I'd like to welcome you all to Building How. We're going to learn how to run some Ruby code with our voice today. It is kind of a lot of fun and also terribly difficult. So I hope you will forgive me when probably all of my demos fail. But maybe one of them will be funny to make up for it. So I am Jonan. I live in Portland, Oregon. I go by the Jonan Show on Twitter. You can find me there. I don't properly live in Portland. I actually live in Beaverton, which is a very big deal if you're from Portland. Is anyone here from Portland? Except Jason, I know. Yes, we have a couple of other Portlanders here. If you are not from Portland proper, you live outside of the city limits in one of the burbs of Portland. And you call yourself a Portlander, you are very likely to be forcibly tattooed with an owl by the Hipsters Union. So please, nobody tell them that I said that. I am actually from Beaverton, and I apologize. I work for a company called Heroku. They invented the color purple. You may have heard of it. They're quite kind to me. They send me to fancy places like Cincinnati to come and talk to people and attend conferences. And I love it. So use Heroku and things. If you have questions about Heroku, I'm always happy to talk. So my wife and I, about a year ago, we bought our first home. We're very proud. And one of the first things that I wanted to do with my home was to automate things. Well, the first thing that I did, I renovated the foyer. So we have the ball pit here. This is kind of to disarm people as they enter. Once the drawbridge comes up, you need to calm them a little bit. So I started to do some work automating my home. I have smart light switches. And I have Alexa in there. And I can trigger things throughout the house. For example, if I say, Alexa, trigger movie mode. Sending that to ift. So I just turned off all the lights in the house and started Netflix. I think it's like 10 AM there. My wife is probably wondering what's going on. So when I started doing this, I wanted to do some home automation. And I'm writing a little bit of code here and there. But a lot of that stuff is already pre-built. And I wanted to get more into it. And I definitely did not want to use one of these draconian interfaces, this terminal, to try and deploy my code to production. The idea is absurd. We live in 2016. This is the future. We can just use our voice. And so I started to study speech recognition. And it was a terrible, terrible mistake. I'm just kidding, actually. Speech recognition is wonderful. But it is intensely complicated. If I were to talk to you for the next 60 days without stopping, we wouldn't cover it. So I'm going to glance quickly over some concepts. I'm going to start at a very low level and try and the opposite of what low level means in software terms. Very high level, I guess. I'm going to talk very simply about sound and about voice. And we're talking about speech recognition here. We're not talking about voice recognition. Voice recognition is my voice is my password. Verify me. You are recognizing someone's voice and using it to unlock a magic door or a computer or some such. We're talking specifically about speech recognition. So there are two major categories of speech recognition. You have isolated word recognition, which is the stuff that we've had around for a long time. So when you call up your airline and you say, I would like to check a bag. And they say, did you say cancel all your flights for 2016? That's isolated word recognition. And it's not very good. But it's simple to implement because you're just matching waveforms, essentially. You're trying to get the other human to say the word exactly the way you said it. And then you compare the waveforms and they match. And so you have an isolated word recognition system. And they're obviously much more complex today. But that's where it started. And what we're going to talk about is continuous recognition, which is the sort of voice recognition that Alexa does and many of the other devices we have today. So before we get into that, I want to talk very quickly about how speech is generated.  You went back and forth, up and down this swing.  I'm much taller than you, so this is fine. And as I'm dragging this up, that shape that we're making, that's a sine wave. It's probably a sinusoidal wave. It's not a perfect sine wave. But that shape will come out kind of like that squiggly line that I'm sure you've all seen before. The reason that I mentioned the low amount of energy that it takes to generate that is that it's the same reason that we have these, which is really just a great excuse to use this disgusting picture in a presentation. This is an endotracheal intubation. I really hope you never have this procedure. It looks like someone's being implanted with a robot kind of in preparation for the apocalypse.  And that makes sound, right? And we do it very quickly. So it's kind of like a throat butt that you use. If you want to think about it that way, all speech is basically throat farting. But so you can hear this sound when you say very low tones, right? If I say, ah, it starts to click, right? You can hear the actual, the sound coming apart. And those are the sinusoidal waves that we're talking about. So again, review for many of you, we're gonna talk about frequency today. The frequency is how many of these bumps we have and how close together, right? And when we listen to music or we talk about it in terms of what the human ear perceives, we call that pitch. We're also gonna talk about amplitude and similarly we call that volume when we're talking about what the human ear perceives. So a little bit of vocab about the words. We are coming into the words for speech recognition now. So this is in utterance. In utterance can be a word. It can be a couple of words. In utterance is what speech recognition implementers use to describe a sequence of spoken language that turns into a computer command somehow, something that can be understood by a computer. I say in utterance, computer understands, right? And we break those utterances down into their phonemes. So phonemes are different than letters in English. They are just the sounds that we use. These are the 44 different sounds that exist in the English language. And that may seem counterintuitive to some who didn't have a background in linguistics. So I'm gonna explain very quickly how some of these sounds come to be and specifically how even the same phoneme can sound different sometimes. So if I say the word bad or I say the word ban, that would be the same a sound, true? Kind of, right? That is one that on paper we would all mark as a yes on every test we've ever taken, right? Probably even linguistic students. But the reality is when I said bad, I made an a sound. And when I said ban, I made an a sound, right? They're different. And those are single sounds like that are called monophones in the context of speech recognition. So we're ultimately trying to break down to monophones at a minimum to start doing speech recognition on a particular sound width. And even better than that, we can break down into bi-phones because when either of those a sounds is preceded by b, it sounds different than if it were preceded by c or n or t, right? Bad and ban. So this would be a tri-phone. And tri-phones are actually what most of these systems use nowadays. So they'll break them down into groups of sounds as tri-phones and build a rather large tree that I'll show you in just a moment when we get into the discussion of hidden markup models. First, I want to again give you some quick review on foyer transforms. And I trust you're all comfortable with this. So we'll just move on. Everybody's got this. I'm just kidding. Simply other than this, to transform your foyer, you just remodel it. Oh, yeah, I was pretty pleased. Okay. So let's talk about foyer transforms here. This is the thing I heard a lot of people talk about and I assumed was far above my head and it probably still is. This is not something that I could necessarily rewrite from scratch, but I think I understand it. So if you have this square wave form like this, this wave is actually comprised of a number of sine waves that we can identify. And we can split out all of the sine waves that can be used to make this square wave form. And here's them splitting out. And now we can use these sine waves and the frequency, the amplitude of those sine waves to make a new graph that does not include time. We can describe a segment of sound without the concept of time, which is exactly what we want to do when we're doing speech recognition. We want to remove time. We want to put amplitude on one axis and frequency on another. And that way we don't have to worry about how long a sample is. And you can imagine that this particular strategy is not very helpful for a very large sample size, right? If I have a five minute wave form, not only is it very time consuming to take that apart this way, but it is possible to generate two different collections of, or two different square waves that could both be described by the same set of sine waves in that circumstance. So when we're working with speech recognition, the trick is to just use very short sample sizes. Generally is something like five or 10 milliseconds. We're taking out of your speech and we're using this foyer transform to analyze that speech and then to map it to a set of numbers that we can look up in a tree because we're trying to match it to something that we already know, right? So this is going to show amplitude and frequency instead of time. We've removed time from the equation. And the idea that a wave of any shape or size could be made up of a number of sine waves is kind of counterintuitive to people, but it's less counterintuitive when you see it like this. And that is that a sine wave is just a circle with time. So if I told you to fill the earth with golf balls, I think you can imagine that in your head. And when you ran out or you couldn't fit any more golf balls, I told you you could use grains of sand, right? And then we went to something smaller and smaller. You can see then that any shape that you can imagine could theoretically be made up of circles, right? So this foyer transform is actually quite difficult on a large scale. It takes a lot of computing power. It was the kind of thing that we weren't actually able to utilize until 1968, I believe. These two gentlemen came along, Cooley and Tukey. Cooley worked for IBM. I believe Tukey was a professor and they came up with a fast foyer transform. And I'm not going to go too deep into this because we have a lot to cover, but the idea of the fast foyer transform is to basically split the set of all of the waves that you're trying to calculate and thereby divide and conquer. So instead of becoming the order in algorithm that would be a foyer transformation, a fast foyer transform is order log n, all of the implementations of it. And there are actually a couple of different ways to do this thing. So I encourage you to look into it if you are interested. It is fascinating. Let's talk about Markov chains real quick. This is something you probably are familiar with where we can take English sentences and just predict what the next word is going to be based on the previous word, right?  And we start with the, for example, right? And then one of those options is the Jonan show, right? So probably like 0.001% over here of all of the human language that is spoken. That was really generous of me actually. I mean, I might even say 0.1%. So the idea is that we then go down through this tree and we build up a sentence, right? And you've seen all of these silly eBooks Twitter bots doing exactly this. When your friend has their name and it says eBooks after it, or some of them have horse in them, I'm not sure the meme, but the idea is these are all Markov chains and they generate text by just taking existing sentences and guessing what the next word is gonna be and they're often wrong in hilarious ways. So speech recognition does not use Markov chains, but they use something called a hidden Markov model. And this is code I don't really want you to look at. This is just constants.  