All right, it is 6.02. Why don't we go ahead and get started? I just want to welcome everyone to our event tonight, Youth Gone Wild, the intersection of music, art, and rebellion. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling a little rebellious these days after being locked up at home for so long. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the mechanics, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library. You can see it right behind me. It is the oldest designed to serve the general public here in California and possibly the far west, not just serving those who wield a wrench for their day to day job. We also are a cultural event center, and so host lots of events like this every day, in person and virtual.  So I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year, and with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. And it certainly is whirling these days as things start to reopen. So our event tonight will be moderated by Liam O'Donohue who is the host and producer of the KPFA radio program and podcast East Bay yesterday. Our other speakers tonight include Samantha Durbin, who is a multi-talented writer from Oakland, California, now living in the wonderful town of Goleta. And she publishes all over the place, but recently published her debut book called Raver Girl, coming of age in the 90s, which chronicles from her perspective the San Francisco Bay Area raver scene in the 90s. We also have with us Jose Vadi, who is an award winning essayist, poet, and playwright. He is the author of Interstate Essays from California, and his work has also appeared all over the literary magazine scene. And last but not least, we have Mark Bishka. He joins us. He is the publisher and arts editor of the local news site 48 Hills, and also the legacy alternative weekly paper, The Bay Guardian. In addition to being a writer, he also co-owns the stud bar here in the city. So I'm going to put people, our speakers links in the chat space. So if you want, you can copy and paste those into your browser to look at later. And also information about how to buy their books, if you should want to. And I also want to encourage all of our guests to use our chat space. If you have any questions, we will get to them at the end of the event. And we are recording this event so you can enjoy it again in a couple of days once I edit it and put it on YouTube. All right, I want to thank you all for coming. Thank all of our speakers for coming and take it away, Liam. And I would like to thank you for hosting this event and helping to put together this awesome panel of so many great local writers. So I really appreciate it. And just kicking things off, thinking about tonight's theme of youthful rebellion, I was thinking back on my own political trajectory because I was raised by a pretty conservative Irish Catholic dad. My family wasn't that political, but from a pretty early age, I definitely gravitated towards kind of anti-authoritarian. I guess you could call it broadly. And I know that the main thing that sent me in that direction from a pretty early age, like middle school, was music. I used to stay up watching shows like Yo MTV Raps in the 80s, late 80s. And I specifically remember one of the first things that kind of jolted me out of my comfortable suburban white existence was seeing the video for public enemies 911 as a joke. Because not only did it make me aware that these public disparities that I had no idea about existed, but I mean, the beat was just so hard. Like the music, it got me so curious about what they were all about. So I immediately went out and bought the tape fear of a black planet. It's one of the first tapes I ever bought. And that like sent me down a whole path of learning about like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and all these things I'd never heard about in school. I mean, there was no Black Panthers chapter in my textbook. Probably because I wasn't reading this textbook yet, which we'll get to in a minute. This is Mark's folk into the streets, which I'll be asking him about shortly. But you know, from Yo MTV Raps, I got into punk, started going to punk shows, underground punk shows in Chicago in the back of the club.  It was an old bowling alley, you know, that used to host bands in the corner for like $5 a pop and, you know, like let 15 year old string. But you know, there were there was always people selling like Noam Chomsky books and Howard Zen and zines about act up and the riot girl movement. Of course, my neighbors are doing construction right now. So I'm just going to close that window. But the point is that, you know, it was music, radical music that got me sort of excited about politics. And I'm still excited about politics to this day and rebellion to this day. So when I was approached about moderating a panel for these three authors, I immediately said yes. But at first, I was kind of struggling how to frame the event because all their books are so different. But then I realized that one thing that unites these three books, I'll hold up the other two right now to give everyone a little bit of love is the fact that they all really do deal with this theme of kind of youthful rebellion. And I think that's really fertile territory for discussion, because it's really often dismissed as just, you know, naivete of the young or kids being kids, things like that. And I think that it's worth having an important or, you know, a serious discussion about because at this moment in American history, there's obviously a lot on the line. And we are going to depend on the young, you know, young adults, the kids of this generation to help fix some of the things that people in our generations and the generations above us messed up so badly. So yeah, what I'm getting at basically is I think that we can, I think history is important. That's my focus. I think that there's a lot that young people can learn from looking back at history. So hopefully, you know, people in my generation, sort of older millennials, Gen X type folks can help sort of share, you know, pass on that legacy to the kids of today. But also, I hope there's some younger people who are tuning in today or will watch us on YouTube later, that can type in questions that we can respond to, because I think there's a lot that people in my generation, you know, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and older can learn from the kids too. I mean, I see a lot of inspiration in the younger generations kind of figuring out some things at a young age that I didn't get to understand until I was much, much older. So hopefully we can get into that as well. But I've rambled on long enough now, I'll start in with some of the Q&A. And I want to start with Mark, because Mark, you're the only person who I haven't interviewed yet. I did an interview with Samantha on my podcast. And also I talked to Jose live at Green Apple Books a couple months ago. And I'll put links into the chat of those conversations, just so anyone who missed those can check it out. And I'm also throwing in a link to a, I didn't interview Mark, I didn't interview you yet, Mark, but I did listen to an interview with you recently that I absolutely loved. You had a great conversation with Vivian from the Rave to the Grave podcast, one of my favorite podcasts, where you share these just absolutely astonishing tales of throwing underground raves in Detroit in the 1990s. So again, I just put that in the chat, hopefully people can check that out, because it's a fascinating conversation. But switching gears, like I said before, like I know you as a music guy, a rave guy, music nightlife writer. So I was a little surprised when I saw that you were coming out with this book into the streets, a young person's visual history of protest in the United States. Because that just felt like a little bit different than, you know, what I see you writing and tweeting about for the most part. So just starting things off, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what made you want to take on such a massive topic as the history of protest in the United States, and why specifically you wanted to aim that topic at young people? Certainly. Thank you so much for that great question. It's a, you know, I've been going to parties as a young person and a dancer and a raver since I was 14 in Detroit, and growing up in kind of a depressed industrial atmosphere like Detroit, which mixed white working class kids with black working class kids, you know, and kind of mixed the margins together. Every time we danced together was almost a political statement. So from the very beginning of my nightlife going out, I, I really, it was really intertwined with politics, which kind of guided my career to become a publisher of like an alternative weekly with such a huge history of from the from the early 1960s through the 2000s of bolstering these kind of protest movements and everything like that.  I was in the Detroit part, which was a little anemic compared to what was going on in San Francisco and New York. But I still felt that I was politically active then. And as a person of Arab American descent, I was also going to college during the Gulf War. And so I became kind of activated towards that too. It was a very interesting time then. So my activation into these things paralleled my rise in nightlife and going out and partying all night. So partying all night, protesting all day was the perfect thing I wanted to do. And, you know, when I got a little bit older, I look back and wanted to share some experiences. And I realized no one had written a history of protest for young people, you know, that wasn't dry, or, you know, that wasn't like just a history book. And I wanted to write something that was visually explosive, because youth culture, visuals, images, it's such a huge part of protest, you know, from the very beginning of this country and before it. And so I wanted it to kind of pop I want something that would be fun, express my own history and underground partying, etc. Through this kind of kind of catchy explosion of history. And while I was writing the book, I discovered that there were just tremendous pockets of youth culture that was driving the development of the kind of awakening in this country to racial injustice. You know, two different, you know, wonderful evolutions we've had in gender politics, the incredible turnout of young people against gun violence that we've seen Black Lives Matter, which was driven by young people in youth culture. And so I found that kind of mixed all my things together. So I wanted to write a history and I hope I did it justice for that. Unfortunately, the book came out right before the January 6th insurrection. So I'm hoping that we'll have a third edition that takes that into into account. And I don't know exactly how I'm going to write about that particular protest. But but yeah, that's basically the story of the book. Well, speaking of follow ups to the book, this is a visual history. But you know, as a music writer, you do I know that you know a lot about protest music. So I was wondering if maybe that could be something like a good company or supplement the next edition, like a history of protest music, because so often, like you said, it's like these youth movements, these student movements, they're kind of at the forefront, the vanguard of these various social struggles. And a lot of time, I mean, there's like an anthem that goes along with those different movements, right? Totally, exactly. You know, that was one of the great things about writing about the Black Lives Matter movement and Ferguson before that, which had kind of started the original hashtag was it was such an explosive, such a flowering of the hip hop community and really brought it to the fore. I was just thinking. The other day, I was fortunate to be reporting on the Arab Spring in Tunisia while it was happening. And one of the most amazing things of that protest was the