I don't actually know of us the largest shirt grant, but everybody keeps telling me it is, so I'll just go with the press people and we'll work it out that way. What it has done, though, is the Government of Canada, basically, has finally recognized that my studying the Lord of the Rings for an entire career is a good thing. And how can you argue with that sort of thing? So I've been working with Tolkien stuff and teaching Tolkien for my entire, it's literally my entire career, ever since 1985, Brad, when he started on with me. And one of the things that, of course, became really interesting for me was the period of time between 2001 and 2003 during the release of Peter Jackson's three films, because suddenly I became way more interesting to people than I had been before. And people started asking me questions about things which just meant I went back, read the book several times, which I've done since then anyway, and had a couple of really, really good experiences in the classroom looking at the adaptation, my favorite of which, and it's just an anecdote I love to tell, is one class where we decided to end it on a Sunday by going to our library and watching all three extended versions of the movies together. First of all, by the end of it, I hated Elijah Wood. Every time he appeared on screen, I just started giggling and breaking up laughing. But the funniest part of that story for me was that, like hobbits, the people in the class decided to bring a lot of food. First of all, it's not allowed in that room, but that's okay. And what we brought, good stuff, fruits, vegetables, all kinds of things you should be able to eat, which is fine, but we had tables full of it. And after 11 and a half hours of viewing a movie, I didn't ever want to see a piece of fruit again for a while. So that's when I decided to eat nothing, but carbs and junk. And it's worked out well for me, but I want to talk about the movement from this, which is, as far as I can tell, the covers, slip covers of the very first editions of The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954 through 56, to this, which are the slip covers of the extended, first extended versions, not the Blu-ray versions, of Peter Jackson's film, made sort of interestingly to look like book covers and show us again why he was very, very concerned with fidelity in the adaptation of these books to this, which was the cover of the first of a series of games, a multiplayer online game called The Lord of the Rings Online. It's now had, I think it's five modules, I'll go through them in a minute. But it is, oh, I shouldn't have said it's not, let me go back a little bit. It's from this to this and to this, because I will emphasize that the game has licensed the books, not the film. Actually, it seems when you're playing it, like it's licensed the film, but that's a whole other thing. It's actually only done that. So we have, it's gone from the books to the film and to the game, I'm gonna show how some of those things work together, I hope. What you're gonna see in the background, because I kind of make boring slides, there's all point form stuff, so I figured you'd need pictures of the back before the actual slide appears, and that's what this is gonna be a lot of. I was also trying for the most garish presentation. So at the end, you'll have to decide if that actually worked out. There's a couple of book covers, obviously. Questions that I wanna talk about are the standard questions in adaptation studies. What is the source? What is being adapted? What is the adaptation? The problems with fidelity studies, and I will tell you right off the bat, if you get involved with adaptation studies, the first thing you're going to read about are the problems with fidelity studies. So we'll spend a fair bit of time on that. That just looks good. I'm gonna be talking about The Lord of the Rings Online and Expansion, depictions of Middle Earth, fidelity in the game, and in a nod, my only nod to what this conference is actually about, genre expectations in the game, audience. All right, so these are screenshots from The Lord of the Rings Online. You see the nice pastoral hobbit-like setting, the Shire, which, by the way, I think actually draws a lot more from the Peter Jackson films than it does from the books themselves. That's one of the areas where the licensing obviously didn't matter to the people who put it together. The question of the source from Brent Westbook. The absolute given of all adaptation studies is comparison. No one writing about a film adaptation as an adaptation writes about only the movie or about only the novel or the short story, the television show, et cetera. The first thing to keep in mind is when you're in adaptation studies, you're always comparing. And you're comparing what's been adapted to where it came from. And this causes all kinds of issues in adaptation studies itself. But the other thing this quote does for us is to show us that the bulk of adaptation work so far has been the move from novel to film. Almost all of it. There's certainly some, particularly in Shakespeare studies, from play to film and only recently have people started talking about other kinds of adaptation. And this includes things like Linda Hutchin talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which is an adaptation of all things, a ride. And it's not really an adaptation of the ride because nothing that happens on the Pirates of the Caribbean movie happens on the ride. If anybody on the ride, they've been on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride? Yeah, it's not a lot like the movie. You know, I didn't get a lot. But that's what happens in the case of the source. So we do look at the source extensively and I will do that today. And then I'm gonna find out later on that I don't know if it matters. We'll see. All right, so what's the source? Obviously, because you're all sitting there, what's the problem here? The source is the Lord of the Rings, the novels, okay? Except that there's all kinds of other source studies that goes into Tolkien scholarship. I wanted to spend with this kind of thing. A set of critical essays on Tolkien and the study of his sources. Source scholarship does not generally come across well in the literature. In fact, source scholars keep criticizing source scholarship. But this is the stuff that comes, you know, which myths he was working with, which legends, which books he read when he was young, according to his letters, all those sorts of things. This is the same kind of thing. We got a collection of what's called sources of inspiration, which is even more directly related to Tolkien's own life. Of course, Tolkien laid his life rather bare in his collection of letters, which is very readable. And for me, it's a great set of letters because most of the time I identify with this man, most of the letters he wrote from about 1944 onwards were apologizing to his editors that he was late. To me, that just rang true, right? And I said, I can be great too, because I've done that innumerable, innumerable times. Of course, it does read the problem of, if you want to talk about genre studies, have we lost that forever? The collection of letters?  Yo! Yep, I agree, you know, that kind of thing. I'm not sure. Possibly. This is Brie. Oh, that's me, by the way. Can you see it standing in the middle? I think it's a likeness. All right, let's go straight to these. These are the ones we always think of. The Lord of the Rings, published between 54 and 55, late 55. Oh, that was 56, anyway. And then the Lord of the Rings, second edition in 1965. Oops, we already have a problem. What happened in the second edition? The reason for the second edition of The Lord of the Rings was not Tolkien's intense desire to correct anything. It was the desire from Tolkien and his publishers to avoid the pirate copies that had been released in the United States. And so what he does change a number of things, not a lot, in order to have people by the real versions. Right? Of course, this causes the problem with what the source is because some things were in fact changed. And by the way, it's not even as bad as what was changed from The Hobbit. As if you're familiar with The Hobbit's textual history at all, there's a crucial moment in The Hobbit which informs The Lord of the Rings directly where Bilbo finds the ring and has the riddle contest with Gollum. If you've seen the recent movie, you will have seen that in person. Real footage of what happened. And, but what happened was Tolkien never liked the original version. So in order, once he realized he was going to write The Lord of the Rings, in order to make the thing work, he had to change the original version of that story. So already in a problem with textual history. And if that weren't enough of a problem, Tolkien didn't write just these things. He wrote The Hobbit. And by the way, the bold highlighted ones are simply the, generally speaking, the most important ones. The things, the ones that people know about or refer to often or can find all of that. All of these other texts were, in fact, related to his world of Middle Earth, every single one. And they're summarized in a number of different areas. You can find different versions of them. And then we have Christopher Tolkien, who is JRR's son, who is probably the most negative person you could imagine about people paying attention to his father's work. What he did do, however, is publish a lot of the stuff posthumously. I can't even imagine his father liking that, but you know, whatever. The first one was The Silmarillion, which is not licensed by Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson has the license only to, well, he now is The Hobbit. But at the time of the movie, The Lord of the Rings, he had The Lord of the Rings texts themselves only. And that included all the stuff, all the appendices at the end from which he drew. But a lot of the appendices originated in the Silmarillion cycle. So there's textual problems there as well.  