BJP has actually got two or three objectives the first objective is to maintain the caste hierarchy and to eventually kill the Indian constitution objective number two is to make sure that Indian women are always subservient to Indian men and the third objective is to divide India along religious lines that is basically the goal of the BJP the congress views is diametrically opposed to this we protect the constitution we protect the rights of women and we bring communities and religions together we are a party that defends the rights of poor people farmers laborers small and medium businesses it does not discriminate between caste community religion state and we are a party that understands how to bring harmony to this nation


All right, so let's start. The first talk today is building a multi-cluster privately hosted LLM serving platform on Kubernetes. Our speakers are Noah Yoshida and Julian Brite from Predibase. So thanks a lot. Let's welcome them. Thank you, everyone, and apologies for the slow start. It's not because I'm from Australia. It's just generally a technical issue. But yes, I have arrived just yesterday, actually, from Australia, and it's great to be here. Chicago is a fantastic city. I hope you all have a great time over the course of the next few days. So we're talking about privately hosted LLMs on Kubernetes. We're from Predibase. So I'm a platform engineering manager in Predibase. So we've both been with company pretty much since the early days. We're a startup about two years into our journey, and we're really excited about large language models. And we've built our platform on Kubernetes. So we'll be talking a little bit more today. And Noah will be diving deep on some of those technical challenges and ways we've approached solving some of these. So briefly, I was a bit surprised to see LLMs so small on the topic slide there, because that's all we think and talk about these days. But for those who aren't familiar with LLMs, they stand for large language models. So these started back in the early days of 2012 when the first generative pre-trained transformer model or GPT came out. But since then, there's been a real progression in the last couple of years in particular with GPT-3 from OpenAI leading to chat GPT, which I'm sure you've all heard of. And that really powerful, very large, $175 billion parameter model has made it possible to do some incredible things. So these models are trained on vast amounts of data, but they're also very flexible and very intelligent in terms of what they can do out of the box with what's called a zero-shot mode. So effectively, you provide an input, a prompt, and we can do things like sentiment analysis, transcription, many other text completion tasks, obviously writing pros and other pieces of content. But they're also useful in enterprise contexts, which is where most of our customers are interested. And in fact, using an open source model and being able to fine-tune and present those serving inference insights back to their business is a really critical capability. So what you can see on this slide here is that since those large language models have appeared, we've had a lot of open source investment, particularly models like Meta's Lama and Lama II, which are available in smaller sizes of $713 and $70 billion parameter, but still very powerful. And when you fine-tune these models, what you find is you can get amazing results. So very quickly, in terms of what we do at PrettyBase, we've got a platform that allows you to connect your enterprise data into the platform and then build and train and deploy these models, these large language models. And we do that at scale in your own native cloud, as well as our managed SaaS platform. So in terms of some of the challenges required to sort of meet these expectations of delivering inference, I won't go into them in too much detail, but the tools are complex, right? So you're dealing with often low-level Python programs, typically, when you're talking about fine-tuning these models, it's very easy to run out of memory, particularly when you've got very large models in the order of $13 billion or more, you can often hit these out-of-memory exceptions. And so making sure you do that efficiently can save you a lot of time and cost. And then in terms of serving, even the smaller models, they do require GPU compute. So NVIDIA T10 or A10 or A100s are typically required. So in terms of what we look to do with PrettyBases, we make this easy. So we're providing an open platform for this where you can bring your expertise of your engineering and developer staff and basically just get started through our API and SDK. And in terms of the efficient fine-tuning, we're built on an open source library called ludwik.ai. And that has a lot of flexible capabilities to allow training with things like lower weights, which Noel will talk about a little bit later in the presentation. And finally, in terms of the serving piece, we make it very easy to make this cost-effective by having just in time a sort of serving infrastructure provisioning and also scaling up these and using some of our own technology that we've developed called Loreax. Again, Noel touched on this. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Noel to continue with some more technical details. Thank you. Cool. Thank you, Julian. So one thing Julian didn't mention is at PretiBase, we pretty much only have about, everyone came into PretiBase with almost no Kubernetes experience. So this has been quite a journey for us. And I think it really speaks to the power of open source and Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies that we're able to do all of this with a pretty small team. Yep, so from now on, I'm gonna be talking about specifically the LLM serving portion of PretiBase, some of the challenges that we've encountered while building it out and how we've kind of navigated those. So once we started building this platform, there were about three kind of like big challenges that we faced. The first was GPU availability and then GPU cost and finally privacy. So despite there being many breakthroughs in fine-tuning and serving technology for serving and fine-tuning on commodity hardware, there's still a lot of limitations around what you can do unless you have a lot of GPU memory. So currently the standard for doing all this work with large language models is the NVIDIA A100, which is quite difficult to find at the moment if you've ever tried to acquire them in AWS or Azure. And even if you do manage to get them, they can be quite expensive. Finally, a lot of customers that we've talked to care a lot about having their models and training data remain in their control. So they're not comfortable sending off all this like proprietary data and they're like very important models off, to be trained and someone else's cloud, they really want that to all remain kind of in their private VPC and their account. So building around these challenges and kind of overcoming them was our main goal at PrettyBase when building our LLM serving platform. So the PrettyBase serving stack can be broken down into several distinct layers, the first of which is our multi-cluster service mesh, which I'll talk about. So why multi-cluster first of all? So the first reason, as I alluded to earlier, is that customers care about privacy. So building PrettyBase with a multi-cluster service mesh has allowed us to deploy data plane components where the serving and fine tuning happens into the customer VPC so that they remain in control of their data. It's also allowed us to deploy into environments where we can find cheap and available GPUs, such as dedicated GPU clouds or on-prem providers. And then finally, using a service mesh, this is a little, I won't talk about this too much, but it has allowed us to scale our platform a lot more because now we don't have to deploy the control plane and data plane at the same time, we can kind of deploy independent data planes for each customer all managed by a single control plane. So here's a kind of high level view of the PrettyBase architecture. So it consists of multiple Kubernetes clusters all registered into the same Istio service mesh. So each data plane for a customer, if they choose to deploy like this, lives in their VPC and their cloud account. And all of these cloud accounts as well have blob storage provision. So that's where like model artifacts will go. And that has allowed us to kind of alleviate some of the concerns with data governance. Also, if customers are okay with us hosting their compute, they can register to the PrettyBase kind of AI cloud platform. So what this is is compute managed by us, where we have multiple Kubernetes clusters spread out between both the public cloud and dedicated on-prem GPU clouds. So when customers are able to queue, when they queue up jobs for fine tuning or serving, we can reroute the job based on some heuristics to either the public cloud or the on-prem cloud based on if they need A100s essentially. And using Istio and kind of this like multi-cluster deployment has allowed us to really alleviate both the GPU availability and the cost restriction as well as the kind of privacy concerns. And going a bit more into that privacy part, for those maybe familiar with Istio, this might be a little bit familiar, but for those who aren't with Istio, we were allowed to configure authorization policies and what we have is a kind of centrally managed Istio control plane that allows us to manage all of this locally, not in the customer data planes so that we can restrict communication between customer deployments. So next going a bit deeper is serverless inference. So first of all, why would we want serverless inference at PrettyBase? So the two main reasons, as you could probably guess, are cost and traffic. So as I mentioned earlier, GPUs are quite expensive. Even if you can find them, A100s aren't cheap. So we really don't want to be running models that aren't serving traffic. So this is both for us and for the customers because if they are deploying the data plane into their account, they're gonna be paying for all the compute. Finally, we also do want to be able to scale up traffic, scale up the models as traffic increases because LL models can be quite bursty with people wanting to do a bunch of experimentation at one time and then kind of forgetting about it and kind of turning it off after a while. So this is kind of a little bit more of a detailed look at a PrettyBase control plane and data plane. So this will kind of help us understand a bit more about how we first developed LL and serving at PrettyBase. So remember, of course, there are multiple data planes, but here's just pictured one. And I'll kind of go a bit into how we initially created LLM serving. So first, when customers would want to provision LLM, the request would come in through our SDO and Gress Gateway and the control plane. It would just kind of go through our API gateway for authentication and then go to our workflow orchestrator where we would kick off an asynchronous workflow which gets picked up by the PrettyBase agent which lives in the data plane. So side note, this is all kind of application level, workflow management. This isn't using any kind of Kubernetes stuff in case you're wondering. But the reason why we do this is we want to have some work executed on the data plane where we want to talk to the Kubernetes API server. So generally we weren't comfortable giving API server access kind of out universally to all these data planes. So instead, the PrettyBase agent kind of takes care of creating deployments and whatnot on the cluster. So once the PrettyBase agent gets the request to provision an LLM, it will create the deployment and then the weights for that model will be downloaded from that data plane's model store. So this blob storage is also in that customer's account or that VPC's account. And then finally, during LLM inference, the request will come in through the gateway which will get authenticated and routed to the LLM in the data plane via an Istio virtual service. So this is all well and good, but let's actually look at what we have to do to make this serverless, because