Here are my three favorite ideas for overcoming a creative block. First idea is to move. When you move your body, you tend to move your brain as well. So, get up from the table or the desk. Just simply move around the room where you're creating, whenever you feel stuck. And as you move, you tend to start having some fresh ideas. It'll start to happen. Now ideally you could go and take a quick walk around the block. Or if you have time, even come out to nature and move your body as you reflect. And that tends to create some fresh thinking, fresh perspectives, inspiration, etc. So, number one is move. Number two is temporary constraints. What I mean by this is to ask yourself a question such as if you were trying to brainstorm what you should be talking about at all, about your work, if you wanted to blog about your business and you're like, what should I even talk about in my business? Then ask yourself the question about temporary constraints. If I could only ever talk about three things about my business that might interest a potential client, what must those three things be? And just answer that question. And you may come up with more than three. And if so, just keep writing, keep going. The temporary constraint was there just to get you started. You could use temporary constraints at multiple levels. At the top level of the big ideas of what, if I could only talk about three things, what might they be? And then you could do it at a smaller level. Once you choose one project or one idea to talk about, you could say, if I could only talk about three parts of this one idea, what most of those three parts be? And just start writing. And again, don't keep going if you do more than three, but just that's how you get started with creativity. And then the third idea I have for you is stages. Whatever you are trying to create doesn't have to be created in one sitting. That's a common mistake. And it doesn't have to be created perfectly this time. Whenever I am creating ideas, I always think, well, this is just one stage. This is just one version of the idea. And I'm going to put it out there and maybe in six months, I'll create a better version of the idea. Maybe in, you know, a year. Who knows? So this is just the one stage, one version of the idea. Maybe I should call it versions instead of stages. So think about creating what you already can know now, not a perfection thing, but just whatever you can now, knowing that there's always a future version that you can create. So there were actually two other ideas that I wanted to share, but I wanted to keep this video relatively short. The ideas four and five will be in the notes of the videos. Be sure to take a look at that. But I hope this gets you started on overcoming your creative blocks. And I wish you a lot of joyful creativity going forward. If you have ideas that have helped you overcome creative blocks, I welcome you to comment below this video and help out others who may be watching this as well.


If a human being trains themselves to identify the loud noise of the ego and to circumvent it and move into the truth impulse and acting from the truth impulse in all moments, no advance of science or so-called advance of science can interfere with the freedom and wildness of that human being. So the choice is between ego and truth actually. The more you give in to the ego, the more you will become a victim of technology. The more you flow with the truth, the more you will be free and wild. So that is the choice that is there.


This video is brought to you by Squarespace. Comets have long, fascinated amateur astronomers. I think the main reason being that they become visible in the sky for just a few weeks or months and then they're gone. The reason for that is they have these really long, strange orbits and when they get into the inner solar system close to the sun, they get really hot and they release all this dust and gas that has been trapped in the ice. Once in a while, we get a very special comet that is visible to the naked eye meaning you can just look up in the sky and see it. The last one like this in the Northern Hemisphere was pretty recently. It was comet Neowise just two years ago in 2020 or three years ago now, I guess. Now there is a new comet for us Northerners. It's called C slash 2022 E3 ZTF. That's its official name. The press has been calling it the green comets because the coma is green. That's common for most comets. And well, I wanna emphasize this is not a great comet because it's really barely visible by naked eye. If you have really good eyesight, you may see a smudge from a dark site but it's definitely bright enough to see in binoculars or through a telescope. And at around magnitude five or six at time of recording it's plenty bright enough to photograph which is what we're hopefully gonna be doing tonight. I have been really eager to photograph it and this is actually the first night in January for my location in New Hampshire that is forecasted to be clear starting around 7 p.m. So we'll see. The nice thing about shooting it now later in January is you don't have to stay up super late like you did earlier in the month. The downside to shooting it now is the moon is getting fuller every night. Tonight it's a first quarter moon and the fuller the moon is, the more it's gonna wash out some of the dimmer details we want like the tails coming off of the comet. But don't let the moon stop you from trying because this is a once in a lifetime event in terms of this comet. And on the flip side, the comet is gonna make its closest pass to Earth on Wednesday, February 1st. And that's usually when it's making its closest pass to Earth when comets will appear brightest in the sky. And a very important thing no matter when you're able to photograph or view the comet is to find a dark location. Tonight, I'm hopefully gonna be shooting it here at home. I'm under a Bordel 3 sky in New Hampshire, which is pretty dark for the East Coast, the East Coast of the US where I live. In terms of gear, I'll always just go back to use what you have. Don't worry too much about having the perfect gear for shooting the comet. Just go try and shoot it. The comet will show up in a telephoto lens if you have like a fast 85 millimeter, 135 millimeter, that's gonna work well. I'm shooting it tonight with this small refractor with a focal length of 300 millimeters. And I'll be tracking and guiding with a mount and a guide scope and all of that. But again, if you don't have all this stuff, you can still capture the comet.  You may not be able to capture the long eye on tail, but you'll at least be able to capture the bright nucleus and the green coma around it. And you can still do a time lapse to show that little green, dirty snowball of a comet moving faster than the apparent motion of the star. In terms of my gear here, I'm using the ZWO ASI 2600MC camera. I'm gonna be shooting one minute subs at F5 gain 100. If I was using a DSLR and lens, I think I'd probably instead shoot 30 seconds at ISO 1600 F2.8. And these are just starting points because light pollution and other factors might change your specific plan. But in general, you wanna use shortish exposures like under three minutes each because the comet does move fast, especially as it's getting closer to the sun. So if you used and closer to us, I should say. So if you are thinking, I'm gonna do a 10 minute exposure to get all this detail, that detail is gonna be lost because the comet will be moving so fast you'll get motion blur. I don't suggest any kind of filters when shooting comets. So don't use your light pollution or narrow band filters. It's a broadband object. The dust tail is sort of beige. The coma is green as mentioned. The ion tail is usually blue. So we have all these different colors and a light pollution filter or a narrow band filter is gonna interfere with capturing all of these natural colors of the comet. You also don't need any special kind of camera to capture comets. A stock DSLR is fine. It doesn't have to be astro modified. I am using an astro camera rather than a DSLR tonight just because this is one of my lowest noise cameras. And if I only get an hour of data, I wanna make sure I get something good. You can capture comets with either a one shot color camera like this or a DSLR. That's definitely the easier option but it's also possible to use a mono camera.  Now in terms of finding the comet, I'm gonna link to this sky live page you're seeing right now in the video description. Tonight for me, for my location in New Hampshire, the comet is almost due north just below Polaris, the North Star. But by the time this video is released on Tuesday, if we go forward in time, that night the comet will be further east and north entering the constellation Camilla Pardales. Now if you have a go-to mount, the easiest thing is just to look up here where the comet will be located in right ascension and declination from your location at the time you're gonna be photographing it. And you can just copy and paste those into your software or write them down and go right to the comet. If you don't have a go-to mount and you're finding it by eye, using a manual star tracker or just a camera on a tripod, you're gonna wanna look for bright stars near the comet. So on Tuesday night, we have HD 51067 right here in the constellation Camilla Pardales. And you can see also if we zoom out that the comet is pretty much right between the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, and the Big W, Cassiopeia. And so you can sort of find it that way roughly too. All right, and then this was just an example for Tuesday night, but let's say it's cloudy on Tuesday and we're shooting Wednesday night. We would just make sure the location is set correctly here and then advance the day to February 1st. And you can see at 7 p.m. The comet is nice and close to this really bright MAG-4 star, HR 2209. And then if we go forward even further to February 5th, we can see it passes right by Capella in Araiga. So it should be really easy to spot that night, but the downside to that night is the moon will be a full moon by then. So it's gonna be more washed out. I'm gonna sort of zoom through the whole capture process a little bit sped up here just because it's very similar to capturing a deep sky object, which I've covered in other videos, but we'll just go through it really quick here. So you're first gonna polar