all right so i actually just got back from work and to my surprise i wasn't expecting it to come this soon but my new shelf arrived for my puzzles. all right so here are the pieces of the bookshelf now the plan is this couch is already moved so we're gonna take this bookshelf and put it over behind my desk here near the couch and table will probably stay around here next to the bookcase i'll see what it looks like and then our new bookcase well puzzle shelf is gonna move to where the old shelf is. so we're gonna put the bookshelf together now and hopefully it all goes smoothly. i guess mo on the side and a little table that i had i'm just gonna leave it there um i'm a little overwhelmed but i think the best thing i can do right now is kind of separate all the nicer looking disney puzzle boxes and i think i want to have those on this shelf here on display the rest of these i'm thinking just leaving it the way i had them previously with like my other collectibles on the top maybe one of my book collections here and then again this one here of just the fancier looking disney puzzle boxes and the rest will be books as well this is what's daunting me here i don't really know how to go about organizing all this in terms of if i'm going to do it by brands if i'm going to do it by style or what but yeah i have a lot to go through here this is kind of overwhelming to be honest but i think the best thing i can do right now is kind of just go through all these boxes and separate them by brand or by style or kind of like how i think i want to organize it and then start loading them onto the shelves and seeing what it looks like so you know what enough talk let's put some music on and let's get started on this all right so so far i have 3d puzzles i have oh the right ravensburger it's just laid over here i have other ravensburger here but i'll probably kind of separate them according to like disney and non disney ones i have pile here of brands that i kind of only have one set of each now i know i've replied to some of your comments regarding buffalo puzzles and i think i kept saying like oh i need to build up my buffalo collection without realizing that um yeah i do have quite a bit of buffalo puzzles which kind of makes me feel a bit silly because um i don't even know what i have so we have the nicer looking disney box sets here that i think are gonna go on the main shelf here and then these are all like the seco branded ones and these are from brands that i only have like one set of from and this is like cardinal rosar i have non disney seco puzzles in this pile and that should be in the one the one off pile as well so i think it's time you know what let's do this shelf first i want to get the pretty disney puzzles away oh i just did a whole video on this from my ebay win so this is gonna end up in probably the rosar and cardinal shelves if they have space for it or they might just end up on a shelf on their own so we'll see let's get busy let's continue put all these books away back on this shelf but what i have done on this shelf so far is kind of set up like i said before the prettier boxes of the disney puzzles pretty much all of these aside from these two here are ones that i picked up at disney world when i was there one of the last times so i kind of feel like this is a nice little focal point for this bookshelf here and then on top here as i said i'm gonna set it up the way i had it originally with my books and my collectibles but the real progress was over here it's funny how once you actually start going through what you have you realize how much you actually accumulate over a short period of time so now it is time to tackle the rest of this bookshelf and just put everything back where it originally belongs and kind of clean up the rest of my room super exhausted right now so i think i'm gonna call it it for a night and i'll probably continue tomorrow i will see you then all right well it's actually a few days later and the room is finally done so let me flip this camera around and let me show you the new improved mandy cave so i originally had this couch over here and the tv unit over here but that's all flipped around now so now we have the bookcase that was in front of my computer under the tv set and we more mounted this now i got my pictures up there then by the couch it looks a little crowded right now because i have my puzzle table there currently folded up but that's gonna move obviously because i gotta get some puzzles going have this little table here and i removed the puzzles that were in there because i'm gonna show you where they are now and then over here i kind of made this one shelf just kind of like my exclusive disney puzzles basically ones that i've gotten from the park or the shop disney website so i have that there set up with some other disney things have some disney pictures down there are my fear street books and then up here i kind of decluttered this shelf it had a lot going on i kind of had all this and all this stuff on one shelf but now it's broken up into two i put my castle picture there and kind of set up my snape shrine my sailor moon shrine is here and honestly i'm really happy with the way this bookshelf turned out in terms of the way i've organized it because i kind of had like those two shelves just cluttered with puzzles and not very well organized and it's just a little bit better to look at in my opinion oh sorry for the lighting so yeah that was the old bookcase and now you can see it's in front of my computer and obviously this was on the other wall but here's what's on the other wall now i'm getting a lot of reflection from the sun so i do apologize but anyways here is my puzzle box wall i must say it is crazy how quickly this puzzle collection has grown since i started this channel and i'm happy to have finally kind of set it up really the way i want it to so there's a lot more shelf space now to accommodate all my puzzles and more don't tell anyone i set that but anyways i kind of have it a little better organized kind of have all my disney puzzles in the middle here i have my buffalo sets here there's the aquarius white mountain like the seco puzzles there's masterpieces so over here is like the robins burger sets and that's where i have like currently my 3d puzzles right now now this shelf is empty but i figured why not put my butt cushion and my puzzle accessories here this is great i'm sure eventually i'll get more sets and i'll need to replace what's in there but that's okay for now it's gonna work i'm really quite happy with this and then of course you know i was gonna put that in the dining room but then i figured you know what it should go where my puzzles are it looks beautiful that's my pin two puzzle so yeah this is this is improvements this is good stuff i'm really happy with the way that looks now compared to what i had before and honestly the move of everything in my room really makes it feel like it's much bigger than it was before i'm not doing a very good job trying to show the amount of space that i have in here now but this is way more spacious than the setup i had before i'm really happy with it i'm so glad that i did it now for the space above my couch it's a bit bare all i have is professor snape but i do plan to add framed completed puzzles on this wall here so i figured you know what i'm not gonna try to fill it up with other random stuff now i'll leave snape here for now but over time this wall is gonna get frames and puzzles hanging on it and i'm pretty sure this wall will have another one or two images here as well because i kind of have like some very bad paint patchwork going on and some screws that be covering up so as of right now i'm happy with this but it does need some more to this wall but yeah overall i'm really happy with the way my room looks it's more spacious i have everything organized it feels less cluttered in here this is fantastic and in this shelf i moved all my vampire hunter t collection books here all of these are my husband's books but that's mine that was in the other shelf previously and then here i kind of just left my budget puzzles which were small boxes and it's really the only thing that can fit in the in this shelf here so i figure we'll just keep that there and it looks good so yeah that was a lot of work it was pretty exhausting to be honest and i don't know maybe if that was just because i had just come from work and i was pretty tired but you know it was all worth it in the end and of course with the help of my husband and my daughter it was much easier to just kind of get things out of the way and moved back and so i didn't do it alone obviously as you saw within the time lapse but what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna leave a link to the new shelving unit that i have um down in the description box below so that if you're interested in kind of getting some more shelf space or if you like that shelf you can pick it up there my room has been a serious disaster for quite a while now so it really does feel a lot better now that it's completed everything is up on the walls everything is organized and sorted out i weeded out some things too so you know i got rid of garbage and overall it just feels so much better in this room i don't feel like as tense i don't feel like claustrophobic i have so much more space you know like i said in my first organizing video decluttering and cleaning up kind of like gives you i don't know it just seems to take a weight off of you it's kind of freeing really to get rid of stuff you don't need and just to kind of make your space more bearable to look at and to be in really so with it being spring now i encourage you all to get busy getting through your closets through rooms in your house and start getting rid of junk trust me it's going to make you feel a whole lot better so hit that like button if you're a declutter fan and if so and if you've done any cleaning up recently let me know down below how much junk did you actually get rid of now also because i'm pretty sure at some point as i you know accumulate more puzzles i'm pretty sure the way i have my sets organized at the minute is probably not going to stay the same i don't know so also let me know down below how do you like to organize your puzzle sets do you like to do it by brand by type by style again as i said i'm pretty sure at some point i'm going to go through another clear route and another reorganize so i like to hear what you guys like to do kind of give me some ideas as well on how to change it up a little bit anyways guys thank you for keeping me company during my organizing fiasco hope you are all doing well and i will see you in the next one