right now this is pretty bare bones, doesn't auto scale or do any of that. So what we did to kind of introduce auto scaling and serverless into this LLM serving was using KETA. So KETA stands for the Kubernetes event driven autoscaler. So it's a project that allows you to scale Kubernetes deployments based on a variety of metrics or events in the cluster. So in our case, we are using the HTTP plugin. So this allows us to scale up and down the deployment based on the number of incoming requests, although we are looking at a variety of different scaling options for different needs. So looking a bit more into what provisioning looks like with KETA. So instead of just creating the LLM service and deployment like one might do in pretty standard Kubernetes environment, instead we also create the HTTP scaled object, which is a custom resource for KETA. So what this does is it kind of configures that deployment, the LLM deployment to either scale up or down based on certain parameters that you can specify in this object. And of course this is managed by KETA. And this does let us scale down to zero or scale up past one and beyond. So let's first imagine that we have an LLM deployment that has been provisioned, but it hasn't received traffic in some time. So KETA has scaled it down to zero. So when a request would come in, it'll come into our Istio gateway into the data plane, and then it'll get routed to the KETA proxy. So this routing is actually kind of dynamic. We can configure it with Istio virtual services, which we do. And once the proxy receives the request, it will talk to the KETA controller. So the KETA controller will then look at the HTTP scaled object, determine if the deployment is ready to receive request, or if there are too many in the queue and it needs to scale up more than one pod. And once it does determine all this stuff, it will then try to scale up the LLM. So while the scaling is happening, the proxy actually holds on to requests. So then once the LLM is scaled up, the proxy will send the request along the normal path, so through the Kubernetes service to the deployment, and then, yeah, on to the iPods. So this is kind of how inference happens. So this is pretty cool. It makes it a fairly serverless experience. You can query an LLM that hasn't been used for a while and might have been scaled down, and you'll get a response back, but unfortunately, the scaling is quite difficult. So scaling an LLM up from zero, we found was very bad performance-wise. So it would take anywhere from like 15 to 20 minutes to scale up, which obviously is not serverless experience at all. The request would time out, you'd have to wait a while. The problem here is that we're not only scaling the pods, but we're also scaling nodes. So pretty much a party base for LLMs, we only have one pod running on a dedicated node, and the reason for that is essentially, the LLM needs to use a lot of GPU memory, so it's pretty much gonna use the entire GPU on the node, so it doesn't really make sense to run a lot of other stuff there. Also these nodes are very expensive, so the whole point of auto-scaling was to save money. So we don't want them sitting around for a really long time because that's incurring costs, either on our side or on the customer side. So this introduces us into the next layer, which is cold start optimizations. So as mentioned earlier, it's very difficult to scale these LLMs up, and two of the reasons are the containers are large and the LLM model weights are even larger. And of course we do have to acquire the node into the cluster, but that's kind of like a different set of problems. So the LLM containers are quite large because they have to be shipped with things like CUDA and custom kernels to actually serve the LLMs. We've done many different things to try to slim down our container images, but they're still in the many gigabytes of size. And the second problem, which is the LLMs, being quite large for those who are familiar, things like Lama 2.70 billion are about 150 gigs on disk, so we have to download all of those weights and then load them up into the GPU, so that can take some time as well. So I'm gonna split this up into two different sections, so first will be the kind of container download optimizations. So after a lot of trial and error, we ended up landing on a service called Spiegel. Well, an open source project called Spiegel, I should say. So what Spiegel is, is an in the cluster container registry mirror. So what that means is essentially it will mirror a container registry that's external to the cluster, but inside of it. And Spiegel, so I'll talk a little bit about how this works, but first it runs as like a daemon set on all of the nodes. And what it does is when a pod is started on a node in Kubernetes, of course the image for the pod will attempt to be downloaded onto the node. And this download happens layer by layer, doesn't just happen all at once. So what Spiegel does is it modifies the container desettings on the node to instead of going to the default registry first, it'll actually go to Spiegel when we try to download a layer. And what Spiegel will do is ask all of the other, kind of like Spiegel pods in the cluster, if any of those nodes that they're living on has the layer that we're looking for. And if the layers are found in the registry, they will be downloaded from the nodes in the cluster rather than going outside to the external registry. So we found this dramatically speeds up the download process. Of course, if a layer is not found, it will have to go out and download from the remote registry, but of course this layer is now in the cluster, so any other pod that needs this layer to start up will be able to download it from inside of the cluster. And another side note is this does require container D to be the image or the container runtime in Kubernetes, but we found most of the cloud providers switched over from Docker, so this hasn't been an issue for us. So overall, after adding Spiegel with very minimal configurations, we saw a pretty dramatic decrease in container download time. So for our larger GPU images, this went from about eight minutes down to four. So this was quite literally with very, very few configurations and it was pretty plug-and-play which is why we ended up using this as opposed to some other things we tried. So next, a little bit more LLM specific, we'll talk about weight download optimizations. So before adding anything, the weight download process of PretyBase looked like this. So when the LLM server would start up, we would download the base model if it wasn't from Huggingface, from Huggingface Hub, of course we do support a few other sources as well. But once we download the weights, which could take anywhere from like one to 15 minutes depending on how large the model was, we would have to convert the weights into the safe tensor format if they weren't in that format already. So that would take on the order of several minutes. Once they're converted, then we can start up the LLM and start serving traffic. To kind of fix this issue, because that was quite a bit of time, we added three things. So an init container, a shared storage volume between init container and the main server and a private cache in the data plane's blob storage. So first when the cache is cold, obviously we're just gonna have to do what we did before, so which is just download the weights. But instead this is taking place in the init container. So the init container will handle converting the weights to safe tensor format and then it will push the weights to the cache. Of course once they're in the cache, we don't have to do this again, so this only needs to happen once per data plane for any specific LLM. And also the safe tensor weights are mounted to the shared storage volume, so they're accessible for both the init container and the main serving container. So once the cache is warmed up, whenever we start an LLM in the data plane, we're able to download the weights from this cache. Now we were actually able to find a pretty fast way to do this at least in S3, which is using the S3 CRT library. So what this is is a set of many of the AWS APIs written in C and it's available in most of the SDKs as well as the CLI. So by enabling this, we're able to do multi-threaded downloads, which is a lot faster. And so for an example, for something like LLMA 213 billion, which is about 26 to 30 gigs uncompressed, we were able to download the weights in less than a minute when before it took about like five minutes. And of course we're able to do this as well because the nodes that these LLMs are running have very fast networking and a lot of CPU, a lot of memory because they're kind of high-performance nodes for GPU workloads. And of course if by chance we do serve multiple LLMs on a single node, these weights are kind of cached onto that node, so we're able to just start up the LLM almost instantly. So here's kind of like a timeline look at what serving was beforehand. So as you can see, it took quite a bit of time, everything, all the way from acquiring the node to converting the weights we had to do, which took several minutes. But after all these optimizations, we were able to get the container download down to about like four minutes and then the weight download to under a minute for the warm cache scenario. And of course there's no conversion that needs to happen either. So another kind of side note is that a lot of this is now acquiring the node and downloading the container, which can all be erased if you don't auto-skill your nodes. But again, we're coming from a perspective of we have deployments and customer clouds and in our cloud as well, and we don't want to keep nodes around for very long because they incur a lot of cost. Finally, we do have one more optimization we've done around LLM serving, which is something Julian kind of alluded to, which is called LORAX. It's more of an application optimization, so I'm gonna go off of Kubernetes a bit right here, but I figured it would be very interesting for everyone here. So when you fine-tune a model at PretyBase, you can fine-tune using a method called LORA. So for those who are not familiar, the LORA method for fine-tuning is you create a very small kind of subset of weights that you're actually fine-tuning instead of all of the weights in the model. And when you use these weights for inference, when you wanna do inference on this fine-tune model, you load in these LORA weights and kind of add them to the base model. So actually, you have kind of two distinct things. You have the LORA weights, which are called the LORA adapter, and then the base model. So at PretyBase, we created a system that kind of lets you dynamically load in these LORA weights at inference time. Because they're so small, this does not incur a whole lot of latency. So what you can do is instead of deploying a whole fine-tune model every time you wanna query it, you can just have a base model and then specify the adapter you want at query time. So we've seen about 200 milliseconds of latency here for model sync weighting. And of course, this can handle concurrent requests as well. So if you have multiple users or multiple models you want to get inference from, you can send the query to the same base model, but with different adapters in each request. And then these adapters are loaded while in the model and they can be loaded while other requests are happening at once. So we can kind of squish things together and increase the throughput here. Yeah, so that is kind of a very brief, but I'd say pretty thorough look at all the serving happening at PretyBase, all the cloud native and a little bit of specialized machine learning optimizations we've done around making serving work. So yeah, thank you. And if you wanna learn more about LORAx, I linked a post about it here in this slide as well. As if you wanna connect with me and Julian, those are linked ends. And there's a few of us here from PretyBase. So if you see us around, we love to chat. So we can talk about anything from LLINs, AI stuff, all the way to every kind of Kubernetes thing we've done because we've done a lot more than what was mentioned here. So thank you.