And if you're not finished reading Tolkien stuff and his work on Middle Earth, there's this little collection. None of these are short, by the way. And these go through, this is Christopher Tolkien, going through the text, explaining things. They're mostly scholarly, in the sense of explaining the sources, up to the peoples of Middle Earth. And in the middle of that, Christopher Tolkien published these four volumes, which is a history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. And this matters for a number of reasons. First of all, if you ever teach a course in composition where it's about and all about creative writing, use these, because it outlines an enormous, great, exacting, sometimes stunningly dull detail, how the writing changed from the very first days until the time it was published. The very first volume is especially interesting, because what's clear from the beginning is that Tolkien had no idea where the story was going. None. He started writing before he knew it was going to happen, and it becomes good. And there's some really fascinating insights as to when the story actually changed. Of course, what this does, if you're an adaptation scholar, is do what adaptations themselves do, is that once you've watched the film, The Lord of the Rings, it's probably impossible to go back and read the books, if you had read them before, and remember what you thought the characters looked like, what you thought they sounded like, what you thought the interactions were, but especially the looks of them. Well, this makes it even worse, because Aragorn, the mighty future king of Gondor, started off in The Return of the Shadow as a hobbit who wore wooden shoes, because he'd been tortured. Well, I can't go back and read about Aragorn and the mighty without seeing this relatively ridiculous sort of idea. And this happens throughout, right? You just mystified with how this happened. You also become mystified at how he ever decided what their names were going to be, because until the final copy that was created, very close to when it was, Frodo was known as Bingo, a rather unfortunate choice of names, and Aragorn was known as Trotter, not Strider. And Trotter and Bingo together do not have the same connotations to me at Frodo. But anyway, and it goes all the way through to the very end, when you actually see Tolkien becoming more sure of what he was doing, but there are changes and changes all the way through. What this also does, and we'll get into a little bit later about what Christopher Tolkien was actually doing with these things, and in some cases what he was looking at is the original pages and in effect trying to read underneath the pencil or the pen markings. So the whole idea of the palimpsest comes into play here as well. All right, there's the fellowship. You get to meet them several times in this game. I'm gonna talk about that in a minute too. Well, we can end up with the film adaptations. You know about these. And of course, the question is, what's the source that Jackson used? And we know he used the novels. We know he used the appendices at the end of the novels was just plain thing. We know he used the prologue and the introduction. And we also know that he dipped into the material that he had a license for. And he's mentioned it several times. He lays it all out, of course, in a series of appendices of his own because knowing that Tolkien people apparently read appendices, he decides to create extended versions which have extensive interviews, extensive documentaries about how the thing was put together, extensive justifications for what they did in order to satisfy the people like me who went in expecting a faithful release, if you will. And we get the fidelity in a bet. But there's also the theatrical releases versus the extended editions. And those of you who've picked up these things know that it was a shorter version that I got released in the movies which didn't stop people from being in agony because they had to go to the washroom before it was over. And then it just got lengthened because what he had done, unlike most filmmakers, was film things from the beginning that were not to be included in the theatrical release and they would go on the final one. So my source for studying the Jackson films is the extended editions, partly because they annoy me less. Right? I'm not gonna argue, I'm not gonna deny that I understand, and we're gonna talk about this in a minute, that adaptation studies has real problems with people who look for the movie to be like the book. And that's what I did when I went into this. So it's what, and I do that in some of the other cases as well. So we'll get into that discussion as well. And then to all the special features. We've just started this cycle. I wasn't gonna include this slide except, oh, this should be 2012, not 2002. And we're gonna have a Hobbit movie. Every year we had one last year. There's two more to come. Anybody utterly bewildered how we could have three Hobbit movies? Yeah. I mean, if the Lord of the Rings was three movies, shouldn't the Hobbit have been an eight minute documentary? You know, just a little short to come at the beginning. Or, you know, conversely, if the Hobbit is three full length movies, the Lord of the Rings should have been 12, 27? I'm not quite sure. But we do know that Tolkien is doing, or Jackson is doing, is again revisiting all the textual material at the end of the books. So he's going to be bringing apparently a lot of that into play. And that's where the legendarium, which it's called, comes in. What we don't know is whether he's managed to get licenses for any of the other stuff that Tolkien published. I was trying to find out, I don't think so. And then we have the game adaptation that I'm talking about. There have been lots of games on the Lord of the Rings, tons of them. But the only one I'm working with is the online multiplayer game called The Lord of the Rings Online. It's a subscription based game. Link is free to play now. And if you would want to get up and see how it works, and if you're having trouble defeating some monsters, email me, I'll get online with you. I'm at level 85, right? And I am now renowned in Middle Earth for being able to kill orcs from horseback. You can't get there until about level 80. So I've gone all the way through. I'm waiting for the next expansion. Just call me. So all of what happens is it'll come into your area and I'll just tell you to stay out of the way because you're going to get killed. I'm not. But you'll get the points for wiping out the monsters, okay? That's called, of course, power leveling as anybody in the hobby knows. It's up to the writers of Rohan and it's only gone as far as probably part of the two towers and it's gonna keep going until probably well after I'm deceased, as far as I can tell. So what is the source of the films? Well, one way is what Jackson has the rights to. That's obvious. The source of the games is what Turbine has the rights to. And by the way, they only have the rights to the books as well. But the other parts of the source is what Jackson had done before. This does come into play in some of the commentary about the Lord of the Rings because what Jackson seems to have been relatively obsessed with is monsters. And you can see when you watch the Lord of the Rings movies that he really, really liked monsters and ugly things. To the point where in the Return of the King, you could argue that it becomes objectionable because the ugliness becomes deformity. But then it's objectionable in other ways anyway. So I don't think he was too worried about that. And what Turbine had done before, and this is where I come into play here, because they're big games before were both multiplayer online games. One called Asheron's Call, which one in versions one and two. And the other one was Dungeons and Dragons online. And a little bit about Dungeons and Dragons after I have a drink. The great source of all role-playing games is Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons came from the war game community. It was basically a bunch of battle games, tactical battle games. Dungeons and Dragons online is a long time attempt by publishers to move the Dungeons and Dragons physical role-playing game, paper and pencil role-playing game onto computer systems. There was a lot of things lost when they did that, but what they did manage to do is retain a number of very formal features of the role-playing community. The formal features are one you level. It's all based on leveling. As you level, your characteristics increase, or I shouldn't say that, your skills increase, the kinds of weapons you get better, the kinds of armor gets better. Although it's rather curious that I played one female character in the Lord of the Rings online, part of the whole ethos of the fantasy role-playing market is that men are dressed in huge bits of pieces of armor. They're built like trucks. Women are scantily attired. And it seemed to be that as I went forward, the better I got as a character, the skimpier my outfits got, but they had higher armor ratings. I had the most armored bra ever. And it could just take off. Nothing got through that, including the rest of the body. I find that amazing. All right, so the Dungeons and the Dragon has a number of formal properties. The one it was missing for a number of years before online communities became prevalent was the role-playing aspect where we all got together across the table and played and ate chips all day. Online, you do this. You form what are called guilds and fellowships and all those things in order to beat up things together. In some games, it's crucial. It's becoming less and less crucial as we move along in the hobby because not many people want to play with other people anymore, it seems. It just doesn't happen that way. Nick and I were talking about that last night. The idea of, you know, I will go and play a multiplayer online game solo. The fact that I can do so means that they've forgotten what multiplayer online game means. But, you know, you can because they realize that we just don't, a lot of us just don't have time to do that anymore. All right. What is being adapted? From Thomas Leach, given the myriad differences not only between literary and cinematic texts but between successive adaptations of a given literary text and for that matter, between different versions of a given story in the same medium, what exactly is it that film adaptations adapt or are supposed to adapt? And this is a big question in film adaptation work. What are you actually trying to make happen in an adaptation? They do it a lot, obviously, so they should know. And filmmakers do know. Number one, and the one that keeps being harkened to in adaptation work is the story. But it's not all the story. Very, very few, if any, adaptations contain the entire story. So it's a selective story. Well, if I'm an author and you go and decide which part of my story is worth putting on screen, which part isn't, I'm gonna tell you it's not the story. It's part of the story. That's the one thing that comes up. Linda Hutchins talks about themes, characters, duration to focalization. Where does the story come from? By the way, it's not normally part of a game's issue because mostly through games, we, they're focalized through us, the player. But movies, of course, can shift back and forth. They can be first person. They can be multiple third person and all that sort of thing. Westbrook's comment I thought was quite fun. People are, and he was actually referring here to my fair lady, when they're trying to adapt Britishness. And there are ways to do Britishness. We all know what they are, I think, because we've watched British movies and they're supposed to be British. Well, the reason this became interesting for me, I think it's funny for one thing. But the other thing is that in both cases of two very popular adaptations, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the actors were intentionally chosen, well, because they weren't American. They were British, right? And so, they are working on adapting that. It doesn't happen in the game. The spirit, this term came up early in adaptation studies with George Bluestone, and it just keeps coming up. The notion of the spirit. What is the spirit of the movie, of the book? What's the spirit of the Charles Dickens book? What's the spirit of a Jane Austen book? And nobody defines it. They say, this is what you should try to capture when you're making a movie. Now, as a Jane Austen fan, I think I know what the spirit is, but you don't have to be a fan of a book to make a movie about it. In fact, there's one person I know, former student who went to write a screenplay was told when the director found him reading the novel, and told him, David, you have a choice. You can either write the screenplay or read the novel. You can't do both. So, he didn't care what the original story was about, but this notion of the spirit is one that keeps coming up. And certainly, Jackson and his team were trying to do that. And in their own way, in different ways, the producers of The Lord of the Rings online are definitely trying to do that. We'll see how. Middle Earth and its things. Anybody go to the tour that went around of the paraphernalia from The Lord of the Rings movies? Anybody go