Hello there. I'm Sandy Allnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel. And I am an artist celebrating her 10th anniversary. And an anniversary is celebrating a decade as an independent artist. And I love milestones, and this is a big one. So all month long, I'm celebrating by revisiting an old project of some kind. And today I'm going to be revisiting the Children's Illustrator series that I did a while ago, creating a piece that incorporates some aspect of a favorite children's illustrator. And this one is going to be about Gay Holland. She may not be a household name to a lot of you because she doesn't have a ton of books out there, but she was my graphic design and illustration professor in college. So she poured out a lot into me in a short period of time. And we lost touch after I graduated and things, but I really appreciate all that she gave me as an artist and made me a lot of who I am today. Spent a lot of time during the drawing that I'm doing, thinking about conversations we had and how much I appreciated her. This book is one that was written and illustrated by her. The others that I have here are ones that she just did the illustrations for. And this one is very much a Gay Holland book. It's about bugs and it's kind of written for boys because there's some creepy stuff about the bugs in there that is written for like totally to excite little boys who love bugs. So that was, you know, just a fun thing to revisit and thinking, yep, that's pretty much what what Gay would have written. I could totally see that happening. But she loved drawing any kind of nature and flowers and bugs and animals and things and did it in lovely fashion in colored pencil. But this book is the one that's inspiring partly what I'm going to be drawing today. I'm going to be doing a bee and she did all honey bees, which aren't the fuzzy bees, but I want to do a fuzzy bee. So I'm going to be doing a buff tailed bumble bee. Had to look that up because he has a white tail to him and hers are all honey bees though. And she has all these different layouts. She was a graphic design professor. So she has varying amounts of white space. I love the way she designs her pages stuff. Just beautiful, beautiful books. And you can look for her in used bookstores, especially. There's still some of her books out there. There's a little bit on Amazon at used bookstores that have Amazon pages. You can get some of her beautiful work. So this was a drawing that I did of a bee when I was in high school before I met gay. So that's what I used to use pencil like. I don't know what I did. I cut out that flower. I glued it on orange paper and then glued it on black paper. I don't know what I was doing, but we're going to see how I can update this and make it a better drawing today. Okay, let's do it. Gay Holland was hired at my university in, I believe it was my sophomore year. The school had just started their graphic design program at the time and the drawing teacher started by teaching the graphic design classes. And I love taking them from her. I loved anything she taught because we got along really great. She was an easy critiquer. She was very kind and gay got a reputation immediately by the students who took her classes for being tough. She had harder assignments. She had stricter deadlines. She was very direct in critiques like very, very direct and she also required a portfolio review before you could even get into her class. So being a self-respecting college student who was taking great pride in being lazy. I did not sign up for her classes right away. In my junior year, the art department changed policies and said if you were going to graduate with a degree in graphic design, you had to take classes from both teachers. Oh my gosh. So I spent my summer before my senior year getting my portfolio ready for this, only to find out when I sat down with her that she said I would never get a job in graphic design with that portfolio. I was a little bit crushed to say the least. I was in a panic. She probably saw that look on my face, but she did say she could see some talent. She would allow me in the class if I committed to really working hard because she wanted me to be successful and be able to get a job when I left the school. And I wanted that too, so I agreed to it. I said I would and her first couple assignments did not prove easy at all. She was tough, but I learned more from her even in those first few weeks than I had in multiple classes from the drawing teacher. So it was a good thing for me. It was good, hard medicine. In about November, I think it was in that first semester of my senior year, my roommates were getting on my nerves. They were just party animals and I couldn't get all my work done because it was just so loud all the time. And I mentioned that to Gay. Probably I think it was as an excuse for not getting my work done on time. And she said, well, I do have a room for rent. I have not found anybody yet. If you want to rent a room, you can come live here. So I did. I moved in with my professor. We had nice boundaries set between us so that she didn't feel like a school mom in my life and I didn't feel like I was living with my mom. But we did have a lot of art time together. We'd sit evening after evening at her dining room table, which had a fabulous light, a chandelier overhead that was excellent for doing art by. And Gay would work on her children's illustrations and I would work on whatever I was doing as an assignment for whatever class. But this was not tutoring time. She made it very clear. She did not get paid to teach me every single day. So I got very good at asking questions that would get to the heart of what I was struggling with but not be a very specific kind of question, if you know what I mean. For example, there was one day I remember I was working on trying to draw pairs. The assignment was to do some packaging and we had to make a mock-up where we'd wrap a piece of paper around the can with our design on it. And I wanted this to be something for pairs. So I was trying to draw the pairs and I just was struggling with trying to make them look realistic enough. I wanted it to be a photograph for the can of pairs but we didn't have computers. We didn't have, you know, color printers and that sort of thing to do any of this with. We had to illustrate them by hand. So I asked her for her perspective on the difference between illustration, photo illustration and photography. Like what did she see as the benefits and everything of each one? And one of the things she said in that conversation was to adapt from reality, don't replicate reality. And what she meant by that was as artists we have the ability to change reality. A photographer can only do so much of that. Some of that is done after they take their photograph and they can manipulate it. But as artists, we can choose whether or not that shadow is going to be as deep as it is in reality or deeper. We can choose whether there's going to be certain kinds of colors in a highlight that's going to add a different atmosphere to it. We can choose how to build up colors to create what we want as opposed to just waiting for the camera and figuring out the right settings to try to capture as much of what's in front of us as we can. That doesn't take away from people who do hyper realism either because she said people who do hyper realism can still make adaptations from that realistic thing. You're trying to do a hyper realistic portrait. Then you can bring in a color from elsewhere to put into the face shadows. If there's blue on a wall, you can put a little blue in the shadows that maybe a camera can't capture but is going to make the whole picture work better. Photographers have their place, artists have their place and she encouraged me not to really worry so much about hyper realism and trying to be that realistic. It's really freed me up from trying to be so perfect and trying to get everything exact. Another of my genius questions was what is your favorite aspect of color theory that you use all the time in your artwork? Her answer was just perfect. She said using complementary colors to make shadows and desaturated colors. And she got so excited about it. It turned into a little tutoring session because she grabbed a scrap of paper and started showing me how things like using purples to shade yellows makes a more natural kind of shadow color for a yellow. And I was like, oh my goodness, the things I can use this for. And I later discovered I could use the same complementary colors using my alcohol markers. I could do it with watercolor, both in glazing or in mixing colors that are complements. It's color theory and color theory works throughout all the mediums. And it's one reason why you'll hear about that a lot in my classes and here on my YouTube channel because it does amazing things. So give it a try if you haven't before. I remember another discussion we had about colored pencil in particular, but it applies to other things I've found over my lifetime because I just wanted to know why she was the only person that I knew that got the kind of texture that she got from colored pencils. Because I know a lot of people who use them and they were either very sketchy styles or they would use a blending pencil or a blending solution to try to get a smooth look. And I just wanted to know like, what are you doing? How did you come to this? And why do you spend all this time doing it? And she talked a lot about embracing your art supplies, embracing them for what they're naturally going to do for you. Instead of trying to make pencils look like a different medium by applying all these things to them, then why not just take advantage of the properties that the pencil has? Similar things can be said of other mediums. I know there's a ton of alcohol marker artists who absolutely obsess over getting every blend to be positively perfect. And by positively perfect, they're comparing their artwork made by hand to something that's maybe computer generated. It's that smooth because it's done on a machine. And in these days of AI, I hope art can get back to embracing the medium that we're using in all of its glory because that's the one thing AI is not going to be able to replicate. While I worked on this drawing, I was consciously trying to remember the conversations that I'd had with Gay all those years ago. I mean, it was so long ago. Some of it just kind of comes in little flits. But one lesson that I wish I had hung on to more over the years came back as I was thinking about this particular drawing that she was working on for what felt like weeks. I don't know if it was weeks, but it seemed like every time we sat down, the same drawing was in front of her and she was working on a full flood background. So it had color over the whole thing and you're seeing how long that can take with colored pencil just watching this one happening.  Aren't you ready to just throw it out the window? Because I just thought I could never do a drawing that large as large as she was working on it and that much of one color. Oh my goodness. I just thought she was crazy. And she just looked up at me and smiled and said, you know, art takes as long as it takes. I'm so glad that I had the length of time that this background took to get to the memory of this conversation because I have completely lost that in my art. A lot of things I avoid doing or I changed some parameters of them because it's going to take too long if I do that thing. If I make a drawing that's going to be that large, I'll shrink it down. If it's going to be in one medium but it's going to take too long, I'll change the medium just because I have that social media schedule. Gotta get something done or I have a schedule for classes. I got to pay some bills. I got to go launch a class. I'm going to do this quick thing instead of just doing art in the time that it takes to get the art done. There's some things that just take a little longer and that's okay. And I got to remember that. Before we take a look at the finished drawing, I want to remind you that there is a Zoom party coming up this weekend and all the date, time, links, everything you need to know is in ArtVenture. So go to ArtVenture and go to the Events tab on the left-hand side. There should be an event there that has all the information inside of it for how you can come to the party and maybe win a prize. So here is Gay's book and my high school illustration compared now with my grown-up illustration. And I think I've grown over the years. The really distant leaves in the background that are out of focus make that be, really come into focus and he becomes like the main thing. I just love how this one came out. It was just an honor to do this and think about Gay. Thank you to her for all she poured into me and hopefully a little bit of that got spilled out onto you. And this is available for purchase either the original on my website or you can also get it on Society Six so you can go buy print. So that's about it for me for today. I will see you guys this weekend at the big party. See you then.


