I am starting from scratch, let me tell you, had a complete brand overhaul, like completely third out the window, starting over. Got you. So how do you honestly feel about potentially using Pinterest as a way to reach people? Because based on doing a lot of research, I was thinking as using that on Instagram because Pinterest is mainly visual and Pinterest is very good at leading people away from it, whereas Instagram wants you to stay on Instagram. The Pinterest, you can go to a website, you can go to an Instagram, you can go anywhere from there. It's the network. I think it's a viable option is just about who's on there and the type of music you have, right? Are the type of people that you, that would be your fans, are they on there? Last question, number one, of course there's a diverse set of people on there, but still there's some types that you can pretty much expect not to be there, right? Little baby's fans aren't on Pinterest, you know what I'm saying? But I think it's a very viable option is just about doing the work to figure out what that looks like, right? Because there is that nature of testing. We don't have that hack yet. We have considered Pinterest in terms of running campaigns, but we haven't had the time or an artist that's been committed enough to it to figure out that system. But we do believe that there could be something there. So if you take that time to figure it out, it's just about being responsive to what you see data-wise and coming up with something interesting enough based on the platform that you think people react to. So are you a Pinterest user? Very, yes. Okay, so I think that's very good news. So I think there's a high chance that you understand what people react to, what's interesting on there, how to lead people away. So give it a shot and go from there. All this stuff comes down to testing and does it work? And it might work for this song and it might not work for that song. But that's the ongoing process. No matter how great we get it, we do. We're always trying to figure out a new system, a new platform. Every time you got to start from scratch, what works there? And then we apply different artists to those methods. We have maybe two to three that work for a vast, vast majority of people. But even those don't work for everybody. And then once you get into the niche versions of things and the things that are less common like Pinterest is just catered to the artist approach. And I think even outside of Pinterest people, I wouldn't say for some people who aren't on Pinterest with your Pinterest strategy. But even if you do something through Pinterest, it is interesting enough. Not only will you likely be able to get people on Pinterest to react. If you do it right, it could become a thing that you're an artist who's doing this on Pinterest, which nobody else is using. And that itself becoming a marketing tool if you use that landscape and format to the max and in an interesting way. In the same way, you have somebody like Tiara Wack when she did her minute project. And where all 15 songs were a minute or however many songs it was. And then that also allowed her to have one minute videos. And then all the videos could be on Instagram because they're all one minute long, right? All these things are basically built for the social formatting that she was expressing it through. And if you make sure you do that with that in mind versus just saying, hey, I got this general music and this general album cover and all that stuff. And I'm just posting it on Pinterest. If you can say, no, what does that look like and how can I build around it? You'll be way better off to start. Whether you have success, let's just start the process and then we can navigate from there.


The following is a presentation of TFNN, the morning markets pick off with your host Tommy O'Brien. Hey everybody, I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TFNN, 8.30 a.m. Monday morning, 60 minutes to go until that opening bell. We got a mixed pretty calm market to start things off. Right now you're looking at the S&P futures, negative by about five points, trading in 3,207. We got the NASDAQ and Q futures positive, NASDAQ positive. It's new with that. NQ positive by 26 points, trading 10,649, the Dow negative by 67 points, trading 26,453. We have gold catching a bid, gold up about $8 right now. You're looking at the contract at 1817. We got silver, silver up 30 cents at 2006. Let's jump to silver to start it off. We haven't started a program off with silver yet, folks, but check out that acceleration just since last night. From 1960 to 2006, you put this on a daily, that's a high for the last year. You put it on a three-year weekly, that's a high as well, and we'll back it up to see where we are in context. We had a long way to go, but we're back to whether it's talking about 2014. Are we over this price level? No, we're not quite. The July of 16, we're looking at a high of 21, 22, but quite an acceleration, folks, from March 11, 64, now trading above $20 in the price of silver. Trading gold in that context, quite a cup in handle formation. Look at this cup, 1923, the high for gold. That's a monthly, putting it on the daily, quite an acceleration. We're coming up to the highs that we made on July 8th of 1829. You got the gold contract, trading at 1818. Notes and bonds, higher price, low yield. What's new, folks? We got the 10-year. Let's drill it down a little bit on a 15 minute. The 10-year, a five ticks at 139.16. We're looking at a 30-year right now, up about 15 ticks at 1806. We're looking at a 10-year yield of 0.61% right now. We got the crew contract. Where are we? Above $40 at 40, 41. Last week, we're as high as 4126. For some context on this area, we're at include, right? You back it up the beginning of the year, whereas there's our dotted line to start 2020. We're floating with $65, remarkable. The price falls out of bed on March 6th when the Saudis decide to slash prices. We open, so that is March 6th. You open March 9th in the realm of $27 after trading the previous day as high as $46. But guess what? We've been flirting with this area.  