So, I want to talk about Final Fantasy XIV. Yeah, I'm obsessed with this game now. I've been sucked into an MMO! It's been my go-to primary comfort game for over a year now, and not a day goes by that it's not on my mind, and I wanted to share the really weird story about how I got to this point. Now, what I mean by the title was not I only started enjoying Final Fantasy XIV because I passed the 300 hour mark, nor is it saying that Final Fantasy XIV only gets good after 300 hours. It's more like it gets good if you actually be really patient and read the dialogue, or once you buy a story skip and just watch the cutscenes. Okay, that's kinda not true either. What I mean by it is that for over 300 hours, over the course of like 5 years, I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV wrong. Sort of. You can't actually play a game wrong. It's complicated. I'm about to go on a really long story about what those first 300 hours entailed for who knows how many minutes, so if you're someone who's been struggling to like the game like I was and want to know how I finally did it, you can just skip to this part of the video. Long story short, I bought a story skip and just watched the cutscenes, and also actually tried reading the text for once, no matter how agonizing some parts of it are. Oh, and also looked up where to unlock the fun content and give myself personal goals. There's also going to be a significant amount of the video criticizing portions of Final Fantasy XIV. That said, this is not a critique or a review of Final Fantasy XIV, but more so the criticism and dislikes are meant to express how I feel and give context to the story rather than anything constructive that I think would objectively improve the game. To be clear, any time I complain about parts of this game, it's merely to let you know how I felt at the time. Whenever I do make such complaints about the game, I will put a green chicken in the corner of the screen as a reminder of this point. Otherwise, the rest of the video is going to be a lot of rambling, but hey, maybe you like rambling.  I've been told I have a nice voice. Anyway, let us start at the start. The initial struggle. It's something like 2015 or 2016. I can't quite pin down the exact time, and I had just gotten my own laptop for college because you kind of need one no matter what major you're in. So being in graphic design, I get a pretty powerful one, conveniently powerful enough to run games on. I also had a fair bit of spare time on my hands one semester and was browsing through what free games were being played at the time since I had a budget of, uh, hmm. And then I see a hot new MMO called Final Fantasy 14 Online Colon, a realm reborn colon heaven's word with a really cool trailer and nice graphics and tall muscular women. And I thought, I don't know, I don't really have the money. And then I saw that there's a 14 day free trial and I thought, I still don't know. And then I saw that you can be a cat boy and I was like, yeah, sold. And so I downloaded the game after logging into the weirdly 2000s looking launcher. What? I was taken in by the grand title screen, the atmosphere, a character creation menu, a cool, immersive opening cutscene with so many plot hooks and mysteries waiting to be unraveled by the story and it plays like World of Warcraft, but slower, huh. So before this game, I was a big MMO junkie. I played WoW when I was a kid. It was around when the Iceman DLC had just come out, which many would consider peak WoW.  At least not in WoW itself. I had played loads of other free-to-play MMOs that were pretty close to being WoW clones except probably a lot worse. I played Fiesta Online, Fly for Fun, Science of Fate, and a whole lot of Nexon games and a bunch of others. I was also very sick of tab targeting by this point in time and felt spoiled by playing things like Terra Online and Dark Souls, so I quit the game until a few years later. The pre-trial period was extended to like the first 20 or 30 levels for an unlimited amount of time instead of the previous 14 day limit. And after making a new account because I forgot the password for the old one, I downloaded the game again and it was fun. In fact, this is the same character that I play today. Not because of the story. God no, after reading like two paragraphs to get through one fetch quest, it lost my interest. No, I was in it for the progression because that around this time I had just discovered crafting. And boy, that was a rabbit hole and a half sucking all my free time good and probably giving me a few past due projects that semester in the process. Now for those who don't know, trial accounts can't use the market board, which allows players to buy and sell other players items, including crafting materials. So I pretty much had to gather and craft each and everything for everything myself if I wanted to make some of the higher level recipes. And it was around this point that I decided, you know what, I like this game. I'll buy it. So it became the one game I bought that year. It was great. I bought and sold items on the market board, got my own chocobo, just unlocked glamour and dressing up my cat boy in some badass armor. Things were going great. Until I had to keep playing more of the main story quest. The thing about Final Fantasy 14 is that it doesn't overwhelm you with information and features and abilities like a few other games I know. It's great at slowly dishing out and introducing you to features. This is a double-edged sword, however, because in this case, it means you have to unlock everything. Raids, bosses, game features, sometimes entire areas have to be unlocked gradually. Some of them are locked behind blue quests that try to give context and maybe their own little story in the process of unlocking them. But most of it is unlocked behind the main story quest, or MSQ for short. Knowing I had to do them to get to the content I wanted made me really, really not like them. So I got incredibly bored and redownloaded a game with a good story instead. Fallout 4. Around this time, I think I clocked in about 60-80 hours of game time total, what many would call a first impression. Which is not totally off since I think I was only about halfway through the vanilla game's story at this point, something like the level 20 or 30 quests. But even then, I think professional B-person Barry Cramer said it right in his Death Stranding video. There's a saying that often comes up when recommending certain games, and that's it gets good after a couple or ten or twenty hours. When someone says that to me, I go, no thanks, I'd rather play a game that, oh I don't know, gets good after zero hours? I think we can all agree that it's totally reasonable to not have to spend an entire immigration process worth of a slog before you can start having fun, right? I'm sorry sir, but you misspelled the name of the Sultana. I'm afraid I'm going to have to reject your application to start playing the good part. What? How was I supposed to know I had to pay attention to the story of an MMO? We made an impressive opening cutscene for you with special animations and story hooks, and yet you still can't recall the name of your faithful companions. Of course I can, quiz me. Flynn Rider. Gwen Stacy. That's a pimp. Girl Who Says Bruh. Gay French best friend of Girl Who Says Bruh. Oh, you can't trick me, that's not a real character. At the time I was someone who hated reading anything that wasn't a Halo lore wiki page. On top of the fact that whenever I did read it was, to me, what sounded like meaningless nonsense that didn't matter. Who is this guy? Why should I care that he wants a pizza?  And now that most of 14's story is a slow burn and that that pizza will be a surprise tool we'll use later, but try convincing younger me that doing eight fetch quests in a row is going to be totally worth it, I promise, for realsies. So yeah, I was not grabbed by the story and the fact that I couldn't just ignore it because it unlocks all of the endgame bits made each quest feel like another obstacle keeping me from reaching the real game, especially when so many of the quests involve standing around, talking, but I'll get to that later. And it was as I started playing through the story and getting through all the quests that I started to realize, wow, I am not having fun. And it's at this point that I'm sure plenty of people will say, yeah, ARR is a slog, but Heaven's Word is when it really picks up. But no, this is how I felt after I beat Heaven's Word. Even the Dragon Song War, which many would say was peak main story quest content before Shadowbringers came out. And no, Shadowbringers being the best expansion now does not change the fact that everybody said Heaven's Word is still amazing and should be what hooks you and when the game starts to get really good. Because I know for certain most players would still agree with that opinion. I mean, heck, it's in all of the free trial memes right now. You call it the award-winning expansion. I beat Heaven's Word, the supposed peak of the game, at the time, and I was not having fun. So, I quit playing, again. Some of you who have been with the channel from the beginning may remember that I did stream 14 a bit around this time, and you may remember me giving my gripes and struggling to get through the game. So it's like, I hate to be negative, I'm being negative a lot. But like, I mean, when you look at this, this quest, when you look at a quest like this, that it's literally talk to someone, talk to someone else, walk on out to this map, talk to another person, and then come back here and talk to the person again, and then that's the quest. I know, I believe you. I believe you that it gets better. But it's hard to get invested when so many of the quests are like this. No side note that doesn't really matter to the overall story, but at the time I tried to play up my reactions and excitement to supposed important and impactful moments happening in the game. Partly because I was trying to be entertaining, but also because they had been hyped up, but to be perfectly honest, I didn't really feel the same excitement as everybody else. But I didn't really want to disappoint or invalidate anyone because they were all excited about this game, and I felt like such an outlier. Like, you know when you want to show your friend a really cool or funny video and it gets to the really good part and you're waiting to see their reaction? I felt like I was that friend the video was being shared with. Others were waiting on how I'd feel and hyping up the moment, here it comes, and so I guess I felt like I had to play it up. Dude, wasn't that cool? Did you see that? Oh my god, I cried at that part. Yeah, dude, that part was really awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Needless to say, I was frustrated that I was missing out. I really, really wanted to like this game. So why is it so hard to? Part 2. The Quests. Now, it wasn't my own fault for skipping the cutscenes and dialogue and not paying attention to the context of what I was doing. That was sort of... Partly yes, but I think it's unfair to say the game doesn't have some responsibility in keeping the player's attention so that they can feel compelled to continue to pay attention. That, and also I think that unless the game's stories are so deeply tied to its mechanics that you cannot have one without the other, that the gameplay part of the game should be able to stand and be engaging on its own. Whether or not you believe 14 does this, I think is going to be subjective. In my opinion, it's not a story that needed to be told with an MMO, and I think it could possibly have benefited from being a different type of game entirely, and I do also believe that the game can stand on its own without the story, and that you should be allowed to enjoy it without the story. Understandably, there's a fair bit of people who would have a