Hello there, I'm Sandy Olnok, creator of the Copic Hex Chart and Polychromos, Prismacolor and Luminance as well. And I thought we'd play a little bingo. I get emails sometimes from folks who can't find a particular color so I thought I'd show you where some of those colors are. It's just a few of them and a why seems like it should be with the yellows. But look at the color that this one is next to. These two are so similar. They're practically the same color and they're a greenish-brown color. So I put it with those rather than with the yellows. Same with the fluorescent blue and fluorescent violet. These two belong over with the dark blues. They don't belong in the electric fluorescence section because they're not electric in the same way. I do have a video in which I compared the fluorescence under black light. If you want to see what they actually look like with black light, most people are going to use them with just normal lighting, which is why I left them over here rather than dealing with the whole what does it look like under black light type of situation. Now there's a lot of colors in here where I am still dissatisfied with where they are and you may have the same argument with some of them. And part of that is because every time I'd move something, I'd end up moving something else and something else and something else in order to accommodate it and try to get it to connect with things that are closer to it.  It was really driving me bonkers to try to do it. And this color right here, B66 is one of them that makes me nuts. It should be above and to the left up there somewhere. But if I had moved it there, I would have had to rearrange all of those and it would have been another round and at some point I had to just say, you know, good enough is good enough and it's just fine. It's just going to be fine. So if you have some issues with some of the colors, that could be why. Now when I created this chart, I created it for myself. It was not really meant to actually be anything I would share with anybody because I wanted to know what color was like something else. So I couldn't get away with not having to get up off the sofa to go and re-ink a marker. I know I'm extremely lazy. And what I would do, I was coloring a lot of people, a lot of faces at the time. And I put little swatches down the side of a piece of paper and was trying to compare them to see which skin tone was close to which skin tone. And that ended up being morphed into, okay, well now how about dark skin tones? How about hair colors? Well, then I need the lipstick and I eventually just started working on a whole chart because of it. And I was trying to visually compare the colors rather than do so by number. I tried to just get the numbers out of my head when I did this so that I could try to keep it as close to color as possible. There is going to be no perfect chart because 358 colors is not enough in terms of trying to make a perfect rainbow out of this. There's colors missing.  They don't really have a home. They don't really fit somewhere. And that's just the way it is. 358 colors is a lot of colors. It's a ton. And if Copic ever adds more, you're going to get a free download of a new chart once I get the chart made. So give me some time if they ever come out with some. But you can come back to my site and we'll figure out how that happens, how everybody gets a new chart. But in the meantime, these are the same colors. They haven't added any in years. Lots of people have different ways of using this. Some, they pick colors by skipping over a few from the color they're trying to use to see what's close that they could find for a shadow color or a highlight color. If you have some ideas on how you use it, please do explain those in the comments on this video so that other people can learn from you. And it would also help if you did that on the website as a review because people considering buying the chart might like to know how helpful it is. So there's the fluorescent section up there, but this FYG2 is not electric in that same way. So I put it with the greens. So for the most part, when you're looking for one, when you're playing bingo and you can't find a color, look in the place that looks like that color would be. Like this B60 is in here with the blue violets. It is a blue, but it's in here with the blue violets because it leans toward that kind of color and it's very pale, that kind of thing. The blue violet twos, all the BV2s are very grayish. They could have actually gone to the second page of the chart, which is all the grays. I left them here anyway. I put them in this section. But the match is iffy at best on those, but it is a blue violet, so I kept it there. This section here is also rather confusing because I did a kind of collection of all the pinkish and purplish desaturated colors. So there's some in here that get lost, like it's hard to find them because you wouldn't expect them to be there, especially in one of them. There's like one color that I get asked about a lot. Where is E04? Well, as soon as I put the E04 with the browns, it started looking pink. And as soon as I put it with the pink, it started looking brown. And there's just no winning. So it's in this grouping that has reds and red violets in it and there's the one lonely E that's detached from it. It's floating above it. And these two charts, one of them I colored three years ago and the other one I just colored this week. And I did a close examination. There was very little fading that I saw on the older one. But that chart that was really old has been in a folder. I don't leave it exposed to light so that I don't have to color charts very often. If you have it exposed to really strong light, you might have to do it way more often. It really depends on your situation. I recommend just putting it in a folder or on a clipboard with a piece of paper over it or something. And then just pull it out when you need it. And that will lengthen the shelf life of your chart so that you don't have to color a new one anytime really soon. One thing I'd like to ask is that if you post pictures of your chart, please don't post straight up photos because people could just rip that off. It would be really nice if you could show a juicy side view like one of these. Isn't that much more fun anyway? So please be kind and do that with my chart if you post your pictures of it. And I will see you again very soon.  Bye-bye.


My name is Louise Vincent. I am with Urban Survivors Union, which is the National Drug User Union, but I also work for North Carolina Survivors Union, a chapter of Urban Survivors Union. My name is Robert Suarez. I am a board member for NCSU, which is the North Carolina Survivors Union, and I do a lot of work with USU, the Urban Survivors Union, as the harm reduction consultant. Hi, my name's Hollis. So I've been working at harm reduction since 1987. I recently left my full-time position in California with the San Francisco Drug Users Union maybe a little over a year ago. I still do consulting with them and I consult with other programs on the side. I call myself an active drug user, which means that I have used drugs from the time I was about 12 or 13 until currently. I've been practicing harm reduction for the last 15 years. For the longest time, my usage had me in a place where I was under bridges, under highways, and in a batch of parks using it in New York City. I was a broken user, right, and I found harm reduction through an organization called Vocal New York. Over the years, my drug use has proven to be both harmful and helpful because it's given me something to literally live for and fight for. In 1986, I was saving someone's life. They overdosed in a hotel room. There was a lot of drugs in the hotel room, so I called the ambulance. The police came before the ambulance came and handcuffed me on the bed. My friends, like, turning like all shades of purple and blue on the floor, they took him to the hospital and took me to jail. Had he died, they said they were going to charge me with involuntary manslaughter because I was in that room. I was like a kid. I was 24. I ended up facing 22 years for that night, and I'm catching eight felonies. So, what has that done? Like, 30 years later, almost. It follows me around. I can't, I can't get a job.  I can't go to school or get student loans anymore. I ended up in a long-term program stipulated by the court. I actually finished the program and graduated satisfactorily, but only one in a hundred made it through that program to graduation. I saw a lot of people leave that program with everything they had stuffed in trash bags, knowing that they were gonna probably go back to jail, definitely lose custody or visitation of their children, and I saw how the community, the recovery community turned on those people and blacklisted those people, and it upset me. So, I looked for an alternative to be able to help people that are in that situation, and that's how I found harm reduction in the very early stages when it was first brought to America by Edith Springer, who was actually my mentor, and that's how I got into it, and then decided that I just wanted to work with current active drug users, as opposed to people in recovery. In North Carolina, we have one view of substance use pretty much, and it's been this way for a long time, that we have an abstinence-based view about substance use and addiction. So, if you've struggled with substance use, the answer is to use nothing, and you then call yourself an addict, and then you go to meetings or church or something to get yourself morally centered and do right. While I was in a 12-step program for a while, I struggled with the ideology of it, and I also struggled with the science behind it. So, understanding that I had been taught things that weren't true was complicated for me, and being told not to think for myself was even more complicated for me. I was not ready to buy into any kind of thinking that said that I should stop thinking and have other people think for me because my thinking was too distorted. One of the things you learn in school is that you can't understand something if you don't have a theory, and I really found this to be true with substance use and addiction. When you take away a 12-step theory, I didn't have anything to put back in, and this was really complicated for me because I didn't know how to see my own substance use, and I didn't understand how to look at the substance use of other people. And so this ended up being a pretty traumatic time for me trying to figure all of this out. And what harm reduction was saying was any positive change, that one drug didn't necessarily lead to another, that you could use one drug and maybe not another drug, you could go back and forth in and around the spectrum. And since there was no harm reduction where I lived, it really was up to me to find it. And one of the things that I wanted to do was create it for other people. There were messages that really that really allowed me to love myself in a different way, not have quite so much self-hatred, and hell, they were at least the truth that my problems are problems of the drug war, and not all problems of myself. We've been working in HIV prevention for 20 years now, and from the beginning our notion was to assist any positive change as a person described it for themselves. And generally there was a chaotic out of control drug use on the one hand we deal with as by incarcerating and killing, letting people die. And the other hand we have utter abstinence, which is not for many, many people a realistic outcome. The human species is an intoxicating one. So we said any positive change would allow us to deal with this middle ground. And in that middle ground there's so many opportunities for positive change with drug users because we've generally focused ourselves