Hello, I'm Julie Pashie, potato pathologist at NDSU. Thank you for your time and attention today. Also, thanks to Andy Robinson for putting together this series of presentations. Andy has asked me to talk about the emergence and prevalence of potato mop top virus. Potato mop top virus is present in many potato growing countries around the world. It's been a serious problem in Europe for decades. Studies that were conducted in 2001 and 2002 in the US and Canada looked at about 3,000 seed lots and found that approximately 4% of them were positive for PMTV. Unfortunately, in this study, no province or state distribution data was presented. So at that time, we did not know where the pathogen was. Another interesting finding with this study was that they looked at the virus strains in the US and Canada and compared those, found that they were 100% similar to each other and then compared the North American strains to European strains and found that they were 97% similar. This is important because when we look at things like genetic resistance and other control measures, we know that we're dealing kind of with the same pathogen population. PMTV has been officially reported in seven states in the US, starting with Maine in 2003. In addition to that, it has been recently detected in a couple of other states, but these have not been officially reported. PMTV has a complex genome with three parts, but not all plant tissues may contain the completely assembled virus particle. The incomplete virus particle may still be infectious and capable of movement in the plant, but they might not cause symptoms or be moved to all tubers or stems. This is important because when we look at detecting the virus, one tuber may test negative, but other tubers produced by that same plant may be infected. PMTV can cause foliar symptoms including stunting, modeling, chevrons, and yellow blotches or rings, but these are only rarely seen in the field. Foliar symptoms occur from seed infections. They do not develop from soil-borne infections. These foliar symptoms can be easily confused with those induced by alfalfa mosaic virus and typically occur on lower leaves. Once ground cover is achieved, these leaves senesce due to lack of sunlight. Therefore, they essentially disappear as the season progresses. Little is known about differences in foliar symptomatology among cultivars. PMTV does not typically reduce yield. What is most important is the reduction in tuber quality caused by internal tuber necrosis. Typical symptoms of PMTV tuber necrosis are shown in the lower right-hand photo. These include internal rust-brown arcs, rings, or flecks. They may be single or concentric arcs, and these may sometimes appear on the tuber surface. PMTV symptoms can be confused with symptoms of other tuber necrosis viruses. PVY in the upper left-hand corner produces raised dark brown or redden rings on the surface that can progress into sunken necrotic areas. Necrosis may extend into the tuber flash. Tomato spotted wilt symptoms in the upper right can include rings or general discolored areas on the tuber surface or flash. What are most commonly confused with PMTV tuber necrosis are symptoms caused by TRV. Tuber necrosis symptoms caused by tobacco rattle virus appear as rust-brown arcs, concentric rings, or extensive browning of the tuber tissue as seen in the photo on the lower left. TRV may also produce concentric rings or arcs externally. I'm in a lab today with Obseda Malik. Hello. Obseda's a molecular diagnostician. She has developed and runs molecular diagnostics for petal pathogens for several years. Obseda received samples from growers and based on the rower recommendations, as well as the symptoms she's seeing, she determines what assays should be run to diagnose the problem. Obseda will go through for you today. The difficulties in discerning symptoms between a potato mocktop induced tuber necrosis and tobacco rattle induced tuber necrosis. The tobacco rattle virus is vectored by nematodes. Here we can see the tobacco rattle virus symptoms in tuber can range from necrotic spots to arcs. In this tuber, for example, we see kind of spots and here it's kind of a necrotic arc. Sometimes the tubers can be totally asymptomatic, meaning that they are not showing any symptoms. On the other hand, the PMTV, which is vectored by powdery scap pathogen, sponges porous subterinia, produces the characteristic necrotic arcs. Sometimes the arcs are not fully formed and ends up looking like the necrotic spots, just like the TRV symptoms. Hence, you can see like this are so similar that they are caused by different pathogens. This one is tobacco rattle virus and this is the potato mocktop virus. Hence, it's very important after visual diagnosis, we need to confirm the pathogen by PCR that's caused for molecular diagnosis. PMTV is a complex pathogen, so I just want to talk a little bit about some plant pathology. On the right hand side, we have what we call our disease triangle. We have the pathogen interacting with the environment and in this case, you know, any production practices or the soil environment because that's where PMTV resides as well as the host, including the potato cultivars that you grow. With PMTV, we have to add a fourth side to make a pyramid, if you will. And that is for the vector, Spongospora subterrania. Spongospora is important in its own right because it is the causal agent of powdery scab. Powdery scab gets its name from those scabby sort of irrompant lesions that you see in the tuber in the top photo. The pathogen also infects roots forming the galls that you see in the lower photo. This pathogen can survive as resting spores in the soil for more than 10 years. These release swimming zoa spores, which cause further infections. And this pathogen is found generally wherever potatoes are grown. Powdery scab. It's caused by Spongospora subterrania. Tubers infected with powdery scab develop small pistules to begin with, which eventually becomes raised and walked like and ruptured the tuber peritone. The pathogen produces resting spore aggregates known as spore balls. The powdery scab lesions on tubers can sometimes look like common scab as it's evident here. And hence must be verified and confirmed with molecular diagnostic procedure like PCR. Let's take a look at the disease cycle of powdery scab. Starting the lower left-hand corner, you see those are rumpet lesions on the tubers as well as the galls on the roots. What's inside there are those resting spores that the arrows are pointing to. Those resting spores release primary zoa spores that swim through the soil water profile. They infect the tubers, they infect roots, but then they also release secondary zoa spores that can be released and cause further infections as the growing season goes on when the soil environment is conducive. That favorable environment includes cool moist soils, especially high soil moisture during tuberization. These conditions favor the pathogen and can increase disease severity. Powdery scab has increased in importance, partly because of global potato markets and banning of mercury seed treatments, but the importance of powdery scab has also increased due to what it vectors, PMTV. These pathogens, both Spongospora as well as PMTV, spread with tubers and soil. Anytime soil is adhering to tubers that are being moved, any machinery that is being moved, wind-blown soil, these are all important means by which the pathogen moves from field to field. As I indicated earlier, powdery scab is really spread throughout the potato growing regions. These graphs represent the distribution by state. The numbers and parentheses at the bottom are the number of fields from each state that were evaluated. On the left-hand side, you can see that in most states, greater than 50% of the fields are infested with the powdery scab pathogen. On the right-hand side, shows the level of infection of each field, the level of pathogen in the soil, where the green bars are low and the yellow bars are moderate. And here, really in most states, more than 40% of the fields have that moderate level of infestation. Effective management strategies for these two pathogens are extremely limited. Therefore, if your fields are clean, you really need to work hard to keep it that way. Plant clean seed into clean soil. PCR assays are available for both of these pathogens and are effective for testing both soil and tubers. Do not spread soil from infested fields. If the soil is infested with spungospora, that means that it has those resting structures in it and those resting structures may be carrying the virus. Russet skin cultivars are generally more resistant to tuber postules than red and white skin cultivars. It is important to note that research has shown that insensitivity to PMTV tuber necrosis is not necessarily associated with resistance to pottery scab. As indicated earlier, pottery scab produces tuber postules and root galls. On this table, tuber reaction is on the left-hand side, resistance at the top, and susceptible as you move down. Root gall reaction is across the top. If we start in the top left, these russet skin cultivars are generally more resistant to both the formation of tuber postules and root galls. As we move diagonally, right and down, susceptibility increases, where ivory, crisp, cannebec, and chepatee are susceptible. But I really want to call your attention to