word with that first part. Asking people online, I've been told some more interesting perspectives looking at 14 and how it achieves its story in ways I hadn't thought of before. Namely, 14's MMO nature means it can achieve such a story that is built over a long period of time with an active community, and can achieve an enhanced level of personal investment and in-game nods back to said community that would not be the same with a single player game. The relaunch of the game being tied to an in-universe apocalyptic event being one of the most prominent examples, but that's not super relevant to the point I'm trying to make anyway. For the longest time, I did not feel compelled to read all of the dialogue because a big chunk of the game showed me it was not worth reading. Woo! A realm reborn! Let's gooo! This wine is my own creation, and I would be most grateful if you delivered! Granted, writing is an art and not a science, so as much as I say it should have had a better story, it's not like the writers just forgot to push the make good story button, so I acknowledge that for plenty of people, they probably did not have the same issue I did. For plenty of people, the story was probably engaging and great all the way through. I do, however, think the questing themselves could have been much more engaging. Or just cut down. And that was my main problem with getting into the game's main story. The quests were not fun. Travel from place to place talking to 8 NPCs only to go all the way back to the original that's now on the other side of the continent. Hope you like running around a lot, or having lots of loading screens. Go to a location, click a thing, wait for the progress bar to finish, and repeat 5 or 6 times. Do about 20 of the typical collect 5 bear asses quests that every MMO has, then talk to about 7 more NPCs. Time to disband your party every time the story decides to turn into a single player game and any friends you're playing with that have either done it already or finished first have to wait around for you to catch up or go off and play by themselves for a while. These quests are not fun to do, at least not by themselves anyway. Take away the game's story, and the actual things you're doing are tedious, repetitive, monotonous, boring. And as someone who was initially turned off by the long-winded dialogue, of course I'd eventually start to not pay attention and instead focus on the gameplay, which are quests which I found boring. And this is still the case even in Shadowbringers. I'm gonna give an example while abridging some of the names in context so I don't spoil anything. One instance, there's a series of quests involving getting directions from some crocodiles, because the crocodiles are the only ones who hold the key to the swamp monster boss and how to reach it. And they agree to help the party, but only if you agree to do their laundry. Really? I'm on an adventure to save the world and you're having me spend a significant amount of time on the main story quests, cleaning Lewis' underwear. And then they have the characters go, oh man, this seems like a lot of busy work. What a chore. Like, yeah, no kidding. Why do I have to do it? Like, look, here's a random quest I did, and at this point I was thoroughly hooked in the game. I was sold. I was gonna go through Shadowbringers and I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Just look at this quest. Was that fun? Cause you do that about, like, ten times or so in that area alone. The limitations of the game's MMO systems makes an otherwise wonderful story extremely tedious to actually play through. Because it is a great story, and these are great characters, and this is a wonderful world with interesting people and cultures and history. But man, does the game get in its own way sometimes. And I think when people say the game gets better at Heaven's Word or Shadowbringers, I don't think they mean the quests get better. Because they don't really change that much, hence why I still wasn't enjoying Heaven's Word. You're still walking eight miles to talk to an NPC, you're still clicking on a location and waiting five seconds before walking to another location to repeat it four or five times. You're still having to disband your party to go do single-player stuff while your friends have to wait around for each other depending on who finishes the solo instance first. The story and characters and world are great in spite of these things. Not that they were removed and now you can enjoy the story easier. And no, I don't think I don't understand why the game does these things. Because I do. And I'm gonna prove it by explaining how those things don't bother me anymore. The first main reason is because it's an MMO. The game developers have to work with very limited systems and have to make sure you can't just plow right through to the endgame in a couple of hours. They can't really afford to implement something like a complex minigame or in-depth combat system or things that more traditional games can afford. Because they're developing a massive multiplayer online game. Emphasis on massive, they just don't have the resources. The second reason is that they're trying to tell a story with pacing and rising and falling action and quiet moments and character building in depth and nuance and things that take time to do. Part of the reason why so many praise 14 story and writing is because everything takes its time. Sometimes for worse, but most of the time for better. It's an actual story where you're not constantly hitting things for hours on end because that wouldn't make sense in a typical story. Think of the average amount of action in a TV show. It's kind of few and far between. These shows have a lot of talking, downtime, that sort of stuff. 14 is kind of similar in that way. The third is the all-to-overused pretentious video game buzzword, immersion. The reason the crocodiles have us do all those chores is to make you feel as annoyed as the characters are. The reason you have to look around in five different spots and find nothing is because the thing you're looking for is incredibly rare and you wouldn't be able to find it just by looking around randomly. The reason the characters talk the way they do with such deliberate vocabulary is to establish a tone and culture and feel for this world and these people. That they talk that way to set it apart from our everyday world. The reason you have to travel such long distances is to show and feel the vastness of the world, the buildings, the cities, kingdoms, are huge masses that are far apart in a big universe. In essence, because you are role-playing. This is the part of enjoying the game that is not going to click with everyone because it is a very acquired thing to get immersed in a game. Some people require some level of presentation in order to really, really get sucked into the world. Real life would be an incredibly annoying and boring game. You have to consume very specific items that are only consumable in a limited amount of time. Every few hours or else you suffer a debuff. You have to stop playing the game for several hours or suffer another debuff. You gotta stop what you're doing every few hours to get rid of your consumables or suffer a debuff.  Red Dead Redemption 2. Now, obviously Final Fantasy XIV doesn't do the role-play and simulation to this extent, but that's essentially the thought behind all these tedious and sometimes boring nonsensical missions. When you get into character, really putting yourself in the shoes of your warrior of light, then the long search you're doing just feels like another day for you, rather than an annoying roadblock stopping you from unlocking the next raid content.  You're participating in the story. In all of its upsides and downsides, all that said, whether it does this well or not is going to be, again, subjective and differ from person to person. At the time, this in my opinion still did not make the questing any less tedious, monotonous or boring, and that if you aren't willing to trudge through them for the story, then the story itself might not convince you. Or will it? Part 3. Setting the Right Mindset. I've been fairly negative for a majority of this video so far, so let's turn it around a bit. Chekhov's Gun is a concept that describes how every element of a story should contribute to the whole. The basic gist of the writing philosophy is this. If in the first chapter, it's written that there is a loaded gun hanging on the wall, at some point in the story, that gun absolutely must go off. Otherwise, don't put the gun there. Now there are variations of the gun going off that doesn't always have to follow the audience's expectations, but if it's brought up in the story, it has to have significance in some way. It's not a universal rule, but it's definitely a piece of writing advice that is tried and true, and many writers consider it a good thing to keep in mind. A writing tool, if you will. Just like the hero's journey, the rule of threes, and basically anything you can hear Red talking about on overly sarcastic productions. Final Fantasy XIV uses this in its writing all the time, almost to a formula, and that's not a bad thing. I'd say in many ways it does it competently at worst, and masterfully at best. And that's the philosophy behind a lot of its writing, and I think what turned me off of the MSQ for such a big portion of my 300 hours. Almost everything is set up for payoff later. And now that I'm hooked on the game, can I say with confidence that all that setup was worth it? Ehhhhhhh. Okay, yes, it is pretty awesome to see the crocodile show up in their freshly cleaned and bedazzled underwear that I myself helped them with, but did I really need to walk 40 miles back and forth between the washing machines to do 20 wash cycles? Maybe it was necessary to get that payoff, but then there are other quests that achieve the same effect without such annoying tasks, I don't know. Maybe my tolerance and patience is just a lot lower than a lot of people when it comes to putting up with all that setup. Maybe it was my experience with old school MMOs where if three quests in the story don't amount to anything, it's a clear sign that the rest of the story is not going to be worth paying attention to. I don't think it's entirely my or the game's fault, really, and again, it's subjective and the answer to that question will differ from person to person and vary from quest to quest. Some people are going to think sniffing the chocobo was necessary for the story. Some people will not. But when I started to realize that the game does do this, I started to adjust my patience and expectations a bit, and that is really what it took. Yes, the quests are tedious. Yes, you probably talked to about 10 more NPCs than you should have to. Yes, I do think in many places in ARR they could cut down even more quests even after they already did so recently. And yes, I'll say it, I don't think the chocobo sniffing quest was all that necessary to tell the story they wanted to tell. Some people would disagree, which is fine. This is going to be an extremely subjective thing. Plenty of people will like the story just the way it is and wouldn't want it changed even a little, and that's fine too. I'm just saying that with how the story went about making you do some of these menial tasks, that it actively turned me away from the MSQ. And as a result, the entire game as a whole, since so much of it hinged on doing the MSQ. The more insightful of you may have come to the conclusion that a lot of my dislikes for the MSQ are sounding like complaining that my strawberry ice cream is not a lemon lime popsicle instead. And yeah, it kind of is. But some people like strawberry ice cream and I don't think either side is wrong. People can like or dislike whatever they want. But when I finally started to realize and accept that it was strawberry ice cream and that I wasn't going to get a lemon lime popsicle, I started to eat it like one rather than being upset that it's not being the thing that I want it to be. The moment this came about was around August of 2020.  