Okay, thank you everyone for being here. My name is Alberto Garcia, I'm going to talk about how SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem. So, first I would like to talk a bit about me. I work at Igalia, the company was founded in 2001, so we're actually coincidentally 22 years old today because this is our birthday. I'm a free software enthusiast already from since the 90s. I'm a devian developer for a long time. I'm currently working on SteamOS and in the past I was working on other projects like QMU, MMO, WebKit, et cetera. One of the reasons why I like free software and one of the reasons why I'm in this business is that I like how creating a new project contributes to other projects that are maybe related to it. So in the case of some of the projects that I work in the past and also this one, creating a new consumer device that is running Linux has an effect on the open source communities that the project is using for this hardware. So the one that I'm going to talk about today is the Steam Deck, the Steam Deck as you are, I'm sure you know, it's a handheld gaming computer released by Valve last year. It has a customer operating system called SteamOS. This is version three. There were two early versions of SteamOS but they were not for the Steam Deck and they have been discontinued. And I find the Steam Deck interesting because it's a successful consumer device with standard Linux components. So I want to explore how making a consumer device with standard Linux components has an effect on the components that the machine is using. So this is one that I want to talk about here. I'm going to mention a lot of contributions by different people. Many of them are from my colleagues from Eagalia. There's a list of the people that I mentioned here. But I want to add a disclaimer before going on. The list of examples that I'm going to have in this presentation is not complete. There has been contribution by a lot of people. I'm surely that I forgot some important project or some important contribution that I overlooked or I forgot it, so I apologize in advance. Also the contributions, although many of them are people from me or for people from my company, there are contributions by different people, companies and also for regular users who have contributed in the public user trackers. I try to give credit to everyone in the presentation but if I overlook someone or something, please apologize in advance. So let's have a closer look at the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck, as I said, is a gaming machine. This is the basic user interface that you get when you start it. This is the Steam Client browsing the Steam Store. From here you can buy games, you can browse the store, you can browse the discussions, you can play the games, et cetera. So for the purpose of this presentation is maybe not the most interesting part. This is just the regular Steam Client running in full screen. But under the hood, this is running a Linux distribution and it's based on Arch Linux. It's actually a rather standard Linux distributions. It has a few customizations that we can see later. But overall it's a typical Linux distribution with a FHS-like layout. It has a new user space, it has system D, DBAS, all the user aspects. So it looks pretty much like your average Linux desktop distribution. And another thing that is interesting that is not so common in this kind of consumer device distribution Linux is that it's unlocked by default. The user has complete access to the OS, there's nothing hidden, there's nothing. From the beginning you can already have complete access to the OS. So the Steam Deck has two modes. One of them is the gaming modes, the one that I will have seen. From here you can do basically all the essentials. Apart from playing games and buying games, et cetera, you can configure the network, you can format your SD card, and you can do all the basic. So most users, they don't actually need to leave this mode. But in addition to the gaming mode, there's a second mode that is the desktop mode. And if this looks like a regular KDE Plasma session, it's because that's what it is exactly. So the desktop mode is a regular KDE Plasma desktop. You can use it to install anything with it. You can install a web browser, you can install your favorite tools, you can install even non-Steam games, the machine doesn't prevent you from installing games that you got somewhere else. Actually the Steam Client itself allows you to run games that are not from Steam. You can add it to the menu and launch them from there.  Another interesting thing is that this mode is not hidden again. It's not like the Android developer mode that you have to find a way to activate it. This is completely visible in the regular power menu next to the reboot. And anyone can use it. So going back to the main use case of the device. The main use case of the device is, of course, to play games on Linux. So there's a problem when we talk about this thing. Linux is a Linux-based operating system, but as you know most games, most Steam games are for Windows, most games in general are for Windows, and most will never get a Linux version because either the developers are not going to do it or because many of them are so old that are not going to be a data for this. So the solution for this is Proton. Proton is a tool to run Windows games on Linux. It was developed by, it's actually been developed by Valve. It was published in 2018. And it's a collection of different open source packages. There's many packages there, but the most important ones are Wine, which is the Windows compatibility layer. There's a couple of other projects that translate Direct3D calls from Windows into Vulkan. And then there's also just streaming on other libraries. As I said, this is one of the big important projects that the Steam OS is running and is actively developed. The main component of Proton is Wine. Wine is used to run Windows applications in Linux. Wine is not an emulator. The code runs directly on the CPU. There's no emulation going on. So it's basically an implementation of Windows APIs using what's available in Linux, either standard Linux APIs or other standards like Vulkan, et cetera. Wine is an open source project that is developed by the community, but the main driver is the company called Weaver, in partnership with Valve. Those are the two repositories. The first one is the official upstream Wine one, and then the other one is the one included in Proton. Proton, I mentioned that it includes several components. All of them are actually modified. They are tailored for the Steam OS, but they contribute the changes back to the upstream projects. So when we're implementing Windows APIs, there's two possible situations. One of them is that the APIs are similar. So in this case, the compatibility layer basically translates the Windows call into a Linux call, and then there's no problem. There's maybe a bit of overhead, but it works fine. But when that is not the case, Wine needs to implement the missing parts, and this can result in overhead, depending on the complexity, and this is not always solvable in this space. So one of the tasks that people have been doing is figure out what are the APIs that are more difficult to implement, the ones that have more impact in games, and trying to find if it's possible to add new features to Linux to fill in the missing gaps. I'm going to give a couple of examples. One of them is the Windows synchronization functions. Windows has this API called Wait for Multiple Objects that is used by many Windows games, but this doesn't have a direct equivalent in Linux. It was implemented using Futex, but Futex is restricted to a single object, and the Windows API, as the name suggests, can wait for multiple objects at the same time. So doing an implementation based on Futex is slow, and it can cause performance problems in heavily multi-threaded games. So the solution for this is to develop new APIs, stack the Futex API to add its functionality. This is this work was done by Andre Almeida. Futex is a fast user space locking syscall. It's used to build other primitives like semaphores and Mutex, et cetera. It's a very old API, and it has grown over the years, and it has become hard to use and hard to extend. It has a few limitations. One of the things that it can only wait for a single object, as I said before, and the other one is that it only supports 32-bit Mutex. It has more limitations, but these are two of the important ones. So when Andre went to talk to the Linux people to see what we can do about this, and they say, okay, we cannot really extend the API because the API is already too cluttered. There's several parameters that are overloaded depending on the function that you are using, and this is too messy, you cannot do this. So we should, how about you write a new Futex2 API where every functionality is separated into a different system call. So the first part was already done. It was matched in Linux 5.16, which is FutexWaveD, which is more or less the equivalent of the Windows API that we are trying to emulate. And then there's more work still in progress to add the rest of the more APIs to the Futex2. Another example, this is very well known in Windows traditionally file systems are case-insensitive. So you cannot have two names, two files that their names only differ by the case. Linux does not have a problem because Linux file names are just a stream of bytes, so as long as the bytes are different, there's no problem. So the problem is that, of course, Windows applications expect that a file with two files with the same name, just differing by the case are the same file. So if those files are stored in a Linux file system and the Windows program tries to open them and they are not found with the original name, the application will fail. The solution for this, the slow one is to implement this in one. So when you try to open a file, the file is not found with the name that is requested, then you had to go over the path and try to look, try to see if there's a file with the same name, just differing the case. This is, of course, quite slow. So the solution for this, the faster solution is to extend the XT4 file system to support for case sensitivity. This work was done by Gabriel Griezmann from our friends in Colabora. He was later added to the F2FS file system by Daniel Rosenberg, I think, for the Android operating system from North Rome. And there's many other contributions to the Linux kernel. For example, reliable user space spinlocks. Spinlocks are an efficient synchronization mechanism that is used a lot in the kernel, but it's very hard to implement reliably in user space. There is work going on to do this. There was a presentation this week, two days ago, I think, by Andrea Meida at this conference. Another one, the SteamOS uses the BatterFS file system. In BatterFS, every file system is uniquely identified by the file system ID. And this has a property that you cannot have two file systems with exactly the same ID. Well, you can actually have them, but you cannot mount them at the same time. But in a situation like what SteamOS does, we have an AB partitioning system that I'm going to talk about