Welcome. I hope you can hear me. I wasn't a party to So I didn't think cryptography. This is the problem that I started thinking on quite a while ago And I done a little bit of research to see and there was anything that could be done Let's put down what is the problem? Cryptography is mostly implemented through libraries not just you know final programs And this is pretty good because we have very few well-managed pieces of code that we can easily Upgrade on the system if there is a flaw and Almost I will use it The bad part is though that it's very hard to get data out of these libraries because the libraries don't have an environment where they can easily You know create log files or do anything like that because they are embedded into programs and they don't want to disturb This problem they want to get out of the way as much as possible So how do we learn? These are the questions I asked me say how do we learn what the system is actually using in the operation like if I want to Decide on what policy cryptographic policy to to To use in my company. How do I know what is actually going on? What the surface of it is? How do I know that if I change the configuration the system is actually doing what I tell the system to do Sometimes it will be bad also, you know either in the configuration how I Design it or maybe even in the library and how do I gather statistics so in the future? I can change my decision if you want to So I thought about another area of computing where They actually have a similar problem. They want to trace what's happening in programs uh, it generally that is for performance and there are tools to that So I thought I started looking at other tools that I can also use for my purpose uh, so tools that are used are Tracing through the bug statements. This is the same problem as logging like it's not really something you can do On a library. It's because you're going to interfere with the program. Especially you cannot use it in production um, then you can use tools like ptrace Drives that like gdb that actually You know intercepts a program But again, it's not okay for production first and then you will have to intercept every single program in the system And wrap it into gdb and there's something strange there And finally I Encountered this thing called ebbf And it was interesting because it's low impact and it potentially usable in production because it mostly stays out of the way So what is ebbf ebbf is a Extended Berkeley packet filter the name comes from because it was initially used in the in the bsdos to do Pocket filtering but has been since being extended. It's basically a limited virtual machine not in the sense of a virtual computer, but in the language sense and then it can even be Optimizing the kernel through a jit optionally and it can kind of run arbitrary code Although the limitations are that they cannot do things like loops or anything else because This virtual machine wants to verify that this program does not interfere with the kernel and cannot crash the kernel stuff like that But it can't intercept a lot of other code running even in the kernel or in the user space The other thing is that it requires with privileges in most cases But that's not a big deal for our purposes So why ebbf exactly because you can't intercept anything including anything in any libraries in user space So at that point that was like, okay now I can really see everything that's happening in the system I want to without having to do any hack on every single binary Or you know, except the Stuff in user space, which is really heavy The other part I can do is I can get your data in the kernel So you don't have to stop the program Do some pressure in the space come back You can simply get the data in the kernel and have that other user space program extract this data in the kernel without affecting The program you're probing and generally has no performance impact because of that The other thing is that it does not require code changes Although if you have changes in the code, it might be easy to use. So what would what did I try to monitor? My idea was to monitor specifically tls ciphers, for example, because it was the easiest thing to look at There are many ciphers for example in tls 1.2 and there have been attacks over the years So it kind of it's a good thing to know what's going on what's being used and to inform future decisions So let's try to find out how to see that So the first thing I tried was to use a bpf trace with u-probes. So u-probes are basically Ways to trace user space programs by just knowing a function name. So if you know the function That you want to look at you can use a u-rat code Which is a probe that intercepts when the function returns back and you can extract for example the return value and in There was this nice function SSL choose cipher That is invoke when the tls session is established and you choose which cipher you're going to use For that tls session that this is called in once for a session So it was ideal to know how many times a specific cipher is used on the system And this is the complete program basically if you run this thing You will get out With this printf what program is using with cipher? So what's good about using u-probes? It's easy to set up quickly. The program can be created very quickly For some simple things you could even do a single line bpf trace script But the There are some issues with it. First of all, I required to install a A tropler of the bug info packages because most of the functions you want to look at are not necessarily directly exposed in in the alpha header And the probe cannot find the function without knowing where it is So technically could figure out exactly where your memory does and But it's very complicated at that point. Uh, and it's somewhat hard to pull data from complex data structures So if the data is hidden through many pointers and stuff like that, it's it's Very annoying to try to pull it out in a given site Because you have to make a representation of the structure and then try to pull that out The other thing is that whenever The code changes, you have to make sure that the bug info packages are exactly of the right Version and if the actual Code not only is being updated that also changes the way structure internally You might have to change the probe over time. So it's it's very good for one shot But for something that you want to use over and over is it's less So I try then I try this other thing is called USDT probes. Uh, this is really interesting. It does require a little more work Because it does require to instrument code. Uh, this is exactly the same probe they're used for example for system tub and they're used for doing, uh Performance tracing and stuff like that Uh, but it's really simple. It's really just one line that you have to add an header That tells you that gives a name to the place where you want to look at something And you can pass, you know the data you want to look at. So in this case, it is a somewhat complex structure here, but I don't have to care You know to try to undo it in the current site. I'm just telling I compile time where that the data is and I give a name that I can find without the bug in the buggy for packages. So It's easy to get the data you want. As you can see you can put a probe in the middle of a function You don't have to wait until the function ends or anything like that and uh, Do not know about packages involved And you don't need to adjust the the probing code over time in the sense that if you if you insert this in the in the source code Upstream and this get maintained Then ideally you don't have to change anything because the name will stay there with the right mean Um, but on the other hand, if this probes not exist in the code already, you'll have to patch it. So this is the The problem this way Okay, so how do we gather the data? So there are a few ways to enable probes. One is the bpf-trails tool that I use for the uprobe experiment But you can also go a little bit deeper with bcc, which is the bpf-compiler collections There are a number of tools they already provide for some common tasks But you can also create a custom c program or an item program, which and that's the the way I went To do my little experiment. So If you want to know how to use we've got here python This is almost all you need to do if you know already bpf You might want to read the bpf documentation to know what to look for here, but For finding out how to use it then in python. That's that's what I did mostly So let's look at the actual bpf code So this is an extract from the program brought and Basically I embedded a small c program which then gets compiled into the bpf bytecode Inside a variable in the python code Um I just created a small data structure where I hold the data that I want to later pass the user space And I created in this case a hash map in kernel so that I can Hold a counter for each cipher I care for and then I just created this function that counts ciphers so basically You get a cipher and you increment the hash map With the cipher Number as the key so every time you get that cipher this counter for that specific cipher cipher will be increment The second part is that you have to load the bpf program into the kernel And so you have to tell what you want to expect in this case. This is the Libreous a cell library. So this this means that any program that ever Opens this and you know runs this will be intercepted from this point on and this is the very powerful part of it You can intercept basically any program using your library. Um, sorry Then I have to use Give it the name that I put into the in the source code for the scd case in the scd probe And I need to tell it which function To use and this comes cipher use is this function that I showed a moment before And this basically hooks the The code to the probe that we created in user space And then we just load the program and it's in Finally Finally what happens that I had a very stupid program That gets this hash map. Sorry about the forwarding thing Uh, and then just Goes through the hash map every five seconds and prints out What's in the current so where the counters are what the counters say So this is the another example that I extracted from from my From my computer that was running overnight One weekend. I don't do anything with the computer the weekend. And so I just let it run And the program was almost identical to the one I showed but I was also Instrumented to look at at the nss library and I just was printing whether I open a cell or nss data was being recovered and It came out with this interesting little table So it had a number of ciphers were being used Um And just from the cipher I can see that some of them are tls one the three because tls one the three defined completely new cipher So just by knowing which cipher it'd be news. I knew it was either tls one the three or tls one the two or probably also earlier and So I came out and I have About half of the connections likely less than half using tls one the three already Which was quite interesting because tls one the three is is recent The other interesting thing is that About a quarter, maybe of the connections used 256 bit ciphers And most of them uses 128 bit ciphers Another finding was that This is basically just fireworks because I just rented only the client side in the nss library And I didn't have any other client program that I know of running and so Firefork did do a lot of connections where I was but why I was not using it Like most of the connections were done by fireforks. I don't know what it was doing Um, the other interesting thing is that I didn't ever figure out What this was