And I was watching a few friends and other streamers playing the MSQ. And since I didn't have any agency in actually playing, not being able to just mash the skip button, I was forced to pay attention to what was going on. I mean, not actually forced to. I could close the stream if I ever wanted to. But you get what I'm saying. I had to sit there and watch and read. And I was engrossed. Even without all the context leading to that point in the story, there seemed to be some big things happening. And I wanted to know what was going on. And so a bit after that stream, I logged into my account, which I had previously story skipped to Shadowbringers in a last ditch effort to find the diamond in the rough of this game. And I started watching through all the cutscenes, slowly getting more and more engaged by and invested in the story. Then when I got all caught up with Shadowbringers, I threw out my gripes about what the game wasn't and instead started playing the game for what it is. And what it is, no joke, is some of the best storytelling I have had the pleasure to participate in. I'm not going into any spoiler territory, so don't worry, but the ways this game ties plot points and characters together. The way it builds its world's rules and trusts your ability to know those rules and rewards you for doing so. The way it lets characters have emotional moments all to themselves just so you can see how they feel. The way it builds up to story climaxes that just make you want to jump up and cheer at how freaking cool it gets. I hadn't realized that for the longest time, I was skipping so much of the journey, the main story quest, so I could get to the real content when in reality, the journey to the endgame, the story and build-up and time is the real content. That and it's always nice to have a story that takes the time it needs. But all this has been me talking about the main story quest, right? Aren't there other parts of the game that need to be good too?  And yeah, maybe other people in my shoes would have been able to enjoy the game even with having to click grind through all the dialogue or just flat out buying a story skip. But at least for me, being invested in that main story made pretty much everything better, especially since so many other facets of the game revolve around it. But hey, shouldn't the gameplay also be able to stand on its own? And yeah, I agree. I think if you can't enjoy a game's story, you should still be able to enjoy its gameplay, which as I said before, Final Fantasy 14 does a great job in this department as well. One thing I didn't mention is that while I was trying my best to get into the game and bashing my head against the wall that was the MSQ, I was enjoying other parts of the game that didn't involve that much MSQ. Things like hunting for cool gear, doing dungeons and boss fights where your class's role and abilities actually start to play into account. Getting together with friends and attempting high difficulty fights that require teamwork, coordination, and many, many, many attempts.  Oh my God! Look at everyone's health! Ow! Look at my health! Ah! And so, so many things that you can do independent of reading any of the MSQ. And it's all so, so good. Part four, the correct way to start. But let's say you're still like me from a few years ago. You're in the mindset that you don't care how good the payoff is. Boring quests and gameplay and spam clicking through the dialogue to get to the good part is a huge turnoff. How can you even like the game? Well, honestly, maybe you won't. And that's okay. There's a free trial up to level 60, so you're good to try it out with no cost to you other than a little bit of your time. But if you really want to know how to get past those things that hold you back from enjoying the game, here are a few ways I feel can help alleviate some of those gripes. Firstly, three different paths you can approach and start playing the game. Path one, the purest. If you've got the patience, try your best to endure the base game of a realm reborn. It's actually got some parts that are better than I remember after doing some research for this video. And they've definitely cut out a lot of really pointless quests. It may be a real trudge, but the people who are able to handle that part are the ones I think can appreciate all the payoff the most. And speaking as someone who does not look forward to when I'm eventually going to go through ARR again in the New Game Plus, I do still envy those who are able to experience it properly. Hey, Jocat from the future. I actually went ahead and did play through New Game Plus already because this video was taking too long to make. And I even streamed my experience, which was useful for getting footage for this video. It isn't much, but go and give them these twilight pretzels, would you? I find comfort food always helps me when I'm feeling like killing myself. Jesus. You know, he's not wrong. Those streams can be watched on my VODS channel, Jocat Streams, for anyone who is interested. A word of warning, though, they are very long. Best way I can recommend making it less tedious is doing it with friends. Everything's better with friends, and hey, it's an MMO. It's kind of made for them in mind. Path to the moderate. If you have some cash to spare and just want to immediately get to the good part, buy a story skip for a realm reborn so you can start Heavensward and watch the story cutscenes from the inn. There's a book called The Unending Journey. It should give you the basic bullet points and most of what you need to know going into it. Maybe a few story recap videos could be good to catch you up on the finer details too. People aren't kidding when they say Heavensward is when the story gets good. Like I said, it's still got tedious quests, all the expansions do really, but at least this one has great moments and good voice acting in it. All strength to the colony. Speak and I shall listen. Also dragons. And handsome elfmen. Path 3. The Impatient. If you really just want to get to the endgame or just want to experience the best expansion according to nearly the entire playerbase, you can buy a story skip to get to Shadowbringers immediately. I can attest that it is, in my opinion, the best expansion and story, though it may not have as big of an impact or payoff if you do this. Hey, Joe Kat from the future again. At the time of recording this, I have just recently completed Endwalker and so this statement is no longer accurate. At least the part about Shadowbringers being the best expansion in my opinion. That thing about the story not having as big of an impact as a result of skipping, that still holds true, especially once you reach 6.0. Endwalker is amazing and in my opinion even surpasses Shadowbringers, however it does require you to have played or at least experienced in some way all the previous expansion stories to understand what's going on, including a realm reborn. Hell, especially a realm reborn. After we get back to the video, past Joe Kat is going to mention that Shadowbringers is a fairly contained story and although that is still partly true, that's only until you complete it and begin to play the post game quests leading up to Endwalker. In which case the game is expecting you to have played or understood all of the stories from the previous expansions, you're basically in the final chapter of a story after all. I say this as someone who did this as a last ditch effort and I honestly do regret it even if it is what finally allowed me to start enjoying the game. There are going to be a few things that will also go over your head unless you watch the cutscenes to catch up on what's going on. But aside from that, it's a fairly contained story. Larry Zauer called it an Isekai and that's less of an exaggeration than it sounds. This is also the path you should take if you have cash and really just don't care about the story at all and just want to get all the fights unlocked. Unfortunately, you will still need to unlock a lot of other things by yourself, like the raids and some of the high-end trials as there is no just unlock everything for me button. But this is the closest thing you can get. I highly, highly, highly recommend against going with this path unless, like me, you've tried everything. This should be considered a last resort. And here are a few things to keep in mind and try to apply to your playthrough regardless of which path you choose to go with. 1. Treat this game like a more old-school RPG. You know, like back in the day when you had to read everything in text boxes and stuff. Either that or a visual novel because there's going to be a lot of reading. The MSQ is definitely more of a single-player game, so be prepared to be on your own a lot of the time. Immediately contradicting this, 2. Bring friends. This is a pretty obvious one, but yeah, friends make everything better, including reading. It also means you get to run dungeons and raids and bosses with them. It's pretty great when you have a full stack. And trust me, if your friends have already played through the MSQ, they'll be more than happy to go through it again with you. 3. After you beat a Realm Reborn, do the Hildebrand quests. The first one is called The Rise and Fall of a Gentleman, and you can get it from this guy in Uldah. If a Realm Reborn didn't sell you on the game's writing, and honestly for a lot of you it probably won't, this definitely will. Do not look up anything about it, just know that it is some of the most amazing and wonderful writing in video games that I have had the pleasure of experiencing. I might even tie with the MSQ as one of my favorite stories in the game. 4. Once you start Heavensward and reach Ishgard, do the Dark Knight job quests. You can grab the first one from this guy, and it's some great character writing for your own character, if you can believe it. It's honestly super good.  Well, this one really is one of those experiences. Some will say it makes all the rough quests worth it. I personally don't think so, but it does certainly acknowledge them in a way that I think is really, really creative and neat. And if you need any more selling, the writer for this quest line went on to write for the MSQ for Shadowbringers and Endwalker. So yeah, even Square Enix realized that it's got some chops. 5. Don't binge the MSQ unless you are really into it. This game's pacing is slow. Really slow, and it can feel like trudging through tar if you try to get through it all at once for some people. Once you're completely hooked by the story, it's totally fine to go do some other things like job quests or unlocking raids and stuff, or even just taking a break from the game entirely. Take your time. Don't be like me. Don't try to get through the MSQ as fast as possible. You will hate it. 6. Most of all, pay attention. I made the mistake of glossing over things or skipping a few dialogue boxes that I felt wouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. But honestly, most, if not everything, is kind of useful information or character building or build up for some kind of payoff later. Whether or not it pulls it off may be arguable at times, but for the most part, the storytelling formula in this game rewards you for paying attention. So pay attention. So yeah, and that's how I figured out how to get past Final Fantasy 14's biggest barrier to entry. At least for me, and start enjoying the game. And I enjoy it so, so much. So much more than I thought I would, especially with how frustrated I was with it before. In the past few months alone, I've joined a free company, made new friends, created a badass and pretty cute looking character that I'm proud of, organized a raiding group taking down some of the toughest fights in the game. I won the lottery, I bought a house, I got married, I started streaming my reactions to patch announcements and updates. I'm genuinely starting to get excited about things in this game. I'm browsing YouTube, constantly looking for every bit of 14 content I can inject into my eyeballs.  I am obsessed with this game now. I'm constantly trying to recruit more people to come play so that I can see them experience the wonders and joys it has to offer. And best of all, so that I can join in and be right alongside them when they do. Well I guess that's the end of this story then. Thanks for sitting through all of that. I like this game so much. And make no mistake, this is far from the last time I'm going to be talking about it. Which reminds me, given that I've been playing a cat boy for pretty much my whole 14 career, I think it's about time I start embracing the cat part of my name from now on. So yes, this is a real thing. This is happening now. I just like this. It makes me feel happy. No fear, no fear! No fear! No fear! No fear! No fear! No fear! Yeah! We got gold! Woo! Oh my god. That's what I'm talking about baby! Um Joe? Your gear? Do you have 38,000 health? Oh no! My gear broke. My gear broke. My gear broke. Do we want to leave the instance? Oh my no. Maybe that's why I couldn't grab aggro. I'm sure she doesn't sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But all the horrible light that came out and went and clapped around.