there? I did. It was research. I got there. But they showed you all the stuff that they'd created. And most of the stuff you didn't even see in the movie. But they had these very carefully crafted letters, documents, you know, dishes, and of course, swords and armor. They had real sword makers, real armor makers there to make sure this stuff was authentic. Because we all know that what JR Tolkien did was do a lot of sword building and armor creation. I don't know what's authentic too, although medieval times, I guess, that kind of thing. And the other thing you are trying to adapt, and this has become interesting later on is audience expectation. What's to be adapted in the game? The story. We do it through a series of epic quests which we'll come to in a minute. Themes, yep, characters, yep, they're all there. They don't do anything, but they're there. Duration, time becomes a big problem in the game. I'll get to that. Focalization does not take place. The spirit of the game is there primarily in the creation of the world. We'll talk about that when we get to the bottom of this slide. Audience expectation, which is in game mechanics, game genre, at least as I will call it, for this particular purpose, which is what I call the retail genre, which is the stuff you find on the signs in your store shelf and game environments, especally, especally, espiically. I added that word last night, how can you tell? The hetero-cosm, the places of Middle Earth. So I got a bit on Hutchins look at this to begin with. All right, from Linda Hutchins theory of adaptation, Nintendo's 3D world of Zelda has been described as a highly intricate environment. Sorry, I didn't want to break this. With an awesome cast of characters, a complicated economics, a broad range of landscapes and indoor scenarios, and an elaborated chemistry, biology, geology, and ecology, so that its world can almost be studied like an alternate version of nature. Similarly, Disney World visitors who go on the Aladdin ride can enter and physically navigate a universe originally presented as a linear experience through film. What gets adapted here is a hetero-cosm, literally an other world or cosmos, complete, of course, with the stuff of story, settings, characters, events, and situations. To be more precise, it is the res extensa to use Descartes terminology of that world, its material physical dimension, which is transposed and then experienced through multi-sensorial interactivity. The hetero-cosm possesses what theorists call truth of coherence. Here, plausibility and consistency of movement and graphics within the context of the game. Just as do narrated and performed worlds, but this world also has a particular kind of truth of correspondence, not to any real world, but to the universe of a particular adapted text. That's the hetero-cosm. I'm gonna go back and forth to this concept because this is the big thing that we see adapted in Lord of the Rings Online. They can't do much with characters. You put them there, they have their names, we meet Elrond, we meet the members of the fellowship, we meet Gandalf, we meet everybody you can imagine and more to talk about how Turbine expands that experience, but really it's about the world. The reason I know that people play the Lord of the Rings Online is because it takes place in Middle Earth. They want to go and see the places. They want to see what these people imagine as being part of Rivendell, part of Lachlorien and then the other places in that world that you really don't see much in any other place. And this fits in well with Amhachan's comments on the hetero-cosm. So we'll go back to that. Prode on Sam and the Boat. The Ring, by the way, means you gotta click on them. There's a quest there, which is good. Because the one thing that multiplayer online games have taken away from you forever because of hacks to World of Warcraft is actual discovery. You just have to go and find things in these games. Now they have elaborate maps that take you right there. So it goes, you know, go find Frodo. And by the way, he's right there.  So Albert Cran and Dennis Kutchen. Adaptors cannot transpose or transfer a novel to the screen. They must interpret, reworking the precursor text and choosing the various meanings and sensation they find most compelling. Then imagine scenes, characters, elements, et cetera, that match their interpretation. So I bring this idea up mostly because where adaptation studies is moving increasingly is towards the study of intertextuality, not towards the study of fidelity. And the idea is here that the adaptation becomes a hybrid. They become a mutually self-supporting set of texts with the source. And it ideally is mutually self-supporting because as you're watching the adaptation of a text you know well, or so the theory goes, you're constantly bringing into it elements of the source, whether or not you like them. And then when you go back to the source, you're going to be bringing back to the reading of the source or the viewing of the source, whether the source happened to be elements of the adaptation you just experienced. And they're mutually self-supporting. Now, when adaptations for studies first started, a lot of that became all about what did the filmmaker do right or wrong? Later, as you would expect, it became more about look, how can we judge these things or if not judge them, at least analyze them on their own terms and of their own accord. I'm going to have the problems with fidelity studies. But before we do that, how are we doing here? Hmm, I was going to show you some scenes from a movie, but you can go watch it if we don't have time to actually watch them. But I'm going to show you a couple of things.  Because that would have taken too long. There's a lot of them, I think. But there were a couple of really interesting choices that Jackson made. And for those of you, how many of you know the books and the films reasonably well? How many of you have no knowledge of these things whatsoever? Have never heard of them? Okay, so this is the time to kind of nod off a bit, if you haven't already. There's a moment when, at the bridge of Khazadoum and Maurya, Gandalf confronts the Balrog. Balrog is this big, fiery, old thing. It comes from an earlier age. And in the books, what happens is that Gandalf loses the battle, kind of wins. He breaks the bridge, the Balrog falls. The Balrog, he has this whip with him, fiery whip, because we all want one of those, and latches it on to Gandalf's leg and pulls him off the bridge.  He dies. He comes back, but he's dead. In the movies, what Jackson does is actually have Gandalf latch on to the ledge, onto the bridge itself, because in movies you can do that. Have you ever noticed that? No matter how far you fall in the movie, you will find a handhold somewhere. It doesn't matter that you've fallen 25 feet and your fingers should break completely, you're still on there. Even if they're slippery and blood covered, you're gonna manage to make it. But what Jackson does is have Gandalf, the whip from the Balrog is no longer on his leg and he lets go. Which, from an adaptation standpoint, works, except I'm not sure what the purpose is, but it really means that Gandalf, in effect, commits suicide rather than is killed, which changes the whole nature of the resurrection later, I think. I was always going to show you a scene that happens as faithfully as I can imagine from book to film to game. And this is a very simple one where the Fellowship of the Ring leaves Rivendell and starts a big quest. And in all cases, it's, well, it's done a little bit differently. It's mostly a matter of just watching them go. And in the game, you get to do that, which is really kind of silly because you can't do anything about it. You have to just wait through it. It takes about 15 minutes and you're kind of waiting. Can you people just go? Now, the funny part in the game is that even though the Hobbits and the Fellowship have left Rivendell, you can go back to Rivendell later and they'll still be there. And you can go back again and they'll still be there. So from a standpoint of the duration, the chronology and the time, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Okay, I'm gonna go through a few things quickly here. Adaptation studies and fidelity. Right.  Okay. Okay, I'll just go through this really fast. How's that? Cases popular or venerated sources. I wanted to talk a bit about adaptations of the Bible, but that's kind of a heavy topic. So I'm gonna go on to stuff that I've read more than the Bible, like Gone With The Wind. Yeah, well it's not true actually, but you know. Gone With The Wind has a great case study for adaptation studies because even at the very beginning when they were making, when David O'Sullivan was making the movie, he was keenly aware of how if he did anything wrong, he might be destroyed. Even to the point where he had this long, long wait until he found who was going to play Scarlet O'Hara. And if you wanna have some fun, read about that and how he managed to manipulate the press in order, because you know, things have changed so much, right? He managed to manipulate the press into making this a big, big story. He knew Clark Gable was gonna play Rhett Butler because there was nobody else who could, but he didn't know. And he went through every major star in Hollywood to find out who should play Scarlet O'Hara. Generally speaking, people from the Southern U.S. wanted a Southern woman, right, seems to make sense. So he did the only expected thing and take somebody English. I guess he wanted to display Britishness or something, but then he had to learn some kind of an accent which apparently wasn't all that bad. But Vivian Lee was brought aboard and there was a great deal of uproar about it. But this is the kind of thing. When you get a popular text, right? The notion of the fact that we shouldn't do fidelity studies, which is what a lot of adaptations work is about or has been about for the last 10 years, disappears completely. In the Harry Potter sequence, right? People went to the Harry Potter movies after having been just rabid consumers of the books and they knew what they wanted. One argument in adaptation studies scholarship is that the first Harry Potter films, the first two, were far too faithful and they suffered as a result, which I understand and I can even agree with, except that my daughter, who was a Harry Potter fanatic back then, watched the first one and refused to go to any of the others because most of the stuff that they had in there, she didn't like and they left out all the stuff she cared about. So what happens to the argument about excessive fidelity, which Tom Sleach makes in his book, Film Adaptation and Discontents? Twilight, I can't comment on. I put it in there because it was another major, major success where people were lining up to get it and they were expecting fidelity. What they got was a really kind of bizarre story of the stars. But I kind of stopped reading Twilight after the first book and I couldn't get myself back to it. It's a little bit what happened to me with Grey's Anatomy. I watched the first season and when the second one started, I sat down and said, I just can't. I just can't do it. Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, of course. These are the taxonomies of adaptation types we try to go through, but I'm not going to. If you want to hear about them, ask me later. The different kinds of adaptations, if you will. And then I'm going to skip ahead because it's late to the very end. Totally got a lot. This is the Epic Quest idea, how Turbine expands the story of the Lord of the Rings. They take the very first part and chop it into a number of stories that do not occur anywhere in Tolkien, but they keep expanding on the world in relative, some of them do. Some of these do appear in very, very limited fashion, sometimes only a sentence in Tolkien's works, but they do expand these. I'll show you the expansion of the place. This is an example, the Mines of Moria, which is an important chapter in the Lord of the Rings books, except it only takes about two days for the Fellowship to get through. There's tons of stuff happening here. There's entire communities, towns, little cities. This is the place that was before the books actually, before the time sequence in the books was basically destroyed. A place called Forochel, which is in the north, which only appears in a very short segment in the books and Turbine expands these things dramatically. All right, they expand the characters, people you never hear of or you just barely hear of in the books, get expanded and so forth. I'm gonna end with a very short comment on the notion of paratext, which I think is at play here significantly. Actually, I better not go through this. This is too long. But essentially, what I'm arguing is that in the game in particular, I think what happens is that the source material becomes paratextual. Essentially, the source, no long, I don't know anybody who won't play the Lord of the Rings game because it's not like they thought the books were. I do know people who are upside of the movies. I know people who like the movies better than the books, by the way. But I also know people who are, the commentary is always, does it do this the way it's supposed to? Nobody I've seen playing the game thinks about that at all. I think what happens is that the source material, as you get more and more immersed in the game, simply becomes something that's surrounding the game, which I paratextual rather than anything else, which is kind of a curious thing for a source of this, a popular source to do. And the other point I make is the expectations that people have when they bought this. This is a AAA game in the MMO, the multiplayer online genre. They have formal characteristics that people wanted. It was designed and announced and sold as an MMO. It was supposed to compete with World of Warcraft. That's why it's the way it is. So the expectations of this bookstore genre, if you will, dictated precisely how the game was going to differ, how it was going to be adapted from the books. Basically, the formula that Turbine decided on was Tolkien fandom, knowledgeable and conservative, plus MMO fandom, equally knowledgeable and conservative about their MMOs equals a lot of bucks. But the gut was not quite as enthusiastic as they were hoping for. All right, I have a summary that goes into my basic take on it, which is that I understand that adaptation studies is all about rejecting fidelity studies. Increasingly, people are coming back to fidelity studies, but they're doing it in part for the same reason I am, because as much as I understand that, I much understand that the adaptation is a hybrid. When you're dealing with a story I care about, I simply don't give a damn. I want it to be the story I wanted. I want fidelity, and I'm not alone in that. And with popular works, that's what we get are a lot of people who want strict fidelity, which is impossible, but they want it anyway. And that's the phenomenon we need to study more. Thank you.


Welcome to how they got hacked episode three three we're getting consistent now yes consistency Tom Lawrence Xavier D Johnson more re-snatch all right and we got some stories we're gonna jump into Sophos AWS destroyed well no no I'm sorry I wrote that's what I wrote that's not what it actually happened though let's break this down we should record earlier on a more awake this would be really interesting if that was the title of this story right like okay let me let me think about this Sophos a UTM maker got really angry with AWS and just decided well we're just gonna destroy them like the entire AWS which is not at all what happened no well that'd be interesting to cover this is almost as interesting to cover there's a guy back in the UK who was working for a digital agency what's the name of this agency I can't think of it right at this very second a VUVA VUVA VOOVA VA and basically this guy got laid off for not doing a good job 36 year old and what he did was just insidious he stole one of his colleagues credentials to their AWS logged in and terminated not turned off terminated which means that I actually deleted the data that was associated with it 23 servers 23 servers at a digital agency that's a lot of information wow this tons of information yeah wow this is bad this is not something that should have happened this is but it does this is not the first time something like this happened either so there's a story that we were just home before and I couldn't find the link to it happened several years ago with a guy left the bank and he was letting they let him know we I guess he was gonna get fired but then didn't actually fire him for a couple days so he took that opportunity to purge backups and purge data from the bank cleaning up after himself of course yeah so in this is one of those security hygiene things you know we're gonna throw that word out there again when you get rid of one of these developers for whatever reason you should also at the same time be like going through all the other people auditing them and saying hey who else has access and you know who else should we change your password credentials because he might have looked over her shoulder surf they share credentials and I know you can beat people over the head don't share credentials but hey maybe he had this in his plan maybe that was something he did it all the time he went and looked over and had a credential key had an API key that you'd produce that was for another dev team within their days working with so those are those are like some of those pitfalls that can happen and I mean let's be honest right like I'll be completely blunt here I'm certified from AWS two times have two certifications one of them is a specialty in security you need to have 2FA enabled and if you don't have 2FA enabled you need to have a policy assigned to all of your users that says MFA present bull equals true you want to always make sure that any action that takes place MFA session is is enabled that's the number one only way that you be able to get around this I don't care if you showed her shoulder surfed and got the latest and greatest password of the CEO if you had 2FA enabled if you had a 2FA policy this would not have happened at all and the CEO emits it he comes out his name is Mark Bond which bond Mr. Bond Mr. Bond that's a really interesting name but yeah he's the CEO of Luba and he comes on it says yeah 2FA able to solve this so even the CEO understands his security mishaps so yeah these are it happens a lot so this is it's unfortunate and it happens a lot of these smaller places really destroy and even for some of the small businesses we do sanitization when we've had staff leave and things like that we got a runaround change of passwords to everything instantly instantly it's just part of the let go process what do you think they had access to we do auditing ourselves like for anything so we know what our staff has access and you hopefully have things like that are logging so you know what that person may have been into because they'll give you an idea of what they could do but you have to change the other adjacent working in that same team or just think about what they had access to what were they also working with other staff that they do some job in accounting well then maybe they have the accounting passwords too because they hung out a lot there cover all the bases 2FA all day every day and I know of a company of a friend of mine actually told me about this their security contact for AWS was a person who had already left the company oh so you know these types of things happen especially in smaller environments luckily enough from what I hear the the person who had the phone call who had left the company was nice enough to pass the information along but maybe he was just front of maybe he didn't have to right you have to always have the what if perspective so I felt like that was really interesting want to share right it was a super easy hack someone got credentials by all means and misuse them and of course these permissions were over permissive because no one at the company should be able to delete data at all right we should have to have some kind of administrative process that allows us to go and talk to the systems administrator to actually write a policy that will allow you to delete or terminate instances the worst thing you should be able to do is turn off an instance right so especially in those smaller environments where you know this digital agency may have only been running 23 servers yeah right they may have had a multi tenant environment where they've had you know you know a multitude of customers on each server so I find that to be disturbing to say the least yeah so that's definitely some of the takeaways from now and I'm just clicking on that next story as I get excited reading some of it but the steel company this poor company man they this was a target they they got hit and what is this called the goal logo locker locker go go locker go go bad pronouncing sorry end of the day so locker go go so this is a really interesting malware that hit them that crypto lockered everything now I we're still getting the debrief on this but it's making the news because this is not just some company this is like if I'm not mistaken the largest aluminum provider in the world their global and a US office if I understand all this it was opened at the US office but then spread across the network that is tells me there's a couple flaws in their network yeah maybe their networks a little flatter and less siloed right and this is the way the security should be working is the US should be very locked down from the different markets different places are in from their home office and each silo should not be able to infect the other well this is really bad because it went across every network and there's actually I love it because I'll leave a link to the TechCrunch article I don't know if you've seen this but the they had a they put signs in the windows because it affected like down to the manufacturing and it said hi Joey are under cyber attack don't use computer till next week it's like stickers and windows like just don't use the computers they're all offline everything's online show you guys that picture we will flip it I'll flip it around and edit it in to show this under but it's on the TechCrunch article yeah that's that's definitely great that's so problematic so problematic there but once again this is one of those things that if there's a debrief from this and I hope I'm gonna get some real good details here this means they were not they that lateral movement across the company so you someone in the US opens it up you end up a lateral movement that spreads across all the sites now that's the sites it went down because this picture is at one of the factories on the production places for us that means this went all the way across which affects whether you're gonna have in that instance is the controllers if you're not familiar with the way industrial control systems work your skater controllers and things like that they're going to be internet enabled for monitoring we don't know if these were effective but they generally do their data logging across their network this is how we keep checks on the steel