It's July 20th, talking about six weeks. June 8th, we were trading within three pennies of where we're trading at right now, folks. It's not hanging out and it's really remarkable. The low that we had from March 6th, 4105, the crew just struggling to get above that level. We'll see where we end up on that crude contract. Jumping around, we're gonna start off with some of the thank stocks today. Why not? You get the Nasdaq futures, positive by 32 points. Last week, of course, eclipsing $11,000 on Monday. We trade lowered at $10,358 by Tuesday. Until last week, options expiration by pretty tame options expiration week. Even taking a look at the S&Ps in terms of where we sputtered out, right? We saw the action on Monday with the rest of the markets. We had quite a day Tuesday. We clawed all back and make new recent highs in the S&P on Wednesday. And then this trading range, I mean, Tuesday, you're looking at a trading range the entire day and the S&Ps are about 10 to 15 points. You did see a little bit of a sell-off. So we'll back it up to where we were in the futures. Last night, futures opened pretty much flat. We get some action at 9 o'clock. We get some action also at 4.30. Of course, you have Asia. You got Europe. Asia this morning, pretty flat. Shanghai up 3.1% after getting clobbered last week. We got Europe. DAX up about 5.10%, FTD down 5.10% and Cat Caroll just about even. All right, let's take a look at some of those thank stocks before we jump around to some of the earnings stuff. Huge week in earnings. About 25% of the S&P reporting their earnings this week alone, we'll get into those numbers in a moment. Right now, Amazon a hair under 3,000, but look at that trade hire, we're almost $40 from where we closed on Friday. Amazon right at 3,000 on the dot practically, whoops, AAPL for Apple, 385, pretty calm action from last week, looking at Microsoft shares up a bit from 202 to 205. Facebook shares. Three out this weekend, Disney, one of my favorites in the long term, Disney pulling a dramatic amount of their advertising from Facebook, but folks, you just can't hold down the Facebook. The Facebook. I mean, we just made all time highs last week. What is the 13th? Oh, Monday, all time highs. What happened to the boycott in Facebook? Yeah, we'll see if that becomes a reality. But right now, folks, nothing really affecting. Let's see what kind of trend line I got here on this chart. Let's back it up. Three-year weekly, no, we're going to look at a monthly on this one. There it is. Look at that acceleration. From July of 2013 at $24, we're a 10-bagger up at 242, and it's been kind of rocket ship. You put a linear regression on this line, talk about some irregularities going below, but if you push this trend line, we'll extend it to the right. And if you pull back to this trend line, folks, that's about a 20% haircut. You're talking about under 200 right now if you just pull back and bounce off that trend line. So watch out for Facebook. This, you know, we'll jump right into, let's jump into the stories. One of them is Facebook. We'll get into it. Facebook and Disney, Disney slashing ad spending on Facebook, according to the journal, joining hundreds of other companies that have paused ad spending on social media giants platform. Disney was Facebook's top US advertiser during the first half of this year. Now that's a big one, right? But what's going on? Folks, I mean, Facebook's down $2, but again, I just showed you, we just made all-time highs on Monday. The market not yet thinking that this is going to materialize. If you're telling me that their biggest advertiser in the first six months of the year is joining hundreds of other companies of pulling their advertising, what the market is saying right now at least, whether it's right or not, is that this is temporary. You know, that the world, that the machine that Zuckerberg has built for advertising for targeting, etc., is just too good to pass up for these companies for the long haul. Now hopefully, they force Facebook to have a little bit of responsibility for the environment they're creating, everything going on in that company. I'm personally not a big fan of Facebook, man. It's just ranting and raving and complaining and all that stuff. I am a fan of Instagram because I like pictures. There's no political, you know, and even that's turned into, now it's a picture. Guess what? It's a picture of somebody with a quotation of words to get the message out there. Nonetheless, Facebook a giant, really on phase when you look at Disney pulling their advertising. Disney shares pretty unchanged this morning. I got some Fibonacci numbers on here. So you have the recent high of 153.41 pre-COVID. That's last year. You fall out of bed from about 140 in late February with the rest of the market. If you focus on the run-up we had from about March 19th. We make recent highs on June 5th, the highs in the market. We've pulled back to almost a perfect 382 retracement. We'll see how Disney reacts to that 127.83 price point as we challenge that A to B equals CDD. And folks, that would be quite an A to B equals CDD. You're talking about 79 up to 127. That's almost a $46 ABC. You call it from 108. You're up there right near the all-time highs of about 153, 154. That becomes an ABC. We'll see if that hits as you approach that from June 8th. And with that in mind, check out the front page of TFNN, folks. I just launched my new trading service. Let me pull it up and find that page. Come on. Where are we at, folks? Where are we at? There we are. Head on over to the front page of TFNN, Rocket Equities and Options Report. You saw the Fibonacci numbers out there. I got the report almost done for this morning. I'm going to put that out. You can lock in 50% savings with the promo code Rocket. Check it out on the front page of TFNN, and you will lock that name as a charter member. I'll go over the details when we get back from the break. We'll be right back in three minutes. Stay tuned, folks. Many of our new listeners have heard about the Tiger's Den. The Tiger's Den is a lively community where professional traders and investors can meet, exchange ideas and information in a comfortable, moderated atmosphere. Hear all of the TFNN shows, plus see all of the charts as they happen live and have access to archives of all of those charts. You can test drive the Tiger's Den absolutely free for 30 days and greatly enrich your knowledge of these markets and how to make your money work for you. Details on the Tiger's Den are on the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN has launched our brand new website. You can still visit us at the same TFNN.com URL, but when you do, you'll see a new and improved homepage with a much simpler navigation, whether you're watching Tiger TV live in high definition or just accessing your newsletter subscriptions. We even have new pricing in six months and yearly options. Check out the new TFNN.com now and experience all the upgrades. TFNN.com educating investors. The gold market has taken off top side in a large way in 2020. If you want to take advantage of this sector, now is the time to subscribe to my Gold Report. The Gold Report took profits in four of its equities in the Gold Portfolio in the first week of January for a combined profit of 99.2% with two positions left in the portfolio that are profit of 67.5% as of January 7th. The Gold Report is a comprehensive look at the metal sector as well as the markets that move gold, which is the currency and bond markets. New subscribers get a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose. Every Monday morning, I publish the Gold Report with coverage of gold, silver, bonds, the XAU, HUI, GDX, as well as more than 30 different mining equities. To see for yourself the types of profitable trades that are recommended within the Gold Report, sign up now by visiting TFNN.com. Don't miss out on the next great gold