proliferation of hip hop. And the United States has really set this template for protest music through hip hop. And by extension, through techno, after hours raves, extra legal parties, house parties that really capture the youthful spirit of rebellion as well as soundtrack actual events that are happening in the world. Absolutely. And for anyone who is not familiar, I will say there's a ton of great rap coming out of Morocco of all places right now. So like the Middle Eastern hip hop world is like, I think, honestly, one of the most exciting places musically in the world right now. So we were talking about raves a second ago, which is right up Samantha's alley with her book Raver Girl. And Sam, Mark was just talking to me to go about sort of how going to underground parties is a teenager sort of politicized him and how they were a political act. I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit too. Do you feel like being a party kid, which some people might just see as like hedonistic or escapist, did that influence your political identity or the trajectory of how you kind of approach politics in the world in any way? Well, let's see. So I was born and raised in Oakland. And so I kind of had these very typical, aggressive, Bay Area parents. And so I was always raised, you know, with my mom was like a feminist. And she raised me as a feminist. My dad was an early tech guy and who had moved out of his house at 16, figured out his own way, dropped out of UC Berkeley, did acid with Alice Lee Stanley. So I was kind of already set up to be this like open minded kid. And so when I found Rave Culture, I was already also really into music that was probably the main draw because I had already kind of heard this like techno music and, you know, there were a few things, you know, that really brought me into the culture. But I was also listening to Guns N' Roses when I was 10 years old. And just, you know, I think being exposed to, yeah, MTV, right? MTV exposed us to a lot that we know as youngins, like, you know, there's so many exposure now, I feel like, probably too much exposure. And so MTV was really the holy grail of, you know, discovering these new music and then these new lives, you know, these new cultures. And, you know, so even though I was an early Guns N' Roses fan, I didn't become this like rocker girl. I became a raver. And I just think of really being in the Bay Area as a raver, like it just solidified my love for, you know, just kind of being being open minded and being accepting. And, you know, kind of like what Mark was saying, like once you're out on the dance floor, everyone is your friend. Everyone is equal. We're all there, like for the same purpose. And it's just this unity that I did not feel at high school. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that first wave of raves had a really utopian outlook as well. Yeah, it was like mid, yeah, like mid 90s. You know, there were kids from all over the Bay Area, like all different socio-economic backgrounds. And I'd been exposed to a lot of that in Oakland, but I also was privileged as I grew up in the Oakland Hills, went to private schools. So for me, it exposed me, I would say more to that socio-economic, the differences there and really opened my mind to my privilege.  So I think for me, in terms of, you know, kind of a political outlook, it was more that it was more, you know, kind of me realizing that I'd come from a privileged place and then opening my eyes to these friends who were not raised with, you know, so many opportunities, but we were all equal and we all had fun and we all got along. And then there was the element of, of course, experimenting with psychedelics. Right. Actually, I wanted to ask about that because you mentioned as a minute ago that your dad was kind of part of that first sixties generation that was, you know, taking acid. And I think a lot of the, you know, popular mythology around acid then that was being promulgated by people like Timothy Leary was that this is a revolutionary drug. If everyone takes it, the world will be a better place, you know, there's the potential for real massive social shift to be fueled by LSD and mushrooms, for example. That didn't exactly happen as we all know now tripping having a great trip doesn't necessarily make you a better person or more empathetic or more progressive or anything like that. But now we're kind of going through a renaissance of psychedelic culture right now. And I know you've been interested in that.  Do you think that this psychedelic renaissance is more, do you feel like there's the potential for political change with it or is this more about like kind of individualistic self healing and sort of that side of the equation? I mean, if we look at cannabis, right, and what's happened with cannabis since the 90s, which is when I started consuming and, you know, it was very much illegal. It was like my dad, one of my dad's biggest fears that I was going to get caught, you know, carrying weed because he knew that me and my brother smoked weed. So if you look at how that has changed culture and industry, you know, I think that a lot of people, you know, wonder like, is that kind of like setting, you know, setting the tone for these psychedelics now psychedelics are very different, you know, I think they need a lot more guidance and they do need more introspection and that's why it has, it is a long time coming and there's all these clinical trials and Michael Bolin actually just released a documentary about his book, How You Can Change Your Mind. And so I think there's getting, there's all this information that's being revealed and it's nothing new for people who have been in this world or experimented or been interested in this world. But I think the world can definitely benefit from the medicinal elements of psychedelics, you know, I think versus like alcohol, right, something that's been around for so long too and has, you know, created, you know, destruction for a lot of people and are there medicinal qualities to alcohol? Like, you know, so I think, yeah, it's a really exciting time. I have been following it, you know, through publications like Double Blind and, you know, kind of on the sidelines. And I think it creates a shift individually for a lot of people and the teachings now are about safety and harm reduction. And that was missing from my experience. I was missing from my dad's experience. We survived. And so for these, you know, upcoming generations, I'm really excited for them.  And so I just think it'll be approached differently. There'll be a lot more information, good information this time.   But it's just like, oh, just leave it alone. Just like, let's let the plant, like, let's like get to the plant finally, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to, I mean, there's just so much to think about there, but I want to make sure I get some questions in here for Jose, because I haven't checked them with you yet. And it's been a little while since we talked. So since I've sort of been asking everyone about how they're kind of, you know, the passions of their youth, music, raving, et cetera, influenced their kind of political trajectory. I want to talk to you a little bit about skateboarding, which is something you cover quite a bit in this book. You started skating at a young age, you're still doing it now. How did being a skater influence the way that you sort of viewed the world? And like, what did you learn then that you still kind of carry with you today, from that perspective?  But I think similar to raving, there is a different relationship with physical space that's very interesting to explore when you're like a skateboarder in terms of cities or even in more vacant areas, you know, like how skateboarding, street skateboarding in particular, like how that self generates and how it creates like a reciprocal relationship with you and a city. So I started skateboarding in 1996. So we're kind of dovetailing from that post-Nirvana major label investment, like Veruca Salt on the radio, you know what I mean? Things are kind of weird. And then we're getting into like, and like the movie goes about to kind of come out and try and interpret rave culture, right? You know, the WB, the wee black, instead of wet black, you know, we're kind of in this like transition model in pop culture. So skateboarding was really weird because they represented all these things and it was on the rise to Tony Hawk Pro Skater and this whole new big invitation to more communities of color, frankly, more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds because now it's in your comfort. So now in 2022 and seeing trans center brands, queer center brands like in skateboarding, seeing women and men in the Olympics, which is an entire another conversation, you know, the concept of rebellion and skateboarding is really interesting now because it's on the podium, right? But it took complete illegality to get there, you know, like, which is really interesting to think about. But I love the Venn diagrams with like active. It took complete illegality to get to a lot of good places. So skateboarding is not alone there. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.  And like when we were kids skating, I skated too as a teenager, you would like never see someone in their 30s or 40s or 50s even skating and now it's not that uncommon. So I am kind of curious about that sort of intergenerational conversation in the skateboarding world. Like when you're out and you see, you know, people who are like 15 or 20, are they interested in sort of hearing what the older generations of skaters have to say?  It really depends on the where, you know, I mean, because certain skate parks have certain cultures where that's more, I think kind of encouraged. And there's a lot of street skate spots that are like designed to be United Nations, you know, where all generations, all generations, all flexibility, they're welcomed. Rock Ridge Park Station in Oakland is the example of that, I think, you know, in terms of California right now, where you know, you do have someone who was pro in the 80s hanging out with someone who just got their first board 20 minutes ago and they're chatting and they're chopping it up and not in a top down way, you know, just in the how does it feel? So it really depends, you know, I just moved out to Sacramento, it's been about a year now. And seeing the scene here, which has to respond so much to climate, you know, all the old barnies and all the little kids are just hiding in the shade all the time, just like stay cool. There's a lot of different like moments that bring people together. And skateboarding in general, it's like, you know, I think one thing that can be older generation is trying to kind of encourage the young people about is like, if you're like, don't skate with AirPods on and a crowded skate park, you know, they mean like, they hello to people, you know, they mean like be present in this physical space, you could be on your phone anywhere kind of thing. So I'd be, you know, that kind of encouragement from the older heads, which is cool. But I think in general, there's a lot more zines and publications now too that are doing this like YouTube channels, like Jeff Grosso's love letters to skateboarding, I think educated a lot of people. So there's a lot more digital resources for kids to go and dig in the crate and figure out why their favorite pro is doing what they're doing in a sense, like what's the historical context. Yeah, very cool, very cool. Well, speaking of historical context, Mark, in your book, it's a great book, but it's like 150 pages and you're trying to cover like the entire history of protests, which we could cover, you know, thousands and thousands of pages. So one of the things I'm wondering about is how you sort of narrowed it down to the, you know, 30, 35 or so different specific protests and social movements that you covered.  