I don't need to mute it, because then she can't hear you. Sky camera? All right, we're back. So now we'll have Heidi Waterhouse talking about disaster resilience the Waffle House way. So take it away. Hey, folks. I'm glad to see you here today in that I can't see you. But I know you're here. And I'm super excited to talk to you about resilience and hurricanes and rubber ducks. So let's go ahead. I'm going to share my screen with you. And then we will be able to talk. Maybe I know that's I love technology. Is that showing? No. I have not shared my whole screen. I promise this all worked perfectly in test. All right, do you have it now? Disaster resilience the Waffle House way. Flat Pops, feature flags, and finite state machines. So this is a really interesting talk to me because I'm excited about how things work. The summer after my freshman year in college, I went to work in Alaska. And it didn't look like this. Instead, it looked like this. I worked at the busiest windows in Anchorage. Hey, Heidi, we can't see your slides. You haven't shared it yet. OK, thank you for checking that. No problem. Thought I had. Yeah, you got to share the screen. I'll switch back to you for now. Yeah, it's a little button. It's right next to the heart in that little chat window. There we go. Perfect. OK, now what do you? OK, we see your slides. That's awesome. Well, you see my speaker notes. That's like my. Oh, so it's back to you. So yeah, what I would do in that. So just share your main screen. Uh-huh. And then because if you have multiple screens, I should say which screen you want to share and just share that one. Oh, OK. All right, we'll do it that way. I have to remember where I put it. Yeah, how's that? We don't see it showing. No, nothing showing yet. Oh, that is because it doesn't understand different workspaces. How about that? It's showing now? No, not at all. I'm so sorry, team. Do you have different spaces or did you just have one space? I have different spaces. But I am just going to go this way. Do it this way. And it's at your vault Skype at this point. I. There we go. OK, so you see my notes, yes? Now we see your notes and we see the slides, yes. OK, so what we're going to do is just present. OK, do you still see it? Now it says, yes, it's loading. Now it says disaster resilience to Waffle Houseway. Yep, we can cut this all out of the recording. This will all be gone. Welcome to edit point. There you go. All right, hey, team, I'm going to talk to you about disaster resilience this way because I'm super interested in how things work and how they don't work. So let's get going. The summer after college, I worked in Alaska and it didn't look like this. It looked like this. I worked at the busiest Dairy Queen in Anchorage, Alaska, and you wouldn't think that was very busy, but there is, in fact, a major military base up there. It's super busy. And I worked there all summer and one interesting thing happened, which is that we lost power during lunch rush. And there are hundreds of people that come through during lunch rush. And I figured we were going to have to shut down because we'd lost power. But it turns out that a fast food place can continue operating without power for quite a while. And in fact, we operated all through lunch rush and made people food, not all the food, but a lot of food, without any power. Because even if you can't microwave anything or the refrigerators have to be kept closed, you can still cook things in the fires, although the timer doesn't work, but the coils do. You can still make hamburgers. You can still serve a lot of food. The frosty machine is definitely out though. That's all electrical. So when I was thinking about resilience, I thought about the fact that even though we think power is sort of essential to providing food, it isn't. And this leads me to think about the difference between failure and disaster. Failure is when something goes wrong. But for disaster to happen, you really need some teamwork. A disaster is a collection of failures that continue to escalate. And when we're talking about failure and disaster, one of the things we want to do is stop things when they're still at the failure stage before they get to the disaster stage. So when I think about this, I think about this in a chart. So on the one side, there's a success and a failure. And sometimes they're not very far apart. This is sort of what we're talking about when we talk about minimum viable product.  But the more data points you get, the easier you can tell whether something is succeeding or failing. And I'm really interested in that zone between the two of them, between flawless success and critical failure. When I think about this, I think about Left Pad. If you remember what happened, a developer pulled something out of the NPM library and that broke a lot of things that had dependencies. And the modern comparison is Seth Vargo pulled some of his Chef Sugar code from Chef when he disagreed with their policies on ICE. And that broke a lot of dependencies. Chef had to scramble and fix a lot of things that depended on code that Seth had written many years ago. But nobody had thought about it because it was just part of the product. Dependencies are always going to be in our products like that because our products are too complex for us to have built them entirely by ourselves. So when we're thinking about success, it's not just like, did something work okay? It's a flawless victory thing. So a single success is like a single rubber duck. It's there as a very nice duck. You can talk to it, it's gonna help you code. You can ask it questions. That's a single success and it's exciting. But what you really want for like flawless victory is to pile up the ninths.  You wanna be able to say, I can't even count how successful I am because I know that these rubber ducks are just going to keep arriving. That's what flawless victory feels like. But the same way one success is not the same as a whole house full of successes, not the same as all the ninths, there are also degrees of failure. There are things that happen that are not ideal but they're not catastrophic. So this is that zone between flawless success and abject misery. And I tried to come up with a good name for it but it didn't come to these. So it's just that bit in the middle where it's neither perfect nor so broken that it doesn't work. And that's what brings us to Waffle House. For those of you who don't know, Waffle House is a Southern institution where you go and you can order the waffles but that's not what anybody is actually there for. They're there for the hash browns. That's the best thing that Waffle House makes. Waffle House has a hurricane center, legit. They have a war room and they watch hurricane tracks and they decide whether or not they're going to be able to continue operating in what Waffle House is will be impacted by the path of the hurricane. And then they station preparedness trucks just outside the zone of damage of the hurricane trucks so that they can get people in right away. And so they have this whole team arrangement that says we're in the South. We know that there will be hurricanes at some point. And we are committed to staying open as much as possible as much as is compatible with life and safety. And when they say that, they mean it. Like FEMA has a thing that says they know that if the Waffle House is closed in a town that town is very badly affected. And if they're still serving some kind of food that's not the place you send the National Guard to first. So they have different ways of operating depending on what's broken. If there's no power and they still have gas and water on the thing that they can do is use the cook tops.  So if you walk into a Waffle House and they're operating in a storm condition where they don't have power they might have trouble taking your money like you might need cash but you're still going to get fed. If there's no gas but the power and water are on they can still make things with the fryer and they can still cook waffles but they're not going to be able to do anything that involves the cook top because that's gas fired. If there's no water that's the hardest one but they can still operate with no water which I find fascinating. Like they've obviously done some intensive training. I've done food service training and all of it is predicated on having potable water. And if there's no water then you have to do a whole bunch of sanitization and use paper plates and like manage all of the things that we do for food safety in a different way. Like I said, they prep at the edges. This is a picture of a whole bunch of people who do shallow water rescue heading into Louisiana as a storm is hitting. They call themselves the Cajun Navy and it's a bunch of volunteers who have boats and they show up and do shallow water rescue and some rapid water rescue because no Coast Guard, no National Guard can station enough things in place to do post hurricane recovery. So these volunteers drive to the edges of where the storm is going to hit and then as soon as it's remotely safe they're already close enough to get in. Instead of waiting at home until there's a call for them to go out they go prep at the edges. So what have we learned about Waffle House? Well, they have a plan for degraded service. They establish the restart at the edges based on how close they think they can get to the storm margins without endangering anyone and they focus on key deliverables. I'm pretty sure they feed a lot of people for free when they aren't able to take cards. I'm sure they want to make money during a hurricane but based on the stories coming out of it they mostly wanna feed people. The thing that we know about how we react to things is that we're always reacting to the last outage. We're always reacting to the last bad thing that happened and not the next bad thing because we know where we failed last time but we don't know where we will fail next time. We need to think about where our vulnerable places are that could fail next time so we can start doing mitigation. So we can start doing prep on the edges so that we can be prepared for when the next failure happens because perfection, although it's a noble goal is not a thing that actually happens in the world. So there are two kinds of problems that we deal with in technology, local and distributed problems. For instance, sometimes what we have is some connection. We have a little bit of bandwidth. We don't have everything that we're looking for but we have some way to talk to each other. So how do we deal with that? How do we say what's important? Sometimes we have regional outages. This is more of a distributed problem. Like if you have the Great Northeast blackout how do you stop that from failing across the entire electrical grid across the country? That was the action of circuit breakers to keep it from getting any worse than it did and it was the action and effect of interconnectedness that made it as bad as it was because all of these utilities that were nominally independent were sharing. But the thing is if you're sharing excess you can also share excess load and it could take things down in sequence. Another one is slow failure. Slow failures are extremely difficult to diagnose because it sort of sneaks up on you. What happens is you start to get laggier response times and nothing is catastrophically down but it just keeps getting slower and slower and it's very difficult to diagnose because there isn't anything obviously on fire. So when we talk about failure modes we often forget to talk about slow failure as a thing that can happen because we feel like we can see it coming. My personal favorite is observation changes state. This is the thing where your computer is running slowly and you would like to run a monitor to figure out what process is slowing it down but the act of spinning up a monitor makes everything run more slowly and sometimes you can't even get the monitor up because it's running so slowly so you can't figure out what to shut down. It's a problem that we encounter a lot not just on our personal computers but in our data centers and