Hello and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to tonight's book talk. I'm John Smalley, a librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Department here at the main library on the third floor, where you will find thousands, tens of thousands of poetry books and also essays in 41 languages. So feel free to visit us sometime. While I'm waiting for a couple more people to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community. So on behalf of the San Francisco Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatishaloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatishaloni have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatishaloni community and by affirming their sovereign rights as First Peoples. Tonight's program celebrates a new book of essays by the San Francisco poet, Kim Shuck, Noodle Rant Tangent, before turning the microphone over to our guest of honor and with Kim's forbearance, I want to say a few words by way of introduction. Kim Shuck was San Francisco's seventh poet laureate. Her poetry draws on her multi-ethnic background, which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco. Her most recent book of poetry, What Unseen Thing Blows, Wishes Across My Surface, a collaboration with the visual artist Lisa Ruth Elliott was published in 2022. In her term as poet laureate, Kim hosted scores of free poetry and art workshops for all ages in neighborhood libraries and schools and works closely with the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Arts Commission to launch major citywide initiatives to honor Native American indigenous people's heritage. Since 2018, Kim Shuck has hosted the main library's monthly poem jam, a monthly poetry reading that takes place on the second Thursday of each month in this very room. If you're interested, want more information or not, there's flyers on the table. So without further ado, please, let's all give a warm welcome to Kim Shuck. Thanks, folks, and thanks for being here. Whoa, sorry about that. Thanks for being here. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day about being not entirely comfortable around other humans. And one of the responses was, no, you're kidding because you're on stage all the time. Yeah, but the stage is my room and none of you are in it. I'm here all by myself. And I think what you find generally with people who perform is that a lot of us really do have, if not human anxiety, then, you know, crowd anxiety. So it's kind of a funny thing. And I realize that I'm actually more comfortable when I'm preparing to invite somebody else up to do something on this stage, to be perfectly honest. I'm delighted with this book. I'm going to tell a little bit of a story before I actually read any of it. Judy Bernard invited me over to dinner. It's a great start to a story, isn't it? And wanted to talk to me about something and asked me, basically, the upshot was, you're satisfyingly sarcastic on Facebook. You do longer pieces of sarcasm. And I said, sure, I have a couple. And I did have a couple and they're in this book. But then, very quickly, I needed to start writing them because I just didn't have enough. So I was sending her one a day and she brought me back. She said, why are you sending me one a day? And I said, because I'm writing them one a day. So a lot of these were written the way you see them, more or less. I'm not sure I have the intestinal fortitude to read this one.  Yeah, when I was trying to do that earlier, it made a big popping noise, so it frightened me.  I just wrote one sentence, drew a line through it, and then spent the next five minutes on my back in my studio with my feet up on the wall. That position is supposed to be good for you. Something about circulation, I think. Why did she wait so long to report it? My partner tells me I've been walking around the house saying no under my breath for the last few days. I have to think of something more than no. If no worked, none of this would be an issue. She waited to report it for all kinds of reasons. You'll be blamed for your own abuse. You'll be forced to repeatedly relieve that abuse under the opposite of therapeutic conditions. You'll be blamed for your own abuse. You'll be blamed for your own abuse. What was she wearing?    And I was 19, so I couldn't argue with them. The premise of their conversation was that all rape is just men taking things one step too far, that often women say yes and then set a limit that is then breached and claim rape and there isn't really rape as such. I said they're grinding my teeth and organizing my counter argument in my head. You know what I was wearing? Boobs. I was wearing a female body. And we're all taught as people who have those bodies that our bodies are a problem. Some of us really take that on board, too. Was she drinking? Now let's get this right. There exists social gathering spaces where alcohol is served. These places advertise as such. They're legal. They don't post signs on the way in that say, women, if you drink, you give up agency over your body. Then there's the woman who has the one glass of white wine. Are we arguing that she ordered the Rohit Nal back herself? When undercover, colors started researching a nail polish that would detect rape drugs. I applauded them. These are the minds I want solving the world's problems. That said, the sad premise is that they want to shift the fear to the people drugging drinks because they might get caught. And so what? Get caught and have to go through an inconvenient court trial and get released because she looked, she drank, she wore. How tedious to be forced to do community service. I don't want all of the onus to be on women. What? Weren't you wearing your anti-rape polish? Poor planning you. What did you expect? Well, having some option seems like a good thing. How many men has she had sex with? That one put me back on the floor for another five minutes. I now have a favorite spot on the floor for feet up, slow breathing, and not having a traumatic event posture. Rape is no more like dating than buying something as like being the victim of credit card fraud. What? Someone stole money from you electronically? Well, how many things have you bought with that card? You have a track record of buying? Why is this theft so different? You suffered home invasion. How many guests have you invited over? It isn't as though you're unused to guests. His life may be ruined. Now that's an excellent focus. His life may be ruined if he commits a serious crime. That might happen. I would love to see more of these guys suffer some discouraging consequence for their actions. In this week that I am writing this, one of these dose them and rape them characters has been released from prison on a technicality and he will resume most, if not all, of his pre-prison activities.  And the problem here is that his life will be relatively unaffected going forward while every one of the survivors needs to carry his actions with them. We really need to do better than that. So that one wasn't really funny. It had its moments. This one's called Scorpion and Cinnamon Bun. I once had an official role in a coming-of-age ceremony for a tribal group of which I'm not a member. There may be people reading this who think that's pretty cool and the cool part is that they ask me, so yeah, it's pretty cool. The cold sweat of sweet creation, no part, will take a bit to explain it and I'm going to have to come at it at an angle because there's no way I'm going to tell you the material fact about the ceremony. In spite of the reputation of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, our day-to-day is mostly like anyone who lives here with some precise location and work-related adjustments. The big differences are philosophical, so in spite of the ointments, the smudge sticks, the material culture, things that you are sold, which are in varying degrees things that we own, make and do on any given day, there's going to be some cheese puff eating on watching a Star Trek.  I'm an indigenous, what can I tell you? There's every so often activist culture bearer who's out there making a boat by hand, teaching twined baskets or camping by a riverside where someone's building an ill-advised oil pipeline in order to save all of our lives and protect the water. And I know these people. They're heroes. There's also a lot of nursing, professing, retailing, filming, trucking and all of the other things that help lives take over. And those guys are also heroes. People have their hobbies. My friends' Facebook pages are studded with surfing photos and such. Mostly indigenous people do many of the things non-indigenous people do. However, many of our religious and cultural ceremonies were officially illegal until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which passed in 1978. Lots of people didn't do their traditional coming-of-age ceremonies for roughly 100 years, and if they did, they were done in secret ways. Many of us who are around now still feel uncomfortable talking about these things, and maybe more than uncomfortable. Maybe unwilling is a better word. There are a lot of reasons for the hostility. I'm in my 50s, and the reticence was impressed upon me early. When I see the uninformed accidentally killing people in clumsy versions of a sweat ceremony, also not of my culture, I think that maybe the non-indigenous people, the way non-indigenous people think about indigenous people, can lead them into all kinds of deep foolishness, and I hate to see ceremony fouled by that sort of thing, so it's best not to share. Anytime a government forbids a perfectly reasonable cultural thing, that thing tends to become a bit rigid. Tradition becomes regulation. None of what I say about indigenous things is ever universal. Any more than any other human population known to universal truths were a varied group, and unlike Europe, our unifying event wasn't religion, it was colonization. When I taught this stuff, the one big thing I wanted to change about my students was the U.S. habit of saying Native American culture. It's always plural. Unless you're referencing a specific group, it's always plural, and sometimes within that group it's also plural. If you get three indigenous people in a room and talk about any topic, there are generally at least five opinions. So our celebrations were banned. People amalgamate, misuse, and are just straight up make things up about us. We become protective of our rituals. For these and other perfectly understandable reasons, and the pressure to behave in certain ways is pretty severe. Unfortunately, the how to behave part can be a bit unclear. It's a serious honor to be asked, as I was, to participate in this kind of celebration. Unlike the other people who had official roles in this event, I was not part of the culture and couldn't risk a guess at anything so I was faced with either being a bit of a pest and asking too many questions, or mostly keeping mom and watching what people were doing while trying to be useful. I can generally manage one or the other. I'm not sure how well I did. At the end of the event, as with most celebrations from all parts of the world, there was a meal. It was amazing. Dishes ranged from roast elk to those mall cinnamon rolls. I got my plate of food and went to eat it by the fire. And I saw a thing that was funny and touching and disturbing in equal measure. It's become one of the ways I see myself, and I'm going to share it with you. It had been a fairly damp event. Rain, sleet, snow, sunshine, fog. It wasn't actually wet, but I was uncomfortable. So I was right next to the fire in the hope that I could convince my clothes not to stick to my body. There was a crumb from a cinnamon roll sitting just outside of the burning wood. It was a big crumb, maybe an inch by half an inch. And while I watched it, it was moving away from me. I realized that the smallest wood scorpion I'd ever seen was toting this thing off. The scorpion could have easily curled up on my thumbnail, way smaller than the bit of bun. And I don't know if wood scorpions can even eat mall cinnamon buns, or if it had another plan for the treasure. I was impressed by the scorpion's work ethic, surprised by its strength and a little bit baffled, because until that moment, scorpions and cinnamon buns had existed in wildly separated places in the world, as I understood it. As much as possible these days, I try to remember that feeling when someone seems truly confused about something indigenous. You know, in life you may see a scorpion stealing some cinnamon bun. You may not know why. It may never be explained to you. It's just possible that story is not there for you.  