those cultivars in the upper right-hand corner. Some cultivars, including Russet Burbank, Umatilla Russet, Snowden, are resistant to the tuber phase, so you may not see postules on the tuber surface, but they produce root galls. These root galls are important because they contain the pathogen-rusting structures. And so if you remember back to the disease cycle, those root galls contain resting structures, which might not be important to the potato crop that you're currently growing, but the next time that you grow potatoes in that field, there will be a higher pathogen population and higher disease pressure. As I mentioned earlier, there are not a lot of effective management tactics for these pathogens. But one of the things we can do is reduce soil moisture, especially during tuberization. And we know that low soil moisture during the early part of the growing season will increase common scab, but that should not overlap with this management tactic. These are results from studies designed to demonstrate that effectiveness of reducing soil moisture. Here we're looking at pottery scab incidents on the left and severity on the right. There are four treatments. They compare wet, which is 90% field capacity and dry, which is 60% field capacity. And we have dry early, and early indicates the first 50 days, and late indicates the second 50 days. Where you see bars with different letters, we have statistical differences. And so with pottery scab incidents on the left-hand side, we see that the treatment where we have dry late and dry throughout the entire 100-day time frame have significantly decreased pottery scab incidents. On the right-hand side is showing pottery scab severity. And again, we have lower pottery scab severity when we have dry late or dry throughout the growing period. These are results from that same study, but results of root gauze per plant. We have two varieties here, Dakota Crisp that's resistant to pottery scab and Ivory Crisp that's susceptible to pottery scab. We see basically the same trends where reduction in soil moisture is reducing the severity of the disease. Here, dry early tends to be a little bit better than dry late, but if we think about when roots are formed versus when tubers are formed, that really does make some sense. These graphs demonstrate the results of the same study where they evaluated PMTV tuber necrosis incidents and severity, those dark flax rings and arcs in the tuber flesh. We have the same treatments, wet versus dry, early versus late. We see the same trends as we did with pottery scab and root gauze, where decreased soil moisture is associated with decreasing tuber necrosis incidents and severity. These trials were done under controlled conditions but similar trials have been done that demonstrate the same outcome that managing soil moisture can help to reduce economic losses due to tuber necrosis. Generally, all cultivars are susceptible to infection by PMTV, but there are either sensitive or insensitive to PMTV tuber necrosis. A second management tactic is to plant cultivars insensitive to PMTV induced tuber necrosis. The pathogen can still be spread in these insensitive cultivars, but they will not develop the dark spots and arcs and rings, and therefore you will not suffer the economic losses. A study was conducted across two years to evaluate PMTV induced tuber necrosis over cultivars from several tuber types. They evaluated 15 white, 13 red, 6 specialty, and 4 yellow cultivars. The table here is representing 21 cultivars among those that were insensitive to PMTV tuber necrosis, which here means that 5% less than 5% incidence was observed in those cultivars, so less than 5% of the tubers produced by each of these cultivars had those dark necrotic spots or arcs. These are results from that same trial evaluating non-resid cultivars, but here we have starting at the left 7 cultivars that were rated as moderately insensitive to tuber necrosis, so tubers produced by these cultivars were either between 5% and 10% incidence of tuber necrosis. In the next column we have moderately sensitive between 10% and 15% incidence, and on the right-hand side, 6 cultivars that were sensitive to tuber necrosis, greater than 15% incidence. Here are the results of the 24 russet skin cultivars evaluated for PMTV tuber necrosis during those same experiments. Among them, 23 were insensitive to tuber necrosis, or less than 5% of the tubers produced by each cultivar developed symptoms. One cultivar, alpine russet, was moderately insensitive. Again, these cultivars are not resistant to infection by the virus. They do not produce symptoms, therefore you do not suffer chronic losses. It is also important to note with the russet cultivars, as well as with the red, white, yellow, and specially cultivars shown in the previous two tables, evaluations were conducted after 20 and 60 days in storage. The reason that I mentioned that is that we know that limiting storage duration in cultivars that are sensitive to the tuber necrosis will help limit the amount of tuber necrosis that develops. These results are from that same study where they evaluated the incidence of PMTV induced tuber necrosis, but I want to draw your attention to what happens over time during storage. As I indicated, limiting storage duration can help limit the development of PMTV tuber necrosis. On the left hand side are the results from 20 days in storage, where the dark green bars show cultivars that are insensitive, broken down by red, white, specialty, russet, and yellow, with the number and parentheses on the bottom indicating the number of cultivars of each type evaluated. As we move to the left, these results are from evaluations done at 119 days in storage. It is very evident here that with increasing storage duration you move from insensitive to sensitive as represented by the light green and gray bars. This is particularly true in red, white, and specialty cultivars. In the second year of that study they performed the same evaluations, but did it at 60 days in storage and at 156 days in storage. Again, the dark green bars are showing the percentage of cultivars that are insensitive to that tuber necrosis stage. But even after 60 days in storage we can see that with red skin cultivars many of them are moving into that sensitive category, where greater than 15% of the tubers produced show that internal necrosis. When we look at 156 days in storage we can see that shift to sensitive is even more dramatic, particularly with the red skin cultivars where approximately 75% of them are sensitive or are producing tubers with greater than 15% incidence tuber necrosis. This is also true with white specialty and yellow cultivars and russet cultivars to some degree, but the swing is not as drastic. Again, these results are from the same study, but I wanted to show them to you in a little different way. We are looking at tuber necrosis caused by PMTV, but this is an average of the cultivars within each skin type. On the left, for example, with the 13 red cultivars, the average tuber necrosis incidence at 20 and 119 days in storage is less than 10%. There is a slight increase with storage duration, but really that increase is much more dramatic when we look at the 2016 data on the right. Here, we are going from 60 to 156 days in storage. And again, for example, in the red cultivars, there is an increase from approximately 13% to nearly 30%. More than doubling the incidence of tuber necrosis during that time in storage. There are other studies that show similar results as these. They all highlight the need to understand the cultivar reaction to the virus to be able to effectively manage storage duration in cultivars sensitive to PMTV-induced tuber necrosis. I just want to summarize what we've talked about today. Certainly, PMTV is an emerging pathogen potatoes, and we know that it's in at least seven potato producing states in the US. Disease management strategies are limited for both the puttery scab pathogen and for PMTV. And I can't stress enough, if your soil is clean, you really want to keep it that way. Seed and soil tests are available for both of these pathogens, but there are no current seed certification standards in place in the United States. I want to reiterate, PMTV, the virus, moves with its vector spongospora subtrania. The vector spongospora moves with soil via those resting spores. So, anytime you move infected seed or infested soil, you're moving these pathogens with them. So, anything that you can do to limit the spread of infested soil is very, very important in the management of these diseases. Also, as we talked about, we can manage moisture where possible, and especially as those studies showed during the tubarization phase. Also, I think I demonstrated that understanding the cult of our reaction to both of these pathogens can be very important. We can plant cult of ours that are insensitive to that tuber necrosis phase in infested fields. Certainly, we're not managing the virus there, but we are managing the economic losses, which really at this point is all we can do. We can limit storage duration in cultivars that we know are sensitive to that tuber necrosis phase as well. Thank you for your time and attention today. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have or I can answer those questions at a later date. Please just contact me at the information provided. Thank you.


