you do that for your videos? Because you're losing people and by the time they get to the good stuff, those people who watch 50% are like, yeah, I'm ready to buy, but it takes so long to get there that a bunch of people are dropping out. That's a good way to compare audiences as well. And of course, you can use them for Google ads. I heard that's a pretty neat thing to do. So generally, audiences are pretty neat. I think that not a lot of people are using them. I think you should use them and I think if your agency signed, tell your clients about them because clients love coming up with different ways to slice and dice their customer data. And I have never had clients so excited as I said, you tell me what kind of audiences you wanna make and we'll make them for you. And they just through the spreadsheet. So you can definitely give them some homework and they will help you out with creating audiences. Anyway, enjoy creating audiences. If you have a neat idea for an audience, definitely leave it in the comments or reach out to me on social media. I'm happy to hear about fun stuff that other people are doing. Thanks so much.


31, finals appearance between them in five years. The question for both teams remains, have they got it right this season? Tonight should offer a few further clues between Western Sydney Wanderers and the New Council Jets. Right at the break, Wanderers won. Promising this for the Wanderers. Still Brandon Borrello, try to bend it! All the shop, as of now, very solid, very professional, very clinical, two chances, two goals scored, a 2-0 win for the Wanderers who are back to winning ways as they end New Council's perfect start to the campaign. It is still early, of course, but the Red and Black starting to believe they are top of the ailing tonight for the first time in two years, with two games in Sydney to come before the World Cup break.


Thank you very much Tony for that warm introduction. Thank you to all of you for coming out this evening. It's nice to see some familiar faces as well. I should correct you on one thing actually. I didn't go to standard life to find out how the world worked. I just went there because I needed a job. I never heard of university. I left school and got this job. Then I met lots of students during the holidays who came to work part-time at the university. I thought, haha! So I applied and then on I went. As Tony said, this is called Not the End of the World, dystopia is nostalgia, the ongoing attraction of the apocalypse in fiction. I'm going to steer away from my own work when discussing this. I'm going to range quite personally actually through a number of texts, but later on I'll be very, very happy to answer questions about my own evocation of the apocalypse and what the apocalypse means to me. It seems very appropriate at this precise time to be writing about the end of the world. I maintain that writing about the end of the world is always in some way going to be an act of nostalgia. I think it's also frequently a rather political act and these two statements can appear to be in opposition with each other. The Oxford English Dictionary defines nostalgia as a sentimental longing or wistful attraction for a period in the past and they illustrate it with a statement that's rather appropriate to us tonight. It's overcome with acute nostalgia for my days at university. It's a beautiful sentence. So nostalgia looks backwards while political acts, although often inspired by long histories, presumably look forward towards an improved future. There are, as you know, binge watchers of Netflix, readers of novels, TV, fans, many, many, many ways for the world to end. Alien invasion, pandemics, zombie apocalypse, climate change, warfare, nuclear conflagration, the wrath of God. The apocalypse is, of course, different things to different people and one definition would be the complete and utter final destruction of the world, the type of arrogance depicted so effectively by the book of revelations. There before me was a pale horse, its rider was named Death and Hades was falling close behind. Quite frankly, this isn't much used to the novelist. You need a few people left to support a novel or a poem, at least for the duration of that novel or the poem. So my apocalypse will therefore involve destruction on a scale devastating enough to suggest the end of civilisation as we know it, but with some few remaining souls whose presence may yet signal survival of a sort. The apocalypse is so fundamental to human outlook that we've been laughing at it forever since time began. There's a version of the chicken lichen, you remember chicken lichen, the little chick who missed an acorn lands on his head and he thinks it's the sky that's fallen on him. A version of this has been traced back 25 centuries to the Buddhist texts the Jataka tales. As you'll remember in the various European versions, which may exclude the Disney version and the Disney version all ends rather well, but the European version, the chicken runs frantically around the arm yard gathering the rest of the birds who all rush into the forest in the hope of escaping the sky landing on their heads and the fox follows them and eats them all up. It's a nobody panic. There's a vote tonight, but it'll probably be alright in the end. It's not all fun and games though. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which comes from ancient Mesopotamia. 