production machines how much steel was made and things like that we deal with this in the automotive market and a lot of controllers so when this gets shut down this is why they can't just well we'll just make it the manual process there isn't one anymore these machines have to have data logging and the data is not there anymore so we don't know what's going in or what's coming out of the steel production yeah this is why you have to have all this so locked down this is really really bad this is about as bad as it gets especially when you think about the type of attack that happened right this wasn't like something that was like a praying spray they seemed like it was something more methodical right yeah it seemed very targeted because where there's another link I found that I thought was really interesting is the the ransom where they hit them with they had uploaded a virus total and it looks like it passed all the at that time of course there's a signature for it now because it's popular but this is the problem with signature based systems and even silence seemed to pass it which also if you're not here who silences or they seem to have a really innovative machine learning slash AI system but whatever things I also want to know is what protections they had in place but it sounds like they probably were really good in security really good on protections but the other side of that is it still went through there and as Xavier will tell you if you develop something targeted for one company and we don't have a signature for what happens it works it works a hundred percent of the time a hundred percent of the time and to be honest with you you know I've been on engagements where I've actually ridden my own malware to be able to attack the company and legally legally it's always legally right and it's gotten caught by AV even though I've written the code right so there are ways that you know some of these newer antivirus systems actually do know the framework in which you're coding in and maybe be able to tell based on the behavior of the cause and types of cause that you're making to the actual it within the actual code that you're doing certain things right and that's when you go to the next level and maybe you start to write things at a lower level and not necessarily at a higher level programming language like C and you can start to control your logic flow a little bit different maybe start to put in more garbage maybe start to move polymorphic there's there's a lot of different ways to be able to get around these these types of antiviruses right that's why the Singers like I said are very interesting the machine learning AI systems they have our behavior but and then we've dealt with this with Hunter Slabs we have Hunter Slabs watches for things added to startup so he does have to get his malware into some type of startup sequence which I did see I even had a chance to read to proof of concept but someone found a way to get things to start with PowerShell without in start being set up so there's the new angles where they're memory persistent that's interesting yeah interesting and because they're realized that's the next level okay we're watching startup but the way that works in how it's worked with us working with Hunter Slabs is they will flag something that was added to startup as kind of like a yellow alert to let us know hey this is added to startup we don't know what it is because we don't have a signature for it and what it was is we have some transportation clients that use some unique software custom written that has the startup run so they had no baseline for it but they did let us know that something was added good news is we knew we added it so we're good so you need that human element this is what like a managed security service providers do is that's add that human element for us to actively look at it and make a rational decision that we just can't get the machine learning to do to say hey this is now running in startup so oh man and I mean you know this is I hit at the the risk of sounding like shameless plug guy here this is the perfect opportunity for something like deception to come in your environment right we like to talk about ways to be able to solve this one way is to install something like Hunter Slabs that looks for a change in behavior on the endpoint but another way to do it is at the network level actually putting these decoys inside of your environment because when I move laterally I'm looking for a domain controller I'm trying to be the king of the castle and if I land on a domain controller that's deceptive and I get in with credentials that seem correct I'm now found and I've been pushed into maybe a few other areas where deception has been enabled because these breadcrumbs are left and I'm following these breadcrumbs leaving forensics I've already alerted the hunt team they're watching my movements now so we're moving just as fast as that you know us blue teamers because I'm on the purple team as blue teamers are moving just as fast as the people on the red team mostly because we do have that purple team aspect and this is a little bit more elaborate is like putting honey pots on your network are really important I once you set up a honey pot that you know you put on a network so nothing should ever touch it every alarm should go off when something touches it right like that when you have something you you know you have something pretending to be an AD controller that's just looking for active connections you see connections come to it you're like my users shouldn't know about this that means someone's plucking through the network we talked to us in last episode these that guardian product that IBM makes where it looks like someone poking at the database same concept where we're looking at the network security layer and going something poked over here and I even even with a smaller now like we have we use our watch to even look for anything new added on to our DMZ network where our servers are or the secure network where the servers are so we can notice any change like anything on there that is alerts me to something happened I need to know what which my guys have given me a heart attack because they spun up I have an old database server and I freaked out I'm like calling answer to phone right away and he needed to reason wise because around the phone with a client and I spent up our old database to get some old information out boy man it I'm like how did I think it started up yeah I didn't think yeah my guys my guys did it so so if you ever want to play if you ever want to prank this guy yeah it just spent something up on this network have one of my guys have one of my staff and without calling me first let me know and I told them they need to let me know so there you go so I did kind of related note to watching it did I talk about the the end result actually because you guys were here last time and I don't think we got the end result we didn't talk about a show I don't know of that the what was going on with the person pinging it oh right yeah yeah yeah someone won reverse engineer something on my website and they wanted to see how we did remote support we haven't embedded our website and then what set off all the flags is we got rate limiting we got Seracada we're watching stuff and there was a bunch of page refreshes nothing nefarious but a bunch of page refreshes which was enough to trigger a rate limit log so I'm like okay why am I getting really like 7,000 hits from one person a reverse engineered it turned out to be an IT company down Florida hi if you're watching because these he watches the YouTube channel there's a relationship here so super nice guy was confused why I was calling up but then understood right away once I said he way was you're the guy that I was watching your YouTube videos I seen your website and I wanted to see how you did the embedding on that well he hand off to his web developer who works there as well and she had put it in like some bookmark manager that kept refreshing the page it was kind of weird he didn't know it did that but I seen the logs of it refreshing the page because it was an iframe set to refresh because we do it an iframe embed for this remote support and that's what to flag but he was impressed that he goes he says something lines of well you don't talk security you actually noticed that and found me I was like yes I did we see you yeah he made it easy at an SSL start with his name in it so you know so you're able to wasn't real wrong I didn't it wasn't that in the reverse you didn't have to break anything yeah show Dan IP address oh look it's 443 allegedly yeah yeah yeah yeah he was listening show Dan they had his and they had his certain name right in there so you show Dan hosts because of the command line I if you don't have a show Dan account get one so you can use the command line way faster than looking at website so you can just grab the IPs throw it in show Dan boom I'm probably gonna do a video about it just so how quick that works it's actually really easy and you can script it pull the SSL sir find out the name SSL sir find a company name and give them a call was easy because it was an IT company so they had their phone to run or so like once again not real rocket science in my part it wasn't that wasn't like I spent a lot of time researching and finding someone but it was so fun nice well good to know that you're watching and I'm always watching we are enjoying the traffic as it comes yeah I'm sure someone might tell me watch this is then going to my website and figure out what I'm talking about and I'm gonna get a bunch more hits and I'm gonna call those people too maybe shut my website down for a day and just gonna go offline I go dark for a little while so we also read you guys comments and we have feedback so you guys say I don't talk enough so here I bring you a story a low-tech hack with major repercussions the story first broke in 2017 Google and Facebook were scammed out of a hundred and twenty three million a 50 year old Lithuania man set up a company with the same name as a company that Facebook and Google have been using and then proceeded to send emails to them posing as a company and acts for a hundred and twenty three million and they sent it quickly they thought it was the other come because what's a hundred million when you're trying to buy servers just I can't believe that companies that large still don't have don't look in-depth into queries like that well let's walk people through a bit how hard is it for company I was very easy to set up a company I mean that's 35 dollars in Michigan I think about 35 dollars yeah yeah I fax it in I mean you can just set up an escort I can set up this so that they're step one the next step is figure out who they use now that's not hard to figure out either public or traded companies have a lot of documents online yep 10 K's 10 Q's actually list off how much they're willing to invest in how much they typically spend on certain services and certain things you can see what their technology spend is pretty easily I mean even if you're just an industry and you know people that work at these companies they're pretty open about like who they go through as far as like bars and stuff like that it's social engineering gets really easy at that level because they never anticipates you you know assuming the identity of the people that they're buying the service I mean but me personally still seeing a request for a hundred and three million hundred and twenty three million come across my desk even if it is from a name that I'm used to I'm still gonna double and triple check to make sure this is okay well and I