Ranger Bill, warrior of the woodland, struggling against extreme odds, traveling dangerous trails, fighting the many enemies of nature. This is the job of the guardian of the forest, Ranger Bill. Pouring rain, freezing cold, blistering heat, snow, floods, bears, rattlesnakes, mountain lions. Yes, all this in exchange for the satisfaction and pride of a job well done. This is an important time of the year for the students of Naughty Pine. Well, I should include every living soul in town because there isn't a person who doesn't get wrapped up in this contest. What contest? Well, this is a very democratic contest that teaches young people the American way of life. Everyone's invited to cast their ballot for the candidate of their choice. What am I talking about? This is Youth Week in Naughty Pine. We'd better get you into the story right away. Here it is. Henry for Mayor. Let's go over to Naughty Pine High. Right now, the Naughty Pine High Band is stirring the spirit of the occasion with the Stars and Stripes March. Listen to them give their instruments all they've got. Wielded by the principal, only envy grudgingly yield the floor to the gentleman with the gavel. Two young people have more enthusiasm than the democratic and the republican national conventions put together. The time is here that you've all been waiting for. The nominating ballots have been counted and I have the results before me. There are two young men you've chosen to nominate for mayor. The first young man is Henry Scott. The second choice to run on the ballot is Thornton Newcastle. Now that the two top candidates have been named, please wait until I finish naming the other young people before applauding. Now for the Office of Treasure, you've nominated Paul Sands and... Hiya, Thorny. Congratulations on being nominated. You're acting pretty big now, Henry, because you got the most applause. I don't understand. Applause and cheering isn't what counts. The ballots cast on Friday will tell the story. You don't say, Sunday School Boy.  You're just what your name says, Thorny. Knock off the talk, fellas. Thorny, I don't know what's eating you, but I will say this much. Whatever it is, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Yeah? Well, you listen to me, Henry. I'm going to win this election and nothing you can do will stop me. Remember that. Come on, fellas. Let's start winning votes. Okay, let's go. How do you like that?  Henry, you should have taken a poke at him for that. No, that wouldn't get us anywhere, Mickey. He's all worked up about something. I'm sure I don't have the slightest idea what it is. Let's go over to headquarters and tell Bill and the fellas. Bill Stumpy and Grey Wolf will be proud to hear this, Henry. I sure hope so, Mick. Hey, the door's opening by itself. Pretty fancy. Rangers have automatic doors. Stumpy, why'd you open the door for me? Isn't very often that we have his honor the mayor call on us with his staff. Here, your honor, have my chair. Here, let me dust it off for you.  I'm not even elected yet. Besides, if I thought you'd treat me like this, I wouldn't want to be elected. Well, there's only one lad who would say that, pal, and that's you. We're only teasing, you know. Sure. I know, Bill. How'd you fellas find out so quickly? Oh, big news like this travel fast as soon as meeting at school break up. Hey, Mr. Mayor, I got a couple of complaints to make. You're not even in office, Henry, an old-timer has complained. And what is your complaint, Mr. Jenkins? Mr. Jenkins, who's he? Oh, that's me. I forgot that I had a last name and used it for so long. Say, your honor, you know that there are green and red stop and start lights at the corner of Locust and Main? Yes. Well, sir, the crazy thing blinks so much when it's green that it almost turns into a nervous wreck stopping and starting. What do you mean, stopping? Well, every time the green light blinks, I think it's going to change and hit the brakes. I stop and start ten times while trying to cross Main Street. And that's kind of hard on your brakes. No, but not nearly as hard as it is on the rear bumper of my car when the fella behind me tries to figure out what I'm doing. Henry, I'm proud of you and all I can to help you win. That is, I'll pray for you. Otherwise, I won't interfere because this young people's job. Now, Gray Wolf's right, pal. Our prayers and best wishes will be with you, but we're not allowed in this contest. Besides, any help we might give could be considered unfair influence. Thanks a million, Bill, Gray Wolf. You don't know how much I appreciate your comments. I only hope that I can measure up to the honor that's been given me. It's the next day now, and Henry enters the locker room to the swimming pool as he gets ready to work out with the rest of the swimming team. Hey, fellas, here he is, the new mayor of Nattie Pine on Youth Day. Hello, fellas. How's your leg, Shorty? Oh, fine. I got the Charlie horse pretty well worked out. Coach says another week and I'll be as good as any old fish in a pool. Hello, boy. We ought to be able to take Canyon City high without trying if you'll be back in form again. Oh, Shorty's in good shape now for the shape he's in. You better go, Mickey. Coach will be sore if you don't. You're almost ready. I'll wait. Hey, I hear around school that you're going to win. Almost all the kids I talked to are going to vote for you. How do you like that with the election just three days off? Fine. Hey, you don't sound too enthusiastic about the news that you're going to win. Oh, I'm excited, Mickey. It's just that I don't want to go overboard until the votes are counted. If the Lord wants me to win, then I'll win. If he doesn't, then that's all right with me, too. Let's go swimming. Thorny, we got to do something about Henry. Why? He isn't going to win. How do you know that? I got a plan. That's how I know. Well, okay. But you better get a move on. I know that two-thirds of the school's going to vote for him and maybe more. Friday's still three days off. Don't worry. I'll fix his wagon. He'll never catch even a single vote before I'm through with him. Okay, okay. So you've got a plan. What is it? This afternoon Dunlap's giving a math exam. Henry's got Dunlap's exam pattern all figured out. Yeah? How's he doing? Stealing exam when Dunlap's not looking? Oh, don't talk like a baboon. Henry never cheat. You know that. Yeah, you're right there. But how's he got Dunlap's exam pattern? Well, by studying Dunlap's test after he takes them, he also marks the book the way he thinks the proper test. He's almost 100% right. Henry's made a science of studying for exam. Not that. No wonder the guy's on the honor roll. But what does this have to do with you? Henry always guards his book like they're gold so nobody can see what he's studied. Now he's in swimming team practice. We're going to take a look at his books while he's working out. Did you wish to see me, Mr. Bean? Yes, Henry. Come in. Sit down. Thank you. Henry, I have here on my desk some exam papers that have been called to my attention by your mathematics teacher, Mr. Dunlap. Yes, sir. He gave the exam yesterday afternoon. I'd like you to take a look at them. What? I can't believe it, sir. These other papers are almost identical with mine. And yours is identical almost to a fault with Mr. Dunlap's questions. Henry, how did you find out what the exam was going to cover? And why did you pass all the information to your classmates? Mr. Bean, I haven't any explanation for this. That is, as far as the exam notes getting into the hands of my classmates, I honestly don't know how they got a hold of them. All right, I'll accept that. I've never known you to lie. I've made a study of all my teachers, sir. I go over their method of examination from stem to stern. Mr. Dunlap's been my math teacher for two years now. You get to know how a teacher tests in that length of time. Mm-hmm. Henry, I'd like to talk to Bill, since he's your legal guardian. I'll tell him you wish to speak with him. Never mind, I'll call him. Am I under suspicion of cheating during examination, sir? No, Henry, you're not. Let's say you've maneuvered yourself into an unfortunate situation. Isn't that saying, then, that I'm a cheat? No, I wasn't referring to that. The words leaked out about this, because I've already talked to the other young men involved. I doubt that you will stand the chance of winning the election after this. Well, now you have all the facts, Bill. I'm sorry this happened for Henry's sake. He's a fine lad, and I don't like to see him hurt. Then you're not establishing a cheating charge against him. I know, of course not, Bill. I know the lad. He wouldn't do a thing like this. He is the victim of a plot to discredit him. But I can't prove a thing. The others involved are boys who have had trouble before. You know as well as I do that the circumstantial evidence is stacked a mile high against Henry. I'm basing my opinion on Henry's outstanding record. Not only in scholarship, but, well, his moral standards. Well, I'm thankful that you're intelligent enough to see through this, Martin. But as you say, we can't prove a thing. Bill, who taught Henry the science of studying for exams? I guess I have. I learned the hard way in college. One time I studied my head off for an exam and flunked it. I studied the wrong subject matter. Partially because I didn't keep alert in class to note all the things he considered of value. I know what you mean. What do you plan to handle this problem? Well, I'll clear the record at faculty meeting this afternoon. But I'm afraid that the damage has already been done. Yeah. The word's probably all over town by now that Henry's a cheat. Henry's sure he's gotten into trouble. What's wrong with him? This sure changes my vote.  Henry sure is a disappointment. Too bad. Fine in. Hello, Bill. Have you got time to talk? I've always got time to talk. Now grab a chair and make yourself at home. What's on your mind? It's about Henry, Bill. You've got to help him or he's going to lose the election. Well, I'd like to help very much, but I think you can understand that I've got to stay out of the picture. But Henry's in trouble. Have you seen him lately? Sure. I've seen him several times a day. Then you must have noticed how down in the mouth he is.  