Hello, my name is Christophe Delinochin, and today I'm going to talk about Alpha waves, which I believe to be the very first 3D platform game in history. There used to be an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for that game, but they dropped the whole section, so it's no longer official. So the best way to understand a game is to play it. So I'm going to start with a quick demo of what it looked like. Those of you in the room have already seen something, but I'm going to start with the main menu here, where you can see that you have a one-player mode, two-player mode, an emotion which is really a training mode without a time limit, some help that we saw running while waiting for the recording to start. So that's what it looked like, and this made the game a bit easier to understand. So what you see on the left is a camera that spins, and the keys that you have to press in order to achieve the desired effect. So let's start by playing the game. So you are this central character here, and I'm going to change to another one for reasons that will be clear at the end of the talk. And basically I can spin around, and I can, by pressing the action button, for instance, the spacebar, I can trigger a sort of reactor at the back, and that makes me move forward. And then I can switch to another room, and there are 256 rooms which are shown in this map here. So you have some time to discover all of them. So this is both a platform game and a puzzle game, and you can save along at the beginning to save your game to make forward progress. You have here something that unlocks the keys.  And what I did by taking this little thing here is I unlocked a key in some other room. And you see that the little thing that spins around it is supposed to unhelp me, or basically be some sort of opponent.  Okay, so that's about it for the one-player mode. I'm going to, so I made a high score there. And you see that I have a permanent high score at the top that I don't think you can play long enough in the game to actually beat that game. So the two-player mode is an interesting first because this was the first time you had this horizontally separated splits. So that means you can actually really interact with the other guy. So for instance, I'm going to push him over there and you see me arriving there. And so that was fun because you could basically, you know, this was probably one of the first cases of co-opetition in a game where you could really either help each other or fight one another as you prefer. And I'm going to change rooms to show that this game used an interesting feature of the Atari ST which was that you could change the palette on the fly with VBL sync. And so the game uses that to have a palette per room. Oops. So the two-players could actually be in different rooms and have different color palettes in the middle. An interesting trivia fact about this particular feature is that it only existed on the Atari ST. The Amiga and PC versions of the game had turn-by-turn two-player game which was much less interesting. Another interesting trivia is that when the first time I tried in this simulator which is called Atari, an interesting open source emulator for all the Atari range of computers, that feature did not work. It actually had very bad results on the color effects. And so I have a two lines fix in Atari just to make that game work. Okay. So that's basically the end of my demo for now unless you want me to try something else, but that's basically what there is. So back to the talk. So let me first say that this was really a wonderful time when this game was developed. The game was developed between 98 and 99 and released in early 99 and 1990 for the US. So that was the time where 3D games were really not there yet. No, that's fine. Why is it so slow to load the videos? So this is the game that was an inspiration for me. It was called Star Glider 2. You can see that as was typical at the time, there was a limited region for rendering 3D graphics. Doing that basically saved a lot of time in CPU usage. As was also relatively typical for the time, there is a small number of items on screen. Here you can count five or six. The floor is really one item with some smarts on how to colorize it. And the interactions in game were typically only remote. So you only had things like missiles, et cetera, but you could not really have physics with other items in the game. So these are three areas where Alpha Way is innovated by having full screen game play all the time, having many objects on screen and having direct interaction with the objects. Now, there was a limited color palette available on screen. For that area, it was 16 colors out of 512. So you had to play with that. So no real shadows. It was all pre-computed colors. Another game of that time that I picked up to show it was Hover Tank, which is dubbed on the ID Software website as the first 3D game on a PC. So first of all, it's clearly not the first 3D game by far. There were many others before, et cetera. Alpha Way was released about two years before Hover Tank. But also it's not 3D. It's really 2D. There is only one axis of rotation, basically. And if you look at the characters, they all look at you facing. So the same thing. We should have displayed area and no truth 3D. That being said, Alpha Way was, in my opinion, not the best 3D at the time, which is probably something I would give to Falcon. Again, the 3D area was limited by default. But unlike in other games, you could actually go full screen even if it was slower. And there were many, many objects by the standards of the time. So that's what full screen looked like. Another, so you see, it was like 5 images per second or something like that when you were full screen. And another interesting thing was that, to my knowledge, this is one of the first games that tried to do some accurate shadow projection on the floor. So Alpha Way did that too, but the same tricks, the shadows are really not really computed. You may have seen that they may go outside of the projected area, for instance.  So this is the first platform game with 3D in it. And in my opinion, this is also the first time there was real interactive 3D in the sense that you could touch practically anything that was around you. So this is what the Wikipedia page has to say about it. But how did the idea come about? So you see that I changed the character when I started playing the game. There is another reason that I actually, at the end, it was to show you something that was the closest to what I had in mind initially, which was I was thinking of Smuff's jumping in a room. So do you know the Smuff's coming book? French people probably know about it. So there are very tiny blue characters like this, and when they have to go over a table, they hop about it. So initially, I wanted to do a sort of Smuff-based adventure game. We are far, far away from it. So let's start with the influence of Star Glider. So when I saw that, my first reaction was, wow, how do they do that? It was really the first time we saw this kind of polygon on an ST. And then my next question was, how does that work? So I tried writing some code that would more or less do the same thing. And then I tried to make it faster, smoother, and I kept improving my code. And at some point, it became obvious that I could draw 3D much faster than Star Glider. Basically drawing on full screen and still have what was the standard at the time, like between 15 and 20 images possible. So I got back to Infogram, and I have to tell you a little story about that. So at some point, Infogram decided to go out of games and try their luck in export systems of all things. And so they asked me to translate a book. And when I came back three months later with a finished translation, they told me basically, oh, I'm sorry, we changed our mind, it's a bad idea, we won't do that, so we don't pay you. And so I returned to Infogram with sort of an entrance in mind, saying I will get them to pay me something. That was basically my objective. And so I came with a number of demos on floppy disks. And one of them that I was relatively proud of was a clone of a relatively popular game at the time called Time Bandits. That was better than Time Bandits in a few respects and much worse in other aspects. But I thought that would impress them, except they're just young and they were absolutely not interested at all. But when I showed my last floppy, which was not a game, it was just a sort of demo thing, the director looked like this. He stayed with the joystick like one hour. And then I thought, okay, I have something that Infogram has not seen yet. And that was when suddenly I thought, okay, I need to be careful there. And I came back with a standard contract telling me you're going to work for three months during the summer on Infogram's project and as a training period and you will be paid 7,000 francs, which is about $1,000. So I said no, sorry, did that once. Not going to try again. So there was one month of, what they call in Star Wars, no, it's not Ferocious Negotiations in Star Wars. How do they call it? Aggressive Negotiations. Negotiations with this lightsaber basically. So it took a while and after I think two or three months of negotiation, I finally got royalties and I thought from here, everything is peachy. For the little story here, Infogram at the time was about 40 people in a single floor and all the engineers were outside of the, just outside of the desk of the CEO. And when I negotiated with the CEO, I remember two things. The CEO is called Bruno Bonel. The first thing is at the end of the negotiation, he said I'm happy I negotiated with you because I never see people your age negotiating. So it's not fun. Yesterday, someone told me I don't need much. So that's what he got. Okay. And the second thing I remember is that at the time I was, when we began discussing, I was 18 or 19, something like that. So I had no idea how the business worked. But in my mind, it was obvious that if I wrote the game, 25% royalties was the minimum. So that was my no-go zone. You don't go below 25%. They started at six. So, and in the end, I got 17% royalties and I was very unhappy with it. So, but I was just tired.   And I said, I got 17%. And they all look at me like, how much? And apparently I was the first external developer to get two digits in royalties at Infragram. They did not pay me, but that's another story. So, marketing. So Infragram was actually impressed enough with the game that they launched something called the Crystal Collection with a new age game. So this is the team that they had at the time. It looks very 80s, right? So that's what the front and back cover looked like. So this is basically what the front cover looks like. And that's the back cover. The whole Collection Crystal over here team. For those of you who are interested in history, there is another talk about Minitel today. That's what the UIL looked like at the time. 13.16. 36.15 for Infragram. That's how we said it in French. So, the collection was, oops, sorry. So we had a few games. We had an English version. You had a 3D version of Tetris. A 3D version of Arcanaeid or Breakout. And they started 3D-fying even their adventure games with something called Dragon. They had actually started the development of Dragon long before, but they put a lot of emphasis on the 3D effects to some extent due to alpha waves. And that's what the games looked like at the time. At the time it was all 2D and typically exploiting existing franchises and stuff like that. So this is where the idea of smurfs came to me, is I thought if they are doing things like that, I could do a smurf-based game. That was why I was thinking about this. Also, I like comics. And another thing that Infragram was doing at the time was the early SimCity. And if you play SimCity today, you cannot think of SimCity as being 2D, but that's what it looked like at the beginning. So, I said they did not pay me royalties. Well, here's another story. So basically I got my reports about royalties every six months or something like that. It was supposed to be monthly, but they never got them in time. And they always told me it doesn't sell in the US. It doesn't sell in the US. It doesn't sell in the US. Okay, well, fine. Then in 1998, I moved to the US, started being present on some mailing list, and I started getting emails saying, are you the guy who wrote alpha waves? We were playing the equivalent of land parties and we were organizing stuff, et cetera. One email, two emails, three emails. So after a while, but, sorry, I'm sorry. Where are the guys who wrote continuum was the first one. And initially I said, no, I did not write this game. But they described the name, the game, and the game looked very much like alpha waves. So what Infragram did is they basically renamed it, sold it to another company called Data East. I had no idea these things existed. That was long before internet was prevalent. So I had no way of knowing. So I believe I never received the actual royalties for the continuum version. I will never know for sure. Maybe I'm lying. Who knows. So what did the press think about it? Well, there was