uh, there was a couple of tests I was doing with a simple SSL open SSL server and a simple open SSL client just to see if this was working So I think what one of these Was done by me intentionally But then during the night My hypothesis is that Either there is a dnf update kind of thing or maybe package kit trying to pull You know the updates for fedora overnight But I don't know it's 79 But there is something running on my machine that is using open SSL to pull data from somewhere Um and This is pretty interesting because I have No idea what's going on with crypto. I didn't know what cypher were being used at all over time And I didn't know how much how many connections are going on overnight on fireforks or that was that there were other things Um, I could have printed for example Uh The program if I you know if I wanted to explore exactly what was creating the stuff I just didn't think of doing it. Uh, because I wasn't expecting this many connections. So this thing was running and I Kind of almost forgot it and then the next day I was looking at oh this please go And yeah, that's basically it I think I was quite fired Any questions? Yeah So yeah, that's what I did Um, so yeah, so uh, there are basically Oh, sorry. Yeah, why I did use a system that probe uh for this So basically there are only two kind of probes that ebbf that gives you for user space programs So for the kernel you have Uh, I think uh, like 10 or more probes, but for user space you have only two the u probes And this us d t user space uh dynamic tracing probes You probes you can use them Without any instrumentation of the code And so they're appealing because you don't have to change anything But as I said before the the problems are that If you want to use this in product actually at any time It's pretty annoying because the debugging foe need to be installed and that's a ton of Stuff and it's really prone to error The the reason why I use the us d t probes is really because Although it requires a change in the package or what I did is I created a patch and did the rpm build to rebuild the package It really like allows you to look exactly at what you want Like you don't have to scavenge Into the data in the in the program memory You just tell you know the program basically create this no operation and put in the health header A pointer that says the data is exactly in this place And so it makes it much easier to get exactly the data you want Out of the program So yeah, you have to balance whether you can change a program and in that case you can use this method If you have like a sort of a black box Then you will have to use u probes And you have to constantly Update them when you know you update this program In particular you can use system Oh, why did I use e bbf also the the question morphed into why did I use e bbf with Assistant with these probes instead of using system tab itself? Well one Very simple reason is I wanted to experiment with bbf and initially Well, initially, uh, I thought that u probes would be the way to go because u probes allow you to basically Intercept without doing any change And so at that point I was looking at u probes mostly and systems that cannot do anything without instrumentation The other party though while I was looking at is that e bbf is much safer to run than system type Because in this case I mean to you I would have to introduce systems up in the current to look at this What people do with a system type in user space is usually look at the program while they are Where it's running is to create basically For this kind of use create a current module That have basically unbounded access to what the kernel is doing because system type is very powerful But actually it's too powerful like if you make a mistake in that program you're running there And it's easy because it's so powerful that you want to do a lot more You can easily destabilize the system at that point While e bbf because it's very constrained as language forces you to move most of the processing out you cannot do loops so you cannot like Cause you know the kernel to be stuck somewhere. So it's kind of much safer. And so in the end I was like Yeah, even if I could use system type and just I'm going to continue experimenting with bbf because it has these properties called So the question is uh, I had to add code so what are the prospects of getting this upstream and whether I talk with upstream So this is just an experiment at this point. I didn't even I think show it must on my team These changes I made so it's a package I built on my machine However from the point of view of acceptance It remained to be seen. I don't think we will have to necessarily carry downstream patches for a long time I would prefer if upstream adds this kind of stuff And because it's basically it doesn't cause any issue to have this code I have good hopes that they will accept it because yes, it is a code change but this thing Is not an instruction in your program What this thing does to the binary it basically introduced to no operations Like assembly no operation. That's all it does And the other thing it does is that when you compile it it will add a small segment in the elf header That is only seen a link time basically or by the usdd from that tells ebbf How to hook into dynamically around time? So basically you have absolutely zero overhead in doing this. So from the point of view of You know the program itself. There is basically no impact. The only impact is on the fundamentally on the source code and in the else So I hope that most upstream won't have a problem But this kind of thing the only problem is if we want if we want to introduce thousands of days because then the maintenance May be perceived a little bit too much, but I don't plan off on you know doing a huge instrumentation for dates It's just Key places where you want to audit some use of crypto at least from now So I hope that it will be Reasonably easy to get this stuff accepted and there are similar things At the question are there similar thing in other open source operators? So Yeah, so one point of view that your question make me think I've is that yes, this is currently in it specific So some Upstream might be a little bit reluctant to have all the main specific stuff However, see me like the all this stuff can be really hidden behind a more generic um Macro Where you can have this specific legal system Thing coming up, but then on Solaris there's also the trace. So this is I think basically Perfectly compatible for you know compiling on there and I don't know very well about bsd Again, if you have a macro you can simply enable it only when you're bleeding. So from the point of view of Of the source code, it doesn't have a huge impact At worst case you have a macro where you you don't have anything on the system But you don't have support because the macro is all in empty define So you don't even need to litter the code with this. You just need to create a macro that does nothing When we don't have support Yeah, so the good thing is that you these This dynamic tracing probes are Somewhat somewhat common at least among a couple of systems So should be okay And you can easily use this for other kind of tracing And so you can like kind of mix them with the bug tracing Question is Question is could I use this system to check that the for example system white crypto policies are applied correctly My answer would be Kind of like i'm not going to use this To go into the program and look what are the ciphers that have been enabled It's like you can do that with better ways. However, what you can do is something like this is You could have A list of ciphers that you know you want to allow Or maybe a blacklist depending on what you look at how you see it And then you can have like something alert you if you see anything else Like if you see one of the blacklist ciphers or you see a cipher that is not in your white list You could have these things sending events to the program Controlling it like the python program and the python program could like log look you have a crypto policy that says that only Shout to 56 is allowed, but i'm seeing shawan being used because it's being involved Because you could intercept for example evp shawan the Initialization function for shawan and you can you have alarms a shawan is being used and in theory You told me your policies that you don't want to use So it could be used to audit whether your system will do stuff that you don't want to do Or whether your system is doing the things you want to do like you can have other policies that are About checking what is being used, but not about checking the configuration itself Yes, so The answer is kind of yes if you Want to basically audit what you're doing which is the point of this research It's about the idea initially was how can i audit what's going on? and then you can do it for example To alert yourself or you can do it for future policy decisions Like maybe you don't have any whitelist of blacklist, but you want to know what is being used like If you see that there is a cipher that's never used Maybe you'd say well, let's exclude it because nothing using it anyway, and I don't want tourists to have more you know attack surface Or you want to know How hard it would be to disable shawar, which is a problem we'll have soon and you can see is it being usable Maybe you find out that you know Most of your systems don't use it and then you're like you can have a custom crypto policy that says no shawar because You're fine. That is like make one percent of the connection to use it That may be you can instrument to tell you what program use it that maybe you are like Yeah, this program can handle you know a failure there. So i'm gonna disable it So that this is the idea that sparkled a little bit this research And I hope you can get actually to to build something that does exactly that Okay out of time. Thank you


I could start this off with a rhetorical question about your knowledge on the Hunger Games and its many dystopian young adult clones, but I don't need to. I can practically guarantee that you know exactly what I'm talking about already. Divergent, Legends, The Testing, Enclave, The Tree Makers, Glitch, Matched, Article 5, Under the Never Sky, Shatter Me, The Darkest Minds, The Moon Dwellers, Partials, The Country Saga, Save the Pearls, Shipbreaker, Breath, Delirium, The Maze Runner, Eve, Blood of Eden, Birthmarked, and many, many more. These started picking up steam around 2009, the year that the first Hunger Games novel released, and they completely dominated bookstores and bestseller lists for years afterwards. Perhaps more than Twilight knockoffs, there were a lot of these released and even more of them got made into movies. This makes sense if you think about it. Twilight clones were focused entirely on romance while these were strongly focused on romance, but they had some action and adventure stuff in there that attracted a wider audience. I've mentioned before that I keep looking for the elusive good Twilight clone with little success. The Hunger Games and its clones are a different story. See, I like the Hunger Games, though it has some notable issues.  