But I'm wondering which chapters from talking to your readers have resonated the most with the kids who are picking it up and checking it out. Yeah, definitely.  So I spent a lot of time in the library looking through things. And I think I was attracted to, but personally, I was attracted to the story of protest in this country is the story of introducing diversity, you know, kind of the struggle against, you know, the struggle to not have straight white rich males dominate the conversation in politics. So telling the story was just a wonderful way to, you know, as Jose said, the integrate so many different sexualities, races, ethnicities, points of view. So really, I zeroed into each step that it took from Native American protests, which have happened for, you know, almost 500, 600 years now through to, you know, write up to Black Lives Matter happening. And so I wanted to make sure that I, that I hit all those notes of diversity that were happening. Personally, the things that I resonated with were kind of what Samantha and Jose have talked about where you make your own space, you make these autonomous zones, you know, in protests, when they are able to carve out this, this kind of space of possibility, you know, it just resonates.  You know, that reminds me, like when I first moved to the Bay Lake 20 years ago, reclaim the streets parties were a big thing. And for people who don't remember those, it's kind of almost feels quaint now, because like the idea was that this is like way before park lids, there wasn't even that many bike lanes. And it was, I think people trying to like be very vocal about like actually taking back public space and having doing something fun and spontaneous and joyful there. And even I helped organize a couple in San Francisco, and they weren't always just about like, Hey, we're going to sort of, you know, turn tables in the middle of the street and have a dance party. But sometimes it would be like, we're going to protest like the muni fair hike by like having a street party and like people come out and dance, but then we'll also be passing up flyers. So like, I love that idea of like, you know, as we've been, you know, coming back to this theme again and again in this conversation of like having fun and taking up space can also be like a great way to like meet people and spread ideas. And especially before social media, when you couldn't just like post something on Twitter or TikTok and expect everyone to find it. Totally. And I think that that's a really good point because a lot of people think that a protest has only one purpose and that's to change it. And if the protest doesn't immediately change the world, then it's a failed protest somehow. But protests are all about getting out and meeting with people, building networks, exercise, getting out in the fresh air, you know, seeing people face to face, passing on those things, even internet protests where you, you know, you just get to connect with other people in a human way.  It's so interesting as Samantha was talking about kind of what happened with cannabis and how, you know, legalization has kind of tamed it and made it into this big business kind of thing. I look at those original protests and things like critical mass where it was like actually taking over the streets or, you know, a number of street protests throughout history that have blocked streets, block bridges and everything. And now that's kind of been not gentrified but normalized into slow streets into what's happening with JFK Drive here where families are going out and, you know, it's recreation. So it's really interesting to see the evolution of how something is so radical. And then a few years later, it becomes a family activity, which protests also are, you know, so. Absolutely.  But, you know, as you put it, they can, you know, taming them is it can kind of smooth off those edges that make them so exciting and relevant and politically challenging as well. Right. Because I mean, look what happened with the parklets. At first it was like, cool, people can actually eat outside. And then it's like, oh, but it's basically privatizing public sidewalks and like making them unsafe spaces for maybe homeless people who used to live on those sidewalks. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. There's those. There's definitely those considerations of how protests becomes legitimized. You know, going back, of course, here to the 60s, as you were talking with Samantha about and her father, where what was once kind of wild and out on the streets is now sold to us in many iterations after iterations after iterations. I mean, I think we're on the 30th time that flares have come back, you know, right now. And one of the things I loved about Samantha's book so much was her detailing of the fashion of rave. Yes. And how much that put into it. And that just like, you know, was was a pristine Madeleine and taking me right back. Oh my gosh. Yes. And the Samantha, your book was also just so like no, like holding no punches, you're really upfront about sort of the ups and downs of your life as a raver girl.  And so I'm wondering, as you raise, you know, your son, you know, how are you going to sort of balance out that, you know, wanting him to kind of have the sort of exciting rebellious experiences that you had when you were a young person growing up versus the sort of parental instinct to not want anything bad to happen to your kid.  But like people got hurt, people got in trouble.  I know. Yeah. Yeah, I get asked this a lot. And, you know, and I think about it a lot.  And so I don't have to worry about society and bad influences and social media and, you know, everything that's going to come. But I also, that time for me, it was really formative and just like my attitude.   But I'm pretty open minded, like, you know, creatively too.  And when I entered the world of rave, I was able to be my, like, kooky creative self. And then, of course, you know, take these substances that actually really did open my doors of perception. And I attribute, you know, this kind of really complex creativity that I can have. I think some of it is, you know, from doing psychedelics at the young age.   He's really smart and really kooky, as a lot of four-year-olds are. I do secretly hope he's not going to be in that job. So, you know, we don't really have to deal with it, but who knows. But if he is, you know, I feel like I have a wealth of knowledge and I will be, you know, very open with him and just makes, and like I said, there's all these resources now.  By the time your son is like of partying age, like micro doses might be available at Walgreens, the way things are going.  Move the kombucha, it's like the you got your psilocybin kombucha, you know, definitely get some DMT at the drive-through on the way to the spa. No, it's really, that's why, that's why I've been, I mean, that's not why I've been following what's going on in, you know, in the psychedelic world. But, you know, I, it's my own personal, you know, experience and curiosity still. But yeah, I mean, if you told me in the 90s that cannabis was going to be, you know, I secretly hope, I think we all hoped it would, you know, and we knew we were like, it can be so therapeutic and it can be, you know, I was medic self-medicating as if, you know, didn't even really realize it. And so it was really exciting when all that unfolded, you know, over the last 10 years. So it'll be exciting to see what unfolds with this. And I think it certainly, you know, can help so many people who would not even consider it before.  Absolutely. Well, you know, my specialty is Oakland history, East Bay history. So you know, I got to get one Oakland history related question here. And this next one is coming to you, Jose. So I've told you this before, but the essay in your book that I resonated most with was your chapter about living in downtown Oakland in your early 20s, which was kind of like right before the giant kind of post-grace recession tech bubble that really changed everything. I mean, so much more development, gentrification, displacement, rising rents, etc. So your book came out about a year ago or so. You've had a chance to talk to a lot of readers about it. And I'm wondering what kind of feedback you've been getting about that topic specifically.  But also I'm curious if you're hearing from any younger people who are like, wow, like you could afford an apartment in Oakland for $400 a month, you know, right out of college, which seems like magical now, but back then was a lot of money. So yeah, I'm kind of wondering like how younger people are responding to that chapter and the rest of your book as well. For sure. Yeah, I think, well, there's a couple of different reactions. Definitely the kind of price of living life, like the rent price alone, I think is kind of jarring for folks both like sharing a spot with two other people, the people that we took over the apartment from just finessed an amazing deal. But regardless, like it's just the type of downtown Oakland that was going down, you know, at that time was, I don't want to say volatile, but there's a lot of things happening all at once that we're leading up to kind of things that you thought occupy and beyond. But I think a lot of people, especially like folks in these bay have kind of responded with like a lot of love to that piece. And a lot of like, even if they weren't old enough to experience that they were like, Oh yeah, my uncle or my cousin or someone I know used to live downtown or live in the area or says that X, Y or Z is very different. A lot of people, a lot of particularly young person at one of the readings said that they didn't know that the 14th Street have been like renovated. Like they kind of thought the amphitheater and everything that's there. Like usually like little things like that are interesting. But then there's all the people that are like, Oh yeah, like I was there.  Oh shotgun, Phil. Yeah. Yeah, because you were with the Oscar Grant riots and protests as well, which was like a really pivotal moment. And in downtown, like you said, kind of set the stage for Occupy, I think in a lot of the Black Lives Matter movement and things that came after. So such an important era. And it's a lot of like parallel kind of histories being told to like the Alice Street film, you know, like about the 14th and Alice, like so there's a lot of things that like the interstate, I think is kind of also like trying to be in conversation with, you know, I mean, like, including your word Lee and frankly, and like, you know, like just trying to be aware of things. And also like things have kind of changed, like the Chauncey Bailey, you know, plaque that I mentioned not being there, the book now is there, like, you know, in the wake of this new development. So like, there's always kind of active history. But I think a lot of people have responded positively to it. When I read the work, a lot of people immediately tell me like their relationship to California. I've noticed the first time I ever read anything from this book with that Wolfman books on, you know, and like, how does that play so much?  So like immediately people tell me the relationship with California, which is really interesting or their relationship with Oakland, you know. So I found that even with people that have just moved to Oakland, or it's the Bay Area, they kind of come with it like with an amount of respect, like they're kind of like, I know that there's something here before me and this helps me understand what was here before me. So like knowing that there's people that are already like curious enough to know that they're the before is really encouraging. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I could like go around asking you guys questions all day. I do have more questions, but I want to make sure that we have some time for the audience to ask some questions too. So I don't know if we can take one from the audience chat now, if anyone has a question. And if we don't, you know, I've got like I said, I've got plenty in my arsenal, but I want to give the people a chance to make their voice heard as well. Yeah, I haven't, no one has posted anything in the chat space yet. Well, I can, I can ask one unless you were going to say something. No, I was just going to say that I'll, you know, please, making the service announcement, please put in the chat if you have any questions. And we have such a small group, you can ask your question directly, I can turn your mic on if you want, or I can read your question in the chat space, it's up to you. But if you have any questions, just let me know. And in the meantime, Liam, why don't you go ahead and ask one of your backup questions. Well, so one of the things I was wondering about, because I do want to make sure that we have some kind of like, you know, inspirational or uplifting moments this conversation. So I do feel like it's really easy these days to get down when when you're looking around at all the various apocalyptic scenarios kind of looming on the horizon from, you know, lack of reproductive rights in a lot of this country to, you know, climate change, et cetera. So I'm wondering, you know, if you guys can talk a little bit about what is giving you hope right now in terms of what you're seeing in youth culture, like what's bubbling up from the Zoomers from Gen Z, that's making you think that, like, they're going to have a positive impact on on some of these crises. I mean, obviously, I'll jump in, obviously, you know, Internet activism has evolved, you know, and for me, seeing how fast knowledge travels and how fast reactions are, and how, you know, how quickly words gets out via TikToks, you know, via group chats, et cetera, that kind of organizing, which is also reflected in what's happening in a lot of workplaces now where there's, you know, unionization drives going on. There are people willing to pour into the streets, as we saw when Roe was reversed, especially young women, taking charge of these kind of things that, you know, seeing people both on the streets and sharing this knowledge in this new technology.  People love to do that, you know, and so that I just love seeing that still happening. All right, that's a question. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Samantha. Do you have a rebuttal? Yeah, I don't have a rebuttal. I have an addition. Yeah, I was recently reading about a really young climate change advocate, and that's one of, like, my biggest concerns as an adult, and especially like having a child, and so, yeah, so I was really reassuring to hear, and she's like, I think she's like 19 or 20, and she's a huge social media following. And so I think, you know, as much as I roll my eyes at social media, when I see young people using it for good, I am so relieved. I'm like, okay, there is hope, you know, and some people are using this for good.  But I, you know, and then just like, I'm kind of obsessed with coming of age and high school shows and movies, I'm always watching them. And yeah, and just even, and I know it's television, but these topics that are coming up for teenagers, I'm like, wow, okay, like they're, you know, even as teenagers, they're aware of these things that like I was so not, you know, like I was a rave girl, I was still in my bubble, and it's kind of like, I don't know, I'm sure there's still kids who are in their bubbles, but it's like, how can you not be aware of all these things that have happened, you know, in the past five years, and even during the pandemic.  And it wasn't a part of the conversation. I feel like it's very much part of the conversations I'm, you know, witnessing and if I ever like when I, you know, when I'm out in public and I see youngins, I like always eavesdrop. I'm like totally that that person. I'm like, what are they talking about? So, yeah, they are talking about, you know, some important things, so. All right, so it looks like a question just popped up in the chat about someone requesting K Davis requesting a discussion about the current state of online communities for the local rave dance organizing culture. It seems like there's no obvious success successors to SF raves, tribe, ground score, etc. Facebook, Twitter seem like hill replacements for the vibrant forms the past. Mark, that kind of feels like a question that you might be ready to answer. I mean, you'd still go to an astonishing amount of parties.  It's impressive. So how are you finding out about things? What are the online communities where people can sort of plug in? Sure. I mean, I think what is happening right now is we're going through the great Facebook collapse where everybody's promotion for events went to Facebook in the mid, you know, 2010s. And then as people got disillusioned over the past four years and left Facebook, they gradually it all fell apart. One of the most touching things that happened to me last year in the darkest time of the pandemic was someone actually handed me a flyer to a party, which I hadn't seen and I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. You know, I hadn't seen it in a while. And, you know, I think this return to physical media is happening as well as, you know, a lot of there is a return happening right now of after hours and extra legal parties, which I'm amazed at and find very helpful. Some of them are a little, you know, not quite my scene, but a lot of them are just really, you know, there's a lot of trans rave parties that are happening and very nurturing of that scene, you know, a lot of gender nonconforming kind of raves that are happening, which I love and DJs coming forth. And I think they've built their own, you know, networks of communication, which is wonderful via group chats, via less public facing things. So the point, I mean, I guess the point of what I'm saying is you kind of need to know somebody now. And if you want to make a flyer, that's the most wonderful thing in the world. Yeah, yeah, definitely. What about in the skateboarding world Jose, is there like a lot of, like, are there part of their forums still where people kind of are like organizing and getting into stuff? Or is it more sort of like private group chats? Because like, I know in San Francisco, for example, they organize that crazy hillbomb in front of Dolores Park every year. And that's, there's no flyers for that that the public is getting. So how are kind of people, you know, collectively organizing things in the skateboarding world these days? Yeah, and the Dolores hillbomb is a great example of something that was started by a local crew that then gets abandoned by that crew and then gets taken by whoever wants it.  So it's like. So it sort of went down the Santa con trajectory then? Yeah, it kind of got brofied. Yeah, actually that's the perfect example. Yeah, basically. And so, you know, but, you know, to Mark's point earlier about social media and its role, to a previous question, I think the answer to this one is that like, a lot of people still show up in real time, like the effects are popping, book fairs are popping, like analog presentations meet, you know, with like events is still like a big thing, you know, and maybe that's the kind of just the power of the forms themselves, but within skateboarding, you know, social media has been that mechanism that has propelled things like unity skateboarding, which is, you know, we're going to show up at this spot, we're going to make it a queer safe in inclusive space for them from this time to this time, show up, get free boards and, you know, whatever, that's now like, an official company that's part of like the industry proper, you know, I mean, that sell boards, you can get at your local skate shop. So social media is a huge mechanism for that. The ironic thing about skateboarding is that skateboarding is all driven by brands. So it's almost like consumerism on steroids, like unity and their skateboards are brands that center it around trans skateboarding. So when you open up a skate magazine, you're following brands and telling you what is skateboarding, like, you know, this, this trick down this hill. And now with social media, skaters are kind of taking back the reins from the bigger companies and saying like, no, this is what skateboarding is, we do it like this in these spaces. Another big thing that's happening is that skaters are taking the initiative to not only build and design skate parks in their communities, which have been going on since the 90s, when there was like a dearth of skate parks. But now they're doing it in these really kind of inclusive community space ways where it's like, say there's two tennis courts that are abandoned, otherwise abandoned, just give us this corner and allow us to create this space that you can fit on maybe at night, or maybe early in the morning when people aren't there. But when the skaters are there, we can use it as our own thing. So it's kind of like, you know, an equal playing field between giving the traditional sports, their big outdoor playing fields, and something that we will actually skate and not another big blocky kind of traditional skate park that now you're seeing in the Olympics, right? So skating is like consistently using digital to like, bring people together in real time in the real space and still have that face to face. So, and even when you show up to the spot today, you still see flyers, you know, posted to the pillars and stuff like that. So yeah, that's awesome. You know, cool. One thing that I was wondering about for all you guys is, you know, when you grow up in these kind of like youth subcultures like raving or punk or skateboarding, you know, I'm sure we all have a lot of friends who kind of like dropped out, grew out of the scene, right? Started adulting or whatever the lingo is these days. But obviously, we're all holding on to, you know, some things that we've been excited about since we were teenagers. And I don't think that's a bad thing.  But I think there's a way, a good way of finding that balance.   What makes you, you know, want to hold on to that so strongly? I think just on this on the skateboarding tip really quick, I think it's the desire to kind of be good at something that you're obsessed at, like, but it's also like to get older just finding your lane, you know, you're not going to jump down 10 stairs without taking out some serious days off of work. You know what I mean? So life insurance policy. Yeah, I would take my own death to get the hospital going clear. You know, you just have to find your lane, really. But I think it's the impact of these things that I think about constantly. Like, why is it that all these, but I think these, these different cultures that resonated with us are all like microcosmic of all these other, they howl so many different worlds, you know, like art, music, as in clothing style, the way you talk to your friends. So, you know, how, how can't you be impacted by this world that like I think about Samantha's book, you know, when she takes people to the Raven Santa Cruz and some of them have been before and some of them, most of them hadn't. So it's like opening the door like out, you know, to the Wonderland, you know, like, um, you just got to find your lane and how to get older with that inspiration kind of alongside you. Yeah, I, I do not attend RAVE anymore. Mainly because I have a four and a half year old son. However, I did recently go before I moved a couple months ago. There was a Sunset crew who used to throw the sunset day parties on Sundays at the end of long weekends for a lot of people. They threw day party and I was like, I told my husband, I was like, we're going to go to this and we're going to bring Donovan. It says it's like family friendly and, and it was the beautiful lagoon, the lagoon park and like San Rafael and it was just like a perfect day and had a couple friends from back in the day who I told and they went and it, and it was, because it was daytime, um, it, it reminded me of what I, you know, of what I loved about this scene and it was the music, the people and just like the energy and so when I, when I'm like, oh gosh, I'm like such a like boring mom now, I'm like, I could always just like put on that music and like go dance in a room in my house and like, I can just get back to that space. Like I don't need the drugs. Like, you know, I've experienced it fully, um, as you know, if you've read the book and so I think it says, yeah, I think it's, it's easy to transport myself back to like the essence of why I love this. Um, and that's really exciting and even just the music can do it. Um, so, you know, I think it's, it's, and it is, it's, it's something that I didn't like talking about for a long time, like in my twenties, I had a lot of shame. I was like, oh my god, I was crazy. I was horrible to my parents. But now, I mean, obviously I'm an open book about it, but because I also accepted it's such a part of who I am and who I became good and bad, you know. Yeah. Yeah. What about you, Mark? Um, I mean, personally, I'm really glad that, uh, techno music and electronic music is so geeky that, you know, you can, like, I often get together with my friends and we talk about the fact that 30 years ago we would be ham radio nuts or model airplane people because we're just geeking out about machinery and sounds and things like that. That's obviously just one aspect of it. Um, and then, you know, I mean, that was a big question that came that came to my mind often during the book was there's this youthful energy of rebellion, you know, kind of like, you know, encapsulized in the hippie movement, et cetera. Um, but, you know, present long before that, where does that go? You know, where does that spirit go?  