You are actually allowed to make noise. Thank you. Does anybody have any questions at this juncture? No?  I mean, there are at least three of you who are allowed not to have questions, because, yeah. Is it biography or fiction? How would we classify a book of essays? It's a book of essays. Nonfiction. Yeah, I mean, this is all stuff I've experienced. Yeah, yeah. That was real. There was a moment during that weekend where we were standing leaning over a fire, trying to make it not go out in a freak sleet storm. I think that coat still smells like wood smoke. This is actually a question that's been asked to me a lot, so this one's called, Why Do You Notice the Birds? Every once in a while, and this isn't part of the thing, but every once in a while I get asked a question that just completely floors me, because it would not have occurred to me that there was any confusion about it. The birds are there, so I see them. Seeing the things around you as a way not to get too caught up in your own head-life perspective. Do you want to notice birds more?  You'd be surprised how, if you didn't notice them before you'll start noticing them. I measure journeys in birds sometimes. Where are you so angry? I get asked. Well, I should be. I'm generally not, but I should be. A web search for Native American pulls up a story about the mass graves in Canadian residential schools. That's the first story I'm offered. The second one is, Are There Still Native Americans? The third story is about the secretary of the Interior, Deb Holland's call for an investigation into U.S. Native boarding schools. The fourth is about a sports team that doesn't want to give up its mascot. Since four is a nice even number I stopped looking there. I'm not angry. I'm tired. I'm often sad. I'm almost always overworked every reason to be, but not. The crows are yelling at the cats on the porch. They want the cat food. And I notice them. An exercise in noticing. Look up the treaty that covers the use of the land where you live. People seem to think that there was a war somewhere and that that war opened up all of North America to settlement. You hear about taming the West. Read the treaty. Is there one? Whose land are you on? I was on a Zoom poetry reading that was organized out of Nevada. So I looked up the treaty of Ruby Valley. I wanted a documentary that I'd seen before and I couldn't find it. In fact, I couldn't find any documentary about the treaty. But I did find videos about a cryptid called The Beast of Ruby Valley. There were more than one. I wonder how many people who are enraged by the loss of U.S. history have ever read any of those treaties. And I wonder if we started teaching about them, how long it would take for someone to make a law against having those in schools. This was written a while back. That has happened. Did you find out whose land you live on? What do they call themselves? Their own name is rarely the one on the treaty. What does it say these documents call people out of their name? Since Crows and Ravens started showing up in San Francisco, I've seen fewer and fewer other birds. I'm watching the morning doves out my kitchen window. What's the sacred food from where you live? My French teaching partner asks me questions about acorns. I don't know all of the answers. We're going off to teach in a place where acorns are the sacred food. They're scattered all over the parking lot, all over the road to the school. Tanoke acorns are everywhere. He looks at me confused. But how can they be sacred? There are so many of them. Anyone who wants them can collect them. Yeah. What has happened to the sacred food of the place where you live? In the photos of the buffalo corpses with their hide piled high. Other photos with buffalo hunters sitting on vast piles of bone. Why was William Codingick named Buffalo Bill? Carry in birds, pick at the flesh. And I noticed them too. Why do I notice the birds? Noticing is a habit worth having. I have to... I know these aren't academic essays. I'm going to come out of a closet now. I'm a recovering academic. I used to profess at San Francisco State University. And I've got to say I love teaching. And I hated the politics. And I'm really bad at it. And I tend to not do things regularly that I find myself to be bad at. It's... Here's a story I don't think is in this book at all. I was an outreach and retention officer at San Francisco State for a while when I was there. There were no tenured or tenured track people when I started professing there. And as a result, they built the department, rebuilt the department on the backs of the folks who were teaching there. And so we had all these responsibilities that technically we shouldn't have been handed, but we were. And for the most part, those of us who were there really wanted to help the students. So I had a few responsibilities and one of them was I oversaw a scholarship as well as being outreach and retention. So I'm talking to parents from small places around the country who wanted to be sure that their kids would be okay in San Francisco. And, you know, we'd talk and I'd say things about my experience of living here, but that it was really different and so you really do have to impress upon people to look both ways before they cross the street and that sort of thing. And I... just to be clear about the sorts of students we had, I had one student who got the scholarship and I called people in individually to let them know that they got it. I didn't think an email or a letter or anything was personal enough. So I'd have them into my office and I had a teapot and we'd have tea and I'd talk to them about the fact that they got the scholarship and some of the paperwork that was involved in that. And this one young woman came in and I explained that she'd gotten the scholarship and I told her how much she'd gotten and she started crying. And I asked her why she was crying and she said because she could pay for tuition by her books and get a coat that year. So that's who we had. And I loved that part. That same semester a friend of mine asked me to show her daughter around SF State and her daughter had just graduated from Cal with an undergraduate degree in ethnic studies. And it was pretty clear she wasn't going to come to San Francisco State for a master's degree because that's not really the ideal way that academia works. If you go to Cal for your undergraduate degree you're probably going to go somewhere either with parody to Cal or the one place in the States that's considered better or maybe somewhere in Britain. Who knows, right? But it's generally not going to be now you go to SF State. But her mother had asked me to show her around and her mother had told her I was going to show her around. So we were both sort of doing the kabuki of that, right? It's like, oh yeah, okay. So you've got family sort of who's working at the place and we'll talk about it and it'll be fine. And then we'll have a cup of coffee and you will go away and I will not see you enrolling in any of my classes. We happened to run into the head of the department the head of ethnic studies who screamed at me about how I was overstepping my responsibilities as a professor by showing this woman around because clearly she wasn't going to come to state and there was just no explaining to this man that I had social responsibilities involving doing this and that like I was on my own time nobody was paying me for doing that. And then the next semester somebody showed up with a gift blanket for me which obviously I couldn't accept because of all the reasons of academia but there has to be some kind of way to make our cultures okay in academia as well. I can also not refuse that blanket. You see the fork there? This is checkmate because somebody's family sent me a gift blanket and I can't tell them no and I can't take it. And so I was trying to explain to the department that there had to be a way for me to accept this and put it in some kind of departmental cash of things that spoke about that the letting the community take care of us as well so that I wasn't in any kind of violation and there just there was no way to get through that that the culture of academia is a specific one that favors hegemony and even if we're going to call the department ethnic studies you're not going to get there. So that was a long way around the tree to say something that's kind of important. I went to a very good school and I learned how to write real essays and these are something else and it's not the fault of my professors that I'm not writing in academic essay form. It's an absolute choice and I will also point out that there's sort of a Cherokee tradition of storytelling that favors the long way around which is in part why the title of this is noodle rant tangent. Mary Jean Robertson is in the audience and Mary Jean has sat at my family holiday table where my father attempted to tell her his life story in real time and my... eventually I don't think he'll ever catch up that's the problem of course right because you can never really get there. So I'm not actually the verbose one in my family. On the subject of family holiday dinner tables this is called Thanksgiving. Sometimes it's the fish. I want to scream. Really I want to throw my head back and just spend all of my energy on sound with the power to express my frustration, conflict, heartache, need, historical trauma, suppressed feelings, all of it. There's a sound stuck in me that no number of words spilled, glued, type scribbled in crayons for a painter stitched in thread that stained with my own blood that's managed to release. There's seven of the holy things now that I've tried. There's your holiday week going. Too much. Fair is fair. This was never going to be a favorite time of year. At best the holiday narrative is about Indigenous people modeling good behavior before being disenfranchised by the guests. At worst it's a celebration of mass murder and for the moment I'm allowing myself not to care that you personally might actually have some kind of thankful ritual. We all know that's not why this holiday is on the calendar. This is a dancing on the graves moment which is why I do not have a problem in telling people who wish me a happy gluttony day that it's not my holiday. I'll snarl it, I don't yell it, I just say it and let that statement float there. It doesn't help that November is Native History Month, a time when we Indigenous individuals are each and all viewed as a window into our respective cultures. By the last Thursday of the month I'm so exhausted by all the events, panel discussions, requests for reading lists, requests for comments and requests for the names of other Indigenous writers that there's so little left me through whatever event my current partner has arranged for us to attend. When I was younger and someone would ask me to say something at the dinner table to offer a Thanksgiving thought, I'd read a section from Chief Seattle's The White Man Will Never Be a Loan Speech. I don't do that anymore. It's a bit of a cold fish in the face but trying to meet some Euro-American ideal for polite behavior really hasn't gotten us very far so sometimes it's the fish. I love stuffing. It's probably my favorite thing. Stuffing isn't a sufficient recompense for attempted genocide nor for requiring