trade. Sign up today. Are China A shares hot or not? If you trade China A shares, now may be time to take a closer look. Trade CHAU or CHAD directions daily CSI 300 China A share bull and bear ETFs. China A shares in either direction. Visit directioninvestments.com today. An investor should consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the direction shares carefully before investing. The prospectus and summary prospectus contain this and other information about direction shares. To obtain a prospectus or summary prospectus, please contact direction shares at<PHONE_NUMBER>. The prospectus or summary prospectus should be read carefully before investing. An investment in the funds is subject to risk, including the possible loss of principal. The funds are designed to be utilized only by sophisticated investors such as traders and active investors. Distributor, Four Side Fund Services, LLC. Don't forget, you can listen to TFNN live on your mobile device 24 hours per day. Go to TFNN.com, then hit Watch Tiger TV. That's TFNN.com, then hit Watch Tiger TV for the latest market information. Welcome back, folks. S&P is negative by about four. NASDAQ futures positive by 38. We get the Dow negative by 39. As I was mentioning, head on over to the front page of TFNN. Rocket equities and options launched it a week ago today. I appreciate everyone signed up last week for it. I'm gonna be putting out a report today. Probably have an update most of the week this week as well. We had one position that we started off with for a long-term position last week. We're gonna be looking at adding to that this week. Big week earnings, as I mentioned. We'll go into some of those companies that are coming out. Big week of volatility. I mean, we're sitting right here on the VIX. Remarkable when you think about the S&Ps are at 3209 and the VIX elevated. We spiked to 27 from 2541. And that's when you saw just the S&Ps pull back a tiny bit overnight, right? You saw a little bit of a sell-off on the S&Ps. We were as low as 3192, almost, what is the low, 3192. We wrote 18 points off the low. The VIX looking very timid. Anytime we get a little bit of a pullback, you're seeing those spikes. We'll see where we go. But we're gonna look at some long-term, some short-term trades. There'll be a report published out later this morning for the weekly report. Check it out. You can sign up for the monthly report. It's usually $97 a month for this month only. So July 20th through the end of July. You can save 50% as a charter member. Just enter promo code ROCKET. Add that code. You'll see the savings. You'll pay $48.50 as opposed to $97.50 off the normal monthly price. And you lock that in for as long as you remain a subscriber, folks. I hope this letter's around for a while. And hopefully you lock that in. Please stay with me and we get some good results. We'll see what happens. But check it out on the front page of TFNN.com and our man Basil Chapman. Shout out to him. He's got an announcement. He's got some action coming up later this week as well on the opening call. Can't go wrong with the gold report right now either, folks. Lots of good action in this market. Let's jump over to gold before we get into those markets with some earnings. I mean, check out this acceleration we're getting. Even at $8.30. Look at that volume bar, right? Like in 18.21.40 and the price of gold currently trading 18.19. All right. In terms of what else we have. So Goldman, Goldman's hiking Amazon's price target yet again, let me see if we get the news on it. No news pulling up there yet. We're trading at 3,004. You see the action, right? We're up from about 29.55. Amazon just not stopping the heat. But in terms of earnings, okay, getting into it. So already this morning, we got Halliburton out with their numbers trading higher from about 13 to almost 14. We also have, let's see, what else do we have? I saw in the den, I meant Dave White. I don't think Darden's out, right? But for some reason, are they getting some action this morning? Yeah, they're down about 75.41, just the service. Maybe that's a factor of the coronavirus ripping across the country. It's going to be hard for these restaurants, folks, especially in Florida. Nobody is talking about hanging out in restaurants inside in this state as coronavirus rages. Okay, in terms of earnings, what else we have going on? Like I mentioned, 25% of the S&P reporting, some of the big companies that you'll be looking for, we're going to get Lockheed Martin tomorrow, Coca-Cola tomorrow before the market as well. Texas Instruments, Capital One, United Airlines, Snapchat on Wednesday, Baker Hughes back to that oil. We're going to get Biogen, some of the biotechs, HCA Healthcare. We also get Chipotle, Align Technology, Tesla on Wednesday. We haven't looked at Tesla yet.  Tesla, 1511, pretty muted action. The high, 1794 last week for Tesla seems to sputter it out and be a little comfortable right around that 1500 number for right now. We also get Microsoft on Wednesday as well. Talk about rocket chip, Microsoft, up over more than $2 right now with a bid ask of above 205 for some context, whoops, on where we've been on Microsoft shares. Quite a rocket chip from the low in March of 132, I believe, yeah, 132, 52. We're sitting at 20288 on Microsoft shares. We also get Las Vegas Sands on Wednesday. These casino stocks pretty hard hit Thursday. Back to airlines, we get Southwest and some of these stocks, right? Let's check out some of these airlines as we come in. So Southwest, bid ask, 3412, pretty calm action in terms of unchanged. And what did we say we get? We also get United on Tuesday, United Airlines, 3392, pretty unchanged as well. We're going to get, I'm just scanning what we get. We get Alaska Air on Thursday. We get Twitter on Thursday, E-Trade, Boston Beers, Skyworks. And on Friday, we get Slumberger, Verizon, American Express, Blumen Brands, and Honeywell before the open on Friday. All right, jumping around to stocks making moves this morning. So Halliburton, as I said, trading higher on their numbers, five cents a share in the last quarter. They were looking for a loss of 11 cents. Not bad. Revenue came in below estimates, however, amid a significant drop in global activity. So big deal in the oil sector as well. Chevron, they're going to buy Noble Energy in a $5 billion stock swap deal, valuing Noble at 7.6% above Friday's close. Largest oil patch takeover deal since the pandemic hit, CVX, Chevron, let me drill this down. Pretty unchanged on this. You see the volatility, right? 