a common theme that the game was hard, was cool, was innovative. And one of my favorite quotes was a French magazine called Generations 4, Generation 4. And what they said was, we don't know what this guy uses for drugs, but we want the same thing. So you have some reviews here. Somewhere good, somewhere not as good. I remember one of the reviews said something like technically very impressive. We only wish it was a game. So thanks to internet, the game remains relatively easy to find today. So if you are fond of retro gaming, you can find it. There are links on Wikipedia. There is this website which I like because it says that the game is a theme. The theme is unique. I like that. Somehow the game did get a best innovation in 1991 award that I was not aware of before preparing this talk. And you can even find it in Russian. So everything, because at the time, I remember at the time, Russia was like completely off the map, right? So nobody thought this would happen. Now, the major influence of the game is that it actually taught 3D to a foreground. And that's through a game called Alone in the Dark. Who knows about Alone in the Dark in the room? Yeah. So this guy is a guy named Frédéric Renal. Who knows him? At least heard about him. Nobody? Seriously? So he's the only French developer to ever receive the Medaille des Arelettes, which is why I have this picture here. Or at least he was the first one. Maybe there is another one now. And so he brought the alpha waves to the PC. And as with all external developers, Infogram decided to review my code before putting this thing into production. So he started reviewing the source code and he went to his boss and he said, you know what? I can port this to the PC. There is one command line per line of code. And this was not completely true. You can check that in the source code today. But what this meant is that this was the first game that Infogram ported from assembly language to C on the PC. And so doing that, he devised a 3D engine that he would later reuse for Alone in the Dark. And he would then clash with Infogram because the same thing, Infogram would not, you know, the game sold by the millions and he would not get a pay raise. So he said, I'm sorry, I'm out of there. So that's what Infogram looked like. So you can see that I take no credit for the inspiration only for the 3D. Because you see it's a completely different way of doing things with actual 2D graphics and the perspective. And the 3D is integrated in it and much less actual 3D because he was doing more complicated things, much more complicated models. And so he could not move as many on the screen at the same time. But that's really, there should be some sound. Can you hear it? Okay. So there was a whole mood and it was really, you know, the thing that made Alone in the Dark so unique was this sort of, you know, or the mood or the sound, et cetera. So it was a really good game. I'm a really bad game designer, frankly. Okay, but game designer. So, well, you can find this online. Let's talk a little bit about the technology. So this was the beginning of everything in 3D, meaning that in the end, we had absolutely nothing to play with. So for example, this is the machine we were running on. That's an Atari ST and an Amiga. And these were bringing 32 bits for every one, but actually the buses were 16 bits and internal computations were also often 16 bits. What you see here in red is basically the amount of memory in my video RAM that corresponds to the whole memory of this machine. And so you could display 16 colors out of 512. So these were very cool machines at the time. So how do you compute 3D graphics on this kind of machine?  So you start with a very powerful three accelerator, like an NVIDIA Titan or whatever. Actually, I don't have that. So at least I can color the pixels. Sorry, I can't do that. Well, at least I can access the pixels individually. Well, no, they are on multiplanes and they are in different regions of memory, complicated arrangement. Maybe there is 3D-accelerated rendering for polygons. Well, no, sorry. All they could accelerate was rectangles. OK, floating point maybe. I know that 68, 8, 2 would come a couple of years later only. OK, division. Maybe division is fast. 158 cycles to do one division. OK, maybe I can do a multiplication. Actually, a multiplication is only 70 cycles. So it's faster than division, but still. OK, what about additions? Additions are four cycles. That's good. I can do something with additions. So basically, I rewrote the problem as how can you do 3D graphics with only additions? integer addition, shall I? Precise. OK, so for computing sine and cosine and stuff like that, it's easy. Because basically you just pre-compute integer values. You stuff that in a table. You offset. You do a load. And that's basically it. And actually you could accelerate that because this was a SISC processor. So you had a complex addressing mode. You could do that in one instruction. OK, but that's only to compute the rotations. So now I'm going to show you how the trick's inside. So for each 3D object, we would have a 3D rotation along x, y, and z axis. And there are multiplications. You can't avoid that. But you can pre-compute with only additions what happens when you have the same vector times 2 times 3 times 4, 5 and 10. And then you can use this, you know, by negating it to go forward or backward. So you have minus of this. So in the code, this is named xp3zm45, et cetera. And you have a table that looks like this. So this is the character that I was playing with. That's how it's described in assembly code. So let's start. So xm1 gets me there. xp2 gets me there. Origin brings me back at the starting point. Then zp5, et cetera. So you see the idea. Basically, I'm jumping like this. And there was this special thing, go one, go two, et cetera, where I could insert some computations to do some basic animation inside the model. So this is how the bouncing of the character is done. And then all you have to do once you have done that is connect the polygons, the dots with polygons, and that's easy. Now, polygons feeling was complicated at the time. It was really critical to performance. So I used something called Brezenheim's line algorithm. I don't know if you are familiar with that, but look it up on Google. It's very interesting. And what this does is basically you compute this movement using only additional subtraction. What I was very proud of is that while understanding why this was working, I realized that you could also do that for circles and ellipses. And so Alpha Waze is probably also the first game where you had real circles on screen. There were a number of circle objects just to show off. So that's the extension to ellipse. But then Alpha Gram asked me, could you please use our code? Because it's portable. We could use that to pull that to the PC or to the Amiga platform. So I looked at that code, and that code did not work on the TT because it was using self-modifying code. So I said, sorry, don't want to have that. So I spent some time rewriting that using something called the Duff's device. And by doing that, I was actually 30% faster than the original code. So we kept that. That's my other contribution to Alpha Gram. So about the music. So you have the whole playlist on YouTube here if you want to scan it. It's really cool, actually, that some guy saved it. So that's the PC version of the music that you hear. So the Atari ST had this music but only during the intro. And the reason is that because the 512, 520, which has 512K of memory, did not have enough memory for both the game and the music at the same time. So it was stored on the second side of the floppy disk, and the second side of the floppy disk was also something that only existed on the 1040 ST. So that was basically my trick. I have a second side. I can load the music, and at the same time I have the memory to store it. So that's good. Except at some point, a magazine was hired by Alpha Gram to, at the time, you know, you had floppies with magazines with promotions. And they only copied one side. And then they blamed me because the game crashed, not finding the music on 1040 STs, trying to read from the second side and said, sorry, no music, quitting. And, of course, they blamed it on me. So I wrote to them an angry letter and they never replied to me, of course. On the PC you have a relatively high quality ad-lib music. That's why you can still find it on YouTube today is because folks really love this music. It was re-exploding the ad-lib music. So composed by Frédéric Manson, those of you who are French may have heard of a group at the time that was called the Voyage de Neuse and he was part of this band for a short time. And the cool thing for me as the author is that I have the original music as performed on a synth, which is much, much better. Now, if you want to check the source code and an article that talks about this, you can find them online. So the source code is 17K lines of assembly code, 68K assembly code, and the article is basically me ranting about the stuff that I told you about today, but going into more details for polygon drawing and stuff like that. And with that, one last QR code is I just released these books so for French-speaking people, if you want to buy this book, it's a very good sci-fi book. That way you can know what I do today. And that's about it if you have questions. So how much time do we have for questions? Three minutes for questions. Yeah, so he went to make a number of titles, like dozens.  So many titles later. He stayed in the business. Me not being paid sort of disgusted me of that business. I said, it's not just for fun. Not that I remember. I don't think so. That doesn't ring a bell, but possibly. He has done so many things that I can't really touch. Yeah, so I said I did not get paid at all. That's not completely true. There is one good thing that came out of this and my wife is wearing was paid by this game. So the question is how did I manage to have separate color planets into player mode? So the Atari ST had this very nice feature where you had 16 registers which you could write directly to change the color. And it happened instantly. And one of the registers was used, color zero was used for the border of the screen. So what you did was basically you would sync, which was the vertical blanking interrupt. You would count how many lines had been displayed on the screen and when you had the right spot in the middle of the screen you'd flip the palette. That was somewhat tricky because it had to take into account whether you were at 60 hertz or 50 hertz and stuff like that. But it was somewhat stand out at the time. Now, I must say that this brings back another thing I wanted to tell you, but I forgot. A very interesting trick that you could do at a time and is really hard to do today is if you wanted to instrument how long some code took you could basically write into a color into this register and change the color when you exited the routine. And you would have on screen how much time it took. That's a trick I used on the ZX Spectrum and then on Atari ST quite a bit. Any other question? So the question is do I still have an Atari ST running the game? I have an Atari ST, I have two of them. I actually have the original one that was used to develop that and it happens to be a Stacey. The Stacey was the idea of a laptop and it had a built-in black and white screen which is why this game is also running in black and white because my own laptop was running this. Unfortunately, neither of them is running anymore. I have a larger collection. I have about 70 machines at all. I can't do something about it. At Atari ST I can't really repair it because it basically, well, I could need to replace the whole motherboard. The motherboard was damaged. I'm sorry? No, no, it was at the end that it was meant. So thank you very much for listening, please.