me to deal with the holiday dedicated to the attempted genocide. My beautiful Cherokee dad has a birthday that falls in the last week of November. Sometimes it falls on Thanksgiving. This means we mostly get that day off and can hang out and eat stuffing together. And I would love to say that these dinners are a beacon of light in our year. I would love to tell you that my family, unlike most other families, has a simple and joyful celebration of this increasingly notable day. I would like to say that our interactions are sensible, loving, full of mutual acceptance. Drawing a veil for a moment over all of the interpersonal silt that's piled up over the years, we have the same tension-filled holiday dinners that many families do. It was pointed out to me that I literally run from the table at the first opportunity. What would we do with our family tension? Hey, I have to work off the dinner calories somehow, right? It'd be great to blame all of the stress on the underlying settler-colonial outrage that is Thanksgiving, but probably the tension comes from being flawed human beings. I live near one of the most notable native run-on Thanksgiving events, the Sunrise Ceremony on Alcatraz Island. I used to attend that event. In fact, I used to help organize getting people to the dock to attend that event. The year my oldest was born, I attended and took him with me, and it was so cold that while I was trying to soothe him by bouncing him while on the ferry to the island, he slipped out of my hands and slid down my legs. Now, he thought that was great and had a good old laugh. My thought was that I had dropped my baby. That same year, I was told a traditional Miwok story about the island. It's not mine to share, but between baby dropping and that story, the lure of that event has faded for me. I don't attend it anymore, and I'm sorry to say it's one of those community touchstones in the year that some use as a measure of our indigeneity. There's only nothing in that last Thursday in November that I enjoy. My aspiration is to spend it grumpy in bed with a box of sea soft centers and a thermos full of good tea. Unfortunately, I'm generally required to put on party clothes, makeup, and shoes in a welcoming smile. I'm writing this on the evening of Wednesday before Thanksgiving 2021, and in a moment, I'm going to be off to hunt for a nice cold fish. Does anybody have any questions yet? Go ahead, John. Yes, is there an essay that I thought about writing or that I wrote that isn't in here, that I rethought having it in here? Yes, there are a couple. One of them was pretty sure I didn't include the one about Brittany Spears. I almost didn't include the one about somebody overhearing something I said in a poetry reading that caused him to call me. I think what it was, he wrote this afterwards.  And I did include that one, but I thought about it a few times because I think the essay starts with a question. Did your grandma ever tell you not to eavesdrop? Because mine did. And the reason for that is that you'll never hear anything you like if you listen in on conversations. So here's the situation. I was walking into a poetry reading. I'm not going to read it, I'll just tell you the story. I was walking into a poetry reading for my apprentice and I was really happy for her that she had a book out. I was so happy for her. And because I'm who I am and people knew who I was, when I attend poetry readings people come up and say things to me about poetry and that's fine and appreciated at all. But this guy came up to me and said I love your poems but I'm not sure that a native woman in this day and age should be writing about what you're writing about. Something to that effect. And I thought that is a really weird thing to say. And thank you for thinking you get to tell me what I get to write about. And I was feeling a little grumpy about it. And then I locked eyes with a person who was right behind me who's a friend and we both kind of went I don't know what that was. So when I was about to sit down she goes I really love this woman's work and I said yeah me too. But I'm not sure flowers are a thing that a black woman should be writing about in this day and age and it was a joke that the two of us shared and it was absolutely out of context for everyone else and I'm sure it sounded really ridiculous. And I said it for a couple of reasons I thought maybe if I said the thing out loud I would understand why that guy had said it to me but there was no illumination there whatsoever.  But the funny part is this guy who wrote about hearing me say that is a Pulitzer Prize winner he ended up on a national website and I thought this is how we're interacting with one another these days right is these half-heard things and then we're judging each other completely out of context and I think context matters you know. So I'm not really critiquing him out of context that's a really weird thing to overhear what's also true is allowing yourself to react to and overheard things something not directed towards you is probably a fool's errand because then you end up totally misunderstanding what's going on and sort of the funny part about it is I actually did end up running into him in another context and he did recognize me and I was introduced as a Cherokee poet and you could just see the gears like I mean I know what I look like I'm 10 years old and I own a mirror and my dad is really brown so that was a source of lots of comment when I was a child but like if you don't understand if you don't know what's going on it's probably not a good idea to have a deeply formed opinion about something based on four words you heard somebody say you know I think we need to be more generous you know there is a general rule right now and I think part of it's the fault of social media but I'm not anti social media actually love it because social media lets me have breakfast it let me have my first cup of coffee for years with a couple of other native women who taught in universities and there's usually only one of us in any university because we need a lot of supervision I'm not arguing with that I think it's true but they generally don't group us together it's probably dangerous to do that and again I don't disagree with that but it meant that I could have my first cup of tea while my niece was having her first cup of coffee in Illinois or if I got up a little bit earlier I could have my first cup of coffee with Debra Miranda in Washington University like before she went off to go teach and so that's the good thing that social media has done is that um a community that's frequently quite dispersed can have moments together that we wouldn't otherwise have but it also allows other people way to feel like they know you in context where they don't so and I have opinions about a lot of things and some of them change tomorrow and some of them I hold for a long time so I don't know is there something I've touched on in one of these that you want to hear more of because there's a bit of overlap in some of these I'll tell you the one I was asked a question I was reading at Haskell Indian Nations University which I do every time I go through Kansas as a request from Kerry Cornelius who is the librarian at Haskell I may love her if you get a chance to meet Kerry Cornelius do that she's an amazing person and a great librarian and a really good support system for some of the students at the University well anyway I always get a pretty good audience because um Haskell students like my work they are my key demographic and I am writing in many ways for them so it makes sense to me what I thought my responsibilities were towards students and how to help them keep them from being too disillusioned by um the academic process when I clearly have a lot to say about how I have a problem with a lot of things about it and I read them this and this is an older piece that dates from when I was professing it and it's called analgesics for treating the results of ongoing cultural misrepresentation or bad Indian movie night and the rubber tomahawk award as a contemporary person of native descent as a sometimes academic as an engaged community member it's often difficult not to take frequent and shall we say questionable material presented about native folk personally there was a time when I'd look and find your totem extra at the end of the brother bear dvd and think okay how many hours of teaching will it take to set that one straight wampum engine corn chips were another personal favorite I love the big chief wampum cut out mask I was a kid in San Francisco during the hippie sixties in early seventies the granny dress seventies the party at rain and lemon sages house people expected things of a woman of native descent and they still do in the spare moments when I'm not crying at the roadside trash or singing depressed songs about my mixed race heritage I like to spend a little time contextualizing these sorts of images for my students and for my own kids I like a good joke as well as the next person it's just that some kinds of jokes don't seem to apply to all equally why is it that wheat thins or saltines don't have a big joke cracker as their mascot the marketing opportunities are legion they could package them in the little box painted like a double wide there could be roadkill recipes on the side panel maybe I should trademark that do these people mean to be offensive? I doubt it they want to buy into the mystique of a native stereotype and they don't think about the subtle effect on actual 3d indigenous people after all we're dead right for a few years I was in charge of outreach and retention of native students at SF State University it was interesting and a challenge the number one problem my students had with their education outrage and heartbreak ran about even we came up with some emotionally meditative solutions one that never got off the ground was the rubber tomahawk award the tommies were to be awarded to the most glaringly hideous case of insensitive material involving native people each semester I'd even designed a really cool award statuette but some of the best ideas are before their time I guess it would have been difficult to give one of the anthropology professors her tommy for asking one of our students if she could take a cast of her teeth for the school collection what's the student supposed to say being asked that in class as if she were subject rather than a student now how does an advisor help someone process that I found out quite early on that the phone calls didn't help neither did complaints to her supervisor letters to the school newspaper or leaflets the idea of a tommy award however let my students laugh at the things that could otherwise cause huge tension and mistrust for the university when I was a student at SF State I took Lakota language classes and this was roughly the time that dances with wolves came out now I know some people enjoyed the movie for other reasons but my professor loved it for the sometimes horrifying misuse of Lakota for about a month's worth of classes he'd play small sections of that movie and we'd all laugh if I'm not mistaken he played bits of it during a test and we had to directly translate and the results were hilarious it was medicine so when I became the advisor for the student organization I tried to guide my students less in the direction of protest and more in the direction of creative and sarcastic social commentary so we had bad Indian movie night the night would go something like this a group of students and friends would gather we'd pop some popcorn and we'd play the movies there were three fantastic aspects to bad Indian movie night there is an endless supply of bad Indian movies so we could do whenever we wanted without threat of running out of material popcorn is a fun and low fat snack that does little damage when thrown the group catharsis was deep now before I continue I know and like many native actors who've been in some of the bad Indian movies we