87.23 and Noble and BL is their symbol. Yeah, as you would expect, trading higher. They said 7% premium from Friday's close. We spiked to 11.60. We're currently sitting 10.69 on their numbers. CalMain Foods out with their numbers. Largest egg producer reported quarterly profit of $1.24 a share, four cents above, revenue slightly below. They benefited from a rebound in egg prices following a long period of depressed prices. Consumers stocked up. I bought a lot of eggs myself in the last few months. Company will not pay a fourth quarter dividend based on metrics involved in its variable dividend policy. Not too surprising that companies aren't handing out cash, but pretty unchanged. $4.16 for CalMain Foods from $44.22. eBay, in nearing a deal to sell its classified ads unit to Norway's Adaventa for roughly $8 billion. Cash and stock deal could be announced as soon as today. eBay shares trading higher on that news from $58.13 to $59.00. We covered Facebook in terms of Disney pulling their advertising, biggest advertiser during the first half of the year. Southwest, nearly a quarter of Southwest Airlines pilots have accepted either early retirement or voluntary leave offers. Remarkable, folks, about 2,200 pilots will leave the airline. That's staggering.  Delta told pilots furloughs could be avoided if they agreed to a reduction in guaranteed minimum pay. Again, these airlines just dealing with all sorts of woes here. KKR, they're in talks for a potential $4 billion acquisition of a medical clinic and hospital operator, Elsan, okay? GlaxoSmithKline, they're buying a 10% in a biotech firm, CureVac, betting on the success of the mRNA technology currently being used to develop COVID-19 vaccines. Yeah, not surprising to see some of those biotechs trying to get their fingers in some of the potential vaccine technology. So Uber, talk about this company a lot. I see some decent long-term potential for Uber. Signed off on a four-year agreement with Google Unit to use Google Maps platform, rides and delivery services. I wonder how that hits it, right? What were they already using? Google pretty unchanged at $32.50, putting this on some context. This is going to be one of the charts I take a look at in the rocket equities and options report. Pretty interesting when you look, they're just coming right back to that 3A2. We dived at $13.71 at this point in the market lows. They're CEO and come out and say, hey, listen, we got a lot of cash. We got like $6 billion right now. Even if business goes down 80% this year, we're still going to have about a couple billion dollars in cash. And the market likes it. But man, they got some woes right now, Uber trading about $32.55. They're going to be using Google Maps for the next three or four years. Stay tuned, folks. S&Ps minus about $3 at $32.11. NASDAQ futures positive by $34, big week of earnings. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. Back in the day, I joined the Hotel California in 2006 and, like many of you, was drawn in by as well as whatever you think about you bring about whatever you focus on grows. You see, I believe that everything in life happens for us, not to us. And Tom ignited the fire within me to want to learn how to master the markets. So how did I go from knowing nothing about technical analysis to becoming the number one market timer for the S&P 500 in 2018 and the number two market timer in 2019? Simply put, I hired coaches with a proven track record, which led me to a whole new set of tools that I created to interpret the message of buyers and sellers. I would love the opportunity to teach you this award-winning set of tools and help you improve your market timing. You can test drive my newsletter service, Mastering Probabilities, for the next 30 days with no risk to you. Plus, you'll gain access to archive workshops that will take you step-by-step through my system. Sign up today by going to the homepage of TFNN.com and selecting Mastering Probability in the newsletter tab. Bam! If you haven't checked out the Newsletters page of TFNN.com, what are you waiting for? All of the TFNN Newsletters are informative, up-to-date, affordable, and must have for every trader looking to gain a competitive informational edge in today's markets. TFNN Newsletters cover every aspect of the markets to offer you the very latest in market news. Plus, new subscribers get to test drive our Newsletters risk-free for 30 days. From all aspects of the markets, including stocks, bonds, metals, commodities, and tech, there's a newsletter to fit your needs exclusively from TFNN. Stay informed each day you trade and get the competitive edge that will help you stay ahead of the game. Visit our Newsletters page by going to TFNN.com and click the Newsletters button near the top of the page. TFNN.com Educating Investors You know what's cool? Taking something that's good for you. Something specifically formulated to help with weight loss, better sleep, stress reduction, and the need to detox. 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Don't forget, you can listen to TFNN live on your mobile device 24 hours per day. Go to TFNN.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. That's TFNN.com and hit Watch Tiger TV for the latest market information. Welcome back, folks. S&Ps pulling back a little bit. S&Ps flat right now. Actually, not pulling back, excuse me, edging up three points. We get the markets now Dow positive as well. You see the little tick up, S&Ps trading at about $32.14 coming into that opening bell. We talked about Amazon briefly, Amazon. So that price target that they got from Goldman and at Jeffries, Street High, how about $3,800 for Goldman and Jeffries, Amazon sitting at about $3,000 right now. Quite the move. We had a question in the den talking about oil. Jarman Z is talking about any dominant companies in the oil patch interest you. So when I look at the oil patch, right, oil's gonna be around. It's not going anywhere. When I look at an oil though that's really a struggle, you put this on a long term chart. We're right back to where oil sputtered around at basically between like 1983 and 2003. I mean in 83, we're trading at $27, 84. Yeah we're trading in $29 in May of 83. Well you fast forward to 2003, we're trading at $30. You have craziness going on here, there's always a pullback. And then of course the volatility that we had recently down to about $6.50 long term. It's tough for me to figure out what's gonna happen in crude when you have resistance of where we traded from lower in terms of that low from the fall off on March 6th. But even looking at, I mean check out some of these companies, right, ExxonMobil. I mean if you wanted a dividend company you just went from 70 to 30 and you're only back to 43. You put this on some context on a monthly, I mean you're back from 43 to yeah, October of 2000 prices. So for me that's a tough one to understand the long term potential especially when things were well on the side of oil for a long time and that's not the case somewhere. Always gonna be around but in terms of sunlight, in terms of all that stuff, energy, energy is a different way, natural gas, sunlight, renewables, all that stuff. Stay tuned folks, we got a treat, we got our man Larry Pesvento, coming up live with trade what you see and as we speak S&P is flat, NASDAQ positive by 40, Dow positive by 7. Should be an interesting fund day in the market, big week of earnings folks. Stay tuned, live programming all day at TFNN, we'll be right back.