And I'll show you in a graph form. So the part that is hidden here is the starting state. We don't know whether it was rainy or whether it was sunny. What we do know is that 60% of the time it's rainy and 40% of the time it's sunny. So this is probably Portland. We keep telling people it's 80% rainy though because it's getting a little crowded there. So if it was rainy, the chance of it transitioning over to sunny is about 30%, 70% of the time it will stay rainy. And then if it's rainy, we have a 50% chance of cleaning, a 40% chance of shopping, and a 1% chance of walking in the rain, which is glorious. And if you move to Portland, you'll get lots of chances. So this is very similar to what you know and love in Markov chains. It's just that the state at any given time is hidden from you. And that more accurately models speech recognition systems. So this is typically what they use. And that is the technical depth that I'm going to go into on speech recognition. We're done with that part now. It's fine. So again, these trees that we're building, they're not actually about rain and they're not about going shopping. They're about these monophones that I was talking to you about or diphones or trifones. We're gonna build a big tree of them and we're going to go and try and find the word that you said based on the sounds that we identified using a fast Fourier transform to match them up to samples that we already have or that we can predict exist. So one more thing we can do to help with that process is we can define some grammars. You can tell the computer what to expect. Just like those isolated word recognition systems, newer speech recognition systems like Alexa will take an input grammar and that grammar will tell them what to expect to hear and it will very seriously steer. Yes, Alexa, thank you for your help. They will very seriously steer the direction of that speech recognition. So let's make a thing. I'm gonna start off with Alexa and I'm gonna be using if. If is the same thing that I just used to trigger the lights to go off in my house, much to my wife's surprise. And we're gonna be using Hubot as well and I specifically chose this approach because it was code light. This is not a thing that you really have to code. If you already have a Hubot implementation, you can start using your voice to deploy with some minor caveats. But the plugin that you're gonna use for Hubot is called Hubot Deploy. It's written by this man Atmos. He works with me at Heroku. Brilliant guy, Corey Donahue. And Heaven is also written by Atmos. And Heaven is, so I'm sorry. Hubot Deploy is the part where you can talk to Hubot. Now I can tell Hubot deploy Steve to staging and it will deploy Steve to staging. Heaven is the part that receives deployment events. So deployment events are events emitted by GitHub. You go into GitHub for your repo and you basically set up a little webhook and you give it an endpoint and you say, hey, whenever someone makes a deployment, just let them know over there and it ships out a deployment event to that webhook. So this is the architecture of this system we're about to describe here. We've got Amazon Alexa and I'm gonna say a thing to it and it's going to use ift to trigger a Slack message. And that Slack message is going to be heard by Hubot. And Hubot is going to interpret that Slack message and it's going to create a deployment event in GitHub. GitHub is going to generate a deployment event callback for Heaven. Heaven is going to deploy the application to Heroku and it's gonna notify Slack. So it's simple, really. See, there's no code. It's fine, what could go wrong? Live demo, let's try and ship it. Okay, so I'm gonna show you the Slack channel that I had here, maybe. Assuming I can computer good. How do we go? Yeah, looking good? All right, so now, if I tell Alexa, Alexa, trigger deploy Steve to production. Sending that to ift. So that is sending it to ift. And at 1142, Steve got a message, deploy Steve to production. And hypothetically, Heaven would have said some things about it and Steve would now be deploying to production. So let's go see in our terminal here. Oh, this is great, I should un-mirror so I can see what's happening at the same time. Let's tail our logs on our Hal Steve production repo and see if Hal Steve actually restarted. Slug compilation started, slug compilation finished, restarting. Stay changed from up to starting. IFTTT is deploying Steve to production. Production deployment of Steve is done. That was at midnight last night and that's the message you would see now, but you don't because most likely network communication issues. But that is fundamentally how it works. You can see that it did actually deploy in reality. Let's just call it a success and move on, shall we? Thank you very much. And back to slides. Does anyone know why the mafia squirrel is the official ship at squirrel? I actually don't think there's an answer to that question. I think someone at GitHub picked an image at random and now this is an emoji that everyone uses to ship things. The nice thing about this approach is you can also use slash Heroku or similar plugins that are already part of your Hubot installation. You can send Hubot any command that you would like and Hubot can do sorts of things. So the one caveat that I was talking about is if is a user without a user ID. And so you kind of have to hack your way around that but it's pretty easy to figure out and if you have questions or you're actually going to try and deploy all of your production infrastructure with your voice, don't do it, then you should talk to me about it and maybe hire me for an exorbitant consulting fee. So Capistrano also has a plugin that you can use from Hubot, many other deployment systems. Anything that you can do with Hubot, you can now do using your voice and your Amazon Alexa. But you will notice that Alexa, when she spoke back to me, said sending that to if which is not a very interactive reply, right? I had to go and check for the heaven message that never came to find out if my thing had actually deployed and I found myself reading log messages and using one of those disgusting terminals like a mortal, right? So we have a solution to that problem. We can use a thing called the Alexa skills kit and the Alexa skills kit is a way to build skills on top of the Alexa platform inside of Amazon. So you can go into a GUI that I'm gonna show you a moment and I'm gonna move very quickly past it because it's terrifying because it's very GUI and small. Don't look at that, look at this instead. Oh, I made it so much easier. So this first page you're gonna be looking at, there's only one thing you really care about here and that is your application ID. You're expected to use this to verify all of your incoming requests and here's why. If I were now to have shown you this skill and I was not verifying that all of my requests came from here, then many of you would have just whipped open your laptops and started sending messages to Alexa on stage to help me with my presentation. I know you would have done it. You're probably still trying. But I am checking that that is the application ID that I'm using, yeah, don't take a picture. All right, this is the invocation name of our Alexa skill. We call Alexa, that which shall not be named because it will wake up. And then we have this piece. This is the meat and potatoes, right? So we'll walk through this here real quick. This is the intent schema where you describe all of the intents that you have on your platform. So an intent is something like deploy, right? I want to deploy a thing. And then I say, if a sentence looks like this, this part is the application and this is the environment. And those are the slot types that I define. I can have an application list slot type and I can have an environment list slot type. And those are types. I'm defining my own custom types in the language of the Alexa skills kit. And before you ask, no, there is not a way to do this outside of the GUI, which is why I'm showing you the GUI. It's really not as difficult, but I was not excited about doing a thing that I could not do programmatically. So let's look at an intent here. This is an example intent. This is the intent to deploy. I've got two slots here, one slot for the application and one slot for the environment. And I've got custom types defined there. I've got an application list and I've got an environment list. And I've defined the application lists to include Steve, Hal, and Heaven. These bars are just there to make up for new lines. They're not actually in the vocabulary that you need to make an application list. You just list them on lines in the little text input field and they show up here. So there's my environment list. I can deploy Steve or Hal or Heaven to production and staging. And then I give Alexa some more hints, that grammar that we were talking about. These are sample utterances. The sample utterances will also be used to give your users help when they ask what they can do with your service. So my sample utterances look like this. I can say, I first declare the name of the intent and then I say to deploy application to environment. So if I were to say HAL, or I would say Alexa, ask Hal to deploy to production, deploy Steve to production, then it would ship that off. It fires off the skill. And on the back of all of this, I've written a service and that service responds to these inbound requests from Alexa at this end point, right? So halrbproduction.herokuapp.com slash apialexainter utterances gets the message from Alexa of what was said and is expected to reply precisely with a well-formed request or Alexa throws a giant baby fit in quits. And the GUI is not my ideal form of inputting code as you might imagine, but it's not as terrible as it may seem except when it sometimes breaks for no reason that you understand. And I had one intense schema that was building for about 48 hours and I ended up having to delete it and start again. So sometimes these things are not perfect. My advice to you is to set up your intense schema and then don't monkey with it anymore like especially the night before your presentation. Don't change it. So let's try and ship something maybe with that. Should we try it? Alexa, ask Hal to deploy Steve to production. There was a problem with the requested skills response. Oh, lovely. So let's try a different application. Alexa, ask Hal to deploy heaven to production. I'm having trouble finding the application happened though it's clear you're trying to deploy to the production environment. I can't deploy Hal, Steve, heaven or lasers. Do you want to try again? Alternatively, you could become a monk. It's sounding better and better. Hal, wait, Alexa, send Hal deploy Steve to production. Alexa, ask Hal to ship Steve to production. Hal has deployed Steve to production, hypothetically. I'm not actually able to give you information about whether or not the deploy was successful because I can't deliver messages to you unprompted. That would actually be a terrible feature. Imagine if LinkedIn could send voice messages to your living room. You'd never stop hearing about how you're getting noticed. That's an excellent point, Alexa. So the one thing that is a downside to the Alexa skills kit is it can reply to you. It can give you feedback about whether or not a thing was successful, but it can't then later reply. A deploy is something that we obviously want to have happen in a background job. These requests will eventually time out. We can't go and launch a deploy and wait around for it to finish to actually give Alexa the response. There is a way to keep the conversation open. I've opted not to use it because it is sometimes difficult to maintain that. So with the Alexa skills kit, it is possible to do that thing, but if you're going to try to accomplish that sort of feedback with Alexa, then you should be using the Alexa voice service, which is basically a way for you to implement your own Alexa. You can use the Alexa voice service to feed a text and get back what Alexa would say if Alexa existed within your system with the same kind of boundaries that apply to Alexa, like she won't say bad words and things, much to my chagrin. And so then the Alexa voice service feeds those results back to you on your own device and then you play it through your speaker, right? Not going to detail the Alexa voice service. We're going to play with this guy. This is Hal. And Hal uses a different way to accomplish speech recognition. So we looked at Alexa, we looked at the if triggers. Hal is going to be using the web speech API, which is a very new thing. I'm very bleeding edge, you see. And the web speech API is only going to be available in Chrome and Firefox and probably Safari, although I have not had any success getting it to work on anyone's iPhones. I am not to be held responsible for mobile device compatibility, that's ridiculous. So just get androids like me, just buy my exact phone and then you can use my application. So we create a recognition object. This is JavaScript, you're probably familiar with it. Our recognition object is a speech recognition. This is the way Firefox calls it. At the top of this code I have assigned speech recognition to mean either speech recognition if it exists or WebKit speech recognition. And I've done the same thing for all of the models we're going to talk about.  