So we're here in a slightly strange and unique situation of speaking when the game should be taking place Obviously it's supposed to be called off due to the rain Frustrating situation so close to the kickoff, but I'm guessing it was the right decision all around. Yeah, I feel it was You know the ref had the forecast and the rain Set to be with us till midnight and the pitch was dangerous. I'd been on it myself Stephen it came off and said that there is a danger the players Lee Johnson was in there with the ref and And the minute there's a risk of players getting injured. Oh, unfortunately the game's got to be off and His other option was to leave it half an hour, but like I said the fact that he had the forecast He said that, you know, I could leave it off now, but he didn't feel it was gonna make any difference So when did the the referee first contact you was it maybe half an hour fucking? No, it was literally five five ten minutes if that really and Everyone coming off the warm-up the lads were obviously changing their kit for to put some Dry kids on and I just he just asked to speak to us. I went in there And then that was it. I was you highly experienced manager But for it to be called off so close to kickoff. Is that quite a unique situation? Yeah I can't remember, you know getting quite close to kickoff time and they're going being off as it was But you know, it was an incredible deluge. I don't think I've seen Mike rain like it and You know as to wanted to the breaker earlier was driving up to the Midlands to watch a game up north tonight our chief scout And he said he'd been doing about 10 miles an hour on the M1 for long periods and couldn't believe it It was dry up this way and I Just thought then I thought well if that where that come does come up it could be in trouble could the game could be in trouble obviously Christian


Yes, here's my regular convention cosplay montage video, which is to be expected, but this time I shot a lot more video and did a lot more work than I usually do because I was making videos for 50th Street and I was working with a host. This is cosplayer Beth Love, who you may remember from one of my previous videos. She was dressed as Red Sonja. If you watched this video, follow the links over to the new show at 50th Street. I will continue to do these little montages for my personal site, but the bulk of the work from now on will be for 50th Street, specifically for this new show called The Oh Look Show, and it will always have a team of people working on it with me. For this particular video, I saw a handful of costumes that I thought were particularly clever, so near the end of this video, look for Jedi Sadness, Business Luigi, and the Gladiator Moons. You'll also see a quick shot of a large Steven Universe cosplay group. These people have appeared in my videos before and it took me a while to realize that I was seeing the same people at these shows. They're an informal meetup group and they're growing pretty large. I liked so much of what I saw at this meetup that I'm making a special video just for that. So enjoy my usual convention montage and then go to 50th Street.


Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music and in this video series we are going to talk about chords and more particularly about the chords you already know triads major minor and so on the three note chords and how one can make those a little bit more exciting maybe a lot more exciting and also bring out other elements and other emotions into the sound like make a chord sound a bit more eerie or a bit more dreamy or a bit more mystical and so on so I have about five tips so we will divide this series into five parts and with each part there will be one approach to to different kinds of harmony usage it could be using chords it could be using some jazz harmony or simpler intervals like fifths so yeah stick around in the first part we are going to basically talk about extended harmony so you may have heard in the intro video how I played a simple triad a set of simple triads the one six and five so that's the chord progression which I'm using for this entire series it could be any popular progression but I've just gone with the one six two five which is very popular right and so on so to make it a little bit more interesting or colorful the first thing to note is a scale has seven notes and seven triads right the seven triads which are part of the scale are major minor and diminished in the order being one four and five is always major two three six is minor and seven is diminished so I'm choosing D major scale for this entire series and I'd encourage you to do it on D as well the C majors sometimes very over used by pianists so it's good to like do it on the D major scale so D major has seven notes D E F sharp G A B and C sharp the seven chords are D major E minor F sharp minor G major A major B minor C sharp diminished and lastly D major it's not really a new chord it's just the same thing which I added so to build a chord all we need to know is the use of thirds so if you take D and you want to build a third from D you skip the second which is E and play the third which is F sharp similarly from E E's third is G F sharp's third is A G's third is B A's third is C sharp B to the D C sharp to E and D with F sharp so these are the sets of thirds we have and as you continue you can add another third from F sharp and that's pretty much your D major triad then you have the E minor triad F sharp minor these are all building using thirds so the first principle which I wanted to mention was if you already know your triads you form them using thirds right and then so if you already know your triads you form them using thirds right you've done a third here you've done another third here you can also add another third so a third from A would be C sharp as you can see it makes the sound a lot more colorful and a lot more thematic and a lot more jazzy as well if you will you know that's the major seventh sound and similarly with E minor you can play the triad build the extended third similarly with F sharp minor with its extended third and we call that third or we call that remaining third as a seventh a seventh interval because three five seven it forms a seventh interval from the root generally when we speak of a chord we definitely need to acknowledge its root so the D major root is D and we build it accordingly D F sharp A C sharp and with sevenths you can also add even more thirds to the equation you can have sevens you can have ninths so we say nine when you go beyond the octave seven this would be eight the octave and then you add the ninth and after a while you sort of wish you had more fingers so you can play the remaining intervals like the 11th now the 11th from D will be octave plus the 11th right so to play it it's going to be a little tough so you'll have to play a few with this hand and so on and so forth now with once you go beyond the nine and the 11 and then finally the 13 what we can also do is we can play those intervals with different tensions so if you have the D chord I can add its ninth I can add its 11th or I can even make the 11th maybe a sharp 11 and different chords have different tensions we can talk about that perhaps in a later video but for now we'll just stick to the scale D major seven notes D E F sharp G A B C sharp okay and now let's look at the chord progression again building it with basically these colorful chords so with with D this is how we used to play it and this is how we are playing it currently and now coming to B minor normal B minor adding the seventh making it a B minor seventh chord E minor with the seventh and then A with its seventh okay so let's try and roll that over the entire progression so I'm going to start with the seventh B minor seventh dominant seventh or A seventh and with the seventh you can also extend the harmony so you have the nines and you can also do a flat nine I'm going to show you that now so you have D major ninth which is a major seventh with the added nine there on top B minor ninth but A dominant seventh plus the ninth you can also add some tension by flattening the ninth I've also put put together a a small chart which you can go through so whenever you're looking at a chord you can actually color the nines differently depending on the the type of chord you use you can have a normal nine which will be this you can have a flat nine or you can have a sharp nine lot of tension use a lot in these Jimi Hendrix songs use that voicing a lot and this is the flat nine right so maybe we'll talk more on nines, levens and thirties in a future lesson but what you need to take from this is it's all starting from thirds you basically have a third giving you harmony another third giving you a triad another third giving you a seventh and then you build it from there to add nines levens and thirteens as well okay so any chord progression the in fact the chord progression I use is quite popular but any chord progression can also have this sort of vibe or you can bring about this sort of a colorful vibe or a jazz kind of sound if you will you can take like anything maybe a one five six four which you use in a lot of these songs right for example beatles is let it be is the first line is on that even this can be quite interesting maybe also what happens is your vocalist or if you are the vocalist you actually have more notes to sing on don't you if you have a triad a lot some of the notes you sing may not work very well within that triad but then if you have like a ninth chord you have about harmony notes you have five notes which you can sing on right so try to work on that and you can do this for pretty much all the pop songs you know whether it's let it be or knocking on heaven's door or that recently released taylor swift song I'm sure right so all the best with that and again just to recap in this lesson we've used thirds to form extended harmony beyond the triads in the next lesson we are going to learn other styles like power chords and quartal voicing so what you may want to do is check out the link in the description we have all of our lessons sort of charted out with all the chord charts with everything notated as well and pretty much all the animation and the summary of what we've done so head over there and immediately try and download that and practice it and I'll see you in the next lesson cheers