in our distributed networks that changing how you're looking at something changes the state of it. And when we do that it makes it really difficult for us to determine what the original problem was because now we've multiplied it. And then there's the human factor. I'd like to say that humans are part of the safety net and we are but we're also part of the problem because humans make the best decisions they can with the resources they have at the time available. So given all of these problems how do we build resiliency? How do we make our systems more robust to deal with the fact that failure is inevitable? I am the English major most in love with state machines. I super love state machines because I think they're a very elegant way to address a lot of problems. What you do with a state machine is figure out all the states that something can end up in what can happen. So if you're using an ATM you could get money or you could be rejected or it could eat your card or the ATM could catch on fire. That's sort of an edge case but you never know, right? And so you map out all of the things that are possible all of the states that it could happen in and you don't have to know yet how you get there because the next thing you do is you take all of those end points all of those places that a machine can end up and you look at how they got there. Once you have a map of how they got there you're gonna be able to see that there are commonalities in how we route to an end point and we can put our reinforcements and our hardening on those commonalities. So every time we look at it we can say the thing that I want is to be able to reliably end up in this safe failure state rather than a bad failure state. I would rather the lights in the house go out rather than I started an electrical fire. So when we're doing this I think it's really useful to think about a state machine as a way to predict what kinds of failures are possible and then route to the ones that are least damaging. So I've given you all of these ideas on how to make it work or how things could go wrong but like what are we gonna do about this now? I don't wanna leave you with just like this looming sense of dread that failure is inevitable, although it is. The first thing I wanna say is somebody told me this and it was really impactful. If trying harder was going to work it would have. If just trying to be more perfect was going to make for better systems it would already have done that. If trying to be on time was going to make someone on time they would have already showed up on time. There's something that is blocking that and in both humans and systems we have to accept that trying harder is not really a useful answer. So one of the things that we learned from Waffle House is that you can offer reduced service. What if instead of serving your whole webpage if you're dealing with a system slowdown you serve only the essentials, no pictures, no ads just the core business value of what you're trying to get through. Maybe most of what you're doing can be stripped down. I think this is a really good place for people to talk about what their core business value is. Like what are we providing? What is the most important thing to get through? Because once you identify that the most important thing is to feed people in an emergency you can do a bunch of things to make that happen. But if you identify the most important thing is to save money then you would close Waffle House all the time. You wouldn't keep it open. That would be the safer thing to do if that was your core business value. So if you're thinking about the robustness and resilience of your system you have to be serving your business value whatever that is and you have to know what it is. And I find that a lot of us in IT and a lot of us in software don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. We're thinking about features and not value. And that's something I want you to go home and think about like if I could only serve one part of what I'm making, what would it be and how would it help the company? How would it help people? Think beyond the binary. When I think about this this is a very gender-essentialist joke but I love this because women are taught a bunch of different color names and men are taught not as many color names. There's the same number of colors but we could be thinking about them in different ways just like we could be thinking about things in a non-binary success and failure in that middle space. I want us to think about like the spectrum of success and failure. Talk to the business owners. I already said that but I'm gonna say it again. You need to know what it is that you're supposed to be delivering and business owners are the people who know what that is because business is not the enemy of development. They are the subject matter experts of customers and I'm in favor of having customers because that's how we continue to live inside and eat food is somebody is giving us money to produce something. And so when I think about this I really want all of us to make better friends with business and understand what they're trying to do because they are just as technical as we are. It's just that their technology is a lot more people-centric than ours. But if you've ever looked at Salesforce it is a terrifyingly complex set of people interactions and I'm super impressed by anybody who can manage that. And another thing that we can do when we're thinking about this is think about the service levels that we are agreeing to provide because every plane you've been on has been a little bit broken. Everything that you deal with is a little bit broken and what we're relying on is the fact that there is a minimum standard. There is an error budget that says if it's more than this percent broken please pull it out of service. But if it's an only ordinary amount of broken that's okay. And I'm a person who lives in the world and I'm a little bit broken and I want my software to operate in the same way to be robust enough to work around the fact that not all of the connections are working all of the time. More TCP protocol, less like one-to-one connection. Another thing that you can do is use circuit breakers and safety valves. Humans are the slow meat part of any system. And we invented circuit breakers because we are slower than electricity and we would like to not die from electricity. So the thing that we do is put in a circuit breaker, a fuse that says, no, something is going wrong here and electricity is going where it shouldn't. So let's stop and figure out what's happening. Even if that means everything goes dark dark is better than dead. So when you're building a system, think about the fact that all of our computer software is electricity and that we are the slow and fallible part. And maybe like spend some time thinking through how to set up circuit breakers so that humans can't break the system, at least not easily, not trivially, not by just like sticking a fork in it. Traffic is pressure. When you think about designing a system for traffic you have to sort of think about pressure vessels and how it is that you can constrain and funnel and release traffic and do load shedding in a way that's not detrimental to your business values so that you're not losing stuff. Like maybe load shedding request is fine because there's nothing important in there but you don't wanna be like load shedding checkout carts because then you're gonna lose money. When you think about traffic as pressure it helps you understand that you have to build both the pipes and the receptacles to a certain degree and then you have to keep checking that the pressure is okay because it's possible as you see in this picture of an exploded steam engine to overpressure anything. Think about modular delivery. And I've said this sort of a couple of different ways when you talked about how Waffle House does, waffles and not hash browns, hash browns and not waffles but think about this for your software. Microservices and modules are a way to say, hey, some things are down but not everything is down. Maybe one part of my system isn't working but the other parts are working and you can get done what you need to get done. And this is really interesting because frequently as people have been moving from monoliths to microservices they've been designing something that I can only identify as a distributed monolith where there are still dependencies and breakpoints if anyone microservice goes down. And then you don't have any of the advantages of microservices like if you only have one database as a microservice you just have a distributed monolith because if the database goes down you can't write to it and you can't read from it. You have to have like more than one in order for it to be a valid microservice architecture. And I work for a vendor that sells feature management and one of the things that we like to be able to do is turn things on and off to test A if they're really isolated and B if turning them on breaks things. So one of the things that I suggest is people either buy something that does feature management or roll their own so that as you finish a feature you can deploy it to production but not show it to everybody.  And a lot of people say, but that's what I use staging for. And the thing is staging is basically a comforting lie because nothing is as weird as production.  And I joke about this but I think we need to be ready for the new generation of the emoji named children. I think they're coming. And a couple of weeks ago I saw an error message go by in our log that said, hey, I can't delete a flag that's emoji named. I'm like, you named your flag with an emoji. Ha, I'm psychic and I can see the future. We're gonna name things with emojis. So the more support that you have for being able to test things in production where everything is weird and expensive without breaking the user experience, the more confident you're going to feel when you actually roll it out all the way. So none of the resilience matters if you can't define what victory it looks like because it's not the same as not failing. So what is a minimum victory? What is barely enough to serve some kind of business value? What is just enough to get by? What's not bad? What is like, I could live with this. I want to improve it. I want to iterate on it, but it's okay. Like the middle state of success.  What is good enough? If you think about that and you aim your robustness at that, you're probably gonna achieve it because good enough is much easier to hit than perfect. And then what's your best case? Because if you don't have a best case, you can't be aiming for it. What is a flawless victory? What does it look like? What is the latency? What is the timing? How could you continue to iterate your system so that you can get closer and closer to it? Because that would be exciting. How can you be victorious if you don't define victory? I think a lot of us define how our features should work, but we're not doing a great job defining it from user perspective, defining it from the way that we want to have it work for other people. Because I want all of us to be rainbow unicorn Pusheen and we can't do that unless we say I want to be rainbow unicorn Pusheen. So if this talk was too long and you read Twitter instead, make failure more nuanced, make it more than binary, make success bigger, hold more things in the pool that you call success, including successful enough, not too bad, I guess it works. And definitely when you go to Waffle House, order the hash browns. So if you are interested in a t-shirt and you were in the United States, I'm sorry, go ahead and follow this link and we will send you a t-shirt and some information. Thank you all. You can switch me back to video now, which I can't see. So thank you all for your time and attention. I really appreciate you doing this with me and I hope it's been a good time. Yeah, thank you for joining us. It was great. And so we're gonna get ready for our next talk now. And I forgot to say that we have a new co-host now here, Maria Nagaga. Hello. And so thank you so much, Heidi. Thank you. Thank you.