in the United States and elsewhere on causing as much harm as we could for as much money as we can. So there were plenty of fertile ground for change. Among the things we've done is initiate some of the first hepatitis vaccination efforts, now incorporating other vaccines such as flu, H1N1, pneumococcal, and tetanus and other things that that people are who might be interested in such vaccination. We've also been able to focus on overdose, which is the number one killer of people with HIV. And late 1996, we began a program asking our participants, would you like to have this medicine? And our participants taught us the important elements of a program that would include naloxone. People were thrilled at the idea. And slowly, very slowly it caught on. I had actually heard about it for the first time in Italy in 1995, the Red Cross there in Florence, was doing something regarding naloxone and they made it available over the counter. So the good idea, I think, from my knowledge initiated there. And all we did was bring it to the United States, put it in program form. And after learning from our participants, a number of extremely important things, what size vial to use, what syringes to use, how to do it and so forth. We rolled out our program in January of 2001. To date, we have seen over 15,000 people in providing education about this. And we have over 2000 reports of people reversing overdose in their friends and family. The Bush administration would say that preventing opiate overdose is something they don't want to do because they fear it will increase drug use. So in effect, the US government has been actively promoting death regarding overdose as well as other drug related issues. We said we can do better. Our participants were sharing with us that lives are being saved. And we've expanded this. I've actually revived five people myself. The first one was a woman who had come and her boyfriend had come to our outreach a number of times. She was running through one time and she heard us talking about overdose in the lock zone. And she mentioned to her boyfriend, one day they came to one of our sites and got some syringes and other equipment they went to inject. And she went out. He was horrified. He was dating this this woman who was 18 years old and from a very wealthy family in Chicago blonde hair, blue eyes. And she was unconscious and she was turning blue. And he didn't want to bring her to the hospital for fear of the police and being charged with murder, which happens in Chicago. He drove back to our site remembering what she had said about overdose. And then my colleagues and I came out, he was crying, please help. We went to the car. She looked dead as dead as anyone can look. And we began the process. She showed first thing you do is you you check to see that the person doesn't respond to painful stimulation such as knuckles on the lips or the chest. She did not. And so I drew up a CC of naloxone injected it into her shoulder.  My colleague couldn't unbutton it. So we just went right through the shirt. I leaned the chair back in the passenger seat and I breathe for her maybe three or four times. She her color got better very, very fast. Her boyfriend then became jealous. He said, you know, I can do that breathing. You don't this old man doesn't need to be kissing my girlfriend. And he began. He breathed for one time and she woke up and it sounded like this. You know, just like a baby being born or someone splashing you with cold water and she very slowly, you know, orient what's going on? You know, what are you people doing here? What? Why is my boyfriend the toughest nails Polish kid? Why is he crying?  And we explained that she overdosed and she said, I didn't overdose. I said, look at your shirt. You see a little hole in the little blood bit of blood there. No, that could have happened from anything.  And she goes, it tastes like mushrooms and pizza. And I said, have you eaten mushrooms and pizza? She said, no. And then my colleague was holding the pizza that we were eating just before they came mushroom pizza. And that's all she wanted to know. She believed us and and then I spent the next half hour with her and her boyfriend, teaching them about overdose and how to help each other should it happen again. And it did. It happened a few times with them. And they revived each other. They're still alive and happy and healthy today. Naloxone looks exactly like water. So as I'm drawing it up, I'm saying, I wish to God this had gold flecks or something in it to make it look different, make it look extraordinary. But it didn't and you draw it up just on faith and you inject it and it works. And it's a miracle. It really is. It's the purest antidote in medicine. So I would say the number one reaction among people being revived is surprise. They just don't get it.  And oftentimes they're motivated to be protective of other people. They want to help others stay alive as they were helped staying stay alive. And they'll be the last one to use because they want to watch over people and they know what to do. And that kind of altruism that kind of concern with others is very catchy with this kind of program. And I think it's kept a lot of people alive. And the whole idea that drug users are are not caring are not helpful is insane. And there's nothing that proves it more dramatically than overdose prevention. So my help is it's integrated everywhere. There's HIV prevention everywhere. There's work with drug users, you know, naloxone isn't a magic bullet. If people are isolating because of the stigma of drug use, if people are, you know, you can't really use it on yourself too well. And it requires a relationship of some kind. Someone needs to be there to help you just as you help them. So that really implies we get rid of the stigma associated with drug use. It's a special relationship where you can say, I think I'm going to use, can you help me? But that's where we need to go. So this is the definition of who we are to unify and empower drug user unions across America to collaborate, thus providing a united platform, giving a voice to American drug users to address the harm created by the war on drugs at both a national and international level. To present drug users and the drug user agenda as an organized, strong and unified front against the war on drugs. Okay, let's vote on adopting this. Historically, it's been really hard in the United States to do and sustain user organizing, just because people would start something, but then somebody would get locked up, somebody would lose their housing, somebody would lose their job. And so in a really difficult environment, it's hard to create a sustainable organizing model. There have always been users in the harm reduction movement. When I started doing needle exchange, I was a heroin user, but we weren't organized as such we were just we just blended in. And now it's more possible to organize as drug users and have an independent voice. We don't have health care for all. And so without health care, and without the government involved in harm reduction, it leaves little room for people to have the services they need to really be healthy at all. When you don't have access to sterile supplies or naloxone, people are just struggling to stay alive. So it's very hard to be engaged in activism. With that said, there's been activism and a struggle for activism for over a decade in the United States. And so people have been working hard. The need for us to organize, you know, as drug users, you know, happened for us, you know, and for my involvement and experience in 2004, not too long before that time, drug users were denied access to hepatitis C treatment. Unless you can document you had three to six months clean, you can get treatment to hepatitis C. If you were a prisoner, forget about it. You know, but we organized ourselves, right, so that we would be vocal.  And I would openly disclose and self-identify, you know, as a drug user, you can hear a pin drop. Okay. And I want to work my presentations.  And I looked at my partner, Jason at the time put a presentation and said, that's not quite what we meant, you know, and we had another opportunity, you know, to get vocal about our drug use and come out, you know, we had no applause, but we have a lot of laughter, you know, so we knew then that we needed to be vocal in challenging the stigma of HIV, AIDS, and drug use, you know, and that's when I came up with the name voices of community advocates and leaders of the New York users union, you know, that now serves as a voice for many to organize is to live for me. If we don't organize and stand up for better laws and and to tear down the stigmatizations, then there's no there's no organization that would do it for us and who better can do it than the users themselves. It's important that users stand up and have a voice. Historically, they have never they've never had a voice in their head at place. They've never been brought to the table when laws are made, you know, things are done around things that affect their lives. It's the same, the same thing with the civil rights movement, you know, women's suffrage as a group of people who are being, you know, immensely oppressed. Vocal is successful at getting having our voices out there. With overdose, we in conjunction with the drug policy alliance help pass a 911 Good Samaritan law and to to encourage people to call an ambulance as someone overdoses without being afraid of going to jail. We just had some major victories in the state capital passing some bills into law. One of the bills we were working on is this syringe access bill. The health code in New York stated that it was okay to have clean syringes distributed. And the penal code insisted that it was not legal to do that. So what we did was we sort of changed the language of the of the bill itself to reflect that the reconciliation was needed between those two agencies so that people would not be afraid to exchange needles without fear of police harassment, you know, and we've done that. One of our key recommendations is to ensure that every single New Yorker who needs a clean syringe can get access to a clean syringe. The Rockefeller drug laws, which were giving unwarranted numbers of prison time for minor drug offenses. So we got that repealed also. You go before judge with a nonviolent violation. They turn it into this amazingly big crime where you could get a maximum sentence of 25 years for a small amount of low or high grade heroin no matter what. And just being a user can get you 25 years. I would say that Rockefeller was out of his mind. Also the 30% rent cap, which allows people with HIV and our disability to pay 30% of their income towards rent so that they have other money free to take care of basic needs. I paid my rent today. And when I was doing it, I thought this could be the last time that I pay 72% of my disability on my rent the last time. Let's face it. Change comes from the grassroots. Change comes from activists like Wanda. Wanda in her leadership with all of her colleagues at Vocal have played a very special role. Yes. Yes, they've made their voices heard. Let's thank them for that because that's the right thing to do. It's what a democracy is supposed to be made of, that energy, that focus, that urgency. Yes, you're supposed to track down people like me and Albany and anywhere else you can find me. And let us know what you think because that's how things change as the essence of how things change. One of our main goals is to fight the stereotype that drug users are passive or incapacitated or unable to make opinions or shape policy. People who are involved in our group, they feel better about themselves. We're giving people a positive connection to their identity as drug users. They're actually doing something to help themselves and others. Combining that with a group of people who hopefully feel good about themselves working on making better for other people. The program that I worked with in San Francisco, we hire drug users and we pay them a salary.  