I can read them without wanting to dig out my hippocampus at least. But we all got tired of these for the same reason teenage girls got tired of watching other teenage girls with no personality fall in love with bad boys who were also vampires or leprechauns or mermen or something. They were all the same. We saw so many teenagers overthrow tyrannical regimes with the power of love triangles that they soon became as vomit inducing as statutory rapist vampires. Not to say that being cliched automatically makes something bad, sometimes being familiar brings a level of comfort, the ability to just relax and take in whatever you're seeing. I know Far Cry 6 is going to be the same as Far Cry 5, but I'll still play the shit out of it when it comes out. So today I'm going through all the major parts of Hunger Games clones to explain how they're put together, what makes them appealing, and what made them such a big hit. And we'll do it in a numbered list. Number one, there must be an evil government. This one goes almost without saying. Ever since authors saw Katniss spark off a rebellion in Panem, they realized that revolutions make for an easy story template. All you have to do is make the setting a country that is extremely totalitarian and oppressive and keeps its people in poverty. Then the audience is already primed to watch the heroes grow their power and fight to topple the despotic regime of old white dudes who hold onto power with their army of faceless drones. Like when Panem's peacekeepers brutally attack unarmed protesters. Wait, no, that's New York. And that's Israel. That's France. That's Hong Kong. Look, you get the point. Most of the time this world will be our world after some sort of apocalypse. The exact details of this apocalypse are unimportant. All that matters is that some crisis caused the collapse of the world order. It'll probably involve climate change, a giant war, economic collapse, a pandemic, or some combination of the above. In the chaos that followed, an authoritarian regime came to power to make sure the people survived. This all makes sense, but then the authoritarian regime overstays its welcome. How has the regime managed to stay around so long or function at all in the present when the vast majority of the population hates it? What actions could the government take to dissuade rebellions beside violent crackdowns that would likely turn public opinion further against the rulers? What kind of internal factions and power struggles are there that might hinder their response? Are there any reformers in power who want to negotiate with the rebels to bring an end to the fighting? Are the rebels ever being unreasonable? The Hunger Games struggled with these very questions, but most clones simply ignore them. The government is just evil, and that means the rebels, for all their faults, are good. Because nothing bad has ever come from moral absolutism. Number two. The protagonist must be a teenage girl. You might think that having a story full of action, rebellion, and explosions would be male-oriented, or at least gender-neutral. Well, you'd be wrong. Hunger Games clones are aimed at an audience of young girls, meaning that the story must also revolve around a teenage girl. She has to be beautiful, but she can't know that she's beautiful, so she'll have to comment on how plain she is. After all, if she had to put effort into her appearance, that might make her look vain. Main character girl will also most likely be a member of the lower classes who lives in the slums, so that she has a reason to hate her country's rulers. This only happens about 80% of the time, though. The rest of the time, she'll be in a more privileged position, and only start hating the establishment when they do something that hurts her personally.  In some cases, the teenage main character girl will actually be a badass fighter and or competent leader, and to show off how much of a badass she is, she'll wear her father's old hunting jacket. Luckily, he was her size. But that's optional, since in many cases, she just sort of exists and is swept up in all these crazy events. In things like Legend, she'll be recruited for an important mission despite being a teenager with barely any experience in whatever she's trying to do. Then she shows up everyone else because she's there for wish fulfillment. In things like Enclave, she'll be a super amazing fighter who can take on monsters, robots, and grown men twice her size with no trouble, even if she's malnourished and too young to have much combat experience. Then through her sheer badassery, everyone will want to follow her and she saves the day. In things like Matched or Article 5, she's not special in any way, nor does she do anything interesting over the course of the story. This is to allow maximum projection on the part of the readers. After all, why would you want to get a different perspective on things when you could just play pretend instead? More important than all of that is the Love Triangle. See, the Hunger Games had a Love Triangle that the author didn't want to put in. The publishers forced her to add it. But she did it in an intelligent way, where Katniss was forced to play up her relationship with PETA to get the public to like her and improve her odds of survival, a pretty clear commentary on the nature of fame and celebrity worship. Most of the copycats didn't get the subtext and just threw in a Love Triangle because they thought it would sell, which it often did. To be fair, most of the fans didn't get the subtext either. You'd think that with everything going on around them, the main character girls would be less concerned with romance and kissing cute boys. You'd be wrong. The protagonist in this instance must be relatable to young women, not in the sense that they hold some universal human trait or experience that anyone can get behind. No, I'm talking about relatability in the corporate sense, where they pick a surface-level trait such as race or gender and slap that on. Then they can use that faux-wokeness for free advertising, since all the white liberals will use it as an example for why society is now fixed and all the reactionaries will screech about how it's an attack on Western civilization.  And there's my rant on capitalism for the month. Number three, society is structured in a weird way. There have been a lot of ways that societies and governments have been stratified and divided over the years, from mono-ethnic states that follow a strict hierarchy to countries where religious identification is the only important criteria to where you fit in and the government is mostly democratic. You could, in theory, construct a fictional society in basically any imaginable form and it would be justifiable. The keywords there are theory and justifiable. If you come up with a bizarre culture and social structure, I'm all for it, but it needs to follow some sort of logic in its construction, perpetuation, and eventual collapse. In the Hunger Games, everyone lived in 12 districts that were all kept isolated and ruled over by the Capital District. Then all those people were forced to send their children to fight in a death match every year, which they all hated, but they feared rebelling because the capitals might seem overwhelming. There are a few issues here, which I've talked about already, but overall there is a threat of logic to it. The clones often missed that. In the clones, people will often be divided into completely arbitrary categories. In Divergent, which is probably the most notable Hunger Games clone, people are divided into factions based on a single personality trait, like intelligence or kindness. In The Testing, you get a single chance to attend university and have a decent life.  In Enclave, everyone is assigned a role as either a breeder, a hunter, or a builder. In Matched, everyone is in arranged marriages to promote social harmony, and so on. Unlike real dictatorships, the people here will all be oppressed equally. There won't be any ethnic groups or religions that the government uses as a scapegoat to drum up support among the populace, nor will women be placed into any subservient role unless that's the whole point of the story, like in Article 5. The categories will often be decided by some sort of testing that takes place in adolescence so that the story can begin with the main character girl preparing for it. Then she'll join whatever group has the coolest job so she can go off on adventures where she kills ghosts with a flashlight or whatever. Failing that, the categories will be assigned at birth. Either way, the story will spend a lot of time explaining how the categories are all dumb and the system doesn't work so that the main character girl will get the chance to show off how she's special and can't be put into a box, just like the person reading about it.  When you think about it, our society's divisions don't always make sense either. Race doesn't make sense because we're all a mix of various things. Religion is something you can change at any time. Location is meaningless, and yet they're all considered important.   Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit and they were all just playing a big game of literary telephone. Number four, you should probably have a POV switch at some point. The vast majority of the story will be told from the perspective of the main character girl, which makes sense since she's supposed to be the most interesting and most important person in the story, but at some point we'll have to see inside another character's head for... reasons. Who will the other POV character be? Most likely her main love interest. Yep, we'll spend some time viewing events through the lens of the muscular white boy with either blue or green eyes, unless he's meant to be ethnically ambiguous. Then he's a muscular boy with olive skin and either blue or green eyes. This POV switch might allow the author to show events that the main character girl is absent from, or possibly give a different perspective on things that emphasizes how her viewpoint is skewed. It probably won't, though. It's most likely there because the author realized they didn't have enough events in the plot to fill an entire series, so they just threw in a few pointless scenes with the dreamboat. Number five, trilogies are the only way to structure the series. Some of you might be thinking that there are a lot of ways to structure a series. After all, there are book series that last 3, 4, 10, even 12 entries. Some go even longer, like Animorphs. The Hunger Games was a trilogy, though, meaning everyone who wanted in on that market had to do the same thing without understanding why. A trilogy is the simplest way to structure a series because it's the most basic. Each book is the beginning, the middle, or the end. The first one introduces the world, characters, and conflict to draw the audience in. The second one is the escalation, where the antagonist gains ground while the heroes go through personal crises. The third one is the big confrontation where the final twists are revealed and everything comes to a head with some sort of big face-off where the villain is defeated. For clones, there's no need to think about that. Just think up your evil government, throw your main character girl into it, split it into three, and release one per year. No need to consider structure or pacing at all. Sometimes the story is already finished by the end of the second book, and the third one has to come up with an entirely new plot just to fill time, like in Legend or Divergent. Sometimes the first book is only there to introduce the fact that this world exists and the story doesn't even begin until the second book, like in Enclave or The Testing. Sometimes there's an okay small-scale story that the author decides they have to expand into yet another series about war, like Article 5. Discovery writing can work out fine for a single novel, but a series has to be planned out, at least in broad strokes. Otherwise you'll wind up with too much or too little content to work with. Here's looking at you, Rothfuss. Number six, the story revolves around rebellion. Revolting against an evil regime is a tale as old as time, and there are plenty of different ways you can approach it. You can show it from all angles and make it a morally gray, complex story. You can make it a simple war story where the focus is just on the action and the villain is unimportant. You can show it from the perspective of an unremarkable civilian who gets swept up in the tide of history. You can have a protagonist who is utterly committed to the evil regime before a terrible event changes their mind. The Hunger Games went with a somewhat unique perspective. Katniss sparks off the rebellion by attempting suicide in the arena. She wasn't trying to make a statement, she was just refusing to kill her friend. Yet it created something much bigger than her, and from then on her main value to the rebellion was as a symbol of their propaganda, not as an action hero who leads the troops on the Capitol. The clones took that idea of the main character girl being unimportant and ran all the way with it. She will be a plain, ordinary girl from the slums who is still inexplicably beautiful and dislikes the government but is afraid to oppose them. Then she's just sort of important after that.  