later. There can be situations where you can actually have the same file system twice and you need to mount both. This was not supported and this was failing. So, there was work by Jeremy Picolli, Michael Iframigalia to support this scenario. Another one is split-locked total handling. If you do an atomic operation on non-aligned memory, those are slow and they can use to cause a denial of service. So, in order to prevent this, the kernel slows them down so they cannot attack the system, basically. The problem is that many games are using this and they are not going to change because many are old games that are not going to be modified. So, the solution here was to add an up to the kernel to control this behavior. So, if the machine is trusted, you can disable this feature and the games can run normally. There's more kernel features by Jeremy. One of them is the refactor of panning on the fires. There's also a tool to collect data when there's a kernel crash so they can report what went wrong with the system so it can be debugged and corrected. And then many other improvements and bug fixes in the kernel that too many to list here. So, after the kernel, I will talk a bit about graphics. Of course, being a gaming machine, graphics is a very important part. One of the key components is RAVV. This is the Mesa Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs. It's developed by Valve and other contributors and it's the most popular driver because AMD driver because it's shipped with Mesa. It's open source and it comes with most distros and it's the one that most people are using. Related work is ACO, which is a shared compiler for AMD graphics. It was also developed by Valve and announced in 2019 and it reduces stuttering and increases FPS in games. Talking about Vulkan, another related work is Vulkan Video. Vulkan Video is a set of extensions for Vulkan for adding a hardware accelerated video in coding and decoding. This needs support in the graphics driver itself. We have work in the Mesa driver by Harjun Koo. But it also needs support in the applications or in the multimedia frameworks in this case. So I'm going to work to add support to G-Streamer. I think the H264 is already working and there's work to add more codecs. Color Linux, the DRM subsystem, exposes a small set of color properties. They have been proposed as to extend the API but none of them have succeeded so far. And in the case of AMD GPUs, they have additional color capabilities. So there's new work to add driver-specific color API for AMD drivers. This would allow, among other things, the ability to display content with high dynamic range. This is already supported in user space by the Game of Scope Compositor that I will talk about later. And it will be available in the upcoming SteamOS 3.5 which is actually now in preview so people can already test it. This is a work done by Melissa Wen, Joshua Aston and Harry Bendler. More work by Andrea Almeida, this is better handling of GPU resets. GPUs, as you know, are very complex and shaders are also very complex and can crash. So the kernel's job is to, when there's a problem, they have to report the problem to user space. The problem is that there's no standard API to do that. So the roadmap of this work is to standardize how DRM reports GPU hangs to user space, standardize how user space drivers deal with the hang and what compositors do after a reset. This work is, as I said, it's work in progress by Andrea. It was presented this year at the North American Open Source Summit. More work by Andrea is adding a synchronous space flipping to the atomic API in DRM. And then there's Game of Scope. Game of Scope, this is user space, user space project. This is a micro compositor for games. The idea is that this works with the case where a game tries to use a resolution that is different from the native resolution of the display. So instead of changing resolutions every time for every game, Game of Scope tricks the game into thinking that is running in the resolution that the game requested and then Game of Scope scales the content to fill the screen. So this way the games can request any resolution. They will think that they are using that resolution and the content will be displaying full screen without having to change the video mode every time. There's also another feature that is frame rate limiting. You can make the game reduce the frame rate. This can be used, for example, to reduce the battery usage. Game Scope is what runs the Steam Deck game UI, the one that I showed at the beginning. So that's why all games are running with this. And this is, as I said, this is a standalone project. This can be installed in a normal distro. It's actually available in, I think, in most of them and you can use it. I was trying to run GTK application and full screen and it just works. And apart from graphics and kernel, there's, of course, the general OS work. Part of this, a big part of this, is the regular work that is maintaining a distro. So it's making sure that all components work together that all versions, they interact with each other properly, working in the OS update system, working on the boot process, many other things. But there are some parts that are interesting and that are interesting for the community overall. This is the part that I'm working on. Steam OS, as I said, is Arch Linux with a customization layer on top. Almost all packages are unmodified. They come directly from March. They are not even revealed, so they are the same binaries. And the philosophy, the philosophy Arch Linux, in general, is to keep everything as close to upstream as possible. They try to not to apply downstream patches unless it's really necessary. And in the case of Steam OS, it's the same. Having a downstream fork of the packages is something that just adds more overhead and it's not interesting for anyone. When there's a problem or something needs to be fixed, it's fixed directly upstream to the original developer or to the Arch if it's appropriate. One difference between a regular Arch installation on Steam OS is that Steam OS is immutable. So the root file system is read-only. Steam OS has an A-B partitioning scheme and this means that there's two copies of the root file system. One of them is the active one, that is the one that you are using when you're using the device. And the other one is not active. So when you try to do an OS update, the OS is downloaded into the inactive partition. If everything goes fine, then the changes switch in the boot configuration and you boot into the other partition. So if the download is interrupted, there's no problem. You can still keep using the original version of the file system. And if you're rebooting to the new one and there's problems, there's some critical bug or something, you can still go back to the previous one. So the thing is that since users are not expected to use the package manager to touch the root file system, how do you install new software there? I mean, you can do that because you have full access to the operating system. So you can make the root file system read-write and install your things there. But after an OS update, they will be lost. So what's the way to install new software? Here, there's two types. One of them is, of course, Steam games. Those just install directly from the store so you don't need to stay and take care of everything. And the other one is the actual, the normal desktop apps. And those are installed, the recommended way to install them is using Flatpak. Flatpak is a technology that has been in the world for many years. It's quite stable now. And this idea of installing everything using Flatpak and having the root file system read-only is also using other distributions like Silver Blue or Endless OS. Flatpak is two things at the same time. It's an app framework for the new desktop, but it works as a packaging system, a way to distribute applications that are independent from the distribution. So the same application can be installed anywhere. And it's also a way to isolate applications from the host. It gives a layer of, it's a containerization tool that adds a layer of security that can be adjusted depending on the tool. And it also allows applications to be handled directly by their developers. In the case of a traditional Linux model, typically the AppStream developer publishes a source targetball and each distribution has to build a targetball and distribute the binaries. In the case of Flatpak, the developers themselves, they can directly produce their binaries and put them for everyone. Flatpak itself is a technology that you can create a repository where to put those applications, but the most common one, the one that is, let's say the official one of sorts, is FlatHub, which is a Linux app store. At the moment it has more than 2,000 applications available and it's the primary distribution channel for some applications. I mentioned here the example of bottles because they published a note a couple of years ago saying that asking people to please use the Flatpak application, the Flatpak version of bottles when running this application because that's the only supported one, I think along with the Arch one. Otherwise people will be using the build of bottles by some distribution that is maybe not using the right version of each library, so there will be errors and they are easier to, more difficult to debug. So as part of, since Flatpak is the primary tool to install applications in SteamOS, there's part of the work that is keeping Flatpak alive and correcting it and adding new features that is done by some of the SteamOS developers. But there's also an already interesting aspect of that and for this I'm using this meme that I saw the other day in Masterdom by Cassidy James from Endless and is that by making Flatpak the primary distribution channel for the desktop mode of SteamOS, application developers that want to publish applications for the Steam Deck, they are indirectly supporting the Linux desktop, so they are every application that people want to develop for the Steam Deck because it's the Steam Deck because it's a gaming device, not because they are necessarily interested in Linux, they are still indirectly supporting the Linux desktop and all the work that is going on to add new features, fix bugs, improvements, et cetera, is benefiting the Linux desktop overall. In Flatpak one of the key components, key concept is the portals. Since applications are isolated from the host, portals provide a way for applications to interact with the host. Portals are used by Flatpak but they are independent of Flatpak so they can be used by others. Portals, they define a set of deep-ass interfaces for things like opening files, taking screenshots, printing, opening the settings, et cetera. The portals themselves, they define APIs but then they are implemented by different backends that are specific to each desktop. So if you open a file you get the file picker from your desktop of choice. So there's the AD backend, the GTK backend, the WL routes backend, the Kino backend, et cetera. The problem is that of course there's a lot of different desktop environments. Some of them are custom ones and not all backends work in all