But Henry doesn't know how to beat it off. Well, I'd sure like to help, but if the word got out that I was helping Henry, I'd hurt him more than he's hurt now. Adults have to keep out of this. I've already told Henry that he'll have to fight this battle alone. Everybody gets a soda. I'm buying. I feel to be mayor of Naughty Pine on Youth Day, Thorny. It's kind of feel fine now that I know I'm going to be mayor. I'll make you please magistrate, Norm. Good. Then I can put Henry behind bars for cheating on exams. Ha ha ha! He thinks because he cheated. Don't spread that around because it's only a rumor. What's the difference?  You know what I say about competition? Right, Thorny. If you can't beat him, get rid of him some other way. That's right, Norm. I have the feel to myself. It'll be a landslide. Hey, Sam, keep the sodas coming.  Just remember who bought them when you vote Friday. You've just got to fight back, or you won't stand a chance in the election. I don't stand a ghost of a chance no matter how you look at it. That's right. Unless you fight back, what's happened to you? You used to be a real fighter. I didn't fight clean. I refused to fight dirty even if I lose the election. If Thorny's going to fight with loaded gloves, then I'm licked. You mean you think he framed you? Sure. Some of his friends in a math class had the same answers on their test papers as I did. Why don't you go tell that to Mr. Bean? Ha! Yeah, I'm in a fine position to tell him that. Why not? I can't prove a thing. That's why not. Besides, it would look like I'm trying to pass the blame. Remember, it's my test answers they copied. I'm going to give up without even trying to win the election. Sure. What else is there to do? Everybody's been told I'm a cheat. It doesn't matter to them whether it's true or not. The damage is done. Well, you've got to help, Henry. You just got to. Yeah, I think you're right, Mickey. This cheating charge has knocked him for a loop.  Then you'll get in a fight and help him win the election? Hey, wait a minute, young fellow. Let's be careful what you say. Your choice of words is wrong. I don't understand. You said you're going to help. That's right, Mick. I did say that. But I didn't say that I was going to help Henry win the election. I... I still don't follow you. I told you when we talked before they wouldn't be fair for me to throw my influence behind Henry. Yeah, I remember you telling me that. The help I'm going to give Henry is to teach him how to fight fair in an unfair fight and win. You know, pal, if every honest man who ran for office would have quit because he was wrongfully talked about and plotted against, our country would be in sad shape today. Yeah, I know that. If every Christian warrior would have given up because he was persecuted and lied about, we wouldn't be Christians today. We'd still be in dark slavery and not have the wonderful story of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. Uh-huh. Honestly speaking, Henry, I'm very disappointed that you've let me down. Huh? Unless you're down. How? Ever since you were a small boy, haven't I schooled you in the art of fighting for what's right? Yeah. Haven't I taught you how to fight fair and clean and a dirty brawl and win? Yeah. You also know from the scriptures that nobody can be against you if the Lord is on your side. Yeah, that's right, Bill. Now where would we be today if the apostle Paul had given up? Chickened out, is the term young Americans use today. How about Martin Luther, John Knox, David Brainerd, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and hundreds and thousands of others who never gave up in spite of the obstacles in the path to their goal? Yeah, I know. I know. But how have I let you down? You've let me down in the fact that I tried to make a strong Christian man out of you. Henry, I thought I'd developed a strong backbone in your mind, heart, and soul. But I guess I've been wrong.  You're calling me a coward? That's correct. I use a lot of words to do it, but I see I got my point across. Henry, I think your backbone has turned to jelly. You really mean that, don't you? You haven't known me to waste time with idle talk? No, I haven't. Never. Where are you going?  Oh, boy, it sure seems good to see the old fire burning inside you again. What happened? Well, wonderful. Are you sure you want to have this out in front of half of the school? That's about how many there are in a soda shop. This is the best time. Let's go in. Hello, Thorny. What are you doing here? I'm chasing down rumors to their source. Rumors? What kind of rumors? About me. Those aren't rumors, they're facts. I think you've been misinformed, Norm. The rumors you've heard about me are not facts. They're fiction. Give it to them both barrels, Henry. We know they're facts, and you can't prove otherwise. The truth doesn't have to be proved, Thorny. But if you want some facts, I'll give them to you right now. All right. Fact number one. I haven't been charged with cheating nor did I cheat. Mr. Bean has cleared my record with the faculty. Fact number two. I saw all the test papers. Norm and Phil, your buddies, had about the same answers I did. How you managed to get hold of my test pattern, I don't know. Fact number three. I haven't been asked to quit school athletics nor do I intend to. Everything I've said can be checked with Mr. Bean and found to be the truth. Let's go, Mick. Oh, you should have heard him, Bill. When Henry got through, you could hear a pin drop in the soda shop. Well, it sounds like the old Henry coming back to life. Get in there and fight. And fight hard, pal. That's just what I'm doing. And I'm not through doing yet. Bill, the school paper's already out, so it's too late to get an editorial in it. You think Smitty would put my editorial in the daily paper? No, pal, but there's one way to find out. Right. Let's go talk to Smitty, Mick. Let me take a look at this article. Sure. Here it is. Wow, this ought to start a fire in your favor, all right? Will you put it in your paper, Smitty? I sure will. Right smack dab in the middle of the front page, too. Thanks. Thanks a million. Don't thank me. Thank yourself. What do you mean? Any young fellow who's got enough courage to stand up and defend himself? There's just a few lines that you're writing honestly from your heart. I'll print it just like it's written. Mr. Martin Bean has cleared my record in school, but I want to clear my record as it is read by each and every citizen of Notty Pine, whether I win the election or not. Every person reading this article has formed an opinion of me in his own mind. I affirm on my word of honor as a Christian that I am not guilty of cheating. I learned a long time ago that lying doesn't pay. As a Christian, I cannot lie. I have always told the truth, regardless of the consequences. Henry makes a nice defense here, fellas. What I like in particular is that he hasn't pointed a finger of suspicion at anyone. Listen to these closing remarks. Yes, I will admit that I would like to be mayor on Youth Day, but to me that is not nearly as important as my Christian testimony. I sincerely hope that the Lord will not be discredited because I have been. This decision is up to you. Henry fighting true spirit of the soldier of the cross and up to people and students now to see truth. Well, I hope that the folks hereabouts aren't blind so they can't tell truth from fiction. If they are, then we're in bad shape. Real bad shape. That's right, Stumpy. We'll get the answer Saturday morning when the mayor of Youth Day is installed in office. Gentlemen, here's honor the mayor of Naughty Pine. Breathless anticipation for this moment when I shall name the young man who will be mayor of Naughty Pine for this day. The students of the high school held their elections and all of the ballots have been counted. The results of this election I have before me. Ladies and gentlemen, the students of Naughty Pine High School have elected to the office of mayor for this, their Youth Day, Henry Scott.  I want you to know that your sincere presentation in our newspaper touched my heart. I'm firmly convinced that your classmates and schoolmates have elected the right young man to be their mayor. I think, come on in. Don't stand in the doorway. Can I see you for a minute? Sure. Come on in, sit down. Thanks. I have something to say to you. What are you so nervous about, Thawney? Is something wrong? Yeah, it's me. Henry, I'm the guy that tried to fix you on the exam so it would look like you cheated. I also lied about you being kicked out of school sports. I'm really sorry. I told Mr. Bean the whole story after I read your article in the paper. Well, you've done a fine thing, Thawney. I have? Me? Right. It takes a lot of courage to admit that you've deliberately heard a person's reputation. I guess I've learned something. That it's ability, truth, and sincerity that went out in the long run. I don't have much ability. From now on, I'm going to be honest and sincere. Hello, boy, Thawney. You'll find that your decision is the right one. Boys and girls, both young men learned a lesson. I hope you have too. We'll see you next week for more adventure with... Rangers!


Meanwhile, the Taraba State Police Command says it will continue to train and retrain its officers to ensure that kidnappers and bandits who have made the state their safe haven flee for development to thrive. According to him, the police and other sister security agencies will not rest on its oars until peace returns to the country in all facets of human endeavours. The State Commissioner of Police David Illoio Mono disclosed this shortly after representing the Inspector General of Police at Senior Police Officers' Conference and promotion event held in Jalingo, the state capital. Illoio Mono was to fight crime, particularly kidnapping in the state. With this promotion, I think officers will be encouraged and they will be happy that their efforts have been rewarded. So we continue with our in-house training, even though we know that being worthy of promoting to this rank is good enough for them to occupy some other positions. We will continue with our in-house training and ensure that they are properly fitted. Incidentally, they have been on ground to know the major crime in this state, which is kidnapping. And we are going to leverage on their experience and then give them positions of responsibilities that I merit their rank and expect them to bring criminals to justice. So I think they are going to contribute positively and ensure that this whatever goal we want to achieve in the state, they will be team players and be part of it. I want to thank the Inspector General of Police for considering officers who merit to be promoted to the next rank.