Good evening. Recently, the TF2 bot crisis has finally been picking up attention in the mainstream. And while that's great news for those in the game's downtrodden community, I've noticed a lot of misconceptions and even flat-out misinformation being spread about the situation by popular publications and internet personalities. So as someone who's played the game for over a decade, I want to try to set the record straight and help those uninitiated in the game's history understand just what's going on. Now, this is a complicated topic that even I don't understand all the nuances of. And it involves not just TF2's history, but also its developers history and also kind of the gaming industry as a whole. So I'm going to try to be as thorough as I can, but I'll warn you now that this video might be a little long-winded. So let's start right now from the very top. Who is Valve? Valve is a software and games company that was founded in 1996 and game they're footing after the release of the revolutionary FPS game Half-Life. They're privately owned, meaning they have more freedom than other video game companies who have to keep to shareholders' standards of product output. They release a game when they decide it's ready, not when their investors do. Half-Life's critical success led Valve to distance themselves from their publishing company Sierra and eventually goes solo after releasing the sequel Half-Life 2. Valve leveraged Half-Life 2 to direct attention to their online game distribution service Steam, which eventually became the most popular game distribution service in the world. In 2007, Valve released the phenomenal Orange Box Bundle, which on top of including a new Half-Life title and the critically acclaimed Puzzle Game Portal also let loose the ubiquitous Team Fortress 2. This class-based shooter may have spent nearly a decade in development hell, but it seemed to be worth it in the end. Thanks to its memorable art style, lovable characters and timeless gameplay, Team Fortress 2 remains one of the most popular games on Steam today, going on 15 years after its launch, mind you. Team Fortress 2 had an immense cultural impact. On a surface level, it spawned tons of timeless inside jokes and memes that still regularly ring out through the halls of the internet, and some of the most popular personalities on the internet trace their origins back to its community. But on a more material level, Team Fortress 2 also influenced tons of other video games. One of the most popular games in the world, Overwatch, takes a noticeable amount of inspiration from Team Fortress 2's class mechanics and gameplay design. Oh yeah, Team Fortress 2 also pioneered and made standard what would go on to become two of the most despised business practices in the entire video game industry. Microtransactions and in-game loot boxes. TF2 began adding unlockable weapons and hats in 2008, not even a year after its launch. Two years later, in 2010, these items had ballooned to such popularity that Valve launched an in-game storefront to allow players to purchase these weapons and hats outright, which led to the game amassing a huge in-game economy based around trading or even outright buying rare items. Players could also spend real-world money to buy keys to open crates that have minuscule chances of containing a rare item. This proved to be an incredibly lucrative business model, so much so that not only did it get brought over to other popular Valve titles like Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Dota 2, but also tons of other totally unrelated games. Several times a year, Valve would update Team Fortress 2 with new levels, as well as new hats and weapons for players to unlock or buy. And people were totally fine with it. As time went on, Valve began adding more fan-made hats and weapons into the game, giving the items creators a cut of profit. This allowed people to monetize their passion for TF2, which is pretty awesome. Indeed, one of the things TF2 is most fondly remembered for is the opportunities it provided for its fans. But this would also prove to be a pitfall. In 2017, Valve released Jungle Inferno, which marks the last time they've updated the game to add their own new maps, hats, weapons, or what have you. Since then, there have been seasonal updates every year, but their contents have been all purely community-made. That means Valve hasn't actively developed any assets for the game since 2017, five years ago. So, Valve doesn't want to touch their old game anymore. Why does that matter? Well, it doesn't. People used to be mad about it, but TF2 fans have long passed the point of expecting new shiny weapons and hats. I think most of them have realized that that ship sailed a long time ago. All they want now is a product that functions as advertised. TF2 as a game is in an absolutely horrific state. The game has always had a bit of a cheating problem, but it doesn't just have a cheating problem anymore. It has a botting problem. Thousands, probably more like tens of thousands of automated accounts connect to the game's central matchmaking system, and if a player lands in a server with them, which more often than not they will, they will find the game pretty much unplayable.  They're also very obnoxious in other ways, spamming communication channels with obscene language, often racial slurs, and copyrighted music too just in case some poor soul happens to be live-streaming. Oh yeah, they'll also initiate vote kicks to boot out real players, but not before copying their username and sometimes profile picture.  You will see that at certain hours of the day and especially during the night, this game is unplayable. This problem has persisted for a couple of years now. Some people chalk it up to a source code leak going viral back in 2020, some chalk it up to the game's outdated anti-cheat, but one thing's for certain, this is not what an actively supported AAA game looks like. You might ask why it's Valve's obligation to fix a 15-year-old game in the first place, and that's a great question. Under normal conditions, it wouldn't be. If Valve were to shut off this game's item server and say, well boys, we've had a good run, people would at least have some closure. But what we have here instead is a game that is ostensibly supported, primarily by community content, mind you, that generates unimaginable amounts of money for its publisher, but that straight up cannot be played in the advertised way. Hold on though, this game still has tens of thousands of active players, right? So the problem can't be that bad. Well, what a lot of loyal fans have resorted to is playing on custom servers, unofficial communities that are thinly propped up by volunteer moderation teams. These cost money, and if you're trying to build them to last, it can be quite a high price thanks to the necessity of DDoS protection and such. The most esteemed custom server branch, UncleTopia, is supported by the ginormous content creator UncleDane, and is easily costing him thousands of dollars every month. That means that if you want to enjoy your first experience with Team Fortress 2, you'll more than likely need to forego the official matchmaking and leveling system that every single player who boots up the game is immediately directed toward, and instead use a horrible, unintuitive UI carried over from the early 2000s that doesn't even format properly on certain modern displays to figure out how to join an unofficial server that is built on the back of a YouTuber. Of course, you'd be hard pressed to find another AAA game anything like this. So what does the Team Fortress 2 community want Valve to do about it? Well, they want transparency first and foremost. If the game is unsupported, they would rather Valve just announce that outright than continue to tease fans with new hats and miniskill bug fixes. But if Valve is going to keep calling this a free, actively updated game, then they want to be able to easily play the game without running into these bots. There's a couple ways to do this. Perhaps most sensibly is for Valve to allocate some of their functionally infinite resources to figure out a way to fix or at least mitigate the game's botting problem. Is that a difficult task? Yes. Is Valve a literal billion-dollar corporation with a CEO sporting a net worth more than that of former US President Donald John Trump? Also, yes. If that's too much, then I, and I'll admit I may be alone in this, suggest that they streamline the community server experience instead. If they're not willing to maintain the official servers, they really shouldn't be directing new players toward them. And if they're not even willing to work with the community at all, then I say just pull the plug on the game altogether already. This would obviously never happen because it would result in a loss of income for Valve, and it would look pretty pathetic on their part as well. But it would in all ways still be preferable to them continuing to parade the game's decaying corpse around for people to see like in Weekend at Burnies. Valve has pretty much always been considered the good guys of PC gaming, saviors even. But in the midst of the video game industry's decay, even they have fallen a far way down, and it's a sad sight for sure. Stagnated activity, thriving off of selling other people's games and microtransactions for cosmetics they didn't even create, and even sidelining community projects instead of endorsing them like they did in their prime.  The situation has gotten bad enough to recently catch the ire of gaming journalism sites, and has also been getting attention from other game developers, and even one of Team Fortress 2's own voice actors. A lot of fans are hoping that this taking to the streets, so to say, will lead to Valve finally acknowledging the problem in a meaningful way, but we have yet to see any official comment. So that's where TF2 stands at the moment. The ball's in your court, Valve.