So we've got our recognition speech recognition. We've got our grammar. The grammar is actually coming from the server in this case. I'm calling it out of the code. This is a JS herb template, right? So I've got on my deployment model a grammar thing that defines the grammar. And the idea is that I can eventually define that grammar dynamically and I can reconfigure my speech recognition as the applications that exist in my sphere change. So if I create a new GitHub repo and a new Heroku app or a new Linux node somewhere, then I can add that to the grammar dynamically. So how we'll immediately be able to deploy those things. And then I create a grammar list. I take that grammar that I've created and I add it from a string. These grammars are designed very much like the JSON you were just looking at. It's a format called JSGF. You can read all about it online. I have. It's fascinating. You can do some very complex things with the grammar. I would not be surprised if it was touring complete. But we are adding this grammar list into the grammars that exist. We're setting a couple of things on the recognition that we want to enter results. We tell it to give us the results in the meantime while it's trying to recognize things. We tell with a language. You can tell it a number of languages depending on the accent that you're trying to recognize in English. So if you have speakers who are using a French accent and you know it, then you can set this to French and it will overcome some of those things by using tri-phones from French samples or French English samples. And then we start our recognition. So our recognition is started and then we do something with the result. When the recognition returns us an result, we dig it out of this hash of results, get the transcript and we put it right into the output on the page, the text box. And then we do this app.deployment.deploy thing. And this may be a mystery to some of you who have not worked with JavaScript. I'm gonna run through it real fast. This is action cable. This frayed cable here represents my implementation of action cable which is absolutely not the way to use action cable and I'm very excited about it. This is how you don't use action cable. So I've created this app.deployment object that I just used and I'm creating a subscription of my deployment channel. And I'll show you the deployment channel in a moment. And then when I call deploy on that deployment as I just did right here, I'm calling deploy on that deployment, right? Oh, it's just a method call, right? I'm just calling that method right there and I'm sending some text down the line. So here's the deployment channel. The deployment channel has this deploy thing here and on a deployment it says, hey, respond to this data that I got and it logs it, right? And the stream from deployments part there is the part you should pay special attention to. That should include some kind of session ID or a user ID or anything to prevent every single web socket that your application uses from being broadcast to at the same time. But of course I've omitted that because I wanted that feature. So when we stream from deployments, any subscriber, any webpage that comes to how.rb-production.arokuf.com and if you are using a Nexus 6P and Chrome with the same version that I am and you go to this website, you too can experience the glory of how, maybe. And when you do, you and your peers will all hear the same things out of your speaker because I'm using the same channel which is not the way that it should be done. I feel like I've covered that. So we get our message way down deep, we do a thing, we actually deploy and then we ship a message back up on the deployment responses channel and then this is the deployment response channel. It's streaming from deployment responses and then in the JavaScript, we are taking that data and we're calling message received and this is actually now finally calling that method back in our JavaScript which is just this function that creates a speech synthesis utterance which is a thing that you can do in any of these various APIs and then it actually speaks from the browser. So who wants to see if this demo works? I do. I'm pretty excited about how. How is my favorite implementation? Let's see if Hal does anything. I think I actually turned Hal off because I'm smart and Hal is dangerous. Whoops. Hello, this one. Not you or this. This one is Hal running on local host which is not the one we wanted. That's the one we wanted. So this is in production right now and hypothetically it has a wake word. Let's try. Hal. Nope. So let's just click the button. We have an option to click a button. The wake word is very difficult because Hal is not a thing that is typically said to these, right? So all of the grammars that they are using and all of the trees they're looking up in, they'll think it is Hal or pal or hell or hill and I actually check for all of those variants but I've apparently struck a variant that I was not expecting. So we can also just click the button here and tell it to do a thing. Whoops. Nope. It was listening that whole time. Clever job. Good job.  I still don't understand. He's just taunting me now. All right, let's try again. Deploy Steve to production. No, the status when it completes. Ta-da, Steve is deploying to production and the status message that I was talking about, we should see eventually something come up here in the logs. Steve is the Hubot implementation by the way who was chatting with us earlier. We're redeploying Steve because Hubot is actually kind of quick to deploy because we cached the modules. Anyway, the feedback cycle now can become that we can just send those messages up on the action cable anytime that we want, right? We can send it, we can broadcast to all of the users anytime that we would like. See, so we can give any feedback we would like from the robot, we can talk down to the Ruby. It's pretty cool, right? This is the best one so far. I was very excited about how. Okay, so let's go talk. About another robot, this is Marvin. Marvin, I was less excited about because Marvin is sad all of the time. But Marvin is a PocketSphinx Ruby implementation. So PocketSphinx Ruby sits on top of the PocketSphinx library which is part of the CMU Sphinx speech recognition. It's an open source speech recognition kit developed by Carnegie Mellon University, thus CMU. So Marvin uses PocketSphinx Ruby and we should probably just like play this slideshow also. I wonder how long I've been doing that. Has it been a while? Oh good, all right. This is Marvin. Sorry, Confreaks. And this is PocketSphinx Ruby which sits inside of Marvin, all right? So we will look at using PocketSphinx real quick here. PocketSphinx, do you want to disable logging up front? When you're just playing with it, when you like first run it as a demo, it's great because it gives you a lot of feedback like probably a hundred lines to start. It tells you about the tri-phones it's using and the identifications it's doing and it dumps the text at the terminal and that's great. But it's not gonna work for what we want. So we disable the logging and this is how you do it. You do not redirect standard out to DevNol. You'll regret it. Probably like 11.30 p.m. the night before your talk. This code is really bad. You're gonna be really happy about this. I'm quite pleased with myself. So we've got this PocketSphinx configuration keyword spotting. A keyword spotting lets you define a particular word that is our wake word for Marvin. When we say Marvin, Marvin wakes up and does the thing. And that ends this particular recognition. So we take that keyword spotting and we feed it in. We create a PocketSphinx configuration grammar as well that we're gonna use for the recognition after we have recognized our wake word. So the grammar definition DSL looks like this. You can just make a sentence. Deploy Steve to production is the thing I want to say. This DSL does not allow you to do this necessarily in more interesting ways than just that. And there are many more complex ways to define grammars than this, but they're not implemented in the PocketSphinx RubyGem. I'm sure they are coming sometime in the future or maybe from you if you were so excited by Marvin that you decided to go out and work on this. So finally we create our recognizer. We've got a live speech recognizer here and we're gonna feed it that keyword spotter that we created earlier and that's just gonna sit there. It's gonna loop infinitely until it hears the magic word and then it's gonna wake up. And then we are going to recognizer.reconfigure with our grammar because now we're done with that keyword spotting. We're gonna reconfigure it with a new configuration to start listening for something different. It's gonna be listening for live speech. And then this is how you make a bell sound on a Mac. You say in the voice bells be and you'll hear how great that is. There are actually a lot of ways to make a bell sound but this is probably my favorite. And then we recognize the speech and we're looking for things that look like deploy Hal or Steve or heaven to station, right? So we run our recognizer, we match the application and the environment and then there's this deploy method that presumably does an actual deploy. And once the deploy is done, then the loop will just start over automatically or else it will hang infinitely. In which case you do what all good Ruby programmers do and you wrap it in a timeout which is actually not something you should ever do. Timeout has a lot of problems. If you ever care about code, don't do this. But again, I don't particularly care about Marvin and so I did it. Poor Marvin, that's why he's so sad. Also, when you're raising a timeout, this is just gonna raise an exception that you can't predict. And of course, naturally, Pocket Sphinx Ruby will raise exceptions at random depending on maybe the word you said or whether the speech recognizer was ready. So the best thing to do is just to rescue all of them and ignore them. So you just put a rescue all exceptions at the end of your code and they magically disappear. I actually had a developer one time tell me when I was first starting out. You know, you can make that go away. Just put rescue nil at the end. And I was like, do you know what that does? It's so bad. But I actually didn't know at the time not to do that. I did it several times. This is the equivalent of that thing. Just rescue all the errors and throw them away.  And then at the beginning, of course, because we're raising errors, now we'll just wrap our two infinite loops in another infinite loop. So problem solved, right? We'll just swallow those errors and we'll keep looping forever. Who wants to see Marvin? I wanna see Marvin. Marvin's great. All right, let's see if I can show Marvin without screwing everything up here again. Well, that didn't work. Let's do this. I'm escaping and I'm tapping and I have a Marvin almost ready. All right, but now I can't see it because I have to command F1. Good. I'm sure you appreciate the running commentary. Make sure this makes it into the talk. This is important. Okay, so we just run Marvin with this bin Marvin command.  So when we run Marvin, Marvin comes alive in a very uninteresting way because we are shrunk. But look how pretty the ASCII art is. If we embiggen and enhance, hello Marvin, you look sad today. Deploy Steve to production and Marvin has actually done it. Yes, I know, you're Marvin, thank you. So that's Marvin. Marvin is- Deploy Steve to production. Thank you, Marvin. That will be all. Let's shut the Marvin down there. You just have to double break to get out of your infinite loops. So, you know, programming. So we've now deployed to production. We've deployed Steve again to production using our lovely robot Marvin. And I wanna go back real quickly over what we've talked about here. We talked about the Alexa and using Alexa with if to ship things. We used Alexa with or we used how to ship things. We used Marvin to ship things. And we were shipping all of those things to Heroku because I worked there and they sent me here and that was nice of them. But also because I have infinite free Heroku, it's dumb not to use that. But all of the things that I've shown you are very easy to do with all of the other services, right? It's plug and play. I just happen to be using this thing. And while I'm on the subject of Heroku, it occurs to me that I forgot to show you something which I wanna show you real quick. I forgot to show you that we actually have Heroku commands inside of our robots. And so I can go over to Hal again. Let's go back to Hal. Whoops, there you are. You're on the other screen. And Hal is being surly with his own name. So we're just gonna click the button and we're gonna say shut down production. And this is the part where Alexa is close enough and he is loud enough for Alexa to hear. But it didn't work. So let's try again up here. Shut down. Yes. Yes. Alexa, stop. And then, what, nope. What are you doing? Thank you, Alexa. Scale web zero. All right, we'll stop him there. I'm gonna shut him down a different way. Let's try Marvin here. Marvin will help us. Marvin is a sad robot, but he is occasionally helpful. Let's see what Marvin has to say. Nope. Marvin, it's fine. Marvin, murder Hal's process. It seems you have outlived your utility fleshwad. It may be time to make better use of all that wasted carbon. Alexa doesn't think very much of us humans.  With meat. All right. Well, I think I've had enough being insulted by my robots. For now, I will return to my slides only very briefly. To say to you all, thank you very much for having me. It has been a pleasure.  I'll leave Alexa out by the booth or something you can talk to her about things.


Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Steven Russell and you've written a book about non-resistance. You've studied an awful lot of church history. You teach here at Faith Builders. We can kind of see some of your work here. Just did a class. And let's just have a kind of off-the-cuff conversation about church history and non-resistance and what we can learn from that. And I know that you've written about the Mennonites in Germany becoming Nazis, so why don't we think about that? So yeah, I did, I graduated from Sharon Mennonite Bible Institute. I did my my graduating thesis on the Mennonite Nazis. So it sounds very strange to say that in the same sentence, but you had Mennonites who basically over the course of time lost their values of the two kingdoms of of non-violence. Yeah, there's quite an interesting piece of history that went into that. Mm-hmm. I know a Mennonite guy who was, I knew him when I was about your age, who then was, he had been in the military. He was one of the Nazis. Really? A Mennonite guy. Wait, wait, where did you meet him? He was in southern Germany. Wow. Now it's long enough ago. I don't know that I remember his name. Mm-hmm. I also, in our own community, we have a young man who was 16 and was not Mennonite, but was drafted at the very end, has a very sad story. Wow. They were taking him across, I think they were sending him from the eastern part of Germany to the west to fight the Americans and Canadians and British and he was just outside of Dresden when the allies fire-bombed it. And to this day, he says, he says, why did they do that? We were beat. It didn't help anybody, but they bombed in such a way. They had actually come to realize they bombed a certain way. It kind of makes like a tornado and draws in air and just makes this wild fire and kills everyone. If it doesn't burn you, it asphyxiates you. And he saw that he was just, he was fortunate. He was just outside of Dresden and the next day they were going to move through there and go to the to the western front and you know, that's something he experienced. And then I, when I was 23, I had an opportunity to work with a tent crusade in Germany, all German, and Lutheran minister who got me the job had also been in the military. I don't know if he was Nazi, but he fought for Germany. On the German side. He fought on the German side then. Wow. And his sister, his sister was, he was a minister and his sister was a minister and she told me she said, we could have known. She said, we closed our eyes. We were afraid. We could have known what was happening.  She said, we could have known that they were being killed. This is at the early point when they were killing people. The generation that either was teenagers or 20-something and fought for Hitler, a lot of them were very, very sad about it. A lot of them became Christians because of the realizing how bad it was. But, you know, they felt like the allies in World War One had mistreated them and that's one reason they that Hitler could get them to fall. Stir up the population. Yeah, exactly. Wow. There's a there's a family here at our winter term and the won't the wife's great-great-grandfather or something like that left the Alsace because of the impending war between Prussia and France in 1870 and there weren't many but but he was non-resistant. He was in a Amish home and they sent him here. They just sent their son who was eligible to be drafted and they didn't want to be drafted if there were. So the ones who still believed it left in the late 1800s and there were just none left. When Germany came together, Germany is one of the last states in Europe to unify and it's after that war with France. 1870. Yes. And then that war is used as the way to unify the the German states and they did try to unify about 30 years before that and it didn't work. But they did get a conference together and they were talking about a constitution and at that conference one man said where I'm from there are Mennonites and I think that they don't go to the military. There were at least two Mennonite representatives and they were from another part of Germany and they said we don't want any special privileges. We want to be Germans just like anyone else. So here was a non-Mennonite saying maybe we should put into the constitution a provision for those that are COs, conscientious objectors and then two Mennonites that were part of this whole thing said no, no, no. We're good. We're just good. Wow. So right there you have a very deep root of nationalism, like nationalistic pride. Yes, you have nationalism and you have like I said those Mennonites and Amish that really held tightly to it they many of them had left in the previous century and then after the Napoleonic Wars many more left. During the Napoleonic Wars it was hard to get out, but as soon as the Napoleonic Wars were done a lot of Amish came to the US and those were the ones that still held to this. So once you get rid of them there's just a scattering. It's a long slippery road down and by the time you and then World War I you start having a lot of Mennonites are joining then World War II was wholesale. All the men you can go find the magazines or the newspapers that the Mennonite churches in Germany had during World War I and they're just full of here are our brave boys that died the last month fighting for their homeland. Okay, so then here's the here is one question at that point. Would you still say they're Mennonites because like that's such a core value is non-resistance and for them to be sent. Yeah. They conceive of themselves as that. Now here's what I would say I would say it's not that that non-resistance is not just a core value for us. It actually is a core value of conversion. Wow. But I'm not gonna say Christians who don't believe in this are not Christians. So I would say yeah, they have lost a good a tremendously important part of what Anabaptism teaches, but they still self identify that way and I guess I would say I hope there's a little bit more of a germ there that we could or a little ember that we could you know Yeah, we could we could fan it and bring it back to a flame. But I also think we are in a time when we can be talking to our brothers and sisters outside of the Anabaptism who are saying things aren't going right. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, and I'm a Christian and I'm seeing it and in my church is allowing things that historically have not been allowed. Mm-hmm. Oh, everything seems to be going to pot and I think we have an opening to talk about believers, a believer's church that is a discipling church and as a discipling church it expects separation from the world, not isolation, separation. And I think separation has three aspects. There are three nones and three positives. The nones are non conformity, non accumulation and non resistance. The positives are in the same order faith, hope and love. Wow. And and those are those are those are meant for everyone. And but what has happened is especially in American, I'll speak of that because I'm an American, in the American setting for so many of us Christians, our Christianity is more American than it is biblical or Christian. Over in Europe, mm-hmm, all the churches except for the Anabaptist were state churches. Mm-hmm. And every state had its own religion. So if you wanted to live in England, well, England was a little bit different, but if you wanted to live in France, there was a little bit of a allowance for a few Protestants, but it was essentially Catholic. And if you lived in Saxony, you were going to be a Lutheran. And if you lived in Bavaria, you're going to be Catholic. And the church and state worked together. So the church supported the state and then the state would get rid of heretics, etc. That's what what it was over there. When you came to the New World, some of the English colonies had state or colonial churches. Mm-hmm. But you know what? If you didn't want to, if you were a Puritan and you didn't want to submit to the Congregationalist state church, what do you do? You go into the frontier, you get away from civilization. So the United, first the British colonies and then the United States because of the vast area. And also in the Constitution, it was written in that this federal government cannot have, cannot support the church. It's to allow all churches their freedom. State governments could still have state churches, but not the federal government. And then the last state to get rid of its state church was Massachusetts. But my point is here there was so much land, there was so much freedom, there was so much space. If you didn't like what the people were telling you, you just went somewhere else. Then the revivals hit and they split almost every church. And so you had the the more conservative people, probably resisting revivalism, and others saying, no, this is giving us more life. And so you have churches splitting. And so what you have is a vast multiplication of churches, but it's all because there's so much freedom. And that's what we Americans really worship is freedom. And so we love it. We want to worship God, but we love it that we have this freedom. We can do what we want. We can start our own church, however we want to do it. We can be conservative. We can be liberal. We can be anything. And I think that it's the freedom and the because of the immense land that we lived in and the possibility of going anywhere you wanted to and doing what you wanted to. You could remake yourself into whatever you wanted to be. And that's the American dream. So we are more many of us are more American than we are Christian. We're Christian, but we're more and that's a creeping problem among us. Conservative Anabaptists that we're we are also in danger of letting the American dream and being an American overwhelm what our forefathers said. And that's one reason when they first came here, they published the first really big book published in the United States was The Martyr's Mirror to teach the Mennonite and Amish boys and that what what their forefathers had died for over in Europe. There was so much freedom here. It was so appealing to think maybe we should help out and you know things like that. Yeah, this is my history is so important though. Oh, yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah, because because our especially my generation is super confused right now, you know because they're like, I don't know what to do with this polarization that they're seeing and where where do we fit in? You like are we or aren't we in it? Yeah. Well, one of the big questions today is what is a human being and one of the issues that comes out of that is is our sexuality and how we express that and So the question of same-sex marriage and all that kind of thing is is I think the key issue is what does it mean to be a Human and that's what the church has to address these other things come out of that But one of the things we have to be careful about is we