We don't... It's just, it's so disrespectful. I think drug users should be paid for their information. Without them, you wouldn't have a job anyway. So pay them what they're worth. In 2000, I believe it was 13, we first formed what was the American Federation of Drug Users and from there, we went on to form the United States Alliance of Drug Users and from there, we formed the USU. Urban Survivors Union has really began to build our national union, which is really exciting. So in the last few years, we've held a national march. We have started a national reframe the blame campaign that is that is a movement against drug induced homicide laws. We've grown from five user unions to over 30 in the last couple of years. So we're growing at a really massive rate. Drug users are beginning to see that they need to come together in order to be more powerful and actually affect change. For me, the biggest achievement in the United States has been that an underground supervised injection facility has been running for... I think it's going on six years now in America. It's been research, it's been studied, it's been written up in medical journals and it's successful. There's no deaths, lives are reversed using naloxone if there's an overdose and this program continues to run and I think that's probably one of the biggest achievements I've seen in America in the drug user movement. We are doing beautiful, beautiful things. We have drug users who are building services and growing and I am growing and I'm growing with my friends and partners and that is not a place I ever thought I'd be but we have to do more. We cannot fight for harm reduction and not fight for racial justice. We cannot fight for harm reduction and not fight for disability justice. We cannot fight for harm reduction and not have an intersectional response. We cannot do this alone. Drug users, we must stand with our allies. We must work with our allies and we must not stop. We must not stop. The drug user rights movement is about human connection and resiliency to me so it's about fighting back. It's about us, it's about people understanding and seeing the truth and refusing to just buy the lie. I think it really is about taking control and changing the narrative. Drug user rights are human rights so for people that think that drug user rights are all about getting high that's not the issue. The issue is these are human rights issues. These are issues as to what I as a human being can do with my body and what we are allowed as you know and what we say about your rights as an individual and certainly in the United States drug user rights are also issues of racial justice so the way we have built the drug war and as an issue around race is truly problematic especially here in the south. The criminalization of drug users in the United States has been huge. As you know the United States is about 5% of the world's population and we have 25% of the world's prisoners right here. Just thinking about that is like whoa so we arrest more people in the United States for things like marijuana right. Low level crimes and we're working towards ending that practice but when we think about ending criminalization that has to do with drug use we have to think about how we replace some of that because we're talking about taking a lot of food of a lot of people's place when we talk about ending mass incarceration because that's what we're talking about and that's a 1.5 trillion dollar business ending up the drug war itself. So working towards dismantling that is going to be huge. Some of the major goals and overarching goals are certainly decriminalization legalization of drugs and ending the drug war ending this mass incarceration and connecting people to community and society. All we do is disconnect people in the United States. So if you are found to be a person who uses drugs and needs help we start with disconnecting you and I truly believe that addiction is the opposite of connection. So what we do is everything wrong to help a person. We disconnect people from their families. We disconnect people from their friends. We alienate people from work.  What we need to be doing is reconnecting people. When you see good people spending time in cages for holding a substance or having a substance when people who rape people and molest people and do real harm to folks are leaving jails much sooner it is really complicated to understand and it is also complicated to understand how we are sitting in a crisis where over 70,000 people died of overdose last year and we don't have solutions. I think the overdose epidemic in America is state sanctioned genocide. I think if they really wanted to stop the overdose epidemic they would and they haven't.  Without supervised injection facilities and decrim of drug possession nothing is going to change. Dan, are you sleeping? How can you sleep like that? What am I, Facebook? Live. Live stream on Facebook? Yeah. Hi everybody. So, I mean I've lost hundreds of people to the war on drugs. Whether it be overdose, my brother died of HIV, my lost friends to hepatitis C, lost friends during liver transplant, lost friends to suicide. Yeah, and some of the leaders in the harm reduction movement we've lost and we've lost a lot of them recently. I mean losing Dan was big for me. I can't really talk about it. Well certainly two of my mentors that are no longer with us are Becky Brooks and Dan Big. Certainly the people that sort of resonate with me the most and the people that I spent the most time with. I wouldn't be who I am without them and I wouldn't fight the way I do without them. I've had so many people I love die. My daughters died of overdose. I can't imagine what I would do if I wasn't fighting the drug war and if I wasn't involved in a drug user movement. This is absolutely what creates and keeps my connection to life and gives purpose. For a long time we've waited for our legislators to sort of make change. We're no longer waiting. We're moving forward with policies on the ground. Enables and then communities that go towards helping people who use drugs live. All the improvements, all the success Chicago Recovery Alliance is credited with is really not ours to take credit from. It's so simple. All we're doing is not hurting people. All we're doing is cooperating with drug users and assisting any positive change. It's just there's so many things we do. We do the thing that hurts the most instead of what helps that makes our work easy. But we hope to get to the point where we accomplish the easy things as a society and we get to the real difficult things. The human shame that is a very tough thing to bring out from within somebody. And hopefully people can accept that drug use are part of our species and we can move on from there.


Good afternoon, and thank you for coming to this talk. I'm Chang Wu from I'm Talking Labs. And I'm talking is a non-custodial wallet based in Singapore. And today I'm going to talk about a topic which is called post-mode wallet. So before the talk, I would like to ask you guys a question, what is your ideal wallet? I think many of you may like use MetaMask. Maybe I'm token or others' wallet. So what is your ideal wallet? It looks like you don't need to answer the question now, but it's worth to think about it. So let's take some time to look at where we are now and look back at the past. I would like to go through some number and some other information from what we have right now. So here is the adoption map of the Ethereum users. So we can see many users are distributed in North America, Europe, Asia, and everywhere. But these users are really are crypto users. So how do I define crypto users? That's because not everyone use the crypto wallet. But I think most of the people right now, they just use the decentralized exchange like Binance, like FTS exchange. So how do we turn this kind of situation? So make more people to get into the crypto wallet. That is the core idea of this topic. So for now, there are over 221 million people have crypto currency right now. This number might not be accurate just for reference. If we assume the number is correct, then 97% of people don't know crypto or don't have any kind of crypto assets. So one day if you want to introduce the crypto wallet to your parents, your friend, or even your teacher, how do you do that? Can you help them to sell out a crypto wallet in two minutes, five minutes, or even in 10 minutes? I think the answer for now probably is no. It's really hard for them to know what is crypto because the learning curve is pretty high. So here are the challenges we are facing every day. If you are working as a wallet company, then you will receive the feedbacks like this every day. So people don't know what is the crypto? What is the C phrase? And also they don't know how to speed up the transition when their transition gets stuck. For those questions, so we need to come up with some solution for the future wallet. How do we fix it? If we want to make the misadoption to happen, crypto wallet is an important entry point for unborderable apps for users. Yeah, so we need to fix it. So how to fix it? So let's recap it again. So if you want to rebuild a wallet, then we need to know what the future wallet looks like. So this is a very good question because if you think about the smart contract developer in 2018 or 2019, at that moment, because they didn't sense or they didn't know there is a kind of attack called NEV attack. So when you design a smart contract at that time, eventually you're really hard to defend NEV attack. So that's why we need to know what is the future and we need to know how to design the wallet. And so this is a reason this topic for the possible unmerged wallet. So let's look at the future. The concept of the NGAN is proposed by Vitalica in 2021. Actually, the goal is to scale in the Ethereum for many users. So we can onboard more users to the Ethereum ecosystem. For the NGAN, in the article that Vitalica mentioned, Ethereum is pivoted into a low-out solution centric low-map. What does this mean? It means we can, today we have already seen lots of layer two solution coming up just like start net, attack, uptrend or up to instant. Since if the layer two is the future, that means we need to have more data space for the low-up. So how do we have more data on the low-up? So here are two ways we can do that. So first, we need to get more larger block. And the block need to be verified very easily for the line crime. If we can do so, then we can have a large block and that is what Dan Shardin doing. And another approach to do this is how do we make the data smaller? If we can make each low-up transition smaller, then it could fit into the bigger block. Then that means we can get a lot of, I mean, transition get into the block. So in the future, ideally we think there might be a high TPS with a low transaction fee into the blockchain system. This is important because if we look back at the history of the internet, then we will find this is kind of similar. So when the internet was born, the bandwidth is a secret resource and it is very expensive. Not everyone can afford to the internet. With the cost decreasing, then we can see many applications start to growing on the internet. So if you was in 1998, you probably don't think about what is YouTube, what is Netflix. But if you are in 2020 or 2022, then you might think Netflix is makes sense. We can have more online video. With cheaper transition fee, we can do more thing, not just DeFi, not just NFT. We can do lots of potential application in the market. So yeah, let's think about how do we make the wallet better? So we can