What's good YouTube? This is your boy Chiwara back to y'all again with another art tutorial. If you're new to the channel go ahead and hit that like button, comment, subscribe, make sure you click post notifications so you wouldn't be notified anytime you watch y'all some heat. In today's video, man, I will be giving you a full walkthrough of making a cartoon head.  When you want to show your work, I'm going to show y'all like the size I like to use. So let's jump right into it. Come over to file, click new. Then I go to my custom setting. I like 18 by 18 inches. That's what I use. That that seems to work perfect for me when I'm drawing and I want to upload it straight to Instagram and keep, keep everything in frame. You know what I'm saying? So after I find my size I want to use, I find the art, the picture, now just drag it in. Drop it right into Adobe Illustrator. Stretch out the size a little bit. Hold and shift and all at the same time so you can keep keep the same like height and width at the same time. Then come right here, drop the opacity down, lock that layer, create a new one. Come over here, file brushes. And if you got a tablet, you can have this setting where you use pressure sensitivity. That's the brush I like to use the one. After you do this, just put three right here in both of these numbers and both of these spots right here and click OK. And it'll give you that brush you see me use all the time with the sharp points. And all it is is like pressure. Like I go light and I press down hard then I end light. So it's just like a technique that you can get. So it's good to have a digital tablet you should invest in one. So the first thing we do, I do is like I started at least with the nose or eyes. Click onto this brush so I can get some more control. If you move your smoothness up, meaning if you got the stabilizer too high, it'll correct your line too much. You know what I'm saying? And sometimes that's a good thing when you're really trying to make clean, clean lines. But then sometimes you don't want it that high because it affects when you're trying to make little curves and stuff. So I'm gonna bring that down for now. And all I did was to get to this option is double click my brush. So I'm gonna click OK. Let's see if it's just doing how I want it to do. OK. When you're working on your line work, don't be afraid to like erase. Like keep erasing it until you get it exactly how you want it. The cleaner your lines is, the better your cartoon here to come out. So make sure you're working on making some clean lines. I get a lot of my inspiration too, like from anime. Like I like how clean like they do their artwork. You know what I'm saying? So if you was wondering what art style I'm really into is like anime. So I just watch some random anime and just look at the detail that they put into those cartoons. Like they're really inspiring. See we taking our time and the line work coming out pretty clean. I ain't rushing it. Just going with the flow. Gonna make my brush a little smaller when it's so I can do these eyebrows.  Now we're gonna make, we're gonna make our brush a little smaller so we can do like the little fine hairs and we're gonna make the lines a little more closer together. So a little more fuller. These hairs. Not what you want to do for the hair. So you can cover a lot of ground at once. You just want to come like to a big size brush and then we're just gonna fill in a lot of space but we ain't gonna go too close to the edges. Going too close. That's what you do in the picture. It's someone with a lot of hair. You just want to fill all of it in. Okay now that we got all that, all you want to do you want to come to like a, we're gonna start out with the one and just come to the edges and you want to just do different swirls. Going left and right so they give it like a fake. Like it's a lot of hair. The more you do it, it'll just fill up. See? It gives that a fake like it's a lot of hair going on, you know what I'm saying? And it'll just buy you some time if you just fill in the inside and just worry about the edges. Keep that one. Now the same thing we did at the bottom we're gonna do at the top, you know what I'm saying? So we're gonna keep this same thing. This all around.  Like just bring the fake out more. Do these edges.  It's time to start the process of coloring everything. Wait, wait, wait, we got one more thing to do. Let's see a little more. Make sure I got all the little details. All right, we got all the details in the line work. What you want to do? Want to highlight everything? Go to object, expand appearance. Then you want to go to your Pathfinder. Where's my Pathfinder? On your Pathfinder, you want to click merge. After you click merge, you can click off of it. Go to your line work, copy of your line work. And lock the top copy. Okay, now while you got the second copy selected, you want to choose a good color to start with for the skin tone. It's pretty good to start with. Go to your rectangle tool and drag the color over the line work. Then you want to right click the rectangle tool. I mean, right click the rectangle you made and go to arrange and send to back. You'll know if you did this step right. If you look over at your layers and you see your line work sitting on top of the color. That's if you know you did that part right. So now after you do that, you want to select all this together. And then you want to click merge on your Pathfinder. And what that's going to do is make your line work become one with the color.  So after we grouped everything together, it made it all one. Now we're isolating selected groups. So what that's going to do is it's going to make every area as by itself, like these little corners right here, like inside it, it's going to make it separate if you click on to everything that's closed off, like even in this area.  So go to isolate, select the group. And now we can click colors individually. That's closed off in color. See, it's showing me. So we'll color this and color that we'll color this because everything is closed off. Another thing I like to do is go ahead and delete the outer and you notice we got a lot of hair. We got a lot of color stuck in our hair and it'll be like it'll take forever just trying to go through like this and manually delete everything. So I got a little trick for that.  Just stroll up locking out of the layers of the line work and leave these first two unlocked. After you do that, you want to close this back. Now we're going to be able to come right here and delete all the color and because we locked the black line work, it's not going to touch that. It's only going to touch. Remember we didn't lock our colors. So now we can just select everything and we don't have to worry about making a mistake and clicking delete in our black lines. Go through and clean up the colors out the hairs and I will be dropping a couple tutorials like this. So eventually if you don't get it, if you can't understand it this time eventually you will if I just keep doing this so much you'll start catching the hang of what I'm doing. We're going to delete all these little colors and clean them. I like to zoom in and go through checking. Make sure everything is done. It looks pretty good to me. So now what we're going to do is finish coloring everything. Isolate the group so we can color only certain areas. Hold shift if you want to color two things at once or multiple things at once.  I just put all the base the base colors down before I start like doing the shadows and shading and stuff. All that's looking good. So now we finish we finish what our line work and we finish with our color layer. So now what I do is put a layer in between so we can do like the shadows the different shadows and stuff. And we're going to make one more layer too so we can do like the detail in the hair. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to go ahead and get that out the way.  Wait wait I know a whole another way what we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our windows and we're going to click swatches. And after you pull out your swatches you just can go through your little books until you find gradient. Okay as you find gradient you can just click one it can be either one okay you got your gradient pulled up and now you can pull out this so you can tweak it. I just did that so you will know how to find a gradient option because I could have easily did it how I had it you know set up already waiting to to use. So what I do is I just bring these two edges to a darker color and I make the center like the color I wanted the hair to be okay so I want this hair to be like a brownish so what you want to do you want to make these two dark edges blend into a brownish color so we're just gonna find something that we're just gonna keep mixing because maybe I don't know what color hair you will probably want but you can do like anything I'm just showing you. Any color you put in the center you want the two edges to blend into it so it'll have a nice even fade and it'll give it a better effect on the light there okay I like that so what we're gonna do now we're gonna get our brush and it's gonna give us that it's gonna give us that effect that we're looking for and you put this layer on top of everything you know what I'm saying you put it on top of your line work sort of so you'll be able to see it right now we did that did that we want to add the opacity down a little bit on it we're just gonna add some glares in the eyes and then we can we can start our shading process we'll go back to these layers we can lock that layer and we can go to the layer in between I think I want to I want to switch that skin tone but we'll do that at the end we'll switch it up a little bit I think I wanted a little more redder so what we're gonna do for the shadows we're gonna in the shading we're gonna sample the skin tone on natural color and then we're gonna find a good what'll be a good light color for the shading I think that'll be pretty good see a little lighter we're gonna start shading first of all we're gonna we're gonna select our shadows expand the pinch then we're gonna click merge on our path find it so we can make it one but now I really want to change the color of the face with the shadows all together so we're gonna unlock the bottom layer and the shadow layer and we're gonna select it all together we're gonna go to object I was gonna go to edit right here right here you can go to these colors we want to change and tweak them that shadow that's a little better right there so what we're gonna do we're gonna add another layer under under them shadows well there you have it you guys how to make a cartoon head I know this a boring video but I decided to make one like this so you can keep up and really try to you know I'm saying figure out the way I'm doing things if you're new to the channel go ahead hit that like button comment like I said at the front of this video subscribe hit post notification more heat coming soon and I'm out of this thing


G'day everyone, it's Gavin Thompson, the Assistant Chief Officer for North West Region. Here we are today, inspecting the new Tarni fire station and the progress of its build. We had an opportunity to walk through with the builders and give us an outline of where they're at and how they're progressing. We expect the station to be up and running by December and handed over to the Brigade to be operating out of here, which would be a great new facility for the team that are hoppers crossing by their staff and volunteers. And they'll be able to service the hoppers crossing community to the ever-growing Tarni community, as well as supporting into Trug and Iona and other areas across the pack. So it's an exciting time for District 14 and the Hoppers Crossing Brigade.