Jmovi includes one really kind of unusual kind of funny looking graph. It's called a violin plot and what it is, and it's sort of the box plot version of the density plot. And it just kind of spreads out and you'll see why it's called a violin. I'm starting with the iris data set from the example data. And I'm using the box plots that I created in the last video. I'm simply going to click here where I have the four variables and I'm not splitting them by anything. And I'm going to come here over to plots. And again, the reason violins right here is because Jmovi is able to stack all three of these on top of each other. You don't want to do that because it gets really busy looking. But I'm going to show you the relationship between the box plot and the violin plot by simply adding it right here. And I do that you get a shape that looks a little bit like a Rorschach ink plot that actually corresponds to what's happening in the box plot here. For instance, you can see that we've got a lot of data here in the middle. And that's where the violin plot goes out the most. We get a funny little manner a shaped one here because of our strongly elliptocratic distribution. And down here, you can see why it's called a violin plot because we get it comes out it goes back in comes out because of the bimodal distributions that we have on these two variables. Now I'm actually going to remove the box plot. So you can see just the violin plot on its own. And what we're left with is really just a little bit of squiggles it feels like again, a projective test. It's a little hard for me to read, but it's an interesting version. Again, it's like a density plot but oriented in the same direction as the box plot. You can of course do the same thing with the subgroup analysis that we have down here, where we broke down the measurements by species. I'm going to click on that to open up this menu. And there you can see we have species there. I'm going to click violin. And then I'm actually going to also unclick box plot right now. And what we have feels like a little set of drawing of ghosts or something. But you can see the distributions for the three different species. And it really feels like we're looking at a chart of animal shapes. There's nice little bat down here. But you can see this shows that it's a strongly compressed range because again, the outcome variable petal length goes vertically here. And then pedal with you can see again, we have a very unusual distribution for the satosis. Well, things are almost kind of sort of normal for the varice of color and the virginica. And so the violin plot not a very common choice, but potentially an interesting one. And it might be able to give you some extra insight into your data.


Made I'm really impressed by the high quality of life here in Australia So one thing very low rates of crime high rates of social cohesion high rates of social trust and then excellent public facilities so People don't want to invest in public infrastructure When you've got a very diverse population because people only want to invest Infrastructure for their own people for their own kind so with America's diversity Americans don't want to invest in social welfare programs for low achieving groups or use Disproportional amounts of say health care and You know all the form of social welfare, but because Australia is homogeneous and Australians willing to invest in social welfare So if you're unemployed you can get the doll in America You know unemployed blokes Unemployed men can't get the doll. There's no doll for men in in America so In Australia everyone gets health care everyone gets help Medicare health insurance So you don't have to worry about health insurance and catastrophic illness in Australia because that's covered by medicare Now on the other hand if you're old and you're sick, you know, they might encourage you to Know to give up and to stop Taking up Resources, but you can say no you can say hey, I like living now I want to do everything that I can so that I can Keep living So low rates of crime high rates of social trust high rates of cohesion. No worries about Catastrophic illness everyone gets Medicare Anyone can get the doll if they need it and There are lots of clubs. It's very clubby convivial high trust Society So there's not a lot of social tension racial tension. It's very low And it's the best place in the world to be an average bloke and People don't usually have to lock their cars or their homes Then they've taken extraordinary precautions because of worries about crime You don't worry about having health insurance and A lavish infrastructure spending really good public toilets and showers of the The beaches and No trash no litter just amazing How nice people are I haven't seen any trash or litter since I've been here so you may feel a bit out of it Being in Australia far away from the rest of the world But nice quiet tranquil place to live You know, what are you going to worry about in Australia? So it seems like the more boring the news the higher quality of life The better the quality of life the more boring the news so Don't forget the warnings here Gotta watch out for the crocodiles and the sharks the marine stingers but Side from that it's pretty beaut, right coming down here to the Tenem Sands Beach Great place to hang out and have a Barbie. Let's work on your laptop Got lifesavers here Everything you need Just humbled by the high quality of life here. It's like wow It's just beautiful


Okay. That's great. Father, we thank you, Lord, for your eternal word, Lord, for the wisdom that is packed in every single word, Lord, in the scriptures. Father, we acknowledge, Lord, that it is life-giving. We acknowledge, God, that it is, God, transforming, Lord, your word, completely changing, God, edifying us. So, Lord, we thank you for the wisdom. We thank you for the life-giving instructions. Lord, we thank you that your life is power. And as you have instructed, God, Lord, we thank you for these things that we need, Lord, to have in our lives, Master, that we would dwell with understanding, God, that we would know that there will be love and honor, and being tenderhearted, being courteous, not vengeful in any way, God. Father, God, we pray. I just pray especially for those who are married, and I just pray that this will be, Lord, found in our lives in each one of our hearts and lives, God, that this will be ours, Master, that even as we treasure your words, even as we love your word to Lord, Lord, take root in our hearts, Master. I pray that this will be our portion, and I just pray for those who are preparing for marriage that's ahead, and I pray, Father, God, that this will be something that will be, Lord, strongly built in, God, in the mind and in the heart. We just want to thank you. We give you all the praise and all the glory at this time. In Jesus' master's name, we pray. Amen, amen. Okay, let's get started. We, last class, we were looking at, you know, the whole aspect of communication, which is chapter six, right? Chapter six in our notes, communication and how communication being the building block of marriage being very important, and how you know, communication comes under attack, right? And when it breaks down, the marriage is not as strong as it should be. And a lot of problems creep in because of the breakdown of communication. We also saw what are the things that actually promote this breakdown and bring about this breakdown. And just a quick review of that, you know, what causes communication breakdown? Well, a major part of it is fear. Okay, fear that we will be judged, fear that we will be criticized, fear that what we say will be used against us in the future, will be made fun of, will be ridiculed. So fear and fear of being misunderstood if I say this, you know, it will not be understood the same way I say it. So again fear. And because of fear, maybe, maybe because of, you know, certain bad experiences, there is a suppression, right?   So basically, just living, excuse me, living a dual life. So what is actually communicated, what is actually said, what is emotive is something else. And the true feelings are actually kept suppressed. So when that happens over a period of time, you know, the first thing that comes under even during that, you know, very rapidly, the first thing that comes that becomes a problem is the whole issue of closeness. One doesn't feel close to the person. One feels very detached, distanced. And so because it's always the true feelings are not expressed, right? It's, it's it's only, you know, it's just something that is artificial, something that's very superficial, right? So we see all these outcomes, all these negative outcomes, which come in the relationship because of communication, right? The other things could be, you know, causing the breakdown of communication could be just disinterest, not interested in the other person, not interested in what they have to say, being not attentive and and constantly being preoccupied or thinking about something else, maybe thinking about work. These are legitimate things, you know, maybe work, maybe there are challenges. But if it's going to be, if you're going to make it a habit to constantly being preoccupied and and not really being able to have a heart to heart communication, heart to heart talk, then that's going to affect the marriage, right? So so we looked at some of the remedies and and how our words have power. Therefore, we need to use our words to bless. And that is in line with what we read just now. You know, it says that do not return evil for evil or reviling for reviling, right? So, so bless, even if there is some negative thing that is said, bless the other bless your spouse. And, you know, that that will bring about change, right? That will bring about change in our own attitudes, attitude and our own temperament, our mood shifts as we bless the other person, the intensity of, you know, anger or anything that we had against the person just goes down and disappears, right? Even as we choose to bless the other person. Okay, so today, we're going to look at another important aspect, but a very practical aspect, which is managing the home. Okay, managing the home, managing the place where we stay. And well, not just the physical place, but also what happens when when two people are married and living in the say under the same roof, there are a whole lot of things that need to be taken care of, right? There are things that those to be paid. There are things to be done in the house outside of the house to keep the household running, right? And maybe we would have given it thought when we were single, but definitely, you know, when you're married, even before you get married, it's better to to think about these things and also get some skills, learn some skills, get some skills on how what can I do to, you know, effectively manage the home, right? Let me share the screen. Yeah, so we're talking about managing the home. Okay, now, when we look at probes 24, and if you could turn there, probes 24, and then versus three and four, okay, probes 24, verse three, through wisdom, a house is built. And by knowledge, it is established. By knowledge, the rooms are filled with all pressures and pleasant riches. Verse six, four by wise counsel, you will wage your own war. And in the multitude of counselors, there is safety. Okay, so let's just read it in the good news version. Homes are built on the foundation of wisdom and understanding. Just one second, okay. Homes are built on the foundation of wisdom and understanding. And where there is knowledge, the rooms are furnished with valuable, beautiful things. Above all, verse six, above all, you must make careful plans before you fight a battle. And the more good advice you get, the more likely you are to win. Okay, so what we're going to look at today is some, some practical information. It is something that is commonly available. But maybe we don't really think about it. And maybe we don't discuss it. You know, maybe one doesn't discuss with his spouse. These things, you know, maybe you think that, okay, it's, it's, it ought to be, you know, the other person needs to have that understanding. But it's like many other things, you know, we cannot assume this. We cannot assume that it will just happen. We cannot assume that well, the other person will understand perfectly. No, it is good to talk about it. It is good to discuss it. Right. So one of the first things that, you know, is to, is to see is to talk about is after marriage, you know, is the couple going to be the husband and wife? I, you know, as husband and wife, are you going to be staying independently? You know, that's something that you need to agree on independently meaning.  