Okay, so you guys can see and hopefully here I am transmitting from my phone which we do often at toward the end of the month because of the internet issues that I've had in the past. Unfortunately this means that I cannot put the live chat on the screen but I should be able to see it so hello coffee and shame. Hello Matt and hello Evan. How do you do? Hello MCDJACDC. Hello Peter Ang. Hello Genesis and Cobra Island. Hello maybe a little bit more difficult for me to see the live chat but I'm gonna do my best to keep up with it. Hello Jeff and Josiah and James and Terry. How's everybody going? Hello Nyquist and I missed that name but hello to you and Glenn and Jump in General and Dungeon and Veronica. How do you do? Hello Jack. How is everybody?  Hello Bloody Card. How do you do? I have stuff to talk about. I have stuff.  Hello Mr. Grunge and Mike. Mr. Grunge says hi from the UK. Hello UK from the United States. I'm good. I'm the hell good at Cobra Island. Thanks for asking. Hello Loki and well you guys are going fast. I saw Sergeant Slaughter's Slaughterhouse. I was on that show recently. How do you do? Hello Rebel Dad and wow I really can't read can I? Well I am freaking blind. Hello Lester and Matt and name started with the K and Rodimus and I think I already said hello to Evan but hello again but thanks thanks for being here. This is awesome. Looks like we got 50 people in here so far that's groovy that's groovy. I don't have like new G.I. Joe stuff to show you but you know I I showed this off I think last time. Oh yeah I forgot that the image is mirrored. The image is mirrored. Sorry about that. So I got this bizarro world G.I. Joe comic. I can talk about that a little bit but we have stuff to discuss. We have stuff to discuss. Let's see the most recent video was Annihilator so I hope you watched that. I hope you enjoyed it. Hello Dendo and yeah these are not bad. I've got the first couple issues here. Thanks to Chris from Comic Tropes for sending those. That was pretty awesome. So yes we have we have stuff to talk about. Most recent episode was Annihilator so we got back to the Iron Grenadiers. Haven't done that for a little while. Oh it's not mirrored for you. Hey that's nice. So this is the right direction for you. It's only mirrored for me. That's great. Hello Jenna. Nice to see you. Hello Woodman. But then why is it got to be mirrored for me? Technology for you. So yes Annihilator. Yes I also like me some Iron Grenadiers. The Annihilator is one that is maybe not not high on my favorites list but I really wanted to do that one. I really I don't mind doing across my eyes. Good idea. I really don't mind doing reviews of figures and vehicles that I don't like just because I don't it's not one that is one of my favorites. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy doing the review. It still can be fun. Hello Vagon. Nice to see you. Hello the Killer Weezer. It's in my settings. I'll have to dive into the settings later but we're live now. We're live. So yeah it's like don't don't don't miss it. Hello Wilkinson Studios. Don't mistake like a review of something that is not one of my favorites for a review that I don't enjoy doing. Sometimes sometimes it can be even more fun to review something that is not something that I like. So you know I I get a lot of enjoyment out of it either way. Hello Garcia. Thanks for being here. Hello Dendo Star. I'm not sure if I said hello to you but if I didn't hello. How do you do? So yes also an eye later in Black, Red and Gold. I see this is going too fast. Yes a different color scheme would have helped. It would have helped. It would not have helped that helmet. The helmet not only being long was also flat. So you'd have to have a head that's about about that tall and then and then it sticks out about that far. It doesn't quite work but but different colors definitely would have helped definitely would have helped. So yeah yeah Tuesday. Today is also Tuesday. That means there is a new episode of Half the Battle with Timmer. He is doing main character May. Which means that he covers a main character through the entire month of May. This month it is Destro. So make sure you check out the latest Destro video from Half the Battle. I'm a fan of Timmer and plus Timmer is a friend and I just really like the guy so you know do support him if if you are so inclined. I I always watch his stuff and I always try to keep up on it. So that's the big thing for Tuesday. We've got stuff. We have got stuff to talk about. Let's go. Yeah we have got a hello comma tropes. Thanks for being here.  Nice to see you. Hello get JK Siege. Yes hate mail. I have hate mail to talk about it. I am going to. Yes that is the topic. I have hate mail to talk about. It's potentially hilarious. Hello Rob Vegas. How do you do? It's it's potentially hilarious but I can't read it to you actually because of this channel's very strict no drama policy. This channel has a no drama policy that I've talked about before but we haven't talked about it for quite some time. So even though I have no intention of giving people the extra attention that they are seeking by reaching out in certain ways it is still a good opportunity. Hey there's Sparkster. Hello Sparkster. It is still a good. Oh thank you the killer weasel. The helmet kind of reminded me of the airwolf helmets. At least you aren't scared of orange. Yes I'm not terrified of orange. That Timmerer has has a bit of an issue with orange. Yeah yes comic tropes. I am going to get to that. I am. It's a good opportunity to discuss this channel's policy about drama and about negativity and how how we handle that. So we're going to use this as an opportunity to to bring everybody up to speed on something that we don't talk about very often because we don't have to. We don't have to talk about it very often because it's not something we deal with very often. So yeah I'm going to get to that here in just a minute. I just want to make sure that we we greet everybody and say hello and hello to Thane Woods. How do you do? He just sold all his Joes. That is a sad day. But you know what? You can still be a fan. You don't have to have the plastic to be a fan. That's life happens. Life happens. No no trouble. I understand. I understand and I sympathize. So yeah have you had clashes with people because of your two different channels? No not exactly. Not exactly. There have been people and other channels that have attempted to have clashes with me but I don't play along. That is not something that I do. Hey there's JLS Comics. Hello JLS Comics. I think I said hello to James but if not hello. WWJD85. Hello how do you do? Robert Long. How do you do sir? And anybody else that I missed. I try to say hello to everybody but sometimes you guys go fast and I miss it. So sorry about that. So let's start. Let's start. Hello JP. I know that I will I won't be able to follow the live chat quite as well as I normally do when I monologue. Hello Henry. How do you do? When I monologue I have a harder time you know keeping up with the live chat but this is a good opportunity and oh thank you for the super chat and the your number one. Thank you Comic Trove. I think you're probably closer to number one than I am. I'm probably a number two. Some people think I'm a number two and you know what that's okay that they are entitled to their opinion. This is not going to be a negative live stream. We're not going to be a downer but it is important to cover these topics from time to time just so everybody understands how we do things around here and so that we're all on the same page. So yeah for those let's start with the the I know actually let's start with the letter. So if you watch my PO box unboxing the donation unboxing video I do it once a month if I get something if I don't get anything that's okay. I don't I don't ask for anything and as I've said before if if you ever feel that if you have any reservations about sending anything then I'd rather you not send it but I do have the PO box open for an opportunity for people to send stuff if they'd like to and I show my appreciation and I like to say thanks. It's something that a lot of channels on YouTube do. It's pretty common and I've seen a few channels that do it and are less than gracious about it and I'm not a fan of that. I feel like if somebody wants to send something to a YouTube channel the person running that channel should have some appreciation for that. That person didn't have to send that thing so say thanks say thanks. At least that's my view of the matter. Anyway so on the last one who we got here I'm sorry um hello Corey uh and um uh core and I'm core commander Cody uh and uh I think uh yes hello killer weezer uh and thank you thank you comic tropes. So in the last one uh somebody sent a prank uh package envelope from a website called smellmythong.com and it's obviously a prank it's obviously a joke but I like to play along with these things because it's amusing you can have some fun with this so I opened it I had a bit of a laugh but apparently the person who's sent it sent it expected me to be offended by it because I was apparently I was supposed to be upset. I don't know why the person would think that I would be upset uh it's just a bit of fun you know it didn't bother me why would it um but so but since I wasn't upset uh the person who sent it followed up with a letter that I that I picked up from the PO box a couple days ago uh it is it is this letter uh it is not a letter that I'm going to read to you uh I'm going to give this letter all of the uh all of the attention that it deserves which is is not very much I will I will do with uh this letter what what what is what it deserves which is which is just dispose of it um and this is something that you will discover if you ever decide to create anything on youtube or elsewhere um the yeah I this is the way I put it you never know how much you are hated uh until you try to create something if you try to create something the you will be amazed at how many people uh come out of the woodwork just for the purpose of of hating you um and so if you're if you're going to do that you kind of have to be prepared for that it just it just happens it's um it's strange uh it's people go to such lengths to express their hatred that um it's just beyond what any normal well-adjusted person would do it's it's odd it's odd um but you just you kind of have to expect it it will happen um but there is I think also a hope that you will by doing these things you will grab the attention of the person doing the creating that uh that that you've got the attention of that that person that's on the screen and um and that is not something that I can do and that's why that's why I can't even though it would be it would be amusing to read this letter it's uh it's kind of silly um in it's in it's um the effort that it makes but I can't read it to you because I'm not going to give uh people who do that more attention than they deserve they don't it only encourages more and I know there are some channels that take that approach that take kind of a uh a confrontational approach to people who do that but that's that's not me I don't do that I have a no drama policy and that policy has been tested on more than one occasion um there have been people who have attempted to bring drama here and um drama can get views there are people who sign on to this website for the purpose of