brought something similar up I think I told you guys about the hardware scams with the recycling one things that the recyclers had done and appeared to make it confusing was they registered the name of their company in the same city as another company with the same name so it made it very ambiguous and confusing because they were in unrelated somewhat related but unrelated directly businesses and they shared a company name so which company was it and when you Google it it was funny because it made the local news of them it's the other company being in the news going it's not us quit asking we're not involved in this scam thing going on and you can legally do that someone you you have to change things with the way the company rules work so I register a DBA and I can use DBAs that are similar to others I can't register exactly the same company name but if you register it with a slight variations or a misspelling it's just like a phishing attack on a website where you have that targeted cyber squatting attack where you misspell a company name so it looks like it came from there the was the company quantum quantum yeah so change your company a little bit just enough and no quantum with the you to quantum with the quanta this name of the company that they deal with so he changes to quanta with an extra a yeah it's it's a little unclear exactly how they pulled that part off but it was posing as another company man that's complete social engineering you just set it all up you build it all on there what was that older movie from a long time ago boiler room where they were in all the fake stocks it's the same concept I mean these are social engineering it's not like we're we may be talking about how they got hacked in 2019 and we talk a lot of technical details but this is why I said this guy over here at the end is a scary one yeah I mean like you know the dude who destroyed those servers made no money and went to prison he just got sentenced so you know these dudes who did the ransomware I doubt they doubt they get paid right even though the FBI just go ahead and tells you you should just pay them for the data if you if you want to get your data back but yeah I doubt they get paid someone's probably want to come out with a unlocker shameless plug here I have a friend who runs no more ransom org if you are hit with the ransomware go to no more ransom org they will help you out there's probably a unlocker thank you been Potter yeah that's a craziness there yeah just to deter the fishers and scammers this guy did get caught oh he did you not underestimate the power they went to Lithuania and got this man yeah there's probably a company's if you're not that I'm suggesting you ever hack anyone but those are really awful it's like yeah yeah there's general electric Facebook Google and then like all of the dot gov's and dot mills that you just don't aim at allegedly please and around you this in the sad reality I'll bring it back to the small business we've we see this less I know we hear about it from a surface level because it's not really a technical hack but we just know because we deal with some of these companies they've been scammed a smaller amounts of money from these companies setting up looking like vendors I talked before about the manufacturing company that was hit via email scam they did hack their email but sometimes they don't even do that they just send out invoices so and actually oh man I wonder you know what he might be I went to take up the details to see if I can turn into the full story but a copyrights on books the guys got greedy and made a few million dollars selling copyrights on books so my friend owns a publishing company and like books actual physical book publishing book publishing is royalties paid out when the author dies royalties are no longer paid because the author dies and then no one asks royalties the way the royalty system works is as long as the author's alive he lets you know and there's like a process you re-sign up for another year royalties so these guys get this clever idea people die I'll just assume the royalties of dead people and it's it's so basic and stupid clever they started invoicing and because they got greedy and someone noticed that books that they're like that guy died what if it's paying royalties well and it is true sometimes even after people die the family may assume the royalties of it you may not necessarily go into public domain so they Dr. Seuss like yeah and they got greedy is where it all went to wrong and everything else but yeah once again complete social engineering someone just got this idea going you know what no one does they don't collect on this and now their entire company basis I think they were getting they got up to over two million a year only thing they had was a bunch of people and they got all those giant machines and stuff envelopes and like that loaded the envelopes and just they'd preprint and mail out bills to all the royalties and just contracts out all over the place to ones they didn't have the rights to but no one else did either so there wasn't like they would get it just it's so stupid but it worked until they got caught because that is illegal by the way we're laughing at it not because they made money or we think it's because it's so silly that you paid out on these royalties yeah that's why we're laughing and royalty payments are small and books you don't get a ton per book so it's you send it to all the different places they have the book in France it's a small amount of money so it takes thousands of envelopes getting mailed out but then cumulatively starts at about a couple dollars here $10 royalty here $100 royalty there oh well we'll leave you with that if I can find the link to that their conviction it'll be fun because it was it's happened a long time ago but I thought that was such a clever basic someone said around and just kind of said you know what we could do and they were all for more people who worked in a publishing business that just got together to do this intense yeah if there's a better audit system in place now for that as he told me but but there clearly wasn't for Facebook and Google but um yeah the guy got greedy and got caught so it's a horrible idea to do and Google yeah trying to go up those companies man yeah I'll bring you update the guy gets sentenced June 28th so okay I'll bring you update on his lengthy sentence was I'm sure it will be looking forward to that yeah it's a nice thing once all this gets there's actually someone who goes by the title skip Olivia you can find on my forums he posts a lot of these things hi because he's also sent show notes here hey he has done some legal research and things like that I think he's got a blog but there's links in my forums and he's posted some of these legal debriefs because he takes the time to lead because once these cases get out and finally get published they get published in some of the court papers that's when people like that will go through and you get to read those technical details and we're gonna use we're gonna be using more of that as some of our technical debrief on some of this because then you get all those juicy details like the court hearing we read last week for how we know what happened over at Starwood like that's testimony it becomes part of public record where we can pour through it and find out they got pop-up me me cats all right also they have high-pie cats now so if you want to have a little fun at the office yeah I want to you know violate a little CFA allegedly allegedly we didn't have time to cover because we didn't really get in depth on it but we're working on we have an interview we're gonna be publishing to the channel with some hacker just some guy does the thing with playing some hacker some guy some guy didn't think with playing if that's not enough clues and trains oh and trains and cars and cars so ships apparently the future is going to be a brain a human brain oh yeah so he's gonna move on from a hacking transportation of moments because well actually it looks like he's gonna be doing a little bit more okay of that in the airplane space now with the whole bowling issue really relate relaying that the you know to be honest with you guys security is fun cyber security is awesome but really at the end of the day it boils down to safety yeah and the more and more of these things that we put online the digital twins of the world I used to work for General Electric it's all about security because safety because we don't want PLC's to be blowing up plants and you know we don't want gas you know gas tanks to be discharged and we don't want trains to be sped up ever so much so that they fly off the tracks so you know security very much so it's related to safety these days because all the time real serious issues yes and it happens in the past you know I don't know if General Motors is but I know Ford is on hacker one GM is definitely a hacker one okay they're they're actually doing a very very good job with responding to yeah vulnerabilities and bugs I remember being at GM when the porn star thing happened and they responded immediately and I actually worked on those systems and they took it very serious so kudos to them kudos to Tesla another really really yeah they're working really hard to make sure that we are safe and secure and they're owning every failure that they've had so yeah that's good stuff and yeah dad because car hacking is we've been having a lot of discussions about it because it's in its infancy it's gonna get as cars get more complicated we're gonna see more car hacks and yeah but but treat cars like locks never pick a lock that you need that's critical never hack a car that you need to drive to work in oh yeah I'm gonna leave you with that yeah sometimes it doesn't go well yeah you have a really hard time to split into the dealer while all of a sudden you know he can't even reflash your computer because some reason well Tesla has the beta sign up too you can sign up to hack your Tesla they have a whole program they have a program for bug bounties and everything that you sign up and they can offer you some like develop modes of the car and even help you they said his best to their abilities that one you're not voiding your warranty that's actually something stage they also say will help you reflash the firmware if you you know end up stuck not you know try to work so poor Michigan because we don't have any dealerships so you have to tow your car to Toledo is it close to Tesla I think there's a little further maybe a little further cooperating with the public because I know people gonna hack it anyway yeah so we might also invite you to hack it with us and we can come up with better solutions together yep exactly check out hacker one and stuff all those big companies are on there it's pretty cool look what they're offering for some bug bounty so and come out to DC 313 yeah this Wednesday when you watch this because it's coming out yeah this Wednesday when you watch or when you see this this Wednesday come on down to DC 313 DC 313.org but data set that's 27 it's gonna be this Wednesday the 27th okay I think it's the 27th yeah 27th bamboo Detroit so if you're watching this after March 27th there'll be another one check out DC 313 and yeah I will leave links all that all right thanks thank you so much for your time later later cool


Globalization has made hundreds of millions of people better off, but it did not work for everyone. And therefore, the future is not about global profit, it is about local benefits. The question right now is what kind of growth we want for the future, and that's really what we're setting out to answer at this summit.