Um, you know, there's a lot of prejudice against older, you know, as I transition into a rave elder, I suddenly come face to face with the fact that, oh my gosh, I laughed at the 60 year old who was dancing at the rave in the 90s.  So I kind of, well, the nice thing about the Bay Area is that you still won't be the oldest person there because there's so many Peter Pan's in this city. That's so true. That's so true. And you know, I mean, so it's kind of, it's kind of a funny situation to be in, but thank goddess for those people, you know, even though the Peter Pan thing can get to be a little much, you know, just the, I'm so glad there's people who are still on the margins and outside of willing to endure the prejudices to do their own thing. Absolutely. And I'm sure you saw the, there was like a tweet that went like a screenshot of a tweet that went viral, like a month or two ago in a lot of kind of rave or social media forums about like, oh, people over 30 should be banned from music festivals. And the person who posted that got like ratioed so hard. I think the vast majority of people agree with you that, you know, no matter how old you are, if you're there for a good time and you enjoy the music, like it's an accepting place.  Do we have any more questions from the chat or I know it's about seven o'clock, so I don't want to keep us on here all night long, but I don't want to skip anyone if there was any people in the queue. I don't see anyone in the queue. However, there was someone who was, oh, it looks like they've popped out, but there was an anonymous attendee who had a question, but they didn't post it in the chat after all. So. Cool. I'm just dropping those links in one more time in case anyone missed them. Those are the links to the previous interviews with Jose and Samantha, as well as that great conversation between Mark and Vivienne on Rave for the Grave, where you just described some parties that I wish I had gone to that major FOMO listening to that interview. Yeah. But so will that do it for this evening then? Was there anything else anyone else wanted to mention before we wrap things up? Well, I think that was fun. And thanks for recording this and hosting. And I'm glad that it'll be up on YouTube soon for anyone that missed it, because my mom was curious about that. And I want to make sure that. Mine, too. Yes, I will send the link to all of our Eventbrite registrants, and then I'll send it to you folks directly through email. So you can share it around as much as you want or post it on your own website. Awesome. All right. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. And I look forward to seeing you downtown or at the Mechanics directly. Excellent. Thank you so much. Good night, everybody. Take care. Thank you. Good night. Bye.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com coming at you with 2020 Hit Parade, The Rookies, Prison Football Edition, Series 3, One Box Random Team Break No. 3 with four mixer spots being given away. Big thanks to these folks for getting into the action. Really appreciate everybody getting in. So as always, we're going to be doing the break itself first, then we'll give away the spot and a different dice roll at the end of the break. So let's do the break first. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it. Three and a one, four times, one, two, three, and a one, fourth and final time. Thomas down to gym, three and a one, four times, fourth and final time, bangles down to charters. All right. So Thomas with the bangles, Daniel Seahawks Falcons, Thomas with the Cardinals, Dan with the Ravens, Chris with the Panthers, Redskins Chiefs Colts for Daniel. Donnie with the Vikings, Jim with the Rams, Donnie with the Cleveland Browns, Adam with the Bears, E.O. with the Saints, Jim, Packers, Bills, Texans and Broncos. Adam with the Steelers, Donnie with the Eagles, Thomas with the Lions, Zach with the Dolphins, Aaron with the Las Vegas Raiders. I changed it. It's a historic moment in Jaspy history right here. Kyle with the Bucks, E.O. with the Giants, Tony with the Cowboys, Jim with the Titans, Adam with the Jets Jaguars, Donnie with the Patriots, Daniel with the Niners, and Jim with the Chargers. There's one great hit inside here. I don't think there's going to be any trades. Of course, the whole, the bigger point of this break is really giving away those mixer spots. We just have one more of these to do to fill up that mixer, ladies and gentlemen, at long last. Oh, that's the first one they ever marked. Interesting. Liverpool win the Premier League title. That's my club. Jürgen Klopp, the manager on in the background. I'm very excited. We kind of knew that the Liverpool were so far ahead in points and he was going to happen, but now it's actually happened. It's kind of finally, finally hitting. And we've got Sam Darnold. Nice. 2018, Panini Prism, Sam Darnold, Gemmint 9-5. Nice. He might be able to take a big step this season for him. Adam Cupperman, New York Jets. Adam Cupperman, New York Jets. There you go, Adam. Too bad. I think Adam's a Jets fan too. All right. Let's flip back this way. Thomas down at Daniel and everybody in between, top four after, top four after seven. Top four after seven. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seventh and final time. So very big thanks to number five through 32 right there. I appreciate everybody giving this a shot. You got one more shot for the mixer and another great hit if you'd like. Congrats to Adam, Gem, Gem and Chris. There you go. So congrats to you four. Appreciate you getting in. Joe for JasperJasperakes.com. Let's do one more. And then the football mixer. We'll see you for that next time. Bye-bye.


Hello and welcome to this presentation of the STM32 Universal Synchronous Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter Interface. It covers the main features of this USART interface which is widely used for serial communications in embedded systems. The USART is a very flexible serial module that supports asynchronous UART communication, SPI or Serial Peripheral Interface Master Mode, or local interconnect network mode. It can also interface with ISO, IEC 7816 smart cards and IRDA devices. It also provides certain features that are useful when implementing modbus communications. Applications making use of the USART benefit from the easy and inexpensive connection between devices, which only requires a few pins. In addition, the USART peripheral is functional in low power modes. The USART is a fully programmable serial interface featuring programmable data length, parity, number of stop bits, data order, baud rate generator and configurable oversampling mode by 8 or by 16. You also have the option to use basic RS-232 flow control with CTS or Clear to Send and RTS or Request to Send signal. The RS-485DE or Driver Enable signal is also supported. The USART supports a dual clock domain allowing wake up from stop mode and baud rate programming independent of the peripheral clock or PCLK. This allows the peripheral clock to be throttled along with the core clock without disrupting communications. The USART features a multi-processor mode which allows the USART to remain idle when it is not addressed. In addition to full duplex communication, single wire half duplex mode is also supported. The USART also offers many other features including auto baud rate detection, receiver timeout and support several modes which will be described later in the presentation. This is the USART block diagram. The USART clock, FCK, can be selected from several sources. System clock, peripheral clock or APB clock, the high speed internal 16 MHz RC oscillator or the low speed external 32.768 kHz crystal oscillator. TX and RX are used for data transmission and reception. NCTS and NRTS are used for RS-232 hardware flow control. The driver enable or DE which is available on the same IO as NRTS is used in the RS-485 mode. The clock output or SCLK is dual on purpose. When the USART is used in synchronous master mode, the clock provided to the slave device is output on the SCLK pin. When the USART is used in smart card mode, the clock provided to the card is output on the SCLK pin. The USART has a flexible clocking scheme. Its clock source can be selected in the RCC and can be either the PCLK or peripheral clock which is the default clock source or the HSI-16 LSE or system clock. The registers are accessed through the APB bus and the kernel is clocked with FCK which is independent from the APB clock. The USART receiver implements different user configurable oversampling techniques for data recovery by discriminating between valid incoming data and noise. This allows a trade-off between the maximum communication speed and noise clock inaccuracy immunity. Select oversampling by 8 to achieve higher speed up to FCLK divided by 8 where FCLK is the USART clock source frequency. In this case the maximum receiver tolerance to clock deviation is reduced. Select oversampling by 16 over 8 equals 0 to increase the tolerance of the receiver to clock deviation. In this case the maximum speed is limited to FCLK divided by 16. The maximum baud rate that can be reached is 10 megabaud when the clock source is at 80 MHz and oversampling by 8 is configured. With other clock sources and or higher oversampling ratio the maximum speed is limited. The frame format used in asynchronous mode consists of a set of data bits in addition to bits for synchronization and optionally a parity bit for error checking. The USART supports 7, 8 or 9 bit data lengths. A frame starts with one start bit where the line is driven low for one bit period. This signals the start of a frame and is used for synchronization. The start bit is followed by 7, 8 or 9 data bits. If parity control is enabled the parity bit is transmitted as the last data bit and is included in the data length count. Finally a number of stop bits 0, 1, 1.5 or 2 where the line is driven high end the frame. The standard frame was described in the previous slide. This slide shows an example of 8 bit data frames configured with one stop bit. An idle character is interpreted as an entire frame of ones. The number of ones will include the number of stop bits. A