Early in the story there will be some sort of event that sparks enough outrage to find the convince the people to rise up like the gamers they are. Or maybe the event will come later in the story, the exact timing is unimportant. Main character girl will catch the romantic attention of someone important like in Save the Pearls, or maybe she'll just be important because the author says so, like in Matched and Article 5. If the setting has characters with some sort of superpowers like Shatter Me or The Darkest Minds, she'll have the rarest, coolest powers available, whatever those are. None of that is important, all that matters is that she will side with the rebellion by default. After all, real-world rebel groups have always been the good guys. What if the story all takes place over the course of a couple of weeks? Who cares? That's how long the fomentation, creation, and build-up of the rebel group takes before they immediately overthrow the evil rulers. Rebuilding the authoritarian regime into something better will be so easy that the story doesn't even need to talk about it. The thing about the Hunger Games is that, despite all the propaganda stuff, Katniss was still a proactive action hero. In the first book, she survived the arena through intelligence and skill, and while she was generally swept up in world events in the rest of the series, she still does things of her own volition. She still gets chances to participate in the action that drew many people to the series in the beginning. In most of the clones, the main character girl will also get caught up in the rebellion through an unlikely series of events, and she'll also join up with them as some sort of important figure. The action hero stuff will be taken out and replaced with absolutely nothing. The commentary on propaganda and the nature of celebrity will be replaced with main character girl being a, quote, inspiring leader, by which I mean she makes a speech or two that inspires the people to overthrow the evil regime. In the rare cases that the story does not revolve around rebellion, it will be about fighting some sort of mutant creatures. Zombies, things that are kind of like zombies, but not really, and... Well, no, that's about it. Things like Enclave and, to a lesser extent, Partials and the Maze Runner don't focus on the evil governments, though that's often a part of it, rather they're about fighting off the not zombies. In this case, main character girl gets to be an action hero again. Sometimes. Number seven. Rebel infighting is non-existent. Real world rebel groups are rarely homogenous. If a regime is bad, then it will make a lot of enemies, and those enemies will hate it for a hundred different reasons. Niche political interests like desire for a more democratic system, religious fundamentalism, ethnic self-determination, not starving, or any of a thousand other motives are usually behind any uprising. As a result, when the rebellion kicks off, those fighting against the regime tend to be an amalgamation of various factions. Revolutions that fail often do so because these factions are unable to get along. Successful ones either come up with some sort of compromise to share authority during and after the fighting, or they collapse into infighting right after the common enemy is gone. An exception would be the Spanish Civil War, where all the major rebel leaders were killed early on except for Francisco Franco, which helped him unite everyone behind him. Another is the Russian Civil War, where the Tsarist regime fell quickly and the Bolsheviks were able to fight off the other factions before they consolidated. In Hunger Games clones, rebels are all fighting for the exact same thing. Freedom. Yes, even the starving peasants living in slums without running water, proper food, or electricity are fighting for abstract ideas rather than tangible economic benefits. The middle classes aren't upset by their lack of representation in the current government. They want freedom. The upper classes aren't rebelling because there's a faction of them that wants to seize power for themselves. They want freedom. Like we said before, everyone is oppressed equally, so there aren't any ethnic groups looking to break off and form their own country, or religious fundamentalists looking to establish a theocracy. And of course, freedom and equality are very vague words that people disagree on the definition of and may cause friction between the various factions, both during and after the fighting. None of that here, though. Usually the rebels are all lower class, including the leaders, but that doesn't keep them from knowing exactly how to run a war. Growing up in a slum makes you an expert in the tactics of modern war, as well as the strategy, because those are the same thing, right? And after the war ends, there aren't any purges in the new government. After all, why would budding authoritarians want to get rid of violent malcontents with combat experience? There are two big reasons for all this. The first is to avoid making the story too complicated. A lot of people act as though a story being simple means it's bad, and I strongly disagree. It's just a different type of story for a different audience. There's plenty of novels out there that focus on complex political shenanigans if you're into that sort of thing, but Hunger Games clones aren't about that. They're about more straightforward depictions of good and evil. Rebel infighting would complicate that. The other is to avoid making the world seem too bleak. It's essentially saying, sure, the old regime is horrendous, but the average person is good, and they're willing to fight against injustice for themselves and others. Or maybe it's just laziness. Number eight, the characters must go to Denver at some point. In Legend, Denver is the capital of the Republic of America, and if you remember my video on how dystopian worldbuilding sucks, you'd know that it's entirely covered by a giant retractable roof to protect it from air raids rather than anti-aircraft weaponry, which would be cheaper and more effective. In The Hunger Games, the capital is strongly implied to be built on or near the ruins of Denver. The Maze Runner has a sequence in the last book where the cast heads off to Denver, one of the last cities that still functions as anything other than crumbling ruins full of totally not zombies. A few other examples also go to Denver at some point. I have no clue why this is such a common thing. Number nine, a happy ending is a must. What awaits our brave main character girl at the end of this conflict? A shattered nation without rule of law? A new authoritarian regime much like the last one? A lifetime of disability from wartime injuries combined with post-traumatic stress disorder that leads to substance abuse and suicide? Of course not. She gets to live in a newly fixed country with her new BF, exactly what she wanted the whole time. This is quite a bit different than classic dystopias, which are known for being extremely grim up until the last sentence. It's also different than The Hunger Games' ending, which was depressing, if a tad hopeful. Legend ends with everything being awesome. Enclave ends with main character girl finally settling down and not being on the verge of committing violence anymore. Divergent ends with the main character girl dead, but her man has come to terms with that, and so on. They're all either 100% happy or 90% happy. I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, having the overwhelming evil system be thoroughly defeated without any remaining vestiges causing trouble is unlikely at best. Plus, it ignores how awful war is even when the, quote, good guys win. On the other, it gives things a hopeful flair. With something like 1984, people might think that world is inevitable and give up trying to fix slash prevent it.  It makes the point stronger, in a weird way. It says that as long as we're determined, and our enemies are idiots, there's nothing we can't overcome.  Whether it's a boss, a shitty teacher, a cop, or a government agency, we all know that stink, and perhaps even more importantly, we know about places where other people have it worse. We all know the urge to rise up and throw off whatever yolks we wear or imagine that we're wearing. Something that shows other people doing the same thing is cathartic. It's a simple hero-villain story that feels familiar to us. The appeal isn't hard to figure out. This genre is less blatant about being wish-fulfillment than Twilight clones, mostly because they have an actual plot outside of their romantic tangles, usually. As a young lad, I read plenty of both, and I enjoyed a few Hunger Games clones. I'm still searching for the mythical good Twilight knockoff. Not to give too much credit to them, of course. I'd say only around 15% of the YA dystopias I read were good, the rest ranged from bad to tolerable. That said, the dystopia boom wouldn't have happened without Twilight. Publishers saw how much money there was in romance aimed at teenage girls and threw all their weight behind that, and when people wanted something new, they just combined the old supernatural romance stuff with the dystopian idea. The new combo was easier to market, meaning that there were more movies made, some of which were good, and some of which weren't. Here's looking at you, kid.  Men had plenty. And that's what it comes down to. Katniss is just snake-pliskin for girls. That's my hot take. Subscribe and stuff. Thank to all patrons, including $10 up patrons, Appo Savilainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Carolina Clay, Christopher Quinten, Great Griebo, Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Ritakova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Microphone, Sad Martigan, Samuel Nevin, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, and Vaivictus. You guys are the best. If you want to get your name on here and get your things in other videos, vote on other videos, become patron, give, give money. I need money to live, to eat, to pay rent. I need money. Please help me out here. If you can't, then rate, comment, subscribe to channel. That's also good. Thank you for watching. Goodbye.


We're going to do this. Well, my TV broke. So I was thinking I've got to do something active now. I've worked up this new invention. And you know, you want to get outside and be out in the water. And stand up paddle boarding is all the rage these days.  We'll see how this works out here. You know, when I'm not at work, I want to be sitting down.