have more application onboard into the internet ecosystem. So yeah, we need to have a wallet which fits there to the roadmap and the user is friendly. Here I want to give you a very brief short summary. So first, it's really hard for the general users to know what is crypto, what is Ethereum. Think about it. If you want to teach your parents to set up a wallet, the first thing is they need to write up the C-phrase. So what is C-phrase? Yeah, it's difficult to understand. And then next, they need to, if they want to send some token, then they need to have some ether. So this is another thing that's quite challenging for them because they, what, this cannot make a transfer unless I got some users. The second thing is the user experience is pretty bad now. Because I think, because the learning curve is pretty high. So most of the user don't know how to, I mean, run the wallet. Like how do I interact with DeFi? If there is a new application, how do I assess the application? They need to learn it from the video or some kind. Or they really, or it's really hard for them to know how to do that. And third, just like I mentioned, for now we have already have some users. But most of the users are crypto users. They are just general users. And because all of these challenges, they are just stayed with the centralized exchange. How do we, I mean, try to get them into the ecosystem? So we need to have a layer two ready wallet which is designed for the future. I think this is a very big thing because in DevCon we see the merge is already finished. So the layer two is, if the layer two is the future, so we need to start to thinking about what is the future wallet look like. So following is a requirement. We think ideal wallet should have. It's overwhelming if you are working, again, if you are working at the wallet company, this is really overwhelming. Every day you will receive users feedback complaining that their token was stolen or they just make, they just approve to some fake contract. So how do we avoid that? Avoid it. And even though they are more important, important question is how do we make sure the user's assets is safe and how do we help them to manage their key? So today I'm not going over this topic, but I will just focus on the key management and the how do we make their account could be recoverable. Here are two solutions, one is MPC, any other is AA, F-Track account. I think the F-Track account is a very popular topic during the DevCon talk every day. So you might, probably might heard about it. But for MPC, why is MPC? MPC actually is a multi-party computation. So think about, this is simple. If you want to generate a random number, you can ask, if you want to generate random numbers through three people, you can ask each one to for a number. And then we can sum it up to get the result. So actually the MPC is a way for joining computing a function over the input. Let's take another example. If we can take the signature as a result, we can ask each party to contribute part of its secret numbers as the input. And then we can get the signature. So this is kind of some one-mess or magic. We do not need to have a private key, but we can generate the validate signature. So the input is not related to the private key. So you don't need to worry about once your device gets lost, because there's no private key stored in the device. But eventually the signature will be generated. The way it operates is pretty similar to multi-seq. So think about that. If a user needs to request a transaction, it needs to have another party to co-work to generate the signature. So this is really like a multi-seq way to send a transaction. So this is a very important feature for the MPC wallet. And the MPC wallet looks like an EOA with an invisible private key. Besides, it could be decided with the threshold settings, for example, like two of three. So for example, if this is a threshold signature, then we can, if we want to send a transaction, then the device need to co-work with another device which is online together to generate the signature. But also this is the weakness of the MPC. It need the help of another online devices to working together. If you think about that, for this secret which is distributed to different devices, it could be stored in some, it could be dedicated to some decentralized service. So for example, if the service help to store these secrets, then the service could help the user to identify the transaction is valid or not. Because one day if the user want to interact with the app or some device application, once this party find the device is fake or it's a scam, then it can stop to help to generate the signature. So it's more like this is kind of like a risk control function. And another part for the MPC is it could support multi-chain because as I mentioned, the MPC wallet looks like an EOA with an invisible private key. So all of the, if this is a wallet and they are all go with this invisible private key. So for MPC wallet, it could support BTC, Bitcoin. It also can support the Ethereum. And all of the private chain is there if their signature is MPC friendly. So this is a source perfect, but for the MPC solution, just like what I mentioned, it requires having an online computing unit to co-work with. These are accounts. In Ethereum, we have these two types of account. One is EOA and the other is a smart contract account. So I just talked about the EOA over the MPC solution. So how about we talk about the contract account? So this is the extra account wallet. So it's a kind of smart contract wallet. So the nice thing that the smart contract is, it's a flexible, you can call anything into a smart contract. So you can have a customized rule. So you can define your rule into this smart contract. With the AA wallet, there is an entry point with two phases, verification and execution. Because in current Ethereum, transactions are verified by ECDA signature with balance and the non-check and then execute a transfer of all the co-function. So we need to define this verification and execution. So this is pretty easy for the AA wallet. So what is important? If we can customize each kind of verification rule, so that means we can define any kind of signature that's in the smart contract, like BOS, like Sino, or like EDDDSA. So we can have all kind of signature verification rule of building into a smart contract. And also, if we think this is not safe, we can make it as a multi-signature wallet. So that means you can control, the wallet could be controlled by five people, but only three people approved, then the transaction can be executed. And then the other advantage is, it could be decided to verify of chain-signing message. So this is pretty important, because if you think about the meta-transession, or, yeah, if you think about the meta-transession or some gaming app, because the user don't know how to get the ESAs. So if you can have some relayer to help them to relay the transaction, this would be useful because they don't need to buy the ESA when they want to send a transaction. And the last is, I think it is more important, is we can change the signer. Okay, to me, the most important and interesting thing for abstract account is, we can abstract account from the signer, from the EOA. So that means we can have a signer, and we can have an account, but the account doesn't equal to signer. So this is a very important feature because one day if we want to design a kind of application like DID or Sobong token, the account could be fixed, and we can have the same address, but we can have a different signer to control this account. Here is a summarize of some parts of features of the NPC wallet and the abstract wallet, AI wallet. So for NPC, it's developed in 2018, and for now, there are many protocol, so you can use any kind of this to design your NPC wallet. For AI, recently, there are some EIP, like 29, 38, and the 23, 37, yeah. So if you are interested in, then you can try to read it. And Alice, Alice is actually is a hierarchical threshold signature protocol, which is designed by me and my colleague. This is a different threshold signature because we can have a different asset structure trying to make a share with a hierarchical level, compare some of the important feature with the NPC and the AI wallet. So for NPC and AI, both of them could run in multi-sync way. So that means we can have a multi-signature operation. But for AA, because the account and the signer could be different, so that means the account could be changed in the future. So this is a, not account, the signer could be changed, this is a typo, okay. But for NPC, because the private key is equal to account and the signer, so yeah, this is not possible. But for NPC and the AI wallet, because they all could be designed with social recovery, so both of them work with that. And for NPC and the AI wallet, all of them can support risk control. Just like what I mentioned, NPC wallet, you can, if you dedicate your secret share to another centralized service, then this centralized service could help you to filter those malicious operations from the users. But for AA, because this is a smart contract wallet, so you can define any kind of rule into the smart contract, like you can set the daily withdrawal limit, or you can have some wireless address. But for NPC, because this is more like a private key solution, so it could support multi-chain. But for the AA wallet, because it runs on the smart contract, so that means if the private chain does not have a smart contract, or things, or it's not EVN comfortable, then it cannot be support multi-chain. And for NPC, because this is not the smart contract, so it could not do some meta-transaction, so yeah, for AA, it can take advantage of the meta-transaction. But for D5 friendly, I think this is a very, very important point here. So it sounds like a pretty cool thing, but if you try to look back all of the smart contracts developed right now, not every smart contract supports smart contract wallet. So that means only the EOA can control, or can interact with the smart contract. And also, another thing is most people do not support EIP 2071. It's an interface for the smart contract wallet. Yeah, so this is, I think this is the advantage of the NPC wallet. From this table, we can see the ports and the cons of this kind of these two solutions. I just borrowed the mean from the, it's too much, yeah. Where's the shower? I just showed, so shower is here. Hey, shower. Yeah, we can combine NPC and the AA wallet. So we can design a future wallet. You can have a wallet like that. If you consider this is a future wallet, then have a sign here, and then we can have account into the smart contract wallet. And also, because of the feature of the NPC and the AA, for NPC it could be run in off-chain, but for AA it could be, because all of the operations are on the smart contract, so it should be on-chain. So there are two different features, but I think that you can take advantage of this kind of two solutions. And third, because just like I mentioned, NPC need another party to be online to help to co-work to generate a signature, so it should be synchronized. But for AA it could be a synchronized, but this is not really friendly for multi-signature wallet, because for multi-signature wallet, when you send a request, you need to have another party to sign a transaction. So there is a lot of delay. So at the last, I think if we can combine these two kind of solutions, this is a benefit we can design a future wallet for this kind of application. Like for payment, because for payment, you need to have a very user-friendly wallet. So, and for DID you need to have an account, have an address, which is sent as an account. Yeah, so we can do a lot of things if we can combine these two kinds of solutions. So thank you, this is my talk.