So the Bible also talks about Genesis 224. And this is the reason for which a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, united to his wife. So there is a leaving that happens. You know, there is a separation that happens. And there is a leaving or a joining that happens. Right. So, so this is, we see that in scripture, and we see that, well, in many cultures, you know, this is, this is a normal thing. But, and it, it is really helpful because you're staying separately, you're staying on your own, and all the decisions, you know, about your life, about certain choices, things that everything that you need to do and make is, you know, both of you are there to decide about it. And also, you can focus on, on building your marriage, you know, there could be conflicts, there could be things that need to be resolved, there could be decisions, day to day decisions that need to be made. And just the two husband and the wife are involved in making those choices, making those decisions. So it is good to do that, to strengthen the marriage, to build, to work through certain things that need to be done and to learn certain skills as well. Now, that may not always be the case. Right. Starting a household and living separately as husband and wife, that may not always be ideally that is what, you know, what is recommended for at least in the early years of marriage, that is what is recommended. But that may not be the case.  Maybe, you know, one of them is no more passed away. Maybe the father is not there or mother is not there and they are alone and they are getting on in age elderly and they need to be taken care of.  So, well, they cannot stay on their own.  That could be the case. Or maybe there's another family member. Maybe it's not, maybe it's not just the father or the mother, but it could be a brother or a sister or someone who needs to stay for a, you know, for a, for a season. Maybe they're studying somewhere and they're, you know, in the city where you are and they, or maybe they're young and they need some help or, you know, it could be various things. So, this could be the scenario, right? So, in, but one needs to be prepared. The man and the woman, the husband and the wife, they need to be mentally prepared for such things, right? Which means that even before the wedding, even before, as part of the marriage preparation, even before the wedding, before it comes to that, it's good if both of them talk about these things, right? And say, okay, this is, this is how it is. This is a scenario. So, what do you think? Right? We need to do this. We need to take care of, you know, my parents or my father or my mother or this and so both talk about it and come to an understanding. And if there is a problem in coming to an agreement, then it is better at least for some time till they come to an agreement that something, some other, you know, some other thing is worked out, right? So, there could be problems, a lot of complications which could arise because of this, right? For example, you know, if the parents are staying on and if they begin to, you know, interfere in the decisions made by the husband and the wife, right? So, now the thing is that it all starts from heart of sincerity, right? You know, as parents, maybe they are very sincere and they don't want the children to, you know, make some poor choices or wrong choices, but they are so interfering, right? With every decision, okay, maybe you guys need to do this, you need to buy this, you should not buy this, you should not be spending like this or, you know, on a day to day thing, maybe you guys should eat this and not eat that and all those things, right?  This is how, this is what they should eat, this is what they should not eat, this is what they should wear and, you know, things like that. So, if this constant interference, right, from our constant pressure, parental pressure, then that's going to definitely influence and affect the marriage. It goes without saying, it cannot be, unless there is an understanding between the husband and the wife and a very strong commitment and agreement saying, hey, if this happens, right, then this is how we are going to respond honorably. This is how we're going to respond and this is how we're going to, you know, deal with it because, you know, we can't help it, that we need to take care, they need to stay with us or maybe it could be a situation where, you know, with the husband and the wife for a season for some time, they do not, they're not doing well financially, okay. Maybe one of them has a job and they're in a city where there's a high cost of living and, you know, they cannot afford to stay on their own and maybe pay the rents and all that. So, they're staying with either of their parents and, you know, housing and all that is taken care for a season, right, till they get a little better financially that the situation changes and then they're able to do well. Okay, so the thing is this to, yeah, otherwise it could also be because of relocation, right, maybe the husband has to go to a different place or a wife has to go to a different city or a town because of the job or there's a job transfer and just need to go there and set up things, set up house and then, and then move the family. So, so the thing is that time period, you know, till that time everything gets sorted, they need to stay, let's say, with the extended family or the immediate family. So, this needs to be discussed, okay. So, this needs to be discussed, this needs to be, and I agreed upon so that things are smooth because it will put pressure on the marriage. Okay, so the next thing is when it comes to daily schedules, when it comes to weekly schedules. So, what do we mean by that, you know, in today's, in today's work, in today's scenario, both the man and the wife, you know, the husband and the wife, they are liquidy working professionals, you know, they're working 95 and probably even longer hours, you know, just not, just not eight hours but maybe 10 hours, 12 hours, right, and maybe it's early part of their career, earlier on in their career. So, they're putting in a lot of work and a lot of work, you know, hours professionally. So, the thing is that they need to plan their time together, you know, like we were saying, you know, communication, you know, or takes time, it takes trust, it involves transparency, right. So, they need to be intentional and make time for one another. So, as husband and wife, if they are, you know, if they do not do that, then it's going to negatively impact. However, if they, you know, despite their busy schedules and daily schedules and weekly schedules, despite their busyness, if they actually allot some time and they get intentional about, about their communication, spending time with each other, then things will change. Like, I remember mentioning, right, there was a scenario where situation where the husband was working night shifts and the wife was working day shifts and, you know, it was virtually impossible for them to actually meet and spend time and talk to each other because one would be tired, the other would be ready to go to work, the other is coming back and, you know, this one's going to work. And so, it was very, very extremely difficult season for them. So, they had to, you know, manage that and come to a place saying that, maybe we need a change, you know, there's need, there needs to be a change in, you know, career and they realize that they need to be a change in, a change in the work, not in career, sorry, change in the work, environment, maybe look for another job, which allows a, you know, day kind of shift. So, they had to be done, okay, and they actually did that. So, things like that. So, sometimes it could even be, well, you know, it could be a scenario where, well, the husband is living elsewhere, different town, sometimes a different country and time just goes by, you know, months go by, years go by and they're just doing that basically to survive.  Now, that's a hard decision, you know, it's a hard decision, it's a difficult decision, it's a difficult choice, you know, and many homes do that. And, but the thing is, it comes at, it comes with a price, right, it comes with a price, because there are repercussions, okay, there are repercussions for the family, like the marriage, parenting, everything, you know, I've heard, like in my own family, you know, the people who did that and the children, you know, after they grew up, they, they felt very distanced, very disconnected from the father, the father was, and they just felt that the father was like a Santa Claus, you know, coming, you know, during vacation, giving them gifts, because he was feeling very guilty that he was away from the home, so he will bring some good stuff, but, but he was not there, you know, in the daily cause of life, right, so it had its repercussions. So the thing is, the family needs to, you know, needs to decide, these are, these are, there's no easy answers, so if it's for a season, you know, as a church and as a counseling ministry, what we normally recommend is, you know, three to six months, you know, if it's a relocation, if it is, you know, something that, that cannot be avoided, right, three to six months, and then we say work towards, and that, and that three to six months also work towards moving the family, so that the family can stay together and, and, and then basically do life together, okay. So it's a very important decision, and while the, the cultural thing, culturally it might be okay. I say, hey, that's, that's a done thing. Well, the father, you know, stays somewhere, and, and maybe the wife is somewhere, and working, making money to keep things going, it's, it's a done thing, culturally that's a norm, it's a done thing, it's okay. You know, everyone is doing that, while that, that could be the norm, but then, you know, as a, as a family, you know, as a husband and wife, you need to decide, you know, is that risk worth taking? Because there is a price to be paid. You know, there is the emotional distance that creeps in, there are other problems when the parenting that happen. So it is not, it is not a price that you need to pay for the sake of keeping things going. Okay. So, so that requires some thinking, some discussion, praying, asking for God's leading wisdom and intervention at times, saying, God, we need your favor. We cannot go on like this. We need a, we need your favor. And so that, you know, we can, as a family, we can stay together and, you know, and, and yeah, move on. Okay. So, well, so daily things, weekly things, schedules and everything, talk about it, okay, what are our work timings, how do we adjust this, how do we things, you know, that, and with that, to say that there are a lot of things which happen in the household, right? There's cooking to be done, people to be fed, there's cleaning, there's cleaning of the house, cleaning of