In this video, I'm gonna show you how you can use keyboard shortcuts with the YouTube player in the browser so that you can be more productive watching YouTube. Hello and welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. Now that introduction may have seen a little bit of a contradiction in terms really, being productive on YouTube, but of course you can be because if you are like me and like watching tutorial videos and, well, I'm guessing you do because you're on my channel after all, then you may do what I do, which is when I'm trying to learn a new piece of software, then I'll tend to have YouTube open on one screen or one side of the screen and then I'll have the software that I'm trying to learn open on the other and I'll be referring back and forth to the YouTube video and then to what I'm doing. And so what I'll often find myself doing is having to pause and rewind and review things because sometimes with me, it takes a couple of times for the information to sink in. So one thing that came up in the, I think it was the e-cam group or if not it might have been Dot Rock's Office Hours group, but it was the question of how can you quickly scrub back and forth through the video when you're on the desktop because on the mobile, obviously you can double tap on the side of the screen to skip forward and skip backwards, but on the desktop, then people tend to use their mouse. Now, a lot of people don't realize that there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts built into YouTube and in fact, Google is very good at including keyboard shortcuts for all of their web apps. So whether it's Gmail or Google Sheets and things like that, there are extensive support shortcuts, so definitely check out all of those. But today, we're talking specifically about YouTube. So let me tell you the shortcuts that are available and then also how I use them because you might have guessed, I've added keyboard maestro into the mix as well and I'll tell you why in a moment. But first, let's have a look at the keyboard shortcuts. So first of all, that is the wrong screen.  We'll come to that screen in a moment. Spoiler alert, you're gonna be seeing two of me. So apologies for that, you might wanna switch off now. So these are the keyboard shortcuts that we've got for YouTube and so basically you've got play and pause to toggle that on and off and it's just the keystroke of K. We've also got rewind and forward 10 seconds which is J and L, previous video, next video and so on. And as you can see, there are quite a few of them and quite a few ways actually to skip to different places in the video. So for example, if you type the keystroke by the zero through to nine, it will skip to that area of the video. So zero being the beginning, one being 10% of the way through, five being halfway through, nine being 90% of the way through and so on. And then you've also got to skip forward and backwards to different chapters. So if the creator has been very good and put in their YouTube chapters, then you can skip straight to a specific chapter as well. We've also got ways to toggle the particular view. So whether it's full screen, picture in picture, that sort of thing. And then we've also got some foreclosed captions and then also the spherical video which I don't intend to watch a great deal of myself but if you are watching one of those ones that was shot in basically with a 360 degree camera, it's actually more than 360, isn't it? Cause it's a spherical sphere but still it is, you've got the controls there for panning up and down and so on. And those are all assigned to keystrokes as well. However, there is a slight issue with this because if you are doing what I was talking about earlier which is I'm working on something but I've got YouTube playing separately. So maybe I'm watching a tutorial or maybe I've just got YouTube playing in the background or something like that. Then the issue that I have is that obviously the browser isn't the front most application. And so what that means is that if I just click the keystroke, for example, K being to play or pause then it won't do anything because the browser isn't at the front. So what I needed to do was make sure that I could control my browser and YouTube whilst I was in another application and keyboard maestro is perfect for that. So let me just show you the sort of methodology to do that with keyboard maestro. I'll just share the right part of my screen now. So here we go. We've got a keyboard maestro open and basically I've recreated almost all of those controls. The only ones that I didn't recreate actually were the spherical video ones because I don't really use spherical video that much. And if I do, I'm not so keen on that or not so interested in being able to control it whilst I'm in another app. I just can't see where that would come up for me personally. But I did create all of the other ones and I will run through all of these when I show you them on the stream deck. But just to show you the method that I've done for, I've used for all of these, you can see there's one for each of the commands. And basically in each of these commands there is only actually one action in keyboard maestro. By the way, if you're not familiar with keyboard maestro I have done an introduction to it. I'll leave the video up in the top corner. But basically there's no trigger because we're gonna be triggering them by the stream deck. And for that you don't actually need to assign a separate keyboard trigger in keyboard maestro. But then all we've got is the actual action that is gonna be performed and all it is is typing a keystroke. Now let me just show you quickly how to set this up because you can, if you just come into new action and then just start typing keystroke, you'll find it there, type keystroke. Now ordinarily it's gonna simulate that keystroke in whatever application that you are in. And so you can see here the title of it is it says type the return keystroke because it's got a return in there. Or if I clicked in there and typed, I don't know, say K it would type in K. But that is gonna do it in the front most application. What we wanna do is we want to actually do this in, in my case it's Safari. So you can see that here there's a difference between these two. This is the default one that I've just added in. But the one I've got here actually says type the keystroke K to Safari. Because if you click on this little cogwheel over on this side, what you can do is you can come down here and you can actually assign it to a specific application. So if I come down on this menu, you can see send to and then we've basically got a list of applications so I can say send to Safari. And what that means is now that I've got that set, it doesn't matter what application I'm in, it is gonna send that keystroke through to that other application, which in my case is Safari. So what that means is, let's say I'm doing something in an application, maybe watching an Excel tutorial or something like that. So I've got Excel open and I've got my YouTube video running with the tutorial. Then if I activate this, this one here, it's actually gonna pause the video, but it's gonna pause it in the background if you like. So I don't need to have it as the front most application. So just to quickly show you that in case it needed demonstrating, I've now got a video open. And if I come back to keyboard maestro, so I'm in keyboard maestro, and if I activate that macro, you can see it's pausing and playing this video. And I can do other ones, so I can do the one for, let's say I'll try the one for advancing the frame, or maybe go to, let's go to 40% of the video. There is a macro, which is basically gonna simulate typing the letter number four. So if I click that one, then it's jumped forward straight ahead to the position in the video. So that is basically how these work and they all work, as I say, just totally in the background. Now what I did do was I surprisingly enough, I created, as you might have guessed, a Stream Deck profile to do just this. So if I come over to my Stream Deck, and that is the wrong one, hang on a minute, I'll come to this one, there we go. That is the correct one, I get my Stream Deck up to the front, how disorganized of me. So I've created this Stream Deck profile. Now in the actual profile, this one here, this is gonna take me back to my take one tech, one that I'm using to control ECANN with. But in the actual profile itself, this is actually a record button that goes