align. I used the QHY pole master electronic polar alignment. Then you're going to focus and I'm using a Bodinov mask here. I have a video about using Bodinov masks. I do mean to update that pretty soon here because there's a lot of different Bodinov masks available, including some new ones for wide angle lenses. But basically the way that a Bodinov mask works is you see this X pattern here and then you're just trying to get that central spike right in between the two other lines so that you are in perfect focus and then you take the mask off. Okay, then I'm going through the plate solving process. I'm using the AM5 mount. And once the plate solving is done, you can see there is the comet. So it did my framing exactly how I wanted it and we are now almost ready to go. There's a quick test exposure. You can see even in that short 20 second test exposure we can see the tails. I'll get guiding going and then we are off to the races with taking pictures. And I'm just gonna let this go. I know that there's probably gonna be some passing clouds at different times. I might check focus occasionally, but pretty much I'm just going to let it take as many pictures as I can before we get completely clouded out here. I love having my own websites. Social media is great, but you have no control over those platforms. They could go away tomorrow and then all of the work you've put into them is gone. Well, if you really want control over your creative portfolio, I really recommend Squarespace is the easiest way to make your own website with your own domain. They do all of the hard lifting for you. So everything is drag and drop. It's what you see is what you get. It's so easy to make changes. It's all mobile friendly and you can very quickly see here your website and desktop or mobile view. Let's say I want to make a change. So for instance, I just moved from Boston to New Hampshire. All I have to do here is click Edit and I can go right in here and just change something. And it's that simple. When I'm done, I just go up here to Done and click Save. I think that they've done a great job with these templates to make them just very easy to use. Another thing that's always bothered me when I make my own websites is the contact form because you always get spam. But with Squarespace, I've never gotten any spam. Every email that's gone through this contact form has been people actually wanting to reach out to me and do something with me or ask questions. So I really think that you can benefit from Squarespace if you want your own website. I've only mentioned the tip of the iceberg here with all the different things that it does. And you can use the link in my description to get started with Squarespace for free. And if you use the code Nebula Photos on checkout, you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Okay, and now we're moving on to processing. In this video, I'm going to show processing the comment images with DeepSky Stacker, which is a free Windows-only program and then finishing in Photoshop. If I feel like it or have time, I might do other parts where I show other software packages. If there's one you particularly wanna see, I guess you could leave a comment letting me know. So anyways, let's go ahead and open up DeepSky Stacker. Again, this is a free program. I'm using the current version, which is 4.2.6. We're gonna start by clicking Open Picture Files. Basically, you can just follow along by going down this list over here on the left-hand side. So I've already gone through this one time already, but so that's why it went right to the folder, but let me just back up here. Okay, there's our folder on the desktop and I'll just click into the lights. This none just means I wasn't using a filter. And then here's all of the different pictures. Instead of just pressing Control-A to select all like I normally would, I'm gonna go from Picture 100 to 160. And I just held down Shift so I could select those 60 pictures, or I guess 61. Oh, and if you didn't catch what I just did, let me redo that. So when they come in, they're not checked because you could go through here and check each picture yourself, but I'm just gonna click Check All for Now because I think these are all good pictures. And when you open up a picture like this just by clicking on it, you'll see that the default behavior might be you don't see the image. We just have to apply an auto stretch here and in Deep Sky Stacker, that's up here in the upper right. So I'm just gonna take this mid slider and move it towards the shadow end of things. And now we should be able to see our image a little bit better. I can see some stars and I can see the comment right there. And now if we go down here to the list and we just press down, arrow, we can check our images. And I'm not gonna go through all that right now because I've already done it, but yeah, you could check each image and make sure it's okay. There's no clouds or anything like that. Okay, and then if you did use calibration frames, you would just load those right now. I did use calibration frames, so I'll go ahead and load those in. But I'll speed this part up. Okay, all my calibration frames are now loaded. And the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna register checked pictures. So if you've checked all of these, they all look good. Go ahead and go down to this red link right here, register checked pictures. And make sure you turn off stack after registering because when we're doing comment processing, we have to register, then we have to use this special comment tool, then we can stack after we've used that tool. But we have to sort of go in that order. So go ahead and click, well, if you want to, you can check your star detection threshold as long as it's finding hundreds of stars, you're fine there. Or I mean, even fewer than 100 is fine too. It just needs to find some stars in order to work. And if it's not finding enough stars, you can lower the threshold. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and click okay. And now it's starting the registration process right away. The reason for that is I already started this earlier and aborted it just to practice for this video, but usually what it would do is it would calibrate first. So nothing to be alarmed about here. It's just, when you have already started something, it can sort of save your process. Okay, so I'm gonna speed this part up too, as it registers all of these images and catch up with you when it's done. Okay, now we're on to the most time-consuming part of this whole process, which is we have to tell Deep Sky Stacker in every light frame where the nucleus of the comet is. I've already unchecked this first frame because it had a low score. So I'm starting here with the second frame and then we're gonna go through every picture. We're gonna use this edit comet mode.  Then when I click into the next one, it says you've made some changes. Do you wanna save them? And I'll say next time just save without asking. And now we can just go through and do this and it's gonna save each time we click. And we can double-check that just by going back to a previous one and see, yes, it did save that position because the pink circle appears. Okay, and it actually doesn't take that long to do this process. Sometimes you get a weird thing where it doesn't wanna lock onto the comet. So you might just have to skip that frame. But if you do skip a frame where it doesn't seem to wanna lock onto the comet, I would suggest unchecking that so you don't stack it. Okay, I'm gonna speed this process up. When I've checked the comet in each picture, we'll go on to the next step. Okay, so I have now successfully clicked on all of the comet cores here and all the light frames. And so now we can go ahead and stack. We can go over here to stack checked pictures, go into stacking parameters and open up the comet tab. Okay, and if it's your first time ever doing any kind of comet processing, I would definitely recommend this mode, stars plus comet stacking. It does two separate stacks and combines them together for you. So it says the comet and the stars will be sharp. This is what most people want. It does say this process is twice longer. What will happen in these other modes is in standard stacking, you would just get a picture where it registers, it stacks using all of the star positions that you've already registered. But the comet, since it's moving through the star field, it would be completely sort of blurry or they say fuzzy. In comet stacking mode, it would use the position of the comet but ignore the positions of the stars so all the stars would be trailed. And in this one, it does both standard stacking and comet stacking and then just combines the two pictures together for you. So you don't have to worry about doing it. So I definitely recommend doing this one and just hit okay here. And we've already done all the kind of calibration and debayering and registering so all we're gonna be doing is stacking. So I'm gonna go ahead and click okay. Okay, it's done stacking. It didn't take too long. Maybe for the 60 frames, it took 20 minutes or something. I'm just doing this on a Lenovo laptop. And then we're gonna go ahead and save this. So don't worry about how it looks. We're gonna stretch it in Photoshop. So over here in processing, just click save picture to file. Make sure it's saving as type TIFF image, 16 bits per channel, compression none, embed adjustments, but do not apply them. So make sure your settings look like mine here. I'll just save it back to my comet ZTF folder. And we'll call this stacked. Okay, so I've opened that stacked.tiff file that we saved that of Deep Sky Stacker in Adobe Photoshop. I am on a Mac now, just because I happen to have Photoshop installed on my Mac and not on my PC, but everything should be the same no matter which operating system you're using. The only thing that would change are keyboard shortcuts and I'll try to save both. Okay, and I am just going to duplicate this layer. I'll call it first stretch. If you wanted to use a keyboard shortcut, you can do command J on Mac or control J on Windows to do the same thing. I always like to just keep this unstretched version just in case I need it for something. Okay, and then we can go to image adjustments levels or use the keyboard shortcut command L on Mac or control L on Windows. And we can start stretching the image just by taking this mid-tone slider and dragging it to the left.  