always have to love that other person And I think sometimes the way they are young people here. Some people talk about these situations They hear these people as haters and demonize the other person. They demonize it. That is not what we're called to We're called to to embrace and love the other person and call them to what they're meant To be as a human being and that may mean struggle, you know All of us if we're Christians, we if we're really Christians we struggle, you know There's there's always something in me that that isn't quite yet in line with what God wants and so there is going to be a struggle Unfortunately for some people it may be in this area of sexuality and just telling them it doesn't matter doesn't help them and if We are right and if the if God really expects a certain approach to that and they're encouraged to do whatever they feel like In the end they're going to end up at the very bottom and they're going to crash And if that happens people like us need to be around to help them. It's not going to be easy Yeah, yeah. Oh, that was interesting. Wow. Maybe we need more and about this historians. I agree. Yeah Well, we just we did just interview Kyle and he is getting a master's degree in that field So that's that's wonderful. I tell some people one of the most frustrating things to me is that the people that graduate here That go on to finish their college elsewhere and sometimes go to grad school like Kyle They tend to go for English and I said what is it? Why haven't I been able to get anybody to go for history church? Yeah, that's been very frustrating. Well, maybe this this will help inspire a few people to To go do it to go for that. Wow. Wow. Well, that was fun. Thanks for okay to following that rabbit trail Yeah, I really enjoyed that actually


The most important insight I had in my work with story is that We are not the creators of the stories that the stories already exist and we are the tellers of the story so in Bowing into service to the story that wants to be born on on this earth a key step or a key orientation is To listen for what that story is and to uncover to uncover that story and that might happen in Collaboration with other people who are also in service to the story and each person tells a piece of it and you recognize That oh, yeah, this that's a piece or maybe you recognize, you know, that's not there's a discordant note there What is that thing that feels out of tune with the story that we're all telling here? What part of what you're saying could be coming from a legacy wound that you have inherited? so it becomes And that kind of inquiry best happens in community because on our own it's hard to tell like what is Coming from you go and what's coming from outside of you go, you know What is service to self and what is service to something larger than self?


Today we find out which gold series is the best, the original series, the Ghost Rares, or Maximum Gold. What's up guys, we're back with another golden video and today we have another battle where we will be pitting three different gold sets against each other, but first we have a giveaway. I'll be giving away this amazing Defenders booster box, simply like the video, be subscribed, turn on notifications and let me know below which is the best gold series. We're gonna have scores and everything but if your opinion is that, oh, the scores were wrong, you know, it should have been better, you know, we got unlucky, what a one last time, so let me know. So as I showed in the intro, we do have Maximum Gold El Dorado, four mini boxes of that. We have four mini boxes of gold series three and then we have four mini boxes of gold series haunted mind. So we are going to have a counter and see which value wins this battle because I've asked a couple of different times which gold is better, newer old gold. This time we're gonna get a little more specific. We're gonna have the original series, which is gold three. We don't have gold one and two, we have gold three. Then we have the gold ghost rare series which had the blue eyes by dragon, which is pretty awesome. And then the newest gold series which people tend to not pick but some people actually really like this set. And now I'm gonna cut open these mini boxes to do you guys the favor of not opening these one at a time. All right, I've gotten all of these out of the packaging. It turns out that both gold series three and gold series haunted mind are single packs. So there's only one of each per mini box. There's a lot in the maximum gold. So that's gonna be like most of like number of packs for opening. Those have a ton of cards in them. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut open four maximum gold, then one and gold series haunted mind and one gold series three and rotate like that. We're gonna have totals popping up on the screen. If you guys have not seen my previous maximum gold videos where we did challenges, go check those out before we start. Let's go. Let's start off with the maximum gold El Dorado which is the best gold, new gold, ghost gold, old gold. Those are our options. We don't have premium gold. That is the only one we don't have right now but in the future we might rectify that. That's an indication. That's a pretty good start. We got the Zephraxie, Ossa, Cursed Eldland. So you do get two of the gold rares, every single pack. It's a very strange set where you get like multiple rares kind of it's pretty weird. So second pack, I'm gonna try and like remember what number pack I'm on for these. So we're gonna try and open four but I'm gonna forget half the time. I can guarantee it. Elderly sort of white destiny. I didn't like recap on like what's in these sets cause I like to get excited sometimes. And I don't wanna remember every single card. We got the boiler painter and then the Avalzor Dolca. Okay, not bad. Number one and the Hukware of the Golden Land.  Oh yeah, I forgot that was in here. That's what we're trying to do here. Maybe get a little bit surprised. I think we can get the access code in here though. We got a Starlight. Unless I'm thinking of the other one. Starlight Road I should say. Not a Starlight Rare, that'd be nice. And then we have a Twin Twisters. Pretty good card. Prank Kids Fanzies. Okay, I think that was our third pack. So that means one more pack of Maximum Gold Eldarado. Then we move on to the others. So far not anything crazy besides invocations probably our best pull. Might not even be a dollar though. Ultimate Conductor Tyrande, the UCT. One of the best cards in the Dino Deck. Pretty awesome. Code Talker. We have a number C1000 Numeroanius. That's a cool name. The Battle Butler and the Kagamushin Knights. So not a crazy start for the Maximum Gold Eldarado. If you voted for Maximum Gold Eldarado make sure you let me know in the comments. Okay, next up we are gonna take a Gold Series Honda Mine 25 cards per pack. Guaranteed Ghost Rare. Ghost Gold Rare I guess is a little bit different. And then a couple of Gold Rears in here as well. I think it tells you on the back. I was just thinking while I was opening these by the way which took forever. And I was like, wow, these are really ridiculous products. How cool it is to get to open sets that have been out of print for like 10 years. It's just really, really fun. I get to do this for videos. So shout out to you guys for allowing me to do this. It's very cool. Let's hope that we can pull a Ghost Blue Eyes to make it even better. Let's see if we can do it. I think it's kind of in the middle here somewhere. I can't remember. I think the Ghost Rare comes up first. I'm just gonna go through the cards. Bonecrusher, Dawn, the Herald. Gorg the Strong's added. Zombie Masters is a good card. Tiki Curse, Fear from the Dark. Pyramid Turtle. Hinswell Book. I think there's a... That is what we call a Ruxen special. If you are new here, the Ruxen special. When you pull, I pulled three cards actually instead of one, right to the Rare. So that is a Ruxen special. We have done it again. Naturia Barki and Ghost Rare. Not the one we're looking for it. And next is the Gold Rare, let's see. Cephalon, the Ultimate Time Lord. Also now we're looking for it. Naturia Beast I think is a couple bucks. So that's gonna be added into our tally. That's at least something. Plus the Naturia Barki on. It's gonna be pretty hard to beat the Ghost Rare series because they have guaranteed Ghost Shares every time, which means they're gonna have some value. But we'll see if Gold 3 can do it. Maybe Maximum Gold will get the access code, who knows. Let's check the foil on this cause like if these are gradable, they're crazy. I'm not seeing any print lines right now. Seems pretty clean, but it's pretty easy to miss the print lines in here. And then you look at a certain angle and you see there's a hundred of them. But it appears to be pretty clean. Maybe I'll send it on another PSA bulk submission soon. Could be a nice Ghost Rare. All right, the rest of the pack, let's see if there's anything. Ryukoki's a cool card. I mean, you guys know I was looking for that for a while, The Dark Mimic. The Book of Life's a great card. Cliff the Trapper was actually a really hard card to find for Go Format, so also not bad. I'm gonna pull that out. All right, quick start for the Ghost Rare set, but we knew it was guaranteed. Gold series three, I don't remember what's in here.  What do we have? 25 cards, three Gold Rears, 22 comments. It's basically the same thing except one of the Gold Rears is, you know, a Gold Rear instead of a Ghost Rear like in the last one. But one singular pack, a lot of cards. Let's try not to ruck in special this time. It's right at the front. Okay, the Gold Rears are at the very front, so we're gonna have to avoid those somehow. So there's one spoiler. Stardust Dragon is not a bad one though, so we're gonna do this. We're gonna take those three and just set them down over there. We'll go through them real quick. The rest of our cards are Destiny, Draw, Amazonus, Swordswoman, Goblin, Zombie. Pretty good cards in here.  