21,000 BC emphasises the necessity of death. Gilgamesh is desperate to discover that thing that we all want to know, what's driven there, lots and lots of novels, the secret of eternal life, but he learns instead that when the gods created man, they let death be his share and life withheld in their own hands. This is a message of course that repeated again and again and again in a myriad of folktales. I'm going to choose the Scots Irish folktale, death in a nut, which is one of my favourites because it involves a wily old woman. The wily old woman beats death on the road. Death has come for her, but she manages to trap him inside a nut shell and immediately the world disappears. And because she can't live in a barren universe, she has to let him go. She's forced to release death. And in some versions death immediately cuts the old woman down. But in other versions he's impressed by her hits back and he allows her another period of life before he comes and collects her.  The natural death of an individual is of course one thing, the sudden death of a civilisation, quite another. Our fascination with the preserved city of Pompeii is fuelled, not merely I should say by the information it provides about ancient Rome, remarkable though that is, but by the unexpectedness of the disaster which felled Pompeii's population as they went about their daily life. And there is of course a voyeuristic edge to this. The ancient Pompeians were getting up to all sorts of things the day that the volcano hit and engulfed them. But the ongoing appeal of Pompeii's sudden destruction doesn't belie our sympathy for the victims' suffering. And I think this mix of fascination and compassion is typical to our responses to contemporary disasters as well. We have repeated news broadcasts about tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, landslides, forest fires, avalanches, and they all capture our attention largely I think because we relate to and fear the plight of those involved. We're also guilty about it, we feel guilt because we're fascinated by it but we also feel overwhelmed, we feel useless, we're relieved not to be there, we're glad it's not us. I think there's another element that makes us feel uneasy about these emotions the composition of fear itself. In writing in psychology today, Dr John Ae Cal describes the anatomy of fear.  The blood flows away from the heart and out towards the extremities preparing the arms and legs for action. These effects served as well millennia ago in situations where we were faced with beastly animals that thought they had found dinner. I love his reference to beastly animals. But what Dr Cal doesn't say is that under the right circumstances typically those involving fiction or roller coasters fear can be rather pleasurable. The things that we fear form a core of much of the stories we tell each other partly because they allow us to identify and confront anxieties we'd be foolish or too scared to engage with in real life but also because they give us a friction of enjoyment. According to Aristotle, the role of dramatic tragedy is to invoke fear and pity to act as catharsis. I can feel myself on rather dodgy ground here because I know that within the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow there are people much better versed in matters dramatic and Aristotelian than me and there are various interpretations of what Aristotle meant by this but I think what he meant is that precariously experiencing fear in a safe environment enables us to identify our own anxieties by relating to fictional characters who are undergoing fear invoking trauma our capacity for understanding and empathy are enhanced. So in other words were you to go home tonight and download the horror movie Saw. It might have a positive effect on your humanity. Edwin Burke and his philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful published in 1757 identifies terror alongside pain as the most sublime emotion and he too recognises something pleasurable in the experience of being scared. As proof he quotes John Milton's Paradise Lost in which he considers death and Satan examples of sublime invocations of terror and I'll give you Milton's description of death. The other shape of shape it might be called that shape had none distinguishable in number, joint or limb or substances might be called that shadows seemed for each seemed either black he stood as night fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell and shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head the lightness of a kingly crown had on? Burke concludes that in this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible and sublime to the last degree. The friction of fear lies I think of course in our inability to quite see the object of our terror and what seems but is uncertain and Milton leaves space for the reader's imagination to conjure its own terrors which is of course a technique still employed by savvy horror writers and film directors. What scares us and why we like being scared also concerns Sigmund Freud who boils it down in his famous essay on the Gothic as Das Anheimlich which is usually translated as the uncanny but also as the unholy. I also think the unholy would make a great horror movie title. Freud gives us a useful list of things that can be used to terrifying effect including doubles, the inanimate made animate, dolls, the reanimation of the dead. All things he points out that with the right handling in fairy stories or religion perhaps are not frightening at all and he concludes that the storyteller has a peculiarly directive influence over us by means of the state of mind into which he can put us and the expectations he can arouse in us. He is able to guide the current of our emotions dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material. I think that's my favourite sentence because I'm really guilty of charge of obtaining a variety of effects with the same material. This is every novelist's ambition. So I realise I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here. Where is the apocalypse? But Freud's essay I think suggests the