Bung the Gelasset News to get top stories and crypto currency and gelassets and bring them down to bite-sized pieces today. Bullish news. First up, Bitcoin addresses holding 1 million goes parabolic as 10% of Bitcoin supply sits idle for 10 years and this is going to prove my theory that there is way less Bitcoin circulating than was previously thought. Also Billionaire Mark Cuban affirms that Bitcoin is a store of value after he called it anything but. And finally we were so close to a stimulus package being put through by US Congress but of course there is a little bit of a flub and somebody is holding out but the reason they are doing it is actually a pretty good reason and we are getting to all that in the 12 days of Christmas as well as the market but I have to make mention of one important factor. There has been a lot of questions about the DNews Cardano staking pool which as of right now December 19th at 4pm we are looking at about 10.5 million ADA which has been delegated to the DNews Stake Pool. A lot of questions have been revolving around how do I buy Cardano. I live in the United States. I live in a state that doesn't allow that. I'm only stuck with Coinbase or wherever else it is. I want to recommend to use SimpleSwap. If you go to my free website at danhagescrypto.com in module 5 there is a simple easy video where I show you exactly how to use SimpleSwap but if you are looking for anything like oh I don't know Cardano it's right there. I was looking for Theta it's also right there or T Fuel or whatever else it is. It's all right here so this is a decentralized exchange this is something that I highly recommend. I use it myself too by Theta. Also to find SimpleSwap is very easy and the link in my description of every one of my videos there is to the exchange and wallet fees and if you just swipe over a little bit here is SimpleSwap and here is the official link which you can click right there and go right to SimpleSwap so you know you won't get scammed. Now one of the 12 days of Christmas so we've been doing pretty good with giving away all these great items. And today the 19th we're giving away three free sessions or three free memberships to CryptoTrader.tax. If you don't know CryptoTrader.tax it is the exact same reporting software that I use for my taxes here in the United States. So unfortunately this will be only for the US viewers and we are giving away free of the unlimited level access to CryptoTrader.tax for $2.99 and we're actually giving away three of these tonight. So to win it's very simple in the description below it'll be the very first link it'll go to danthediscripto.com forward slash taxes putting your first name email and submit and this is going to go directly to the team at CryptoTrader.tax and they are going to find out three winners and they're going to email those winners so they can get access to the software. So good luck to everybody go ahead and submit your first name and email and they will take care of everything. Alright so let's take a look at the market so today was a pretty good day for Bitcoin they actually went to $24.1 almost $24.2 and it's actually tumbled down about $700 but it's still up to $2.1 and 25% for the week. That's our amazing numbers we like those numbers. If they're up to around $6.50 pretty great we'll take that 14% for the week. XRP watch out $0.57 down a little bit but still up 13.5% for the week so we'll take it. Tethanomic care is like coin 10% at $120 almost like coin has been in a tear thankfully for that PayPal listing. It's really had a resurgence. Whatever PayPal lists from now on will essentially be the coin base effect. The next cryptocurrency asset that they list will be enormous on PayPal hopefully it's Cardano who knows. Chainlink at $13.30 up 10% for the week. Cardano at $0.16 anything really great not too much just a little bit here and there. Now let's take a look at what it could be if you were just investing in Bitcoin we'll take a look at what Bitcoin is so what we're looking at here is if you would invest it into Ethereum you'd actually be down about 2% instead of investing in a Bitcoin XRP same thing Tether whatever like when you've been up massively 7.4% and again that PayPal listing was huge 2.6 for Binance coin and really that's a 3.3 for who will be whatever Uniswap a 3.5 I can see that especially after we talked about today in the earlier video today we talked about how Steve Mnuchin is they're putting forth regulation to control the custody type wallets that are on exchanges it's gonna be a lot more KYC and AML type of regulation this doesn't really affect the private wallets such as the ones that you have within a ledger but again big brother dipping into what you are doing so I have made a proposal that I think that decentralized exchanges will be much more in demand as opposed to using an exchange and paying all the fees that they do unfortunately Dex is having pretty they still have fees to alright that's what's going on the market let's jump into today's top stories first up this is what I've been saying all along we talk about the 18 and a half million Bitcoin that is circulating but that's not true there's actually been many millions that have been lost because in the beginning when people actually mined Bitcoin they were getting like 50 bitcoins every 10 minutes and it was just like nobody's money was just a couple of cents here it didn't really matter so people would throw away their hard drives or they would lose it or they would just break because 10 years ago the computers 10 years ago sucked so for me for like a PC I'd have a PC for like a year and I just throw it away because it's just worthless so I believe that there are millions that are lost and the circulating supply is actually around not 18 and a half million I think it's between 2 and 3 million personally maybe even 4 million so I think that would even raise the price up right now because circulating supply will be we'd be a lot lower and this report proves it so Bitcoin addresses holding on 1 million goes parabolic 10% of Bitcoin supply sits idle for a decade alright so the time of publication Bitcoin is hovering just below 23 so this was obvious a little bit earlier because now it's a 23.5 just about and then researchers from Glassnode tweeted the number of Bitcoin addresses holding at least 1 million and said the metric has gone parabolic it's what they say these wallets that have a million or more increased 150% to 66,540 addresses why because Bitcoin cross 20,000 has turned all those early minor addresses which had 15 black rewards into millioner addresses so can you imagine back in those days when you're reminding Bitcoin no one would have thought it would have gone to a dollar first of all they never thought would be on par with the dollar that went to a hundred bucks that was crazy and a thousand that's ridiculous and as soon as a thousand hit people started 10,000 no way 20,000 no way 100,000 no way 500,000 no way so you see I'm going here this is the same thing that's happening and it says it's happening in perpetuity it's a perpetual motion of people just not believing it can actually happen and then it happens it's crazy so at current exchange rates a person needs close to only 44 Bitcoin to be a millionaire which doesn't seem like that much especially if you would have bought you know back in March was like 5,000 I mean look you could have got mean 10 for 50,000 imagine 10 Bitcoin for 50,000 and that just sounds crazy right now but it really is so here's the big crux of it the data indicates that 10% or almost 2 million Bitcoin out of the 18 and a half million in circulation hasn't moved in over a decade so what does that mean either you have the strongest hands on the planet where they're not moving anything at all or they are lost they are gone they are thrown away they are not coming back and those numbers should be taken out of circulation which would cause us to say well what we really have instead of 21 million it's really only 19 million and that is the total max supply of Bitcoin because we can't get the other ones back and also let me move down here these wallet addresses these weren't like they were mined they were minted and they were transferred somewhere and somewhere and somewhere these 1.7 million Bitcoin have never left their minor addresses these are fresh wallets where when they remind the risk-puttings addresses and that was it they haven't moved at all so that is almost 10% of the circulating Bitcoin supply the analysis shows that 98% of those coins were mined more than seven years ago 94% more than 10 years ago that is a lot and it says most could be it's not could be I mean most are lost forever and this was I thought was pretty interesting there's only one Bitcoin address in existence today with between 100,000 to 1 million coins and the address has 141,000 Bitcoin worth over 3 billion using today's exchange rates if that's not Satoshi's address or wallet I don't know which one it is but that is amazing to me that one address has that many but it is what it is so let me understand the common section let's move on to our next piece so next up billionaire Mark Cuban who has been kind of wishy-washy on Bitcoin now says yep Bitcoin's a story of value and it's amazing how all these experts come out and like yeah that's story of value yeah it's going up yeah we're buying a ton of it and all of a sudden everybody's like oh yeah it is story of value it's amazing so yeah here we are with the same type of story billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban who has long been a prominent crypto critic says he believes Bitcoin can store wealth that's amazing the odds favor this is what he states the odds favor those trying to approve upon it it currently works a story of value with demand outstripping supply so people are interested thanks Mark didn't know that so yeah that makes sense right I mean PayPal they're gobbling up at least 70% of the total new Bitcoin and then grayscale is getting the rest and of course you have micro strategies buying up as much as they possibly can and you just had Guggenheim said they're buying up a ton they were buying a 10,000 that's the one that said that's gonna go to 400,000 so and that's just the ones that are public for every one public company that says yeah we're buying Bitcoin I believe there's 10 or 20 in the background in the shadows in the secrecy of darkness who are