Hello everyone. Thanks for coming out here. I'm Dharmit Shah and I work with CentOS Container Pipeline Team. Today's talk, this talk is about a container pipeline which can be used by both developers as well as the enterprise people. This is actually coming from the feedback that we got in the previous year. They've come 2018, I was here to talk about the same project and we got pretty good feedback. It was really helpful, critical feedback, and based on that feedback, we went back home and re-architected the entire pipeline service, such that it can now be used by developers, which is already hosted on the CentOS Infra, and it can also be used by enterprise or some people who are maybe concerned that, they don't want to push the container images to a public registry. Maybe they want to push the container images only to an internal registry. So yeah, because I had given a talk about the same topic the previous year, I just want to do a quick show off hands if anyone was here in the talk or they took a look at this talk from DevCon 2018. Anyone? Okay. That's great. Anyone who has used the service so far or this is the first time? Okay. Thank you. Anyone who has heard of it before the talk? No. Great. This is not related to my previous year's talk, but anyone over here who maintains more than one container image or as I heard in the talk from Honza that are you a container maintainer, container image maintainer who maintains about five images, 10 images, anything? Okay. Then this talk is, I'm quite sure it's going to interest you. All right. So I have divided this talk into three different parts. One is the features I'm going to talk about. Second is the architecture change that we did, how OpenShift came to the rescue, and finally the main purpose of the talk that why exactly I'm here to talk about the same service second year in a row. So the core features of the pipeline CentOS container pipeline, which is hosted on the public interfaces registry.CentOS.org. You can take a look at all the container images on that URL. The core features of our service include pre-build, which means that you can pre-build an artifact or a binary before you build the container image. Next is the Dockerfile linting. So you use a Dockerfile, so far we use Dockerfile and the dev cons in this year and previous year, we have been trying to find different names, but we want to avoid using the word Docker, I know that. But yeah, Dockerfile, that's the canonical way of making container images right now, and we do the Dockerfile linting using the Dockerfile lint project from Project Atomic. Next, we build the image which is obviously the main meat or the main bread and butter of the service. That's what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to build the container images, and we have some surprise over there. We scan the container image. When I say we scan the container image, I'm not sure how many of you have taken a look but obviously most of you have used Dockerhub or Qua.io or something like that. And if you look at certain pipeline services, what they do is they do provide scanning feature, but it's not free of cost. It's available at a certain price tag and it's only CVE scanning that they provide. They don't provide any of the scanning. But as a part of the CentOS Container Pipeline Service, what we do is we scan your container image for possible RPM updates or possible updates for NPM and GEM package managers. We also scan your container image for RPM data verification, that is RPM minus VA, but we give you the output in a very human-vailable form. And finally, we also scan the container image for possible capabilities that a container is going to come up with. So there is a run label in the Docker file. If you have specified the Docker run command that is supposed to be used for the container image, we check that out and we tell you that, okay, these are the certain set of capabilities that the resulting container is going to come up with. And I'm pretty sure, I'm like 100% sure that no other container pipeline service out there provides these features. Next, we deliver the container image to the registry. At the moment, registry is registry.centos.org. And finally, we notify the users about, sorry, we notify the user whose email is registered for that particular container image. We let them know that your image has been built, whether the image build was successful or failure, what is the URL, and what was exact git commit that caused the build. Next, coming to one of the most important features, which is parent-child relationship. So yeah, of all those people who are maintaining container images, you guys, the container maintainers. There might be a scenario wherein you have 10 container images, and all of them are probably dependent on the same parent image. So you got sentos latest, and then you got container images like HTTP, Nginx, or Node.js, anything which is dependent on the same parent image. This is a very common scenario that we have seen and we see that in our pipeline service at the moment as well. So you got 10 container images, parent image gets updated. So you are maintaining 10 images, all of them based on the same image, and parent image gets updated. So how do you exactly rebuild, how do you update the 10 child images manually by doing Docker build, or maybe a shell script, something like that?  They have around 20 images or something like that, which are building on sentos container pipeline right now. What do you do in that case? Rebuilding all the container images manually is a really tedious and boring task. Obviously no one wants to do that, but what sentos container pipeline does is it automatically rebuilds all this container images, which are dependent on a given container image. So previous year, we had this scenario of Meltdown and Spectre where the container images got updated, the base container image sentos latest got updated, and a number of child images were also updated. What we ended up doing was rebuilding around 500 container images all by ourselves automatically. No developer had to contact us to request a container image rebuild. Everything happened automatically. So a quick summary of the features that our service provides is that we rebuild every container image whenever there is a git push to the repository that's corresponding to that container image. We rebuild the container images upon parent image rebuild as well. And as a result, if you are a container maintainer, then you can be sure that container images coming from our registry are going to be updated pretty much all the time. Weekly scanning of images. So I mentioned about the various scanners like RPM update, NPM gem, the container capabilities, and RPM verification. We do that on weekly basis. Every Saturday night, we have a job which runs and which scans all the container images and it sends out an email to every user. And finally the email notifications. So yeah, email notifications are for every build as well as for every weekly scans. Quickly going through the workflow of the container pipeline service, there's only one time when a user has to interact with the service or when they have to deal with us. It is when you get onboarded with the project. So when you are saying that, okay, this is my open source project and we are building container images on top of CentOS and we want to build our container image on your registry. You open up a PR on github.com slash CentOS slash container index. I'll be sharing the link at the end of the preso. But yeah, that's the only time. You open up a PR, we take a look at it and once we merge it, this is what happens. We first check if a pre-build is required. Pre-build, remember I mentioned that if you want some binaries and artifacts to be included in your container image. So pre-build is the step that takes care of it. And if the pre-build is required, then okay, we go ahead and run the pre-build script which is available in the Git repo or we do the link build scan deliver and we push the image to the registry.centos.org. Finally, we send the email. At the bottom right of the diagram, we see that we do weekly scans. So yeah, that's the same thing that I mentioned earlier. We do that on weekly basis. And this is an example YAML file. This is the kind of YAML file that you are going to write and open up a PR with container index. It's pretty simple because everybody over here works on Kubernetes or Ansible or something like that. So YAML is not really new for anyone. We require the app ID and job ID, which is so based on the app ID, job ID and desired tag combination, what happens is the image getting created out of this YAML file will be registry.centos.org slash luster slash storage sig minus heketi colon latest. The notify email over here is heketi.devils at luster.org and we have the pre-built script as well as the pre-built context. We also have the build context, which means that if you have Docker file in a certain directory and if you want to do Docker build from a different directory, then that's what you do. I mean, that is the very last dot of the Docker build command, right? So that's the build context. And finally, the depends on field, which is going to determine that, which is the parent image of this container image. So every time registry.centos.org slash centos slash centos colon latest, every time that image gets updated, the luster storage sig heketi image is going to get updated as well. All right, so I said I was here in previous DevCon and I'm here again. What changed in a year? To be honest, when I went back to India from DevCon 2018, I went back with really good feedback and one thing was clear from very first day that I'm going to come back to DevCon 2019 and I'm going to talk about things we changed because there were a lot of things from architecture point of view that needed to be changed for the service. And to say it in a very short, maybe in one line, it was that the service was not really stable. We guys were doing firefighting most of the time. I'll come to that in the next slide. But yeah, in DevCon 2018, we had the same service, we had more features, just one more feature. We had emails being sent out to the users that contained logs from all the different stages like pre-build, docker file lending, building the container image, scanning. So all the logs were written into the same email and being sent out to the user that resulted in a pretty long email. We used to do the lending, building, scanning, delivering and automatic rebuilds used to happen upon every Git push, upon every parent image rebuild and upon RPM updates. So till previous year, yeah, the service used to do container image rebuild when any of the RPM in your container image was getting updated. But that is something we don't, we didn't have the bandwidth at the moment when we changed the architecture of the service. So it's not there. We are going to be working on that in near future. In DevCon 2019, what we have is the same service with one last feature, which is lack of RPM update. But we are now sending email with very minimal information. We just send you the link to your repository. And on that link, you can take a look at the logs, you can take a look at logs of all the stages about lending, scanning, building, everything over there. And yeah, rest of the things remain as it is. We still do the same stuff. Okay, so my CFP talks about OpenShift came to the rescue. It says that OpenShift was one of the game changers for the pipeline service. How exactly was it the game changer? Previous year when I was here, the service we had was completely heterogeneous. In the sense, we had workers for every task, like pre-building, like linting, like building the container image, scanning it. For every single thing, we had a Python worker return. And maybe one worker was running as system disservice. Another worker was running as a Docker container, rather a Linux container spun up by Docker run command. Build