importance of knowing a manipulating atmosphere. The enjoyable presence of fear in literature benefits from the reader's own sense of security at the point of enjoyment. The opposite of unheimlich is surely heimlich, homely and that I would suggest can be allied in some ways to nostalgia. So let's get back to the impending apocalypse. I know you came out tonight to avoid that. Earth's imminent destruction is a trope that's been used for countless sci-fi movies often involving external forces, rapacious aliens intent on capturing our planet who are finally vanquished by Sigurni Weaver, Bruce Willis, Doctor Who or some other lone hero. This is, I would say, Apocalypse's backdrop effective and entertaining but a kind of space-western. It doesn't really matter who the monsters are in these movies. The sight of the massing on the mountain ridge with their bows and arrows is enough. The audience surfs the adventure but we know the deal. Sigurni is needed for the sequel. Bruce gets the girl and Doctor Who survives to regenerate another day. The aliens are sucked out of the decompression hatch. The craft blown to smithereens, the alien force massacred, border restored. Like the sci-fi villains, the form the apocalypse takes is not really the most important thing. It is there, in Freud's words, to guide the current of our emotions. As I've already mentioned, it seems certain that apocalyptic visions predate the written word. I imagine that our ancestors sitting in their huts and caves and homemade structures talked often about the end of the world. But the first emanation of the apocalypse and the form of the novel is generally agreed to be Mary Wilton Crath Shelley's The Last Man, which is published in 1826. Set between 2073 and 2100, The Last Man evokes a world rather like Mary's own. There are no visible technological advances. Please look elsewhere for your flying cars. The Last Man evokes a world rather like Mary's own. People ride horses, they drive carts, they sail, and wear floaty dresses occasionally equipped with veils. The Last Man is narrated by Lionel Verney who relates the progress of a devastating pandemic and the responses of a surviving population to the crisis, which includes with shades of our own time, perhaps, factionism, religious extremism, and ultimately silent warfare. In a move that has become a staple of apocalyptic fiction, the surviving population of Britain go on the march, seeking warmer and healthier climes. They fail and, spoiler alert, there is only one person left standing, our unhappy narrator, Verney, who is left all alone on the earth with only a sheepdog for company. I don't know if Richard Matheson, the author of the post-pandemic zombie apocalypse classic I Am Legend, which is published in 1954 and has been adapted for the big screen several times, including in 2007, as some of you might remember, with Will Smith. I don't know if he had the last man in mind, but the image of that poster of the man and the dog alone in the wilderness always conjures Mary Shelley as the last man for me. So, despite the soundness and the originality of its time of this concept, the last man is no Frankenstein. It's a sprawling, unfocused, wish-fulfillment novel, lacking in pace and drowned by nostalgia. At the beginning of the book, Verney describes his father as one of those men on whom nature had bestowed the prodigality to prodigality, the envied gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bank of life to be impelled by these winds without adding reason as the rudder or judgement as the pilot for the voyage. Of course, the romantics delight in imagery connected to the sea and sailing, but I think it's impossible for us to know Mary's most and craft Shelley's history and not glimpse her husband Percy Shelley in these lines. He's a man of prodigious talents and prodigious recklessness, and Shelley, of course, drowns in 1822 at the age of 29 and a sudden storm and a gulf of Spezia. The Courier, a leading London newspaper, began his a victory with the words, Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned. Now he knows whether there is a God or not. Mary is urged to develop herself and this nostalgic project is understandable. By the time she's writing this, she's lost most of the people close to her. By the age of 27, she's lost her husband, her half-sister, several children, and all of the people with the exception of her step-sister Claire Claremont, who's now a governess in Russia, who had spent the summer of 1816 together at the Villa di Adate near Lake Geneva, where, of course, Frankenstein was conceived. She's a young woman, but her youth is now behind her. So the last man, I think to an extent, attempts to resurrect the players of that summer. Percy Shelley is Adrian, the kind and noble protector of England. Byron is represented by the dazzling Lord Raymond, commander of a liberated Constantinople, and Mary herself is, of course, the last man, deserted by the companions of her youth to face the burden of life alone. There's another form of nostalgia expressed in The Last Man. Nostalgia for the political ideas of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft and her father, William Godwin, and the failure of the French Revolution, perhaps, to bring about an ideal state. The Last Man with its plague-riven society, divided by religion and warfare, confronts the concept of the inevitability of progress and the idea that the collective will, collective effort, can lead to collective improvement. So Mary's dystopian vision is political as well as nostalgic, but this is the politics of disappointment rather than hope. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's The Last Man is itself a failed experiment. Nevertheless, it anticipates many of the troops of later apocalyptic fiction, the isolation of the individual from the rest of humanity, the images of massed populations upritted from their homes and on the march. The questions of what humanity is when the veneer of civilisation is removed. There are so many apocalyptic visions to choose from that I can't actually imagine how big the big book of the apocalypse would be. It would, I don't know, it would fill Glasgow. So I'm going to proceed with a few books that smeared me at an impressionable age. Books, I think, that occupied the carousel in Bobby's bookshop rather than the shelf and the library. But I'm going to begin with a classic. H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds published in 1898. This too falls into the camp of sci-fi speculative fiction or fantasy with a massive dose of horror added for good effect. And it's one of the first apocalyptic novels I fell in love with. Endlessly malleable, a gift to illustrators and broadcasters, film and TV directors, steampunk enthusiasts. War of the Worlds is, of course, located in the period in which it was written. I'm going to underestimate the power of this. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose work H.G. Wells repeatedly denigrated, which was very cheeky of him, had established the efficacy of locating proto-sci-fi fantasy horror in the contemporary period almost ten years earlier with the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde published in 1886.  So it might not have been an original trope by this time, but War of the Worlds' modernity adds to its shock effect. Something, incidentally, that Orson Wells uses to good effect in his famous 1968 radio remake, which he relocated to contemporary America and which, as you know, costs some panic amongst listeners. The locations chosen by Wells, Woking, Letterhead, Richmond Hill and Sheperton, a setting later used by J.G. Ballard to good effect in his own dystopian fiction, seemed designed to underline the impact of outrageous acts happening on domestic territory. These are suburbs, not battlefields occupied by normal citizens, non-combatants rather than soldiers. We're told the milkman came as usual and that the narrator heard a train running towards Woking, comforting everyday details. The disruption of a reassuringly familiar world or, if not familiar, a regular world, one with habits and rituals that reoccur at predicted times. For the modern reader, the circumstances might be reminiscent of witness reports that follow terrorist attacks and which often seem to need to express a location of the event within until then an eventful present. I'd been at the gym and I was cycling to work when it happened. A man told BBC Radio 4 in the aftermath of the recent Westminster attack, perhaps nostalgia is an inevitable part of any disaster. We long for the moment before the redundancy notice, the accident, the poor diagnosis. As I said in my introduction, writing the apocalypse is often a political act and as you'll hear, Wells is no egalitarian but his novel inevitably draws comparisons with the expansion of the British Empire, which at the time of the book's publication was at its height with colonised territories in Africa, Australia, North and South America, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, and the Atlantic and Pacific Islands. Chapter 1, The Eve of the War, says of the Martians. Before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but on its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of 50 years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? H.G. Wells was a huge influence on the next dystopian novel, which snared me in its tendrils. John Wyndon's post-apocalyptic The Day of the Tripods was published in 1951. Unlike the War of the Worlds, it imagines an invasion by a ruthless superior species and the Tripods have, of course, more success than H.G. Wells' Martians. After a meteor storm succeeds in blinding most of the human population, the Tripods hold sway, leaving only a few pockets of survivors. The novel's first chapter is entitled The End Begins, and its very first sentence both establishes and undermines a cozy evocation of a world governed by regularity. When a day you happen to know is Wednesday, starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. Wyndon's choice of days, Wednesdays and Sundays, which I suspect in the period he was writing were the dullest days of the week, a suggestive of boredom, but this is no ordinary Wednesday, something is seriously wrong. The protagonist in apocalyptic fiction of this period, tend like Wells and Wyndon's narrators to middle class. This helps to underline the paradise-lost aspect of the books. The economic imperative is at bay, and so the collapse of society comes as a shock, rather than as a relief. Brian Aldis singled out Wyndon's Day of the Tripods when he coined the phrase cozy catastrophe in his History of Science fiction, Billion Years Spree, published in 1973. Aldis might as just have easily signalled the War of the Worlds as narrator as an unnamed journalist. It's true that John Wyndon's hero, biologist Bill Mason, maintains such a constant stiff upper lip we could suspect him of Botox, but the horror that follows the breakdown of law and order in the wake of the Tripods victory is, I think, far from cozy. The population divides between blind and seeing. Those with eyesight are in hot demand and liable to find themselves shackled to a work-gang acting as a guide for visually devastated people. The working classes are represented by the form of a despotic scavenger named Torrance, who eventually heads a fascistic militia. Written during the Korean War and at the beginnings of the Cold War, the day of the Tripods allegory of a blinded population of the mercy of