clothes, laundry, bills to be paid, shopping, etc. So, so the thing is this, you know, in a busy world, in a busy working environment, whether it's ministry or that it's, you know, otherwise, where both husband and wife, they are busy, you know, that's one scenario, right, where both are working professionals, they are, they are morning till night, they are busy, they are working, and they come back. And well, it is in a traditional setting, you know, in a cultural thing, it could be that the wife takes care of the cooking and the things in the household, and now that cannot happen, like in this situation, where both are working, both are working professionals, both are spending time, equal time, or sometimes more than someone is spending more time than the other outside in the workplace. So, when they come back home, well, the man of the house cannot expect the lady of the house to take care of the household chores and everything. So, it's, it's a partnership, right, so both have to take on that load equally and say, okay, I'll do this and you do that, right, this comes, this is where your strengths are, so you do this, and then, you know, you take care of the cooking, I'll take care of the cleaning, or you take care of this, I'll take care of that. So, there needs to be a plan, there needs to be understanding. So, well, the family might say, or the culturally might say, what is this, the man is cooking the house, you know, how's that even power, why should, why should the man do that? You know, maybe there are just some jokes at family gatherings, oh, he does all the cooking, and he's, you know, she's the boss of the house and all that because of the, you know, responsibilities they shoulder at the home, but not a problem, you know, because it's, it is this situation, where both are working professionally and spending time at the workplace, and they need to equally carry the load, even otherwise, you know, even otherwise, to be a partnership, to be a team, to take care of things in the home, when there are children, there are additional responsibilities, caring for children, maybe there are, you know, caring for some, some other members of the family, all those things, right? So, working together as a team, and making sure that the responsibilities are carried out, if there is an understanding, you know, then things are smooth.  Like, for example, in our home, you know, I, I'm very bad at cooking, or you know, my cooking skills are very negligible. So it, what I can clean, right, I can, I can wash, I can clean. So very early on, said, okay, this is how it is, you know, you do the cooking, I'll do the cleaning. I can take care of that.  And I'm fine. I'm okay with that, right? I'm okay with putting away stuff after the meal, my energy levels are fine. I can, I can, I'm okay with that. So we just came to a, you know, early on, an understanding very early on in life, saying, okay, I'm fine, I can put away, I have the strength, I can, I can wash, I can clean, I can do that. But, you know, kitchen is very unfamiliar territory for me. Otherwise, cooking is unfamiliar territory. So it's best that you handle it. So, so that's working perfectly for us for some, maybe it's something, someone, something else, right? Like I have a relative who's a chef. So he's, he's very good. You know, he's cooking and everything. And, and the wife doesn't cook, but she does all the other things, organizing stuff.  And he's very good at it. Everybody enjoys the cooking. Everybody enjoys the meal. So it's very creative and makes things interesting. Wow, works. Right. So things like that. So it might go against the tradition or popular culture, but it's fine.  Okay. Okay. Another thing that we can oops, okay. Okay, when it comes to, you know, especially when it comes to, you know, the times we live in, there are a lot of things, you know, I remember, there was a time when we didn't have, you know, there was growing up, we didn't have a television. And then the television came in. And, and virtually conversation around the dinner table during mealtime just came to zero. Okay, when, where we used to, I'm talking about my school days growing up and where we used to talk about, okay, what happened during the day and how's everyone's day? All that came to nothing because we were just so glued on to the screen and then just eating, we don't even care what we're eating, we just, you know, so it became like that. And then so, so when we got married, we decided that we won't have a, you know, a TV at home, right? And then definitely, we will not have, you know, anything on during a mealtime. So at our home, the rule is no phones at the table, you know, and no, of course, we don't know programs, but we do have, you know, a television screen, but no cable, but we do have internet broadband. So we pick and choose what we want to watch and we watch. So very rarely, like if there is maybe there's a, you know, a tennis match or a cricket match or something like that happening. And then, and then we have a meal around that. But otherwise, we'd like to talk, you know, during a, during a mealtime, just catch up with each other and what, how the day was because dinner's the only meal we have together, because otherwise, you know, breakfast, we just brushing and, you know, college and work and everything. So, so the family also needs to have some kind of agreement or understanding about screen time, right? Whether it's phone, whether it's television, whether it's social media, have some kind of a thing saying that, okay, you know, because sometimes, especially during this pandemic and everything, the lines blur, right? You're working from home and still there could be people working from home. So there is no work time and the home time. People finish work. There are some late night calls to be made. So everything blur. So you just continue to work, continue to work.  So there needs to be some set time. Yeah, there are emergencies. There are some specialized, you know, things that happen. And that comes with the understanding saying, okay, there is a call. You need to take, there is a meeting. And it could be outside of work hours. And but, you know, it is with the understanding that, you know, we'll do this and that you take on only that so much so that it doesn't interfere with what's happening with the family.  It could be taken later, or it would be answered later. But then you need to have that understanding. Okay. And talk about that, right? Because it's very important. Because if that understanding is not there, then these become a constant irritation, constant source of frustration even for other family members. So they would say like, okay, you know, the father was always doing that, the wife was always doing that. Why can't they take the call later? So it becomes a point of contention, right? So that is also something that needs to be clarified. Okay. Before we go further, okay, let's look at family recreation also. The other thing is also to plan for time together. Okay. Like we said, plan for time together to intentionally talk to one another, plan for recreation. Now, what happens is some, in, in, in most, I would say ministry homes, right? If it's a pastor home or, you know, somebody who's in ministry. Now, there's recreation taking time off to spend time with one another or a vacation. Sometimes it's considered as a taboo in the sense that it's you know, you should be ministering. You should be taking care of people. It's, you know, almost feel guilty for doing that, right?  It's almost, it's like, it's like considered a taboo, whereas it is not. God is the one who instituted family. God is the one who designed family and for the family to thrive and function well, well, you need to spend time, right? So there's nothing wrong.  Absolutely nothing wrong, right? So family recreation, maybe family vacation. Okay, so, well, each family does things differently for, and for each individual, you know, there are different things that really work. You know, some people like to maybe eat out for them. That's fun and a certain kind of food that's fun. I mean, that they like, there are certain things that they like doing. Some people want to go maybe just window shopping, you know, go to a mall. Maybe they want to visit others, right? That makes them happy. They enjoy doing it. And for some people, it's like, I don't want to go out at all. I just want to stay at home, maybe do some gardening and do the, you know, for some people, it's like that. So whatever works, you know, for the family, for the family member. And, well, there could be a case where, you know, one person is very, you know, outdoor. They just enjoy time outdoors but the other person is basically, they just want to be indoors. So then you have a, you have a problem there. You have a challenge there, right? So, so there's needs to be given take saying, okay, let's, let's spend some time outdoors. Let's do this. And maybe the other person who's not a very outdoors person can actually learn something. Enjoy it as well. And well, the other times you could be indoors, you could think of things. So there is, there is some amount of sacrifices, some amount of given take and that, right? Knowing fully well that the other person enjoys it and you want to be able to provide, you know, facilitate that enjoyment, facilitate that time together. So, so that is, that is really good. So it could be shopping, it could be going to a park, it could be some outdoor activities. And what are some things that new things that you want to look at, you know, new activities that you want to explore together, you know, do, do this together. I remember once we, it was very, very, very early on in Bangalore and when our daughter was, I think she was probably, I don't know, eight, eight years, nine years old and maybe younger. Then we went to this mall and then there was this house of horror, you know, you, all these scary things inside and then we all said, hey, let's go, let's, we've never been to one. So we said, let's go, let's go. And then we went and, oh, wow, it was, it was, for me, it was funny because these things keep popping and then, but then both of them, my wife and daughter were terrified.  So both of them throughout that time, it is a short time, you know, it's a short walk entrance to exit somewhere.   