All right folks. Good morning. Welcome on back here this Wednesday, July 5th Although it feels like a Monday just coming off 4th July great to see all of our students and members alike inside our live trading room Love to see all of us here Jeff and Grant and Patrick Manuel later of Vina Sam John before Kathleen before and Jeff and all of us just joining us right now inside the Side group trading room great to see you back there great to have all of us back Collectively though if you're not in inside the live trading room Perhaps you're on our social streams Facebook live LinkedIn Twitter YouTube the works I hope everybody enjoyed the day off at least in the in the half day Perhaps if you ended up taking off on Monday as well making a nice long weekend Hey, let me know what you ended up doing across 4th July folks for Michael Phil and Kathleen jeth etc. There's anything fun that you ended up doing over the past day day and a half Let me know right now Make the start off actually just that and I'm really coming off just 4th July Nothing really in terms of stocks that we're really talking about from yesterday We have a couple of trades here this morning like quadruple C CCCC as you can imagine there ended up making a nice little pop-up But then it just pulled back a moment ago So at this point now we'll likely put it on our watch list But you're reluctant of trading it though going into the open because you got to be careful of the down trend there off the highs Kathleen says grandchildren time. That's right Kathleen ended up telling me actually on a If it wasn't on Friday Kath, maybe it was Monday morning You told me that you're on vacation right seeing some grandchildren So hope you had a great time there All right, perfect, and we got a bunch more of us actually taking right now So actually what we'll do is just pretty much begin here and we'll go right from top to bottom Phil says you went to see an air show Doing his pool. Yeah, it's a little party of friends. There you go I'd love to love to hear that and Manuel says Monday great Monday of treating but yesterday You had 20 people over for a nice party Manuel hosted. Where's my invite? You kidding me Manuel? Let me get my webcam up in the trading room for this when well You kidding me? I didn't get the invite. You had 20 people over Says next one. I'm teasing. I'm teasing them. All right folks today is not Tuesday But today's Wednesday is that put my phone on silent there, but normally on Tuesdays What do we normally conduct inside our live trading room on Tuesdays? That is on Tuesdays What do we normally conduct each and every Tuesday? But today being Wednesday and that the markets closed on Tuesday yesterday We're gonna do it today traders talk Wednesday edition of traders talk They'll be at 11 o'clock eastern time just live inside the cyber group room So we're gonna do a normal morning of audio commentary Take a small break at 10 30 then I'll be back on at the top of that hour at 11 o'clock to do our weekly workshop Q&A workshop traders talk so any questions that you got feel free to shoot me over a quick private chat or email That goes just exclusively for us inside the live trading room if you're on social media right now Actually, let me get the QR code up right now You could use your phone and scan that on the top left of the stream And if you wanted to make it for our workshop this morning Then feel free to just do that and then shoot me over a question or trade of your own and Josh at c2 trading calm I always like to post that here as we go through Now let's just go from top to bottom here quadruple C I don't know if the news is out on the stock ended up leading to a nice pop after the 8 o'clock move pretty much And a little spotty beforehand But once 8 o'clock hit has started to trend up and it's even at that point it had a big spread for the price So thankfully and we could say this now after the fact but right around 8 15 8 20 ish as a pop tire here The spread filled in more the liquidity got better on the book So it ended up providing a nice tradable move from there and hopefully more to come so quadruple C I'm gonna put on our watch list here We keep it going this im bl or I am PL for that matter just very choppy I mean it was the most active stock throughout the whole pre market But as much as you wanted to see this break higher it just failed to do so and sideways You know, I'll put it on our watch list here at this point for the open Just wish you and just wishing we were showing better direction at this stage You know hoping is one thing, but otherwise you just can't rely on hope and Seems to be said here a d-wack even though this end up making the pop I know at 8 o'clock or prior to that I think one of our students had called it out it was not tradable then it was on a big spread It wasn't going anywhere for about like what 45 minutes nearly an hour since that post was made So the news came out I think over the weekend or from from Monday this past or earlier this week I should say I think there is some settlement with the sec some 15 million dollar settlement So it led to a nice little pop good reaction so far and for right now The spreads have contained slightly, but there's still fluctuating up and down a bit here in pre market So definitely want to see the order book filling a lot more heading into the opening bow And it will put this back on our watch list I say back because if you're not familiar with this trade if you're a new student of CTU you got to show this here D-wack off its IPO. This is back in 21 But you know a lot of us were here live or a lot of a lot of us were joining Faustone myself live on this day This a weekly chart, but during our on-site presentation back in August September of 21 It was right here led to this enormous pop You know when the news came out of Trump and his involvement with this back this special purpose acquisition company led to a big pop up And it was a great day trade So like we always say here if a stock that has history like that can make a fraction of the type of run that it made back then That's a home run. That's a huge success I mean you could even say just looking at this daily chart this thing is tanked since But back from November of last year even you know on the daily side here had a gap And then it had popped up pretty nicely. So as far as a day trade this definitely has repeated success as far as making a nice Intra day move for us to capitalize on Pull this back out. I don't have my level four open for D-wack. So I'm actually pull that up right now So 1580 seems to be a bit of a resistance, you know for as thin as the book is right now in pre-market 7000 shares and it's been out there for a little while. So for as long as it's been out there the size I would respect that 1579 price to be exact 1579 about 7000 shares 78 even even one lower So 16 would be a big level focus on your 50 cent levels whole numbers traditionally, but in particular 1578 Be a resistance there All right, cool. So we have three stocks so far I mean, you know, I wish that there was something very liquid that was popping trending up extremely well making even that much better for us to follow But we got time here and be trending up going into the open but order book pretty thin Man, this was bad in pre-market early. So it's pushing up a little bit more now I reckon I slept this just on the back end of our watch list for right now. All right So let's see what else we can grab here and P Just trying to find something cheaper even all right this TMC trade. It was actually looking pretty decent earlier in pre-market I didn't make the call out Thankfully it ended up pushing back up and looks even better here It's had a hell of a run though looking at the daily chart back from late June early or back from late May early June you could say Stock was like a 70 80 cent stock ended up popping up. So it's up already like, you know 250% from that point. So You know, just be careful of a false breakout on this trade. It's already gapped up a little bit from that close from Monday So, you know, just for right now edit TMC Bookmap open for this one either. So we're gonna just keep going through Rivian Rivian was looking the best going into the eight o'clock move It was making a lower high at the time but very active on the chart good volume on the book So it dumped off afterwards but now making another squeeze back up once again Rivian we ended up trading back from Friday of last week into Monday the half day So we know that there is some news in relation to their deliveries as far as their electric vehicles their EVs And that's also coming off the news that Tesla had over the weekend with their own EV report So it looks like the EV market kind of hot right now and Rivian definitely a great beneficiary Beneficiary of it. So up six and a half plus percent right now making a strong push once again up to 21 There was an iceberg. I'll bring book map back up for this one level four backup for this one here There was a pretty big order up top at 2160 and it's still there about 55,000 shares out there since like 745 in the morning. So, you know, that's a big one to work off of then from there 22 Got a big support level get broken through earlier 2090 so support should become resistance even there at first. So watch 2090 Then from there if it blasts much higher than 2160 as your next resistance after that Rivian now you're now now at this point. You have a pretty good list We're also pretty much at 5% right now here on the gainer side So if there's anything else looking good folks, just type it in on the chat board Let me know for all of a sudden social for all of us inside the live trading room Didn't see much down percentage wise early this morning the AMR X you're down a 16 now, but we graph Nothing much happening there BWA same deal I saw something the crypto stocks down a little bit this morning coin riot Mara You know, you know, I'll take a look at Mara I called out earlier inside the chat board inside the cyber group room a few different support levels to work off of on This trade how about this little teaser if you wanted to know those support levels join us inside our live trading room You'll see what's underneath this chart here And I posted it inside the chat board a little bit earlier for Jeth John Kathleen, etc. All was there now So, you know, I'll be watching Mara going into the open personally personally like that's my side list stock You know, perhaps we'll focus on it after the open, but I feel like if you can't short it then You might need to wait a little bit for that bounce off that support Alright, so folks, that's pretty much all I got I mean really there's nothing really else looking great from the loser side Although the markets were down a little bit early this morning in pre-market bottomed out off of 441 50 But a lot of time left to see the market pull back lower and then from that from there Perhaps around 1030 will be ideal time to look for that down to reversal Manuel saying out of duo you oh 10 cents on that trying to get out of good now Oh duo had a nice little pop there Manuel and this catch and