Hello, I'm Xavier Warnicke. I'm the Associate Head of School for Students and Nations in our School of Languages and Applied Linguistics. I'm here with my colleague Miriam Hauck to talk about our Open Centre for Languages and Cultures, within which my remit is the support of Indigenous community and heritage languages. Hello, I'm Miriam Hauck. I'm the Associate Head of School for Internationalisation, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and I'm also the Director of the Open Centre for Languages and Cultures. One priority of our Open Centre is the promotion of the use and learning of the UK's Indigenous languages. We want to support people's understanding of the communities living in the regions and nations of the UK. This aligns directly with the OU's social justice mission, as the learning we offer empowers marginalised groups to participate in society and to access services and, importantly, education. One example is our work on the Scots language. Scots only received official recognition as a language in its own right in 2015. Although it had been the official language of Scotland in the Middle Ages, it has since been mainly excluded from public life and was only spoken in the community. To revitalise Scots, we developed two major initiatives. In 2019, we launched a badge open course for the general public, which since has attracted over 25,000 visitors from 90 countries. Our second initiative is designed to bring the Scots language back into education. We are developing a professional development short course for teachers from primary and secondary school from any subject area. It upskills teachers to bring Scots language into their teaching. It is the first of its kind as an online course and it carries a professional recognition award from the General Teaching Council for Scotland. In its 2020 report, the Council of Europe highlighted this initiative as the best practice example of helping the Scots language survive. Another example of this work is our community languages project. This came about because OU students contacted us through our student association and suggested we teach some of the languages spoken in Milton Keynes. So we have started developing a taster course in Tamil. It is the most widely spoken Indian language in Milton Keynes. 0.8% of the MK population have it as their mother tongue. We are actually producing the course with members of the Tamil community. And you might find it interesting to hear that Tamil speakers in Milton Keynes come from Sri Lanka, South India, South Africa, Mauritius and Malaysia. We will be launching this course in July this year to celebrate South Asian heritage month. The total Tamil population in Milton Keynes is presently estimated to be about 6,000 people. There are three Tamil schools in the city and pupils can even get a GCSE in the language. The idea is similar to that of the Scots project. Raising awareness of other languages and cultures and of people with other identities living at the heart of our society. We want to encourage Tamil speakers to perfect their language and English native speakers to learn the languages of the community, but at least to get a taste of it. Coming back then to our open centre for languages and cultures. In its name we mention cultures and language learning is closely linked to learning about other cultures. So our languages short courses also offer insights into the many different cultures associated with the languages, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Welsh. And we've already mentioned Scots. We also offer bespoke short courses in intercultural communication and short courses in artificial intelligence, which are directly relevant to industry, the workplace and our own staff. At the same time we are exploring business to business opportunities with the Open Universities Business Development Unit and our faculties external engagement team. All of this comes with a systematic scholarly inquiry into the design, production and delivery mode of the short courses, including learner reception of this innovative product. The insights gained from the inquiry will inform sharing of good practice and hopefully the rollout of this new model elsewhere in the OU. And this is actually quite timely because there's currently a university-wide redesigning production program for core curriculum on the way.


I'm going to draw your attention to Ethereum on the daily timeframe, testing this Pivotal support zone 1744 down to 1640 and trying to put in a reversal here. If we can get a close back through this internal trend channel resistance at 1890, then we can look for an extension higher to test the sending trend line 2157 through there. We can be back up testing range resistance at 2887. However, if we get a close below 1640, I think next stop is down to 1227. As always traders, plan the trade, trade the plan, most importantly manage your risk. Until next time, thanks very much.


We continue today with Lesson 254. Let every voice but God's be still in me. Father, today I would but hear your voice. In deepest silence I would come to you to hear your voice and to receive your word. I have no prayer but this. I come to you to ask you for the truth. And truth is but your will which I would share with you today. Today we let no ego thoughts direct our words or actions. When such thoughts occur we quietly step back and look at them and then we let them go. We do not want what they would bring with them and so we do not choose to keep them. They are silent now and in the stillness hallowed by his love. God speaks to us and tells us of our will as we have chosen to remember him. Amen.


Let's see the breakfast and plus TV Africa right here. We're looking at the second, we're looking at our conversation this morning. Labor Union has asked Buhari to constitute a board immediately for the NN, the NDDC. And we'll have a guest joining the conversation of Abumere Osara. He's a legal practitioner and a notary public. It's good to have you join us this morning. Good morning. It's my pleasure to be here this morning. Well, a bit of a background to our conversation this morning. Now, the Senate had in November 2019 confirmed 15 nominees sent by the president as NDDC board members. The president has sent the names of the nominees led by payas Udubu to the Senate in October. However, President Mohammed Buhari refused to inaugurate the nominees following the clearance by the Senate during the confirmation process. The president also ordered a forensic audit of the operation of the organization. That's the NDDC from 2001 to 2019, also before the nominees were cleared by the Senate. The minister of Niger Delta, Goswilak Pabio, named an interim management committee for the NDDC. And in recent times, the Almagamated Union of Public Cooperation, civil service technical and recreational services employees, that's called for the inauguration of a board of the Niger Delta Development Commission. That's the NDDC. The group is an affiliate of the Niger Labor Congress and said it is imperative to save the commission from destruction. The union appealed to President Mohammed Buhari, National Assembly, Senate President Ahmed Lawan, House of Representatives Speaker Femig Bajabiamila and Minister of Niger Delta Affairs Omana Omana, to take steps to ensure that the NDDC delivers on its mandate. According to the union in January 2019, the NDDC Managing Director, that's in Simaikere and the Chairman, Senator Victor Doma Egbar, resigned the appointment to contest election in the estate. The position should have been filed in accordance with section five paragraph three of the established arts of the commission. Like I mentioned earlier on, we have a boomer, Osara, who is a legal practitioner. He joins the conversation this morning. Osara, it's good to have you join us. Thank you for having me. Quickly, what are your thoughts on this now?  What are your thoughts? Well, it's a rather unfortunate situation that we find ourselves. And if you follow the trajectory of the head of state, you would not really be surprised that we are this sorry pass. What is going on with the NDDC is typical of what is wrong with Nigeria, particularly since 2015 when General Buhari came on board. He's sad. One would have thought that having been a military governor, having been a petroleum minister, and the military head of states, and the chairman of petroleum trust fund, and then having contested to the highest peace in Nigeria, about three or four different to kitchen, and then he announced, not democratically, that the president would have been broad-minded enough and be in the capacity and mindset to do what it says that quite contrary to the clear and strong provisions of the NDDC act, the president decided to act more in breach of the law by refusing to act in compliance with the clear provisions of the act. I'm not surprised because it seems that the president would recall when he was newly spawning, it doesn't have one of his official visits of the country to the United States made that allegory of 97% and 5%. And I believe that is what the president made comes to the question of the United Nations in the zone. You and I would recall the issues and the situation that Nigeria faced leading up to setting up of the current during the awesome job rate. I mean, that the nationalists also need to address the NDDC question. For the first time, that the National Assembly override the veto power of the president. That is why you'll find out that since 1999, the NDDC act is the only law enacted by the National Assembly of Nigeria that was not signed, that has not been signed by successive presidents. The National Assembly had to start to have very knowledge and patriotic in their endeavor when the four presidents General Lucio Gumbel-Bachsanjo declined to sign the act as passed. The National Assembly came together, united as one, and passed the law into effect. In 2015, after he was sworn in, the first acts of the president in respect to the NDDC was to appoint a sole administrator and it was declared to that by the act, the act does not cognize the composition of administration of the commission by means of a sole administrative. And the president went ahead to appoint his excellency, Mr. Mike Ray as the MD and Senator Udo Mayaba as chairman. One would have thought that thereafter, the president would have be sufficiently equipped to realize the framers of the NDDC Commission of the Surveillance Act were very careful when Sentinel commuted, when they made copy of provisions adding the manner of appointment of the chairman and the managing director. Section four of the NDDC is very clear. As you find that the manner of the commission shall be appointed term of force and alphabetical for the anoints that comprises membership of the commission and arranging an alphabetical or the study from Abba to the last. At all the first chairman, Chief Shreya Konyema and then with respect to the appointment of the managing director of the commission is also very clear, very quite explicit that the MD director shall be appointed as the quarter of oil produced generated from the state from the producer to the rest. So clearly, the law has given to the president the mode has simplified the order of session. The law don't admit of appointment of an interim management or the president has decided for the best to him to put it in order how let's clear provisions of the act. So the call by the is a right call and it seems to sink with all calls that has been made by all women in Nigeria since 2019. Appealing, pleading with the president to constitute the board and have the substantive managing director in line with the provisions of national assembly has passed the solution of past imploring the president to constitute the board and have the manager in line with the position of the act. So the the purpose for which the commission was set could be realized but the president chose on his own not to hacking to their call. And now I say to myself you have to remember that it is winding down. We have just about several months even though it's a right call but I wonder whether it's the right call and also wonder have they got to the way the president has treated all appeals from leaders of thoughts originally called Niger data leaders but Barista Barista please start to interrupt you you rightly said that you talked about the NDDC act and you said that this trend of having the administrative interim management committee for the commission is not in following in step with the NDDC act you also talked about the entreaties to the president from different