That's just a display issue when you're dealing with complex data like this. I don't think it's an actual issue with the data. So I'm gonna press command L again. And now we see something interesting. You see how there's this little spike right there and then this big spike right there. What's going on there is we have these corners that for some reason did not get cropped off in the registration process. So it's showing up as data that should be clipped to black. So we don't have to worry about that when we're doing this stretching. We can take the shadow slider and bring it right over to the edge of this larger spike here and not worry about these little corners. And you can see again, I think that looks a little funky, but once I hit okay, it looks okay again. At this point, I can really see those corners and see where I would wanna crop. So I'm just gonna go ahead and crop those corners out so we don't have to deal with them anymore just cause they're gonna throw off our histogram representation and it's easier for me to understand everything without that distraction. So I'm just gonna crop those out like this. Press enter to accept the crop and now that looks a lot better. Okay, let's keep stretching just a little bit more. I'm gonna take this down and now you can see something interesting. You see how there's this little gap right there in the histogram. And if I look at the actual image, this sky looks way too blue. So we need to do some color balancing and the best way to do that is to be able to see your color channels. And yes, indeed I can see the blue is way ahead of the red and then the green is falling behind here. So they're all separated. If you don't have this view, you can just click on this little hamburger menu right here and change it from compact view to all channels view and you should be able to see the three histograms. Okay, so now I'm gonna open up levels one more time and this time I'm gonna be looking over here as I change each channel separately. So see right here in levels you can change it from RGB mode to single channel mode. And so I'm gonna go to the blue channel and I'm gonna take this shadow slider and I'm gonna move it over until the left edge matches up with the left edge of that green channel. Then I'm gonna do the same thing with the red channel like that. And you can see now the image looks a lot better. This sky looks a lot more neutral. Okay, cool. So you can see the dust tail I guess is just this sort of general thing right here. This is called the coma, this green part. This little bright part is called the nucleus. And then this long one that goes all the way down here is the ion tail. And it's not looking super blue in my image but that's okay. The moonlight probably affected the blue color. I'm happy that... Well, I sort of framed it this way on purpose but to get this little asterism right here sort of with the tail is what I was going for. So I'm glad that worked out. Okay, one thing I notice here is that there is a gradient, right? So over here it's darker in the sky and over here it's brighter. So I'm just going to take a curves adjustment and I'm going to do this where now over here this is about where I want it to be. Over here it's way too dark but we're going to then apply a gradient to the mask on this curves just by grabbing the gradient tool and doing something like that. Nope, wrong way, this way. I don't know, I was seeing some banding there so I just played around with the curve a little bit until that banding disappeared and I think this looks a lot more even now and if we might just stop right here we could just apply a little bit of a saturation boost or something and then stop right there. I'm going to go a little bit further though because I like to push the images a little bit see what I can bring out. And so the way I'm going to, one way I'm going to go further is I'm going to make a starless version of this with star net plus plus. So to do that we're going to save a copy and we want to save TIFF with no layers. I'm going to call this stars.tif. I'm going to save it in my star net folder. Since I want to make a starless version I'm going to run star net which is a little complicated on Mac. It's a command line thing so you have to go to the terminal and I put my program in the documents folder so I'm going to type in CD space documents and then CD space star net and then I'm just going to press tab to complete that. Okay, now I'm in the folder and there is a command within that folder called run star net.sh that's a shell file so I'm just going to do period slash run underscore star net.sh and it takes that file that we gave it stars.tif and it makes a starless version and it takes a little while to do this and that worked quite well. Let's try a curve so I'm going to just do command M on Mac would be control M on Windows and I'm just going to really aggressively stretch this just because I want to see what's there. Put this to the side for a second. Okay, so you can see the eye on tail does extend all the way down there but it's pretty noisy when we zoom in like this. There's some interesting structure over here. I don't know if that's real or not. Okay, in any case, let's try to just bring out as much of that stuff as we can. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. Okay, so now I want to bring this image back into this one so I'm going to do command A would be control A on Windows to select it command C, control C on Windows and then command V to paste or control V on Windows. It pasted on top here and now that's all we see but we want to blend it in so I'm going to do a screen blend and that really helped with the tail. The nucleus is getting a little hot, a little bright but and then the background we're seeing a lot more noise and it's a little bit more uneven and we also have a little bit more of a blue tint now so yeah, if we look at the channels they're sort of wonky again. So let's do a stamp from visible. It's command option shift E on Mac or control alt shift E on Windows and let's just correct that blue a little bit. There we go. And then I'm also going to just darken the whole thing a little bit. Okay, it's looking pretty good. There's a weird sort of brighter part of the background right there. It's sort of bothering me. I think I'm just going to make sort of a funky mask here. Okay. And I'm going to after I've made that selection I'm just going to select curves adjustment layer and darken those parts of the image up a little bit. Okay. And that looks obviously really bad but what I can do is then click on this mask and I'm going to feather and density out that selection until it looks better. Okay, that looks pretty good but now I'm just going to do another curves adjustment just an overall, I think what I want to do next is the saturation I think looks perfect in the actual comet part but the stars could use a little bit more saturation. So I'm going to do a stamp from visible again command option shift E on Mac or control option shift E on Windows and then I'm going to do select color range and select the highlights and we'll just go pretty aggressive with this. So I want to get all the stars. So I'm doing 100% fuzziness range of 89. Let's see what that looks like. I'm going to press the Q key for quick mask and I'm just going to paint out the comet nucleus here in black because we actually, I was fine with the saturation of that so I don't want to include it in this star mask. Okay, good enough. So now I have all the stars selected. I'm going to go over to the adjustments layer, pick saturation and increase the saturation of the stars sort of a subtle thing but I can definitely see a big difference. Okay, you know what? I think I'm pretty happy with this. We can just do a final crop I guess. Let's do a 16 by nine. I think that might look good. Going a little bit tighter on the comet and I want to keep this asterism definitely. Okay, I'm going to do one more stamp from visible and just do a final little pass with a camera raw filter here. Camera raw filter. I'm just going to play around a little bit with a curve in here and add a little bit of the color noise reduction or actually maybe plenty of color noise reduction. Let's zoom into a hundred percent. See what that's doing. Yeah, I like that. Let's see if we can add a little bit of noise reduction and a little bit of sharpening too. Yeah, that's looking good. Sort of look all over and make sure there's nothing standing out as being bad. So I like that the tail, you can just very faintly see it extend all the way to the edge. This cluster is my favorite thing. Okay. Yes, this is all looking okay. So I'm going to zoom back out. All right, and I think I'm going to call that it. So let's bring it full screen. Take a look. You know, there's little things we could still change, but overall I'm pretty happy with that under a quarter moon. Hey, editor Nico here. When I was editing this video, I thought this final version looked a little bit dark on some screens. So I decided to make a brighter version. And even though it's a little bit noisier, I think I prefer it. So just wanted to show you this to you. All I did was just another couple curves adjustments to sort of make everything brighter and I think I like it better. So you're now seeing the names of everyone who supports this YouTube channel over on Patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. It's an excellent community of dedicated amateur astrophotographers, just people who want to learn and are very willing to share their own expertise. We have over 800 members now. There's an active discord that you can get involved in. And I can't thank my Patreon members enough because I'm now doing this full time thanks to all of you. And it is what has allowed me to make these videos and to really pursue this as my own business. So thank you so much to all my current Patreon members. And if you enjoy this channel, I think you will get a lot of benefit out of joining my Patreon community. It starts at just $1 a month. And for that, you get a bunch of perks including direct messaging support with me, a monthly Zoom chat with the whole community, a monthly imaging challenge organized on Discord where we pick different targets every month. And a whole lot more. So if you're interested, head over to patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.