break character is interpreted as receiving zeros for a frame period. At the end of the break frame two stop bits are inserted. The USART supports full duplex communication where TX and RX lines are respectively connected with the other interfaces RX and TX lines. The USART can be configured to follow a single wire half duplex protocol where the TX and RX lines are internally connected. In this communication mode only the TX pin is used for both transmission and reception. The TX pin is always released when no data is transmitted. Thus it acts as a standard IO in idle or reception modes. This means that the IO must be configured so that TX is configured as alternate function open drain with an external pull up. In RS232 communication it is possible to control the serial data flow between two devices by using the NCTS and the NRTS output. These two lines allow the receiver and the transmitter to alert each other of their state. The following figure shows how to connect two devices in this mode. The idea is to prevent dropped bytes or conflicts in case of half duplex communication. Both signals are active low. For serial half duplex communication protocols like RS485 the master needs to generate a direction signal to control the transceiver or physical layer. This signal informs the physical layer if it must act in send or receive mode. In RS485 mode a control line is used. The driver enable pin is used to activate the external transceiver control. DE shares the pin with NRTS. To simplify communication between multiple processors the USART supports a multiprocessor mode. In multiprocessor communication it is desirable that only the intended message recipient should actively receive the message. The devices not being addressed are put into mute mode. The USART can enter or exit from mute mode using one of two methods. Idol line detection or address mark detection. The USART can also communicate synchronously. It can operate as an SPI in master mode with programmable clock polarity or CPOL and phase or CPHA. The clock is output on the SCLK pin. No clock pulses are provided during start and stop bits. The USART can be used in smart card mode based on a half duplex communication. The clock is output to the smart card on the SCLK pin. It supports the T equals zero protocol and provides many features allowing support for T equals one. Both direct and inverse conventions are supported directly by hardware. The USART supports IRDE specifications which is a half duplex communication protocol. The data from and to the USART is represented in an NRZ or non-return to zero format where the signal value is at the same level through the entire bit period. For IRDA the required format is RZI return to zero inverted where a one is signaled by holding the line low and a zero is signaled by a short high pulse. The SIR transmit encoder modulates the non-return to zero or NRZ transmit bit stream output from USART. The SIR receive decoder demodulates the return to zero bit stream from the infrared detector and outputs the received NRZ serial bit stream to the USART. The USART only supports bit rates up to 115.2 kilobits per second for the SIR end deck. In normal mode the transmitted pulse width is specified as 3 sixteenths of a bit period. The USART receiver is able to detect and automatically configure the bond rate based on the reception of one character. The received character can be a character starting with a bit at one. In this case the USART measures the duration of the start bit falling edge to rising edge. Any character starting with a 10XX pattern. In this case the USART measures the duration of the start and of the first data bit. The duration is measured from falling edge to falling edge ensuring better accuracy in the case of slow signal slopes. Zero X7F character frame. In this case the bond rate is updated first at the end of the start bit then at the end of bit six or a zero X55 character frame. In this case the bond rate is updated first at the end of the start bit then at the end of the bit and finally at the end of bit six. In parallel another check is performed for each intermediate transition of the RX line. The USART supports a receiver timeout feature. When the USART doesn't receive new data for a programmed amount of time a receiver timeout event is signaled and an interrupt is generated if enabled. The USART receiver timeout counter starts counting from the end of the first stop bit in case of one and one point five stop bit configuration. From the end of the second stop bit in case of two stop bit configuration and from the beginning of the stop bit in case of zero point five stop bit configuration. The USART is able to wake up the MCU from stop mode and the USART clock source is the HSI 16 or LSE clock. The sources of wake up can be a start bit, address match or any received data. Several events can provide an interrupt. The transmit data register empty flag is set when the transmit data register is empty and ready to be written. The transmit complete flag is set when the data transmission is complete and both data and shift registers are empty. The N-CTS flag is set when the N-CTS input toggles. The received data register not empty flag is set when the received data register contains data ready to be read. The idle line flag is set when an idle line is detected. The character match flag is set when the received data corresponds to the programmed address. The receiver timeout flag is set when there is no activity on the RX line for a programmed duration. The end of block flag is set when a complete block is received. The wake up from stop mode flag is set when the wake up event is verified. The DMA request can be generated when received buffer not empty or transmit buffer empty flags are set. Several error flags can be generated. The overrun error flag is set when an overrun error occurs. The parity error flag is set when a parity error occurs. The framing error flag is set when a framing error occurs. The noise error flag is set when a noise is detected on the received frame. The auto-baud rate error flag is set when the baud rate measurement failed. The USART peripheral is active in run and low power run, sleep and low power sleep modes. The I squared C interrupts cause the device to exit sleep or low power sleep modes. The USART is able to wake up the MCU from stop 0 or stop 1 mode when the USART clock is set to HSI 16 or LSE. The MCU can be awakened from stop 0 or stop 1 mode using either a standard RXNE interrupt or a WUF event. In stop 2, the device is not able to perform any communication. In standby and shutdown modes, the peripheral is in power down and it must be reinitialized after exiting standby or shutdown mode. The STM32L4 devices embed five instances. USART 1, 2 and 3 have a full set of features. Instances 4 and 5 do not support synchronous and smart card modes. This is a list of peripherals related to the USART. Please refer to these peripheral trainings for more information if needed. General Purpose, Inputs and Outputs, Reset and Clock Controller, Power Controller, Interrupts Controller and Direct Memory Access Controller.


Hello, everyone. I'm Don Jaikari. In this presentation, I'm going to talk about to-dos and what not to-dos in service mesh architectures. As you may already aware, service mesh is one of the hot topics in the container networking and Kubernetes in general right now and I'm going to talk into different aspects of the service mesh, starting off with why a service mesh, how we got here and what are the reasons that we decided to put a service mesh on top of already completed networking infrastructure, and then we'll look at what is a service mesh, all the technical aspect, architectural aspects about it, briefly touch upon traffic flows of the service mesh and all those things and including the components and then we'll end off with taking a look at to-dos and what not to-dos, you know, what are the considerations around service mesh infrastructures that you can think of, that you can take into account when you are implementing, as well as if you're operationalizing service mesh infrastructures. Let's talk about how we got here for a minute. We had monolithic architectures back then and we decided to break apart that monolithic architecture and decided to introduce these microservices-based infrastructure, right? Now the issue with having these microservices is, you know, now you have many of them and to make any sense out of these microservices, you need to make sure effective communication between these many microservices, right? Now, make matters worse, organizations were building up these microservices, not in a really a cookie cutter way, in a very different way, right? To start off, they were developing these microservices using different languages, they were deploying these microservices using different build patterns, build pipelines. So all these things have made matters much more worse and this actually resulted in much more complexity, unnecessary complexity and obviously inner innovation, right? And that is not what we were wanted to get out of the microservices infrastructure and that's why we actually start break apart the monolithic in the first place, right? Looking at the use cases of the service mesh infrastructure, right? In the next slide, I'm highlighting three main use cases that always come up as the main drivers for the service mesh infrastructure. First one is being the reliability, right? Reliability across communication between these services, right? Making sure the services are connected properly and services are able to reliably discover each other properly. All these are main drivers for service mesh adoption, right? And for the long the line, the traffic handling behavior, right? For example, let's say you want to reroute the traffic, right? This intelligently route traffic is one of the primary needs in an application environment, right? For example, let's say you have a service and you are trying to bring up a new version of that service. Now your use case is where you wanted to intelligently route, like let's say 95% of the current traffic should go to the current service, the old service and 5% of the traffic should go to this new service. This kind of, you know, canary deployment, people want to make sure we are able to correctly route traffic between these services properly. So this reliable connectivity is one of the main drivers for service mesh interactions. And the second one is the security, right? You have many microservices in your infrastructure compared to the old monolithic architecture. Now obviously your attack vector in a certain way has gone up, right? You have many more endpoints, many more services that are talking with each other. And you want to make sure that this communication happened in a much more secure way, right? You want to encrypt the traffic between these services, right? Right next to the services if at all possible, right? Not after a couple hops. If you can encrypt it right next to the services. So this kind of encrypting capabilities, right? And furthermore, you want to make sure that you can actually do security policies from a much more centralized fashion, right? These kind of use cases, security use cases were not the primary driver for service mesh adoption. And last but not the least, observability. It is true that, you know, we are losing a certain amount of visibility and not necessarily losing is just getting much more complicated, right? So increased visibility is always a plus sign in this complex infrastructure, right? Now, the use case is where you want to increase visibility. At the same time, you want to, you want to able to get a lot more contextual awareness to all these traffic patterns, right? So you want to be able to gain a lot of understanding of how the traffic is working. So if there's an entity that you can provide all these tracing data and all these heuristic data, that would be great, right? So that was one