Okay traders, welcome to this week's weekly live market and trading last session with me, Patrick Munnily. I just want to do a quick audio test if you can hear me loud and clear a why in the chat box and if you can see the tick-nail welcome screen also why so I know. Before we do jump into today's discussion as always we want to adhere to the risk disclaimer and most importantly for today's chat the views expressed by me and the opinions today are solely mine they are not representative of or indicative of those held by Ticknail UK or Ticknail Europe Limited. Also as we get into the charts today I'm going to walk through a bunch of charts that I where I see potential opportunities developing and give you my overview on those. If you have any questions if you could note those down and hold them till the end I'll open up Q&A section if there's a chart you want me to take a look at that I haven't covered through my deck then feel free to put that in or I can unmute your mic if you have any other type of question. So for those who are not familiar with the first time a brief introduction to myself my name is Patrick Munley after I graduated from university I joined a city plc consulting firm and after a couple of years learning the roads I left with some colleagues and went on to co-found and successfully exit a consulting starter this was post a merger in late 2004 so I then moved on to explore my passion for markets some capital to play with and some time in my hands I started day trading or more appropriately day gambling the S&P 500 and after some early beginners luck I racked up some solid gains however as is often the case I begin as luck went out and as the market phase changed I began to average down into what were essentially significant losing positions giving back all the gains and ultimately experiencing a serious six-figure hit to my personal financial capital. To say this was gut wrenching it's every experience it's an understatement I had to really stand back from the markets and figure out if it was feasible for me to make a living from trading markets so I decided to get serious about trading and sought out a mentor with an excellent trading track record. Working with my mentor for a period of 18 months to two years I up to not just my technical game researching and developing a strategy that suits my personality extensively back and forward testing the strategy and developing a rigorous risk management approach to underpin it but more importantly during the period of mentorship I significantly developed my mental game and probably the most important watershed shift I made was moving from being a goal orientated individual who was focused on financial gains to being a purely process orientated individual. So what does that actually mean? Well it means I had to stop focusing what I could make from the markets and start focusing solely on managing my mindset to allow me to consistently execute my trading strategy oftentimes in the face of negative feedback from the markets in the form of losing trades but once you become process orientated and have a professional trading mindset and understand the true nature of trading being a numbers game in which you're simply playing the probabilities you lose the emotional investments and that hellish emotional rollercoaster of living and dying by the outcome of individual trades so I'm no longer concerned with the outcome of individual trades or even the string of trades. My focus is on the next 100 trades because I know if I focus on excellence in execution my edge will demonstrate itself over an extended series of outcomes. My multi strategy approach has delivered positive annual returns since 2008 since 2013 I've also been managing investor capital through a managed account service delivering annual positive returns you can see the trading data for that service on the screen at the moment. I'm actually currently responsible for managing a multi million dollar portfolio. Since 2010 I've personally mentored over 100 private traders of all experience levels from complete novices to former CME floor traders in developing the technical and mental skills to reap consistent returns from the markets. I've also consulted to brokers and training education brands contributing written content webinars and live presentation content on a range of topics for market analysis to trading strategy development and execution. In addition to my fund management and private mentoring I'm also a resident market expert at Tickmill providing daily market analysis and trade analysis. You can actually register through their blog and you can get these updates sent to your inbox on a daily basis. My other passion project is as head of trading and trader education for a leading trading education brand called FXcareerswap.com. We offer development and funding to retail trading talents at FXcareerswap. We don't just develop retail traders market and trading strategy knowledge we work on mindset development through our structural program that culminates in managing the firm's capital at zero personal financial risk on a profit share basis and for those that are interested you can see on the screen a number for the desk in London or if you would like to email the guys and request any information they'll be sure to get back to you with that information. So that gives you a flavor of where I'm coming from. Now what I want to do is jump into the charts got a bunch to go through today so let's let's get going. So we're going to start here with the S&P 500. I was talking in previous sessions about watching this 3930 area. We saw a decent reaction from that 3930 got down to the 3800 level. What I'm looking for now is another new high in terms of these S&Ps and we'll just draw in where I see the next opportunity. So consolidating at the moment one of two ways I think we go we either head straight up into this resistance zone now where we have this projected ascending trend line resistance top side of maybe an ending diagonal and we also have the monthly R3 and weekly R3 coming in at 4030. So if we head from this current low at 3816 if we squeeze higher here I'll be watching the bearish reversal patterns as we test into this 4030 area looking for another pullback certainly back down into ascending trend line support and maybe even a little bit deeper this time for a test back down into the 3700 area. The alternative scenario is that we hold current levels and so we hold the current low here we hold the current high potential double top and we pull back down into this 3800 gain for another test this major trend line support. If that's the route of the price then what I'll be watching for a bullish reversal patterns in this area to set long positions targeting this 4030 area. So the two key areas really of interested me at the moment are the 4035 area and the support back down at 3790. So I'll be watching either one of those areas as potential opportunities to trade from the long or the short side. Now let's have a quick look at the Dow. So the Dow is actually trading up into its trend line we're seeing a little bit of a pause here at the moment this morning in terms of price. We have this ascending trend line resistance at the 32100 level. We have the weekly and monthly R3s just above 32184 and 32324. So bearish reversal patterns in this area looking for short positions to target and move down into to retest 30750 of support and if we take out that area then what I'll be looking for is a move into the trend line support back down to 30300 before again watching for bullish reversal patterns as an opportunity to set long positions for the next leg to the upside. So going two key areas or our three key areas to be watching in terms of the Dow. The DAX is still consolidating highs. What I think we'll see now with the DAX at this stage is a move into this ascending trend line support. So if we hold the current support what I anticipate we see is a move up into here 14435 and then we get the pullback into the 13250 area. The Nikkei. So we didn't get just fell short of that resistance area I was watching previously. We're holding here now at the 29600 area as we do there's a potential for another leg here ultimately I'm looking for a test of this ascending trend line resistance 31433 and then I think we see a pullback certainly to get a test of the ascending trend line support the internal ascending trend line support 29200 and below there we're looking at the primary ascending trend line support down to 27181. Dollar index took out the support at the trend line area that I talked about previously now looking for a retest of the lows here 8920. From there I'd expect we get some type of bounce profit taking bounce potential and then I think we retest this ascending trend line support broken support to act as resistance before getting that next leg down to this initial target of the 8750 level on the downside which is that weekly ABC pattern that I've talked about in previous sessions. So that's the broader dollar index the the equal weighted dollar index with the Aussie, Yen, Sterling and the Euro look for a move down now to get a test of 11495 before we might see some type of bounce back into this prior support to act as resistance before we head lower here I think we're heading down to 11000 sorry 11390 is the next downside objective which is the median line of the channel that we're currently trading in. The yields obviously been exploding higher here and what I'm watching for now is a test that I think there's 150 on an initial test simply because of the psychological level there will probably provide or potentially provide a profit taking move which could see the yields then trade back down to test this ascending trend line support at the 130 level before moving up to test the projected channel resistance up towards 160 in terms of in terms of the US 10 year yield gold not doing much of anything at the moment still trapped within this this area around the 118. As we hold below this 118 yearly pivots then I think we can get the move down that I'm looking for whereby we test the descending trend line support down to 1690 what I'd be watching for is bullish reversal patterns there for long positions but ultimately I'm looking for a test of 1653 which is the equality objective versus this swing high so just draw this in so you can see exactly what it is talking about so this so I think once we get into that area then we can see a more pronounced correction in terms of gold so two key areas that I'm paying attention to are the sending trend line support 17 just at 1700 but ultimately I'm looking for 1653 before we can see a more meaningful correction in terms of gold crude oil so crude we're trading back into the top side of the channel where I expect we find resistance here at the $64 a barrel area the area that is of real interest to me is any pullback into this internal ascending trend line support currently coming in around $58.60 I think that's the area where I'll be watching for bullish reversal patterns set long positions ultimately looking for a test now of the projected primary ascending trend line resistance that comes in just above $70 and there then I think we could see a more meaningful correction in terms of crude oil before we mark look for the next leg higher but certainly bullish crude oil at the moments but looking for a pullback to get in on the long side and watching this internal ascending trend line support as the area of interest copper looking for copper to test a 100 projection at the prior channel that it was trading in here which would have it up at $4.50 and we've got the weekly r3 coming at $4.47 so watch for any move back up into this area to see for a pullback whereby then what I think we'll do is we'll use this prior ascending trend line resistance as support for the next leg higher in terms of copper so that currently comes in just over the $4 mark and I think that will be an opportunity on the long