ran in fact a movie lost points towards the Tommy if they had talked actual native people into participating in their film some of my students couldn't believe that people we knew were in these things I'm older more cynical and I know I've been in books I regret blessings on the actors I'm sure you needed the work having said I'd love to have been in the mind of Adam Beach when he agreed to star in Squanto a warrior's tale for those unfamiliar with his classic bit of cinema Beach plays Squanto who at one point in the action is thrown into a bear baiting pit and manages to calm the bear down with we're not really sure perhaps his inherent and mystical native powers this scene still plays to enthusiastic laughter at my house and no movie night was complete without the what makes the red man red song from Peter Pan polywally gumdrop indeed squaw get him firewood if you missed it or don't remember it go see my very favorite bad Indian movie even in a field of serious contenders still has to be white command with William Shatner Shatner plays half Comanche twins the darker of whom leads a renegade band against white settlers the lighter twin helps to subdue his evil brother and hooks up with the blonde woman has brother raped in an earlier scene fantastic stuff half naked young Shatner stilted dialogue at least one clearing continuity era lock this bit of cinema into probably a permanent location Tommy charts considering what movies don't get made I marvel that this one did children's movies occupied more than their fair share of bad Indian movie night which is probably because of the recurring errors in which a kid's adventure book just isn't a kid's adventure book without pirates magic and you guessed it wild Indians wild here having the meaning of painted half naked with long hair humans are pattern recognition animals it's one of the things that we do well children in particular are taught to pick up on those sorts of patterns this is how we get Peter Pan with Indians Brady Bunch visiting Indians the Partridge family visiting Indians the Hardy Brothers Nancy probably even the Bobzie twins everyone takes a turn although in this moment I can't think of the name of the book with the Bobzie twins visiting them but we are mysterious and natural and whatever whenever there needs to be always a lost wonder in a story they frequently reach for us so ok the English have their teacup and pith helmet the French their baguette and beret and we have our loincloths and feathers no one's immune to the stereotypes of what am I going on about last month my youngest child's high school had spirit days in order to show school spirit the students are expected to dress in whatever way is specified for the day so there was nerd day and pirate day and what have you and there was also Wild West day you guessed it cowboys and their counterpart my youngest has worked terribly hard at school he maintains top grades in a low profile he's in the process of getting tall which makes him a bit of a throwback and he's not really comfy in his skin yet unlike his older brother he doesn't know how beautiful he is nor would he be interested if he did my son made it into the most challenging and competitive public school in San Francisco and for the entirety of spirit week he dressed in his words as if he were forced into close at knife point in the dark by a ninja all in black he attended all of the spirit week dressed entirely in black he did it on his own as a protest it probably made him stand out even more tall and good looking as he is but he felt that his sarcasm went unnoticed and every day he had to walk past a poster of the Tasmanian devil dressed in feathers whooping it up he characterized the experience as disappointing it'd be one thing if there were the native stereotypes and then the students had to read some high and native lit as they do with the British and French examples but no for us it's just the stereotypes and I agree with my boy that really is disappointing I can't fix the world for him I've been an activist for years and I'm getting tired but I can offer a school of Robert Tomahawk award for their achievement it may be time for another bad Indian movie night too just for the giggle of it yes it's an interesting question I couldn't tell you what percentage what I can tell you is that the people who self-identify had something like a 2% graduation rate when I got there which has to be adjusted for the fact that we have sort of an overall at the time the year that I was outreach coordinator we had like a 2% graduation from high school rate as well so it's not a whole lot of people so I think one year we had four people graduate and then the next year we had 12 yeah but I was sort of talking to because I have my own reputation and my family has our own reputation and it's not universal or Indian country but you know my dad is sort of impressive my family, my grandmother's family is sort of impressive and so people trusted me with their children and so it went up for a while but what also happened was the person who decided to the person who was sent to decide how well I did who didn't look at any of the numbers and how any of them had changed but just came in and talked to me personally looked at my face and came in and talked to me personally wrote this long thing about how I was unqualified to do my job which is really interesting to me because four times the number of students graduated the year after I started doing it but I don't know I imagine we could think guess what it was that she saw that she thought disqualified me for doing a good job supporting Native students and I think we'd be right so there's a lot of this to go around the struggles aren't just out to end but from in laterally as well I think I did a pretty good job my students almost rioted when I quit so I think it worked I think it worked better after we started having tissues as well as tea in my office you know you need a community to get yourself through things and as I pointed out I think academia favors hegemony we're not in charge of things pretty much nothing so there are some of us though who grew up in the red power movement and believed them when they said go get a degree and we come back and people would be like you think you're too good for us I was like yeah I do actually I'm like what do good for you mixed message about boy you know and then we're working through it you know as a community but what would really help is if people would just stop offing Native women quite so frequently that would be a good improvement you know people are struggling against a lot but gotta tell you I do not blame young Native women for not wanting to come to San Francisco because we're on the top 20 list of towns where Native women get killed for being Native women never makes the papers they're absolutely delighted the papers to publish things about lateral violence within Native communities attacks made against people who have been in charge of organizations in the city who have done really good work by people who are doing really nothing at all or attacks against people like Sashin Littlefeather by people who have no such reputation helping people working for cancer research and doing all of the things Sashin did but you know the newspapers are delighted to post those things but you almost never hear about in San Francisco and our newspapers about how we're towards the top of the list of places where Native women get killed I did a 50 50 day series of poems about murdered and missing Indigenous women and while I was writing it a woman that I considered a second daughter to me was shot and another girl was kidnapped while I was writing it people I know this is not a scientific measure by any stretch of the imagination but it does sort of help illustrate it is ubiquitous when I went and read that book at Haskell Indian Nations University I had to stay an extra hour and a half to talk individually to each person in the audience because everybody wanted to tell me their story and there was no way I was going to walk out on them one girl looked at me and said I lost your daughter which I did and she said I lost my mother and they still haven't investigated it she said so if you ever feel like you need to call somebody up to tell you they're horrified by the color of lipstick you're wearing I'm your girl we're um there are some real challenges turns out the top of the list is Seattle and Tacoma for those who don't know which is across the bay from Seattle is number six dealt with separately yeah it's pretty epic huh my goal for this year by the way while we're winding down my current goal is to be banned from Florida school libraries I think what I have to do is send copies, donate copies of my books to Florida school libraries and then they'll they'll then ban them I said that and this one guy goes you're just trying to raise your sales I'm like baby if I were looking for sales I wouldn't be a poet this is not the way one makes money it's really not which is why I have to say if we could have a round of applause for my the publisher of this book who's sitting in the front row here Judy Bernard who likes my writing it's an interesting thing um to listen for where the laughs happen because they happen in different places depending on the audience and uh and sometimes there's an absolute silence because even though I play them like jokes it's not funny but I have found that there are audiences that have to hear it that way or it doesn't enter like they need it to come sneakily into their brain or they can't take it in but uh I already have a death threat on my head so and I'm getting I'm slowing down as I'm getting older so not as quick as I used to be it's probably a good thing to um to try to do it without the actual dust up I mean we'll have the dust up if we have to but it's better not to I'm still looking for the way to keep our children safe and safe in their heart as well as in their bodies if that makes sense and part of that it hurts to witness I mean it really hurts to witness for people and it hurts to be witnessed for I've said this at a couple of things recently this is real stuff it's painful but the community is we have to be there for each other anyway there are some copies of this book um one fun game to play is if you get a copy of the book and then you go listen to things on the internet where I'm actually reading it find the places where I wasn't actually reading word for word that's a good one to find all of the things you disagree with about my punctuation the people who've read it on paper are the ones who are laughing anyway thank you so much for being here thank you uh John Smalley for hosting this thank you to the AV department for their tireless efforts on my behalf and thank you very much the San Francisco public library without whom I probably would have to find something else to do of a Thursday afternoon take care