buying up Bitcoin like nobody's business and that is what is going to drive up the price and then Mark says something like no matter how much Bitcoin fans want to pretend that's a hedge against doob's day scenario it's not countries will take steps to protect their currencies and their ability to tax so the more people believe this is anything more than a story of value the more risk of government intervention they face well here's the question to mark how they gonna do that how are you gonna do that how are you gonna ban Bitcoin when you'd have to ban the entire internet there are over 10,000 nodes throughout the entire planet that hold Bitcoin people say ah well that is those ban the exchanges sure go right ahead America ban the exchanges and fall flat again because guess who's not going to every other single country out there they're like oh you don't want to do it well no problem because we'll do it we'll take over this this is no problem for us and we'll get around these sanctions and we'll have our own little global currency or at least a global store of value so America have fun we will leaving the dust and you will be old school just like what you're doing right now all the rest of your junk banks the reason I get a little bit passionate about it is I think it's irresponsible sometimes for someone to say you know you really because it kind of gives a negative spin on it and people get a little scared they don't invest into it and then people invest in you know goofy things like bonds and putting their money in the bank and they they they put it in savings they think that's what you know it's what their mom and dad said that's what the grandparent said it's gonna be safe and that's okay and then they put in the assets that are you know they're they're prone to inflation or they just put in the cash and then when they have cash what happens to that it's on fire so this is a problem and Bitcoin and a lot of different digital assets they appreciate we've seen it time and time again 2021 we're gonna see a massive amount of appreciation in this market so when we hear these types of things I feel sorry for the people that you know they it sounds good to them at first Mark's like oh it's sort of value and he's like bad but you know governments might ban it they're like I'm staying away from that and they won't buy and then when everything comes about and the world really does become a fire they just missed the boat this is why I created the channel this is why I keep my website free this is why I do the things I do every single day and yeah let me know what you think in the comment section let's move on next up oh politics everybody loves that there's two things you shouldn't talk about to say friends religion and politics and I will do one of those right now politics live update COVID relief negotiations stall the GOP senators call to end emergency Fed powers and first when I first this my god leave these these damn corrupt politicians and then I get to why he's doing I'm like well okay I can kind of see that so let's just scroll down now hopefully this goes through and I have to tell you I gotta tell you that these are the weakest bunch of congressmen and congresswomen out there if they can't get anything passed they are net because can you imagine their huge corporate sponsors who needed a bunch of money they said hey we you you got a pass I'm gonna give us something and they were able to do that and in in perpetualness now when you're trying to deal with the American people they're like hey we really need a stimulus and we don't have anything to really live on I mean the last woman's check was what 1200 bucks how long goes that that may I can't remember it's been a long time and of course there is unemployment but they actually slash the cost of that because they couldn't fund them because they can get a stimulus bill fast so here we are almost said in Christmas and they're still fighting over the same things and it's not gonna be 1200 bucks seem like 600 bucks if that we'll see what happens so it's discerning to me that I see these types of things happen I'm sure they're trying to breast I'm sure they're doing the you know the greatest thing of all time but you know they have to keep pushing things forward and they have to actually keep funding the government so they can stay open so they can get this thing done here's what I say I say nobody gets a paycheck in Congress until you pass the stimulus check or the statement stimulus package nobody gets a paycheck you're gonna work for free just like everybody out there so I'm sure at that point things get done so one of things that is one of the holdups is that as the hours tick down towards another government shutdown senators deadlocked over Republicans insistence on a provision ending certain emergency Fed reserve powers be included in the bill again what they're trying to do is to reduce the amount of power that the Federal Reserve has which could be quantitative easing which they said hey you did a great job you bailed us out but you know you can't keep printing money like that it's totally fiscally irresponsible and this is just like one one guy at senator Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania and a Republican and they're like no we're gonna push this through but he's staying staying fast the reason I bring this up is because the last time we had a stimulus package there was a spike a huge spike in Coinbase in how much money they got as far as the specific amount and the package itself was $1,200 for each American citizen I mean depending on where you got it right and they saw a huge spike in the amount of cryptocurrencies that were bought for $1,200 and the same things gonna happen here as soon as this gets passed a lot of people are that are doing okay are gonna put that money and write in the cryptocurrency is now the ones that need it they got to buy you mean you got to buy groceries you got to put food in the table for your family right but the ones that are like you know I'm gonna okay they will put that into cryptocurrencies which will increase the market cap and you know bring the whole prices up so I'm hopeful this will happen but with the way the things are going I just don't see it's getting passed anytime soon so that's it so just remember if you want to win the crypto trader dot tax we're gonna give away three of the unlimited plans that's what I go go for but believe me in the description you gonna see there's a video actually I talk about crypto trader tax it's fantastic it's a ton of time a ton of headache a ton of heartache and it's great so I just go to dante just crypto dot com forward slash taxes again the link will be the very first part in description below putting your first name and email and then send it over and then you can win now remember this is only for you to see what citizens coming for the most part this is what it really does but I've got some good news for non-us citizens that is 12 days of Christmas over by Swiftx the Australian crypto exchange and they've got some pretty great gifts call my 80 on 25th to give away one Bitcoin and anybody can register throughout the whole planet and you don't have to be a swift expire I'm gonna leave the link in the description just gonna click on the inner giveaway and you'll do a multitude of things and they pick up multiple winners so go ahead and check that out and that is for everybody all right so thanks for sticking with me to the very end I really appreciate a lot of good interesting stuff going on if you like these types of videos maybe two months gonna pop up on your left and right let YouTube do their magic and that's all so thanks again really appreciate it see you on the next one


Are you ready for warm weather and a little sunshine? The Appalachian Wireless team has decided to have the ultimate spring break event. The spring break event is going on now through the end of April and all smartphones are on sale with Appalachian Advantage. We are you, we are Appalachian Wireless. Beginning today, UPIKE's Film, Media & Arts Festival will hit the screen in downtown Pikeville. Thursday, Mountain Top had the opportunity to speak with FMA Professor Andrew Reed about how you can watch. So this year is our 8th annual UPIKE Film & Media Arts Festival. This is the first in-person version of the event that we've held since 2019 and we've got a lot of exciting changes for this comeback year. We're for the first time, we're hosting it off campus at the Appalachian Center for the Arts in downtown Pikeville, which is the former Ginny Wiley Theater for those that maybe aren't familiar with it yet. With over 50 films to watch, the festival will be held over three days. Reed mentions some of the genres audiences can expect. And then we have films tonight and followed by films Friday and Saturday. We've got different blocks of films. We have several feature films that we're showing that you can read about online, but then you can also find about film blocks, where if you like horror films, we've got a short horror film block. We've got a short documentary block with short docs, short dramas. So there's all these little blocks like a comedy block, an animation block of short films that you can come in and check out a variety of different things. Since the festival start eight years ago, Reed mentions that this year has some of the strongest regional selections. We've had the strongest regional slate we've ever had, I would say overall. We've had great, we've always had great regional films, but I feel like this year pretty much everything we got from the region was pretty strong and it was very difficult to program all the things we wanted to show. So some good films didn't necessarily make the cut and it just became about a time thing. I mean, we're showing films starting Saturday morning at like nine and same with Sunday. So we're, we've kind of got, we've kind of stretched ourselves as much as we can having the festival. You know, we've, we typically would do a Thursday night and then a Friday and Saturday and now we're kind of actually starting Thursday at 12 noon and going through Saturday night. So I know I'm going to be exhausted by Sunday. So, but we're excited and we've had some of the best submissions we've ever had. So we can't wait to show them. For a list of films and show times, you can visit fmafest.org. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Horgell.