Go ahead. All right. Hi everybody. Wow, I can't believe I'm getting to speak to so many of you at once is really exciting. If you didn't know my name is Caitlin Bowden. I am the CEO founder of badass, which stands for battling against demeaning and abuse of selfie sharing. I'm going to be doing a brief intro real quick of who we are what we do. Then I'm going to introduce you to my amazing team. So here we go.  I was a victim of non consensual pornography or not consensual image intimate images being shared online. When I didn't want them to be, I started researching the websites that were surrounding this kind of stuff and saw how big the problem was and how there were no resources for this sort of stuff. I got really sick of feeling helpless. So I started reaching out to other victims. I kind of wanted a crowdsource justice.  And we just got together and sort of brainstorming different ways we could fight back. Now, before all this happened, I was a bartender and didn't have any experience in any sort of, you know, tech field, or really much of anything other than making the best Long Island you'll ever have in your entire life. You know, but I went from being a bartender to, you know, helping introduce legislation in the state of Ohio that would criminalize revenge porn, which we did get passed. We were organizing, you know, a huge group and helping out thousands of victims, helping them remove their photos and collect evidence and see some justice. You know, and then I got to go and introduce a federal bill. You know, which is still, you know, going through the process but hopefully pretty soon it might be a criminal act in the United States, which is what we'd like to see. And now I get to talk to you guys so really this is like the peak of my career thus far.  And, you know, and I'm here kind of because y'all keep insisting on it. Everyone keeps insisting in my hacker I cannot write a line of code, but you know I have helped organize 1000 victims to fight back and we've gotten to do a lot of really cool stuff.  And, you know, teaching them some tips and tricks on how to be secure and, you know, still express their sexuality online. You know, and there's other things that we've done that are best left for sky talks. My lawyer is here she will yell at me so gotta be quiet on that one. And here we are. I'm going to introduce you to this amazing and wonderful team. I'm actually just going to be moderating this panel I'm going to be letting them speak because I get a lot of chances to and it's time for their voices to get heard. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my bad asses. Alright, first off, we have Kate venable, the aforementioned lawyer. She is our head of legal. She keeps us out of trouble and, you know, helps victims with their own specific cases. Next we have Rachel lamp who's my COO. She is amazing and wonderful and has more empathy I think than any other human being ever at my entire life. Marley Farlow who's our CMO. She is creative. She is fun. She is organized, which is the opposite of me, very disorganized. We next we have Ali Barnes, who is our CTO, who explains all the things that you know you guys talk about when I have dumb questions and teaches me a little bit about tech. And finally we have Timmy doomsday, who is our CISO CISO, however, that said, and he is a blast he's hilarious to be around and he is really focused on making sure that we have all of our security locked on tight. And I'm going to be asking them some questions and you can ask them some questions and let's get this thing started hey. What's happening. So I made a really brief recap of what we've, you know, done thus far and what we've accomplished with badass, but I would love to hear. Let's start this out, you know, on the positive and I want to hear y'all brag and talk about your favorite thing that has happened thus far with badass what is your favorite accomplishment. Let's start with Rachel. My favorite accomplishment with badass is definitely getting that law passed in Ohio, it absolutely was life changing it was so great to be able to take something that would assist so many victims because a lot of us like in the beginning we were based in Ohio. So being able to have a course of action for our immediate base was just really life changing. Yeah. Kate, I know you've got no yeah. The law was awesome. Never really expected that to happen on in the same vein of things I never expected to happen was, you know, my best friend is like let's start an on profit. And here we are. I really like when I was a law school never thought ever that this is anything remotely close to what I would be doing and it's so cool and it's so awesome and it's so much more interesting than half of what all my friends do. So, I really enjoy it. All right, Marley. And as a team I'd say like every time we help a victim is just like a huge accomplishment when I see one of our victims come into our group and let us know that they actually receive justice. Definitely something to rejoice about and then on a personal level, my favorite professor from my university asked me to come and teach a course with her to like hundreds of students about this issue. I did it once and she's asked me to come back and definitely and I'm just super pumped about that. All right, Ali. So favorite accomplishment that I've gotten to like be around and witness is definitely tits for deaf con was great to witness and on a personal level, you know just getting to. I think one of my favorite things has been like the cybersecurity awareness month that we did and stuff like that is in my favorite. All right. And finally, Timmy the newest member of this team. Right, so I'm like the squid right so, you know, my biggest accomplishment honestly is to just be here with these wonderful people on this panel today.  All right. So now that we've gone over the past a little bit let's talk about the present. I know lately we've been a little bit absent on our social media pages we've been taking just a teensy bit of a hiatus although we are still reachable. In case of emergency if victims need to reach out. But so where have we been. Well, I think we all took a break to reflect on pretty much what we wanted badass to be in the future going forward and also we were just really out of spoon.  It really, it takes a toll to continuously have to, you know, go through and reopen those wounds and assist victims. Okay. Sorry. I was just going to say and I think like, we're not. I mean, while we do a lot of remote stuff, we're not immune from, you know, the effects of quarantine. Everybody else is feeling like we're all still here trying to figure out what in the world it means to work from home and how we have to change our model like nobody knows what like the next day brings in terms of coven and all that. So I think that went a lot like went into our decision to just like take a step back because we're all trying to figure it out along with everybody else. Yeah. I think a big thing also is that we, you know, we started this and it just blew up. And we were just learning as fast as we could. You know, the best ways to go about doing things and to run an organization at this size. I mean, we went from being a group of 10 of us to a global thing. And, you know, we, we were just scrambling to catch up, but nothing we didn't have any, any, you know, procedures and things in place that were long term sustainable. We were just doing whatever we needed to do in that moment. And we needed to organize, we needed to figure out the best ways to do things. Yeah. And I think like because of, because of a lot of us being victims, like we just coming into the organization came into it like, crazy passionate and wanting to take on like anything and everything. So a lot of us were like, like I'm in marketing, but then I'm going out and trying to do law enforcement training and I'm doing classes at colleges and like taking on so much because I want to and I'm excited to help and move this forward. And then of course, you know, burnout comes into play and we have to look at ourselves as an organization and look at what we want to do, but we want to focus on and do well and then expand from there. Exactly. And you mentioned law enforcement training. So let's talk a little bit about the laws and responses from law enforcement. Just quick thumbs up or thumbs down from the team here. Do you think that law enforcement is doing an excellent job of handling reports and complaints about when it comes to non consensual image abuse. What do we think. All right, so let's talk about that. I'm going to say what you think can be done to change that training for one. Yeah, well like for me, as a victim, going through my own personal case it took nine times to report my own victimization and a lot of the reason was, nobody knew that they that they handled cyber crimes, and that they didn't handle cyber crime units and they told me to call the FBI and it just like blew my mind. I'm looking at a statute saying like it literally says number four local law enforcement handles this issue. So like why is there this disconnect between you understanding that you can do something for victims. And yeah, so I'm just going to say training is one of the biggest issues here. Okay. Something else that I noticed and maybe Kate you can speak to this a little bit more but like when I was first brought on, you know I was working on building resources for victims and one of that was going through and just making the law a little bit more digestible. And it seems like a lot of the laws that are on the books can't even decide what a nude is. And that seems to be like the basis of the entire conversation so if we can't even agree on a vocabulary to talk about these things. How are we going to push effective legislation. Yeah, I mean I would, I would definitely agree with that. Like it's not only just like what is a nude but I know Mary Anne Franks has talked about this a lot and a lot of the stuff that she does with CCRI and I mean we most of the laws have these intent to harm clauses and basically what it said. Basically you have to prove that the poster intended to harm the victim in whatever way by posting it and it's next to impossible to prove and it's next to. Yeah. Yeah, that vocabulary malicious. Yeah, it makes it pretty much impossible to enforce at all and I think. Yeah, I mean it just goes on what you said to me like, we have to agree on something and then we write these laws and we think they sound all good and great. But then intent to harm makes it this, I wouldn't say useless per se, but it makes it hard. And complicates it further once you get into crossing state lines or country lines because the language of each state law is so entirely different and, you know, it's hard enough getting police to want to pursue justice for these victims but once it crosses state lines they just give up pretty much all together. Yeah, the language has definitely been an issue. Speaking of language. Most people know about the type of abuse that we're fighting against they know it as revenge porn. What do you guys think about just that wording. I hate it. I like I get it.  