This video is brought to you by an epic game called Guardian Tales, your next RPG on Switch. Guardian Tales for Nintendo Switch is an adventure RPG with classic pixel art style, showing sophisticated homage to the classic JRPGs. You will play as a Guardian Knight, newly recruited, but destined to protect the Canterbury Kingdom from invaders. Exploring each world, you will meet other Guardians to save the world together. The classic tale expands into a sci-fi epic that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Get ready, experience an unforgettable journey filled with action, puzzle solving, attractive characters and thrilling battles. Embark on a thrilling conclusion to the first season of Guardian Tales with the fully updated World 11 which is available on March 21st. The journey with the princess will come to a close as you face a formidable boss and make a pivotal choice that determines your fate. If this game looks even remotely interesting to you, be sure to go down through the link in the description and thanks again for sponsoring this video, Mr. Guardian Tales. This is a little bit of a strange video because by the time you guys watch it, I'm actually going to be at PAX East on the what is it the 23rd or something like that. Yeah, well, technically I've already been there a little bit to pick up my badge and all that. And yes, there's some really cool Zelda stuff going on, a statue and and handing out some pins. It's pretty cool. You know, for a event that Nintendo said Tears of the Kingdom wouldn't be at Tears of the Kingdom was literally front and center. It's pretty much the first thing every attendee is going to see. So kind of crazy that they didn't decide to do a demo like who knows maybe I can hint hint nudge nudge an employee and they'll let me know when the demo event is going to be. Anyways, that's not the topic today. We will have a vlog going out later tonight. Our first vlog of the trip. Sorry, I didn't get one out yesterday. It just wasn't a lot recorded. That being said, what I want to focus on today is the size of Tears of the Kingdom. This game is going to be massive. We talked yesterday about how there might have been a hint a few years ago about some scuba diving or underwater exploration. And we've had that in other Zelda games, maybe not to the degree we hoped, but we have had underwater, you know, things, temples and other aspects in the past. The Zora Mask and Majora's Mask. So that's obviously one thing. We obviously have the Sky Islands and we have Hyrule. But I want to talk about the overall size of this game and just get your guys's thoughts on if this is good or if there's such a thing as maybe too big. Interesting debate, right? That being said, before we jump into that, I want to remind you that we're on our road to 100,000 subscribers. And if we get there by the time, Tears of the Kingdom comes out. Man, oh man, oh man, we're just going to give away a collector's edition of Tears of the Kingdom because why the heck not? So getting back into the Tears of the Kingdom discussion, I find it fascinating that the game is over 18 gigabytes in size. And by the way, that's just the initial install size. That doesn't include any possible Day 1 patches, Day 1 DLC, or any sort of crazy things Nintendo might add on. By the way, I'm not a proponent of Day 1 DLC, but Day 1 patches are pretty normal and sometimes can be several gigabytes large. Maybe this ends up being a 20 gigabyte game when it's all said and done, at least when it comes to the Day 1 update. But here's the thing, I honestly think a lot of that size difference might have to do with assets. Like the assets could be higher resolution and that's going to take up more space. But I also think the game's going to be massive. The whole of the prior Hyrule is still there. Now there's been some major changes to that Hyrule. As an example, we have no evidence to Korok Forest exist anymore. So what the heck happened to the Koroks? What the heck happened to the Great Deku True? What happened to all of the Divine Beasts? At the end of the while we're supposed to be going to check out Divine Beasts of Aruta for problems and what the hell happened? It'd be nice to find out and I'm sure the game does have an explanation. But yeah, we're going to explore that Hyrule again. And as Aji Anuma told us over the weekend, this is an unexplored Hyrule. So there's going to be a lot that we just don't know about. I think there's been a lot of assumptions that this Hyrule is pretty much going to be exactly the same. And that has maybe made people think the game isn't worth $70 or whatever nonsense they're throwing out there. Which by the way, value is in the eye of the beholder. It's fine if you think it's not worth 70 bucks. That's your prerogative. Value is up to an individual, right? It's sort of like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is value. That being said, I do think that this Hyrule is going to have so much new that it's going to feel very, very fresh. And I can't wait to just re-explore it and have that familiar yet completely different feeling. But this game is so much larger than this. These Sky Islands, as an example, aren't, at least they don't appear to be to me like this single layer of islands scattered all throughout the clouds of Hyrule, because there seem to be even layers among the islands. You remember some of the early trailers, like Link was falling an awfully long ways and only was just coming upon some of the islands below. So there's even layers to the islands in the sky that I find to be completely fascinating and really might show how large and how in depth the sky stuff might actually be. But then we've also seen teases of underground areas. We've seen caves. We've seen little cracks in the ground. And you start to wonder, is there going to be like this giant labyrinth? Now I do think some people assuming there'll be some giant underground labyrinth of cave systems and intricate stuff. I think it's a little far to just assume we're going to have a lot of that, but we are going to have some. And some is more than Breath of the Wild. So again, it just adds to how big Tears of the Kingdom actually is. Then you get to the hypothetical stuff like going underwater. And at first, you know, I talked about how I didn't want this to happen yesterday, or I think underwater gameplay is one of the worst aspects in most video games that aren't specifically built for it. But I did forget one key factor. In this game, it's pretty obvious that we can craft, well, vehicles, whether it's a hot air balloon, whether it's some drone like thing we fly on, whether it's the lawnmower, you know, we've had that vehicle crafting aspect essentially confirmed in the trailers. And one aspect I didn't consider for underwater is what if we could make just just just think about this for a moment. What if we could make a sub? No, I'm not talking about $5 footlongs and earbuds and Gerberts and I don't know whatever your favorite sandwich shop is. I'm talking about underwater subs. That would be really, really cool. There we go again. Someone's going to mention you could just take a two inch destroyer and dip it in water. That's a sub now, right? Look, I'm talking about the actual, you know, physical things that we use the submarines, right? Again, you can still use that for a sandwich. How am I supposed to talk about this without making food references? I don't I don't think you know what you know what I'm talking about. What would be really cool if we could build something like that and actually explore the oceans, the sea, only to an extent obviously they're going to limit how far out you can go. But then they can add this whole intricate underwater system, right? You could have coral reefs and various wildlife everywhere. You could have sunken cities where if there's like references to, you know, the Hyrule's version of Atlantis or something or heck, maybe we see old Hyrule underwater that was flooded from the Wind Waker and stuff. Like there's just a lot that I think we could do with underwater exploration in the sense that we could build our own custom submarine. So look, I honestly think we are looking at a game that is going to be one of the largest video games in existence. And that's saying a lot because obviously some Minecraft maps, their max sizes on certain devices can get quite large almost beyond imagination. We've seen a really large world of cyberpunk although it's kind of in a city. But then we've also seen like the Witcher series have super massive maps. But I'm just talking about you know, not just the map size, but just the size of what there actually is to actively explore. Because this world appears to have layers. There's layers of exploration in the sky. And there's layers of exploration on the ground, whether it's underwater, whether it's in a cave or a cave system, cracks in the ground underneath buildings, or if it's just new stuff on the surface, it appears this game has decided that it wants to go up and down. Now that doesn't mean, you know, Hyrule hasn't expanded and added new lands, you know, going east, west, north, south, but I do think that this game is just going to blow our minds with the sheer amount of exploration we can still do. I think exploration being such a big deal in Breath of the Wild, while this will be a more fleshed out world with more things going on and lots of crazy stuff, I do think that it is going to be also fully explorable and we're going to get that magical feeling again that this feels familiar yet for some reason I can't stop. I gotta see what's over that ridge. I gotta see what's down that hole. I gotta see what's over on that little island, that little speck I see 20 miles off in the air. There's going to be some magical moments with exploration in this game and that's attributed directly to how big the actual world is going to end up being. But you know what, this is just one person spewing his guts to the internet letting you know my thoughts on all of this. You guys let me know your thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom and the size of the world down in the description and I will catch you in that next video.


In modern warfare there is always a strong probability that the enemy will launch a chemical or biological attack whenever it suits his purpose to do so. It follows therefore that in any tactical situation, a great deal of your combat effectiveness will depend upon your ability to protect yourself against all varieties of agents. The purpose of this film is to show you the correct procedures for masking and the various basic circumstances under which you will mask automatically without command. Every individual should be trained to put the mask on correctly in 9 seconds or less. This training will enable you to follow the automatic masking procedure when the need arises. The procedure for masking under CBR conditions include three important steps. Stop breathing, mask, and continue your mission. Let's look at some of the ways the enemy may use to spread chemical and biological agents. By bombs, artillery fire, mortar fire, rockets, aircraft spray, and smoke. When chemical or biological operations are begun or suspected and your position is under attack, mask immediately. Don't wait for a command or alarm. Stop breathing, mask, continue your mission. Keep your mask on until ordered to remove it. Unmasking is a command decision. Toxic chemical agents affect you in various ways. If you suddenly develop a runny nose without any apparent cause, mask immediately. If you experience difficulty in breathing, a sudden feeling of choking or tightness in the chest, mask immediately.  Mask immediately. An unaccountable dimming of vision or difficulty in focusing the eyes on close objects, mask immediately. In any tactical situation, when an unusual liquid or odor is present, mask without delay. Then use the detector kit to determine whether a toxic chemical agent is present and to identify the agent. Through intelligence and other channels, your unit leaders will normally be alerted as to when and where toxic agents may be expected or have previously been used. Beyond the alert for areas posted with contamination markers. If you approach the contaminated area from the downwind side, mask immediately. If your mission permits, bypass the area. Even though you may be in an area which is clear of contamination, always keep your mask within easy reach and never fail to use your unit's detection device for determining the presence of toxic chemical agents. Most toxic chemical agents are invisible and odorless. For timely detection of their presence, you can't depend on your senses alone. When you hear an alarm, don't wait for a command. Mask immediately, automatically, regardless of whatever you may be doing. The mask is your most important piece of equipment when chemical or biological agents are used.  Depend on your mask. It is your best protection. You must know how to put it on properly and rapidly. And above all, you must know when to put it on.