hopefully more to come on this trade I like this move so far Duo is back on our watch list again I say back because back from Friday of last week. We ended up at least trading the stock It was an ugly move at least going into the afternoon, but NCRA from Jeth It's just Not going anywhere, you know moved up and down already So if it pops once the market opens then we'll call it out But for right now, I'd rather us focus on the list that we just you know made right here All right, if duo is looking stronger quadruple C is looking stronger for the moment TMC Rivian Then I'd focus on those initially. There's no need to look at something that's Dropping or going sideways or not really show any life, you know, you want to start and stick with the best at first All right, so folks, I think that's just about it. It's going to wrap up for us right now So for all of some social once again If you wanted to join us so you could either scan the qr code on the top left of the screen Or go right down to the link on the green banner below Just if you're not as fancy with the tech and all that like myself Go right down to the link on the green banner below Just type it in on your internet browser It takes you to a small trial page where you sign up get a weak access inside our live trading room Especially for this morning and our traders talk weekly q&a workshop. I look forward to seeing you there But for Kathleen jiff john manuel donald love seeing donald here with us as well I look forward to talking to you all coming up here at the opening bell So we got about 15 minutes left and a post and tweet the pics folks and then uh from there I'll see what's out there best of luck trading heading heading into this market open talk to you all soon


Adams with Voice of a Veteran. I am zooming in from St. Cloud, Florida. How exciting is that? Land of Disney, Mickey Mouse. So here I am here today to help you guys understand a little bit about changing your mindset from the military way of thinking like I used to be like to the new way of thinking dealing with the VA, the civilian way. First slide, please. So how many of you have ever had problems dealing with the VA? I know that I did when I first got out. I didn't know I was even entitled to anything. I was a dental lab tech and a dental assistant and all I had was my education benefits. So my thought process was just go to school, start my life and get on with it. Well, life had a different path for me because I got introduced to the number one obstacle that all of us face is our mindset, our military mindset. So one of the things I'd like to share with you, the first side is the military mindset and then the second part is the component to how to combat that on the VA side. So how many of you heard no pain, no gain? Work through that pain. How about you're going to be punished, right?  Sometimes you might find that you don't, you're persuaded not to even go because you are feeling bad about things or you might get held back. What if you were negatively viewed by your peers that you're slacking?  There's nothing wrong with me. I'm young, I don't need help. And the worst one that I see a lot of, I don't need the VA's help. Other people need it more than me. So what I have found is the VA mindset is totally different. So you have to learn how to self-advocate for yourself, okay? When you go to the exams, the law says to the point of pain, the examiners cannot push you through that pain cycle. You can stop and say stop. You can advocate and be honest and open to your providers. Don't hold anything back. Talk about your worst days, not your best days. You're not there to impress anybody. Document, document, document. If you're still active duty, please make sure that it's recorded in your records. It's really important. So people ask me all the time, well, how do I document something that, basically, how do I show them what I have? And I'm like, that's easy. If you can visually take pictures of things that are problematic, take a picture, do a journal, do a calendar. How often does this happen to you? How long does it last? Anything and everything to substantiate your claim. And finally, use a buddy statement. Did you tell anybody about what was going on? Did you reach out to your higher command? Is there records of that? Your buddies, your peers can do statements. Hey, I was there, I saw. I know this person before they got injured and now this is what I'm seeing. So help each other out and do statements for each other. They're called lay statements or buddy statements. You can write your own. You can have your spouse write one for you. Because I tell you, I'm not the same person I was when I was 18 years old and joined the Army, even only serving four years I got out. I had tons of medical issues. Next slide. I want you to know the most important thing. You are not alone in this process. I'm here to help you navigate and understand through three basic E components. We're gonna educate you, okay? Using the law that governs the VA, Title 38. We're gonna use forms that are used on you when you go for your compensation pension exams. They're called disability benefits questionnaires, DBQs. You're entering a world with a whole new set of acronyms. Once you get out of the military, you gotta learn a whole new language and a whole new system of navigation.  We're gonna keep you engaged with the VA. Don't walk away due to red tape.  That's called the means test. But if you become 10% disabled vet, that goes out the door. So make sure you know your rights. Using a veteran's advocacy service is your number one way to stay engaged, okay? You go to veteran service organization meetings. When I was in Fairbanks, Alaska, I used DAV. Hawaii has DAV. Other organizations, check them out. That's how I started when I was 24 years old and didn't know anything. There certainly isn't a class that teaches you this. Even the TAP classes don't teach you how to navigate the VA. They tell you that they're there and it's up to you to figure this out. Well, not anymore. You're not alone, I promise. Empower yourself, okay? Advocate for yourself. Build your case, learn how to organize everything. Become intimately knowledgeable about your records. And definitely, please change your military mindset. This is the number one struggle every active duty has as they transition to the VA healthcare system and benefits system. Next slide, please. Okay. You versus the VA. Now, let me help you understand this. If you upload your documents into eBenefits or any electronic VA.gov or any electronic VA document system uploading, you are doing yourself a huge disservice. Please utilize accredited representatives such as disabled American veterans. Here in Florida, I use a lot of the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs but use these accredited representatives and on that slide you can hit the hyperlink and find the persons that you are interested in working with. If they are not accredited through the VA, usually it's a scam. I can tell you that ahead of time. There are a lot of agencies that are not being managed by the VA to look out for you. These accredited representatives for initial claims do not charge a dime. It's only when you get denied a claim then they can charge you and it's a contract and it's all pre-approved by the VA so that you don't get ripped off, right? Well, because of COVID and because of the PACDAC, the new law that we'll talk about a little bit, there has been tremendous problems with the veterans being scammed by these organizations that claim to help you but they want upfront money. Please do due diligence. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Do not upload your documents into the VA system. You're not represented it. You're not represented. You need a veterans advocacy agency to help you. Please, please do that. Next slide. Now, a lot of times people don't even understand the basic components that the VA is, Department of Veterans Affairs. Next to the DOD, they are the second most funded agency in the US government. They have a cabinet position with the president and there are four components of the VA that you need to understand and understand this. They don't talk to each other. So if you change your information in one, you need to let the others know. If you, especially in healthcare and in benefits. So if you upload or change anything, please make sure it's on both sides of the house. Now there's the Veterans Benefits Administration. They deal with everything other than your healthcare. Here's a link to them and a phone number. Please use that. The other one is the Veterans Healthcare Administration. They are fantastic. They do everything concerning what? Healthcare, exactly. And the National Cemetery Administration, they deal with everything concerning burials at national cemeteries, reimbursement for burial expenses. And they have a change recently that you can predeterminate and make yourself eligible. If you want to be buried in a national cemetery, you can set all that up ahead of time. How fantastic is that? And last but not least certainly is the Vet Center. They're a readjustment counseling center that's there for combat vets and for veterans suffering from military sexual trauma. I was a work study at a Vet Center and it is a very different mindset. Their whole office is different, how they treat veterans is different and they do not share your information with big VA with VHA unless you allow them to. So it's a great opportunity to diffuse and learn benefits and get counseling sooner than if you were to use the VA, the big VA. Next slide. Know the law that governs you and the VA. The law that governs the VA is title 38, chapter one. Okay, here's a site for it. And under chapter one, part four, there's regulations, right? Subpart A and the key things that people don't know that is if they get a rating officer that is rude to you or is disrespectful, you have the right to get a new rating officer. Nobody knows that, they just accept what is given to them.  