Now, the chairman of INC Professor Jakubo Mamoud has denied reports making the rounds about the 500 billion Nara earmarked for the conduit of direct primaries in the 2022 budget. According to him, it was not responsible for the president, Mohamed Buhari, to deny an assent to the electoral act as amended. The INC chairman made his clarification during his visit to the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriation at the National Assembly in Abuja on Thursday. Professor Mamoud said his visit to the National Assembly was to brief members on INC requirements for the 2023 general elections and its conduct of the primaries. INC did any cost for the conduct of primaries by political parties by direct method. We have had very good discussions with the Committee on Appropriations of the National Assembly for showing to the resolution of the House. And what we discussed, you'll not hear from me. Maybe the chairman of the committee will tell you. The cost of 2022? Once the budget is finalized, you will hear. On the direct or indirect primaries in his, in what we discussed with him, he specifically told us the role of INC in direct or indirect primaries is just minimal. Everything relies on political parties. Party primaries are roles of political parties, not INC. That's what we discussed. For direct primaries, as what INC chairman told us, is only political parties has responsibility on primaries. Funding on primaries for political parties not INC. to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


All right, shall we begin? It's one after five. Great, okay. This is Watch Me Work. I'm Susan Larga Parks and I'm gonna do a little blurb explaining what Watch Me Work is before. Has everybody been to Watch Me Work already or are there some people who don't know what it is that we're about to do? Hey, Mo. Is everybody? I'll just do it really fast because there's a few people who are like, huh, what is this? We're gonna have to watch Susan Larga Parks work for an hour, how boring. No, so Watch Me Work is a show. We've been doing it for over 11 years. Usually I do it in the lobby, live in the lobby of the public theater for 11 years. And Howl Round, the public theater has been helping it happen. Howl Round came on several years ago to help us livestream the event. And since this Corona lockdown thing, I figured, hey, what could be more fun than doing Watch Me Work from my home five days a week? So here we are in our second week of that. I'm a writer. I write lots of different kinds of things. And big thanks to the public theater and Howl Round for helping this happen. Here's how Watch Me Work works. It's a show. It's a play. We're gonna make it together like all the worlds of stage. And here's what we're gonna do. It's gonna have the first part of the play is gonna be the action of the play and we're gonna create the action together. And then the second part of the play we're gonna create the dialogue, meaning you talk to me, asking me questions about your creative process. Okay, so this is an opportunity for us to work together for 20 minutes. I'll have a timer. I'll set it. And then it's an opportunity for you to ask me questions about your creative process. I said that twice. I'll say it again about your creative process, okay? We won't have the bandwidth in this forum to offer you to read something you've written and to have me critique it. It's not about that. This is about process where we just talk about how you're working, how your work is going, any difficulties you might have, some difficulties that you might recently have overcome concerning your work. And it can be any kind of work, really. Big ups to the people in the medical profession and all the EMS people who are working very hard on all of our behalf. If any of them are out there, thanks for everything you're doing. And everyone, really, who's contributing in some positive way during this very difficult time. So what else? Audrey, is there something else that we should mention right now? Totally, I'll let you know how you can ask some questions. So if you're in the Zoom class itself, you can ask a question by clicking on the raise your hand button. It should be in a participant tab on your screen.  And I will see. And I will click and unmute you when it's time to speak. If you are watching the stream on HowlRound.tv, you can ask questions via the public theater Twitter or Facebook. And you can also tweet at watch me work SLP hashtag HowlRound H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. And that's it. I'm gonna be setting this timer for 20 minutes. If anybody wants to know why I use kitchen timers, we can talk about that in the question part of the show. But I'm gonna set it for 20 minutes and we're gonna work together. Okay, here we go. One, two, and whoops. Great, all right. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Audrey, I just, it's funny, I was so focused on you guys that I set my timer and then I didn't turn it on. So during that, if any of you saw me texting, I was texting Audrey, what time is it? Anyway, it happens. So, yeah. You're ready? I am ready, I'm ready. I just had to get my, you know. All right, up first we have Monique. Hey, Monique. Are you understanding? Hey, Monique. Hi. Hi there. Thank you so much for doing this. This has been amazing. Thank you. So I'm an actor primarily. I just started writing this year. Oh, yay. And yeah, so far I've written two short plays and I did a part of an online devised play a few weeks ago once quarantine started. My question is I have some other ideas for a full length play and I'm just having trouble sort of expanding my work if that makes sense. Like the other plays I did, they were by design short. They were for submissions for upcoming festivals and things like that. So I kind of just had an idea and knew I had to keep it really compact. But now I'm sort of wondering how do I take my next idea and, you know, do 60 pages instead of 10. Right, right. That's a great question.  How did you decide that they were going to stay, you know? Short. Yeah. As I said, I wrote them for specific reasons. It was more that I saw submission opportunity and thought, oh, since I want to start writing doing a short play seems like a good place to start. Right. So then I kind of got an idea, expanded on it and I guess since I knew ahead of time that it had to be short, I didn't let it run away with me too much. Right, so now you want it to run away with you. Now you're going to write. Okay, so let's think of like, do you know the play Hamlet?  Oh yeah. Okay, you're, okay.  Well, not high school. It was standard. Yeah, you go, Hamlet, okay. So right, so Hamlet, right. And most of us know Hamlet. Shakespeare's Hamlet, okay. So Hamlet, it could be like Hamlet comes home, Horatia goes, yo, we saw your father's ghost. Hamlet could go, that motherfucker, my uncle killed him.  Right, it could be that, right? Yeah. Okay. So instead of that, it could be that. And that could be very interesting. That could be your short play, right? And then instead of that, the writer Shakespeare, he goes, well, what if Hamlet wasn't sure? Oh, that's interesting. You see what I mean? So he starts to ask, I mean, I don't know, you know, what he did to write that play, but we can pretend to know. But I see where you're going. Yeah. So what if one of your characters wasn't sure? You know, what if, what if, what if, okay, they want to go to, they want to go to Coney Island, right? But they don't have any money to get there. So you start asking, what if, right? You start introducing complexity, roadblocks, if you will, things that your character has to deal with. So we could say that geometry says this, the quickest, the shortest length between two points is a straight line, right? That would be a short play, right? There's less complexity. But when you have a circuitous route where your characters are going, well, what if I go in that door over there? What if I have to make money to get to where I'm going? I have to get a job. What if I don't have a job? Then I have to, you see what I mean? Just starting introducing complexity and see if that expands it. And again, you want it to feel, you don't want to just fill up pages for the sake of filling up pages, right? So you want it, Sam Shepard had this great essay years ago, the playwright Sam Shepard, he wrote an essay called, I think it was called Time, when he talked about, to paraphrase horribly, a play should be just as long as it needs to be and no longer. You know what I mean? So you don't want to stuff your play with unnecessary twists and turns just to make it longer. You want the changes, if you will, like musical changes to organically come out of the situation, right? Like say Jane wants to marry, you know, Isabelle, right? Great, they're both single, they're both available, boom, it happens great. But what if Isabelle is going out with, you know, Frank or something, then it gets a little more complicated. Okay? Yeah, no, that's- It might be a fun exercise to take some of your favorite plays and just go, this is a full-length play, simplify it down and then see the complexities that the writer observed along her path as she wrote the play, you know? That's a really good idea. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thanks, great question, Monique. Thank you, Monique. All right, up next we have, oh, so sorry, I scrolled to the wrong part. Devon, hold on one second. Are you unmuted, Devon? I am, yeah, thank you. Awesome. Hello, hi everybody, hope everybody's doing well today. So I am a college student, actually, and I was wondering if you had any insight or like want to talk about your writing experiences throughout college and how the, or like the earliest like formative part of your writing days and like how those might have informed like where you are now, like how do you see that lineage from where you started to where you are now. Right, so here's where we do some gymnastics. Ready, Devon? So because this is about you, we're gonna make it about you. Okay. What I'm gonna do is ask you how are your writing classes going so far and how do you see a connection between the writing classes that you've taken and the writer that you are now? Yeah, I do. So I've taken a couple of playwriting classes and extracurricularly, like I do poetry workshops and like different varieties of things. And I do think that they like have informed my like writing practice, so to speak now, even though like it fills up the prerentive to say that like I'm a playwright or like I have an artistic practice because I don't even know if I do yet. But yeah, I do think that like my writing courses have been helpful, but I also think that now that I'm starting to like write more outside of those classes, I'm figuring out a way of like how do I use those materials that came from that class and the things that I wanna be writing like for years to come. Like do those things just get put on the back burner? Are those the things that you start working from? You mean the pieces that you've started in those classes? Yeah, like for example, like one class you're supposed to write like a one act play and like that was interesting but that work doesn't necessarily look like what I wanna keep doing. So like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, so you just keep going. I mean, the thing is that good writing classes, good classes, good interactions are gonna give you tools, right? Tools, I've been my says tools not rules. So they're gonna give you tools. So you're gonna have at the end of each class or each interaction a series of tools for your tool belt that you can use to, I mean, if I gave you a hammer and a saw and a bucket of nails, right? You wouldn't say like, and you have to build a diving board every time you go to work, right? No, you're like, yeah, I don't wanna build a diving board every time I wanna go diving board today. I wanna build a seesaw tomorrow. I wanna build a park bench the next day, right? I mean, whatever, right? So the tools we give you are going to help you do what you wanna do. You can take a short work and expand upon it. I mean, that's what Monique earlier is gonna take a short work or you can say wow, I really kind of, I like, this is kind of the work I like to do. Maybe I'll just pick a whole new topic and apply that skill set that I learned, those tools to a new piece, okay? And we all know those of us who did any kind of formative education that you're getting a great education right now in college and in a lot of people's experience once you graduate is when the learning really starts. So it's like a whole new level of working because you're out in the world and working.  