Abusing one another. That only represents 8% of non consensual image abuse cases. So I don't like it for that reason but like, more than that the term revenge automatically implies that the victim did something wrong. So there's like victim blaming built into it. And then the term pornography also has a false sense of consent built into it because generally people who are creating and creating pornography content are consenting to be taped and shared which none of these victims are so personally I don't like the term I will use it in cases where I'm trying to get some awareness out and people aren't understanding what I'm talking about so more as a reference point. Or if I'm specifically dealing with somebody who's former partner or current partner is abusing them. Yeah.  Are there any more stats that you think are really important to share. Actually, since you are our stats person, you know this stuff better than any of us. That's on stats. Yeah, it's actually kind of interesting because there's not a ton of resources dedicated to researching this topic. Like CCRI is amazing. They have so far have put out the most research on the topic. I just see one that came out in February that said that the rate in which this is happening is one in three people are being victimized. And that was just two months ago. But that was that was geared more towards European countries and wasn't a worldwide view. The most recent stat we have as far as worldwide is concerned is 2017 which said it was one in eight people. I'm not sure we'll get into lots of reasons why that is rising quickly, but it's hard to say I'm going to go with probably something closer to one in five, one in six, as of currently but it's something that we really need research on. And then I know another interesting fact is that, you know, this affects three out of four women victims are are women in most cases are female identifying people. But in cases where the victim does identify as male, it's 90% of those cases in incorporate sex torsion as well as the image abuse. So, that's just some, some facts. And yeah, those are scary, scary figures to hear. Yeah, that many people this is happening to this is a huge problem. You know, but the biggest thing that we hear when we discuss these sorts of things with the public or in the press. Immediately the first thing we hear is, well, this wouldn't be a problem if you just didn't take those pictures. And so we hear it so much I know we all have a ton of different responses that we go to. So let's let's share all those responses let's just get that out of the way. Rachel and I can see it. I have so many words for people who such things but I'm going to keep it professional ish. It is, it is not the victim's fault. Like, it's 2020. We have cell phones attached to us they're basically part of us. It only makes sense that, you know, people would be using their cell phones and their sex lives as well I mean it we use it to record when we sleep like to tell us when we fart, like when we talk in our sleep, like of course that's going to be incorporated into sexual relationships as well. I think the thought of excluding that or blaming the person because of them using and expressing their sexuality within a consenting form, and that being abused it's just, it's senseless. One thing that bugs me is that people always say that when the fact is we are, you don't even need to take a nude to become a victim anymore. You know, I see deep fakes are already being brought up here in the chat. And that is, you know, something we have been monitoring. So, what, what should we do about the deep face do we see that becoming more of a problem. Yeah, I mean I feel like the media recently has just realized that that's a thing, but it's something I think our organization has been talking about amongst ourselves and within the community of victims and activists for over a year now I would say. And then all of a sudden like was in the last like, I think six months or so, the media is like, oh deep fakes and I'm just like looking at the headlines like, duh.  The deep face victim came to us about a year and a half ago. And since then it's it's it's it's going to continue to rise like it human curiosity and then us just being bored and quarantine people have a lot of free time on their hands. Deep fakes are going to continue to be on the ride. Yeah, I'm actually interested to find out what the stats are on that just because. Like being quarantined.  I know that there's that one. I think a year ago or a little less than a year ago that came out was kind of making waves and I really wish I like I knew how to how to stop that or any advice to prevent that from happening but it's just. It's cropping up everywhere and so quickly that I'm just I'm not I'm at a loss personally as to what to do. And I mean it doesn't help that you know the think about the processing power it takes to do some of that stuff. It wasn't just sitting on your desk. Two or three years ago, whereas now I have a laptop that could probably generate a deep fake in an hour or two.  And never underestimate, you know, someone that's time rich and money poor, which is a lot of us right now. Yeah, I was going to say that's exactly it. People have so much more time to write these tools and stuff now. Yeah. But beyond deep fakes, I mean, that's a, it still is a problem that is growing and it's something we're anticipating. But you know the majority of the people coming to us.  And that was leaked without their consent. So, say someone wants to, you know, still continue doing that, which we encourage we encourage that sort of thing, but we want them to do it safely. What tips do you have for people to sext and take nudes and not become victims. So there's a few things I feel like that we tell people and I mean, I feel like this is the perfect time where I love how we do cybersecurity awareness month because I feel like it's a perfect time to like flood everyone with all the tips every day and Rachel did such a good job. Yeah, I almost said yesterday, last year, putting stuff together but, you know, basic things are like simple things but you know turning off the location on your phone and making sure your address is not attached to your data. That's coming from your camera roll. So pay attention to what apps you're using and what data they're storing of yours. Something that a lot of people don't think of that I've seen people get bit on is like snapchat memories. You take a picture on snapchat and you think it goes away but snapchat saves it and is like trying to remind you about it later but all it takes at that point is someone to get your snapchat password if you don't have everything protected properly. So those things, you know, keep things we say keep two factor on for all of the things that you can. You know, pay attention to what's in the pictures that you're sending to people that you don't know or trust. Make sure there's maybe no random box in the background with your home address on it.  Making sure you know what's in your pictures. Exit data. You want to make sure to wipe that so you're not accidentally sharing location and stuff like that. What else. Oh, I was just sorry. No, no, I was done go. No, I was going to say like so in my data. This is like actually really helped my practice and me helping victims and, you know, like just raising awareness in general as to like how to protect your own privacy not just in terms of image abuse but like if there's domestic violence or stalking, or some other, you know, like men saying or whatever crime you can think of that involves somebody being creepy, like it's basic privacy and so change your passwords, turn on two factor turn off your location. Don't give your significant other like unfettered access to where you are 24 seven because that's creepy anyway but that's neither here nor there. But I mean, it's just, I mean basically what Ali said like it's stuff that people don't think about and with the way that all these companies like Google and Apple and whoever like track our data these days it's important to know what data we're sharing and who is seeing it and what control we have over who it goes to and where it goes to and when. And also, sorry. I was going to say to add on to that you could, you can simply watermark your photos with the name of the person you're sending them to. And also you can you can create kind of a contract between each other by like asking your partner explicitly, like not to send these photos or it will cause me harm. Those are really important words because we know that that's how the laws really frame them is that intent to harm so if you can just check that box immediately and screenshot it keep it in a file with their name. Then I think that would really do a lot in the way of prevention and also assisting in your own legal case if it comes to that point. Yeah. I always want to remind people you know you want to think about the future and always hope for the best prepare for the worst. You know, make that screen that contract screenshot at your lawyer if they ever need one will thank you for that. So yeah, that's really important. I know that we had discussed Snapchat and other various apps that are being used to share these images and what. What, you know, responsibility do they have. Do you think. To, you know, prevent this sort of thing from happening and what are you seeing platforms and companies doing that they're just falling short and letting, you know, victims. Victimization happen on their platform.  I mean, for my perspective, like, Facebook could like respond to subpoenas that are from not law enforcement, maybe possibly at some point in time that might be helpful. Like, if somebody sends stuff during like using Facebook messenger, it's next to impossible to get anything useful for court. And here I'm not law enforcement, so they don't care. I mean, other people can speak to what they've experienced, but that's the first thing that comes to mind for me. Well, the other thing that the first thing that comes to mind for me are hosting companies, right? There's usually a blanket policy that says, don't post these kinds of things. But image abuse, if there's, especially if there's not minors involved, right? They may or may not be on their abuse priority list. So, I think it's important to hold these hosting companies accountable and keep letting them know when they're willingly hosting, you know, websites and clients that are committing image abuse, like Cloudflare. Oh, wait, wait, what did we have planned for Cloudflare when we said that at some point? I just want to throw that out there. Yeah, just we're waving we're saying hi. Now, we've run into these issues with Cloudflare for a very long time. They have repeatedly, you know, and it's not just them, but they are the most egregious when it comes to this.  I think that Twitter is quite a shame. They could really respond to reports. I remember that there was an actual Twitter account that was for one of these hosting sites and it took two years for it to be removed. And they openly boasted about having specifically leaked images and revenge porn. So, Twitter. I can speak to a couple of ones that have at least been trying.  You know, Facebook, they came out with a pilot to try to prevent images from being uploaded in the first place. And yes, it's Facebook and nobody's going to trust them.  