watching the drama they they get a lot of amusement out of it um and I don't control what anybody else does with their channel um but that's not what I'm here for if that's what you're here for you may have come to the wrong place but that's not what I'm here for so um I just I just don't play along and what that means is um regardless of the tactic that's used to bring drama to this channel um I will not respond I may someday in the future somebody may try to accuse me of something uh somebody try may try to scandalize me in some way uh to such an extent that uh people who know me may be encouraging me to respond you've got to say something you've got to do something but but that is not what I do I will not I will not bring drama to this channel that it just won't happen I am here to talk about gi joe I'm here to connect with friends I'm here to discuss something that uh that I enjoy and hopefully you enjoy too uh and that's that's my purpose and that's the policy um and I will stick to that policy even if it means that people uh want to part ways that people don't want to watch anymore uh if people you know uh are fed up if people insist that I that I deal with the drama in a public way I just I don't do that uh so I will accept that I will not have as many viewers or viewers because I do not run a drama channel I've accepted that and I'm okay with that um so that that's the gist of of the policy I I don't I don't do that here um my feeling is that um that's a cheap way to get views and a lot of channels do it because it works right it works it does get views but um you can't you kind of you get the audience that you cultivate you get the audience that is drawn to the type of material you do and I feel like if I were doing that type of material the audience that I would get from it would not necessarily be an audience that uh I would enjoy hanging around so um I'm willing to make that sacrifice I would much rather have the audience that wait I have I would much rather have you guys than whoever I would bring in by turning this into a drama channel it's just it's not about numbers it's just about the type of person that I am and the type of person that I want around me so uh so that's how that works um any future hate mail that I get um I can assure you if you want to sense something like that uh as soon as I understand that that's what it is it will not be read um this one has only gotten the attention that it's gotten for the purpose of giving us the opportunity to talk about this aspect of of creating on youtube and how we deal with that it is a good time to do that we've got to take these opportunities uh I think it's too late to talk about these things when something happens uh when the bomb is already exploded it's too late to defuse it so we're doing this now so that uh if anything ever comes up in the future you can refer back as uh the answer to how and why uh I'm doing things the way that I'm doing so I hope that makes sense to everybody um it's not something that I don't require agreement uh with that you are uh capable of having your own opinion uh that's Josiah's super chat uh founder creators respond to positive critiques better anyway um on unrelated note I love it when comic trope covers uh image related subjects comic tropes is an excellent channel um comic tropes uh did a video on neil adams recently which is very good um I have a lot of nostalgia for image like early image um I remember that era very well I was a very active and avid comic book reader at that time and uh it's I've got a lot of nostalgia that's that's all I can say um uh uh oh I um comic tropes wants half that super chat I'll uh no I'm gonna I'll tape this envelope together and I'll I'll put I'll put it in there and I'll I'll send that to you I'll send that to you um oh uh Chad send a super chat I think Chad haters are just uh sad pathetic lumps of poo uh they're just jealous because you're doing what you love uh they want everyone to be as miserable as they are and that there is something to that um and the thing is I don't I don't wish those people ill right I it it does it does me no good to hate them back um I just hope that they find whatever it is in their life that they're missing that causes them to think that this is acceptable behavior um I think the everybody around them probably hopes that too so uh good luck to those people um there is that does actually lead into one other thing that I wanted to talk about um and that is um another policy the something that you have a part in you part in this as well uh one thing that I will never do uh and if and if I ever ever did it you should call me out on that um and that is I will never attempt to weaponize my audience I will never encourage anyone to attack someone else even if that person is attacking me that is something that I don't do uh and that's something that I I dislike when I see other channels doing it uh I would I want you guys around because we share a common interest and we have at least the potential of being friends um I I do not see you as a means to my end I do not see you as weapons that I can fire at somebody that I don't like and if ever I were to do that uh you you individual person here who is watching this you should call me out on that and you you I probably don't deserve your support if I ever do that um so uh if uh I am ever attacked by anyone and I I have had some attacks in the past I've not given them any attention but it's happen you know it's nice it's nice to be defended right it's nice uh when people stand up for me that's that's cool that there's no problem with that but that doesn't mean that I would want you to attack anybody uh for any reason that's just not what we're here for that's not what we're here for at least that's not what I'm here for so um so please never ever ever attack anybody on my behalf even if it seems like they deserve it that's still not how I would want to respond so I hope all that makes sense I um I and I think that's the end of my TED talk I think I think that's uh the end of the speech I think I've covered everything I wanted to but it's a it's a topic that uh understandably we don't cover very often I I don't like to discuss this but again it's we got to from time to time um I want everybody to be on the same page to understand the policies of this channel and why I do things the way I do them so that if anything comes up in the future you know how we're going to handle that so there's that there's that um uh what we're here for what we're here for is not the drama we're not here for the drama uh thank you jm thank you very much I appreciate that uh done uh dungeon person hello I'm sorry uh uh the because I'm doing this on my phone the screen is a little bit farther away than I would normally have it hello Chad um yeah the drama we don't want we were not here for the drama we're here for stuff like um like like this like this this uh snake eyes knock off lego thing this is what we're here for um actually my my daughter put that together where is it oh it's right there my daughter actually assembled this um uh she she had a bit of a bit of fun doing it but she did she did comment on how like see this is it and this this is what it looks like uh that's the picture on the back and here is the actual thing and she did comment on how easily this falls apart it and it's trying to fall apart in my hands right now they did a few of these other sets uh hello Robert Monty thanks for being here my hello Jeff Morris oh thank you Bradley uh next time someone uh tries to um set a time bomb send in zap and short fuse they can defuse it for you they can indeed I think zap is my go-to guy I think zap is my go-to guy uh for for disarming the the time bombs um uh yes the the hoodie bootleg zone um uh yeah um yeah exactly sparkster yeah see yeah exactly so um and I did I didn't mention any of the uh the common you know issues with these things uh to her before she built it she just discovered that on her own I want I wanted to go if she was gonna do it I wanted to go in and form her own opinion about it uh so there's the motorcycle and here is the uh the the the not quite Lego um snake eyes now don't it's not Chad good question it's not Creo it's not you may excuse me you may remember the Creo um Lego knock-offs um uh you know I great fun very too nice to see you um uh yeah so um people have suggested other guys to defuse bombs and I do agree with you but I'm going with zap uh because just because the character doesn't get enough play I just feel like he he needs more to do so you know let's give zap the spotlight just a little bit that there may be characters that are more qualified but zap can do it zap can do it um so yeah but uh yeah these these are not even the the previous uh Hasbro um Lego knockoffs Creo this is a different one this is what is this um uh this is uh forever clever licensed by Hasbro uh I've I've never heard of this I have no I have no idea um but I know they did several of these and I wanted to I wanted to check them out I wanted to at least see what's about um that is something that I try to do I try to not pass judgment on something unless I've actually it's come apart uh unless I've actually seen it myself um I try not to pass judgment um but now I've seen it and people have said that these are uh flimsy and fall apart really easily and they're not lying they are they are telling the truth I'm trying to get this thing back together and like how's he supposed to sit on there oh it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter put him back um she didn't put the stickers on it this the sticker sheet is right here I I think those stickers might look better on something else I could I could apply those stickers to something else I think that might be more fun um so but hey yeah like that's what we're here for we're here for little plastic guys and um I guess I guess somewhat related um negativity toward um action figures and such um I don't have as much of a problem with it look action figures are made of plastic they don't have feelings um and uh my goal when I review something like annihilator is to always be fair I try to be fair um whether my opinion is good or bad uh I want to be fair and my hope is that um even if you have the toy even if you've seen the toy uh together uh maybe the stickers hold it together that's a good thought good thought um if um um even if you have had the toy if it's something that you uh like maybe I can show you maybe a different perspective of it so at least like you can you can see the possible criticisms of it or if it's something that you don't like maybe I can show you a different angle that uh maybe shows that you uh you might like it a little more than you expected right so um oh uh thank you gray fox uh for the super chat wanted to send uh flag points but youtube doesn't have a why yeah flag points by the way hasbro if you're listening and we all know that you're not listening but hasbro if you're listening flag points um uh every time I touch the screen I I rest the live chat and then I can't see the new messages sorry about that sorry about that um but um what was I talking about is something had something to do with something anyway I was um I was talking about something um hasbro is listening to the channel according to to uh to um uh comic trope maybe maybe it's possible it's possible um but uh yeah uh so anyway my um yeah I