So try to do that as much as you can, you know? Not to chastise yourself if you don't show up every day but try to show up every day, okay? Yeah, awesome, thank you so much. Thank you, thanks for tuning in. Thanks to everyone. All right, next up we have Vincent. Vincent, are you unmuted? I am, can you guys hear me? Yes, yeah. Oh, great. Thank you for taking the time for my question. I'll try to simplify it so I don't give you all the baggage background but basically I've been working out of play for the last couple of years that just recently through Mutual Friends and a theater company that they have, we've started to do readings of it. So I've gotten to hear it a couple of times and we just did a, there was a reading in February that we had our first invited audience for. And I sat down with one of my old writing teachers who got to go and got some notes from her and I've talked to the director and I have a lot of good information. I feel like I'm excited about the rewriting process. This is like whatever draft this is at this point but there's part of me that also is struggling with if I've lost like the initial impulse of what, like the reason why I started writing this to begin with and trying to be okay with like, okay, the journey.  It's not always gonna be the place you started from but I think in all the notes that I've gotten, I'm like, that's cool. Yeah, that works. That sounds really nice. But then there's always that like part of my brain that's like, but was that the initial, was that the thing that really was exciting for me about it? And just curious how you address if when you're working on plays or when you're working on revising, if you ever feel like you've lost that excitement about what the initial idea was and how you find your way back to like, oh, that was the nugget that I was starting from. And now here's my way back into it as I allow it to morph and change. That's a great question, Vincent. And I think a lot of us have that sort of experience. In my experience, I get more excited about the thing I have than the thing I thought I was gonna have when I started writing however many years ago, back there, right? You know what I mean? So in my experience, I'm like, wow, look, I have something and it's growing, yay. And that sort of obscures what I thought I was gonna be doing when I started. But it sounds like you might have a sort of feelings of maybe not regret, but concern.  Is it, am I hearing it correctly or? I think that might be it. And I think the other part of it for me too is that it's, I was doing a lot more like experimental writing for lack of a better word, non-traditional kind of theater playwriting. And this play came out in a little bit more of a traditional way. And I had a draft where I was like, I'm gonna blow this up and do the experimental version. And then I showed it to the director and he's like, yeah, I don't think we need all that. That's maybe like for this reading, we don't need that stuff in there. And I said, all right, I know it, let me try it and stick with what he's saying and keep digging into it. So I think maybe there's that part of it for me too.  I don't know. So I think there's that part of it too. Uh-huh, uh-huh. And sometimes it's confusing when we, we grow and change as artists, you know? Yeah, right. Our work when we're, you know, 15 doesn't resemble our work when we're 20 or 30 or 50 or 80 or whatever, you know? I mean, there are artists who are the same all the way through. I worked with one of them years ago in the middle of rehearsal, I said, well, why are we doing that that way? He was a director, he's a director. And he shouted, I've been doing it this way for 30 years. And I was like, wow. I mean, that's his style, right? Those of us who do it the same way for our whole career, you know, and there are those of us who are not like that. So we grow and change and we have growing pains and we say, is this really me? Or was that really me? Who am I? You know what I mean? Right. So it sounds like there's something of that in what you're experiencing right now. Is there a deadline or a finish line are these collaborators, wonderful collaborators of yours? Are they saying I need a new draft by such and such? Right now it's been sort of loose where I left it was, okay, with the notes I have, I'm gonna sort of beat out the moments, talk about the new scenes and then address it and then sort of write out the next draft. And they wanna, I think they're aiming to produce it. Hopefully, you know, who knows what's gonna happen but in the fall. So that's sort of the loose deadline. Right. It's tricky.  Like what is it that you really wanted to do? But it might be one of those, it might be you changing into a different kind of writer. You know, I mean, the tricky thing is, is that right now if they're planning to produce it in the fall, you're kind of in a relationship with these wonderful people. You know, they sort of signed on to what you're writing. So if you decide now to go and do something else, you sort of aren't really working in the spirit of the collaboration that you have agreed to thus far. Right. And so while you might, you can certainly write two kinds of the play, write the far out there play and the less far out there play. You could, you know? Or you could just say, I'm gonna write this like this. Right. I'm gonna write it like, I'm gonna talk to the play and make sure it's okay with the play that we're going in this direction. And we're gonna write it in the direction that we've agreed to, you know? Right. You know what I mean? Maybe it's like dating. You go, I'm not single anymore. Oh no, who am I? You know what I mean? We're all on parent. I'm a mom, I'm a, yeah, you know what I mean? And then there might be a lot of that. I don't know, but I do know that you have made it an agreement with some people who I, sounds like you like. I do, yeah. I think they've been very, I mean, they've been very generous to me with their time and continuing to hold these readings and then the invited read. You know, I think it's a really, their whole company is about creating new works. It's been very supportive. I think my fear is like, oh, I'm gonna disappoint them because the sort of initial part for me was maybe something else and, but I'm conforming to their idea to please them. That's maybe that's misrepresenting it because it's not totally like I'm only just doing their notes. I think it has been a good dialogue, but yeah, feeling just a little bit like in that weird blasé place about it, like how do you move through it? And maybe it's just you do it and move through it. I think, yeah, I think you, because you appreciate the collaboration, if it didn't feel good, right? If it didn't feel good, then I'd say get out. Yeah. Like that. It feels, it feels pretty good. So you go with it and maybe along the way you, maybe your next play is just very different. Sure. You know what I mean? And either back to the style that you used to have or a combination of the two, you know? I mean, my style has changed up a lot. I don't really sweat it too much. Sure. I'm just like, oh, here I am today, right like that. People have accused me of doing all sorts of evil, selling out, pandering to the man. I'm like, fuck, I'm just writing, you know? Right?  I don't, I'm not one of those people who is deliberately staying the same throughout her career. Everything I write is different. Cool. And that's just me. But, you know, it also feels right as I'm writing it. I don't feel like I'm being pressured to write a certain thing, even in work for hire. I don't feel, I mean, I feel slightly constricted because of the medium and the form and all the money that's involved. But it still feels like something I want to do. Right. Maybe because I pour everything I got into it. I think that could be perhaps part of it, is withholding something. Like let me just get over the fear of like it's too, it's too anything and stop putting two on it and just say, it is what it is. What's the... Yeah, it's yours. Right. It's yours. And maybe this one is different than your other ones. Sure. It's okay.    It came out of me and I'm doing the best I can under the circumstances, you know. You know, a lot of people like, well, want to lay that on you. We knew you win.  You know, I mean... I appreciate that. Okay. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. And we're your squad.  Thank you. And all your changes. I mean, I gotta say this, this is my soapbox thing and this is not Vincent, what you're talking about. But if in this culture we can, we lambast and we get on artists for selling out, for being different and different artists than they were last year, but we're welcoming to people who might want to change gender. Right? We have to be open and welcome to ourselves. We have to allow some of that generosity for ourselves. Right? This is who I am. This feels honest to me right now. You know? Okay. That's my soapbox. Thank you so much. I'm gonna get off my soapbox though. Thank you so much. That's wonderful. Thank you. Thanks Vincent. Thanks Vincent. All right. Next we have Emmanuel. Emmanuel, are you unmuted? Thank you so much. I can't hear you so good. Oh, you can't hear me? Oh, better, better, better, better, better, better. Okay, I'll just speak really close. So thank you very much for doing this. It's been amazing. So I am writing a musical and I've had a first reading and the main, so I love all the characters. But the main character, so the feedback is that we don't like her and then I realized I don't like her. The story, like it feels quite organic. It felt like that's just the story and that's just the way it is. And I was just wondering my question was how do you make a character more likeable? Is it, I mean, yes. I like all the other characters with all their faults and quirks and everything like that. I like them and I think that means that they come across as likeable. I mean, I'm just, I'm speculating, I don't know. And her, the main character, like everything happens to her, I guess. And so we don't necessarily, yeah, I don't like her very much. I like her but I don't like her. I mean, she is what she is but I don't know how to make her likeable. That's a hard note to get. Your character is unlikeable. Yeah, I know. That's a really, that's a, I find it a tricky note and a note that can make it difficult to know what to do. You know what I mean? Because we don't wanna turn all her frowns, all her frowns upside down. You know what I mean? Yeah, she's smiling all the time. Now she's happy and she gives cookies to people and so she's likeable. I mean, that's horrible. But maybe what the note might mean is that we under, maybe your readers are not fully understanding why she does what she does. Yeah, I think that's... Okay, so yeah, so for example, another Shakespeare like Richard III, you know, he goes and kills a lot of people and people go, okay, he's not likable, right? But we have a sense that we feel him. He feels disenfranchised or out of the loop or made fun of. So he has these feelings and this anger, maybe. I'm not a Shakespeare scholar, but you know what I mean? So maybe you need to ground her actions. You also said a lot of things happen to her, which is tricky. So you need to activate her, have her do things to get what she wants, right? And to ground everything she does in something that is, well, that is grounded. You have to really tie everything she does to a real need that she has. Does that make sense? I don't know if that would make her more likable, but it certainly will help the audience or your readers wrap their heads around why she is doing the things that she is doing. Maybe the tricky thing is because the idea is that it's the outside pressures that are making her do what she's doing. Okay. That she's pressured into this way of being and that she thinks it's her idea, but it's not her idea. It's what society's told us, what her parents have told her. It's what everyone, and so she's acting, thinking that it's what she wants, but it's absolutely not what she wants. Right. So activate her, make it a real choice. Give her some real choices to do real things to get what she really wants. See? I mean, people will follow anybody, look at who's the president. You know what I'm saying?  