But they were trying. They addressed that there was an issue and, you know, they acknowledged it and they are trying something. And the other one that has been actually good to work with, and I know this is, you know, a bit of a controversial opinion, but porn hub has had their moderators involved with us from the very beginning. And given us a direct line to making sure that things get taken down really quickly as soon as, you know, anyone discovers there's a problem and no one has even, you know, really tried to make sure the problem never happens in the first place yet. But I'm waiting to see that happen next and I'm really excited about that. Anyone else want to call someone out want to call it a platform start a fight. Let's do it. I mean, we've had issues with Instagram forever. Oh, yeah, like reporting. I mean, I personally have no someone who it's not necessarily like revenge porn or image abuse per se but it started like his victimization started with Instagram and it's been years. And it's taken thousands of people reporting and millions of dollars extorted for them to even do anything.  Yeah, and that's a shame because I feel like a lot of like high school leaks end up on Instagram and the fact that they're not very responsive in a very fast way. Really, it's a shame because that stuff should be knocked out relatively quickly, you know. I have one. Reddit. So, like they, if they try sometimes. My, my qualm with them is that they don't. They have moderators who who do remove content which is great, but they don't retain that content so that victims can claim it and use it as evidence, which is kind of huge. Like in where I'm in Florida and it's a stackable offense here. In my case, my image was posted on Reddit and also on another site. And the person who did it was only facing a misdemeanor because Reddit took down the image and I had no proof that it was ever there. So, you know, I reached out to them directly and asked them like what's going on, can you put something in place if you can flag images as non-consensual image abuse, then you should also be able to like keep them in a repository that's saved, saved for law enforcement to contact and get later. Alas, there's nothing. Absolutely and how could we forget discord. That's actually the first time I ever came to discord was because of my images being in a entire revenge porn discord server, which is lovely and they also remove content without preserving any of the data. You just have to really hope that the officer you're working with is able to send the preservation of data quick enough before that content is just gone forever. And that's the stream getting dropped immediately. I mean, and that's not even in just, you know, image abuse cases with adults, we've run into that issue as well. A lot of our work, you know, does involve CSAM, which is exploitation of children. And so it's been really frustrating to see companies drop the ball on that a lot. So we've discussed, you know, the platforms and their responsibility and I know a little bit ago I just saw a really great talk actually. You know, just a couple hours ago it was in crypto village and it was regarding section 230. As well as the upcoming, you know, the earn it act, which is gaining momentum. You know, through the process and you know what are your thoughts on those. Yeah, I mean, with CDA 230, it has a lot of nuance to it. It has some good points that also has it also creates loopholes that I don't know. I don't want to like criticize it too much because I'm not sure that the loopholes are necessarily intentional. I mean, when we were talking about Cloudflare earlier, I mean, their web hosts aren't responsible for the content that they're hosting because of laws like CDA 230 and while they are meant to be helpful, like they also create more problems. And it just, it needs to be retooled so that it's a better law and has less room for wiggle, like less wiggle room.  And people claim that, you know, this is free speech. And what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think that nudity and nude photographs could be free speech, but once it enters into the realm of harming people, that's when it exits, you know, free speech up until a point. But what, at what point, do we consider things to be harmful? Is it, I think it comes down to the consent personally. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think that's where the, I think that's part of the argument. The highly intent to harm thing, um, hint into harm clause is, is that's what makes it not free speech anymore, but we can't define it that broadly and make it that vague because it becomes unenforceable. Free speech is complicated. It's way more complicated than the average person would think it is. And yes, we have free speech, but it doesn't mean that you can say what you want and do what you want without repercussions. And it doesn't mean that it also doesn't mean that just because it's free speech, it's the right or moral thing to do. Like there's a difference between what our country allows us to say and what is morally and ethically correct. Um, yeah, legality doesn't always equal morality nor vice versa. Yep. So yeah, I noticed I've seen quite a few questions in the chat. Also, big props to my amazing husband TC if you haven't noticed he has been helping us field these questions he's making sure that we get them. He's sending messages that I might be missing because I'm also moderating the panel and don't always have time to look at this chat. He's making sure we see them. And just basically being the most amazing personal assistant role. So, thank you to see. So, I would like to start addressing some audience questions. Alright, the 1st 1 is given the type of victims that you help. Do you find that you as an organization are now targeted in order to gain access to lists of clients by harassers and such like. And they, they aims that toward Ali. So, I mean, let's start that off with you. Yeah. So, I would say it definitely makes us more at risk. I don't know if I would say that it's for people wanting to get a list of our victims or clients. People that we help so much as it's people that are pissed off that we're doing what we're doing and they kind of fill this need to like plot a revenge against us. It's kind of thing. We're taking away their control, right? So. They're revenge revenge porn. Yes. Revenge. I mean, I think Caitlyn can tell you this we have a whole lot of trolls. And yeah, I can we talk real quick though, like speaking of tools, can we just talk real quick about tips for Defcon from last year. And how that went. If anyone remembers that. And just, I remember. Yeah, that was fun. People are mad. They were so mad.  We've gotten. You can only use, you can only use money you made in infosec to come to Defcon. That's the only money you're allowed to use. Yeah, poor money should be spent on poor things. Exactly. Just what we did. Right. Right. I like that. Yeah. And we've had like members of the org be threatened, re victimized docs, like all kinds of things. So I'd say, yeah, 100% people do target us, or they try to. And, you know, we all support one another. And do our best to fight against that too. I just wanted to show off the whore dollars, the stickers that we had for Defcon last year that say, that says, I spent my money at Defcon and. She's got a titty out her favorite one. Just one. I think I have three. To my three whore dollars. What are you going to buy? What four things are you going to buy? Something special. I don't know where it came from. Alright, so the next question. Alright, so we discussed, you know, do we see ourselves more of target? I think so we have had people try to infiltrate our. You know, private spaces that we have for victims. We have a lot of different things that we do to make sure that when people contact us, they are who they say they are.  You know, there's a whole separate, there's a whole separate fetish for people that enjoy seeing victims reactions when they find out their photos are out there. They like to get the screenshots of them notifying victims.  And I had somebody try to do that to me actually on Twitter rather recently. And I just made fun of them. It was great.  But that is a thing. So gaining access to victims and watching them in their most vulnerable states.  Just saying. The next question is, what are some privacy tips that parents can pass on to their kids or teens? You know, recognition of exploited, exploitative behavior, protecting oneself online from malicious X someone and so forth. I'm going to still, I'm going to like repeat what we said a little bit earlier and just like, in general, have the talk about consent with your with your kids and your teens, even starting at a really, really young age, like it applies to everything. It's never not sexy. It's never weird to bring up that like, I want you to do this or that with my body or images of my body and only that. So yeah, just impress upon them the importance of consent and having those conversations with their partners. So if they are sharing images, which it probably will be. They do need to have those conversations about what is allowed to happen with those images that they do share. Yeah, I also want to say.  Oh, sorry.  I was going to say, do not force your kids to hug people that I can't agree more. You can start talking about a consent at a very early age. It's not just consent that you want to cover. You also want to cover what your agency is having agency over your own body, how to say no, how to pick out when something is making you uncomfortable. These are conversations that people don't want to have because they're uncomfortable, but they need to because later after a victimizing incident and after trauma is going to be way more awkward. I promise. Not to mention traumatic. Yeah, I think just. No, and I'm just going to pop in real fast to like, because you're right, like consent agency go hand in hand and like actually just kind of recently. In the last couple of years, there's a new kind of method of looking at consent, called the triangle of consent I encourage everybody to look it up. So that incorporates power, agency and communication and all three of those things come together to create consent. So I think that's a really good starting point for talking to your kids and teens. I also think that really important addition to that is once your kids reach the teen years and you notice that they start to look at pornography. I think that talking about consensual pornography and what that looks like and what they should be recognizing and what they should be consuming. I think that's really important as well. Yeah, I think that yeah, having just healthy talks surrounding sex. I think that's really important, but it's also really important to talk to them about, you know, security and things like that because they, you know, that this is a really big place of where both things, you know, intersect.  