rapacious plants might seem clunky. Indeed, the plants themselves are ridiculous, as big a challenge to filmmakers as the slow-moving, bandaged Egyptian mummies of early cinema who always caught their victims despite moving at a snail's place. Nevertheless, the book functions. More than that, it's remained print and popular since its first publication. I don't know why this is, a combination of voice style, characterisation, pace and place. John Wyndon manages the act of prostigination that all writers strive for. A central driver, the element of nostalgia in Wyndon's The Day of the Tripods, is once again for order and regularity many of his first readers, a lot of whom would have experienced the Second World War, a bombsite from rationing had perhaps never really known. What a Benjamin is like from the standard of an age yet to come. Readers alienated from the mechanisms of contemporary world may find release in the struggles of wells and Wyndon's protagonists fighting against the odds in apocalyptic landscapes. It's hard to square these books' popularity with the depiction of the working classes as either a simple folk destined for cannon fodder or brute intent on surviving at all cost. Perhaps this is also part of the prostigination. John Christopher's 1956 novel The Death of Grass and the Clue to the Apocalypses in the title might be seen as a reply to Wyndon's cozy catastrophe. Once again, the central protagonists are middle class. John Constance is a comfortably off engineer. His friend Roger Buckley an equally comfortable civil servant. The class is important because they have a long way to fall. Once again, the threat comes from outside, though in the case of The Death of Grass the source is not extra terrestrial. The deadly Chun Mili virus has spread from China devastating all the crops of western Europe and causing massive famine. It's not long before the veneer of civilization disappears and vigilantes start roaming the English countryside looting, raping and killing. John Constance's brother, David, farms a little known hidden valley. He saw the disaster coming and has been growing a virus-free strain of potato. This I think is the only novel but the hero is indeed a virus-free strain of potato that our salvation lies. The novel follows John and Roger's quest to reach the valley with their families. So the two moments start off as typical stoical Englishmen and the journey takes a matter of days but in the short period between leaving his home and arriving at the valley who has more leadership qualities than you might consider healthy becomes a ruthless survivalist. I think the most shocking moment comes roughly midway through the book when John goes to a farmhouse a woman opens the door and he shoots her in the face. He shoots her in order to gain access to the food in her farmhouse. John's son, David, asks him what was the shooting daddy? John looked into his son's eyes. We have to fight for things now, he said. We have to fight to live it's something you'll have to learn. Did you kill them? Yes. Where did you put the bodies? Out of the way. Come in, we're going to have breakfast. There was a stain of blood at the door and another where the woman had lain. David looked at them but he did not say anything else. A shock to the reader comes not only from John Constance's act his resorption to violence his shooting of the woman in the face in her own home. The real surprise I think is his sanguine attitude afterwards. There's no soul searching and when Roger's wife Olivia insists the woman's teenage daughter Jane who's likely to die on her own comes with their group John reflects that crisis were always likely to produce strange results in terms of human behaviour. The strange results he's referring to is his wife's compassion rather than his own ruthlessness. Shortly afterwards the teenager Jane is claimed by Perry a London gun dealer who's joined the group and has executed his own wife for infidelity. John and Roger's wives object they want to arm the girl and encourage her to slash Perry's throat shocking in itself but the men consider Perry's skills as a sharpshooter worth any sacrifice young Jane may have to make. The gender politics in the death of grass is clear when the apocalyptic chips are down men step forward and women should look out. Despite international laws we know that systematic rape continues to be used as a weapon in war and that the international states in their lives broke apart report in 2004 the opportunistic rape and pillage of previous centuries has been replaced in modern conflict by rape used as an orchestrated combat tool.  It's perhaps not surprising that Wells, Wynddon and Christopher don't give much agency to female characters in their novels though women are treated with a mixture of paternalism amusement and impatience. However we feel about this whether we dismiss it as a reflection of the times in which the books were written a blot on the text or a reason to avoid the novels altogether. The convention is a physically weak woman who however intelligent and capable they were prior to the disaster of forced by prices to return rely entirely on men is an invitation to other novelists engaging with the genre to turn things around. Just as a portrayal of working class characters is nasty brutish and short out to prevent the inequalities of previous social systems are opportunities for reinvention. And this of course has happened in the 20th and 21st centuries. The elasticity and allegorical opportunities of the apocalyptic genre has resulted in it being embraced by feminist writers notably Margaret Atwood who commands I would say a whole section of the apocalyptic bookshelf to herself. Atwood's novels explore the fragility of hard-won human rights in civic