through to, oh sorry, a YouTube button rather, that opens up Safari with YouTube in it. So it's kind of like the way to activate YouTube if you like. And so I created all of these icons. And so let's just quickly run through what we've got here. So the first one we've got is the, in fact, let me start at this side, shall I? The first one we've got is the different viewing modes. So you've basically got viewing full screen, viewing theater mode, view in the pop out. So it's just a sort of picture in picture in the browser, the mini player it's called. And these three are all basically toggles. So pressing those will toggle it either on or often like reverting back to the regular view. This one here is if you've got the mini player open, then basically clicking this one will just close it down altogether. So you just back into the general sort of YouTube there. So it will effectively stop the video. We've also then got the play and pause button. Then we've got jump forward and backwards 10 seconds. So that's kind of skip forward. Also got the next and previous video. When you are paused, you also have the ability to advance by a single frame. This is really useful actually if you're watching stuff that's quite text heavy or content heavy, or maybe they're giving demonstrations of something specific where you want to get some information out of it. Then being able to pause it and then just sort of skip forward or backwards a frame or two just to get to the exact correct spot. Maybe you want to take a screen grab or something like that and that is useful. And we've also got these ones here where it looks like a, hopefully it looks like a timeline with some markers on it. Well, this is basically skip forwards and backwards to the next and the previous chapter marker. And then we've also got these ones here, these 10 going up in increments of 10%. This is basically skipping forward to a specific spot on the timeline. So zero being at the beginning, obviously 50% being halfway through and so on. So those are just simulating those keystrokes of zero through nine. Then also we've got some related to the closed captions here. So this is toggling the captions on and off. We've got this one here, which is simulating the transparency. So you can toggle the transparency of the actual text that's coming up. So this one you can see that one of the letters there, maybe you can't see it too well. I've got the sort of checker pattern that symbolizes transparency in graphics. And then this one here has got the checker pattern on the background and that is to signify that you can change the transparency of the background of your captions as well. And final two here we've got related to captions are increasing the size or decreasing the size of the writing, so font size. And then the final one here is just toggling on and off the mute on the video as well. I've also added a couple in here for the speed as well. So when you're watching YouTube videos, you can obviously say obvious, perhaps you didn't know, you can increase the speed of the playback and that goes up in increments of I think 0.25 or something like that. So one and a half speed, one and a quarter speed, double speed and so on. So I often do watch things at double speed if I can take any information quick enough. And so that's what those two are just there. So this is in a complete icon set. And as you can see, it is actually triggering a macro. So these aren't using keystrokes as in just the built-in keystrokes on Stream Deck where you can actually have them go to system and simulate a keystroke. So it's not that one. What this is, is this is using a plugin called KMLink. So if I come down to here, we've got this KMLink down here. And this is a plugin. There is a keyboard maestro plugin for Stream Deck but I find that KMLink is actually a lot easier to use and set up. And it's just basically, all it does is you drag it on as an action and then you just select the particular keyboard maestro action that you want it to run. And so in order to enable this, then what you'd have to do is just come into the store, go into the plugins and then just search for KMLink. So if I just come in here for a second, KMLink, you will find it in there, there you go. So you just need to install that. But then you can basically just go and assign that to assign your actions to any specific macro that you want. So I've obviously made this available on my store. So if I just come over to my store for a moment, in fact, I've got to come over to my website. Look at that. I've actually closed it down. That was a bit silly of me, wasn't it? So if I come back to my website for a moment, so if you go over to takeonetech.io slash store, or you can just come over to the homepage and click on the store up at the top, and then you'll see it there. And so that is the YouTube player icon pack. Now, what I've done is I've actually created, rather than just the icons, although it has obviously got the icons in it, what I've also done is when you get the download, then that's basically got all of the icons. So you can create these yourself on a stream deck or on your loop deck for that matter and just use these icons yourself, assigning the relevant keyboard shortcuts. But what I've also done is I've also included the macro group for keyboard maestro as well. So if you import that into your keyboard maestro, you'll then be able to just hook it straight up to stream deck because I've included the profile there as well. And so if you've got the 32 key XL, it actually fits perfectly on there. And so basically you need to just install the macro pack in keyboard maestro, which I'll show you how to do in a moment. Insert the profile, install the profile on your stream deck, which I'll show you in a moment. And then that's it, you're good to go. Now, the only one other thing I should point out is that in my case, as I say, I do use my YouTube with Safari. So when I come down to my keyboard maestro actions here, you can see that basically all of these are opening in Safari. If you use Google Chrome, you would need to just go through and change this application to, instead of opening in Safari, you would just come down here and go to send to Chrome or whatever browser you are using. But the keystrokes, the actual shortcuts themselves are all exactly the same. So that is how that would work. So let's have a little look, shall we? It's how you actually install the macro group into keyboard maestro. So what I'll need to do for this is I'll need to come into my demo mode for a moment. And then I'll just zoom into this top corner. And then here we can do to file, import, import actions. And so you just click on that one and then that would just bring up the regular file picker and you would be able to then select the macro group and it would just install them straight away into your keyboard maestro. Nothing more for you to do there. Then in terms of the stream deck, if I come into stream deck, if you want to install a profile in stream deck, what you need to do is come over to the settings, click on the settings, come over to here and then where you've got your profiles, you'll find there's a little dropdown arrow just at the bottom of the profiles list. Click on this one and then you'll see there's an option there to import and then you'll do the same again, just import the profile from the download from the website and then that would then bring that into your stream deck and then literally you would be good to go with that. So I hope that is useful. Now, obviously I am making the icon pack available for sale on my website but you can just go ahead and do this yourself and if you don't need all of these icons, then it's just good to learn these keyboard shortcuts because you might find you only need one or two of them and so you can perhaps just make your own little shortcuts in stream deck or just use the keyboard itself. But like I say, I do hope that is useful and if it was useful, then don't forget to go and like and subscribe and while you're down there, then also leave a comment or two as well because I do always enjoy getting your comments and feedback and if it was really useful, then you can always head over to my Buy Me A Coffee page at buymeacoffee.com slash take one tech. So that is all for now, but I will leave a link to some of my other stream deck videos over on the right hand side and YouTube will hand pick a video just for you up in the top right there. So until the next video, have a great day.