Dear colleagues, in May, ITU will convene the Fifth World Telecommunication Policy Forum. This high-level international event gives stakeholders from government, industry and the global regulatory community a chance to exchange views on the key policy issues shaping today's fast-changing ICT environment. Organized by ITU, the Forum is open to ICT professionals from all sectors, as well as media and members of the general public. Unlike some ITU conferences, the WTPF is not designed to produce outcomes with the binding force of an international treaty. Instead, it will foster productive discussion and build global multi-stakeholder consensus on constructive ways forward. The theme of this year's WTPF is Internet-related public policy issues. Through an opening strategic dialogue followed by three days of exchange and debate, the WTPF is a tremendous opportunity for all players to contribute their unique perspectives. The preparatory process for the Forum has been inclusive, as usual. It was led by an informal expert group that was open to all stakeholders, irrespective of whether or not they were members of ITU. The Forum will aim to find consensus on the opinions and a final report from the expert group. These perspectives can be used to guide ongoing global ICT policies, regulatory and standardization efforts worldwide. The draft opinions up for discussion in May span topics such as broadband, Internet exchange points, the multi-stakeholder governance model, and the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. As an institution, ITU has proved itself a highly successful, neutral global convener throughout its long history. We are firm believers that only open, transparent and inclusive processes can lead the way to successful policymaking. I hope you will join me in Geneva from 13 to 16 May for this important and stimulating debate.


Patriot Prime Reviews is a channel for adult collectors and may not be suitable for children under 13 years of age. Viewer discretion is advised. Now, onto the decals. And the set we're looking at in this video is for Generation Select's Grease Pit. And this is a set I have been looking forward to getting because this set is very Marvel G1 inspired. And if you follow my channel, you know I am a huge Marvel G1 fan. That was my G1 fiction back in today because living in Podunk West Virginia, I didn't have cable to watch the regular television show like everybody else could. So I am thrilled for this decal set. And this decal set includes one large decal sheet on foil backing and a smaller decal sheet on foil backing. So now without further ado, let's take a look at Grease Pit both before and after Toy Hacks decals. And welcome to Patriot Prime Reviews. In robot mode, straight out of the packaging, Grease Pit looks awesome. Yes, he's a repaint of Ironworks, but he is my favorite of the two because of his collar scheme. Now taking a closer look at the figure, he's got great paint applications. Purple faceplate, blue eyes, purple detailing there in the chest, some paint applications here on his weapon.  So when you position him like this, you add the gas tanks to the bottom so he looks like he has a flamethrower. Another extra piece he has is the gas station sign Super Gas Z1. This is a sticker, but it's not put on very well. That's a factory applied sticker. Little Decepticon logo right there on the arm moving on down. Paint applications there on the feet, and that is pretty much it. I just really love the collar schemes on this guy. It's very true to his original G1 toy, which was in fact the gas station base. And this guy's awesome. I really like Grease Pit. And there you go guys, there is one final look at Grease Pit in robot mode before and after. Now Grease Pit in robot mode doesn't really get a lot of new decals thanks to toy hacks because honestly, he doesn't need them. But taking a quick look at the figure, he gets a new decal right here on his shoulder. You got a purple Decepticon emblem on chrome backing. Now you have the option you could do that or that little one right there. He also gets new decals right here on the sides. New decals right there on the waist or the crotch area. Decals here on the hips. A little decal right there on the forearm. And new yellow decals there on the knees. And lastly, a decal right there that goes around the barrel of his red gun. And of course you see the decals for the gas station or the gas pumps that we'll go over later on. So there you go, there is one final look at Grease Pit in robot mode after. In gas station mode, straight out of the packaging, all of the collars from robot mode carry over and they carry over very well. They have a lot more roadways here. And I am really impressed how they took Ironworks's construction yard mode and turned it into a gas station. You got the gas station sign, Super Gasoline Z1 right there on top, and the pumps that plug in on the sides. That looks really cool. Now you got the convenience store section right here. You got some decals that look like windows. And really that's about it. That's the only real details you have other than the molded details and paint applications. Three decals. So there you go guys, there is Grease Pit's gas station mode before. And after. Grease Pit's gas station mode or excuse me, car wash mode looks amazing. Now the whole story behind the wash and roll car wash is this decal set is an homage to Marvel Transformers issue number 31. A pretty weird transformer story where Ratbat had created these car washes that would hypnotize humans into giving the Decepticons the gas out of their cars. Yes, it was the 80s. That was a weird transformer story. So it's really cool that Toy Hacks' design team created the wash and roll car wash out of Grease Pit. This is really cool. Now the first decals you're probably noticing are the new decals here for the ramps, which really add a lot of detail. And right here especially it looks like soapy water is coming out of the car wash and going down a drain. So that's really cool. Here along the sides you've got the types of car wash you can do. The super deluxe and basic. And then there's your stop caution go signs, clearance sign right there. There's the doorway into the car wash and the big spin rollers. And they go all the way back into Grease Pit right there. That's really cool. Side of the vehicle you've got the inner and the exits. That's on both sides. Here along this bar right here you can see inside of the car wash right there. It's a nice classic Marvel comic artwork. And on the back the same thing. You can see it's actually a control center for the Decepticons. Now right here on the sign you have the wash and roll car wash sign, which is a great throwback also to that Generation 1 comic book art. And it features GB Blackrock. Now GB Blackrock was the Marvel Transformers Tony Stark so to speak. This guy was a multi-billionaire oil tycoon that was pretty much in issue number 6 all the way until the end. So he was a major player in Marvel comics. And let's see right here on the gas pumps we've got decals right there on the top, the bottom, and there's a decal that goes right in the middle that separates them to make it look like there are two pumps and still one solid piece. Now the wash and roll has a terrible secret. Once you open up the roof here you see Ratbat. He is overseeing the entire operation and inside the hood is the machinery used to chop the cars up. That was a defense mechanism that they used on Buster Whitwicky. So that is really cool. Now if you don't want to have Ratbat right there, you can use these optional yellow decals. But I think that's so cool that they added Ratbat. I absolutely love that decal set and kudos to Toyhacks. Great job. So there we have grease pit in car wash mode after. The Toyhacks decal set for Generation Select's grease pit hits all those Generation 1 bells and whistles for me. As I said in the intro, I was a huge Marvel Transformers fan and getting this set, which is a great throwback to such an obscure issue, just really hits all the marks. Toyhacks, you did a fantastic job and it just amazes me the creativity that your team has for these figures. This is highly recommended, especially if you're an Avid Generation 1 Marvel fan. Now guys, if you enjoyed the video, don't forget to like, don't forget to subscribe, and don't forget to click that bell icon to get notified when I upload new reviews. Once again, this is Patriot Prime, signing out. Hoorah!


Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and you know recently I started working on my Radcast if you've watched the channel you know that I've done a few videos on them and As I was painting through them it came time to eventually decide on bases Now I really take basing seriously. I think that providing a cool-looking and interesting base Sets your miniatures within a world. It turns them from toys into something that has a life and an existence Beyond the tabletop so to me having a base that conveys the Geography the environment the place that they live is really important now I knew my force lived in Haish which in Age of Sigmar is basically the plane of light and Admittedly pictures on this were pretty scant I looked around through the books. I looked online There just weren't that many images of what Haish looked like it seemed to be there was a lot of deserts Floating rocks and crystals Well two out of three ain't bad So today we're gonna talk about crystals how you paint them and you'll see how they look on my army The strict techno man sir that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style I think crystals are a really fun thing to paint Because it's a pretty simple effect now. They are also often time consuming So just to warn you in advance depending on how many of these crystals you're going to do Well prepare to be stuck in it for a while I'm going to use the color blue today as we get into this But you can apply the same basic lessons to anything and any type of crystal any color that you would want So let's get into it So right away from the paint list you probably saw that this is a very very simple Effect and we're gonna start actually over here in my little image check out my awesome graphical skills The key is dark to light crystals are translucent So actually they become darker toward the top because light passes through the crystal and gathers near the bottom The upward-facing angles of crystals whatever is directly facing the light will be the light facet It's going to be very very reflective. It needs to be opposed by a shadow to mid The last and most important component is white edges because that's where the glimpse the light is going to collect Around the edges of this gem and it'll give it its characteristic crystal look So let's translate that now into reality I'm going to start and whenever you're doing crystals you want to just generally start with the lightest sort of color that you're going to want not white color the lightest hue so in this case I have my Blue-green mixed with a lot of white Once you've got those all base coated then you want to start sketching in your shadows And I found it's easiest to just start with the darkest shadows And you notice how I'm always pushing the shadows up toward the top of the crystal um And on the facets that face away from the light In other words the facets facing downward I also then put some shadow up top to get that shadow to mid transition Now here I'm working relatively thin. It kind of depends on how much time you want to spend on this You want to use about a layer type paint Um, you can do this all through glazes If you feel like you want to take a long time as a point of fact if I was doing something for competition I would do this completely through lots and lots of glazes But I have a lot of these to paint as you can see this is just one base amongst many So yeah, we got to get into it And the key is I'm just making sure every facet You got to work your way all the way around and every facet on the vertical part of it the shaft part of it as it were Has the darkest up toward the top Now I'm using a mix of the blue green And the uh dark sea blue To like that initial one was just dark sea blue by the way I'm using a mix of blue green and dark sea blue to then Uh blend that transition in between the two I'm also hitting other facets that aren't facing directly toward the light Uh to make sure that they have a little bit of color in the top You'll notice the key here is unlike how we normally think about these things The shadows always go toward the top So the top of the item is the darkest part so you can see how on the facets I'll push the shade up toward the