was talking about my approach to reviewing my approach to reviewing um whether I like something or not I I try to at least be fair um I also have to be frank because if I'm if if I'm not frank and honest why should you watch me uh yeah NSA is is always listening hello overlords um sure do you like all the job that you guys do yay NSA um so um like I I feel like part of my job is to express an opinion I want to show the toy and I want to show you like all angles of the toy I want you to see it I want you to see it um as if you've been able to hold it in your hands to see how it moves to see all the angles um but you know that's not necessarily a review thank you uh Rob Vegas says shout out shout it out loud to all the awesome friends here in the group slaughterhouse sparkster cobra island photo viper and everyone else absolutely uh this group that you guys really keep me going these Tuesday live streams I look forward to um uh every week um it I always feel like my spirits are lifted after talking with you guys so uh I can't tell you how much I appreciate this um even when I am in oh thank you Chad uh missed the last couple live chats uh and was wondering about uh a joe fest update are you ready I am ready Chad that um yeah well let me let me finish my Delo here and then we will talk about joe fest because it's a good time to talk about joe fest too uh thank you for bringing that up thank you um uh but I think there's more to a review than just showing the toy I feel like um it's like writing an academic paper you can you can list all the facts but that's not a paper um you also need to express an opinion you have to take a position and I feel like in a review I do need to take a position about the thing that I'm reviewing but um I think it's also important to be fair to be fair uh that does not mean my opinion uh is objective like objectively the best and correct opinion um it all it means is that um based on what I'm seeing right now I'm trying to point out everything that I see that's about both good or bad um I feel that the each of those opinions needs to be reasonable and fair um uh my hope is that even if you watch a video or if you and you don't agree with it you would at least still recognize that it's that it's fair that's fairly stated um and um and that I haven't just gone off the rails and uh um and been just a total dick about everything um I really do try hard to find the good in in anything that I'm reviewing and most of the time I can most of the time most of the time I can't um but I just think that's my job as a reviewer um and hopefully it sparks some discussion hopefully it uh it maybe gives people a different angle on things things maybe they haven't considered before um uh that's the hope you never know you never know you just don't know how people will take things um uh so hello the figure six pack yeah I'm also kind of looking forward to top gun maverick I wasn't sure that I would be it's been a long time coming and top gun is one of my favorite movies is one of my favorite movies of all time um uh but uh but I wasn't sure if if a sequel was warranted that's one of those movies that didn't necessarily need a sequel but now that we're getting to it I am actually looking forward to it I did I do think I want to see it I want to give it a chance to see how it goes um anyway um uh oh uh jack what are your thoughts on repro figures and accessories it's not something that I collect um and since it's some not something I call collect I don't necessarily feel qualified to make a lot of statements about it um I am a vintage gi joe collector which means that the plastic that I collect has to be old plastic um and so repro stuff doesn't it doesn't fit in my collection so I guess that's really kind of all I can say about it right now um people uh have stronger opinions because they have more experience with it and so I should probably defer to people who who know what they're talking about all I can say is that it's outside of the scope of of what I do um joe fest joe fest um uh uh uh uh uh sparkster atop contravia tom cruise during the first film was one is too short to be a fire pilot he is he is kind of short uh he's not tall there are some famous actors actors um there are some famous actors that um have been in some big movies that are actually relatively short sometimes shorter than the the the actresses that they're acting with uh either shorter or you know close to the same height um Sylvester Stallone also is is kind of a short guy but yeah uh tom cruise not tall he's not tall um anyway um joe fest uh it was requested um uh yeah a val Kilmer is is uh is not in the best of shape um val Kilmers having having a tough time uh health wise joe fest it was brought up I want to get to it um we we have some time we're not out of time yet I am going to wrap up the video or this live stream at eight o'clock my time uh because I'm tired plus I have to work some more um uh I uh I have been picking up a little bit of legal work from just here and there picking up projects from time to time so I have been working on stuff I worked like 50 hours last week and I will probably work more than that this week um it's it's kind of crowding out some of the other things that I need to do also I'm going out of town I'm taking a trip with my daughter um not next week but the following week so I'm going to be out of town a little bit um I'm also working on cober convergence stuff stuff I actually have copy written for the cober convergence announcement launch video I've got it written I just need to record it and my expectation is to record that tomorrow so um so uh joe fest um joe fest is is ready um I have the hotel's booked um I have I will be I do have a table I will be in artist alley um and ed said uh that he was going to come out with the the floor plan I think this week it's either this week or early next week so soon I will be able to tell you exactly where to find me at joe fest um I will have some artwork for sale uh my main purpose for being there though is to see everybody I really really miss hanging out with everybody in person the pandemic kind of blew that up right pandemic ruined lots of things um but um uh what guests does joe let's see they have uh guests that I would absolutely look up uh if I were not on my phone and if I were on my computer um uh me they have me um uh I will have some artwork for sale but mainly I'm there to to see everybody so um yes Ron Rudolph will be there uh last time was there like the whole rudat family came so if you'd like to meet Ron Rudolph in person he's actually a really cool guy uh come in and uh and meet Ron Rudolph where is joe fest rob uh joe fest is in august a georgia um the the organizer ed lives in august so he does it in august every year so it's always in the same place um it looks like uh larry hama will not be here this year I think there was like a scheduling conflict he already had something else booked for that weekend same with sergeant slaughter sergeant slaughter is usually there every year this year scheduling conflict ironically he's gonna be in oklahoma where I am but I'm going to be leaving oklahoma to go to Georgia where he ain't so uh that kind of sucks it would be cool to meet sergeant slaughter again um but uh yeah the um I'm I'm looking forward to uh finding out who my convention neighbors are going to be who's who's going to be on the neighboring tables uh I think that's going to be super fun so um uh yes uh um toy connections yes I got some hate mail we we covered that earlier uh we're moved past that though no we're we're done with the hate mail we're we're good we're good we're we're on with the love mail now um uh yeah um so joe fest is coming up um I will be there I will have a table I will be at my table as much as possible but one thing um one thing that uh yes the voice of storm shadow that guy will be there um um one thing that I found difficult about the last joe fest that I went to is um I was at the table a lot and I hardly got to get out and go around yes that's true uh draws uh Sylvester Sloan has been shooting a tv series called the kings of Tulsa yes and he has been here Sylvester Sloan has been here um filling that and in other parts of Tulsa there was somebody posted he he ate in a a restaurant in oklahoma city and people got selfies with him and junk like that so yeah sliced alone has been in this area uh Tulsa is quite famous for movies we we were the location of the blockbuster movie u h f starring weird al yankovic you know so you know basically this is like a miniature hollywood you know we we got weird out here uh so uh yeah so yeah Sylvester Sloan was in town I don't think he is now I think he's moved on um but um uh yeah um uh favorite 90s vehicle is uh wait sorry uh is the 1993 just uh detonator what uh I don't have the detonator yet and it's one that I've been looking for spatula city um my favorite 90s vehicle uh that's a really good question I would need to think about that um the one that comes to mind uh is uh the ghost striker I really like that jet um but if I were to think about it further I might think of one that I like more but I just like the ghost striker it's based on a real jet you know a bit chunkier than the real jet uh the badger is a good one um I think I would probably like the general but I don't have the general yet uh so I can't I can't say for sure but the general has a lot of features and is probably pretty cool and I'll find out someday when I actually get it um uh but um that I'm glad you pointed that out that is one area where my collection is uh the most deficient I think that's the one the one area where I have like the least stuff and that is 90s vehicles um JB with numbers says hammer is my favorite 90s uh 1990s vehicle even though I do not own did not own one as a boy uh yeah the hammer is an excellent choice uh the hammer is actually a great choice um uh Jonathan says is formula x257 just taking an extended break uh hope he's not uh done with GI Joe I I don't know is the answer to that um I hope he comes back I love Kevin uh he's a super nice guy I have reached out for him but I have not heard back so I hope he's well I hope he's doing all right um but I haven't heard from him for quite some time so Kevin if you see this how are you and we miss you we miss you we hope that you can come back at least in some capacity um he's a very well well liked guy so uh we all miss Kevin um uh yeah but there there were some good 90s vehicles but that is probably the the area where I have the biggest gaps in the collection um thoughts on the future of the channel the future of the channel will come after the president of the channel um and um I don't know I've been kind of going back and forth about you know how I want to approach the future of the channel um keeping it going and whatnot um um we'll see how some other things shake out but at least for the time being you know I'm I'm plowing ahead and I'm I'm just keeping this thing going I say that but I've got to um I've uh long says GI Joe is dead rest in peace GI Joe um I say that I'm keeping the channel going which I am but um for the next week or so it's gonna be a little uh a little uh quiet around here comma tropes uh this is so you can buy the defiant at Joe fest this should cover it absolutely um I for those who who all you may know I do have an incomplete defiant shuttle complex that is a really hard one