As part of the strategy of Interpol to provide operational support to any region in the world, it was decided Interpol should have a new operation room at IGCI. This operation room provides support specifically to the region, to the Asian region, but to this very moment we are working to collect information from any part of the world. Having Amanda Coordination Centre in IGCI has improved the capacity of the region, also in having Interpol services. So we provide a wide range of expertise and the operational support if a police in any part of this area requires to connect to another side of the world. Linguistic capacities, real-time database checks, everything a police in a crisis situation might need is offered now at IGCI. Operation Sunbird is involving 10 Asian countries, but involving also the entire Interpol organisation. You need an operation room behind that. You need the support, the logistics, the infrastructure and skilled staff who can help you in any time, in any emergency. We are providing the dedicated staff. We are having teams, part of the teams, who is working only in supporting Operation Sunbird and they are working closely with the Immigration and the National Centre Bureau's officers in the Command Centre.


Chairs can break. Appliances can overheat and catch fire. One thing is for sure. Incidents can happen at any time. When they do, don't worry. Go to SaferProducts.gov to report your product safety concerns. Use the search tool to get the latest info on the products your family uses most. SaferProducts.gov. Report. Search. Protect. A friendly reminder from your friends at CPSC.


So let's get started. It's weird at time now. And hi, everyone. Thank you for joining in this afternoon. It really is great to see all of you here. Again, I'll start off with doing some brief introductions, and then we'll get started. We'd really like this session to be interactive and have more of a time allocated for questions at the end. So with further ado, I'm Alulita Sharma. I'm the co-chair on the observability tag. And I've been working in the observability space for many years now. I contribute to Open Telemetry as well as I'm on the Governance Committee for the project. I also have been involved working across the Prometheus and the Open Telemetry project on making sure that the metrics protocol has been fully interoperable. And again, super happy to see the collaboration we had there. And I also work in the Thanos Cortex as well as other stacks across the observability space. So with much further ado, again, hand it over to Bartek and then to Vijay to introduce themselves. And then we'll get started. Thank you. Amazing. So my name is Bartek Vodka, and I'm working at Google as a senior software engineer. I'm active in CNCF as a TAC tech lead for this group. And yeah, I'm maintaining Prometheus, Thanos, many other open source projects. And yeah, I think in Prometheus, what's relevant? We recently are active to make sure it works with Open Telemetry very, very well. Yeah, I also wrote a book called Efficient Go. It's about Golang and optimizations. Yeah. Hello, everyone. My name is Vijay Samuel. And I help lead the query language standardization workgroup as part of the observability tag. I've been an active participant in the Prometheus and the Open Telemetry communities as well. And outside of that, I help run architecture for the observability platform at eBay. Let's go. All right. So for today, we have, again, like a few slides, few content parts prepared, but we want to make sure it's interactive at the end. So let's go through them very quickly. We want to talk about definition of this group, what we do. We want to actually show what we do by showing our progress. We want to talk about active workgroups. So kind of like dedicated group of people and focused meetings and work stream about certain project to get it done. We talk about trends that we see when we are talking with end users and vendors and how to get involved. So essentially call for action for you to help us in this journey. So very quickly, what we do, that's our charter. But essentially, in a simple world, we try to grow the ecosystem of open source observability. We want to identify gaps. So things that may be projects that are missing in this ecosystem, maybe kind of things we can improve in those projects, especially around interoperability, compatibility between each other. We want to share good patterns, share knowledge about observability in general for both new to observability and those who are more advanced. We want to be venture neutral. So we want to make sure we're unbiased here. And we are kind of like making sure you can kind of like no vendor or kind of like steal the whole ecosystem here in terms of observability. So everyone has a first chance to move around with their observability data. And finally, yeah, support projects. As we know, we have multiple observability projects in the CNCF. Some of them are in sandbox incubated and graduated stage. And they just sometimes ask us for help, or especially if they have to move to a different graduation stage, we help them to get there. So let's talk about some accomplishments. So this year we released observability paper. It's essentially an introduction to observability as we know it in the CNCF. That's the first one-zero version. Over 30 people helped writing content or reviewing. So it's pretty kind of like a laboratory. So make sure you go there, get this, you know, read me page and work for it. There is a lot of actions there, right? It's of course not, it has gaps, right? It has some things we would like to expand more. So this is called for action for you, right? Like essentially we have our GitHub repo just go there, check the open issues and assign yourself and try to provide the content for us. For review we can expand this and release version two-zero. This is in progress. If you have ideas for more content that you read through the paper and you are missing, let us know. We'll just add it there. And, you know, maybe we can collaborate together on this. So, you know, everyone knows more about observability, essentially as it evolves. Second thing, we love knowledge sharing, especially in the video format. So, in our tag community meetings we sometimes host presentations. So feel free to check our YouTube channel where we essentially talked about those projects. For example, in the last quarter we talked about accessibility, optimizing, promoting to use open course, open elementary community GPT, and where is the graph of understanding artifact composition. So lots of nice stuff new to me sometimes as well. And so feel free to join and learn. Especially feel free to share your knowledge about, you know, very wide spectrum of observability. We already have scheduled three more talks very, very soon. Native histograms by Bjorn and continuous profiling from Fred Eric, Polar Signals and Proxy, awesome by Wesley. So really let us know if you want to speak about that. We want to host you. We want to share your knowledge. And, you know, I will continue to ask questions to you as well. Later on we also collaborate with other tags and work groups. Recently we kind of sponsored a very important cloud native AI work group, of course. And they actually were super fast to deliver a really, really comprehend white paper as well. And it's available on the CNCF page. Side note, we should probably make our white paper available there as well. Observability one. That's some action item for me from this week. We should also mention that we are kind of trying to review the projects when that comes to CNCF. For example, we took a look on opalometry, Kubernetes GPT, Logging Operator. And yeah, it's amazing to see the space grow. And yeah, finally, work groups. I mentioned two work groups. First is Observe Kubernetes. It's essentially our idea to kind of make sure to share the knowledge in an interactive way. So we have a paper, we have documentation, but we would like to also show you maybe a demo, maybe a tutorial that spins up multiple, let's say, the biggest projects, observability projects on the Kubernetes and see how you can essentially observe some application, which is like online boutique. So thank you for, you know, like so many people were there, but definitely shout out to Ken and Hendrik, right? Probably more, sorry. But like so many people were kind of like already doing this. And so right now we have a demo that, you know, uses essentially contains, you know, metric logging traces, but we want to convert that to tutorials. So if you want to help join this work group and we can kind of build my studio that you can reuse as well in your presentations in, you know, in your internal training, so I think it's a nice project. And Vijay will tell you more about exciting stuff on querying. Thank you, Bartek. Query language standardization. As everyone is aware with the open telemetry few years ago when things on the ingest side were extremely fragmented, like-minded people came together. They put out a specification and a means for everything to converge to the point where we now have one SDK per language for all signals, and it is basically the de facto standard. A few months ago, Chris Larsen from Netflix and myself, we had the conversation with the tag to see how we can do something similar for the query side, because the same that was for ingest several years ago is still the case on the query side. There are so many languages that are there. Different kind of preferences were baked into each of the languages. So we are setting ourselves on the journey to figure out what these languages are, what was the reason they were built in or designed in the way that they were. What are the commonalities that are there? How can we suggest something that could be a standard on the query side as well so that observability as a practice has a single way to instrument and a single way to query? So that being said, this past year, we have actively been surveying several open source projects and vendor products on how the languages have been built out. And shout out to everyone who helped out or spent time in coming up with slides and meeting with the working group and explaining everything about the language and answer all the questions that we had. Some of them are on the screen. We still have a few more to go. If you are a creator of an open source project that has its own query language for observability or if you are a vendor that has done the same for the products that you own, please do reach out to us. We'd be happy to interview and collect valuable feedback that you might have on how your languages came about. The next step that we also want to do is to empower the end users to tell us about their observability journey. What are the ways in which they query the observability platforms that they are consuming right now? What are the pillars that they use? How they consume them for the various use cases so that we can identify patterns on these are things that are very important to end users. These are things that are not available, but they really care about things like that so that we can finally go about describing that ideal language that we could potentially propose. We welcome contributions both on the creator side and on the end user side. You can find us at the Slack channel that's mentioned on the slides and we meet the second and fourth Tuesdays 9am PST. Okay, so today another topic that we want to cover. You now know all about our work groups, but this has been an area which has kind of picked up steam amazingly fast in the last few, last year I would say. It really is how leveraging, understanding observability for LLMS as well as understanding how to use LLMS for observability. So in this diagram, as you see, in the case of LLMS, which are, again, you can use for observability to act, predict, suggest, assist with the help of an LLMS in observability. Similarly, LLMS can be observed, monitored and analyzed with the observability frameworks that they look at, right? So that they use it. So again, it means different things to different people, you know, from an observability perspective, LLMS can help a lot with root cause analysis. And I think we have the next slide here where we can, we can actually talk a little bit about the layers, but whoops. Go forward. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Try it once more. Okay, so going back to the first slide. Again, I just wanted to complete my thought there that LLMS in observability are typically used for root cause triaging today in systems, you know, where you have deployed applications in production.  