top I want to take a quick moment to talk about brush control and movement When I'm doing this you'll note that I'm usually pushing up Right like my brush is usually pushing up And the wherever possible some of these little crystals are almost too small to do it but I'm pushing up with most of my paint strokes because I want the paint to Push into the area of shadow And so that way the most paint is deposited in that area And the end transition down by the lighter part remains the thinnest Again, all of these are about the same consistency paints. It's all basically a thin layer type consistency Now on the biggest crystals. I take some of a slightly lighter blue white basically my original base coat Or something pretty close to it and I just go ahead and reinforce those Now comes the first glazing you got to smooth this out. You'll have four rough layer transitions So you grab the darker color not as dark not my initial dark sea blue But something like a glaze of the dark sea blue plus the blue green and I just glaze over all of it Work my way around every facet and do one two Three glazes as many as you think is necessary based on how smooth you want this to be Okay, so now comes the time consuming part which is the edge highlighting Dun dun dun But don't worry you can do it Crystals are actually a great way to practice your edge highlighting because things shaped like this often have very pronounced edges And because they're usually exposed You can use the side of your brush and it's a great way to practice The appropriate amount of brush control and brush pressure to get your edge highlighting in place For this i'm just using pure Titanium white. I'm using a heavy body acrylic, but you can use any white paint. It's nothing magical I just H heavy body acrylics are are really great white and I would recommend everybody pick up a heavy body acrylic white But if you don't have those any white paint or white ink will work And i'm just catching every single edge all the way around Now we need to talk about the facets So remember the facets that face toward the light are going to be very bright Because they are a flat plane That is hitting the light and because we're painting specular highlights That is to say it's highlighted as though we the viewer are looking at something a real light situation That face that facet of the quartz crystal would appear Very bright to us very white It's like when you look at a car and you see that bright reflection along a polished car's hood Right, but if you move the reflection moves with you So all those light facing highlights. I'm going ahead and Putting that bright white on now. What happens if you make a mistake when edge highlighting? We all make them Oops, there we go. Look. I fat fingered an edge No problem. Take your original darker color So in this case i'm taking a little bit of the dark sea blue plus blue green mix and i'm very carefully Just smoothing out the edge line and you notice how i'm Working from the safe part out and you can work yourself to a nice thin line As a point of fact i end up doing that on a lot of this just to make sure all the edges are clean It's a it's a good final step to do my last step here for the this kind of for the for getting down sort of the base tones is I am reinforcing the white and i'm doing that with a little white heavy body acrylic plus gloss varnish Why gloss varnish because gloss varnish reflects white and white paint reflects white when you mix the two together What you get is an extremely bright reflective white You don't gloss varnish the whole gem Because you are controlling the light you gloss varnish just in the white So that that way It reflects a lot of light This is me just continuing to clean up other edges. You can see i'm using the exact same technique Just making sure that all my finished crystals now are looking nice and smooth And that's how they come out when you're all done It's a nice look in effect It's simple. It's just a matter of those colors One final thing if you really want to push it as you apply all these other colors and glazes You may have some of your edge highlights dull The white paint won't be very strong. So go back over and do one more pass with your edge highlights And now here we go. Here's all the finished crystals across the army I'm really happy with how these came out. I'm sure you can see that some of my blends aren't as smooth as they could be That's fine such as life when you look at them in the aggregate. You won't notice the individual Issues you'll only see the overall effect So there you go Give that a like if you liked that if you've got any questions drop them down in the comments below I always answer every question subscribe if you haven't already We have new videos here every saturday, but I really hope you did enjoy this one and as always We'll see you next time


Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kaley Iakina, your host and president of the Grass Root Institute. If you have been aware of anything at all, you know that we've been in a state of emergency for the last two years. As of March 4th, it will be two years since the president, excuse me, since the governor first pronounced the state of emergency to deal with the COVID situation. And that's quite a long time. Originally, it was supposed to be a 60 day emergency period. We're taking a look at this in depth today. Our topic is ending Hawaii's state of emergency. As you know, Hawaii legislators have introduced several bills that would limit the governor's potentially endless emergency powers. According to Malia Hill, Grass Root Institute of Hawaii Policy Director, the goal is to bring a much needed end to the state's economic and social lockdowns and restore the government's constitutional checks and balances. We're going to talk with Malia today. You've seen her on the program before, and I want to welcome Malia. Aloha, all the way from the east coast near Washington, DC. Malia Hill, welcome to the program, Malia. Hi, Kaley. So nice to be back. Well, you've been an important part of the Grass Root Institute for quite a while. When you lived in Hawaii, you worked on legislative staff and became part of the Institute. Then when you moved away, you stayed on board virtually at least as our representative up on the east coast in DC. What keeps you with the Grass Root Institute? Well, my body may be here in Washington, DC and very chilly, but my heart is still in Hawaii. I have family in Hawaii, like so many people I had to leave. But those of us who leave, we always sort of think one day I want to come back. And one day I want to come back and I want to, while I'm away, contribute to making Hawaii better, happier, more prosperous. Well, thanks to the technology of distance communication. You're here with us constantly on a daily basis in the islands, and we appreciate your policy work. You have been published here in local media, and you continue to do significant work that helps improve the quality of life of many people in the state. Now let's get to the topic today. Governor Ege just extended the emergency again through his latest proclamation, which is going to terminate on March 25th. At this point, it seems safe to say that we're in somewhat of an indefinite state of emergency. But there are a lot of questions about the law that allows the governor to make the emergency proclamations. What was it intended for and explain to us a little bit about that law? Yeah, because of the way that the COVID emergency has gone, we are looking at this statute in an entirely different way. But originally, we're all familiar with the emergency management statute. The intention is, as it's right there in the name, it's to give the governor powers to act quickly and to respond to an emergency. And you think of it as something that you need to respond to, obviously, times of war or military kind of action, but also hurricanes, natural disasters.  But in the last two years, over the course of the COVID emergency, we've seen that this law was not really made with the intention of dealing with a problem that is going to go on for indefinitely. The emergency statute, as it is, has an automatic termination of 60 days. And it has, as we've noticed, we're way past 60 days. And what has happened is that the governor just keeps extending the emergency and taking advantage of the powers that he has by virtue of the statute to basically somewhat usurp the legislative function. And we've actually gotten to the point where the governor's been extending this emergency indefinitely, contrary to the clear intent of the statute. And we've even gotten to the situation where some of the changes that we've been living under under this COVID emergency, things like changes in licensing restrictions for doctors and nurses, those kinds of things. People almost want that part to continue, but it's all tied up in these emergency proclamations. And fundamentally, this is just not the good democratic way to run a state government. Well, you know, it's kind of ironic that although it's not ideal to be in a state emergency, that has loosened up the government with regard to some regulations, as you mentioned, such as telemedicine and so forth. So here we are needing to bring medical personnel into Hawaii to deal with the emergency, but we have to amend the law to allow them to be licensed, sort of what we've been advocating for all the time, reciprocal licensing. And so that is really an irony. I'm glad you pointed that out. Now, let me ask you this. Why, therefore, is it a problem if the governor keeps extending the emergency? And now that the most restrictive orders have been lifted, maybe we need the extended proclamations to deal with these, for example, like travel, or am I being too glib about that?  But now that the worst of the lockdown has been lifted, it isn't impacting people's lives in the same way. So the question comes, you know, what is really the problem here? And to some extent, I'm afraid I'm going to have to be philosophical and say that, you know, the extended emergency upsets the balance of power. It prevents the people from having a voice in the conduct of the emergency. And those democratic principles still matter. The emergency, especially as it is now, the law basically allows the governor to exercise legislative powers, like suspending laws and creating new regulations for as long as the emergency exists. Now, sometimes that's good. We like what he's done, but that doesn't make the function of what he's done a good thing, you know, it's still problematic that he's acting in a legislative capacity. This is understandable for a few weeks. That's what the statute envisions. But two years, that's a totally different ballgame. You know, if the governor has introduced something that we say, wow, that really worked. What a great idea. And the legislature can and should just act to make that part of the law. You know, yes, let's make that permanent.  Probably this is for a different, a different program about the changes that, you know, would be good to make permanent that came from the emergency orders, but that still doesn't get away from the fact that the legislature shouldn't be shirking its responsibility by leaving these kinds of things to the governor. Sure. Well, Malia, you never have to apologize to me for being philosophical. There are times when we do have to be popular and take the popular will of the people into consideration. And so we do look to see whether the people want the lockdowns or not. At times, we have to be pragmatic and see whether there are good things that are coming out of the lockdowns in and of themselves. But you raise a very important question for democracy. And that is, are we constitutional? We have something, as you pointed out, called the balance of powers. And so the fact that we have one individual capable of declaring and maintaining almost perpetually a state of emergency seems to work against that balance of powers. And it mitigates not only the role that the or the powers that the legislature has, and those powers ostensibly represent the people, but it also mitigates the responsibility that the legislature takes or needs to take for what goes on. And so I think more people do need to talk about what you're raising. And that is the damage that is done to the balance of powers, which is an essential constitutional part of the way we do government in the United States. Now, back in the 2021 legislative session, there were already attempts to curb the emergency powers. In fact, there was a bill we were very disappointed that it ultimately did not pass. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yes, that was a HB 103, which basically was trying to create a mechanism where the governor would need legislative approval to extend the emergency, pass the 60-day time limit in the statute. As it is right now, the statute just says an emergency terminates at 60 days. And then it doesn't specify what happens after that. So the governor has, during the COVID emergency, just extended and extended and extended. And there's nothing that says he can do that, but there's nothing that says he cannot. And so far, it has been allowed to continue. HB 103 wanted to put a stop to that, and it did move through the legislature and was supported by a lot of different public interest groups, obviously the Grassroot Institute, also groups like Common Cause and even the Hawaii Government Employees Association were behind it. But the bill failed in conference committee for somewhat mysterious reasons. We've looked into it and we've heard that maybe it failed because of disagreement over how it was exactly that the governor had to get the legislature's approval for the extension of the emergency. We know that the governor didn't really want that bill to pass, so there is that. That is a consideration as well in the way it failed. Right. Well, I suppose it's a case of when we get behind closed doors. We don't know really what goes on in those conference committees. But whatever reasoning took place that led to the demise of HB 103, let's look ahead. This legislative session, are there any bills on the docket that would address the problem of indefinite emergencies? And some of the other issues related to it, such as emergency management, well, within the emergency management statute? Well, there are a few bills that speak specifically to our concerns. Most significant at the moment is HB 1585 because it's being heard tomorrow in Tuesday in the House Committee on Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness. This bill lets the legislature and an emergency either in part or in whole, which is an interesting twist, by a two thirds vote. It also clarifies that emergency powers have to be consistent with the Constitution and it creates parameters for the suspension of laws, including the requirement that there be a justification when a law suspended, which is pretty important for those who feel like some of the laws have just sort of been suspended for convenience sake. I understand that you're working with a team on some testimony for that bill in particular. And one of the questions that arises is what value is there in the legislature being able to overrule even just a portion of the decree of the governor? That's actually a very interesting thing. And yes, we were going to submit testimony on this bill, which we think for the large part is a really good bill. It takes some important steps to curb this indefinite emergency thing and to put a legislative check on the governor's powers. The reason that you might want the legislature to end an emergency in part is because phasing out some things, when you end the emergency, everything that was in the proclamation in theory would just end, including some of these things that we might like or that might require. If, say, example, you wanted to the legislature wanted to end the emergency on the whole, but there were elements of the safe travel system or vaccine elements, requirements and such that they wanted to preserve. This would let them preserve portions of that emergency until they could address that. Because all of a sudden, let's just say one day you have the safe travels in place and then the next day you don't, it creates a bit of uncertainty and problem. So you can see why having it end in part is useful. The other reason is that there's the possibility that certain funds are tied, especially federal funds, would be tied to the fact that you are in a state of emergency and so you wouldn't want to completely end the emergency in order to take advantage of that. So there are reasons why we wouldn't necessarily have an issue with partially ending the emergency and partially keeping it in place. That's not automatically a problem. For the most part, this is a good bill. I'd like to see some stronger language in the way that the governor would need to get approval from the legislature to extend an emergency because as it's written, it does let the governor extend an existing emergency. And I'd like to see a few more protections in place for transparency and for the civil rights, especially property rights. But it's a really good step in the right direction. Well, that's good to hear. And you're talking about HB 1585. Yes. I agree with you. I think that the fact that it's not an all or nothing kind of bill, the fact that it's not throw the baby out with a bathwater bill, but is a little more surgical than that makes it feasible. It makes it more practical and realistic in terms of trying to manage what's going on in the public. And more than that, it may allow us to retain some of the emergency features that have actually been good that perhaps in the long run, such as telemedicine, such as reciprocal licensing for medical personnel from other states, these things which in the long run may be good for why we can retain them a bit. We're going to take a break now. But when we come back, I'd like to hear a little bit more about what's going on at the legislature in terms of other bills and how effective you think they may be. I'm with Malia Hill now, policy director of the Grassroot Institute. We're going to take a short break and then she'll be right back talking about what the legislature is doing in terms of altering the perpetual states of emergency that one official, the governor, is able to enact. I'm Kilia Keena on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Don't go away. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Joshua Cooper and welcome to Cooper Union. We look at what's happening with human rights around the world and we invite you to tune in every Tuesday where we feature the voices of the people from the front lines, sharing the struggles for self-determination for the importance of sustainability and solidarity with one another to make the world a better place for all of humanity. If you can't catch it live, you can also look at ThinkTechHawaii.com as well as on Vimeo and many other places to catch the amazing shows where we hear from authors, activists, academics, analysts and artists who are contributing to positive social change around the planet. Aloha. Thank you for joining us for justice. Aloha everyone. Welcome back. Thanks for sticking around. You're watching Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kilia Keena with Malia Hill, the Policy Director of the Grassroot Institute. Malia, you were telling us about an important bill that would potentially curb the emergency powers of the governor giving the legislature more power and responsibility, thus restoring to some extent the balance of powers, an important feature in our constitutional form of government. There's some other bills that are worth noting as well. Do you want to comment on some of them? Yes, 1585 is the only one that's had a heatness up for a hearing so far, but there are a few other bills that have been introduced that haven't yet been heard. There's HB1416, which is essentially a replica of last year's bill. It's very similar to the one that's being heard already in that it allows for a termination of an emergency by a legislative resolution, and it has similar provisions about the suspension of laws and the emergency powers having to be exercised in accordance with the Constitution. There's a Senate bill, SB 3285, that's the Senate version of the one that's being heard in the House. And then there's a pair of bills, HB2121 and SB 3089, that are part of the governor's package. So the governor has sort of weighed in That's quite interesting. And let's take a look at that a bit because I find some of the approach of the governor quite telling in terms of his posture toward what the legislature is trying to do in turn to reducing the powers of the governor. Yes, it is interesting. It does have some similarities to the other bills in that it does have language about constitutionality, the state constitution having to, all emergency powers have to be in accordance with the state constitution. It has some similar language about suspension of laws, having to be justified and having to end as soon as they can. But the way that it deals with that real big question, the 60 day termination clause, is that it codifies that the governor can extend emergencies through supplemental proclamations, which is effectively what he has been doing this whole time. It just puts it into law that what he has been doing this whole time is completely okay and legal, which raises some interesting questions. It's almost like an acknowledgement that, hey, maybe this wasn't 100% okay and legal up till now. But, you know, now for sure, you can 100% do that. Very interesting. Yeah. And it does not, I think it probably goes without saying, but it doesn't, the governor's version, the governor's package bill does not have a provision that would let the legislature end an emergency by any kind of vote. We'll take a look at the battle over that. Now, it's also 1496, which deals with gatherings in public. Yes, there is a bill, you know, there's, there are so many bills introduced and, you know, it's a lot of them touch on emergencies in different ways. There is one 1496 that basically allows the restrictions on public congregations in a state of emergency. This has been a real tripping point of debate for people, especially regarding restaurants and bars and retail food establishments. That's specifically what this bill is about, allowing them to limit service to vaccinated persons or patrons with a negative test for a contagious disease. Very specific bill. But this bill also says it can, the restriction can last no more than 30 days. And that it requires legislative approval in either regular or special session, if you're going to extend it. So it's a real mixed bag as bills go. And it's interesting to see it as one of the ones that was introduced this year. Well, take a look at all these bills together. Would any of them really have an impact in terms of stopping the governor from extending, continuing to extend that is his emergency orders in the fashion we've seen over the last two years? You know, it's interesting to put it that way because while we've been sort of talking about these bills and the emergency powers and the emergency management statute in terms of stopping the governor, what we really, really want is a return to balance of powers. That's the real goal here. So it's not so much, you know, getting these mechanisms stop the governor as just ending the ambiguity of this 60 day time limit and finding a way to make sure that people have a voice in the way that this emergency is and emergency is managed via their elected representatives. So that's important to remember because there are several of these bills that do allow the legislature to end an emergency via resolution or vote, etc. So hypothetically, that makes it possible to stop these indefinite emergencies exactly like what we're talking about, but it's really, really important to recognize that it's a vote. So it isn't the, that it would stop the governor, it's that it would make it possible for the legislature to stop the governor assuming that the legislature does vote to stop the governor. So, you know, it's a subtle difference, but it's important because just because you passed this bill, let's say, if you are really, really watching into the emergency, the bill passes, it doesn't mean that that will end the emergency. The legislature could choose not to act, the legislature could choose to endorse the continued emergency proclamations. I think what you've said underscores the importance of citizens getting involved in the voting process. We have every legislator in the House of Representatives, as well as the Senate, up for election, this coming election 2022. And if we really want to see a legislature that is empowered to stand against the executive branch when necessary in order to balance the powers, we also need to see that we've got the right people in there to vote the way that they should vote. And so this is my plug, it's my commercial plug. Exactly, though, there's no such specific engagement. We talk about the legislature kind of giving up responsibility and handing it over to the governor. Well, the people cannot do the same thing when it comes to the legislature, just because the legislature is there, it doesn't give you an excuse to just check