stakeholders but when the NDDC you know when the NDDC interim management committee was set in place Mr. Effing Aqwa being the minister in 2020 we had different groups coming up foreign against one of those who came up to support the move by Mr. President is a south south emerging leaders forum who in 2020 the same December 2020 when the appointment of Effing Aqwa was announced President Bahá'u'lláh for appointing Effing Aqwa as the NDDC administrative and they said that the president acted in line with the act setting up the commission that's what they're saying that he acted in line with the act setting up the commission and the forum appealed to those agitating against the appointment of this man to give peace of chance for the development of region so what do you say to that some group are saying this is in line with the with the commission in fact what the group this is Naja Delta sorry south south emerging leaders which is a group comprising of professionals from the south south what they said is quote this is not the first time that a sole administrator is being appointed for the NDDC they are still going to quote this was in 2020 December 2020 it will be called that in 2015 the minister of transportation appointed Mrs. Bheem Semenetari and a Joe woman and his former aide as sole administrator as sole administrator of the NDDC after sacking the Dan Abia led management of the commission this is I'm quoting what they wrote so it's saying it's not the first time and they said quote our appeal to the entire people of the Naja Delta the new leadership of the NDDC to deliver its mandate and supervise the completion of the ongoing forensic audit ordered by the federal government well my immediate reaction is that perhaps that group they were speaking in error not properly advised they did not have the benefit of drew the clear provisions of the establishment act section 12 of the NDDC act it's very clear and with your commission I'll just read out section 12 of the act revised as follows there shall be for the commission the managing director and two electors who shall be indigenous of oil producing areas starting with the member states of the commission with the highest production of oil and shall rotate amongst the states in order of production now if you go the entire section provision the new flow provision is made for the appointment of a sole administration is immuitably the current regime has successfully launched onslaught on the rule of law and taken to track on it what we have is the we have the rule of law of me and that's why the trample all clear provisions they do I'm not surprised perhaps because my sex of the president has it in or two against the south side the goose that lays the golden bed and it's rather unfortunate that since 2015 the cry of marginalization of the Niger data the cry of oppression of the minorities and the Niger data by this regime is a very worrisome development but alas we are confronted by the fact that in less than several months time this regime will run its course hopefully we will have a new leader who will be broad minded enough who will not be betrayed by primordial scientists the sex sentiment and who will take care of some old constituency who will incorporate who will not be 7% and 5% and who is for this regime in 2004 and 2019 and because this is really they do not believe in philosophy of the composition and establishment of the NDC acts that is why they have systematically put in place escape the real dreams of the acts and the inspiration of the Niger data and of the allies of the Niger for sex besides also the dream of the Niger data people it will trust you that that at the same time the president was forwarded the names of Bartol the they are also friends of the main commission so they sent it but that has seen constituted and they are up and running sorry we are having a bit of a network problem with you that is interfering with the quality of the audio coming from your end but I was going to ask you is there nothing in the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria that allows the president to get away with this because we see that from recent history that the president really acts without seeing something in the constitution that gives him overriding powers of sorts and it's not that sometimes the constitution or the laws will give powers to certain organizations or provisions that allow things to be done in certain ways but those provisions will be taken away by the constitution which will give just one line to say the president can still do this in spite of that and I have been studying section 5 of the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria just to see if there is anything in there that we can hold on to and we really haven't seen anything but of course section 5 of the constitution says subject to the provisions of this constitution the executive powers of the federation shall be vested in the president and maybe subject as Afo said and to the provisions of any law by the national so do we show the president is not doing this based on the powers vested in him as the president of Nigeria in the constitution that may give him for some sort of loophole for him to get away with this yeah Barista did you hear me please okay hello okay yes please go president of Nigeria swore on oath to uphold not only the constitution but also of all other laws in Nigeria now we've got to some hand the Niger data there is a law passed by the national assembly which has established a regulation of how that particular commission to be a government and the president of Nigeria have swore on oath to to ban our animals including the the and obliged to observe of the provisions in the D.C. acts the executive power of president conferred by section five of the constitution does not detract from the proof of the D.C. there is no problem in the constitution that gives power to the president to act contrary to the clear provisions of an enabling statute rather than what the president do by his own office is to enforce and act in accordance with that act with that particular law so these are our forces but the president and you will arrive from 2019 2015 starting with the appointment of the sole administrator of the cemetery all that clears the problems of the D.C. acts even the setting up of a forensic audit is also against the clear provisions of the D.C. acts because the D.C. acts has made for monitoring we have to let you go now we sincerely apologize the network from the end is not too good and also we are out of time but we would like to thank you very much for your time interesting thoughts there the lawyer has given us a lot to show on messy today some have said you know what yes the law is there but they also look at morality look at the the protection of the rights of the people protection of the finances of the nation stepping in to do what is right and people have talked about okay look at about 6 trillion Naira being spent on the entities in how many years what is this issue for it we need to find out where the money went initially there was support for this forensic audit there was some support and even the gentleman went around visiting the likes of thank you Briggs and other people and they received him warmly sort of a good will talk but it seems that people have gone impatient because they want to see some action some people are saying that I mean unfortunately we are out of time it is taking too long when you say yes taking too long because it would slow down the entire process where you have some certain critical decisions that need to be taken projects have been embarked on who now on approves and all of that it becomes quite worrisome but that is why we would take a break this morning on that discussion we hope that we will have some other time to talk about this thank you so much for being part of the breakfast we appreciate you if you missed out on any part of it it will be beautiful to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and do you subscribe to our YouTube channel we are at Plus TV Africa and Plus TV Africa lifestyle my name is Messi Bopu have a fantastic day and my name is Goofy Bartels we will return tomorrow good morning


Now standing up, bring your arms up and very slowly and gently pull that energy down. Feel how solid it is, that love light from above. Feel how solid it is and how heavy and weighty it is. It is here in reality, bringing it down all the way down and you can just push it down into the core of earth very gently, very slowly.  She enjoys this massage, pulling that energy down, helping her to stabilize. Your arms up again, scoop up all this chaotic energy and bring it back down, weight it down, pulling it down, helping the earth to stabilize, anchor more times, scooping up, breathing in, bringing that energy down, release your breath, moving the energy out, sending blessings through your palm chakras, bowing your palm chakras to face the earth, just use circular motions or back and forth motions, just to soothe like petting a frightened animal, allowing it just feel it start to relax underneath your hands, just kind of ironing out that chaotic energy, spreading out the love, smoothly, smoothing out the energy, calming and soothing like a healing balm over the surface of the earth, allow that healing balm now to begin to penetrate into the surface of the earth, allowing every being on the surface of the earth to begin to receive this balanced energy, balanced energy, healing energy, allowing it to calm the feelings of excessive anxiety, bringing this beautiful energy of the mother down to earth, all beings feel themselves held, the arms of the great mother, that the earth herself be supported as the mother of all life on earth, supporting mother earth to love her children, giving the mother earth what she needs so that she can be a loving mother to all beings, calming her, soothing her, loving her, attending to her, praising her, telling her you're doing such an amazing job, thank you mother earth thank you it's not easy you're giving birth to something new to a new version of yourself not easy we see what you're doing we're here to support you just giving birth to this higher consciousness you can do it you've done this before mother gaya you are strong you are loved sending so much love to mother gaya lifting her up supporting her anything that the mother earth needs she will be given we're here to listen listen to your needs our ears are open our eyes are open wide our hearts are open our arms are open we're listening anything you need just ask we're here for you we're here to bring it for you to you with you as the contractions grow stronger we're here for you we will breathe with you we will push with you you lead the way we are following your lead where we need to push we will push where we need to relax we will relax we breathe with you this can be easy we release any belief that giving birth must be done in pain or suffering we release that we release any fear the outcome of this birth will be anything other than miraculous we release any anxiety there's not the support for the cleanup the birth is messy and we release any shame or guilt around that you see it is beautiful the beautiful chaos of birth the beautiful mess out of which new life arises we bless it we bless the birthing pains we bless the beautiful mess we bless the cries of new life we sanctify this space this process we honor the process we are following your lead beautiful mother we breathe with you we cry out with you we rejoice with you we bless her on her way bless her on her way bless her on her way bless her on her way her bullying, her bullying, her bully, bless her on her way. bless her on her way, bless her on, bless her on her way, bless her on her pushing, her pushing, her pushing way, her pushing, her pushing, her pushing way, bless her on her way, bless her on her way, bless her on her way, bless her on her way, her nurturing, her nurturing, her nurturing, her nurturing, her nurturing, her nurturing way, bless her on her way, bless her on, bless her on her way, bless her on her way, receiving her, receiving her, receiving her, receiving her, her way, her birthing, her birthing, her birthing, her birthing, her birthing, her birthing. Thanks for new life, giving thanks for the new earth that is birthing at this moment and in every moment, within us and without us. We release anything that is not fully of service to the light and supportive of this beautiful birthing process of Mother Earth, all sovereign beings in service to the light. Thank you, thank you, thank you, and so it is.