to finish that's a very hard one to complete it really is um uh but yeah so for the next couple weeks though I'm working uh hardcore on a cobra convergence stuff I've got to get caught up on that there's important stuff that has to get done um I'm also going on a trip so I'm going to be gone for a couple of days so it's going to be a little bit quiet around here but we'll get back to it as soon as we can and of course we have cobra convergence in July and that's going to be very busy there's going to be a ton of content for that um so um so yeah just just for your information maybe a little quiet around here for a little while but uh but we're we'll get back we'll get back to it we'll get we'll it just it's gonna take a minute uh there are just a few that we're going to take precedence over uh knocking out weekly review videos um but I do have stuff that I I'm ready to review um what oh wait what month uh uh action figure expert what month is oh I think you mean cobra convergence cobra convergence is in July so it's going to uh it's going to launch in July the first of July and it's going to be the entire month of July uh last time we did it which is the year before last oh thank you Josiah Watson Joe Bynes sponsors have like five defiance in their commercial that is true um I think I think you're referring to Kokomo toys they uh uh that that's like a big big toy store um I did not have five defiance I I I'd like to have five defiance I would take you know even though it would take up a lot of room I would make room for five defiance um yeah so uh I have stuff that I I want to review that I'm ready to review um that I I'm eager to get to but uh the the the logistics of it right now is uh is is a challenge because there's so much other stuff uh going on there's so much other stuff um but in the long run you know if you it may be slow around here in the short run but in the long run it should be bigger it should be better you should have a lot more um and and hopefully it'll be a lot of fun uh so yes a cobra convergence is in July it's the entire month of July um the the last time we did it which was two years ago we did it in August but that was because I had a lot of stuff going on around that time and I just I just couldn't do it in July that it just it just didn't come together so we did it in August instead traditionally though it's in July and we will do it this year in July the whole month uh you'll have um sometimes multiple presenters every single day so we're gonna be ready to rock ready to rock and ready to roll ready to converge the cobra um uh dendo says I have one crusader it alone is huge hey yeah I have a crusader too and is uh it's it's massive uh thank you Josiah for the uh for the super chat uh I'll do the I'll do the the jingle uh Kokomo Kokomo Kokomo toys Kokomo Kokomo Kokomo toys I haven't actually made it to Kokomo toys yet but it's on my list it's on my bucket list there are a couple toy stores that I must visit and that is one of them uh and if I ever make it back to that region I definitely will um the other one is um the uh brick and mortar store that Roma Collectibles has now in Ohio I almost made it to that one I was driving through Ohio a few months ago but I just happened to pass through at a time when they were not open that killed me I like it was the I was there it was the perfect opportunity it's just the timing didn't work out but I I love uh visiting those uh toy stores vintage toy stores we don't have a lot here we have a few of them uh but there are more vintage toy stores I feel in other areas so uh I really enjoy doing that I enjoy doing that uh should visit uh Boba Khan in Seattle massive vintage toy store see I would love to I would love to um finding finding vintage toys here in the wild can be kind of a matter of luck um you you have to look at a lot of resale shops a lot of vintage shops a lot of antique shops and get lucky and I have gotten lucky I have um like um one of my uh vintage 1960s 12 inch Joes I found that way a couple other odds and ends I found that way um but it's a challenge it's a challenge in this particular region of the country uh finding vintage toys in the wild is not so easy um so but that's why I enjoy uh hitting those really big vintage toy stores um it's still a little bit of a novelty me to me and it's just cool to see all that stuff to see all that stuff um so uh yeah um there are a few that that I'd really like to hit one thing that I think would be fun is to like you know make a tour of it you know hit some toy stores on a road trip that would be cool um I will not be able to do it on the road trip that I have coming up because there's too much other stuff that we're doing and that is one that I'm doing to spend some time with uh with my uh with my kid um Bradley says do you have the Rumber Rumbler do I have Rumbler and the RC Crossfire I got them at a flea market in 1994 but I had to sell them in 2010 I do have them I do actually um I have one complete I think it's the alpha one that I have complete and I have the delta one that's not complete um uh Roma will likely be at a toy show in uh Columbus in uh late August um yeah uh uh the Roma Collectibles family uh opened their own actual brick and mortar toy store uh not that long ago and I do like supporting stuff like that if I'm gonna give my money to somebody that's the kind of person I'd like to give my money to uh people who um I had Dale we did have some hate mail earlier but we've covered that we've moved past the hate mail we did have the hate mail um I I gave I gave the hate mail all the attention that it deserve um uh we're we're past that now no more hate mail no more hate mail um but yeah I I appreciate people who um take the risk and open their own business and really put themselves out there that that is very risky and I respect that uh and if I'm gonna buy something I would prefer to buy something from a place like that it's just something that I I don't have an opportunity to do very much here because we don't have a lot of those stores here we do have some we have the vintage toy mall which I've I've talked to you guys about before and I did a little tour of it um and I hit that every once in a while right I do go back and I check to see excuse me see if there's anything new so um yeah um uh let's see uh Michael my Michael Mitchell I almost said Michael Michael uh you're going to cosplay as Hooded Cobra Commander at Joe Fest I I should the thing is I I do have the hood but I don't have the rest of the costume I have the I have uh I have the the laser pistol that was sent to me like years ago I have I have the laser pistol I just don't have the rest of the costume um so uh yeah um someday someday down the road um someday down the road maybe when when this video project is all wrapped up and we viewed everything um uh everything uh that everything vintage that there is to review um I would like to explore other areas uh to uh to be a fan um I am says a return of comic reviews I do need to get back to comic reviews uh that unfortunately is something that has kind of gone by the wayside with all the other busyness that I've been up to but I have not forgotten about comic reviews I really really want to get back to them and I will I will um um but like I said we got Cobra Convergence coming out I've really got to jump on that I've got a lot to do with it uh or a lot to do for it but um uh once I once we can get all that done uh then we can get back to doing stuff like comic reviews which I miss I really miss doing that uh thank you mcdj acdc yes and and comic tropes yeah I really uh I really do want to get back to to comic book reviews um it's uh I yes yes yes I do yes yes I do um but um I would say after we wrap up this project I've reviewed every vintage thing there is to review um I'd like to explore some other ways to be a fan and one of those ways I'd like to explore maybe uh is um cosplay because I've never really done that before um uh thank you George uh thank you very much a thumbs up to you as well um uh which comics do I still want to have I think I have the whole marvel run uh and in most of the idw run as well so I think I'm good on comics I do have the comics I just have to I just have to read them and review them um uh so yeah that's something that I may explore when I'm done with this phase you know when I'm done with uh with this project not phase it's a big big project um is uh is maybe look into cosplay I've never done it and uh people seem to have a lot of fun doing it and uh I think that would be cool uh anyway um uh yeah um yeah Darth I think that's the best that I'm gonna do with it and honestly that's more attention than um than any future letter will get any future such letters will simply disappear and never be heard from that's really what they deserve uh HCC 7 is yeah I just have to dye my hair and beard red and it would be perfect um uh let's see your fresh and see you uh stood your ground unrelated are you really into a class by now I do like classified classified will never replace vintage for me uh thank you Rob uh Vegas uh take the Aussie flag to Joe fest okay I can do that I can do I will do my best to remember the Aussie flag I actually have it it's like over there and uh yes I for those who don't know I got I got an Australian flag and one of the packages I opened on the on the uh the unboxing video um uh so yes um the point about classified I have been really enjoying classified uh nothing will replace uh vintage G.I. Joe for me I am primarily and always will be a vintage G.I. Joe collector and reviewer the classified stuff is in my view bonus stuff it's it's kind of cool to have new G.I. Joe coming out so that's that's all right uh and I have I do generally like the figures some are better than others as you would expect um but uh uh uh yeah it's it's a it's an extra it's a bonus it's a bonus thing um but anyway by my uh clock right here we have been going for an hour I am a little tired so I am gonna wrap it up I will say good night to everyone thanks for everybody for being here we had a really really good crowd this time and it was a lot of fun um it's good to see all you guys I saw a lot of regulars in here saw some new people in here uh you guys are awesome and and I do appreciate it uh but I'm gonna let you go uh I've got some things to do I've got to get some work done um and I've got to get some things set up because my expectation is to do some audio recording for Cobra convergence tomorrow so I've got to get ready for that so uh thank you everyone uh I will say good night and I will see you next week good night everybody bye bye


I didn't really use to mask very much, but I definitely used to have like mirroring like behaviors. So I, there'd been lots of situations when I was younger and I was introduced to someone from like a different part of the UK, like Scotland. And I'd start just naturally mimicking their accent.  And the parents are like looking and asking, why is your child doing this? For me, it was a way of relating to that person, making them feel like they're safer to be around me. But I understand like looking back on it that it's not ideal. And to be honest, even within my podcast, if you kind of look back at the different guests that I have on, the way that I interact with people, the way that I speak like the tonality of my voice tends to very much mimic the person that I'm talking to.