Sure, the Blue Flame, Amazonus, Archers, Amazonus, Colute, there it is. Cemo, Engage, they're right there. Black Whirlwind, we've got a lot of Blackwing stuff. Miss Valley, Freya, Chainmaster, Reese, Amazonus, Archer, Bora, a lot of Blackwings right there, that's insane. All right, now our Gold Rears, which we're at the very front, which is a little bit weird. We have a Stardust Dragon, a beautiful print of this card. Edison Format, it's pretty strong. And basically all formats that it plays in until now probably. And then we have Smashing Ground, pretty solid, it's a pretty good card. I don't know if that's a dollar because there's a lot of prints of this card. Then there is a, ooh, a JD, a Judgement Dragon, that's pretty sick. I think this is the rarity that I run in my Lightsworn deck for Edison because I don't have those Seeker Rears, unfortunately, in First Edition or Alties, but maybe one day we'll have them. And as you're looking at the rarities, make sure to, you know, think through, what do you like the best? Do you like these Gold Rears from Gold III? Do you like the Gold Ghost Rears? Do you like the new Maximum Gold Rears? I wanna know your opinion in the comments. Okay, our second round, you guys will see the score popping up right here to see who is in the lead. I'm guessing the Ghost Rears are in the lead, but I really don't know. That's a big one, IP Masquerina. I think that's around 10 bucks, that's huge. That is a huge pull. Oh, another rucks in special. We got a 10 key, not too crazy. Prank Kids Battle Butler. All right, so a huge pull. IP Masquerina, that's big for Maximum Gold. And keep in mind, that was only one of their four packs that are gonna open this round. So we've got a lot more potential they can do here. A lot of decent cards that they can pull to make a comeback. Number four, we got a Prank Kids Lamp Seas. Weather Painter Snow, that's probably not one to make a comeback. That is one. I think this is only around two bucks, surprisingly, but it's because it seems like people don't really love this rarity, but you're gonna have to let me know in the comments if that's the case, or if there's another reason for Pot of Extrav being only a couple bucks. But a couple bucks counts on the scoreboard. Two packs to go in this round for Maximum Gold L Dorado. Will we pull something big? We've got the Weather Painter Thundery Candice. We have the Preda Plant Verite Anaconda. Would have been a huge pull before it got banned. We have the Oslo, the Earth Charmer, we'll have Starlight Rare of this. For sale, check it out on TCGplayer. We've got the Numeron Calling, seller named Ruxen, by the way. Fire from Ancient Tin Key. Okay, so nothing too crazy in that one. Would have been a great one before Verite got banned. This would be such a crazy, like small box, mini box, whatever you call it, back then, but unfortunately in his ban now, we have the, well, probably not for it, unfortunately, but hey, look, I like Dragoon, okay? Let me summon it, okay? Kunky Store, that was a Ruxen special, by the way. Red Eye's Darkness Metal Dragon. I always, so like the original print of this was always worth money, and this alternate art is not usually, I don't think, so the Conquistador honestly could be a couple bucks, though, because Elwitch, pretty popular. I'm not sure if that one is over a dollar or not, but we'll have to see on the screen. So that was four packs. That was a decent showing for Maximum Gold El Dorado. I think the score's getting a lot closer. Let's see, if we do pull blue eyes here, I'm not sure if any of the other gold can win, but we'll have to see if they can. The Ghost and the Gold Rares were pretty early in this pack last time, so I don't know if I could figure it out. Maybe do like this. Wait, I'm a little scared. I'm a little scared to try that, so let's just go through it. We have a Goblin Zombie. I'm gonna not rucks and special this one. Watch this. Dark Scorpion, Dawn of the Herald, Fear from the Dark, Tiki Curse. We got the Red Ogre, the Call of the Mummy, Vampire Lady, Hidden Spellbook. This was one that was like a little bit of money for a while. I think the next one could be the Gold Rare. Wait, it isn't, okay. So what we're gonna do, the next one, so it's one, two, three, right there. We're gonna do four just to be safe. All right, we have the Double Cost and the Dark Memic Level Three, Hell Palmer, Book of Life, another decent one, Gernia. Dark Memic Level One, Fiscal Double, Raikouki, Pretty Cool, Lighty and White. They are always the same card. It's not like Gold Series One where me and Simo pulled the same cards over and over, but it's pretty close. Chick the Yellow, Potition of Darkness, Hidden Spellbook, there's the card. Wait, is that it? Wait, okay, maybe it's the next one. Copy Night, here should be our Ghoster. Blue Eyes, White Dragon, Solid Judgment, Mystical Space Typing, that's what we want. It's the Blue Eyes, White Dragon, let's go! Oh my goodness! The Ghost, Gold, Blue Eyes, White Dragon, and let's see if it has any print lines. Oh no, look at that! It's got a ding on the edge! No, come on, how? How did that even get there? Oh, the rest is so clean. Blue Eyes, White Dragon, wow! That's such a bummer, because it looks so clean. All right, the rest of the Gold Rear is our Kurokuri Steel and Call of the Haunted. So a couple of decent ones there. Man, that's such a bummer. All right, Ghost Series Three is gonna need some big pulls here. So, okay, we remember that the Gold Rear is at the front, so what I'm gonna do is flip it around like this. Gonna do a little strategy so we don't ruin it right off the bat. We're gonna do one, two, three to the back. We're gonna go Magical Arms Shield, not TPA, but it's a Magical Arms Shield. We've got the Grubb, the Archer, the Destiny Draw, Miss Valley Watcher, Worm Hope, we've got the Chain Master, Amazonas Paladin, the Miss Valley Wind Master, the Blackwing Soroko the Don, good card, Infernity Dwarf, Amazonas Swordswoman, so many cards, Miss Kodor, the Aegis of Gaia, Amazonas Fighter, Blizzard of the Far North. I basically have an entire Blackwing Core at this point just from these two packs. Amazonas Tiger and Amazonas as well, Black Whirlwind, Free of the Spirit of Victory, is it next? We've got the Blackwing Share of the Blue Flame, that's number two of those. We're in Falco and we have First Gold Rare, a Blackwing Armor Master, just more Blackwings. Okay, that is a pretty nice card and Smashing Ground again, isn't that the same card? Okay, and then Thunder King Ryo, a pretty nice Edison card, so a couple of decent cards, nothing insane there though. Okay, this is looking interesting actually because I think, I mean, based on my estimation, it seems like Gold Series 3 might be in last place because the, well, it depends. It might be close, so the IP is gonna be like 10. Yeah, they might be in the same ballpark right now, but we know that the Ghost Rares are winning right now, Scrap Wyvern, Prankett's Pranks, you guys know in general what it is, but Elixir of Scarlet Sanguine, the Prankett's Rocket Ride, Fire from Engine Tinky, and Numeron Network. Okay, next pack, pack number two of our third round with Maximum Gold Eldorado, will we get that access code talker? I'm gonna be saying that, it's not even in here. We have a Broken Line, we have a Conquistro of the Gold Lane, could be money, I'm not totally sure yet. And a Rescue Cat, I think that's pretty decent, the alternate art probably is worth more. And then the Sinet Mining, okay. I haven't checked in on these prices in a while, but I know usually these, you know, if they start money, sometimes they go down, they could be like two bucks, they end up being like 50 cents. Let's see if we can get a big pull out of the Gold of Maximum. We got the Scrap Chimera and a Book of Moon, that's certainly not worth a dollar. Book of Moon, Summon Limit, Nice Card and Fire Wall. One last Maximum Gold Eldorado pack for this round. So far, not much has been pulled that's really gonna impact their standing, which means Gold 3 could move up to the next level. Gold Land, we got Eva, can we get, oh Black Rose, that's pretty sick. So we pulled Black Rose and Stardust in this so far today, it's pretty amazing. We got the Fossil Dig, solding over after Cool for Dragons, or Dinos, I should say not Dragons, but not that great in terms of value. Okay, and then a win. All right, all right, Gold Series on in mind, we've been pretty good so far, can we get another Blue Eyes? It is possible to get multiple Blue Eyes out of one box, which these four did come from one box, so I will say that. I've seen three, I think Rhyme, of course, pulled three at one point. Let's go, we have called them up. We're not gonna worry too much about the commons because there's so many of them and we've seen most of them already. Bone Crusher, let's just get to the Go-Share, it should be coming soon. Don's Luke, I think is a few dollar comment, so that should be added. That's just more value added onto their huge lead already. We've got the Copy Night, we've got Pyramid Turtle. Oh, oh, it's a Solemn Judgment.  All right, Edge looks good. Surface looks amazing, it looks clean, I don't see anything too crazy. Back looks good, wow. Okay, wait, this might be a greatable Solemn Judgment, I was thinking about that about the Blue Eyes and then we saw the ding, but wow. Solemn Judgment, Go-Share, I think that we know what's gonna win this. This is gonna be, yeah, this is gonna be a blowout, I think. Then, of course, we have Graffa, which is nice, and then a Briannac or Briannac, whichever one you want to call it. Probably more value on both of these as well. All right, Gold Series III, this has just become a battle for not getting last, it feels like, at this point. I don't know if Gold, I ruined it, I forgot to do a special pack trick, but Mizuki is the only one we saw, no big deal. I don't know if it's possible for them to come back versus those Ghost Trairs. We've got Amazonas Blowpiper, Archers, Calude, Malicious, why am I even going through all these? I guess Malicious is pretty good, we'll pull that out. I guess we haven't seen too many comments that we want to pull aside yet, let's see. Infinity Guard, you have Ruxen Special twice in this pack, Chain Master, these feel like extra sticky, like there goes another Ruxen Special, but these are like colluding against me, okay? Colluding, get it? Okay, we've got the Abort of the Spear, we need that, duh, duh, edit right there, we got the Soroko, the Mist Codor, Amazonas Fighter, Blizzard, we got Infinity Dwarf, there's the Mizuki that I looked at, pretty nice, anything else. Acreous Attack, another good card from Black Wings, and Elemental Hero Prisma, which at the time was a pretty crazy card, okay? I don't think it's gonna bring them back though. All right, final round, we have Maximum Gold Eldorado, I think Maximum Gold Eldorado actually has a shot to get second place, which I would not have guessed. They need a big pull here to solidify it, let's see, Weather Pain or Rainbow, I thought that could have been something big. Scarlet Sanguine, the Zephrexie, Tempestraggler of Storms, okay. I've been looking for a title dragon ruler of Storms 10 and I can't find one, so if you guys have one and you wanna help me out, you know, for a video, let me know and then, you know, not in the comments, I might not see it there, send me a message, email me, that's even better. All right, three packs to go, Eldorado, give us that access code which may or may not be in here, I always get it confused with the regular Eldorado, I'm pretty sure it's in here though, we got Cursed Eldlan, nice, number C1000, are you gonna do the night Romulus? That was exactly how you say that. I don't like how they move around the gold rares, they're in different spots every time, it's really weird. I don't like it, I'm not a fan of that, okay. Just keep them in the same spot, all right. I like consistency, we got Trishula, nice, Fossil Dig, Super Dreadnought, Rail Cannon, Juggernaut, Conquistor, all right, that's our place at a Conquistor, Akira and Numeron Wall, all right.  