It was truly a pleasure to welcome and meet today with Philippine President Corazon Aquino. Her courage and her commitment to democracy, mirroring those same qualities in the Filipino people, have inspired the world, and it's been an honor to have her as our guest. President Aquino and I discussed her strenuous efforts to bolster the democratic institutions of her country and to ensure its security and strengthen its economy. And I assured her that all America wants the Philippine democracy to succeed and to prosper, and that we'll do what we can to help. These have been trying times in the Philippines. President Aquino has been overseeing an historic transition. In the coming months, a new constitution will be submitted, which will pave the way for strong, democratically elected local and national governments. In the meantime, President Aquino has been doing her level best to unite her richly diverse people under a banner of freedom and opportunity. Her efforts to reconcile all elements of her society and bring them into the democratic process are applauded here. I might add that her personal bravery in this heroic endeavor to diffuse conflict has won the hearts and imagination of the people everywhere. Despite President Aquino's efforts, however, well-armed communist guerrillas remain a threat to democracy in the Philippines. President Aquino and I discussed her strategy to meet this challenge. It includes attacking the root political, economic, and social problems that feed insurgencies. The second half of the formula is building the Philippine military into a professional, properly armed, and trained force that is capable of dealing with any threat. The United States stands ready to assist President Aquino in her quest to create a stable and secure land, as well as in her commitment to invigorate the Philippine economy. During our discussion today, President Aquino reaffirmed her belief that free enterprise is the surest path to development, the surest method of opening the door of opportunity and advancement to all her people. Her government stands for free trade and is encouraging private investment. She knows in the long run nothing would better serve the Filipino people than unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit and putting the creative and economy-building power of the marketplace to work. As one might surmise after hearing this, I'm bullish on the Philippines. I would hope American as well as foreign investors take notice of this incredible opportunity to help build a country. For our part, we will hold our mold, our efforts to encourage development in the Philippines. Today, for example, we discussed the idea of increasing Philippine exports to the United States, including improved treatment under our generalized system of preferences. We also considered ways in which the Philippines can provide a larger share of the goods and services consumed by the U.S. military facilities within that country. Just a side note, when talking about those bases, our two countries share common interests in the peace and stability of the Pacific region. I'm confident that we will continue to enjoy a strong mutual defense relationship for the foreseeable future. President Aquino reaffirmed today that the military-basis agreement will be respected through its current term. I understand and am comfortable with her position. The next review of our defense relations is scheduled in 1988, and that gives us and the people of the Philippines plenty of time to think about it. In the meantime, I will continue to ask Congress for appropriate levels of economic and military assistance above and beyond existing U.S.-based related commitments. The latest installment of our current aid effort of a $100 million grant of economic support funds, which I am pleased to announce will be signed by our respective cabinet members in a few moments, a $50 million grant of military assistance along with a $20 million package of medical supplies and services has been approved. In the future, to the largest extent possible, future U.S. aid will be designed to provide the greatest benefit without exacerbating the country's debt burden. One last thought. Today, governments, businesses, financial institutions, and individuals are dealing with a new kind of government in the Philippines. We're dealing with a noble and honest people, people with ideals, people we can trust, and we place a high value on character and hope everyone appreciates this and takes it into account. A great Filipino hero, Dr. Jose Rizal once wrote, God is justice. He cannot abandon his cause, the cause of liberty without which no justice is possible. Well, Jose Rizal, like President Aquino's husband, died for freedom and inspired his nation. President Aquino and I reaffirmed the commitment of our two peoples to the ideals which so many Americans and Filipinos have given their lives. And we also reaffirmed the bonds of friendship and affection between the United States and the Philippines. It was truly an honor to have her here. Thank you and God bless you. Thank you, President Reagan. This has been an opportunity to get to know each other, to explore common issues together. Love although I can say that for my part, the most important aspect has been the chance to meet each other. We are both politicians who set great store on face-to-face encounters. Government-to-government contacts have their proper place. Yet when the leadership of a country changes in such a dramatic fashion as happened in the Philippines, it is only right that the presidents of two such close allies meet and get to know each other. Issues do not generate of their own accord the decisions that will resolve them. In the end, decisions will be made by the people who have the responsibility to make them. Without this meeting today, both our governments will go out with a clear sense of priorities, with a recognition that we must both work hard to strengthen the bonds between us. I hope we have set the tone and direction for a new relationship. By recovering our democracy, we Filipinos have recovered our self-confidence and pride and hence our ability to deal with our major ally on an equal footing. This is the only basis for a relationship between friends. And I think we were able to start on that agenda today. I was able to explain to President Reagan the problems we have inherited, all of them rooted in a devastated economy. I was also able to outline to him what we are doing to set things right. I am gratified that President Reagan understands and supports what we are trying to do. As you know, we have placed our faith in the private sector as the stimulus of growth. I also briefed the president on the wide range of reforms we have embarked on to resolve our difficulties. A new constitution is in the final stages of drafting. There will be a referendum on it, followed by elections early next year. We are carrying out a long overdue program of military reform. Within this context of an economic reconstruction, political rebuilding and military reform, we can combat our remaining problem, the insurgency. As you know, we are pursuing a political approach, but this is backed by the military option. In all these areas of rebuilding, I hope we can count on American support and understanding. But most important, reform is being done in a new environment of freedom, human rights and democracy. So as today's discussion showed, we have a lot of values in common again. We admire freedom and hard work in just the way you do. For two countries who have a faith in God, in freedom, in the family and in democratic values, we should allow nothing to come in the way of an ever-growing friendship. Today was a good beginning, and I thank you all for it. You get your minister and ours, and we shall have the signing. Did you discuss Ferdinand Marcos, sir? Did you discuss Ferdinand Marcos? Did you discuss the former president of the Philippines? Is there going to be a summit if Danilov isn't out? No one does. Did you discuss the former president of the Philippines? Is there going to be a summit if Danilov isn't out? No one does.