And similarly, LLMS systems based assistance like, you know, chatbots are being used for querying this data. Right. So if you are getting, if you're running an application globally, where you're running it in six regions, and you're getting data telemetry data from all those six regions. Typically, an LLMS is used nowadays to be able to consume that data, you know, in terms of the telemetry coming in and being able to query that for triaging analysis. So, you know, that's a very basic case of how LLMS are used. But it still is something that has rolled in into ops today. Right. And this is not even without adding observability frameworks to use LLMS actively and directly. So that's something that, again, also leads to the, you know, opportunity here to be able to actually adapt existing open source collection frameworks such as open telemetry or any other Prometheus agent and other, you know, agent components in open source that exist in the CNCF environment or otherwise to be able to leverage LLMS for exactly, you know, consuming telemetry data, understanding it, pre aggregating and being able to actually provide standardized signal analysis as a result. So moving on, again, LLMS are also a new type of asset or workload, if you will, that we need to observe. And I had, you know, we were talking about AI enabled applications in a previous talk I had where you have different models that are being introduced weekly, some of them, and most of them are black box today. The black box is ability, the black box, even to the application sometimes, but no, there are also models where the entire, you know, weights as well as other parameters for the model are all defined. They're actually published. And you do have some metrics that are, you know, being released or available from each layer. So in these layers, again, as applications become, are built with LLMS, the need for observing these LLMS also becomes part of understanding the behavior. And applications, you know, which included code and models traditionally now also includes small models or large LLMS, right. And also that, again, leads back to the idea that for observability, you are also looking at new types of hardware, which is used for AI applications, such as GPUs, accelerators, CPUs and other kinds of specialized, you know, chipsets. And also model inferencing and training pipelines. So these are new assets that are coming into place, but also on the observability side, that framework of instrumentation as well as analysis needs to be built out in the existing application, you know, observability projects that exist today, which are very widely used across the industry. So moving on again, some of the areas that are already being used are using LLM based data are anomaly detection, tiered analysis, distributed tracing comprehension, where you need to understand, you know, the, if you have hundreds of spans in a particular transaction, for example, you know, what is the general behavior going to look like, as well as data quality, root cause analysis, and, you know, also suggestions for the steps. So what did, did you want to talk a little bit here about, you know, rags and why rags are not enough. Don't quote me there, but essentially I saw. Well, like, I guess, yeah, like, generally, like the community around LLM, especially around observability or making decisions on top of like some data that you have available are complaining on rack, which is essentially using vector databases, right. Essentially, my point is that if you want to innovate, if you want to kind of like know what's next is that we need better kind of ways of making sure that our LLM has context of your live deployments because right now, the current solutions are essentially asking you know, to make some decision or kind of suggest some decision based on like limited context of like, you know, maybe thousand tokens or 10,000 tokens, which you can paste maybe, you know, I don't know, hundreds of yamls of your deployments, right. But literally cannot model your whole architecture yet, right. So, and, you know, rack is essentially a way to kind of like maybe get this data upfront to the LLM, but it's still not enough. So my point is like, we are still looking for ways to kind of like make it better. So please innovate, please. Like, it's not like somebody do this for you. There is lots of room we can improve. But yeah, essentially, this is what we are looking for in the future of embedding LLM with observability data. Good. So I think, you know, again, needless to say the reason why we highlighted the spaces because it's evolving very fast. And whether that's on the tool chains that exist today, or whether there will be new tool chains that are coming in, you know, which are added for specifically, you know, understanding LLMs and being able to actually monitor, analyze, and visualize and correlate all across the board with other, you know, layers of the system to be able to get a more holistic understanding that you usually, you know, want to have from observability. There is a fair bit of work to be done there, right. And that's the opportunity where if you're an observability engineer or an ML engineer, you really can get involved in actually building out some of these features. On existing projects or maybe even, you know, starting a new project where you actually specialize on a certain set of models that, you know, you're looking at or you understand well, and to be able to build the observability instrumentation for it. So moving on, again, there's an, we usually do this every year. And these are some of the trends that, you know, we see across the observability space at this given point in time. And again, across the industry, whether we are using LLMs or not in our applications, cost continues to be a very, very pervasive theme where understanding cost and performance of resources is super important. Because then, you know, organizations are running large scale systems, large scale applications on cloud infrastructure that the cost optimization is essential as an essential part of observability. And observability platform costs from pre-aggregation and sampling, that is data costs in itself is an area where there are continuous improvements in terms of what does pre-aggregation do for you, right. Can you reduce the cardinality of the data you're setting over the wire because it costs money, right, at the end of the day. And you turn on tracing, you know, for 30 seconds in order to get 100% traces or, you know, do you do it for a minute? It costs money. And so this is a very pervasive theme in the industry in terms of continuing to optimize. And there's a couple of open source projects within the observability domain in the CNCF itself. Cube cost and open cost. Cube cost is based on open cost. And these have been, you know, used as just foundational projects, if you will, or foundational components to be able to track cost, right. But as you now enter also the world of smart applications, you know, that dimension changes because how do you measure costs for models, right. And is that something that has already been defined? So these are areas which are evolving, which, you know, there's a fair bit of work that is being done by hardware vendors to be able to, you know, provide some data for the resource utilization you are doing. But it's not adequate because, you know, there are lots of other moving parts in the data that is being generated, you know, for your telemetry of your applications, which also costs money. When you're shipping it over the wire, whether you're storing it, how long you're storing it for and, you know, do you actually look at it, you know, seven days after you don't need it anymore, right. So these are many considerations that you need to keep in mind. And there's a fair bit of work happening in the industry, both from end users, as well as from open source engineers on the projects, where some of this is being thought about. The other part is very, you know, there's a fair bit of work happening is end to end observability, where you have, you know, this is not a solved problem yet. Although, you know, many, many pipelines have been proposed, and many reference architectures exist. But you still cannot say, hey, you know, I'm going to just turn this, this, this on, and everything will work end to end in terms of being able to see my Edge networks, my Edge devices, client applications, server side applications, infrastructure models, as well as any other data that you want to see. It's not, it's not there still, even after, you know, all the work that we've all done, whether that's in open telemetry, or whether that's in the media, so whether that is in tracing or logging, right. So this is also another opportunity where there's a lot of work that is, you know, ongoing. But again, our world also becomes more complex as we introduce a new generation of applications coming in. Smart applications. Open telemetry is moving us in the right direction, because as you can see, initially, the project started with, you know, converging ingestion under, you know, of the different telemetry data under one umbrella. And initially it came in, started tracing, then metrics, logging, and today profiling has also become the fourth signal on the project for ingestion, right. So you continue to see that convergence happening in the ingestion space. Now, why is profiling important? Because believe it or not, in the world of understanding performance and resource utilization for models, again profiling is used, fair bet, for being able to understand those layers and what, you know, the latency is and performance is for each of those layers when they are in a model when they are being used for training or for inference pipelines, right. So again, it's an interesting time in history where you're also seeing that convergence happening, but existing telemetry type signals being used for, you know, that for these observing these new assets, if you will.  And what that, what does that mean is that, you know, for a large scale systems that you're building, you would like to have multiple customers leveraging the same common infrastructure from a cost perspective. And hence multi-tenancy, even in the observability data space, becomes a thing because you do want to be able to access, you know, data and correlate across multiple tenants, which may be different namespaces that are belonging to a single customer, right. And a single customer could be, for example, your finance, you know, organization running 20 applications where they're sending telemetry for 20 applications into 20 tenants, right. And they want to be able to correlate their observability data and be able to see, hey, you know, this is the behavior of our systems at any given point in time. So multi-tenancy is actually becoming very important in the, in the scale of, you know, the type of applications as well as the cardinality of data that is being generated by systems. So with that said, again, I think I'll hand it over to Barkech. Do you want to? Why not? Why not? I would love to. So last slide, how you can get involved, right? Make sure to participate in our discussions. You can do that by joining our calls, which we have two per month. Make sure to just add a topic to the agenda, maybe go to our Slack channel and let us know what you would like to chat and maybe how to form this. But feel free to ask about anything. We have people essentially new to the community asking maybe questions that are kind of related to maybe Prometheus project and telemetry and TANOS and any other project. And they kind of don't know where to start. Feel free to ask them there. Like it's fine. We direct you to the correct people. And this is super important. Don't be shy. We are here for you. You can use our mailing list, but I think Slack is really good enough. And yeah, really share your insights and present the topic about maybe the project.  