out and not act and not be engaged because the legislature will only act if people are engaged. Right. Now, at the same time, with all of this concern over the balance of powers, we recognize that there is a role for the executive. We do have natural disasters from time to time. There are other kinds of emergencies, catastrophic in nature, that occur. And we do definitely want to have someone in a position of power capable of acting on behalf of all the people. Now, do these restrictions on governor's emergency powers represented at some of the legislation going forward prevent the governor from being able to act when he needs to respond to natural disasters or catastrophic emergencies? Short answer is no. This is actually one of the things that does make it difficult to amend the law is that in all fairness to the legislature, they are trying to walk a line where they preserve the ability to respond to emergencies, but take advantage of what we've learned through the pandemic to prevent the indefinite exercise of executive power without a legislative check. So these are changes are very specific, really specifically tailored to address the shortcomings in the existing law. It's very obvious that when this law was written, it just was never intended to cover an extended health emergency. It's really designed to deal with these more immediate natural disasters, catastrophic emergencies that you're talking about, and that won't go away. You know, it's important to recognize we're really not at a place where we're able to construct the legal system that surrounds emergencies from scratch. We're doing this on the fly as a society. What we're trying to do is correct a flawed emergency powers act while we're actually using it at the same time. So that's quite an interesting dynamic as we advocate for constitutional structures, but at the same time recognize the pragmatic issues that need to be addressed. Now, I've got a question that I've been thinking about for a while. Many people have. At the Grassroots Institute, we're very committed to transparent government, open and accountable government. And so we were concerned when originally the governor enacted the first emergency decree and actually suspended some public records law at that time. Now, is there anything being done to fully restore public records laws and government transparency in general for the public? Well, you know, that's a very good question. You know, Hawaii was the only state to suspend public records law early in the pandemic, and it was lifted a few months later. But there was a lot of criticism. Grassroots Institute joined that criticism of government watchtower groups, common cause, civil beat of the governor for taking that action. It seemed unnecessary. This was definitely something that you would like to see a rationale for the suspension of the law. There has been a bill introduced specifically on that issue, SB 20, 29, 16. It prevents suspension of open records or vital statistics requests during an emergency. Obviously, that's a very good law. And I would like to see it pass. But, you know, there's no reason why we couldn't see protections for transparency added to whichever emergency management bill moves forward this session. It would be nice to see that element in there. It would be nice to see something that recognizes the need for greater transparency from those executive from the part of the executive and his advisors and the actions taken in an extended emergency like that.  One of the things you do as policy director for the Grassroots Institute is scour the country for best practices defined where there are states that may have solved problems that we have. Have you seen any of the kind of legislation we're talking about getting into effect in Hawaii go forward in other states? Well, you know, it's interesting you talk about, you know, trying to adapt and respond to the problem on the fly. And that is happening in almost every state. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, legislators in every single state proposed some kind of measure to address executive emergency powers during the pandemic once it started. It had different, very differently, different states have different laws. Some are already more constrained than the one in Hawaii. Some states have laws that separate different kinds of emergencies and who's allowed to act and why and so on. So a lot of them have different time limits. But bills were enacted in about nine, at least 19 states, 19 different states made changes to their emergency management law based on the experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. About half of them limited the length of time that a governor could maintain a state of emergency or they required legislative approval to extend a state of emergency. So Hawaii is not even very close to alone here. Well, Melia, I want to thank you very much for being with us today. Our guest Melia Hill, policy director for the Grassroots Institute of Hawaii. I'm Kili Iacina, president of Grassroots Institute and you're watching Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Network. Thanks everyone for being with us. Thanks again, Melia. Thank you.


I'm Dr. Irma McLaurin, and I have a very important question for you today. What are you going to do with your stock? I'm the founder of the Irma McLaurin Black Feminist Archive. My goal is to build an archival home for black women. And the goal is to solicit contributions from women who are activists, artists, scholars, ordinary women, but people who have made many contributions that often go unrecognized. So, what are you going to do with your stock? And I want you to think about all those papers that you wrote and published, the ones that you didn't publish, the poems that you wrote years ago, the letters that you have to friends who may have passed on to the ancestors, manuscripts that you've been working on for years, novels that are finished, novels that are unfinished. Maybe you're even an artist and you have sketches and drawings. What are you going to do with your stuff? Because here's the issue. If we as black women don't believe in the value of what we do, the contributions we've made, the work that we've done, the labor that we've done as activists, as academics, if we don't believe it's worth preserving, then who's going to? And down the road, when we haven't put our things into a collection, someone will come along and pull together all these loose ends and weave together a narrative of your life. And the story they tell may not be the story that you want told. So I'm inviting you to consider becoming an agent of your own self-preservation and to join me and make a contribution of your materials to the Black Feminist Archive. The Irma McLaurin Black Feminist Archive is a collaboration between myself and the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And it's also a collaboration with the W.E.B. Du Bois Center there at UMass as well.  What do you kind of do with your stuff? Put it in the Black Feminist Archive and make sure that it is preserved.


What is going on guys welcome back to channel critical overload here some time about Buffy the vampire slayer here in this video again here today So today marks the 25th anniversary of welcome to the hellmouth area on the WB network back in 1997 and of course this of course mean is the 25th anniversary since the Buffy verse has been in existence and been out there for millions of people to enjoy for countless years and Very first time we were introduced to the characters of Buffy Xander willow Giles Cordelia and Many other important pieces of a puzzle that came together within that first initial season Which was more long on the campy side, but then grew into this Monster of a show that has been riddled with a lot of important life lessons that still remain relevant today You have these great characters that you spend seven seasons with you had Sarah Michelle Geller Just portraying this absolute iconic character on screen this Complete reversal of what you are accustomed to seeing if you were someone who grew up with a lot of horror movies prior to that show debuting because that type of character that Buffy was was the type of character that and I think Joss Whedon mentions this That's the type of character you would you would see get killed in horror movies But I think this also came from the idea of wanting to flip that on its head And what happens when the girl fights back from which is what buff of the vampire slayer is essentially is and of course It does act as a very lengthy sequel if you want to look at it that way to that original film Joss Whedon was also a part of with Christie Swanson in the role But Buffy the vampire slayer again is 25 years old today and this show still is very important It's very relevant. It still is talked about in a lot of educational Environments of different podcasts exist for it. I myself do certain videos sometimes about the series and go into little Quips about it and I still have my intent of finishing up those reviews of the seasons I'm still on my rewatch at this point. I'm my new rewatch. I do a rewatch every year I am about to start season 2 of the end So after I get done rewatching season 4 I'll have a season 4 review up and hopefully finish out 5 6 and 7 and Hopefully start doing it just a lot more in the in the realm of this show and diving into certain things that mean a Lot to me about it I know I recently had a video about the body because there's so many different impactful episodes that relate to life and Just important things that everyone can take from these episodes and just carry on with you Forever and then still revisit this universe so many years later and have those same lessons Just hit home so hard because if you're someone like myself who grew up at a very young age Catching these last two three seasons when they were on TV And then growing up and getting to experience some of those things that those people who are older than you at the time Getting to experience it getting to experience some of that in your own teenage years and early adulthood that show Now more than ever just means so much to me as a source of comfort Buffy Summers is one of my comfort characters Sarah Michelle Geller again She does an incredible job in that role for the entire seven season run I know there are some people out there who think the show should have ended at season 5 I can say that 5 would have been a perfect end to the series But I'm not disappointed by the fact that we got two more seasons that means season 7 is good I don't want to say that season 7 is season 7 it is very It's it's very good at having its highs But also very good at unfortunately having some very major lows But then you have that incredible finale the chosen episode which I in and of itself Can't say that you know the the big massive cavern of Demons inside of it which we were told about was not really what was there is mostly just the army of Turkan With the first leading it that was down there And it wasn't this portal because I know in the earlier season they described the hellmouth as being a portal between earth and several Hell dimensions I would like to know wearing that cavern a portal was or if that's just was completely ignored because we Basically got a giant cave underground with a lot of demons in it which made for a very impactful emotional and very Full circle finale with some very important arcs for Buffy coming full circle This whole theme of her just feeling like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders being lifted After so many seasons of feeling like that feeling alone in the fight against evil and she has this look ahead of her With that smile she gives it the end of the episode with that look of knowing that she now has a chance to live Hopefully what is somewhat of a normal life I guess if you want to call it that fighting demons but not having to worry about being in it alone and the characters that we got introduced to along the way these new slayers like Faith played by Eliza Dushku and Just the characters like Kendra played by Bianca Lawson and These other different vampires we got introduced like Angel played by David Borey Nas and then Spike played by James Masters so many characters that have per very incredible arcs and character progressions throughout the series but People I'm thinking of right now in particular are spike Cordelia Anya and Spike Cordelia Anya, I can't think of the other person Buffy's one of them spike Cordelia Anya Buffy and Yeah, I'm going blank on who the last person was but I put out a tweet about it earlier today But those characters that I'm thinking of