I'm telling you right now, the law has protective rights in there and one of them that people don't usually utilize is the attitude of the rating officer. They have to show you respect and they cannot be disrespectful or rude to you or try to hurt you in any way. People go, hey, VA math doesn't add up. Here's the combined ratings table on how they do the VA math. And when you look at it, there's instructions on how to read your combined table and convalescent ratings. If you are safe, for instance, you need crutches for months on end or a month and you're immobile for 30 days or more, you can request if your service connected for that knee and you have to have surgery, you can request that you get convalescent rating at the 100% rate. That's, you have to apply. So the second part is subpart B, the schedule ratings. Every part B has the major muscle groups or the major body components. And then at the very bottom, it's called sub, excuse me, schedule of disability ratings. That is phenomenal because it tells you from zero to 100 what you can get for those symptoms. So you can use that to your advantage and tell the VA basically what's going on with you. Please think of the VA as someone that you're trying to paint a picture about your military service. A lot of veterans go in for their exams and they go, hey, this is what happened to me in military service. And after I got out, I did ABC and D. No, you're there to tell them what happened to you in military service. That's it. How did this hurt you? How did this impact you? That's what you're there for. Don't go into great detail about after your military service. VA doesn't give you compensation for that only for what is service connected while you were active duty. Understand that. Next slide please. The PACT Act is the newest law in 83 years for us veterans and it's phenomenal. Check it out. A lot of Vietnam veterans are being affected by the PACT Act. Go for veterans. Please, please, please look at this. Be very familiar. If you have questions, contact me because the PACT Act, one of the things that changed was hypertension. So a lot of veterans have heart attack, hypertension. They served in Vietnam. They expanded the duty of service exposure to Agent Orange, to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Johnson Atoll. My own husband was affected by that. He served in Johnson Atoll in the 90s and we found out under the PACT Act that, guess what? He was exposed to Agent Orange and he filed a claim because he is diabetic. Diabetes is a presumptive issue concerned with exposure to Agent Orange. So there's all these laws and all these things. If you get complicated, don't worry. You just contact me and I will help you, okay? Next slide. Everything that we do is for one purpose in my mind. We don't want to lose another brother or sister to suicide. 22 a day has been reported. I personally feel like it's a lot more than just 22.  Please, they have changed the new crisis line number.  We can talk about anything and everything when it concerns body issues, but the minute I start talking to veterans about mental health, they want to clam up. Well, to me, as you all know, it's mind, body, spirit. And so if we deal with the body, we're missing out on taking care of our mind and our mind is so critical to help us with our body. And it's a holistic approach. When I lived in Hawaii, I was fortunate to use the VA there and they have wonderful mental health programs there with art therapy and writing and all these things transitioning. So check them out if you're in Hawaii at that VA there. And I was fortunate because that's not everywhere. There are times when you go to the doctor, especially down here, a lot of the VA mental health providers want to prescribe medication, medication, medication. And if you need it, I'm all about it. I was on a lot of medication for a long time, but what I found is I do better through talk therapy. And I encourage all of my veterans to use talk therapy and talk to their providers and say, hey, I want a voice in my care plan and really be adamant. If you don't want to take medication, they cannot force you to do so. There are other methods to help you in the mental health field. Dialectical behavior therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, prolonged exposure, it just goes on and on and on. And so utilize those and see how that helps you. I'm not a doctor. I'm just telling you from my own personal experience what has worked for me and what I tried to help navigate and advocate for other veterans. The crisis line, everybody thinks the only way you can contact them is if you are suicidal or homicidal. That is not the truth, okay? When you're in crisis, what does that mean? I know what it means for me. Let me give you a good example. I was in Walmart shopping and I don't do well with the self-checkout thing, right? I like people actually to interact with. And I was stuck that day. They didn't have any tellers. I had to go through the self-checkout. I freaked. I left my buggy in the middle of Walmart, went to my car crying because now I'm frustrated and angry. I call crisis line. And they're your number one advocate. They are your best friend. They will sit by you and help diffuse the situation. And they will ask you always, are you suicidal or homicidal? And if you are, we need to get you to a safe place into a hospital. And that leads me to a number two thing about the newest law changes. There's a new law called the Compact Act. Any veteran that is in crisis, in suicidal crisis, can go to any emergency room and say I'm a veteran. And if they have to inpatient new, VA will pay. We do not want to lose another veteran to suicide. We wanna do everything we can. And I encourage you in your communities to start having that dialogue on how to best serve our nation's veterans and their families, right? Because families are impacted too. And a lot of times we focus a lot on the veterans and the families are kinda left to the wayside. While families, I'm an Army brat. So families, military families are amazing. The spouses that stay behind and run everything and take care of the children and the finances while the service member goes off and gets deployed. My hats are off to you. My dad did 22 years Army and I was moved around every two years. I understand that the children and the spouses desperately need help. And there's a lot of mechanisms if you're a combat vet for family therapy through the vet center or through the VA. If you lose a veteran, there's bereavement counseling. I have sent many people to bereavement counseling because they don't know what to do when their veteran passes. They don't know how to navigate anything. And some of them, due to income, are eligible for pension or for DIC if the veteran passed for a service-connected disability. There's a lot out there. This is huge. VA knowledge is huge. But what I'm here to tell you is you contact me. I will help you navigate through all of this and answer questions and share screen with you and talk story. I'm all about that. Do not suffer in silence anymore. I see that all the time. I see people that have not told their story in 20, 30 years. Myself, I did not talk about my own traumas in the military.  And I thought that was just normal behavior back in the 80s in the military. Who know? I suffered with that for 30 years before I even spoke out. And I don't want anybody out there to ever sit in silence and suffer. We're here to help each other. All the traumas, all the stuff that we all went through, we are here for one purpose in my mind. It is just to reach out and help each other. And I'm here, I started my own nonprofit called Connecting the Dots for Veterans. And you can reach me through this link tree account, link.tree slash connecting the dots for veterans. And this will help you navigate and understand. If anything, please, please talk to somebody. Okay, I'm here to help navigate and educate you. We do that, like I said, through a couple methods. I hope the slides help you. Please feel free once again to reach out to me. It has been an honor and a privilege just so that all of you know. This is a continuation of Voice of the Veteran. I want to thank Jay Fidel and the ThinkTech family for allowing me to restart this. This started in 2017 and I had to leave the island due to my own health issues and moved to Florida. I had triple bypass in Honolulu and I needed more care. And so I had to move down to Florida to get it. And it's been an amazing journey. But I just wanted to thank the ThinkTech family. This is really critical. Our veterans in Hawaii face a unique situation. Their resources are very limited, especially if they live off of Oahu. Even on Oahu, I was looking at the reports. In 2018 to 2019, the number of veterans that asked for care jumped up over 600%. And it's only gonna get more and more. And the resources are still less and less. So they try to do community care. They try to help as much as possible, but there's only so many doctors that can go around. And just please don't give up hope. Don't give up being your self advocate. If you don't like your own doctor, guess what? One piece of paper and you can ask for a new doctor and they will make that happen. It may take a little bit of time, but that's okay. You're worth it. I wanna thank all of you, active duty that are out there serving today, all those that came before me and all those that are serving now and are coming after me. My son is active duty Air Force station at Lackland. And I just, all of you that are deployed have a safe trip home. And I just wanna say Mahalo and well wishes to all of you and your families. And I wish nothing but good things and safety for all of you. This is Helen Dotty Adams signing out. Mahalo and God bless. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.


Hey what's up you guys welcome back to my channel if you're new here hi hello I'm Lydia and This vlog is a weekly vlog. I'm not really doing much this week. I'm waiting to get paid on Monday I thought I'd just make a little message in the beginning so it makes sense. I Didn't vlog on some days because I didn't do anything It's not long to us each other now Not long to us each other now Hopefully I'm gonna go now. I love you Have a good rest It's a bit too late and I will Love you Bye The most lovely doing is going to Tesco. Currently I'm waiting for Kyle to finish touring. I've got a video called It's Torts My Booth That's the thing I don't think of things to sing Where's my folder gone with all my songs and things? 20 years 18 Today we're going to be discussing a product Now it's not a product review because I've scammed By a company this company. I put just one of their Chill pulse things And this is what I got in the mail It's all plastic It's not got a soft texture The buttons don't work It's useless. I paid 36 pound for this It's supposed to give you paulson's But it's supposed to give vibrations To calm you down in the anxiety attack Which is why I bought it But it doesn't work like At all. There's no buttons to press like that look like that looks like a one doesn't that you can't press it No, it doesn't click down What a waste of money Don't buy off this company because you'll receive this Something that looks like Aliexpress Hold it in It doesn't even work.   So I'm gonna end the vlog here Thank you for watching. Thank you for supporting me and thank you for watching this video The next video will be out on Thursday Peace


تعلي ابنى بطالب رضي الله تعالى عنه كم بري بروتي ميك قب one day أنه أوتيا بإناء ماين ليشربه so he can drink from the water فأخذه ونظر إليه he observed a cup he looked at it from every corner and then Ali said a very powerful statement he said الله أعلم الله knows best لكن كم فيك من عين كحيل وخد أسيل he said to him how much is inside your cup a person's cheek and a person's eyes this cup is made out of the earth swallowing you when the person is buried the people utilize the earth and they make cups out of it and they make houses out of it as Allah said in the Quran قد علمنا ما تنقص الأرض منهم وعندنا كتاب الحفظ الله said we know how this earth swallows its people so this cup that we're drinking from and these houses that we're living in is most likely a person's body part