of the primary drivers for the service machine infrastructure. Now, let's take a pause for a minute, right? Because if you really look at it, none of these use cases are new, right? Because, you know, we always have the need for better traffic handling. We always want security and we always need better visibility and better observability mechanisms, right? So none of these use cases are inherently new to the container infrastructure or, you know, we always have this need in previous architectures, right? So if you really look at the evolution of these, these service mesh use cases, right? It's pretty interesting. If you take a look at like pre-2015, right? Pre-COVID in this area, we were deploying these services on top of, you know, different platforms, right? Like VMs, bare metal, open stack, whatnot, right? And the services goes on top of it. And most of these use cases, right? Traffic use cases like circuit breaking, routing, service discovery, all those things, including security use cases such as authentication, observability use cases like tracing, all these things were more or less getting embedded into the services, right? In this so-called middleware layer, right? Now, fast forward into 2020, what's happening is, right? What's already starting to happen is, this middleware layer is kind of getting disappeared, right? This, this tight coupling of this middleware layer to the service is getting abandoned for a number of good reasons. Now, services are getting much more loosely coupled with each other and that service mesh layer is going to take care of that middleware layer, right? So operationally speaking, this is pretty good news, right? Because developers can go about their way of writing their service applications and adding value to the businesses, right? And operation organizations can take care of all the other use cases to make sure that operationally, all these services are getting deployed in a proper mechanism and you have much more granular control of this service infrastructure as a result, right? From the traffic handling point of view, from the security point of view, as well as observability point of view, right? So that's the primary driver for the service mesh. So that, that middleware layer that we used to see back in the day is kind of getting absorbed to the service mesh infrastructure now with the, with the, with the much more loosely coupled service infrastructure. So as a result, you know, both development and there's a clear boundary between development as well as the operations organizations of enterprises, right? So what is the current state of the service mesh, right? So it started with the linkergy and least there was not far behind. Now fast forwarded to 2020, mid 2020 now, right? So we have so many solutions to pick from, right? So this is, this is frankly, it's pretty good news, right? If you look at like the people that who are actually bringing service measures, right, they can, you can kind of, you know, quickly fill out the buckets, right? Like the big cloud providers, right? AWS app mesh, Google Anthos, right? Azure engineers have their own open service mesh, right? Past providers like VMware, Tanzu, right? All these are, you know, they are, they are already solving some of their unique use cases with the service measure, with their own service measures, right? Middleware companies like Mulesoft have their any point service mesh, right? And, and third party providers like HushCop, right? For example, HushCop has console, right? So which is pretty popular in the arena as well. So everyone is solving their own unique use cases. So which means, you know, there are plenty of use cases and problems to pick from, right? That's, this is all that it's saying from this graph right here, right? Basically, you know, it's pretty good news in the sense that, you know, there are plenty of use cases, plenty of problems. And at the same time, you know, you might actually have, might have trouble evaluating all these services, but you know, they are pretty unique to be honest, right? Like people are focusing on some, some of, some of the folks are not just focusing on the container environment, right? Because at the end of the day, traffic has to shuffle through everywhere, right? You are not going to leave behind your legacy infrastructure. So one of the prominent use cases that are coming up is, you know, how to, how to make sure that, you know, you are not leaving the VM environment behind with the service mesh architectures, right? So some of these service measures like Kuma, for example, are mostly focusing on, on bringing in like traditional VM environment into the picture as well, right? So, so everyone has their unique spin on the service mesh and the architecture and where it's going. But from the data plane point of view, I definitely see that, you know, most people are getting converge on the on my proxy layer, I'll cover a little bit more depth on that for the slides on the what, what is the service mesh talk, right? In that section, but, but in a high level, right, most of these, these, these guys are offering like unique spin on the control plane, right? Some, some folks are extending its to your control plane, but then the others have their own control plane. But for the most, for the most part, the data plane is, you know, getting, getting uniquely clubbed, uniquely clubbed together with the envoy proxy. Okay, let's move on to the what's a service mesh portion of my talk, right? So, let's start by looking at, you know, the architecture of the services, right? So in a very high level, if you look at it, service mesh is nothing but an abstracted architecture, right? There is a control plane. And there's a data plan, right? So in the control plane, right, control plan exposes set of API's. And as users, we can interact with that API's and instruct the control plan to put all these, you know, use case policies that we were talking about earlier, right? From a traffic handling point of view, you can say, this service, this service, traffic is going to direct it in this manner, right? The security policies and observational observability rules and so on and so forth. So all these are getting directed through the control plane. And then there's this data plane, the proxies live right next to your applications or the services, right? So the placement of the proxies we'll talk about in a second. But in a general speaking, it sits right next to your service and app, right? And it's the connection is getting terminated right on that proxy itself. So what this means is from the data plane point of view, all your communication is getting terminated. Outside world only knows about this particular proxy and proxy is doing proxying for that service that is sitting on top, right? So as a result, so the control plane actually instructs the proxy to enforce those policies that you define through that control plane API. And then the data plane proxy is handling the, all the data plane functionality. So for all the hype, it's for the service mesh, it's a pretty straightforward architectural pattern, right? It's nothing more than more than bunch of user space, user space proxies stuck next to the service or app, right? Whereas in stock, we'll talk about it later. But it actually referred to as a service mesh data plane. And then you have the control plane, which actually data plane intercepts this request from the control plane and it does stuff, right? And the control plane coordinates the behavior of the proxies and all that with an API. And as a user, you interact with that service mesh control plane using that API. So where should this proxy actually lives, right? So this is something we talked about briefly touch upon, right? If you really look at the placement of the proxy, right, I was showing right alongside the application, but that's not necessarily true, right? In the next slide, if you move on, you will see like three different options where we can actually put this proxy on, right? In the first option, we can embedded this proxy as a library into the application. The upper and downside is right now you have to depend on your developers to get this proxy and embedded into the applications, right? So that's not necessarily why we started out this whole microservices service mesh journey in the first place, right? Like you are coupling, you are tightly coupling more with your other teams, right? So number one, option number one is not necessarily good. In the option number two, what I'm showing is right, we have the, you have a proxy per node, per Kubernetes node, right? So this is, this is cool in a way that, you know, you don't have to deal with like multiple proxies in this case, right? You just have one guy sitting on a per node basis and all the applications, all your Kubernetes services get proxied from there and it's a much more simpler model. The drawback of this drawback is, you know, it's a single point of failure at this point. I will cover all these things. I'll touch up on this subject later as well in the dos and don't section. But, but then again, you know, it's, it's pretty obvious that it's a single point of failure. So now that means, you know, you have to deploy, you know, two, three proxies per node, that's good or not, right? So, so this is up to the debate right now as well. And then the third option is the sidecar option, right? Sidecar option in this case, what happens is your proxies getting embedded right next to the application. So if you recall from your Kubernetes 101, right?  So what's happening is we are actually embedding one of the proxies as another container into the same Kubernetes pod. So as a result that proxy has is sitting right alongside with the same network namespace as your application service container. So as a result, it has, it will inherit all the networking parameters from the application. So, so this is what called a sidecar container. And that is that proxies getting embedded into the same pod or same network namespace as your application right alongside. Now, if you look at the common, most common deployment patterns today, the sidecar is definitely winning by a margin right now. People do like this aspect of sharing the same namespace, network namespace alongside the actual Kubernetes service itself, so that it actually sits right alongside with the application and that's pretty good from the security point of view as well because proxies right there, it's not going to cross any boundaries. So if you implement security policies, so if you implement like encryption, such as TLS, your tier, your connection is going to get right almost right down to the network namespace of that application. So, so that sidecar proxy is getting a lot more, a lot more eyeballs rolling these days and most of the implementation that actually using the sidecar proxy. So actually talking about proxies, you cannot really talk about proxies without talking about Envoy right. Envoy has pretty much become the universal data plan for all the Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft services, Kubernetes architectures today right. It is, it is the most prominent proxies being used pretty much, you know, by a wide margin if I have to guess right. One of the reason is being when it came out of left, you know, it was really focusing on the performance aspect of it right like this data handling data shuffling back and forth right it actually uses a high performance C++ library and that was the one of the key differentiator. But, but more importantly it actually provided a lot of observability and you know advanced load balancing functionality. But most importantly there is one reason that in that why Envoy really got popular because of the declarative style API that actually it allowed very similar to the Kubernetes style right. EngineX and HAProxy was there and the proxies were there but, but this declarative style API actually allowed Envoy to get really popular among developers