Let's not do it again. And, but, but that's a memorable moment. I, we still talk about it, we laugh about it after all those years, maybe, I don't know, maybe 10 years back, or maybe even, you know, more, but we still laugh about that. It was memorable, but not really enjoyable. So, yeah, so, you know, you, the thing is to plan. Now, some, some of us have not been very good at this, you know, planning ahead and saying, okay, on these dates, or in, on, in this month, right, when, when, well, the schools close or, you know, you can, it's a, it's a lean month when you can take time of work, whatever, right. So, planning that and saying, okay, these three days, or these four days, or maybe if possible, this one week, you know, we will take off, take time off and spend time together as a family, maybe visit, go someplace, you know, to plan that in advance, okay. So, what I've noticed is that if you don't plan, it doesn't happen, right. If you don't plan and set aside that time, well, even if we plan, you know, sometimes there could be contingencies, you know, there could be certain things that come up because of which we are not able to, you know, do that, but at least you plan ahead and you set aside some time and if not for those contingencies, you would have gone ahead and, you know, with that plan and you would have had a vacation or some time together. So, it's good to, you know, think ahead, look at the calendar, maybe a year ahead, maybe for, you know, 2023, maybe now is a good time to look at it and say, okay, set aside that time, right, as a family for a vacation, for some time together, plan ahead. Otherwise, well, certain things happen at very short notice. There's maybe a, you know, a day off or, you know, something like that and you can take a day off and do things, but if it's extended time, right, it needs planning because you cannot, if you're working in ministry, you know, you cannot just take time off randomly. It needs to be planned because there are certain responsibilities, certain things that you are meant to do and if you're not there, you need to make some arrangement for that to be done because things have to continue, right? If you're not there, then who can do that? So, all those kind of things you have to, so that needs time. That requires some adjustment at work or ministry. So, plan ahead, okay, and be intentional about that. So, these also, these times also help bond together, help the family to bond together, help the members of the family, the husband and wife to bond together. Well, it's not, it's at these times there could be some conflicts as well, okay, there could be some misunderstandings also, you know, there could be certain difficult topics that come up also that need to be addressed. So, we will look at that, you know, we will look at conflict resolution, but the thing is, you know, to actually plan ahead for these times, plan ahead for these moments, right? Okay, so, any questions, let's pause for a bit. Any questions? I know it was kind of a practical thing that we looked at, not much of chapter and verse, right? So, any, any practical, anything, anything that you might want to share also, like what worked for you in your family, in your marriage, like some things like, you know, what we decided, right, that I will clean and I'll wash and put away things, something like that, what works for you, what worked for you, or any questions, or maybe in different cultures, maybe there are certain other things that you want to, maybe there are certain other challenges, maybe you could, you know, ask those questions also, anything at all, right? Doing dishes is certainly helpful, yes. Yeah, doing dishes at a time when, you know, the spouse's energy level is low and this, it certainly, you know, helps. Another thing is laundry, and if you have a washing machine, you know, putting clothes into the washing machine is definitely, I mean, the easiest thing to do. The other thing is to, you know, take it and if it doesn't have a drying function, you know, take it out, put it in the clothes line, drying it, yeah, those kinds of things, you know, these are, I mean, these are simple everyday things, but seem very magnified and like, you know, when two people are living together, right, husband and wife, yeah. Anything else? Okay, we'll take a break and then we'll come back and if there are any questions, we can address them, right? We'll take a break right now. Thank you.


everybody. This is Mark Coleman, your co-host today on Talking Tax here on Think Tech Hawaii, your favorite community affairs program. We cover all the world as well apparently. Anyway, my co-host today as usual is Tom Yamachika. He's really the main man here as usual on this show. He's the president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii and that's why we call it the Talking Tax Show. He's the expert on that subject. He's a private practice but he's also head of the Foundation which keeps track of all the tax goings on at the legislature and the county councils. Today we're going to talk about a tax issue, not a law, not a proposed law or anything like that. We're going to talk about the process of amending your return if so requested by a tax agent and it's the basis of the show today as a column he wrote recently called amended return equals guilty plea and that sounds kind of ominous. So Tom why don't you explain that a little bit? Good morning everybody and morning Mark and thanks for that wonderful introduction. Today instead of talking about what our legislature is doing, we're talking pretty much about the nuts and bolts of what happens in daily life if you are audited and there are a lot of people getting audited out there. We hear about this every once in a while and the point of today's show is to get people understanding you know some of the tactics that auditors use and what the ramifications are for you as a taxpayer. You have rights and we don't want you to lose them unwittingly. Now the technique we're talking about today is called please amend your return and the way that works is you get into a tax audit. You are unfortunately one of the people who are picked for a tax audit you know a certain percentage of people get picked for a tax audit every year and you're with the tax auditor and the tax auditor asks you for documents you give it to give the documents to them just like a regular upsetting citizen and the auditor then says okay I found something I found this portion of income which you haven't reported will you please amend your return to include that item of income okay and for those of us who represent people who are being audited it's kind of an unusual request because typically what happens if an auditor finds something is the auditor can write it up on their side and issue what's called an assessment. First you get a proposed assessment you get 30 days to confer with the department and then if conferring with the department doesn't produce agreement you get what's called a final assessment but here the auditor is offering you a means to short circuit all of that by saying please amend your return and the question then becomes what happens if you do that um and again this is just uh an information show so oh we need you as taxpayers to know what's going on and what's going on is if you amend your return uh the change is coming from you not from them and that means you lose your appeal rights now um when an auditor and you don't agree on a particular issue the auditor has the right to write you up and assess additional tax and if you don't agree uh with that additional tax then you have appeal avenues uh in within the department you can go to the administrative appeals office that's what it's for within um you know quasi within the department there is something called the board of review and and those are three people that are uh on the department's payroll but aren't aren't technically part of it that act as a essentially administrative hearing officers they'll you know they uh can hear your case and render a decision but they are not part of the department's chain of command so they have some independence in that regard and uh the of course the other thing you can do is appeal to uh court there's a special court called the tax appeal court that you can go to and that court hears uh disputes like um not only disputes over interpretation of the tax laws but also if there are say constitutional challenges if the tax isn't constitutional then the court has the power to adjudicate that type of challenge and you appeal from the tax court if you go that far can you go to a regular court at that point uh well the tax court is a regular court oh it is it's considered yeah it's considered it's it's uh basically in the circuit court building and it's like any other circuit court it says it just have a different title but if you had a ruling that you didn't like there you could appeal it even higher you could go up yeah uh you could go to the immediate court of appeals or the supreme court of Hawaii okay like any other court judgment oh she um there there are you know a little uh you know some quirks in the appeal process that uh you need to be aware of if you're gonna do that but but basically it's the same as appealing from a regular circuit court judgment now um all of that of course is going to be denied to you if you amend the return yourself because again that change is considered to come from you and not from the department and uh and there's a law that says you can't appeal uh from your own return well is that is that kind of like a fifth amendment issue i mean is that like testifying against yourself of course a tax return in itself is a fifth amendment issue at the at the core really testifying against yourself but is that kind of what you think about that um well not really i mean uh tax returns are required by law and um you know courts all over the country have considered you know whether taxes are legal and they are so uh well i was i was reading that perhaps uh that at least at the federal level that you do not have a duty to amend your return if if something comes up you don't have to amend it um what would happen then if you didn't amend it well like i said the agent has the right to assess you so if the agent thinks you owe more tax than what you've put on your return uh your agent can rate up an assessment and that's what you're going to feel from so do you think that they are that when you are unlucky first of all do you think how many people do get audited every year and why on average do you know i don't know but i think the national statistics are like around five percent okay and and locally if so if you did get audited and and they now if they're pulling this tactic on you um are they just are they being malicious are they or are they just trying to be efficient you might say trying to minimize time and and money that that an appeal might involve are they just trying to wipe away this right that you have for their own convenience or or are they assuming that you're a bad person and they want to get you get you or what uh i think it's more um it's easier for them if you don't appeal you think that's part of a policy like they have their meetings and they say all right now go ahead and use a tactic as much as you can it'll save us a lot of money in time i i think it is i mean i i've seen lots of auditors from different places use it all it's all over the state uh it's not confined to any one particular place uh it happens all over so um i think it's some kind of established policy somewhere well but i just uh you know that's just my speculation i mean they're really there may in fact be uh you know written documentation for this but um they haven't made that public well has has there ever been any uh court cases challenging this notion this tactic or have you ever thought about challenging that tactic have you ever been in the one it's it's it's very easy to undo you see if you've amended your return and uh and and you think about it for a while and say oh darn this is not what i wanted to do uh as long as you're within the statute of limitations you could amend your return again and that's 30 days no no no it's like three years from oh the uh uh date of your uh you your annual return i see have you ever been in a situation like this yourself with the client well yeah no i mean i've i've um well you're familiar with it probably not yeah yeah yeah so uh i and and my um recommendation to them is amend your return again uh like i said if it's within the statute of limitations you can do that and uh if your amendment is denied you know because your your amendment is like created refund claim because presumably you paid more tax when you filed your amended return so if you amend again to to get it back to your original number there's going to be a refund that's that's being claimed by you and the department can all always say you know claims denied but if they do that you can appeal from that so what would you say so your repeal rates come back well that's great news uh i'm sure everybody'd be happy to hear about that but what would be the basis for an appeal if you were able to if that came to be well it's it of course we're assuming that uh the the issues that the auditor found is not something you agree with so that's why you would