We have the Hot Red Dragon Archfiend, the Ancient Cloak, we have the Bullet Train, Plasma Ultra Art and Magical Dimension, okay. Plasma's a decent card, I don't know if that's gonna get in the dollar range or not, but maybe it will, they're probably gonna need every dollar they can get. All right, final Gold Series Haunted Mind pack, just rubbing it in the face of the other golds. Do you agree with the results of how this has gone? Do you guys think Gold Series Haunted Mind is the best gold series ever? I think a lot of people would, because they really like the Gold Ghost Rares, I think they look pretty nice. The foiling on them is absolutely awesome, so I think that that is definitely possible. Let's just see if we can get another blue eyes. We're generating Mummy, Don's Luke, big comment right there, let's just pull that out. Zombie Master, Copy Night, Pyramid Turtle, it's gotta be coming up soon, Goblin Zombie, Dark Scorpion, Gorg the Strong, and Mystical Space Typhoon. This is a great one, we are getting a lot of great Ghost Rares, we're getting all the ones we want. Centering's pretty good, I'm not seeing anything on the foil, but it's pretty hard to see sometimes, so I'm gonna double check those in different lighting maybe later. Beautiful in terms of absolute quality on this, which is unusual for this set, so I'm probably missing something, but maybe we'll be grading these Ghost Rares, I hope so. It will be kind of a bummer though, okay there's our, oh Formus Synchron's a good one, okay that's nice. If all the other ones are like PSA 10 potential and the other one would have been, but it had like a little ding on the edge for some reason, that would kinda suck, but I'd still be happy with the other ones. Final pack of this gold battle between the original, the ghost, and the maximum gold. I mean it's not the original pack, but the original series, I did it again, I ruined it. Can they make a comeback against, not the Ghost Rares, you're not gonna be able to do it, against the maximum gold, that's their only chance. Okay we've seen these commons many times before, you know I'm just gonna go like this, or it's a woman, they're very sticky and hard to get through. Amazon's Tiger, Miss Kodor, we wanna get to those gold rares, because that's what we really care about, there's the collute, okay they're colluting against me. That's probably what Gage felt like he felt colluded against, we have Reese, we have the malicious, another one of those, that's two of those, you know it's a play set, you know it's one's banned, Blackwing Bora, we already know that front one, so no big deal, we get the Guardian, and Furnity Archfiend, which is pretty cool, can we get something big? Plague Spreader, that's pretty big, that's a good card, okay, very nice, that's definitely worth a few bucks, and Vice Dragon, pretty cool card, okay. Vice Dragon has a pretty cool story behind it, that Special Edition version is very, very rare, so seeing this in any version is pretty awesome, it looks like, I don't know, but here's your results, I think that it was pretty close for second and third place, but first place was an absolute domination. Make sure to let me know in the comments if you agree with the results of this video, and if you enjoyed the video, make sure to subscribe to the channel for more epic content like this. Shout out to Toenfo Show, Daxer, JTChill, Puffins of Doom, Ernesto Deanna, Dizzy, FlexiBoy, Hoppus, Choice333, Missycle, James Jantz, TCGTrusterCards, AmericaDeutscher, Supreme, Sage21, Frankie Martinez, Nenetai Show, Ian Loosa, Junior Barting, Mimic Gecko, Shadowfall, and Thomas McClain. Thank you guys for supporting the channel, and I'll see you guys in the next one, peace.


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Hey everybody, it's DJ V and it has been a while. It's just been a really busy year. But that being said, I wanted to do something that I've wanted to do for a really long time. So I put a poll on my Instagram and a couple of you guys answered your burning questions or questions that you wanted to ask me and I wanted to film and put them in my YouTube video and I'm hoping to do this every once in a while. So we're gonna dive right into it. I got quite a few questions. Favorite OF model in your collection? That's a really hard question for me to answer. I do feel like Alvarozo is kind of one of my favorites ever. This isn't my personal Alvarozo. He actually lives in my living room. This is my second Alvarozo that I'm hypothetically supposed to paint but he's in really good conditions. Like I'm having a hard time actually committing to painting him. Like I don't really care about the collectability of briars. I purely collect briars based on what I like and I just feel like his sculpture is really anatomically correct and quite possibly one of the best briar faces that exist in all of the models. He's just really proportionate and he's really expressive. I just like his nostrils. Like they're even too. He doesn't have any weird warping or weird seam lines but my second runner up who is really close is Nikoda and you can see I've pulled him from the staff. They go out of frame here but I have a large Nikoda conga and this is my favorite briar. This particular paint job and release on this briar is just, he's just stunning. And then if I had to pick like a third top it would be this guy. Do you have any tips for drying horses like you do on canvases? I feel like my canvas art doesn't get as much credit as I would like it to. I love painting on canvas and I use painting on canvas as a release. If I'm having a really stressful week or a stressful month or I'm feeling really anxious or pent up or even creatively blocked I will go to canvas painting because I don't set any rules for myself when I canvas paint. I just let myself throw paint out of canvas and I don't care if it's drippy I don't care if it's messy I don't care if it doesn't really even turn out. It's just the process of like creating something but not worrying so much on making every little detail perfect. So I find it very therapeutic. As for drawing those on the canvas sometimes I freehand it. For the most recent piece that I did which was like for my bedroom it's like two giant full size canvases. I sketched that in Procreate put it in an illustrator, stretched it cut it down to eight by 10 squares which is what my little printer can print and then print it all of those out and kind of transferred it onto the canvas by charcoaling out the back of the paper and then drawing lines over top. Ideally, I actually need to just buy myself a projector. What is Fable breed-wise? It's been driving me nuts since she's really hard to show as a grade mare. I have this problem with all of my work. I find that I don't actually sculpt to a breed stand. I actually kind of just sculpt a pretty horse. That's why my stuff doesn't always show very well because it's not really breed type. So Fable, she's just a cross. Like she would be a pasture horse that you would have or a Mustang. If you go to Briar Fest next year will you host a workshop? I am not technically allowed to share any of that information. Briar keeps everything under wraps until a couple of weeks before the festival so I can't announce anything pretty much early. I don't really know how I feel about the whole like in-person workshop thing. I think it could be really overwhelming for me but also at this point it's not really official or not for me if I will be attending Briar Fest. That is something I would like to work towards. That is something I'd like to do in the future. What are your current passions in the hobby world or things that you've lost a passion for? I think I really love the tutorials and that really brings me a lot of fulfillment. I'd say the whole hobby is kind of my passion. I don't have one area that I love more than the others. I like that I can jump from the sculpting to the painting to the videoing to the editing and all the different realms of everything. I find that really exciting. I think I've lost passion a little bit for the collecting side of things. I think it's shifted for me just growing up and having more responsibilities and being more of an adult. I don't buy as many Briars as I used to. I don't find as much joy in showing the OFs either. I think it's fun and I usually end up doing it if I'm already going to the show but I don't need to do it anymore. I think that the custom and the art side of everything is really exciting for me. I think another area that I've kind of lost desire in is painting stablemates. I don't do that as much anymore. I started with the stablemates and I started only painting and now it's kind of evolved and I'm reaching a point too where the drastic customizing is phasing out a little bit for me as well because I'm into the original sculpture realm and the casting potential of that is much more exciting than just creating one of a kind piece. I'm aware that that is happening and I'm going to do my best to make sure that that doesn't happen because I still wanna have drastic custom pieces. I wouldn't say that anything has really died for me. I think I'm still really passionate about everything that's happening and I'm really grateful and humble. I do feel like at some point in my life I may not be doing this. I don't see myself doing this forever until I die. I think I'll always do some form of art like this until I die. I just may not be a complete business or self run as I am currently but I sure am having fun at this current time and I don't have any intentions of leaving or losing that desire anytime soon and I think one of the things I need to do is push myself a little more into fantasy work as well like just have a little more fun kind of like the canvas painting, throw caution at the wind instead of just super hyper realism all the time. If you could sculpt a companion animal, not an equine, what would it be? I would probably sculpt a goat. I grew up with goats and they're really cute and their anatomy is really interesting too. Maybe I should work on that. That would probably get some good traction if I made like a little mama goat with little kids. How cute would that be? How do you find good inspiration pictures for coat color? I find that Pinterest is amazing. If you just go into Google images all the time, you'll see the same photos over and over but if you go to Pinterest, it's a really good reference board because they pull from lots of different places. I find also DeviantArt has a lot of stock images that are really, really great references. I also refer to sale ads a lot. I spend a lot of time on Kijiji and Facebook on different horse sale pages and whenever I'm on social media I will screenshot anything, save anything that I like. So I'm always saving photos. 