So please join us and thank you for coming today. If no one stops us, maybe you can ask some questions. Let me grab a microphone. Anyone? Any questions? Yes. Hi. Thank you for the talk. I'm not familiar with the LLM things. So we talk, we, you talk about the model LLM for the observability. So where we can find such a thing where you can find the model or something available for, I don't know, to test on our data or you have to buy a vendor. So I think it's a good question because, you know, where do I find and model that I could use for observability data, right? Even if it were out of the box, there are several simple models that are available, which are open source and they can be used. You can even use the existing chat GPT or Gemini or other, you know, services out of the box. But typically, you know, you can just actually configure that in terms of being able to download models. I think the references we could give are probably your hugging face models, the TensorFlow models, your PyTorch models, which are actually available. It depends on the number of parameters that you are, you know, interested in and where you're running these models. Because again, size is, you know, proportionally larger if you have large models, right? Large LLMs. So definitely, you know, these are some of the projects where you can actually download the models and run them. Amazing. Any other question? Hi. Yeah, thank you for the talk. It was very, very good. I like the LLM part as well, even though that's not something that's being utilized by us at this point. I think we are still kind of at the point where I think we have a challenge of balancing resource consumption and allocation versus granularity of the data that you get out of it, right? It's like, you know, you increase your cardinality, you increase the amount of series and the resource usage, particularly memory, explodes in Prometheus and in Thanos. Do you have any guidelines on how to deal with that problem, how to find the right balance? Martin, did you want to answer that for campus? I think it's a good question. I think you should be able, we should have a solution where you specify I want to use only, you know, let's say two terabytes of memory on my cluster and nothing more. And essentially, you know, let's do as maximum as possible within. Now it's a bit more manual, so, but I really encourage you to kind of like make it data driven. So essentially, essentially, you know, kind of measure benchmark and put on production some portion of observability slowly increasing, right? I agree on certain cardinality of the metrics, agree on certain volume of logs and traces. See, you know, to the point where it's kind of minimally, minimally useful, measure the cost of it and let's see and start from there. And you know, if it's too expensive for you, you have to essentially reduce some of it, maybe focus on metrics more and less on logs, maybe opposite, maybe actually reduce cardinality of metrics and use logs more. But yeah, this is what I would, what I would kind of like recommend. I wish there was more automatic solution that will help you analyze all of this. It's a good idea. One other thing that you can probably do is like analyze your query logs to see if the labels that have high cardinality are things that you're actually querying. If not, some of the projects have ways to do a pre aggregation, or you can use the open telemetry collector to do aggregations as well. So that before it hits the DSDB, you can pre aggregate and store, which is a lot cheaper. Yeah, I mean, we definitely again in several of the solutions, you know, we definitely pre aggregate a lot. And we are very conscious of again capacity sizing ahead of time, where you are actually very much sizing storage, as well as data traffic, right? So kind of going in with some initial parameters, you know, for these numbers is always good. But also the percentage of, you know, traffic that you're sending or data you're sending is always proportional to the amount of aggregation you're doing. So you can do multi level aggregation, depending on the type of metric or depending on on the time period, right? Thanks for the talk. And it's nice to see the tag is progressing in a year. A lot of things has progressed. About the first question part, actually, we already have an open telemetry demo application in open telemetry repository and another one here. But a start point for LLMs, a demo application would be great, actually, where we can each offer. Yeah, actually, we were discussing this on the open telemetry demo. And we do plan to use, you know, kind of introduce a workflow for being able to actually do a simple model and being able to trace it, or being able to, you know, instrument it and then publish some metrics, right? It would be still a playground app, but still nonetheless, you know, does provide you insight into how you would do the instrumentation. What kind of metrics are you looking at for the models? And also, what translates into SLAs and SLOs for model performance? Because that's another new area that's emerging out of that. That's great news. And the second part, I have heard a lot of cost work throughout the conference, maybe an energy consumption can be also as refrigerators or kitchen equipment. We have those labels. That might be nice looking at from energy perspective. Yeah, in fact, in fact, there's been a conversation about the tag sustainability, working with the tag observability tag to be able to define a new sustainability taxonomy of labels, so that that actually could be used as a standardized set to begin with for, you know, energy and performance observability. Yeah, great presentations. I love the end user surveys, so keep up with those. I would really like to see more of those coming from the public sector. We would really like to participate more with our experience. Documentation is really top concern, missing documentation and scattered. On specific projects? Open telemetry in general. Is it on the website or do you need to dig through all of the repos? Open telemetry, for example, which is a very large project, it has 80 plus repos, is in the process of consolidating all the documentation on the doc site. So you have to go to every repo, but rather than you can find it on opentelemetry.io to slash docs. And Prometheus is the same way. Again, the documentation is centralized and most large projects tend to do that. But if you see any areas where you see that it could do better, definitely please let us know. We talk about the projects all the time. That's great. So definitely we can work together. And the second thing would be more use case studies, how certain companies in different sectors implemented sort of all the signals and make use across of that in their organizations. Especially when they have multiple teams, I have 200 teams and 1,000 developers. So making sense of all the telemetry is quite a challenge. Yes, absolutely. And I think to that point, I would say that the new end user tag tab that is coming in now is actually tasked with that initiative of continuing to get in technical case studies of observability implementations, which will be again published by the CNCF. But that's a new initiative that's actually just starting off. Well, honestly, we could kind of have some section about observability use cases and we can essentially dig through the existing KubeCon talks and just make it in a centralized place. That's a good idea. So I will note this down. Last two questions, maybe. Thanks again for the talk. So my question is what are some of the best practices to use LLMs for at scale observability. But if you want to take that, I can take the second iteration of it. Okay, I mean, that's the problem. That's what we are missing here. For example, like there was a good question before, there was no observability specific models, right? So you have to kind of use the general model to ask, you know, generic questions and provide as much context as possible. So the best advice I have now is to choose the model that kind of, yeah, is the biggest with whatever compute power you have available and really try to narrow the context. So essentially what exactly is happening in your cluster, what exactly scale problems you have and yeah, and go from there. But we are missing. Yeah, we don't have a good answer to these questions. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because at this point in time, there is not a standardized suggestion that, you know, we can give out of the box. But however, we do plan to actually collate that together over this year because you know, again, there are several models at this point that are used for observability. It depends on like if you're doing anomaly detection, there are specific models that are used, you know, both statistical as well as ML models, which are very common, commonly used. And we can certainly, you know, kind of catalog that out on the tag of the ability, you know, documentation. But right now there is not any consolidated documentation that is available. Another to do. Thank you. Last question. I was following your work on standardizing query languages. And I also heard opinions that since LLM becomes so powerful, it doesn't make much sense to standardize it because learning is no longer a problem. So we can like generate everything and no need to learn each individual language. But on the other hand, each language is tailored to actual database. So it will be more efficient and any average standardized query language will be not that good as existing one. Can you give any arguments why it's wrong and like why we still need this? So I think it's a very good point in time.  And it's really, really awesome to see LLMs, you know, pick up steam and actually get used for MLOps, right? So ML observability is also actually being used. So if I give you an answer that, yes, it's already being done where, you know, multiple query languages are in the observability query language space are actually being fed to LLMs. And there's one human query that is being done to, you know, get whatever data you want from whichever telemetry type that is already being done. Now what is the next step here is that if we could provide a reference implementation from the query language group or reference, you know, architecture, that, hey, you know, you can take this kind of a model where, you know, these specifications and be able to have a demo application available for multiple query languages that you can download and use. That's the next step. I can add one point to that. So yes, it is possible for each project slash provider to have a model that can understand their backend. But from an end user perspective, it's not just dashboards or ad hoc queries that you typically care about a big portion of your observability is with recording rules and alerting rules and whatnot. So there, would you put an LLM in front of that, it would probably be something that's not very cost efficient. But rather if you have standardization, you promote neutrality in terms of projects and vendors implementing their own thing, and you're able to define your rules and alerts in one way and use it across any of these projects. Yeah, and like I already mentioned, like it also provides us the ability to say that, okay, you can have one base model for this standardized query language that you find you and you offer that as a mechanism for others to add weights and things like that. So there are there are definitely a lot of advantages to having a standardized language similar to what we have for the database world. And I would like to add two things. One thing is that when I was walking through the books today, or yesterday, there were two vendors who don't who offer essentially logging and tracing metrics back and they use prompt QL for metrics, but they don't have any language for logging traces. And I asked, why not just using something that that is now or or something that I'll create your own. I was like, I'm not doing this like there is query standardization how we know kind of collaborated with open telemetry. They will come with something amazing. I would just be that people will definitely adopt it. So I'm just waiting. I'm not going to implement twice. So that's the first kind of thing that people are waiting for kind of somebody who helped define some standard language. They don't want to do that. Right. The second thing is that many of those small, say languages that are per project, like they are not in the general model, like, and there's literally statement from from some people. If chat GPT doesn't know about this certain language, it doesn't exist for me. Right. That this is where we are here at this point, which is good. You could be changed many of those maybe small project or like vendors would have their own models that would help with this problem. But right now, a single language can help. Yeah, to have a one model that understand this language, for example, man. And with that, really, really, thank you for so many questions and yeah. Thank you again.