was running inside OpenShift cluster. And pre-built, that was the craziest thing that was happening on ci.centers.org, which is an altogether different infrastructure. So yeah, things were really messed up. And as a result of this, what used to happen is that deployment cycles were really, really long. Upgrade cycles were also really, really long. As a developer, if I used to make any change, I had to run the Ansible Playbooks once again. And the Ansible Playbook used to take around 30 minutes to deploy the service, even if the service was deployed. So in short, we messed up big time as far as deploying the service is concerned. We had some negative feedback from the ops in the sense that a few teams tried deploying our service and they came back with the feedback that your service is absolutely unmanageable. And we guys were doing firefighting most of the times in the sense all our standard updates are about, okay, today BuildWorker was misbehaving and Dharmit was doing this to make sure that it's getting fixed. The next day we had some other worker misbehaving and the developer was saying that, okay, I was working on fixing this. So in essence, we guys were not getting time to focus on new features or be able to attract more users or go out and tell people that, okay, this is a container pipeline service that does this, this, and this and it does it in a stable way. We had no guts at all to tell anyone that we did things in a stable fashion. That was 2018. Welcome to 2019. And our service is now OpenShift Native. I'll elaborate on that point in the next slide. Our development and deployment cycles are really fast in the sense when a developer makes any change to the code base, all they need to do is or all we need to do is we just do a manual Docker build and we push the container image to our internal development registry and we are done. So instead of 25 to 30 minutes, we are doing that task in about five minutes, tops. Stability, that was the most important reason why we wanted to move away from a heterogeneous architecture to an OpenShift-based architecture and OpenShift did help us achieve stability in the sense we deployed the service in the late September, 2018 and we have not faced any major downtime except once when, I don't know, it was a Friday evening and I was supposed to be out having beer or something but instead of that, I decided that, okay, I want to do a major OpenShift 3.9 to 3.11 upgrade in production and yeah, Friday is not good for production upgrades.  That was not a mistake. That was not a stability issue at all. We ended up having better throughput in the sense the time we used to take to build the container images or do the weekly scans, it has gone down dramatically. Earlier, we used to take a lot of time and we used to use Beanstalk D, okay. I didn't mention the Beanstalk D over here. It's kind of a message queue and we used to use Beanstalk D for communication between different workers. So sometimes what used to happen is that job is there on the Beanstalk D but the worker is not picking it up. This kind of issue is, I mean, it's 2019. We shouldn't be facing this kind of issues anymore, right? So yeah, that doesn't happen anymore. Stability is great, better throughput and weekends are fun in the sense, I can do what things I'm supposed to do on a weekend instead of focusing on okay and not stressing on a Saturday that some worker will go down and my Sunday will be spent troubleshooting what went wrong, okay. So yeah, that is a major benefit that we got from OpenShift and as I said, I'm going to expand on OpenShift native part. So what we do, what we did as a part of moving the entire service to OpenShift is that all the workers are now running as stages in Jenkins Pipeline. They are no longer working as separate workers as a system decervice or as a Linux container or as anything else. Everything is working inside Jenkins Pipeline. How many of you have maybe used OpenShift and Jenkins Pipeline together? Okay, great. So you definitely have some opinion either it's good or it's bad. I'm sure you can't stay in between. You can't say that it's good, it's bad. It's definitely a strong opinion. Adya, that's what we did. We made every worker a stage in the Jenkins Pipeline and what it does is for every build request that comes in whether it's a weekly scan or it's a container image rebuild, any build that comes in for that we spin up a new part for every build request and it happens dynamically. So we don't have to have a separate Jenkins master and different Jenkins slaves running in our environment. We just have Jenkins service running inside OpenShift and dynamic slave parts come up and they just go away once the task is finished. We don't have to use Beanstalk D. That's a major relief and OpenShift with Jenkins orchestrate everything. So no Beanstalk D and just OpenShift and Jenkins they orchestrate every single thing. Switching to Builda, I don't see Dan Walsh over here but I'm sure he would be one of the happiest guys if he had seen the last point. So yeah, this is something I have tested for about 250 images and we were very successfully able to build all the container images using Builda in our service. So it's just about me going back to India from the conference and then focusing on one and only one task which is moving away from doing Docker builds to Builda bird. So yeah, that's what we are going to be doing next. Although we use OpenShift and although it has been really, really helpful it has come up with a certain issues of its own and I don't think you can run away from this. So remember I told about the weekend I had upgrading from OpenShift 3.9 to OpenShift 3.11. One of the major issues that we faced is let me tell you, I have time, I'm going fast but I still have time. So we upgraded from OpenShift 3.9 to OpenShift 3.11 because 3.11 has this cluster monitoring operator which is Prometheus Grafana, everything built in and the moment you spin it up it's supposed to have Prometheus Grafana, everything properly there is going to have the OpenShift routes all that stuff. And we thought that what we will do is we will have OpenShift's built-in rules that it thinks are important, the alerting and monitoring rules and besides that we will add certain rules on top of it. Now that is where I went really wrong. I should have probably done some more RTFM or something but what happened is that the cluster monitoring operator it's read only. It doesn't let you add any rules of your own. So yeah that is where we kind of messed up and we have to kind of live with it at the moment. OpenShift and Jenkins, they don't sync with each other 100% of the time that's our experience but unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce this cleanly. But quite definitely the OpenShift Jenkins sync plugin it's not working 100% of the time. And Privilege mode, so once again this is coming from Dan Walsh, he doesn't really like people using Privilege mode or earlier he definitely used to hit people who are doing a Selenix permissive but yeah this is the next thing that he doesn't really like. And yeah, so we still need to use Privilege mode to be able to build container images. This is something we would like to move away from. All right, coming to the final and probably the most important section of my talk, at least from my point of view, it is that our pipeline service needs more users. So if you are a container maintainer, building images on top of CentOS or maybe Fedora even, please just take a look at it because this service is now stable and it does pretty much all the things that I am promising over here and we are doing it in a really nice way as far as I can tell you. But yeah, the service is running on CentOS infrastructure for about three years now and there are various upstream projects that rely upon it, but we need more. I mean, one of the matrix, if not, because it's a debatable topic, but one of the most important matrix that determines the success of an open source project is probably that how many people are using it, how many people are benefiting from it. But as far as this service is concerned, it has got two benefits from a 10,000 feet point of view. It is that if you are building container images on top of CentOS, then the service is already hosted on CentOS Infra and you can use it as is. But if you are someone who wants to build their containers in a private infrastructure, you can just go through the documentation. We have made sure that everything is covered. You can bring up an OpenShift environment very easily within your infrastructure. We have even mentioned the steps to do that and you can deploy the service in a private infrastructure. Maybe you can contribute back to the project in that way. And this is something that I don't really talk about a lot or we don't really talk a lot about it, but the service is distro-agnostic in the sense that it probably takes less time than I have been speaking with you guys. So I have been speaking since 20 minutes, but it would take less than 20 minutes to make sure that you change a few commands and the same service can give you useful information for container images that are being built for maybe Ubuntu or REL or Fedora, anything. Anything where OpenShift works, right? So wherever OpenShift works, you can just go ahead and deploy the service. You can build container images for that. Distribution do anything for that. I'll end the talk with a few quick links. So if you want to take a look at the containers that we are building right now, it's registry.centers.org.  It's github.com.centerscontainerindex. If you want to take a look at our code base, which is much more beautiful than how it used to be earlier, it's github.centerscontainerpipelineservice. And if you have any queries, just shoot us an email on centers.table at centers.org or on the free node. Questions, feedback. Feedback is the thing you have at the, under dev.com.sked.com, right? So yeah, I would love if you can share some feedback. If you have any questions for me, then I would be happy to answer. Right, that's it for me, yeah. You see, as I said, I haven't really tested building real images, but I don't see any reason whatsoever why you should not be able to do it, because everything is running on OpenShift. We deploy OpenShift using OpenShift Ansible. And I think it's really, it should really be possible. It's just that I have not tested it, but I'm 100% sure it will work. Ah, okay, so the base image, say you, sorry. But you don't want to, so the question is that you don't want to automatically update? Yeah, can you repeat the question, maybe? Me, fine. Sorry, I'm sorry. So that's what I was doing, actually, that. I think the question, as far as I have understood, is that you want to be able to disable the feature of automatic updates for the base image. Okay, but as far as Git push is concerned, that's not going to happen. So if you push something to the Git repository, image is getting updated. But if you don't want your image to get updated when a parent image gets updated, then probably the best way right now is that don't specify a parent image for it. At the moment, you just leave that YAML entry empty. The last one, okay, depends on none. That's, I mean, that's how Centhouse base image itself works. It depends on none, it's the parent image. I hope that answers the question. Okay, so the question is that, can you synchronize the images with Docker hub? No, that's not possible. I mean, we guys push to registry.centers.org and synchronizing with Docker hub is really not something we have considered. You can always modify the, I mean, change the locations where you have specified Docker.io slash my awesome image. Instead of that, just make, move from Docker.io to registry.centers.org. Yeah, I get it. Any more questions? Yes, okay, I'll try. I'm sorry. Okay, sorry. I'll take the questions outside if anyone has one. Thank you.


Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the Minister of Labor and Employment, Chris Ngige, is said to issue a Certificate of Recognition to a Factional Trade Union in the University System, the Congress of Nigerian University Academies, Conwa. Findings revealed that the move may not be unconnected with the lingering strike by the academic staff union of universities, which has spent more than seven months. The information was gathered through a press invitation extended to reporters covering the sector today and issued by Oshundu, a large-day deputy director, had press and public relations of the ministry, invited them to the recognition and presentation of Certificate of Registration to the Congress of Nigerian University Academies, Conwa. Recall also that the federal government through the National Industrial Court had ordered the striking academic staff union to return to work a judgment that ASSO is reported to have filed an appeal against.


Child maintenance? Is it comparable or voluntary? The question of the comparability of a child maintenance is one that many demand answers to. The laws regarding children born in a marriage and the laws regarding children born outside of marriage do differ. Can a father be compelled to pay for child maintenance of a child he did not want? This is a great question. What is child maintenance? Child maintenance is an ongoing periodic payment made by parents for the financial benefit of a child, following the end of a marriage or any other relationship. Child maintenance is paid directly or indirectly by an obligor to an obligee for the care and support of the children of a relationship that has been terminated or in some cases never existed. Parents generally have the responsibility to take care of their children and provide all they need to live. However, there are also instances where parents have failed to adequately provide for their children financially. As a result, many parents and guardians have turned to the court or law enforcement authorities to enforce a child or guidance support order. The object of a maintenance order is to protect and safeguard the welfare and well-being of the children of the marriage or children born outside of a marriage. Its purpose is to ensure that a child has the financial security and protection that he or she requires. Can a father who did not want the child be compelled to pay child maintenance? Yes, he can. Children born outside of a marriage are usually on the wrong ladder of the society in terms of maintenance. Most times they are faced with denial and, in some cases, outright abandonment by one or both parents. They are most often denied the necessary financial maintenance required by either of the parent. Nonetheless, section 142 of the Child Rights Act states that every child has a right to maintenance from his or her parent or guardian in proportion to their financial capabilities and that the child has the right to pursue this right in family courts in proper circumstances. The law compels parents of children to ensure the proper maintenance of their children. In a situation where the mother of the child does not need financial help from the father to take care of the child, the father does not need to pay child maintenance. Nonetheless, in a situation where she needs help, the father can be compelled to pay child maintenance as he is under an obligation by the law to take care of the child. In such a case, the child can apply to the welfare department of any state which will, in turn, apply to the family court. For an order of the maintenance, in Lagos State, the criminal code law of Lagos State makes it a crime for a parent or guardian to fail to provide for maintenance. By the combined provision of sections 206 and 207 of the criminal code law of Lagos State 2015, Lagos State states that it is the duty of every person as a head of a family or has charge of a child, being a member of his household, to provide the necessities of life for such child and he is held to have caused any consequences which result to the life or health or any person because of any omission to perform that duty. Thus, a child who is denied necessary maintenance can make a formal report to the relevant law agencies to enforce this right. For instance, there are instances where a single mother will be unable to get financial assistance from the father of her child. It is usually advisable that a single mother who has found herself in such a situation should take full advantage of the section and seek help at the gender section of the police command in Lagos, for example. For immediate prosecution. Finally, the position of the law is key on the matter at hand. A father is comparable under the Child Rights Act 2003, criminal law of Lagos State to pay for child maintenance regardless of whether he wanted that child or not. What is your opinion? I actually have to go first on this one. Come for you. Come for you go first there. Because I'm a lawyer and for me what just jumped out for me here is that the man again is the one put front and center with the fight for equality and gender rights here. I think what we also need to do is to make it a level playing field. That probably needs to be reworked also. So it's not just the man, it's also the woman. One of them can be compelled. So if the woman has, then she should be made to pay also. If it's the man that has, then he should be made to pay. Not one-sided. I think for me that was what stood out for me the most. Now that we're playing this level playing field, it should apply to maintenance for children. Over. Thank you. All right. Okay, for me what is worrying is the level of illiteracy that I'm starting to realize that many of us are suffering from. I can admit here that I didn't even know that we had the laws right that compels a father to pay for maintenance for his child. I know loads of single women, right? I mean right now it's not balanced. I know loads of single women who have had to struggle for years alone and they didn't know that they had the costs to the law. And you see this thing is consistent in everything that affects us as Nigerians. We have no awareness of the laws that protect us in employment, in marriage, in children. Just name it. So I think for me, right, we really need to start to change the curriculum of our schools. Somewhat. I don't know at what level because information is, knowledge is par. But you can't even have, how do you act? How do you fight for what is your right when you don't even know? I didn't know. I can agree. I didn't know until this session. So this is new information that I'm going to now start to put out there. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Which is why I'll add a little to what you just, the quote, you know the quote has been updated a bit. So it's now applied knowledge is par. Yeah. Because guess what, the knowledge is there. But then we don't have it. We don't, you know, application, right? Applied knowledge is par because there's the knowledge. I've never heard, this is the first time hearing of this.  And the fathers actually in the place in a better position to actually provide this, you know, basic message of life. But they don't even realize that they can seek, you know, redress in court. But hey, there's also the part where you go to court, you know, do you actually get those injunctions? And then are they enforced, right? Because, yeah, so they don't know. So when they now know, and they now make, you know, the decision to, you know, to take that step, do they actually get the redress? Yes. The other question, sorry, quickly is, I don't understand the part where they say, demand that you not to want the child. But that's a whole different conversation. That's a whole different conversation. Because I don't... Yeah, that's a whole different conversation. Maybe you can help as a lawyer. What does that mean? I'm a man, I don't know what it means. At the point where you're doing certain things, you know there's the possibility of this happening. So whatever the outcome is, if you say you don't want it and the mother of the child says, I want it, I'm not willing to risk my life to go through an abortion, which is illegal I guess. Exactly. At the point where you are having that conversation, you should know that whatever happens, you have a responsibility. It's no longer, I don't want it. It's now we. It exceeds just your own decision. And also just to reply to comfort. The reason why it might sound like they are going after men is because in Nigeria especially, you have too many single mothers. You have a situation where it is just the women that cater for these children all their lives. And the men are having kids by different women and not caring whatever it is that happens to the child. So that is why it might sound a bit like the law is enforcing it more on the men than the women because it is what is rampart in our state and we can't deny that. And I get that and I honestly understand that I think for me also more important than the financing so that for me honestly I'm sorry if the man is not ready to do it. I am more interested in the emotional well-being of the child. Now when these maintenance custody battles come up, it's not even the parents that go through this. It's the children. And because we live in a patriarchal society as it is, let us face it in the long run, the men tend to get away with this. I normally would advocate to single men that look, honestly if you can take care of your child, leave him let him do what he wants. But for the health of your own child, is there a way you can have a relationship for your child? Because we are also growing up with a lot of children who have daddy issues. And comfort. So for me it's the balance.  Comfort is what you are talking about. Psychological health. What you are talking about is actually the crux. Like you are saying, men who don't want. For me that is what I was going to talk about, the irresponsibility of certain men. Because how can you get a woman pregnant and say you don't want the child? Listen, even if you have all the problems in this world with the mother, as long as you are the father of that child, go for your DNA test. And you know that this is your child. You do not have a choice, but to take care of that child. Because if you are not able to take care of your child, what you are saying in essence is that if you were to see somebody in your area dyingly in need of help, you would not help that person. That's what you are saying. And you are more of a curse to the society than any other thing. But in a situation where maybe they used protection for some reason, protection failed, it goes beyond and he knows that he can't financially be able to afford it. But that's a different thing. Can such person be held liable to provide when they know you don't have money to do it? I mean you will be held the little you have, you must contribute from that. Exactly, that's it. So, let's bring you home then. Tolu is next after this break.