50% of my phone storage is reference photo and then I do take time and I compile all of those into a folder on my computer. I refer to that album when I'm looking for inspiration. It's harder for me to want to start something and have to sit down and find a photo that I want to create. I find it way easier if I'm just casually scrolling through Instagram and I'm stopped in my tracks by a photo. Those are generally the photos that I will use to make my next original or to make my next drastic. And I think that's kind of a metaphor for life is generally when you're not looking for things is when the good things happen. That's relationships, reference photos. It's the same vibe. Favorite pony slash draft breed. I like both of these horses and all of them. No bias there and same for ponies, no bias there. And I like ponies I think more in life because they're less intimidating to me. I'm quite a small, light person. I like my horses to be a little bit smaller so that I don't know, it's just more manageable. It's easier for me to get on and off of them. I find them funner to ride because they're quick and catty and so that's Drifter basically. I call him a pony. He is a horse.  I don't think I would ever really want a draft horse to ride. In my older years as I age, I would probably prefer a draft though because their brains are amazing. Best way to cut models up for resculpting. So the fastest way is using a dremel and using a dremel cutting wheel and I've demonstrated that in some of my videos. But I personally have a love-hate relationship with my dremel. I love it, but it also terrifies me and I'm a very nervous person when using power tools. So I actually spend a lot of time just using a hacksaw on my briars and I bought a really good hacksaw from Home Depot, the Husky brand and it's a good arm workout as well. I find that it has more control. Please make a video on how to paint Cremelo slash Purlino. No. If any of you guys know me, this is like a thing. I don't like Cremelo horses. I'm sorry. I'm not interested in dilutes. I love a good buckskin. I love a good palanino, but I will not do Cremelo. I will not do Purlino and I will never paint them. How much planning do you put into sculpting or customizing your models? A lot. I think if you don't plan, things will go wrong very quickly. I will either start with a sketch that comes out of my own brain or I will start with an image that really inspires me and then generally I'll convert that into a sketch. So I'll always have a sketch and I'll always have a photo or a combination of photos to create that pose or idea. And then I will take time to scale that photo and illustrator, print it out in briar size. I'll take time picking the model I'm going to choose to customize. So there's a lot of prep and even if you're starting with a drastic custom, there's a ton of prep in picking the model, finding all the cut lines, deciding what needs to chain. If you're starting an original sculpture, there's a ton of prep in building the armature. There is always a lot of planning that goes into all of them. Would you ever want to make a life-size sculpture someday? I'll do the sculpting, I'll do the slap on a clay, the like armature stuff, that's really difficult. Understanding how much weight could go there too because if you're using that much clay. Is your main art sculpting style inspired by any other artists? And if yes, which artists are in particular? My inspiration is from all of the things, Raven Maddock for her hair, Kylie Parks for her overall persona of model. I love the way that Stephanie Blalock paints. Her apolluses are really shaded and dynamic. I really, really enjoy horror studios. Like pretty much all the big names, like I love, I love everybody's art. I really do. And I pull inspiration from a lot of those pieces that I really like. How are you so awesome? Because I follow my heart. My word of advice is always follow your heart.  You have to listen to your head sometimes. Most of the time, listen to your heart. Favorite horse breed, Mustangs. I would say Mustangs. I love that they don't have a archetype that they need to be. I would actually really, really love to own a Mustang one day. It's kind of a long standing goal. Dream horse, Drifter. Biggest hobby pet peeve is publicly shaming people. I don't like this current trend and it's not just from model horses. It's kind of as a society. We feel like it's okay to publicly shame people over social media and share a post or a really bold opinion publicly so that everyone else can gang up on the post and say really nasty things. I worry for the people who are starting out. I worry for the young generations and the kids and you guys that are just looking to learn and you want to share your stuff because you're excited about it because you want to learn how to make it better. And there's some people out there that will completely take it and squash it. I don't want that happening to anyone. And it's happened to me before but I'm established enough that I understand that I shouldn't worry about it. I want this to be a safe space for newbies and beginners because you gotta start somewhere and we all start somewhere. I want you guys here. I want you guys sculpting and I don't want you to be ever afraid to post your work. What's your favorite color to paint? City, buckskin. I could have one briar in every mold in city buckskin and never get bored of it. From a fellow Canadian, how do you spray primer and finish in the winter? I think the biggest thing is humidity and where I live in Canada, we don't have any humidity who are really dry and I try to avoid those really cold stretches. My biggest thing is I will take the model outside, spray and immediately bring the model inside so the model will cure and dry indoors. I do try as a general consensus to prep and prime models in the summer, warm months and then I have a lot of stock to paint over the winter. What is something that inspires you to create and also keep going on your projects?  People still continue to send wonderful messages and comments and fan mail and emails. I've never done it for the compliments but it really does keep me going and it makes me feel inspired. My art is loved and that my style is loved. I love knowing that there's younger people looking up to me as I looked up to these kind of people that were doing this when I was a child. I find that really inspiring and it's something that's like so deep inside of me that I have to do it. And so that always drives me forward but knowing that it's so supported and embraced and loved and I've created this community and this name for myself and all of these different extra elements on top of like just loving the art of it, it makes it so special. I literally am in this state of euphoria because it's such a unique thing that I've found here and it's a passion and a love like no other and I couldn't have done this without you guys because if no one was there to purchase my work I never would be able to potentially do this as a career. So it's really, it's you guys. I know when I started the Instagram I made a pact with myself that I would reply to each comment and I did that for a very long time. There's too many comments to reply to but know that I would if I genuinely had the time but if you ever wanted to reach me personally and actually chat with me, send me an email, send me a message. I always reply to all of those. Not so much comments just cause there's an influx of them. What is your process with commissions? What do you prefer commission versus sale? So I have done a bit of both. I prefer sales pieces. I prefer the less pressure but with sales you're not a guaranteed payout. I like that sometimes because I wanna be able to create stuff, choose if I wanna sell it or not, decide to sell it or keep it for a few years and then sell it, show it and then sell it. So I like that flexibility. Whereas commissions you're guaranteed a payout and generally I can charge a bit more for commissions just because it's taking my time and actually committing it to something that's not a personal piece. But I don't love them in the sense that I don't find as much inspiration and joy from them. So there was a time where it was just I took commissions first come first serve and I think that's the flaw in that process. So since then I only take commissions that peak joy or spark interest and that way I stay committed to them and I want to do them. There's certain colors I won't paint, there's certain molds that I just don't love the vibe of and then there's other molds that I'd love to paint but never would have the opportunity otherwise. How did you start collecting briars? I have an entire video explaining that and I think that you should check it out.  This is like a long standing thing for me. This is my marigold custom start. Not as like simple as you would think it is and she looks wonky and I know she is wonky but that's marigold. She's got an extra long back, she's got really prominent hips. Her shoulders are kind of wonky. But Drifter and Yoda, I've thought about making them as actual original, be able to cast them. That is something that I would like to work on. And the last question of this Q&A video is how do you keep the inspiration flowing and deal with burnout? I am pretty good at managing my time. Knowing how long things take and budgeting myself enough time. So I think the biggest thing is never overbook yourself, never promise timelines to anyone. So all of my commission work is on a no guarantee turnaround and all of my logo work is the same. I try to do things as fast as I can and I end up doing them in a timely manner. If I'm ever feeling overwhelmed, I can take a break and not feel guilty about it because I'm not on a timeline. Now that being said, I do set timelines for myself and I make sure that I'm doing things enough per month, per week, but I don't overburden myself. And if I have to let something go, I let something go. I definitely try to take breaks. I drink lots of water. I would preach drinking water while you work. It helps you concentrate, it helps you stay in the zone. So I try to like not do the same thing all day. If I'm feeling that burnout kind of start, I'll switch to something else for a little bit. That being said, inspiration and all of that comes to me really easily and that's just because I love this so much. And that inspiration is always there and I'm always feeling it. But I do think that you need to keep yourself healthy as well and that really helps because if ever I'm feeling like not mentally 100% or not physically 100%, I can't create to the extent that I can normally create. So I do try to get outside an alpha. I do try to ride my horse or go hang out with my horse. I find even just going into town for Aaron's help. This has been really fun. I think it's a really interesting insight. Thank you so much for watching and tuning in and this has felt amazing. I haven't filmed a video in so long. This has been DJB and happy customizing.