because now you suddenly get this APIs that you can actually program against and using the XDS protocol that's the configuration language of Envoy right. Using this XDS protocol as users you can now really decouple that control plane from the data plane. So, so this decoupling of this whole control plane idea was pretty much, you know, very popular got really pillar with the Envoy itself. So, compared to the data plane we did have a universal choice for, for the, with the Envoy when it comes to the control plane we don't have the choice and that's exactly the point right. That's why we do have many different service mesh architectures because the control plane is different. Everyone is implementing the service mesh in a different, different ways and attacking different use cases. So, one of the example, popular examples is Istio and Istio, you know, there's the pilot component where it actually is the control plane component that, that, that responsible of pushing the, generating the configuration, accepting the user configuration, generating it and you know, streaming it down to these Envoy proxies. And this is, you know, you can see this kind of equivalent architectures around other service mesh control planes as well. Yeah, and then with that, you know, I'm not going to go that much detail into a particular control plane because everyone is different from that angle right. So, with that let's take a look at, you know, what are the do's and don'ts of the service mesh infrastructure because whether you are planning it out or whether you are already in the POC process or trying it out here and there or even you are all the way, you know, ahead of the curve and, you know, getting a service mesh deployed, there are certain considerations that you might want to take a look at and let's go ahead and take a look at those considerations. To start off, right, do you really need a service mesh? That's actually a question, very valid question that you should ask, especially if you are, if you are trying to figure it out, you know, whether to put it or not, service mesh on top of your infrastructure. Boyant, the maker of the Lincardier actually has this specific question. I have a very interesting question on their website. If you haven't taken a look at it, I urge you to go and take a look at it. There are interesting questions like, you know, how many people are you in your engineering org? How many microservices are there in your application, right? Because at the end of the day, like I was mentioning, service mesh is nothing but an another abstraction layer on top of it, right? And like any abstractions, it does have its tradeoffs, right? You know, you know, if you don't have that many microservices to take care of, it might not be worthwhile to, you know, put this another abstraction layer on top of it, right? Your general CNI networking layer that does the packet forwarding might be enough, right? Or you may want to take a look at a specific service mesh infrastructure, right? Like so there are certain things that you have to worry about, right? Another aspect of the questions that they're probing is, you know, whether do you have any, all your services written in a certain language, right? Or you have more of like a polyglot kind of environment where most of your services are written in different languages, right? If you keep inheriting different languages, different teams in your infrastructure, right? The service mesh might be a very valuable proposition for you, right? So you need to be very aware of these kind of, you know, questions before you start going and evaluating the service mesh, because again, you know, it might not be for everyone, it might, it might, it may be a fantastic solution for you, but you just need to be aware of these, these conditions. Now, moving forward, another consideration that you have to really look at is, you know, you have to really pay attention to your application architecture, right?  That's one of the, one of the primary considerations that you have to primary, you know, primary things that you have to worry about, right? If your services are not really loosely coupled with each other, it might not be a good idea to put a service mesh because, and not just from the technical point of view, as well as, you know, your organization structure point of view, right? If you have clear structure boundaries between your services to your, to your organization structures, right, your departments for say, for example, right, it may be a very good plus point to put a service mesh, right? Because everything is decoupled, everything is very loosely coupled, right? You, you, even from, even from the, from the deployment angle. So, so that's another plus point, right? So, but, but then again, you know, you, one of the key things, not just from the application architecture point of view, even from the deployment point of view, right? What I meant from the deployment is, you know, for example, let's say you have 100 microservices, right?  Not, not in terms of, you know, the service boundaries, but in terms of the deployment, right? The service Y is expecting service X is already there to, they are in the deployment cycle, right? The head of the pipeline, right? This kind of deployment gotchas might actually cause unnecessary problems when you try to put a service mesh on top of it, right? So, so again, bottom line is, you know, you should be free of, I wouldn't call it free of dependencies, but you should be almost free of these kind of gotcha dependencies. If you seriously considering a service mesh infrastructure, because if you don't, then you may actually run into big problems down the line. So, another popular consideration that you actually pay really, really big attention to is the resource utilization, right? And I mean, you're not going to get a service mesh without a zero cost to you, right? There is, there is pretty, pretty apparent, you know, resource constraints that you should be aware of, right? And you can kind of, you know, divide that into control plane related issues and the data plane, right? In the control plane, things like, you know, your rate of deployment and configuration changes may, you know, if you, if you're planning on doing a lot of configuration changes, you know, that is going to really tax the whole system a whole lot, right?  The number of proxies that actually connect in a number of envoy proxies that are connected to the control plane is significantly play, play into the resource consumption picture, right? In terms of the data plane, you know, the usual suspects, right? Your protocol, your CPU cores, you know, number of threads that you have, right? The number of client connections that these proxies are making, all these things will play into picture. In terms of the resource considerations, just to throw out some numbers, right? So, Istio actually has very, very comprehensive list of scalability numbers in here. So, just to, and Istio is using envoy, so I would expect that, you know, the numbers would be, if not similar, it would be in the same ballpark for most of other service measures. But, obviously, you know, you need to kind of, you know, go and verify with the service measure of your choice. But in terms of Istio, the numbers are, you know, if you have like a thousand services in a 2000 side car with a 70k measure request, then, you know, you're talking about envoy proxy might add like around 2 to 3 millisecond of latency per hop, right? That's in the 90th percentile. And that's the number that they came up with in this particular cluster. And you can kind of take a look at all these granular numbers in the Istio performance documents. And there are like couple good Twitter threads as well. So, I'm pointing, putting a link out to Karl Stone, his Twitter thread in his, I think he's working for AutoTrader. So, he's describing an environment where, you know, 650 virtual services, 420, 480 rules with MTLS enabled and Telemetry V2 with the new Istio version, the performance numbers that he's getting. So, it's worthwhile taking a look at, but at the end of the day, you know, just be aware that, you know, you are going to pay for your service mesh because at the end of the day, you know, it is going to utilize resources from the latency point of view as well as from the CPU and memory point of view as well. So, another popular operational consideration that you take care of is upgrades, right? Again, you know, you're putting abstraction on top of it. So, better plan it ahead, right? You have to read your upgrade nodes according to your particular releases, release nodes and so on.  There are certain settings on some of the service meshes that you can actually reduce the disruptions to the active services by using like Android deployment. For example, you can spawn your new control plane, then version two of the new version control plane, somewhere else and, you know, gradually move the services to that new control plane while keeping the existing control plane intact. So, be aware of all these upgrade mechanisms when you're doing service mesh upgrades and, you know, plan ahead. Another popular consideration is DR, right? This is very, very much, I mean, at its infancy to say the least, right? You still need to, you know, to monitor the space very closely. There are a couple ways, right? You know, you can have a single cluster in a single service mesh. You can have a multi cluster in a one mesh or, you know, you can go into multi cluster, multi mesh, like the whole Utopia mode over here, right? So, these are little bit, you know, I would not, I have not seen that many significant developments around there. But, you know, there are a lot of active conversations, but be aware of all the DR considerations as well. Now, another popular consideration point that you won't want to consider is the SMI, the service mesh interface that's coming up, right? The idea of behind this SMI is, you know, having a standardized interface for a service mesh in the Kubernetes. So, all your service mesh, like Istio, Linkadee console, all these service mesh will be a provider to this API.  So, consider this as, you know, abstraction on top of an abstraction, right? So, why do we need that, right? Why do we need to put in this kind of abstraction and abstraction? Because, you know, it might be actually makes sense, you know, if you're building a tooling on top of a service mesh, SMI might be a pretty good alternative for you, right? You might want to consider this because, you know, you want to be transparent to the underlying provider service mesh. And at the same time, you know, you're tooling, you don't want to rewrite your tooling, right? So, SMI, that's the idea of SMI. It's still pretty new, but it's an evolving subject in there, right? Now, around the ongoing developments, there are a lot of things are happening around the sidecar, a lot of people are working on it. Proxy placement is almost a done deal, you know, sidecar almost have one, but, you know, there are certain pros and cons in that environment, right?  So, people are wondering about burnout process, right? Then again, you know, all these concerns that I mentioned earlier might come up, right? SillyMT is working on accelerating, you know, sidecars, you know, they have multiple presentations around that. Google has this interesting concept of traffic director, where, you know, the control plane of the service mesh is completely outside of the cluster. So, these are like a bunch of the things that use that happening. And, you know, bottom line is you have to be aware of this ongoing developments. It's a very much of a very fluid feel right now. So, I hope this presentation gave you some idea about what's happening and, you know, basics on the line, what to do and what to know to do about this service mesh infrastructure. And thank you for watching. All right. Thanks, Don. Let's just see if you have any questions come in during this time.