desktop environments. Some of them they don't, they work maybe they don't look nicely because they don't integrate well with the desktop and some of them they don't work at all. So this can cause crashes, timeouts and other issues. The backend developers, they cannot possibly test in all desktop environments. So the situation here is that since many backends can be installed at the same time, how do you choose which one to use? The problem is that there's a way to select what portal backend you want to use but there's the existing mechanism is very limited and this affects the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck runs two graphical sessions, the gaming one and the desktop one and both of them may need at some points to use portals. So selecting their wide one or which ones to use and which one not to use is very important. So this was fixed this year by Emanuele Bassi. There's a new mechanism to configure portals and with this desktops can select, have a much more elaborate method to select which portals to use and which portals not to use. This was just added to the new version of free desktop portal when I think that was released I think last Sunday and it will be soon in all major districts. Apart from all the working portals there's also many boxes in different components of the OS and here's some examples with KDE we have been doing fixes in the Discover, the application to store software, also rate flap-related fixes and fixes related to external drives. I'll also be working in UDISCs which is the storage demo used to manage different devices. And many more, there's been also fixes in network managing, also pipewires, DL and many, many others by different people. So wrapping up, SteamOS as I said is a fairly standard Linux system so it's as close to your regular desktop as it gets. Has the philosophy to keep everything upstream so every improvement, every change that is made goes directly into the Linux DevTools that we all use. In order to make SteamOS like a successful gaming device there has been a lot of work to Linux kernel, to the graphics and to the desktop and that is pretty much everything is open source and can be used by all of us. And then for people who are not necessarily Linux users themselves, this brings a new way to bring those people closer to Linux. As I said, app developers now have an incentive to publish apps in Linux thanks to this even if they are not Linux users themselves. And with this, I finished the presentation. I would like to thank you for being here. If you like this kind of technologies and working on this kind of things I would like to let you know that we're hiring so this is our website. This is all. Thank you. Anyone have questions? I will be happy to answer. It's basically a snapshot of Arch Linux with some customizations on top. The customizations are basically the minimum necessary to integrate with the Steam client and with the two sessions, et cetera. So there's not, as I said, we keep them to the minimum. So the problem that affected, the question is whether the problems that affect Arch Linux will also affect this Steam OS. Yeah. Usually we don't have the same versions of the packages because Arch Linux is a rolling release and Steam OS takes a snapshot and stays with it for a while. Like Steam OS 3.5 has a certain set of packages and they are not updated unless there's a problem with them. Oh, it depends on the pace of the update. I think the 3.4 was released, don't remember, earlier this year and 3.5 is in preview now. So it depends. I don't think there's a, I'm not the one to talk about this. I don't think there's a fixed schedule. I think things are published when they are ready. So the question is if it's possible to route the root file system the same way that you do it with Android. You have complete access. You open a terminal, you can sudo into root and there's a script to make the Steam OS the root file system read write. It's provided by the system. It's like a support tool.  If you do that and you start to store things then you can break things, but people do it. People, they want to have, I don't know, the coops server to print things. They do it. Well, that's why I would like to mention the recommended way to install applications is Flap Pack is only for desktop applications, but there's also other tools to install applications that are more for terminal command line, et cetera, that I didn't cover here. But they are not officially supported yet, but they're people experimenting with containers and with nicks and things like that. So the question is if Arch is a running release every time there's a regression of a problem the Arch package is updated. But Steam OS takes a snapshot. So how do we do that? If there's, we detect that there's a problem with one of the packages. Well, if there's a problem with one of the packages it's really a problem that deserves an update when we update it downstream. If it's something that hasn't been fixed upstream yet then we send the fix there. We give the patch private and then on the next rebase, the patch is not necessary anymore. The rebase doesn't happen. The rebase happens regularly because there's sort of development. There's an update channel that is sort of like a nightly build. It's not called like that. That is a bit more hidden from the user, but users can actually download them. But it's on their own risk because they are basically not tested. So if you can lose your data. And those, in that channel the Arch is rebased every once in a while. So every time we feel like okay, we should rebase the system because we're having a bit of two older version of pipe wire or network manager. More questions? Yeah. So the question is wasn't Steam OS debian based before? Yes, the earlier version of Steam OS was debian based. The one for the Steam Deck is Steam OS 3 only and that one is based on Arch. That happened already several years ago. So the question is why did it change from debian to Arch? No, I don't know. As a debian user myself, suppose I was a little bit disappointed, but it's okay. I mean the nice thing about Arch is that, as I said, they try to be as close to upstream as possible. So everything that is fixed there, it goes upstream quickly. More questions? Yes? Boom! Yeah, I guess there's new features that are on the works, but I don't know how much I can take about those. If you check the change lock of the new 3.5 version that you will see are some of the new features. One of the things that are going to be new now is the ability to connect regular external USB drives. And we're having a bit of issues with those, like there's some rough edges that need to be dealt with, but that's everyday work. Yes? I'm sorry, can you repeat? I didn't get the part. How many downstream patches we have on the kernel? On the kernel actually, I don't know. I suspect more than in other packages, but I think now we are using the LTS version of the kernel if I'm not wrong. I think it was not the case for previous versions of SteamOS. It's the less stable one now. Okay, it's not LTS, the long term was, no, okay. Okay, so the question is if you go from one version of the, like, SteamOS has several channels, there's the stable channel, there's the beta channel, et cetera. If you go from one to the other, how do you keep compatibility, how do you manage that going back to a previous version doesn't break compatibility, et cetera. Okay, so the root file system is read-only and that's where all the packages are. There's another file system that is the var partition, that one is read-write and that's where the, there's basically an ATC overlay that is stored there and that's where your ATC changes are there, the state of some packages are there, et cetera. So as part of the update system that downloads a new system and switches to the new one, there's a tool that copies your configuration to the configuration of the other partition and there's some tweaking going on. Sometimes in the cases that we know that there's a feature that will not work with the other version of the system that we updated manually, or we updated automatically, sorry. This came, of course, this is not without challenges because there's a lot of possible packages that people can have, especially if people install their own software, you can have a lot of things in ATC and the good thing is that you can actually wipe the var partition, the system will reboot sort of in an original state, however, you still keep all your games, you still keep, I think, all the flat pack applications should work because those are stored in the home partition. So doing a reset of the var partition should remove those compatibility problems and should still leave you with a system where you still have your games. Okay, so if there's no more, I think we're done. Thank you. Thank you.


Hi everybody it's Sam here so I've just condensed down the Facebook live that I done last week where I made a card using the lovely elf and some of the props from my Christmas props stamp set. So the focus on this card was the masking and the coloring. Lots of people have been asking me to do a more detailed coloring tutorial so I thought I'd do it on a Facebook live and then share it onto YouTube. So I've got my masking sheets there I'll show you those in a bit closer detail in a moment but I've just got my piece of five and three, no this was five and a half by five and a half and I'm just starting to create my scene. Now when you do the masking technique you need to kind of think about your background and your foreground so the first stamps that I'm laying down here are going to be the very the very front images they're going to be right in the front so you kind of have to think about what you want to have in front and then everything behind. So I'm laying these ones down now I do end up changing it more towards the end initially I kind of thought I'd have this kind of image in the middle of the cardstock but later on as I started going through it and we were chatting in the live chat it would have looked better to have them all kind of starting right from the very bottom and you'll see that change through the video. So here I'm just kind of talking what I'm doing but I've just stamped all of the presence on the cardstock and then I've also stamped them on the masking sheet and the masking sheet is a low tack sticky tape really and you stick that back over your image so it now means when I stamp this elf when I peel off everything he will be behind the presence because I've masked off the top of them so you can see he goes down onto the presence there however that part will you know come away when I lift that masking sheet. Now I want to mask off the elf because I want to build up loads of presence behind him so I've stamped it again on the masking sheet and you want to cut right up to the black line so yes it is a bit of fussy cutting you could run this through your scanning cut and just set your outline to zero so it cuts right on the black line so I'm just spending a bit of time cutting that out and I do speed it up now you don't want to sit and watch me do that for too long now the good thing about the masking sheets as well as you can keep these so they do come with