the commissioner emeritus of the NBA and we will talk about that quite a bit but you know Alan Hans had it on the show before our show he might be probably is the greatest commissioner of any sport in history and I read all these stories about him over the last day and there was one that jumped out of me you know he took the NBA global and he kind of cleaned up the NBA because when he when he became commissioner in the NBA I think 9 of 11 of their past NBA final games around 1130 on tape delay on CBS right wow can you imagine 11 and this is this is still a magic and bird when the league everybody thinks that you know they help clean up the league and they made it big again their their games are on tape delay so David Stern when he took over as the commissioner he started taking VHS tapes and sending them to people that he knew in China so that they could be exposed to what basketball was and that opened up an entire new revenue stream for the NBA and they are probably the most global brand of any big sport it's it's I think it's basketball it's hockey it's football and baseball is trailing on the backside and they're trying to make you know obviously strides with the London games and all that but he opened up just a portal of revenue for the NBA and also he realized something that Buick you didn't realize that even Pete Orzel didn't realize and that is is that the key is to market the players make the players the star not the game the players now in football it's hard to have helmets on baseball they didn't really do that that much they didn't do that that much because they were always fighting the union David Stern realized the guys those guys those are the stars they're allowed to market their brand he did some things that were people are on way every interaction that I ever had with him personally was always pleasant but he was tough you knew that when you asked him a question you better hurt your facts because he'd come right back at you this was a really really smart man and he was in good health 77 years old had a brain aneurysm while he was having lunch in Manhattan and he passed away yesterday yeah it's this amazing life and he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for where this sport is right now and in some places in this country it's number two I know baseball is fighting that but in certain areas when you look at the television ratings and the popularity that it could be the second biggest sport in this country and it was unthinkable you know the finals on tape delay you can't even wrap your mind around like that right and it would be between him and Pete Rosell because both of them were innovators both of them made their sports monsters but you're right that sport was broken they had a massive drug problem you know games on tape delay and he was able to build the sport into where it is today it is a global sport and it's popular and it's the most global sport you know and specifically that that story Michael about sending tapes to China and then you think about what then later ends up happening with Yao Ming and where we are how direct an impact he had on that specific part of it which is so much money for them about the talent on the court Peter if not for the global expansion there's no Luca Donchich yeah there's none of these guys these great foreign players it just isn't so he opened up that too and if you think and there's a lot of people that do not like him but considering that we're a day removed from a winter classic that included the Dallas Stars and the Nashville Predators who do you think is responsible for Gary Batman David Stern absolutely you know and you know he was under his wing and was learned from him and became the commissioner he is based on what he was able to be educated by the greatness of David Stern and be able to grow the NHL in the way that the NBA is trying to grow itself and to build and so he's got a tremendous reach in all of sports and you know when I heard the news we were actually on the air when it kind of trickled down about the brain brain in your wisdom and we're just kind of hoping that he'd be able to recover from it unfortunately he was unable to


Let's compare his baseline from what we know from the other episodes we've done to this baseline. When he's by himself, his body language is completely different than when he's with Megan. Now what we're seeing here is he's much calmer. I think this guy has a cold or something because the sniffs were here and we hear him during the questioning as well. So we pay attention to that. For me, the sniffs mean nothing. They drop right out because I think he's got a cold and he's sniffing for that. But compared to his baseline, that's what we're seeing. Now, as well, we're not seeing as much movement as we usually see with him. We are seeing the illustrators and things where he's emphasizing specific words and phrases but he's keeping his hands and his arms closer to his body. They do grow out some, but they're not as big. They don't go out as far.


This is the most toxic team in Madden history. Why? The answer is the Quadfather. Now AJ Dillon by himself is a stud, but he has a special ability called Freight Train Quadfather. And for two AP, you start the game with the Freight Train ability. Freight Train increases the chance to break the next tackle attempt. It works nine times out of 10. On top of that, you can add the ability Persistent, which makes it more difficult for your opponent to knock Freight Train off. You can add tanks so that you break every single hit-stick tackle. You can add bruiser for more powerful trucks and stiff arms. And this by itself is incredibly toxic. But the rest of this team makes it even worse. Number one, there's a new card, Mercedes-Lewis Big Dog. Honestly, didn't know people called him Big Dog, but whatever, the card goes pretty hard. This is an insane blocking tight end. He has 95 run block, 94 pass block. He's also an incredible tight end in his own right, but he's basically a guard at tight end. All of my wide receivers are massive tight ends or wide receivers who can block like Maniacs, George Kittle, Megatron, and Delaney Walker. At fullback, I have the Nigerian nightmare, Krishna Koye. You guys have seen my videos.  And to make this run-only team even more toxic, I added Big Truz. Lamar starts with the ability Truz where he cannot fumble as a result of a tackle. We also put Dexter Lawrence at tight end, who is an incredibly big blocking tight end. I don't know why he got a tight end card. It's pretty awesome. We're not quite done yet. My offensive line is fully loaded out with abilities. Roger Saffold has post up, dominant when engaged in double team blocks. Creed Humphrey gets identifier completely free so I can see who my opponent is usuring and adjust accordingly. Will Shields has post up and secure protector. Ryan Ramchick has edge protector. This is just in case we do throw one or two passes. Andrew Thomas has natural talent and secure protector. The rest is on the quad father, Elamar Jackson. I am absurdly excited to take this into a dead game, but that's not all. Just to really top off the run-game-only team, my defense is consistent of players who at one point in their career were used as a running back. Derek Henry is obvious. Micah Parsons has gotten a few handoffs. Bo Jackson is obvious. JJ Watts gotten some reps, I think as a fullback. William Perry's been a fullback, same with John Randall. Julius Peppers has gotten the ball. Durrell Rivas played half back before. This isn't a defense video though, by any means.  My goal is seven yards per carry, three rushing touchdowns, and 200 plus yards. The quad father would be round one, pick one in my fantasy league, and you know what? He's got Keith Byers, the next best half back.  Actually, this team is so toxic. I'm gonna run, come on, I'm gonna let him score. I'm just gonna let him score on the first play of the game, doesn't matter to me, take it. Take it, because I'm marching down the field, and I'm gonna score, and I'm gonna get my two point conversion, and you won't be able to stop me, it doesn't matter to me. Also, I have insanely exciting news, and I need your guys' advice. This right here is my prize pick of the week. Now the reason I show you is the sponsor of today's video is prize picks. Now you're looking at my pick here, and you're wondering how I got Joe Burrow at more than half a passing yard. This is a really cool promotion that prize picks does. Every once in a while, they offer a free slot. Now I'm an old mathematician, but I feel like Joe Burrow should throw for more than half a passing yard, so I feel really good right there. And then my selection with Isaiah Pacheco, he's averaged 67 rushing yards in the last five games, so I feel like my odds are pretty good. I can't tell you guys how excited I am to work at prize picks for the next entire year, and to bring you some awesome, awesome promotions just like this one, and with that said, there is a link in the top of the description to download prize picks. And first time depositors, you can get a deposit match up to $100 with promo code MMG. When you download the app, it'll ask you for a promo code, just throw in MMG. You can ride my picks with me or make your own. It's totally up to you. I'm really hoping we can get a W on this first pick. Let me know what you guys think and enjoy the rest of the video. First intent, so the quad father. In order to lose freight train, I'd have to get tackled for a loss two separate times. His ability to do that, it just won't be very high.  It just doesn't, it doesn't matter. I mean, congratulations, that was pretty good. It won't happen twice.   Rodney, I can't catch me. I really started this video with a negative one yard loss followed up by the same play for an 80 yard gain. While my yards per carry is on par right now, considering we have 40 and a half yards per carry. And like I said, he lost the game. The minute he didn't go for two, he lost the game. There goes the quad father. Taked a seven. I tell you what, man, I'm a fortune teller. Oh, that's so messed up. Gun tight flex PA post shot. Oh, Daren Kenry free safety did not pick that one off. He is struggling right now though. Oh, good ball. Daren Kenry with a big hit. I hope he goes for that again. I'm gonna alert this.  Ooh, bowl catch him though. Oh, bowl, you didn't get that? That was my fault. It took Daren Kenry out of that zone. It just means more rushing yards for the quad father. He can't win. He literally has already lost. He keeps kicking P-A-T's. I do have Wildcat too. I'm gonna follow this. I'm gonna go Wildcat power. We're gonna follow the boy here. Tough, tough. The quad father has now lost his ability. I did get TFL twice. Like it's not invincible, but to get it back, he just has to play five offensive downs. He doesn't have to do anything special. Let's go to Lamar. We still got Lamar with big truss. Walker's wide open. I will take a pass. I'm not above taking a wide open pass. A nice stiff arm as well. All right, let's hand this ball off. Third and six, that O-line lighting up, but he is there. Bottle that up. Fourth and five. Ooh, nice play. Nice lurk. I actually gotta lock in. Wait a minute.  