She really wants that.   If you've made her passive, it's maybe she just doesn't have enough energy behind her. Okay, see if that works. Do it a scene at a time also, you know? Or you can have cards and kind of work with index cards and do some basic outlining and sort of starting to feel her. You need to really focus on, you probably focused on all the other characters, which we often do, and then we focus on the main character sometimes last. Yeah. Okay, now it's time to really focus on her and her journey. We can't hear you anymore. Are you saying anything? Oh, I said, thank you so much. Oh. Thank you for saying that. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. No worries. All right, next we have Anna. Anna, are you unmuted? Yes. We hear you. Hi. Hi. Thank you so much for this. I had a question. Can you hear the rhythm? I do dance theater. So the text is happening in between movements. All right, am I back? I'm in Mississippi. We have bad connection. So I'm wondering about how you build momentum with your text. So with your characters and how you use tempo inside of dialogue. Anna, it's tricky for me to hear you. I said, I think you said you do dance theater pieces with choreography. Is that correct? I can hardly hear you. Oh, she's repeating. I think I get it. You do theater pieces with dance in them. Is that correct? Maybe did anybody else hear her? And how do we, how do we work on putting dialogue within the movement? But I'm not sure if that is your question. So I'd hate to answer a question if it's not yours. Yes. Yes. I'm looking for your. Hey, Anna, maybe you can log out and log back in and we can, we can try this again. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Sorry about that. We've got about seven minutes left. We want to do one more and then hop back to Anna. Yeah. All right. Next is Saida. Are you unmuted? Of your character. Hello. Hi, can you hear us now? I think we were getting a delay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hi. Great. Okay. Go ahead. I know I won't. Okay. Saida, you're on mute. Okay. How about now? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Yeah. How are you? I had a specific question. I'm a, I'm a 27 year plus English and drama teacher on the high school level. I'm trying to leave some of the English alone and move more into some of the English. I'm a young woman. I'm a young woman, I'm a young woman. I'm a young woman show. And I'm just really interested in. Any specific instructions like Allah, Sarah Jones or Anna DeVere Smith, just writing for yourself. The, the creation of characters that you then feel you can play. If there's any specific. about 12 different stories of women of color throughout the diaspora and it's just I don't want it to all seem so vignetti and just people telling their story over and over again but really to give some life and breath to the characters and maybe show how women of color connect throughout the diaspora. Right so you have your your subjects right you have your subjects and I mean you you've mentioned Anna Deere Smith great you know to to look toward her of course you know Intazaki Shange for colored girls and you know that kind of beautiful work that has different stories from different women or different people you know it's okay if it starts to be vignetti I mean the thing that the thing that the thing that links the stories together is that they're all searching for something if you will or with Anna's pieces you know she's working through something or she chooses a particular community or a particular subject you know so I think I think you just write them like think of your your subjects you know this person that person the other person I mean they're are they fictionalized or are they real um they're all fictionalized and they're all talking about insidious racism and how we all function with white supremacy great great so I mean where do you know um are they all in the same place no they are actually I'm I'm here in the Caribbean and some of them are African Americans some of them are Caribbean and some of them are from the continent right okay so I'm learning accents and doing that in terms of my my my acting but in terms of my writing I didn't want you know people I didn't want to feel very preachy and overwhelming I still wanted to see beauty even though I'm taking on the animal that is racism right so yeah so I think I mean I think you're really there you do you have a writing schedule um well now thanks to you there you go I mean I I mean now that I'm just teaching remotely as well it just gives me more time with my own children and with my own writing so good I mean I've taken this COVID as a gift you know right well good good so you have a writing schedule right um so you do a little bit on an every day yes you I would suggest doing one character at a time so maybe you have a list of all the characters you'd like to eventually get to but you choose one uh woman at a time right and even if you write her one of her monologues if you will um just imagine what it is at first draft and then go to the next one so get a first draft of everybody's monologue mm-hmm and it might be obvious but to to get away from that preachy thing even though you're tackling big subjects you remember that first and foremost these people are people mm-hmm so we're I'm going to be more interested in the details and specifics of their lives than them telling me although this is not what you're saying but them telling me racism is some bullshit yeah because we could do that in like you know five words right right right so I want to you know think of for color girls I mean it was it told us a lot of things but yeah there are in so many different ways and you want to just keep coming uh and maybe someone one of them two of them 12 of them are not talking about racism right maybe they're just talking about yes they're they're not specifically saying like this is what racism is this how it affects me but I want the thread with all of them you know the way in which you know it's a strange bedfellow and how it impacts all of their lives mm-hmm great great just remember their people and get into them as people okay and what they're doing what their day-to-day is like okay right and what stories they have to tell you right right and and and and then sort of see if you can see common threads common themes emerging as you go along and you'll think of how to but get a first draft of each one of these characters yeah that's what I'm I'm almost there with that so I love that great great great great thank you I think it sounds like it's gonna be beautiful well you know you can only try it's true it's true thank you is Anna back I've got Anna she typed out her question to me out loud um she said she's looking for guidance on building momentum in dialogue how do you deal with tempo and speed of dialogue between characters and action right oh gee that's a hard question that's a hard question Anna no but a really good question um but is it did she say something about how she has dance in her pieces or was that just a she's nodding yes yeah okay okay so how do we deal with tempo and say it again Audrey please she said uh building momentum in dialogue and how do you deal with tempo and speed of dialogue between characters and action right right um so desire Anna and stakes are really really helpful okay so if I want like I want a pie for dinner really badly I might be moved to run out to the store and get it right I mean but but I might not be moved to run out to the store and get it because Cuomo I'm in New York City you know they said don't go outside today right so it's gonna what I'm saying is that how much your character wants something and how many obstacles they have between them and the thing they want that's one way um speed is also accomplished in dialogue speed is also accomplished after we've written a first draft or a second draft or whatever in trimming away the stuff that's unnecessary but that's later that's the second or third draft right so we don't want to really worry about getting the tempo just right in a first or second draft we want to allow ourselves to have a little fluff to have a little fat to not know all the answers right away okay and as much as you can um you're you're you're a choreographer also is that what you said no am I just making that up no you're a dancer you do me no I'm just making all this up yes is that a thumbs up that's you said yes okay um great I got it so you're a choreographer you move okay so as much as you can when you write something Anna a page or two of dialogue or whatever stand up and even by yourself say you got no fringe and you're self isolating or whatever you can take your your script your thing and read it out loud and when you start reading your work out loud you're gonna feel what doesn't need to be there right and what might you might need to add so it's just you so again it's about the urgency being really clear on what the stakes are and what the scene is about you know that scene with again Hamlet and Hamlet's ghost you know dang man we saw the ghost of your father oh shit what are you gonna do I don't know right I mean just be really clear on what the scene is about okay that'll help you trim away the excess that'll help you with speed all right and read it aloud for yourself it doesn't have to be a play for you to read it aloud it can be a screenplay a teleplay us a novel whatever you can read it aloud to feel the language language is a physical act it should run through your body it's not just something that happens between the top of your head and your shoulders right it's not a neck up kind of thing it's a physical thing and you should be able to move your language should move you I mean I keep I mentioned Shakespeare like 10 times today but that's one of those things that's really great about his work that it moves you to do things you know you can feel the movement in the lines which is very exciting okay so get in your body or get you stay in your body because you're in your body already you're a dancer well it is 604 604 okay should we come back tomorrow we'll come back tomorrow let's come back tomorrow amazing as a reminder if you want to sign up for class it's at publicleader.org by 3 p.m each day and you'll get a link for the zoom and we'll release next week's link on friday at three thank you guys have a great day keep washing your hands