they are Characters that I feel like have such great progressions because they start off in these kind of Evil do or type of roles. I'll just say Mostly that being spike and Anya Cordelia is more along the sides of just being a mean rich girl but then they grow into these Symbols of heroism and they get there they get these heroic moments that kind of just speak to How far they've come and it's so beautiful to see when it happens for all of the characters when it does happen and It just is it speaks to a lot of the fact that life is a journey where you start isn't always what matters But where you end will be Probably something that a lot of people will remember you mostly for and the stuff in between will be talked about of course But it's not how you start it's how you in and I think those character progressions with certain characters who were very evil in the start But finished out very positive and very heroic in the end that speaks to a lot of what Buffy is all about Which is navigating life But using demons and all these other monsters as metaphors to represent certain life problems like we get in season one The way the story were structured for the other seasons with the monster of the week but you have this ultimate big bad that was going over the entire season culminating into a Satisfying finale most of the time And I think that's what a lot of TV shows today struggle with because I know that TV shows today They don't really know how to handle a season that's 20 episodes long They will have episodes that feel like filler the kind of just going through the motions None of the episodes feel important, but shows like Buffy and Angel they did it so tremendously in the late 90s Early 2000s a lot of other shows prior to that But I think a lot of TV shows couldn't do that anymore So now we have this 12 arc eight episode arc stuff that we get these days But I just want to come out here and kind of geek out about Buffy since it's the 25th anniversary And go over how important that show is to me and talk about some characters of mine that I think are very important Let me know just think about this down in the comment section below if you have a record Make sure you subscribe turn on post a case your name is a video in the description I've linked some social media accounts on Facebook Twitter and Instagram You can message me there of course limiters any movies and those are reviews You like me to cover in the future and without any mind guys. I will see you in the next video


Hi, so my name is Will, I'm Will Rax on GitHub and Twitter if you're interested, recently moved to London from Australia. So I work for a company called AlphaSites and you can find us there at engineering.alphasites.com. So we use Ember, we use Ruby, we have a little bit of React, we have some Elixir, so we have a whole wide range of technologies that we use. We kind of operate on the similar to Netflix, so you can kind of choose the technology as long as you are ready to own that technology and kind of, you know, vouch for it and convince other people to use it. So we're a pretty fun and interesting company to work for. Of course we're hiring and we have cookies literally and we have apples and things like that as well if you're into that. So I wanted to talk to you today about Ember CLI Mirage. So I wanted to kind of cover what Ember CLI Mirage is, why it exists and how you can use it. So what is Ember CLI trying to solve? Well basically with most Ember applications you're going to need some sort of data that feeds into that application. So whether you're using Ember data or something else to fetch that data, you usually have like a Rails API or an Elixir API or a Node.js application that's serving data to that. And this is kind of like a typical setup for an application. So you have your client and then you have your API on the back end. But this kind of poses a little bit of a problem for development or at least initial development. So one of these, or both of these things kind of have to exist for the other to exist. So it's very hard to build a front end application without an API running on the back end. And again, it's very hard to kind of work with your API when it's hard to see those details kind of happening and happening, occurring on the front end of your client. So we kind of have these two options for, well we have three options for kind of dealing with this issue of how, well where do we start? It's like a chicken or the egg type of thing. So the first one is we build out our API but then we have to spend weeks building out this API or a week or so, building out this API before we can jump into our client. And that doesn't kind of lend itself to parallel working.  So the two options from there are kind of server mocking and client mocking. So by server mocking I mean you build your API but you don't worry about any of the implementation details of your business logic or anything like that. You just have it serve these kind of dummy objects. They're just objects that are representative of the data that you will eventually provide to your front end. But this kind of has some issues, right? It kind of doesn't, it's not portable for one. It's not shareable easily across teams. It also means that data gets out of sync quite quickly. So if you're not keeping your objects up to date on your back end, then they're not up to date on the front end either and what you're expecting. And it also means as your team is building out the functionality in the back end, the objects may fall out of sync there. But as I said, the kind of big issue about that one is it's not portable at all. So you may have your front end people working on that and then they have to get this whole Rails application running or Node application running. They have to keep that in sync, they have to run this whole server infrastructure, which doesn't lend itself to quick iteration in the beginning, which leaves us with client mocking. So what do I mean by that? You might use fixtures, for example. But this, again, has some kind of issues. Data gets out of sync quite quickly. It's not very portable across apps. So both of these options, while they have their pros, they also have their cons which carry them. So what is the ideal situation for this? So what is the ideal solution that we would expect to kind of solve here? Or solve this issue with? Well, in an ideal world, we would want conventions. So we would want a convention that we can say to our team, to our developers. This is how we do our testing. This is how we build out and mock our objects. And this is the library that we use. These are the type of tools that we use as well.  You'd also want some sort of fixtures or even factories would be ideal as well. So you'd want to be able to recreate data on the fly. You don't want to concern yourself with generating these objects every time. So say you need 10 of one thing. You don't want to go and then spin off like 10 different objects, trying to look after the IDs are different. You might want different names because you have presence validation or uniqueness validations rather. So we would also want routes. So we'd want to say this is what our application gets and this is what we want to serve back to it. So something like pretender and then all of these things put into pretender. And we also want like a database. So we want to be able to manipulate this data in some way and then send it back into our ember data or into our application. So this is our pipe dream. So this is basically what Ember CLI Mirage provides us with. So it was created by Sam Selikoff. He works at TED and he started Ember CLI Mirage and it's up on GitHub and you can find it under his account there. So what does Ember CLI provide us? Well, you saw the list before, so really it gives us these things. It gives us a set of conventions that we can pass down to our users or to our developers rather. It gives us fixtures and fixtures, that should say factories. So it gives us fixtures and factories that we can use in development and test environments. So they're easily portable, they're set in one file, easily reusable across the whole app. You create them once and you can use them in a variety of routes. So it also gives us a configuration file where we can actually say, like these are the endpoints that our server is going to hit. This is the data manipulation I want to do. And then that feeds it back into the Ember data or whatever thing that you're using. And I'll kind of go into a little bit more detail on how that works, because it's a little bit of a concept to get your head around. But it also gives us a database to use. So it has its own internal store where we can store data, reuse data and manipulate data as well. So this is kind of what our front end development thing begins to look like now. So we have our client and we have our API that exists within our client as well. And with Ember CLI Mirage you can opt to use it in development and test or you can just use it in your testing environment. So for our application, for example, in the beginning we used it for development because it was very easy to get up and running. And we could kind of build out what the Ember application was using. And then we switched that off when we used our, or when we got onto our Rails API and now we just use it for our test environment, which is very good. So I've built a bit of an example application that I kind of wanted to walk through and just show you how we've used or how we've implemented some features of Ember CLI Mirage in this very basic application. I'm assuming zero knowledge of Ember CLI Mirage, sorry. So these are very basic examples and there's a lot more that you can do with it. So is that way too small? Okay, so the application itself- I'm not full screen, wait, I'll turn on all this. I can't go any longer. So the basic premise of this app is that it displays a list of movies. It's really simple. It's nothing like IMDB. Basically it's just a page, you have a list of movies. There's an input form and you can fill it in and things like that. You might notice I'm not using the new input things as shown before. So this is our main page. It's only a one page or a one template application. This is the model for the movies themselves. So each movie has a name, a rating, and a trailer link and that can be YouTube or whatever. And the two things that I'm going to do with these movies, so the two actions that I'm going to hit on them, I want to get a list of movies and I also want to post back to movies to create a new movie. So if I was to run Ember server, which I've done here, so it's running, and then load up the application, can you see that? You might notice an error down the bottom here saying Mirage. You remember app tried to get my API awesome company slash movies, but there was no route defined to handle this request. So straight away, Mirage is kind of guiding us in what to do. So what's happened here is the app is loaded. It's gone through the normal Ember stuff. There is a fetch to fetch the actual movies in my movies route. So I've gone store find movie and then that's gone and Mirage has kicked in, or pretender through Mirage has kicked in and it's discovered that there is nothing to return or there's no actual mock for that endpoint. So this is an example of Mirage working in development mode, which is the default setting. So what I can do is when you generate a new Ember CLI Mirage setup, it generates a config file for you. And this is where you set up what the routes for your application are. And this is kind of where you have to touch on this separation of the client and what Ember CLI Mirage is actually providing. I'm going to call it Mirage from now on. So Mirage is really, it's very agnostic towards what you're using for your data store, so it doesn't care if you're using Ember data. It doesn't care if you're using anything else like that other one that exists. But I can't remember the name of, because it's separate from all that. It doesn't insert directly into Ember data or anything like that. All it does is mock what your RAIL server or your node server may look like. And that becomes evident when you look at the factories that are created for this particular movie. So you'll notice here the trailer link in particular, it's not the camel case that normal JavaScript would be. And that's because in my adapter, I'm using the active model adapter, right? So that, by default, from RAILs will send a key that looks like trailer underscore link in the usual snake case. So there's that difference between, or once you kind of get the concept that the data store within Mirage and the data store within your Ember