side in terms of copper Bitcoin we've got the pullback um as anticipated from the ascending trend line resistance at the $58,000 level and now whilst we hope whilst we held the ascending trend line support here on a closing basis we pierced the intraday but on a closing basis I think we're set for another leg higher and I think we'll see some volatility some two-way volatility as we ultimately look for a test now of this $63,000 level and then from there I think we could see a more meaningful correction but certainly bullish above $42,000 now with the target at the moment for $62,000 is the view on Bitcoin at the moment. It's interesting as well now that this broadening pattern would play very well here if it's being the top side of the broadening pattern so it could be that once we get down into this area then we have another leg to the upside right so Dolly one again we traded into that weekly trend line support area at the $640 level we've held it again we haven't really had a significant bounce although we have had a couple of closes outside of the major or the primary descending trend line resistance so whilst we hold here I'd be looking for a test of the 650 level and through there then we could we could look for some further consolidation as we try and build out here what would be a inverse head and shoulders scenario before trying to make a more sustained recovery in terms of the Dolly One so you want to keep an eye on the Dolly One in terms of it as a as an Aussie proxy really more than more than you're likely to be trading it itself but this is what I anticipate now some consolidation and a potential for an inverse head and shoulders scenario before moving higher. Dolly Yen has traded nicely within this trend channel that we've been tracking so what I've been looking for now is to move up into the top side 10675 is the level I'd be watching bearish reversal patterns there I think we'll get another pull back back into the 10530s as we try and grind higher to ultimately test this major descending trend line resistance towards 109. SWISSI has come up into its major trend line resistance and we're seeing a bit of supply here we've also got the weekly projected range resistance at the 9070 level so what I'll be looking for now would be a close today back through yesterday's low so 9030 level with an opportunity to play a short down to the 89 18 area and then from there we'll see if buyers step in strongly we could be up testing the weekly sorry the yearly pivot point 9180 but if we hold the trend line again then it could be that we roll over and we see a test back into the the 8870 area but certainly watching the price action today as we test this major trend line looking for a rejection as an opportunity to do something on the short side of the SWISSI dollar CAD is traded into its uh descending or in the internal descending trend line support which could act as a wedge now for the dollar CAD so we want to see this hold on a closing basis so close back above 124.75 there may be a bullish reversal to see a squeeze here in terms of the dollar CAD using this this wedge scenario however if we take out this on a closing basis I think we'll trade the 123 is the is the next target on the downside for the dollar CAD Singapore dollar looking to try and put in a double bottom here we've got some some divergence so want to see a close back through yesterday's high at 132 33 and then maybe we could we'd have an opportunity here to play a double bottom with an initial 133 89 target in terms of the simple dollar euro is trading up into that 122 30 resistance we've got weekly range resistance 122 39 monthly range resistance 122 46 and we have an equality objective versus this swing loam here at 122 30 and we're seeing a bit of a pause here we get flipped to the intraday charts let's see so if we uh if we've got a bearish reversal pattern a bearish reversal set up here on the four hour back through 129 129 90s on a closing basis and that could set up potentially a bit more consolidation in terms of the euro as uh as we work our way back to uh to test support again back down to 120 50 before we get this run up into the 123 50s to pay attention to how we trade this is some decent confident resistance in play here in terms of the the euro and really we'll only get initially oh sorry we'll only get excited about further upside imminently on a close through this 122 50 area so that's certainly this this area we're trading at the moment is is important for the euro and could set up another leg another leg to test a bit lower euro yen i'm looking now for the euro yen to move up into 130 30 watch for bearish reversal patterns here i think we get we get an opportunity to do something on the short side and maybe get a retest of the prior highs here at 127 30 for looking for the next leg higher in terms of the euro yen to the level to watch there is 130 30 euro swiss has had a bit of a breakout here and uh and now what i'd be watching for is a test of 111 50 which is the projected ascending trend line resistance very interesting how price responds there we could uh we could then be getting a bit of a pullback in terms of the euro swiss back into the um prior resistance to active support so we'll be looking at something like this for uh for attempting another leg higher in terms of the euro swiss similar really in scope and scale to what we saw develop here from the loans not be surprised to see that type of move in terms of the euro swiss so watch 111 50 euro sterling has made the target area that i've been watching on the weekly chart so what i'm looking for now is a break of this internal channel here to confirm this 86 area is going to act as support for the euro sterling and we can see a recovery certainly back up into 88 70 and then maybe see how we trade from there but this was the area that i highlighted last week and you can see that a decent bounce from there euro was the down into the projected descending trend line support and it looks like we're trying to carve out a reversal here so i'd be looking for a close back through the 153 70 level set long positions certainly looking for a move up into 155 90 is the area i'd be looking at on the as a target for a long setup sterling dollar into the mid the median point of the of the midpoints area of the channel that it's trading in since the lows back in march last year and a little bit of supply coming in here but certainly now remain bullish above 140 initially would be the area where you'd expect buyers to step back in and ultimately what we'd be driving for would be a test now of this ascending trend line resistance so this covers up trading 147s in terms of sterling now if we don't find support of the 140 area the next level of interest is going to be back at 137 50 which was the prior resistance area but even then that's still an opportunity to to get in on the long side bullish reversal patterns and ultimately we're targeting now a test of this this ascending trend line resistance for sterling sterling yen looking for a test of 151 and i think again from there with sterling yen if we drive up into there i think we can see a pullback certainly to test 147 the support before looking for the next leg higher let's keep an eye on how we trade here 151 70 area it's uh i think it'll be an opportunity to play a pullback in terms of sterling yen sterling swiss into its channel resistance here but i'm watching to see if we can get a bearish reversal pattern here as an opportunity to do something on the short side in terms of sterling swiss i want to be looking for would be a test of this ascending trend line as support and then maybe an attempt to break out to the upside in terms of sterling swiss you really want to see a close certainly back through yesterday's low or back through the the near-term b-wap on 27 to encourage the idea that we're going to see we're going to see a correction here in sterling swiss sterling cad into its range resistance here nice bearish reversal pattern let's bring in this trend line here as whilst we hold that trend line support we can still see a squeeze higher here in terms of sterling cad sterling kiwi i'm looking for a move back into the ascending trend line support third test so looking for 188.50 as an opportunity to do something on the long side ultimately looking for a move up into the yearly pivot there at 197.50 ozzy treading into the monthly r3 weekly range resistance so i think we're going to pull back here in the ozzy the pullback should be shallow and i'm looking for a move into the 78 level i'm watching there for bullish reversal patterns as we get back into the trend line support and set long positions now what i'm looking for is a test of this a third test of this sending trend line resistance and a potential leading diagonal to to end this move or as an interim pullback level from this from this just above the 82 level so the area of interest for me will be long positions from 78 and short positions from 82 ozzy yen nothing for me to do in that one at the moment ozzy cad similarly nothing there the ozzy kiwi we did get eventually got a rejection from this trend line but what i've been watching for now we want to see a breach of the 10680 targeting 105.70 but so this 105.70 looks like the opportunity to do something on the long side retesting the yearly pivot from above watching for bullish reversal patterns here set long positions then targeting up to 109.70 kiwi has broken out and now this is the area of interest for me now with the kiwi just above 75 i think from there we should see some short-term exhaust in the kiwi and i've been looking for a move back to test the 73 level as support and then maybe we build for the next leg of upside what the ultimate target now for the kiwi is going to be this ascending trend line so we're targeting 79 so watch for pullbacks from the 75 uh 75 10 area to use the 73 level of support ultimately then looking for a 79 test kiwi yen just trading into the weekly r3 here no signal is such at the moment but again similarly with the the kiwi i'm looking for a test now these this ascending trend line resistance once we see a pullback and find some support then immediately have a play there kiwi cad just come up into the monthly range resistance potential for a bit of a bit of corrective action here with kiwi cad back down in here before we try and build for the next leg of upside similar story looking for these ascending trend line resistances to be targeted as we find support in these kiwi pairs so it's yen this was one of the trades in the week last week for me got short against this candle here and picked up 140 pips on the downside and we've seen a bullish reversal here um what i've been looking for is whilst we hold this this uh support now at the 116 level looking for uh 119 on the upside as the next opportunity something on the short side in terms of the kiwi swiss cad yen just testing uh projected ascending trend line resistance got the weekly r3 above so i'll be watching for bearish reversal patterns here if we get them and there's an opportunity i think to trade back down into the ascending trend line support at the 82 level before we see another leg to the upside so there's a basically the charts that i'm watching at the moment um there are a bunch of pairs there that you can see that are just sitting out or very close to some pivotal levels as always what i'm watching for is uh from bearish and bullish reversal patterns on the four hour or the daily time frame to to play those levels um so yeah that that pretty much brings me up to speed guys are there any questions you can type an n in the chat box if uh if you don't have a question just so that i know that uh we're all on the same page and uh i can wrap this session up the the 10 seconds here and um i'm gonna close this one out okay well look thank you all very much for your time and i hope this helps and we'll reconvene at the same time next week thanks very much