society. The Handmaid's Tale possibly her best known apocalyptic novel evokes a world where widespread infertility is accompanied by the rise of fundamentalist religious sect. Women's rights including reproductive rights are removed. They are forbidden to read, be educated or have any agency at all. As Atwood has pointed out this is not so much sci-fi as reality for many women across the globe. Dangerous pregnancies strange births and threatened reproductive rights haunt speculated fiction by women writers. I've already mentioned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There's also Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child Octavia Butler's Blood Child all classics of perilous, provocative fiction. Pregnancy is the perfect vehicle for body horror. Birth is dangerous. You do not know what you might be harboring in your womb or who might take you. Take it from you. Fertility rights are central to Louise Erdrich's near future dystopian future home of the living God which was published last year, 2017. This novel embodies the complexity of race identity and the matriarchal line and the person of Cedar Hawk songmaker, a young pregnant woman and a world that is running backwards. Evolution is reversing. Animals, birds and insects reverting towards their prehistoric forms. Human-eyed babies look increasingly less human. Life births are dwindling, women dying in childbirth and perfect children becoming rare. As the crisis progresses fertile women are encouraged to become womb volunteers and gestate embryos from in-featured clinics. Pregnate women are rounded up imprisoned in hospitals and the newborn babies taken from them. It's only a matter of time before Cedar is imprisoned and rather than awake her fate she goes on the run. The fear of child abduction is ancient, fundamental and ongoing. Still in children with ghostly presences and folk tales and news reports from around the globe. A tribal member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Louise Erdrich engages with magical and religious certainties in a contemporary political world. The history of indigenous peoples including that of Native Americans are blighted by church and state sanctioned forced adoption programs. The Indian adoption project was a federal program which ran from 1941 to 1967 and its victims include children snatched from mothers who are subsequently jailed for trying to bring them home. As baby songmakers birth for us near the tension ranks up as nature regresses and the new self-imposed authorities determine to continue the human race at the cost of women's freedom. As I've said already many apocalyptic fictions that I could discuss and I think many of you will have your own favourites but I'm going to end with an optimistic note I'm going to end with a book that while never of turning away from the dangers of the road I don't know if you saw what I did there also contains elements of joy and I think this is because it can connect the post and the pre-pandemic world that evokes through the medium of culture. Canadian author Emily St John's novel Station 11 begins on the night that the Georgia flew hits Toronto and it begins with a sudden heart attack and death of Arthur Leander a Hollywood actor who is on stage then King Lear. The narrative travels through between before and after the pandemic stretching some years into the past and 15 years into the future. Arthur Leander's death of course has nothing to do with the pandemic but Emily St John's focus on it and the lives and deaths of Arthur's friends and associates answers the question that apocalyptic novels often dice with does one death matter in a world of mass destruction? The focus of the post pandemic world is on the travelling symphony a combined group of actors and musicians who travel dangerous routes around the new settlements playing concerts and giving performances of Shakespeare. They've tried adding more modern plays to their repertoire but these never seem to go down as well as Shakespeare and Dieter, a member of the symphony believes that this is because people want what was best about the world. There's a phrase that flits through the timelines of station 11 things happen for a reason and the novel's narrative refutes this. The just do not get the reward and the guilty often go unpunished but all is not lost because at the heart of all things there is culture which helps to make an impossible world possible to live in because in the world of the travelling symphonies motto which they stole from Star Trek Voyager survival is insufficient and in case I make station 11 sound pompous it's important to note that a broad sway the cultures embraced by the novel including comic books, films, television at one point Annette says that the most apocalyptic movies she's seen had all involved zombies and just saying she said it could be much worse. I go to finish with a short extract from station 11 which I think reads like a love letter to the world that we have the privilege to occupy now, right now we've got no need for nostalgia because we are here and she heads it as an incomplete list. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power at the electric third rail no more cities no more screens shining in the half light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages no more concert stages lit by candy coloured halogens no more electronica punked electric guitars no more pharmaceuticals no more certainty of surviving a scratch on one hand a cut on the finger while chopping vegetables for dinner a dog bite no more flight no more towns glimpse from the sky through aeroplane windows points of glimmering light no more looking down from 30,000 feet and imagining the lives lit up by those light at that moment at this moment thank you