a release paper so you can just put it back on that or you can actually stick them onto your stamp acetate you know that the stamps will come in so which I just briefly showed there so don't get rid of these it's actually something nice to keep so that when you want to do it again it's not going to take you as long so I'm just laying down that masking sheet right over that stamped image so that's now all protected and this is what a lot of people do when they want to create a background as well so you can ink the background which you'll see me do shortly. Now I also want to have these naughty and nice little signs and again I want the presence to be behind that you always have to kind of think ahead you know start off simple I would say I've gone quite complex with this and I've added a lot to this card but if you just want to do some simple masking just have maybe a couple of stamped images and go from there so I've laid that down I've also stamped them again on the masking sheets I'm just peeling off the backing there and just sticking that over the top you can get these most companies sell these masking sheets as well stick to anything crafters companion hunky-dory and more so now I've got that laid down you'll see I've stamped two other presence and then I thought I need to mask them so I did I think I probably ended up stamping maybe 20 of the presence but they are easy to cut out and I know I definitely want to do this card again and it would look great for birthdays because those presence you know it doesn't matter how you colour them so I will definitely use this again for a birthday card so every time I'm kind of stamping I'm then masking so that I can then stamp over the top of that one again so you'll see that I've just laid that one down and then I'm just going to pop the masking sheet over another one so I can lay another stamp over the top and you just keep going from there like I said I went quite over the top with this I wanted it to be really full and the final card I'm thoroughly pleased with it and I actually just don't end up giving it a well I'm at the moment I don't want to give it away and lots of people that understood that as well they said no I can understand why you don't want to give that to somebody but I probably will so come into the end of the stamping and the masking but I figured I just want to add a few more bits and pieces in so I've masked all of that off and this is now when I started to think it looks like it's just floating it needs to be kind of landed it needs to be you know coming from the bottom there so I'm laying some more down here now rather than cutting more masks because it's literally just that little side there you can see you can just use a piece of copy paper so I'm just laying it down so that the overhang doesn't go on to the stamped image below and it saves me having to cut out some more masking sheets and then I've just done it on both sides there just so I can get a little bit of that present just to fill that gap but you can see there you get a nice effect and I end up filling the far left and right and you'll see why shortly so now I've laid all that down I'm starting to bring in my distressed inks so I'm using the faded jeans weathered wood and this one is chipped sapphire and I actually come in with a little bit of black as well so I'm just using my blending brushes starting with the darkest color at the bottom using that copy paper just so I don't go over although in a minute I do I was so cross with myself but you can see now I wanted to create this nice kind of starry night sky which is what I will achieve shortly so I'm just bringing in that slightly lighter that was the faded jeans starting to kind of blend that with that darker color and bring it all around the top of the elf and then just finish it off with the weathered wood at the top so I've got a selection of the blending brushes this colored one isn't one of my favorites but it is the one that I use for the blue it's just it's not as soft I don't find I get a nice the the nicest blend I prefer the actual makeup ones and then I just brought in the blending sponge here for the top section because I didn't have a lighter color brush without having to go and clean one and then it has to dry and yeah you can you can see why I've done it so I'm just now really working those two colors to get a nice blend and go back over the lighter color go back over with the darker color I wanted it quite light at the top that's where I'm going to stamp my sentiment which I'll see me do shortly and just make sure you don't lift your masking sheets either because you don't want to obviously ruin the image now you'll see can you see the blue that's gone over just where I've put my hand down I just wasn't thinking I just in my head I thought it was masked and it was fine but it's okay because we end up resolving it and lots of people gave some suggestions and um yeah I'll talk to that talk about it in a moment so now is the reveal the best part of the masking so I'm just peeling off all those pieces like I said you can keep them all definitely reuse those again I guess if you use them a lot over time you'll probably have to make new ones but I can certainly get a few more uses out of those and I'm just peeling them all off with my well it's actually my cricket weeding tool but you can just use a poke tool and just carefully lift those up because it's such a low tack it won't you know tear your paper um so it won't ruin your image or anything like that but um it was great and everybody was like oh my gosh it looks so cool and now you can see by I've come in much closer because I'm going to start coloring but you can see how the elf is behind that very first strip and that's when I kind of wished because the ones at the bottom can you see they go under those presents that gets corrected later on so now about the coloring so my coloring is very very simple and I you know I I do spend a long time but I don't I wouldn't say I do anything kind of really tricky so I'm just laying down a light it's quite a almost I would guess a neon kind of color but I wanted that real nice kind of highlight so I just go over the whole area that I want to be for this case green in that light color and then I bring in a slightly darker shade and I go all around the outer outline of the image with the darker color always working in circular motions and I'm just kind of blending it in you know back into that lighter color so already just by adding in that you know that second color there you can see the image starting to lift and I'm doing that exact same technique on his little hat then I'm coming in with an even darker green and just going into all the little the areas where there would it would be very dark you know when you've got a crease in your arm where you've got you know underneath your armpit there would be no sunlight there so it would be much darker behind his ear there it's been much darker and I'm just going in now you can see the same technique I've laid down a nice light pink and then I've gone in with two darker shades of like a reddy pink and just filling in all those areas with the elf you do have to just draw in the cuff on his left arm it was missed out but it's very easy to do same technique with his hair laid down a very very light camel color and then I went in with some very dark browns again all around those small areas and around the outline and already you can see he's starting to come together I was conscious of the time for this during the live so I wanted to get the sentiment down so people could see how that looks so I know it's very close up but again I wanted to keep it in this video just so you can see exactly what I've done so I'm just using the VersaFine just to get a nice intense black and this is a woodware it's an old you get a set of three really nice large Christmas sentiments again if I can find the links I will link it in the description box below but I'm just going over it again just to get a real nice intense black color make sure your oxide inks are dry because they can stay wetter for longer so that's you know I stamped it twice just so I've got a nice crisp color because it might absorb some of that and kind of suck in that black I've also flicked some water just before I lifted on the masking off initially I flicked some water because oxide distress oxide inks react to water you can see they've got a kind of snow a look but I do go in with a white gel pen later on now in the stamp set you do get these little polka dots and stars to fill in the presence so I've gone back in and brought in the masks again just to lay it down so I can pop these details in without ruining the image now you can see obviously how they look now I'm just going to color everything I'm going to put it on much higher speed and I'm going to put some music on in a minute but it's just that same process of laying down a light color all over the area and then go around the outer sides with a darker shade so I'm just going to leave you now to watch me color in the rest of these presents okay so now you can see everything's colored and what I also went and done is I stamped and colored those individual presents and I'm going to stick them along the bottom and it just completely transformed the image and made me much happier so that was how I got around that kind of mistake and also I wanted those to be in front of all the others so they kind of staggered as they kind of went up and then I'm just trimming from the back so you get a nice finish then I just colored his face actually brought in I used the black widow spiders to color everything but I didn't feel I had the right kind of skinned colors so I've used my artesa and it was the peaches and creams you'll see that pencil there's slightly different and then I just used a tan color from the black widow just to give him a little bit of color and then I just brought in my black pen here just to create some little kind of poles for the signs and I had a little bit of a bleed around his face but I just rubbed that out with my eraser popped it onto some silver card and a six by six card blank so it's got a nice silver frame and then here I'm just using my secure jelly roll and it's the jelly pen sorry and it's the white and you can see how nice it looks to give that snowy effect I also added some glossy accents onto his eyes but overall I think this card looks fantastic really really pleased with it like I said I think I'm going to keep it for a while I may give it away I don't know so thank you for watching I'll also link a couple of other coloring tutorials now so you can have a look at those if you'd like and I'll be back very soon with another video take care bye