And recognizing threats. Just teaching kids to be careful when they're online and talking to people when they're on tick tock and interacting with people that they, they think are one person but they might be somebody else. Like, don't put your private information or your personal information anywhere. Just general upset I think is really important to start that conversation as soon as your kids have access to a device. All right. Next question is, and I was told to ask this one next is Jordan wanted to know they have a famous friend named, you know, I'm going to redact the name because the stress and effect was real. And she's a very bad stalker who has now been stalking my other friends who have worked for her provided outfits business, etc. should she contact badass for this or something she and her friends are very lost. Yeah, contact us. Yeah, definitely. Timmy you're the one that said we need to take this question. Absolutely. I mean, I think, I think if there's like that public cry for help. I definitely think that that's something you should contact us with. And that's the whole reason we have this org. Absolutely. I do want to mention that you're. That while we do focus squarely on image abuse. Okay, which is non consensual leaking of nude images it also has to do with upskirting any sort of non consensual behavior online or offline that involves images. You know, we get approached a lot when it comes to questions about stalking about harassment about, you know, abuse and while we might not have every answer. We do know a lot of people that we can too. And we will always do our best to address these issues. As much as we can. So yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think the best way to sum it up and I actually think Caitlyn's the one that said that said this to me when I first started was, if you think you need to contact badass like if that's even a question in your mind. Reach out. Yeah, I mean, even if we can't necessarily, even if you don't think that it pertains to what we do odds are somebody in this group will be able to help you. Somebody has experienced what you experienced somebody is somebody's there. And that's the beauty of our group is you're not alone. And you always have somebody to talk to. I will say that when this happens to you online, especially, you know, when it happens to you in my situation, I didn't understand the internet at all. I barely went outside Google and Facebook. And so when it happened to me, I felt really, really helpless and overwhelmed and alone. Above all, I felt isolated and scared because I didn't know who was doing this to me I didn't know who had been helping them who all these people making these horrible comments about my body. I didn't know who they were so when I turned to somebody for help, it might be one of those people that's just looking to make fun of me more. Kick me when I'm down when I'm feeling vulnerable. So, you know, just knowing that you're not alone, and that there is someone that you can talk to that you can trust and isn't going to be judging you and isn't going to be re victimizing you is important. And that can make a huge difference. So, yeah, that is absolutely have them contact us they can do so with any of our Twitter handles. And we'll put those in the chat. And, you know, or through our website www.badassarmy.org, which also I saw one of the questions was how can people support you guys. And how can people support y'all and the best way they can do that is through our website. We have some donation links that they can use as well as just letting people know we're here. So next question. What about cases outside of the US like Ireland or the UK. We have a UK group. We know people. I mean, our organization has contacts like internationally for. I mean, we can. We can find someone who can help you pretty much is what my answer to that with me. Our, our net is wide and we can. We all know enough people who know people who can point you where you need to go. I want to mention that the US is really far behind everybody else. That's what I was going to say.  And Australia, oh my gosh, Australia is just really ahead of this they have an entire section of their government that is just, you know, it's a government funded organization to prevent this. And they're really tackling things that the US is still, you know, most people don't acknowledge that they're things that exists like deep fakes or, you know, how this all play, you know, they're really starting to make things happen in Australia so it. Yeah, we have a lot of we have a lot of ways to go. That's literally what I was going to say so yay. Um, somebody said it really comes down to this how can a lot or set of laws be created or phrase to fight this issue without being used to clamp down on speech or sex workers, similar foster sesta, which is. You know, something that by all means it was meant to help people that are getting victimized and. You know, help prevent this sort of victimization by, you know, in making platforms. Accountable but at the same time, it hasn't really been used for that has it. No, what it's been used for is to attack and harm sex workers. And it has a body count at this point. So how do you think that we should be addressing this in a way that isn't going to either a use to harm sex workers or be be used to infringe on our free speech. Yeah, that's really hard. But like my first initial thought is to just is to kind of focus that language on like. I guess focus the law itself on proof of consent so like you're responsible if you're posting content to prove that the subject and that content has consented to being in it. Like, maybe if there's if that comes into play somewhere that will help a lot. Like requiring websites that allow pornography to get a release from every person that is actively participating on screen. Yeah. I mean, that wouldn't be any different than other websites that posts. I was verified. Yeah, like just verify the user. I think the US speaking of being behind and how other countries deal with it. I think the US over criminalizes that behavior. From my personal opinion on it, not necessarily like legal opinion on it, but Yeah, I think there's a way to write these laws that doesn't make it like that makes consensual sex work legal and doesn't criminalize it and lets people do what people are going to do. I mean, we're country founded on privacy. And also a large portion of our victim based our sex workers because, you know, you want your photos in a consensual way to be released to a certain market and a certain bubble and once it releases outside of that. It can be just as harmful as for anyone else, you know. So I think that these sorts of laws help and also harm.  Yeah, Rachel, that's a good point too is.  One doesn't consent to to consent for one doesn't translate to consent for many, allowing a certain, I mean, even transactional consent is consent and that is the thing that matters.  Right. So it's double the trauma right there. I mean, I think it's the ultimate irony that we're speaking at a hacker conference where we talk about how broken copyright laws are in the DMCA and at the same time, you know, that's one of our as an organization biggest tools to fight some of this, you know, is the copyright laws. Oh yeah. Hey, you know, we have a really important question I do want to address. And this is from a friend of mine, we've. And they asked what should happen is allowing rules that help victims without removing liability protection platforms outside of CSAM and CP and deeply concerned about the bills that have been proposed like earn it, which is definitely a pro censorship law and even more worrying LAD act, which went outlaw encryption in the US and I want to know what the panel thinks about this. Anyone else want to take that one first or sort of cool if I jump. You can do it. All right. Cool. Go for it. You know, I kind of started in on this one with, you know, fossa sesta and how these laws.  But really, when it comes down to it, it's removing the privacy of every user. And the fact is we've seen them be put in place and we see exactly how little they actually help the things that they're supposed to be preventing. What these laws are going to be doing is destroying censorship and freedom and I don't think that's right.  And if you care about something you need to start calling and making stuff happen and you need to call your lawmakers and talk to them about the earn it act and that, you know, encryption isn't really important to stay something that we have available.  Real quick, I'll take, I'll take a line out of a talk Corey, Dr. O'gave at DEF CON a couple years ago about the war on general purpose computing and something that I think these lawmakers forget is that it is not possible to make a general purpose computer that does everything except the one thing that you don't want it to do. That's just not how computers work that's not how math works, and that is a nuance that is lost by the old white men writing these laws. Yeah. That's a real quick point. Real quick, we got like a minute so Oh, I was just going to say, I thought you were telling me to stop. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that's a really good point to me but also like to go up, Caitlin was saying like there is a balance between free speech and censorship and I think if we're going to start doing things like outlawing encryption and censoring material like we really need to We really need to take into consideration and without boring y'all with conlaw jurisprudence. You know, that's, it's not something to be taken lightly. And I think we really need to examine how we do this and what precedent it could set for the future. I think Kate just really wanted to say jurisprudence. I did. Okay, all right, as long as we got that cleared up goal achieved all right real quick.  So, yeah. But I really quick. I just want to see if anyone has one final messages they'd like to share with the people watching and listening to this. Okay, anyone final message Rachel. I'd say everyone please reach out if you have a question comment concern we would love to hear you and we would love to integrate you into our, our group of like, you know, sorry, I cut out the webcam.  We're here for you. And, yeah. Oh, me. Yeah. Okay, I'll keep it quick.  All right, Ali. Gonna echo Timmy's foot cloud flare comment. Thanks for listening to us reach out to us if y'all need anything we're always around to answer questions and we definitely are going to keep talking about this stuff. So, Marley. So, ditto on what everybody said and to add to it. Yeah, let's please keep talking about this conversation about how we can make laws that don't infringe on speech and encryption, but that will help victim saving that's a really important conversation to have and your voices are really helpful. Kate, do you just want to see improvements again. No. Black lives matter and consent is key. I'll always get it. Right. I'm going to end this whole thing up by saying thank you to everyone out there watching thank you to the, you know, everyone organizing def con this year I know it has been crazy and chaotic and you. Having do a lot of things that is that are brand new and I just want to say it's been wonderful thus far. I miss you all. I can't wait to see you in Vegas next year. And meanwhile, you know, life is short have all the orgasms consensual healthy orgasms or cookies depending on what you want. And just stay badass.