He really likes this play. P-A-Po shot. I don't mind that pass. Ooh, my God. Maybe I do. That was a laser beam. He's gonna run this with buyers. Oh, he doesn't. And he gets that. Oh my God. McPherson a little onside kick. Picked up by Patterson. Made a little cocky, got me in some trouble here. So, so let's actually lock in. I'm gonna try a hat-pack wham. Got big dog coming over for the block. And that got blown up. Wow, we're not going anywhere right now. Gonna hit the boy, Kittle. Nice catch. How do I get back to the run game though? I can't be passing the ball. I'm not gonna feel good about this if I do. It's the most toxic run team. To run a stretch out to the right side. I'm loving those blocks, gentlemen. I really could have followed my block. I didn't have to light that guy up like that, but it was pretty fun to do so. Beautiful blocks. Beautiful broken tackles. A quad father for another six. Down two possessions a little ugly right now, but this is a high score match right now. That's 30 points scored in the first quarter. I'm just gonna go left side again. He's there. He got that one. Just gonna go right up the middle this time. A little zone run play. Oh, he's on me. We broke the tackle. Tough. That one was tough. Gotta take off with big tries. Can't fumble. First in goal. That's a big conversion right there. He dropped everybody back. All right, we're gonna run left side here. Let's do it. He sees it. There's just nothing he could do. That's my fault. I gotta dive there. Got a little greedy. Let's see if he predicts correctly. Nah, he just got stood up. A and the quad father. Pings down the big boy. I am gonna take my PAT here to make this a seven point game. And then if I can score again without him scoring, I'll go for the two point to make a 23 to 22. Like I said, I think him not going for two that first time or not is actually gonna be a big mistake in this game. Well, we know what play he likes. Dude, I'm blitzing seven. Somebody's gotta get home. There we go, baby. I don't think he can throw part of him again. What a ball. And he caught it. Oh my God. I can't believe he caught that. All right, he's gonna do the same thing. Let's get to the QB this time. There we go. Yes sir, got the, that's so whack. How do you catch that first one? I don't catch that easy pick. Unlucky but we do take cutting him down here. It is third and 21. Let's see what he elects to do. He's gotta throw quick. Definitely doesn't have the time. He'd like, oh, nice ball. And he does get the first nice play. See if he does it again. Oh, I'm there this time. Hey, another sack. Randall Cunningham goes down once again. He is just full speed. I'm on it again. Let's go. Third and 26. I almost want to call it a timeout here. Let's see if he choose clock. Throw right over the middle. Yes sir. Not again. We got Bo Jackson on the return team. Like I said, it's the most toxic run team. That's a huge, huge stop right there. Especially because I get ball at half. I retain three timeouts and there's 23 seconds left on this clock. Let's see if the quad father can get all the way down there. I mean, it's pretty questionable to go the run play here. Just clock management wise, but this is my run team, you know. Oh, I can hit Dexter Lawrence. Oh my God. He got it. Let's go dude. Let's just get a feel go out of this. Get a feel go out of this. Ooh, that's a questionable ball. Shit. I bumped with a bunch of people and the ball didn't go where I needed it. He's gonna onsite kick again. Oh, he's gonna touch it before. Yep, beautiful. Take our penalty and quad father does not have far to go. Just go right at him.  I was lucky to get two yards there though. He kind of blew that up. He does the same thing.   The quad father. There's a big one right there. And you know what? I got two interceptions right now. So what I get for throwing the ball with the toxic run team, let's try and get to this left edge. See if the quad father's built for it. Ooh, he's there. We do break a tackle. We don't break the second one. That's good defense. He doesn't have his X factor anymore. Lamar still has his, of course. I'll take that. Quad father's still a beast. See, he doesn't need the X factor. He just likes having it. Third and five. I'm gonna run too close to the right. Ooh. Ooh, nice stiff arm. It's fourth and two. I'm gonna run right at him. It's the run only team. I gotta believe, right? I got first and 10. Huge play. No huddle run play after no huddle run play.  Another huge stiff arm. Another big hit. He doesn't need the X factor. 17 rushes, 113 yards and two touchdowns. This got blown up last time. And I'm gonna try it again.  I know this is a good play. Oh, that's where you'd love to have the X factor. If I got the X factor right there, he breaks that for sure. Right at him. Come on.  We're down to the four.  I don't even consider it option. I think this is a keeper with Lamar, no? Let's see how it looks. It's a keeper with Lamar? I think the keeper was the right call. I'm gonna pass it. George Kittle's too open to pass up. I'm so sorry. I know it's the run team. But when you run the ball that well, it sets up the pass. This is a critical moment here. I'm going for two. I said I would, so I'm gonna do it. I was gonna say I'm gonna try and make this look like a stretch as much as I can. I'm just gonna dive right at him. But dive right at him. I'm gonna trust the boys up front. Let's go AJ. Oh my God. Park the red seed. Doesn't get any easier. It's a one point lead. That may literally be the first time he's ran the football. One rush for negative one yards. Play action. Maybe no, he literally ran the same play and also got negative one yards again. I'm confused on the strategy here.  Maybe he's gonna chew clock. And then yeah, he is. He's chewing clock. He's gonna try and kick a field goal with no time left. Mine. Oh, nice high ball. It was a good high ball.  All right, just a little handoff. There's Troy Anderson. At least slowed him down. You have the two minute warning on our side. It's third and seven. Yeah, this could be tough. If we don't get some crucial stops, this will be tough. I'm tempted to let him score. Might be my best odds. I don't know if I can stop him with my run game defense. Nice defense. Dude, he is getting lit up back there. He is not in field goal range either. God, Bo almost just ended the game. Oh, he's gonna roll out. I don't think he's got anything. God, he's gonna roll out. Chewing clock. I wasn't trying to be toxic. I just was running the ball. Micah ends it. It's not true. It's not true. Don't say that. I shouldn't say that. I mean, this is the dominant run game team. I expect to get a first down here. A few moments later. It's fourth and nine. I feel like a punt is the choice here. He has no timeouts. See, I haven't won the game. I shouldn't say that. I don't really know how to punt the football because I just don't ever do it. But I'm really hoping that's a punt dot right there. Because I need it right now. Holy fuck, that might have been an absolute dot. Punt dot. Down at the four. Does he really run his play-action play here? He really does. It's a screen dot and it does everything. No way. Did he actually shut the Xbox off? Dude, I blitzed my far right corner on accident there too. He literally could have thrown anywhere on the right side and had a touchdown. Quad father went off.  My run scheme just isn't that good. Like if you have a good run scheme or you're like a better Madden player than me, which is probably a lot of you, you could do about a billion times more than what I just did.   All right, boys. It's the most toxic run game team. If you see this in online, I'm sorry. You've probably already seen it. Yeah, I didn't invent this. I love you guys. Thanks for watching as always. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.


T.E.F.L. San Francisco, California San Francisco is a city of icons. It is hard to think of the United States without at least one of the city's famous landmarks coming to mind, whether it's the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Haydash Barrier or an old-style cable car hauling passengers up San Francisco's famously steep streets. It is also a place with a long history of openness and inclusivity, making it one of the most diverse cities in America with many unique neighborhoods displaying their own particular identity. As well as being home to an excellent transportation network, the city is also bicycle-friendly with cycle lanes and bike racks on buses. All this combines to make San Francisco an incredibly fascinating and rewarding city in which to take a T.E.F.L. Tezal course. The Spanish first settled the area in the late 18th century, but San Francisco remained a small town until the California Gold Rush in the middle of the 19th century, with the population of the town increasing from 1,000 to 25,000 in the space of one year.  Its use as the backdrop to many a famous Hollywood movie has since led to tourism becoming one of the city's prime economic drivers and the technology boom in Silicon Valley to the south has made San Francisco an ever popular place for tech entrepreneurs and their startup companies. As mentioned above, San Francisco is home to some of the most well-known landmarks in the country and no tourist's photo album would be complete without a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge or the infamous Alcatraz Island. Then of course there is Haydash Berry, the epicenter of the Euro Summer of Love which echoes through the bohemian atmosphere of the area to this day. Of course this is not all San Francisco has to offer, as you would expect of such a diverse city there is a thriving arts and culture scene with many theaters, galleries and museums expressing the international flavor of the city. There are also a large number of parks throughout the city, with Golden Gate Park being the most famous, all of which are ideal for exercising, exploring or simply relaxing as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. San Francisco's rich cultural history combined with its many world famous attractions, vibrant population and excellent infrastructure make for the perfect place to attend a TEFL Tezal certificate course. With our prime city center location, well equipped school and dedicated IT professional staff, it is no wonder that our course in San Francisco continues to be one of the most popular with trainees from all walks of life.