Okay, I've never met Devin Hester. I've dreamed about meeting Devin Hester, so here's the deal. Unless my producers are cruel, hard-hearted people, I'm being led to believe that Devin Hester might come on the show today. What? I can't even believe it. If you have questions for him, please hit me up. Also, our training camp tour stops, asterisk tentative will be revealed today. We're gonna say where we're going. We're going to the East Coast. It just was easier. We'll see what we can do on the West Coast. We also have Nick Cosmider from The Athletic on the Broncos, which is just, you know, another day in paradise over there. Matt Schneidman, our old friend with The Athletic, covering the Packers side of things. And we start the show with Burr. No! Is, has a chance to do it all this year. And let me just tell you why. Joe Burr walks into this season. Healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy, healthy. Really? Really? Just when we get our guy, Chris Collinsworth, to get these Sinssey fans all excited, we have an injury to the quarterback who was said to start this season healthy for the very first time. Ah! I can't believe it. Zack Taylor, here's the deal. He's calling it a calf injury. Let's get you caught up on this. It was while rolling out during practice, everyone saw it. We still don't know the extent or a timeline as you're seeing it here. Now there are reports, oh, I don't want to see it. There are reports that it's a calf strain. And there's reports that he avoided something more serious. Jamar Chase also said he got one of those, sup, nods, I'm okay, from Burrow after practice. So he thinks he's fine. Okay, I'll buy into that. Sure, nervously. It could have been worse. We all saw the sleeve on his leg there. And I don't know if people are talking about this. It looks like he put pressure on his leg, that leg as he hopped onto the cart. But no doubt about it people, this is bummer city. This will almost certainly keep him off the field for an extent of time. And Collinsworth predicated his entire Super Bowl-bound Joe Burrow best year ever. Finally get there and win it. Argument on the basis that Joe Burrow is going to be available. I mean, the knee injury in 2021, the appendectomy in 2022. And now this, and to address Chris's point, and we have to, he's saying basically every advantage matters. There's no margin for error, especially in that conference, right? That division even. And yes, if you look at his numbers over the past two years, in September, up against the rest of the season, you can't argue it's the numbers, right? Burrow has been solid in the first month and still been in sort of a ramp up mode, numbers-wise, because he's been significantly better by every measure over the final four months of the season. Now there could be tons of reasons for this. It might not have to do with even Joe Burrow. And, you know, of course it didn't keep them from almost being their last year and it got them to the big game that year before that. So you can counter this right away by saying, it's year four, Joe Burrow has the chemistry down, it's all fine, and that can be true. Or you can get, Skye is falling, nitty gritty, maybe baby, and suggest that had they come out hot last year, there wouldn't have been any coin flip drama. And that title game is at home, yada, yada, yada, what could have been? But I'm making the decision to not get carried away today. Yes, the AFC is going to be so tight this year, even just the AFC North is woof. And those September games are going to matter as the playoff seating shakes itself out in February. But here's what I'm about these days people, okay? And I'm working hard to do it because it's not natural and it's not easy to me, but it is a choice to control your thoughts, to not think negatively, to not assume, we know nothing. And right now I am choosing as I am urging, encouraging and willing you to hop on board with me and choose the Jamar Chase, he's okay outlook on life, okay, it could have been worse. It's better that it happened now, a little thing than a month from now. We don't have enough information, so let's just be about the positive vibes. That is my take on the Bengals. Let me know what your thoughts are, tell me that you're thinking positively about it, or not if you're a Baltimore Ravens fan who has to say everything about Bengals when I mention them. Okay, let's switch gears now and stay in the AFC. And are the Broncos a sleeper team? Well, they're certainly not being quiet right now. Sean Payton had a quiet day yesterday. So let's bring in my guy, Nick Cosmider, who covers the Broncos for the athletic Nick. Coach had some strong words yesterday for the previous short-lived regime calling Nathaniel Hackett's 22, one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the NFL. That's an actual quote. Then he took shots at the Jets. I mean, Jeff Fisher somewhere like, hey, what about me? But what stood out to you? Yeah, I mean, you're right, Kay. Some of that stuff sounded as if it was quotes coming out of an Onion article. Like, you're reading through it and you're kind of rereading to be like, did he really say this? Like, let me make sure I'm reading these quotes right. And the interesting thing is he had hinted at some of this early in his tenure, like when he joined the Broncos in early February, he had poked fun at the fact that their play clock issues led to the crowd counting down the play clock in the home opener. He had called the film hard to watch. He had been pretty blunt about what he thought of the previous regime, but he went ether in a whole new way in a way that people around here were very surprised by in part because he also took shots at people who still work in that building. Definitely a tone that was set to start training camp that is different than what has been around here for quite a long time. Okay, so let's dig into that. What is the difference in tone? Sean has made it very clear that he wants to make big differences. He's implemented big changes. I think he's a reckless hothead pirate, rage against the machine guy who's just rolling in there and likes to be in control of the organization. What's the biggest things that, what are the biggest things that you're noticing as the change of regime takes place? Well, you kind of touched on it. Like it is a wholesale change in terms of the control that the head coach has. And part of that is because each of the last three head coaches, the Broncos have hired since Gary Kubiak stepped down after the 2016 season were first time head coaches. Obviously, Vic Fangio is one of those. He'd been in the league a long time, but still when you become a head coach, it's a new job. And so for each of these years, you had people that were sort of still trying to figure out their voice in that particular role, just trying to figure out how exactly they wanted to do the job all while dealing with issues the Broncos have had at quarterback, with the front office, with general manager change, ownership change, just so much kind of always revolving in Denver. With Sean Payton though, it is, he knows how to do this, Kay. You know, he has been doing it for 15 seasons. And I think this new ownership group that was still trying to kind of find their way wanted somebody that would take full control and be kind of the voice, a front facing voice of the organization. They certainly got that. A few interesting things before this even happened. I made the case on Wednesday that I think Hackett's a bigger deal than people are making in New York with the Jets and with Aaron Rodgers. And that'll be someone who sort of reels him in or like works really well with him, at least in that matters when you have a quarterback who's as intelligent and as demanding and knows what he wants as a guy like Rodgers. And so I had Melvin Gordon on to talk about the running backs and his Hackett experience. And he was telling me that he did not enjoy his experience in Denver. Obviously the production on the field sort of reflected that. And he's moving on, but he made it about almost like the people Hackett brought in that were, like Hackett was good, but the people he brought in maybe weren't as strong. He mentioned, you know, if Hackett came into the running back room and he was able, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Mike producer saying something, I'm sorry. Oh, okay, sorry. I thought it was, I thought, I don't know what was happening. He said that Hackett would come into the running back room and explain it to them. They got it. And he left and he did it. So he's kind of throwing some of the staff under the bus and didn't make waves like Sean Payton did about Hackett and company. We also had TJ Ward and Malik Jackson on the show. And they were sort of talking about what will or what will not work out for the Sean Payton Russell Wilson experience. So I want to sort of get into your thoughts on that. Not what happened last year. Like let's not look too much into the past, but it's got to just be run the ball and play action, right? Like what's going to be the most important factor in making Russell Wilson, Russell Wilson again? Yeah, I think that's where it starts, right? That they have to, they were 27th in the NFL last year in rushing efficiency and that was on top of giving up a league high 63 sacks. Russell Wilson absorbed 55 of those in just 15 games. It was the most in his career. So offensive line issues were a huge issue. They went out and spent 80 million guaranteed dollars on two offensive linemen, which really shows you what they want to do. They want to be able to run the ball efficiently and they also want to be able to get better protection, particularly in the interior of the line to give Russell Wilson the time that he needs. But you saw in the last two games when Jerry Rosberg came in as the interim head coach, they had a lot more cogent plan on offense. They were committed to running the football and they did to your point K, really bolster the play action game. The one thing I'm very curious about is Sean Payton's teams in New Orleans are always in the top five, top six in time to throw. You get, they get rid of the ball quickly. That leads to a low sack rate. Russell Wilson time to throw is always 30 or 31st in the league, a high sack rate. And part of that is because he's able to escape to make plays, to work off script. I'm very curious to see how, how far Russell Wilson can come to Sean Payton's way of doing things. And that is three steps, back foot, get the ball out, quick passing game. And then we'll take our shots when we've softened up the defense a little bit more as opposed to hunting those as a way to start our offensive scheme. I'm very curious to see how that's gonna mix together. I don't know, T.J. Ward told me you can't have Russell Wilson be, you can't Drew Brees, Russell Wilson. You can't make Russell Wilson something he is and you have to make him comfortable. And that in my world makes Javante Williams maybe the biggest factor in all of this. Obviously helping with the offensive line that figures everything out. But Russell's at his best historically when he has an impactful running game. Now Javante is coming off a knee injury. Is he going to be full go by the start of the season? That is sort of the outlook right now. And we actually got to talk to Javante yesterday for the first time since he tore his knee in October. And he said that even he was surprised by how quickly he got back. When he tore his ACL, he had other ligament damage in that right knee as well on October 2nd in a game against the Raiders. He was told, hey, it's gonna be a calendar year or more before you're able to be back on the field. And now here we are just inside of 10 months. And