So, when is a hybrid? Not a hybrid. Is it when it's a highwood? And when is a fairway wood? Not a fairway wood. Is it when it's a highwood? Yep, it is of course the Cleveland highwood and it's very much the review that you've all been asking for and put me onto this club and we're going to find out what makes it so special. Right, so the first question I asked myself is what is so special about this club and what makes it so different, well quite simply, it is a hybrid of hybrids and fairways and it is a shorter shaft. That shaft being the length of a standard hybrid with a head the size of a fairway wood. That coupled with 18 degrees of loft, it's suggesting it's a three highwood and it's certainly not a three fairway wood and it's closer to a three hybrid in terms of distance. It feels very good, let me tell you already, it performs exceptionally well in a number of different situations. So it's very much a positive start out there on the fairways but I've come back inside full golf chester and what I want to see from this is what I might actually get in terms of data. So what I'm really interested in for this club in particular is the carry distance and spin and descents.  It's 18 degrees but what does it really do? In terms of performance comparable to maybe an 18 degree five wood, for example. Time to find out, I think. OK, so the first thing for me is what I want to see is what this thing does with just a sort of an easy swing. So we're not going after this, we're just, we've got a green setup, we're playing a nice part three at a dead manner which is, I think it's a couple of hundred yards from T to green. So an easy one to start proceedings. OK, so slightly down that left hand side, it's an OK-ish start and interesting enough we're kind of like, well we're top end of that sort of 180 creeping into perhaps 190. So the second shot because I really do think this is a very playable club and also very versatile. I just want to add a little bit more to it and see if we can perhaps just change the shape a little as well. That's a much better strike, a much higher ball flight and a lot longer, I would say. We're still down that left hand side, turn that one over a bit but the carry difference changes significantly, that's 207 carry, so straight away we've got some significant sort of versatility in this thing in terms of how far the ball can actually travel so I love that first of all. I'm going to finish off with my last shot which is sort of, if I'm playing from the T I want a bit of distance and I'm sort of going after this thing I'm swinging the ball quite well, the club quite well. How far can we get with this thing? Absolutely. Mull of that is the technical term I think. That's gone a long, long way. That's carried very much that back end of the green and topping out as I thought, well a little bit longer than I thought to be quite honest from what I've been seeing out on the course. So there is clearly a lot of versatility in this club in terms of how it can be played which can not often be said about your typical three-word. So I suppose the question is, what is it that gives me the confidence to perhaps try those three different shots and I think first of all it's going to be mentioned quite a lot during this video. It's the control again that this shorter length shaft gives. So that combination, shorter shaft, bigger head but it says 18 degrees but it seems to present more loft visually than 18 degrees. Crown sits really nice at a dress and it just for me visually just gives me a whole lot of confidence like I said from how close I am to the ball perspective, length of shaft, I just feel I've got plenty of control over that clubhead. Really, really sort of impressed with how this thing has performed inside. I don't know whether you're catching the sound or not, that's a really high ball again. I mean really decent strike there. It's performed incredibly well. I don't know whether you're catching the sound or it's what I was saying. It's a good balance. It's a good balance between this thing feels like it's firing on out there. You've got plenty of responsiveness into the ends. It is again ticking all the boxes inside here at four golf. There's not a lot more I can tell you to be quite honest with you. The kind of carry distances I think it's a case of going back out to the course. Now one thing you've got to get right is no matter how good the product is in terms of performance, for me first of all you've got to get people in. You've got to get people trying it. So shelf appeal and how this thing looks for me is really, really important. Especially for Cleveland because Cleveland I always think is slightly up against it. They've got to get that club in people's hands and when they do from what I see and what I read from comments most of you are really, really impressed with it. It's also got to be right in terms of price point. So this product is 209 in terms of the UK. That's the kind of price point, £200. That's what I'm seeing it for. In terms of how it looks, I think it looks really, really good. I think they've done an exceptional job. Again that muted mat crown looks absolutely superb. But then I think from the underneath perspective again where it sits what you see on the shelf really good colouring. Not too over the top, nice and subtle. Again, them rails are really important that you can see. Slightly raised rails on the bottom there which we'll talk about next. So if you are new to the channel then please consider subscribing. I am very much the average golfer. If you're a long time viewer of the channel then well thanks for watching. Back to me inside just for a second or two. Just wanted to show you this dry ball that you offer a number of shots. Like I said, trying a variety of different shot types. What you'll see is it's that as we've shown in those first three strikes I hit inside very much can control a difference from sort of that top endo 180 but then the kind of one that you go after is I think it's 212 or something but again the spin drops off considerably when you try and hit that knuckle ball. Interesting, good peak height, good descent angle, you can see the launch angle. It's basically reiterating the points that we found in here and it seems like on the course as well. Get back out on the course for evaluation time and I think this is where you truly learn how a club performs and I've got to say like it does everything so so well. Maybe the surprise for me and the thing you need to be careful of is just to make sure that what you're expecting in terms of distance when you see a three high wood don't be confused like I said is it being a fair way wood in terms of distance because it's nothing like that. Clearly that's sure to shaft plays a big part in that but for me that was the key take away point in terms of what I found in terms of distance. Yeah in dry ball data but more importantly in reality out here on the golf course but like I said if you were a club that everyone, not everyone a lot of golfers struggle with hitting a ball from a lie on the fairway with a three wood. This makes it a damn sight easier. Also if you're struggling off the tee this would be a nice go to club to help you out to get a bit of confidence back. Again does it really well. It's really just reiterated the points we continually make on this channel about that shorter shaft really. I think that's the big again take away point it's just having greater control and the thing zips off it at times it almost feels illegal the way it's trampolining out there it's fast ball speeds it's so so good as you can tell really really maybe even almost a tad surprise just how good it is and I'll tell you how good it is just straight in my bag and the reason it's going to do that it's going to fill a void that I've been trying to fill for a long long time and that's a club that I really like at the sort of 210 yardage always have struggled with a lot of different hybrids but for me this kind of thing fits the bill goes in at 210 and oddly enough it's shorter than my 18 degree five wood so like I said loft is only one small part of the equation there's lots of things to consider and funnily enough you've seen it from inside in terms of dry ball days you've seen it performing outside here thank you for giving me the heads up in terms of all the people who told me that I should have a look at this thing I really do owe you one because I love it anyway thanks for watching give me your comments down below get me your feedback and I will see you all soon thanks for watching this has been the average golfer from hollywell golf bye for now