app is different, then it kind of becomes a lot easier and it makes a lot more sense in how it fits into your development and test workflow, which is one of the reasons why Mirage is. So portable across different apps. So if you have different apps that use different APIs, it's quite easy to just bundle this kind of Mirage configuration into a separate node module or a separate set of files where you can just import into your application, get up and running straight away. So if I wanted to get rid of that error, I would just need to comment this line out, the app will rebuild. And what I'm saying here is Mirage will read in this config file and it'll actually evaluate that get slash movies into a mock, sort of interpret and send it through to pretender. And what it's actually going to do is it's going to say when I hit my API, so at the moment Mirage is acting as my API. When I hit my API with slash movies, I want to return the movies from my data store. So in development mode, this is going to spin off and create some movies. And you can see here that it's done just that. And these are all the movies, so it's just Lorem Ipsum. So some things to note that Mirage comes with in regards to these factories. So what it's doing is it's creating a list of factory of movies. It's putting that into Mirage's data store and then it's sending it to my application through the API request, which is then populating it at Ember data. So Mirage comes with Faker as well. So you can use Lorem Ipsum, you can make up company jargon. You can do all types of anything really that Faker can do. If you're not familiar with Faker, I'd definitely check it out because it's extremely useful for creating unique records. The other thing you can do, you can just assign straight values so you can go five or you can say 10 or you can do 50 or whatever these can be strings or anything. The other thing you can do is you can use this kind of sequencing. So if you're familiar with Factor-Go, with Rails, they have a sequence method. So this is a very similar thing. So it passes in I, which will be the sequence of the list. And then you can actually tag that onto the end here. So you're making unique records. So you can either use Faker or you can do this. So I think before I had something like like that to make a unique name before I switched to Faker. And I'll just revert all of this. So now if I load my application, we have the movies there as well and they're all listed neatly. So now the next step would be to create a movie, right? So I can go Jurassic World. I'd give it a rating of 10. Oh, great. We'll just ignore that for now, I must have. But then if I hit save, we're going to get that a very similar error to before. So my Ember app tried to hit post movies, but there was no route defined to do this request. So what I can do is I can uncomment this. And now I've set up a route or I've mocked a route that will take that post to movies. It will manipulate that data. So when you do this, you get access to the DB. So Mirage's internal store. And you also get access to the request that was sent from Ember to your API.  Then what I do is you create a movie. So you create an instance of the movie in Mirage's store. So in Mirage's database. And this is so I can reuse it later if I need to. Say you're doing relationships or something like that. You can kind of get as tricky as you want in there because remember this isn't Ember data's internal store. It's Mirage's internal store. So in here you would do things that your server implementation would do. So say you in your like ideal API, you would create a new movie. It would go off and like aggregate scores from different websites. It would actually try and get the trailer link. It might do some fancy stuff. Well here you can implement that same logic and then just return what your Ember app expects to get returned. Does that make sense to everyone? Cool. And then I just need to return. I need to return the movie and then the movie object as well. So far this is just exactly what my API return in the active model serializes fashion. I believe that there is actually an option for Mirage to supply this stuff by default. But I kind of wanted to demonstrate that you can get in to the gritty details of how you want your server and you can do a deep data manipulation and things like that. So with that now if I save my movie, now it gets added there to the end of the list. Just ignore the fact that the name's not showing up. It does work in reality. So what this also allows us to do is use Mirage in a test environment. These tests may fail now because stuff's broken everywhere. But if I show you a quick example of a test, so this is a test for movies. So we do a couple of tests. We're testing that the first test we'll do is test that the current path is movies and everything loads. That's just a basic test. But here we're gonna actually fill in a movie into the input form that you saw earlier. So you can see here that I am just filling in each input with different kind of information. So with the rating, the trailer, the name, I'm clicking the button. Then I wait and then what happens is that actually goes back to Mirage which carries out the exact same API manipulator or API response that we were doing for development and then sends that back to our test environment and the test passes, yes. So then, and if you want proof, I can make it fail as well. I hope it fails, yeah. So CLI Mirage makes it really easy to kind of create this development environment that you can use in your test environment straight away as well. So you're kind of killing two birds with one stone. So kind of like more, or another test here is that we wanna test that each movie is, or if we load the default page that the movies that already exist in the database are populated onto the page. So there's an example of this here where you see in a test Mirage will actually give you access to this server object which is direct access to Mirage's internal data store. So you can actually manipulate that and set it up from your test. So here what I'm doing is I'm creating a movie object generated from the factory. So I could create a list of movies and create 10 of them. I believe that's how that particular thing works. And then that would go off and spin off 10 unique movies which would then be used in our test. And one of them fails now because it was the first one. So I'm gonna do that. And then we just do a normal test there to check it. Oh, I have to change this one back. And then we should be green again. So yeah, this is just a very simple example of what Mirage can be used for. I would really highly suggest checking it out even if you're not using it for like development just for testing alone. It saves a ton of time in being able to create the factories for one, the configuration file and just having it all tie in neatly. It makes it a ton easier. Does anyone have any questions about Mirage or my application? How did you solve Mirage? How many pictures to generate? In development? Yeah. Yeah, I knew that would come up. I can't remember. Yes, that's it, the scenario. Whoops, I knew I forgot something. So Ember and Mirage has this idea of scenarios. So at the moment you can only load in one scenario which is this default scenario. But in the future you'll be able to create a scenario for say in the instance that we have 100 movies and we wanna paginate, then you could easily run that. Then yeah, you can just set up your factories and your store from there. So I could change this to one.  And then it will load in that scenario, create one factory for me in my Mirage server. When my Ember app goes and hits that Mirage API, it'll return that one object. Do you choose audience? No, so the moment there's only support for one. So it'll only load the default one. But in future the plan is to have multiple scenarios. So you can easily just spin up like different situations for your app. Any other questions? You should have started off with the element, but Mirage, do you stop now that you've got the API you're knocking anymore, does that... Sorry, so... Well, because it's done now, why do you stop once you... So we just use it for tests now. We stopped using it on the development side. Is that the question? Why did we stop using it on development? Yeah, so the complexity of the app itself was the way the app works but actually uses another app and then talks to that and then sucks in data and then sends it back. The complexity of that, it's things like RabbitMQ and then there's all this other data that gets populated from the other side and it just became testing it. We needed to test that the flow kind of worked right through to the app. So it was more an application-specific thing where it was just like we made the decision to go, okay, now we need to start using the app in development with the full suite of tools of other applications. In an ideal world, it'd be awesome to use Mirage the whole time but yeah, it wasn't just a simple case of serving this API, unfortunately. Yeah. Can I run my tests to get to each of the old versions? I... With fixtures. Sorry? With fixtures you can do whatever you want. Yeah, fixtures, yeah, you're fixtures, because you could create... Yeah, you could create a fixture that represents a different version of that object from a different API endpoint. You can use this, you can use this, yeah, yeah. How far off is that, does it look like at the moment? I'm not sure. Yeah. Like, so one thing about Sam is he's been actively like, this thing is, he's been adding more and more as he goes and is actively developing it. So I think he uses it at work, well, I would assume he uses it at work quite often. He has a ton of ideas so he wants to do more things on relationships so at the moment, relationships are quite difficult. Well, they're not difficult, they're just a bit, yeah. They, yeah, they're manual, that's the word. So you have to create each object and then assign the IDs to it when you create it in your test. So you saw before how a server create movie. So if that had like comments then I would create my comments first and then I would assign those comments to the movie internally. But he has this whole idea of being able to do that in the factory. So very similar to factory girl. The next step in your task, Sam told me, was creating a small R&M. So the factories are closer to what factory girl does and knows how to create associated records. So having quite small factories will lead to maybe less typing, you know, if you can create user or create movies with comments like a trait in a factory girl and create, it espouses 10 comments for each movie. Yeah, it's been really good. The other thing that you don't have to do is you don't have to, so in another application that we have at work they have to manually build their objects in their tests each time, which they no longer have to do. So they were able to like rip out a whole bunch of test code. So yeah, any other questions about Mirage? Yeah, I was wondering, does it ship with any test helpers for like asserting that the right thing goes over the wire in a particular test? Because it looks like in Mirage itself you could check that the parameters that came through were the expected things or like fit criteria. But sometimes it's quite nice in a test to be able to say, you know, I took this button I expect to see exactly this payload go over the wire. Is there anything to help that with that? Yeah, I see, like to check. So that it actually calls the API you mean or? Just like something that could say, I know, hook into Mirage and say, when you're processing this request, give it to me so I can run these assertions first. Right, right, right. Not that I've used. Yeah, you can. You can? Okay. Because inside your test you can define groups. Groups, like you do on your profile. Oh, and Mirage? Yes, so basically the same thing you have on your profile, you specify a small server dot, I think server dot map or something like that.  Inside this function, you can use the assertions because it's your type of data. So the server object that you get access to is kind of like the God object in Mirage. You can get access to the adding routes, the database and all types of things. And it's up to you to spin it up and set it down again in your test. It's not something you need to spin up. It's just there. It's just, am I supposed to put it in there? How do you make sure that it's not carrying any state from test to test? No, no, no. How does it make sure that it's, maybe you have been in a new server on before its test, okay? This is wiping everything. Nice. Cool. All right, thank you very much. No problem.