when they get out there here in just about 45 minutes he's going to be full go. He said he's been cleared for contact. They will bring him along slowly. I think he'll have some load management days where he's a limited participant. And the preseason plan for him, I don't think has been fully established just yet. But I expect that he's going to be ready week one. And you're right with what Sean Payton likes to do with his running backs. You're going to have two guys that go over a hundred carries this season. Somaje P. Ryan could be that other guy for the Broncos. But Javante Williams in his short time last year before he got hurt really showed growth as a wide receiver or as a receiver out of the back field and split out wide. That is going to be a really interesting wrinkle of just how much they use him in that regard. And having Tim Patrick back is huge as well because he is a guy who is a physical wide receiver in that running game. And he is also a guy that is just so reliable from a big third down kind of catch perspective. So those two figures who they didn't have most of last year I think people don't realize how big they will be if they're in the lineup and healthy. I think it speaks volumes about what the team thinks about their health of staff Sean Payton himself. They weren't really after any of these available guys that are out there. Karim Hunt still available. Delvin Cook of course flew to New York yesterday but that's somebody that I would imagine Sean Payton would have been interested and I think bolstering a running back group that he might not have felt secure with. He likes running three guys. He did it over and over again. He likes putting everybody out there to do their thing like you're saying. I think him not reaching and not bringing a guy in is indicative of how he feels about Javante Williams. His health is availability and that running back group. Just my thoughts though. I'm not speaking for him. Okay, we got to go. Nick Cosmider, I appreciate you and your work with the athletic. Just enjoy the Sean Payton experience. Like buy yourself some Jordan 11s, roll into camp and just let it wash over you, you know? That's all you can do. Just embrace the ride for sure. I think it'll be super fun and sneaky good too over there and at least interesting in Denver. Maybe I'll see you out there at training camp. We now welcome in a co-worker of yours, a friend of the old virtual water cooler, Matt Schneidman, our good friend who covers the Packers over at the athletic. How have you been? Interesting week in Green Bay to say the least. Yeah, I mean, Aaron Rodgers isn't here. So I would argue it's very interesting still with Jordan Love. More importantly, I'm a four-time guest on Up in Adams. I could not be doing any better right now. Listen, you just got out of Matla Floor's press conference. Any fireworks I need to know about? Now nothing interesting. They're going into a 50% jog through practice today since the past two days have kind of been full ago. So a pretty slow day here in Green Bay. What is post Aaron Rodgers Green Bay like? A lot of unknown. I've said, you know, this is my fifth season covering this team and there's always intrigue around the Packers. You know, they're one of the most iconic franchises in sports, but the question around this team the past four years and for the 10 years before that was, are they going to win the Super Bowl? Are they going to make that final jump from NFC number one or number two seed to hoisting the Lombardi trophy? This year it's, are they going to be any good? There's a lot more unknowns. They have two rookie tight ends who are going to be their top two tight ends. They have a quarterback who started one game and I believe thrown 83 passes in his NFL career. They have a wide receiver group whose most experienced receiver is 23 year old Christian Watson. So many unknowns on this team. Nobody really knows what to expect, which is why I would argue it's more interesting this year than in any of the past four that I've been here for. Now, what other unknown is this mustache? Is it staying? Is it part of like some sort of a team bonding experience? What's going on there? No, well, this is a fake answer. I just kind of like how it looks. I'm probably wrong, but Rogers always has his training camp mustache that he does this time of year. So someone's got to pick up the slack if he's not here because Jordan Love ain't grown a mustache. I can tell you that right now. He's too young to grow a full mustache, it seems. You miss Aaron. I'll say this. I've said this to you before. You too. He is a reporter's dream to cover, not all the extra curricular stuff. And listen, I love Pat McAfee and they've been great to me. Maybe sometimes we would rather go grocery shopping on a Tuesday than listen to an hour of COVID talk. But I digress. He is so insightful. He's always been good to me. I wouldn't say I miss him, but it'll definitely be different covering Jordan Love, who so far hasn't really come out of his shell. I don't blame him for that. He doesn't want to maybe show too much of his personality or come out and make any outlandish statements before he's really done anything in the league. He's very PC right now, but we'll see if he kind of comes out of his shell and shows a little bit more of his personality if he starts winning games here. I don't care about his personality. Most people hated Roger's personality 50% of the time. Talk to me about what the QB1 of the Packers looks like on the field. He looks good right now. You know, he's thrown a lot of dead ducks over the years on short passes, on long passes, just watching him in practice during OTA's mini camp, training camp over the past three years. His spiral is a lot more tighter. That may be a very mundane thing, but he's been okay the first two days. Matt LaFleur said the other day, the last thing he's going to do is overreact to one day.  Matt LaFleur was not buying that as an excuse, but this is going to be a growing process. Nobody expects Jordan Love to come in and light the world on fire. Aaron Rodgers, the Packers I should say since QB wins are in a stat, the Packers went six and 10 during Aaron Rodgers' first season starting. He threw 13 interceptions in 2008, the most he ever threw in a season in his career. The Packers are built to win games other ways. They have arguably the best running back tandem in the league.  A defense with eight first-round picks. They don't need Jordan Love to be Superman this year, which I think is good, because not too much is going to be required of him, which as you know, Aaron Rodgers was tasked with winning this team games by himself over the years and the Packers don't really have to do that this year from that position. But not last year. Aaron Rodgers was not winning games as much by himself yet last year. He was not his MVP self last year. That's just true. You can say for whatever reasons. And the chemistry started building with the big tall number nine Watson out there and company. But I like the expectation isn't that he goes out there and has an MVP Super Bowl season like Rodgers had. He doesn't have to at this point, which is sort of nice for Aaron Rodgers, even though I'm sure there has to be some sort of sentiment at locker room like he gave back 35 million. Why wouldn't he do that for us? Why wouldn't he do that here among these Packer fans? I'm wondering if you're hearing that in the locker room at all. But I should have asked you this at the top when I brought you in with the Hackett synergy here. I don't know, I'm being a bad host today and just to completely let that go. You're a perfect person, Matt, to ask about this. You know, Sean's got these comments about Hackett. Everyone's sort of throwing him under the bus. It didn't work last year as we all know us to listen to the worst he's ever looked. Yada, yada, yada. He's back with the Jets. How much of an impact will he actually have? Sala is saying Rodgers will have creative control. He's got input. He's part of the architecture. Like maybe sell me or explain to me how important or unimportant Hackett is going to be to the Jets' success. I said he's low key, super pivotal. Chris Collinsworth Monday totally downplayed it. I wouldn't even say low key. I would say it's very high key. I remember back in 2020 when we were doing Zoom interviews during COVID, Nathaniel Hackett, his first head coaching interview was with the Atlanta Falcons. And we were on a Zoom with Aaron Rodgers. And we asked him about Hackett's credentials for that job. And Rodgers kind of quipped at the end. I hope he doesn't go anywhere unless I do. And that was still kind of in the aftermath of Rodgers being a little peeved at the Jordan Love Pick. What I learned about Aaron Rodgers is he'll probably flourish best if he's around people that he likes. I'm not saying he didn't like Matt LaFleur. I think he did. But there were obviously some people in this building that Rodgers didn't like. And it led to some tension. Obviously it didn't affect the on-field results that much. But Aaron Rodgers loved. I want names. I want names. Well, it's pretty clear. I want names, okay. It's obvious that it's Brian Goudicum's. Rodgers does not like him. And very quickly when I talked to Rodgers a couple months ago for a story I wrote on kind of how the marriage between he and the Packers fell apart. One of the lines he said that kind of made me sit back in my seat or perk up. I should say when Rodgers was talking about the lack of communication between him and Goudi and kind of the whole thing of the FaceTime this off season he told me I talked to people that I like and that was directly at the GM. So that was a whole nother thing. That we could talk for 20 minutes about that. But Hackett, he loves Hackett. You know, I went to Rodgers press conference his first one with the Jets and saw Hackett there and Hackett was sitting front row. And it's not just someone he likes. It's someone who knows him. Someone who can accelerate this process of, okay, what are we gonna put in this offense? That works for Aaron. Two of his three MVP seasons here in Green Bay were with Nathaniel Hackett as his offensive coordinator. He's not just gonna go into the Jets and take half a season with an offensive coordinator who he doesn't know to get up to speed. He has an OC there who knows everything about him already. So it's not just on the personal side. It's on the football side as well, which Chris Collins was a genius. He'll forget more football than I ever know. But I think it's high key, a huge part to why I think Rodgers has set it up for success with the Jets this year. I agree, I think he's sort of a secret weapon that nobody's talking about until Sean Payton trashes him. And I would just say, I know that Sean, everyone's saying or the porters he talks to is whoever, whatever, are saying if there's a plan, he's trying to probably motivate this team, new sheriff in town, all of that. Well, the stray that's being caught to Hackett in this strategy is just going to incentivize and galvanize and add fuel to a Jets team that is excited, but probably going to start feeling pressure right about now. It doesn't hurt to be hearing crazy trash talk about your offensive coordinator, if you're Aaron Rodgers, Garrett Wilson, Randall Cobb and Al Lazzard, who know and are probably very friendly with Nathaniel Hackett. So I would imagine it's like, hey, thanks, let's send Sean Payton an edible arrangement later this afternoon for that beautiful thing of fuel that we needed in the middle of training camp, you know? I think you're missing about six other former Packers who are on the Jets now. I think there's eight. I know, I was saying, I was like, somebody asked me, what are the Jets doing with that 35 million? I'm like, that's James Jones salary. What do you mean? That's what's gonna happen. Jordy Nelson's on a farm somewhere looking for an extra 10 million. I know you miss him. I will tell him you love him and say hi because I think I'm seeing him next week. Speaking of, to add insult to your injury, I thought you guys beat us all the time. Devon Hester's coming on the show today. Now there's a guy who's probably faster than me. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I mean, this is the guy who I think is faster than Tyree Kill. I said it and he's on the show. No longer plays for the Bears. He also doesn't have a bust in Canton yet, which is the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. So we're gonna get to that. We appreciate you, Matt Steinman, and all your work over at the Athletic, the mustached one. We also, we got to get out of here because we've got, you know, we were gonna have Livian Bell on the show, but big surprise, he canceled on me. Devon Hester is on the program after this on a Friday. Fantasy bits, fantasy bits. It's time for Up and Atoms, Fantasy Bits. Oh boy. I'll never do that again. I promise you guys. But today I wanna talk to you about J.K. Dobbins, okay? I know he's had some injuries in the past, but I think he is being sorely undervalued right now. His ADP places him squarely in round four right now. Okay, he's gotta move up. What are we doing here? You can see he's ranked 18th at the running back spot. If he's able to stay healthy, I don't see why he can't perform much better than that and be a strong RB2 option, okay? When he's on the field, he was very special. He's RB1 potential, honestly. In 23 games, he's played. He is racked up almost 1500 yards. He's scored 12 touchdowns. He's averaged an NFL best 5.86 yards for Carey since 2020. No one else is even close. It's more than half a yard more than the next closest player, Nick Chubb, every time he clutches the ball. Really think about that. He also put up over 100 total yards per game over the last five weeks when the knee was finally back to full strength. So he clearly hasn't lost his step after those knee injuries. And while we're hearing the Ravens are going to do their thing and they brought Odell and all that stuff and their receivers, they're gonna open up the passing game more. We're hearing that even Melvin Gordon said Monk and wants to throw the ball a lot. I'm not that concerned. And it might just mean that there's more catches out there for JK for your PPR leagues. So the one thing to keep an eye on would be his absence from training camp. He's not there. It sounds like it might be contract related, more of that than an injury sort of situation. So I'm not gonna touch that right now because we do not know, but just keep your eyes on that situation. But if JK is ready to go, you can get a ton of bang for your buck by taking him in the late third, early fourth round. And he could be one of the bigger steals in your draft when it comes to running back in depth because we value running backs on up and at them. So we value running backs in the fantasy football game. We also value training camp and they're in full swing and I just had to get into the action. I've always wanted to do like a mini tour. And by mini tour, like I wanna hit all 32. So it's impossible, lots of logistics, lots of, it's just been absolute madness but we have sort of been pumping it up all week, getting options, hearing from you guys. And we've got some locations locked in for round one. This is, you know, this is the start of it at least, okay? So reveal the map, please. All eyes on gang green. We're there first Monday, July 31st next. Oh, is that an RV? We're going to Bill's training camp, Turkey Burgers on Tuesday, then to the commanders. Then we are going to check out the Eagles in South Philly after their Super Bowl appearance and finally we got the Day-Ball Boys, the G-Men, the Giants. Okay, so let's do the strength of schedule style. Okay, we've got five games on the map. So far, cross country, so you've grown on the road for a long time. We have a legendary quarterback right out the gates. So like, as for, like how do we get Rogers? How do we get through fans? How do we get through the HBO cameras? Like Rogers come to me, come hang out with me. Then the Bills, I mean this is the longest leg of the road trip, so I think it'll test friendships between me and my producers. I've never been with them for longer than like 10 hours a piece, so this will be tough. I think we're getting in a sprinter van and driving to Rochester on something called a throughway. Also, crowd noise is going to matter.  You're going to have to deal with a lot of adversity if you're trying to put on a show. Also, is Haley Steinfeld going to be dressed better than me? A question I have. Then we go to Washington. That'll be on Wednesday. I'm very excited, new vibes. And we're going to face a quarterback named Sam Howell who we don't have a lot of tape on. You know, we don't know what kind of defense to throw and we don't know what he's going to give us. So you've got to figure out how to gain plan for a relatively unknown QB situation there. And then to a division rival. I mean the Eagles might smell the commanders on us, right, they're going to smell us that we know that we're coming. And that's about as tough as an environment on the road as you can get there in Philly. And then there's, of course, having to make decisions which I'm terrible at, like which cheesesteak is the cheesesteak? Do I skip the cheesesteak altogether? I need help. You guys have to let me know at Up and Atom Show. I'd love to meet some of you guys out there at NovaCare and wrapping it up, we're going to go back to New York, but we're not wrapping it up. I don't think I'm done. I don't think this is enough. We're going to go back to the Meadowlands, which I actually think is like a perfect little reprieve. They're not as hyped up as the Jets. It'll be probably a little more settled. They're more old school. They're old money kind of vibes. And we can just watch great football, check out Siocam Barclays quads, and probably keep an eye out on celebrities. Like are we going to see Vito from the Sopranos? Bobby Bacala, who I saw at the Knicks game that one time, you just never know. Giant's Camp is where a lot of guys go and women go that are celebrities of these teams. Okay, so who am I taking with me? Hamilton has to go. So Hamilton's going and poor Marissa McBride is going to have to be elbowing, communications people and people from local radio to try to get us some of these guys. But basically it's the three of us in a sprinter van on dead stop traffic on something called a throughway. Marissa, are you excited? I'm so excited. A little nervous, yes. Optimistically happy. Yeah, I think so cautiously optimistic. I think it'll be fun. I'm wondering who's going to get the aux score though for the first leg of the trip. That is what I'm really wondering. Oh God, well, we're taking a flight from LA. Hamilton, we're meeting you at Jet's Camp. It's a crazy way to start, is to go into the jet situation where everybody wants to be a part of it. We have to, I'm thinking water balloons, I'm thinking ice cream truck, I'm thinking like have somebody come with some sage or something for Aaron, like let's bring adaptogens and just hand them out. Like let's just hand out mushrooms to everybody. This is the thing I already know.  I'll leave the aux score to you. Marissa is the secret weapon. Hamilton, you're great. I'm fine, whatever. Marissa is not a person who will be told no. Like Marissa is going to, we're going to be with the fans. We've got some presents for any fans, any of the camps that we're going to and headed out to. We want to meet you guys. We're excited to see these players and really just celebrate what it is. But I take on this sort of like little sister vibe and I'm like, Marissa, what can we do for them?  It's going to be a smorgasbord for sure. We've got some tricks up our sleeve. I'm excited to reveal them every day. I think the players are going to love them. I think the fans are going to love them. We're going to get them all incorporated. I think this is going to be a pretty good rollout of leg one tentative leg one. And Kay, you bring up a good point. Marissa on these road shows is a spectacle in and of itself at the draft that sprint when they were doing the soundtrack for Motley Crue behind us. Jackson Smith and Jigba was blown away by her 40 time getting to that soundtrack to stop it. Since high school. That was the fastest I've run since my four by one in high school for sure. I looked across the fountain at the Draft in Kansas City. Marissa's they're doing a sound check. It's so loud. We can't hear anything. We're about to we're we're interviewing Rich. What can I think of it? Rich Paul and we from Clark sports and Marissa sprinting and all of a sudden in the back, I see two souls just go into the air and she ended the lives of two poor people working for Motley Crue with whatever she did. Respectfully with love with love. She did that. And the other thing Hamilton will be to wrap this up. Marissa in Philadelphia, which is just, you know, I'm coming home. I don't know if I can handle that. Oh, it's going to be great. We'll do it. We'll get some Philly love. I'll show you the ropes. Nothing to be scared of. Just a nice little Philadelphia welcome. That's all. Okay. I heard gopers a hundred times during Super Bowl week. I don't know if I can take any more. I mean, who's going to handle Marissa's media availability? That's on you, Hamilton. I'm not doing it. Marissa does interviews. I can't be doing this again. I can't be going on Fox 29 again. Nope, no, no. Can't do it. Don't get me started on Fox 29 either. All right, okay. I want, I want Aaron Rodgers. I want Josh Allen. I want, I need to know this Sam Howell guy. We got to check in with our guy from the draft. We hung out with him Chase Young. Hopefully we can talk to Coach Rivera about the new vibes. I'm just so excited to see what Washington's all about. I've never been to their training camp. I've never been to a single game down there. So I'm super looking forward to that, but we're not done because I just think we're doing like three NFC East teams. It just made the most sense. I think it's a starting, starting point. And because I'm thinking positively and I'm putting all this positive energy, I just feel like on the way back, there has to be some sort of like Cincinnati, Nashville, L.A. Or like Cincinnati, Denver, L.A. Chargers done something. There needs to be, we can't just do like New York back. I just don't, I don't believe in that. I like the Denver little route. I think we could. Oh, he did. Denver. I like the little Denver route. I like the Tennessee angle. I want to go to Cincinnati, never been there. Chargers are down the street. I think those are great additions to the tentative leg too, but I want more. Bring it on. I want more. I want more. What is the best, well here's the thing. The flights are brutal. The flights from Cincinnati, L.A. That's all brutal. Everybody tell us where we should go on our way back. One or two cities. And then I think I've blown out the budget till 2026. So we're going to take a break here. We're trying to get Devon Hester. Are you guys lying about Devon Hester? Is he coming on? Do we know? Are we getting Devon Hester? Oh no, we're not. They're not telling me. Oh no, I hope we get him. Adam's trying to get to Devon Hester. He's in a car. We're trying to see if we can get him on because I would freak out if I ever got to talk to him, but I mean, year number two passed up for the Hall of Fame. It makes no sense. The Hall of Fame respectfully with love. What are we doing? 