This is stock number 10365. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used heavy-duty truck headquarters today. We are checking out this super clean 2011 Ford F-250 Crew cab short box this truck has the 6.7 liter power stroke diesel and Has been fully safety to and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids Have been checked and topped off and this truck is 100% ready to go Royal red metallic is the color over Think it's pale adobe We shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device Turn them on right now because it is like you're right here looking at the truck with me And definitely your best way to check out the vehicle quality and condition wise before seeing it in person If you want to check out more pictures of this truck in the upper right-hand part of your screen Is a link right to this vehicle click that and check us out there polished aluminum 20 inch rims has BF Goodrich all-terrain LT 275 65 R20 tires with a little bit under half to tread left But still decent tread there frame and under body is in really nice shape Has some 3m tape on the hood to keep it nice and clean for many rock chips chrome trimmed grill is in nice condition as well Hood is in excellent shape Passengers side fender is an excellent condition as well and the passengers side rim No scuffs or scrapes on that As you go down this side of the truck you can see just how clean the body is how reflective and mirror like that paint is We take these HD videos So if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down You can still see the truck here the truck and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here So that when you do get here, there's absolutely no surprises cab is an excellent shape In fact, we offer a summit auto fast-pass option in the upper right-hand part of your screen a link right to our website Where you can apply for financing get pre-approved appraise the trade Get a payment quote all from the comfort of your own home. You can see it as very clean under body and All the remaining factory exhausts So it hasn't been altered in any way this back rim is an excellent condition as well And the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires Frame and under body back here is in excellent shape Very clean truck as the chrome tipped exhaust Rear bumper is in nice condition didn't see any dents or dings on that does have full towing package Which includes the receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wiring get a good idea that metal flake in that royal red Metallic color has the tailgate step assist backup camera and locking tailgate Has a b&w Fifth wheel hitch in it You also get a seven pin wiring spray and bed liner And that's a really nice hitch in there And that comes with the truck there's your tailgate step assist And as you go down this side of the truck just as clean as that passenger side Didn't see any dents or dings in the box And for full disclosure this back rim is in nice condition as well Driver's side doors excellent shape. It does have the door code entry We do have the code for that has the power scope mirrors they power fold in and telescope out I'll show you how those work right now So they power fold in like so and then they also power telescope out and in I always like showing both sides just so you know that both sides are working There you go Inside the laryet package gives you the tan Leather interior there are no rips there are no tears on the seats excellent condition And both these seats are heated and cooled and power factory floor mats throughout auto headlamps power pedals memory driver's seat power mirrors and power locks and windows As we hop inside the truck here you can see that this one has 28,377 miles Instrument cluster is very nice and clean comes with a leather wrap steering wheel That is an excellent condition Bluetooth and audio controls on the right and cruise controls on the left six speed automatic transmission has the Touchscreen radio. This is my favorite radio because you can actually store music On to this radio. It has a hard drive in it has the factory navigation system am fm and serious xm radio capabilities And this is also where your backup camera shows up Dual climate control factory brake controller turned out four-wheel drive And your stability control and sync controls where you can Plug in your cell phone Or hook up your cell phone bluetooth And talk through your speakers passenger side seat no rips or tears and the headliner is an excellent shape On this truck it does come with your home link buttons for your roger door security systems and lane systems up there Power sign rear window and map lights We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we will check out under the hood Also has the nice chrome step bars on here The back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips. No tears back here does have the power sign rear window Got cup holders and that center console and these seats do fold up And there is lockable storage underneath here so that locks with the ignition key you get two Receiver hitches in there Factory floor mats back here and you do get 110 volt 150 watt plug-in back here as well You do have the factory subwoofer and your latch tether anchors back here And finally there is the child safety locks on the back doors We'll take a quick look under the hood I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this hd video You have been able to tell just how clean this truck is all the way around inside now Under the hood. We have the 6.7 liter power stroke diesel engine base very clean runs very smooth This truck has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop as a fresh oil and filter change All the fluids have been checked and topped off truck has been gone through mechanically 100 percent and is 100 Ready to go To see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 450 new and used cars trucks stv's Minivans wranglers half tons three quarter tons one tons you name it. We got it go to our website www.summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations All at summit auto.com if you like to check out more hd videos You can go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos That you see there in fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our youtube channel And you left a link to more heavy-duty truck videos like this one on your right If you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this vehicle on our website Click those check us out and we really look forward to helping with this super clean 2011 forward f250 crew cab short box Lariat with the power stroke diesel. Thanks again


Hi everyone, Joe for Jasper's case breaks.com coming at you with 2020 2021 Panini immaculate basketball one box random team break number 21 Yes, we found more immaculate hoops It's a high-risk high reward kind of break But these are the kind of people that like to take the high risks for the high rewards big. Thanks everybody here and There's all the teams right here Let's roll it. Let's randomize names and teams snake eyes two times one and two Easy got a few Bennett's down to a Mike a Matthew that is snake eyes easy for the teams one and Two we've got Chicago down to Cleveland. All right, Bennett with the Bulls jazz and Sixers Michael with the Nets Thomas.  Yep Hornets for you Matthew with a Cleveland This is for you now while you're considering trades Let's consider which box we're gonna do here There it is fresh case of 2021 immaculate basketball, let's pick a box Confirm for Harry's I don't know if Thomas is gonna confirm that though. It takes two to tango. All right So we've got box one two three four five We're gonna select a diet. We'll select that one and we'll just roll it one two three four and five If I roll a six, I'll just roll again Three one two three and we'll save these other ones for next time So we'll put those X's there so you know, they're from the same case. We'll set those aside over here And we're gonna pause the video when we come back We're gonna see if there's any trades and then we will have the break be right back All right. Welcome back everybody No deals were done here in this one box break on March the 2nd. Thanks everyone for Joining the fillers taking a risk on that. Thanks to the people who bought spots straight up Appreciate that as well. Let's see what we got That's that we've only this is a this is the first box out of a fresh case so We're only just at the tip of the iceberg So the next box is up, okay, let's keep working on the full spots and the two fillers Now back to this break at hand Let's see what we have here. All right first one out of the gate is Zion Williamson 21 out of 25 apparently some good news according to Nancy that That he can he can start putting some weight on that foot now Pelicans Michael P with the pals to be good for the hobby if we start seeing him in some games Maybe in the playoffs next one is 72 out of 99 Isaiah Stewart. That'll be for Detroit David The Motor City Udoka as a Buike for the jazz 13 out of 50 Jersey numbers. That is for Bennett and the Utah Jazz We got past and present signatures Josh Howard Mavericks 82 out of 99 That'll be for Alex and the Dallas Mavericks Signature moves Carlos boozer for the jazz 73 out of 99 for Bennett and the last one It oh, oh, I thought it was his teammate Six out of ten. I psyched myself out two color patch and autograph Jaden McDaniels That's for Michael P in the Minnesota Timberwolves. It's an RPA to 10 nice low number here, too All right, there you go gang. That's that Again, we're just scratching the surface on this case. So the next one box break is in the store Jazzpiece case breaks calm. Check it out. I'm Joe. I'll see you next time for the next hoops break. Bye. Bye