appeal uh so like for example you would challenge the assessment well there there would be no assessment if you amend the return there is no assessment but at the so you see you amend the return once there's no assessment you may amend the return again you have a refund claim and then and then um when they deny the refund claim that essentially becomes your assessment well in your article weren't you saying that um they come with you and they say they found some income that you failed to report and so could you please amend your document and that would increase your assessment wouldn't it and and and and i don't know why you would necessarily be talking about a refund help me out here and maybe i'm not getting it okay so so let's say so let's say you file a general excise tax return and uh you report a hundred dollars of income and you pay you're 450 of tax auditor comes up and says hey um you uh got this grant for 50 dollars you didn't report it and the grant's taxable income but you don't you don't think the grant's taxable income but you amend the return and you pay another uh two dollars and 25 cents right with penalties and interest presumably okay um now if you if you then listen to this show and and say well look um i have a case that my grant is not taxable then what you do is you amend your return again to go back to your hundred dollars and then you say okay uh so um my my actual amount due is on uh is four dollars and 50 cents i paid 675 so i want my two dollars and 25 cents back plus the penalties and interest that's your refund claim i see oh uh huh so does this does this tactic apply mostly to GET or or or to personal income tax corporate income tax whatever well it applies to anything i see it mostly used on GET because um uh GET is basically our department of taxation spread and butter it's our state's bread and butter it's also probably where most of the income is sort of a voluntary disclosure right uh GET and at least a lot of deductions and maybe cash payments and things like that well um one thing you got to remember about GET um it doesn't have deductions pretty much oh but oh so oh so that's right yeah yeah so that's why uh it's it's our state's bread and butter all you gotta do is deal with the income and um there are no deductions to prove up so at what point does do they come at you with something like a fraud claim and they're really mad about it oh they can they can do that for example if um you charge your customers g tax put it under bill and you don't pay anything but uh huh uh huh okay wow yeah then then they they consider that you've defrauded your customers um had to get very very mad about that no well what how would they okay so is this a normal court procedure in normal courts um where it is you somehow can how do you look i'm i'm trying to and now analogize this to a regular court where somehow you could end up losing your right to appeal like if you plead guilty which is what you're saying here if you amend your return you're you're basically pleading guilty and yeah and that's that's it's kind of the tax world's equivalent of pleading guilty yeah because if you plead guilty in in regular court um then consequences then come right and and does that mean you can't appeal in a regular court down the road i mean say hey i you know i changed my mind i i don't feel like i was guilty after all you know or whatever well i i think you know there's a means for you to change your plea but um um but i think once you uh you know you're up there in the hot seat and the judge is asking what's your plea what's your plea man and you say guilty uh the judge propels the sentence it's kind of tough to change after that yeah yeah yeah well i guess if you're in prison maybe you'd have time to put together some sort of a of a hey can we reconsider the sentence i suppose right but maybe you're always speak still be guilty well you would you would have to withdraw your guilty plea first and and in the tax world the event the equivalent equivalent of that is amending your return again and and and like i said there um there are limits on it like for example if the statute of limitations has passed uh you can't uh that that's not available to you i see well so that has this ever is this a thing that deserves some legislative attention perhaps well the the the same statute uh that says you can't you can't appeal from your own return it's it's been on the book since the 1930s i believe so it's so we've had it for a hundred years and i don't think uh well let's say it's going to be changing at any time soon well do you think there's abuse of it you think this is an abuse is really the question well uh i think in a way because the the auditors know what amending a tax return means in order in order in order in in in terms of you know leaving appeal rights taxpayers don't have as much information because they've not gone through an audit before at least most in most cases so uh they're at an information disadvantage and uh that's why you know if you are being audited you know you should consider being represented by a professional because um it's much less likely that an auditor would be able to snow a professional yes do you think this is something less professionals uh in Hawaii are familiar with i believe the either they are or they should be it what do you know about how many of all the hawaii taxpayers that there are um do you have any idea of how many are represented by tax accountants tax professionals i i don't know you think these cases are mostly filed against people that don't have tax accountants or the or that this tactic is applied mostly against you know innocent people so to speak people who have no clue um well audits come up against people who have um no representative and people who do uh not everybody has a professional prepare their return uh for the ones who do have a professional prepare their return then uh it's very it's a very natural thing for the taxpayer to call in that professional um but for the one who uh hasn't had a uh a professional from the beginning uh there's you know the the new step that they got to go through namely you know looking through different professionals finding someone who uh meets their needs and then you know going forward with that what do you think about i know you're a tax accountant yourself or a tax attorney maybe maybe you would have a biased opinion on this but what do you think about people filing their own taxes without without representation so to speak that go between someone who can apprise them of all the of all the you know the latest updates in in the irs and state for tax law and uh who you know would be aware of tactics that might trip you up or and that of course would also be there to represent you if there's any problems how do you think that compares with you know turbo tax and all these other programs are what people seem to think is really just fine maybe it's a matter of how complicated your taxes are but is there a point at which you really ought to have a tax accountant in your opinion well you know i i think i think you hit it on the head there depends on how how complicated your return situation is uh the the more complicated it is the more uh you would need i think a professional um to make sure that uh that nothing is going wrong but you know professionals do have a cost right so you have to engage a cost benefit analysis to um right you know just to see if it's worth it for you right yeah i guess most people that i know that rave about the tax programs that you can buy the software usually are saying yeah but my taxes are so simple you know and um well let me and and and you gotta realize that you know for GET it's not something for which their software in the market oh yeah the the turbo taxes and so where there's all income tax uh huh that's right so it's a good help for income tax but for uh for GET um people are normally on their own i mean this this also applies to um a professional representation of you know large businesses um when i was at pwc uh right one of those yeah and representing businesses of all kinds most businesses only used accountants to prepare their income tax returns for for sales tax compliance um and not only in hawaii but in other states that the business would usually you know do their own thing or or they would um or if they were really big with with presence in like you know 30 40 states they would they would go to a multi-state software company like vertex um and and get helped that way but but if you're in like one or two states um most businesses just do it themselves that's been my experience so so in this in these cases where the irs or the excuse me the state got guy might call you and say i've noticed that you should be i'm suggesting that your menu return i found some things that you ought to take a look at now that's because he's looking at your tax return that you already submitted and and he's he's challenging something that's already there he's not saying i found some additional income that you didn't report it could be could be one of the one or both yeah and how would he know about additional income that you didn't report well a lot um one one key thing that they do is they compare different types of tax returns that you submit every state does that okay so you submit an income tax return you submit your g e t return if the bases are different okay uh then they're gonna they're gonna ask you how come yeah oh well based on your own return or based on an average of other people who do a similar thing no base based on your own returns do you file an income tax return you file a g e t return they say look in in uh online 17 of the income tax return you admitted to having a hundred thousand dollars of income in hawaii but you but you really reported 80 thousand you know where's the 20 man uh huh uh huh okay so then the other way is that they challenge something that you might have listed but you didn't consider it taxable yeah that's that's quite possible too are there any other other other ways people can be tripped up that way um i think probably thousands right probably thousands yeah well this is a a favored tactic apparently or at least a tactic that do t people apparently use but is this something that do you think they do at the federal level you know whether they do this at the federal level i don't know what they do is at the federal level do you focus mostly just on state taxes or when you're you would you do that's your yes that's my thing state of state of hawaii taxes right right how much does your private practice inform your thinking about what goes on at the legislature well um you know i i do both so i mean like like anybody else in hawaii i got two jobs so uh you know you need you need more more than one job to feed your family usually so yeah yeah yeah we live in hawaii second highest tax burden in the country and highest cost of living uh uh number one so it's a a lot of fun to live here in hawaii if you can do it um tom thank you very much for explaining all of this in great detail um you know that the tax system is something we all dread dealing with uh every year you you're involved with it all year uh i i have a tax accountant and i'm always super impressed uh at how anybody keep up with all of that all the changes every year at the legislature and so on but anyway their job much pardon me it's their job yeah well yeah okay and right and they have an act for it and so hopefully they hits their passion but thank you very much tom any last words yeah um today was just an educational experience and be better and more indicated taxpayers right on good deal tom thank you so much and thank you all for watching today hope you enjoyed the show hope you learned something hope you uh stay out of trouble take care and we'll see you next time i love you