20 career total touchdowns most of all time. I knew in 2006 after that first touchdown, again, I think it was the Packers. If I remember correctly, it was like an 84 yarder. He should have been, leave this up there. I need to read through that. Can we put that up there again? He should have been in the Hall of Fame after that, okay? What he did, that bears Rex Grossman, Jake Cutler, not much to watch or be excited about. I'm a Chicago girl, born, bred, raised. 14 career punt returns most all time. Two kickoff return touchdowns in one game, most tied for most all time. And all those punt return yards, third all time. The Hall of Fame is supposed to be the best players from all the positions in the NFL. There are kickers in the NFL. Special teams is part of it. And I would, this is no shade to Cutler. Well, you know how I feel about Cutler on this show. No shade to him or a sexy Rexy, but you put him on another offense with another quarterback. Maybe those receiving numbers, those receiving situation is a little bit different from Mr. Hester. I want to talk to him about that. I want to talk to him about Tyree Kill, his son, things he does in the community, what he thinks about this year's Chicago Bears, all of that and more. And hopefully we get him after this. If not, you're going to see a nice little tap dance by K.S. You better get about my way. Get your faith. He's going to take it all away and for Chicago. My favorite, when he's looking at the scoreboard, there's so many plays where he turns around and starts waving. He had it all going on. He revolutionized the game, a game changer and gave me a young gal from the Northwest side of Chicago whose parents were immigrants from Poland, didn't even know anything about American football. He gave me something to get on my couch and jump up and down about every Sunday after noon. Oh my goodness. I'm so excited to welcome our next guest, 11-year NFL veteran, four Pro Bowls, three All-Pros, future Hall of Famer, the greatest punt and kick returner in the history of the NFL and an absolute legend. Hi, Devin Hester. How you doing? Pretty good. I hope all's well with you guys. I'm good. Yes, I'm so great. I'm so glad to talk to you. I know you're in your car. Thank you for trying to make all of this happen. I love seeing your highlights and we're gonna dig into some of those in a bit, we'll talk some bears. But first, we're gonna talk with the Hall of Fame situation. That's fine, but somebody who's going to get into the Hall of Fame is your son, okay? Your son, Drayton, aka ankle bully. He will be in Canton with some of these highlights. Look at these. Take me through some of these. Oh, okay. That was the game last week. He played against a part one team called Mopaka. And that was the game last week. Pretty much like the first game of the season for those guys coming out for our lead, which is Florida Elite. Well, amazing. He is so incredible. I saw Roddy White was commenting. There were like a thousand likes or more than that, even on this video. He is crushing it out there like father-like son, of course. And I want to talk about some of some issues, but I can't, you know, the pain it causes me as a Chicago girl, that you're not in the Hall of Fame. We can't move past it. I can't move past it. What are your thoughts today on that?  Don't be, don't get so frustrated because the minute you get that call, it's gonna feel like it was a first ballot, man. You're just gonna be so relieved, man. You know, we all know that it's bound to happen. You know, it's just a matter of time with me. And you know, I just got to stay positive, don't think negative about the situation. It's out of my control to be honest with you. But at the end of the day, we all know as football analysts and as great players that I should be in by now, but the time will come. And you will get in. Is there a reason that you've thought of, you know, we can look at your resume here. Is there something that like, if you were to answer the question, why aren't you in? Like, why aren't you in these two years? What's the reason? I think it's from just talking to the high guys above that know more than anybody about the Hall of Fame situation. It's for me, they was pretty much saying, this is the hardest thing for those guys to evaluate. First off, just special team-wise, it's what's hindering the situation. They just don't know how to quote-on-quote figure out how special team will play a part in the Hall of Fame. I do know that when they do pick five guys each year, the last two years, I was the sixth guy to get cut. So I was the last of the crop, two years in a row to get cut. And it's just one of them unique situation where I'm listed as a special team guy and a returner, so it's so hard right now for those guys to figure this out on how to get a special team guy now. But they know that sooner or later, I will be in. Wow, see, I hear that, and just as a fan of yours, I'm thinking, okay, well, kickers are in there, Ray Guy is in there, why not a return specialist?  It doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't at all, you know, and I did get frustrated the first year, the second year, you know, it was, I was kind of used to the situation and the situation that I was in and it didn't hurt as bad the second year, but the first year I did cry. I'm gonna be honest with you, I was very upset because as a player, you know what I mean, not just looking at special team wise, but what I did to the game and how I changed the game, you know what I mean, from the aspect of special team wise and what I'm forcing was able to be a first ballot. That's something that I really wanted, you know what I mean, as my career got going and I started doing some things that never was done before. I looked at it as, you know, hopefully I can be a first ballot and that's what I worked so hard for, for as a, as a player, my real key second year, third year on up to my last year in the league. I really, really wanted to be a first ballot and unfortunately it didn't pan out the way I wanted it to, but at the end of the day, you know, all things worked out for the good and hopefully I'll be in soon.  I am in the church of Devin Hester this morning. That is an incredible way to carry yourself and incredible, honestly, an outlook on life. I was thinking this morning about this with how explosive, how dynamic you were out there on the field. There's so much more creativity in the NFL right now offensively. What does Devin Hester look like in a Debo Samuel-esque role in today's NFL? Oh, that's, people that know me and the coaches that know me know that if I was in a system where I was playing with patchman homes or I was playing with the 49ers, right now I would offensively that those guys have that. I will be right there with those guys when it comes down to performance and the way they play and the way they're utilized. I think I fit that type of skill. I can always line up at running back. I play running back my whole high school, part one of the years. So that's not a question of me running the ball. You can see in glimpse of that University of Miami why I did both ways on the ball, offense, receiver, throwing the ball, even running the ball, catching the ball. In offense like that, Scott's the limit for me, man. That's why I always tell my friends that I feel like I unachieved my current NFL because it's so much I could have did, but it wasn't shown. The fact that you're saying you underachieved is crazy, but I look at a guy like Tyree Kill, a guy who looks up to you. Tyree Kill, he was comparing himself to you back in 2016 before he even had a game. He before he even was out there for training camp and then you see what he was able to do with that speed. But I heard you're faster than Tyree, huh? You would have beat Tyree can embrace? Tyree, Tyree, I look at this more. He probably would have got me on the track. I think when it cost of me, when me and him get compared, I think my change of direction is faster than his. I would say his straight ahead, live speed, he probably has me, but on the field change of direction, I think my moves and his moves, I don't lose speed, and sometimes he may slow down a little bit, making a move, but I think that's where I get him when it comes to football speed is my change of direction was something that I worked on and I craft, you know what I mean? Since I was young, I was able to make moves and not lose speed, and that's where I feel like I can get him on the field. Now, everybody talks about the iconic play by you, like not, you know, and you had one really good receiving year, but I think too, I think if it wasn't Rexman, or a Grossman, Rexman, Rex Grossman, if it wasn't Cutler, if it was a different world, a different system, that your numbers would have been bigger and you would have made more of an impact in the receiving game. I think that's so true, but you were iconic in it.  Everybody of course talks about what happened against Indy, the Super Bowl, it's never happened since, it never happened before. Do you have a favorite play though? I'm sure you're sick of seeing that one. What's your hall of fame worthy play? Like your favorite thing you ever did out there on the field? If I had to pick one, of course it would be Indy, but I always say that my favorite moment was when we played Arizona, Arizona card, and it's my rookie year. Oh yeah. It was down, it was down like 20 plus. There you go. Talk me through this. Yeah, it was down like 20.  I had a couple of returns before this game, and we just couldn't get nothing going on the offense. Arizona jumped out on us like 20 sun zipping the hat, 20 sun, like 24, two or 24, three and a half time, and we found the way defense found the way to come back, and they put up like, kind of put the game in reach, and then for it to come down to this situation where I had the opportunity to get my hands on the ball and take the point back to put up, give us the lead to win this game. And I think that right there really solidified the type of player I was. Yeah, there's that one, there's your return. There's your return against the Giants was my favorite. I just love that, the J.P. Lee kick. I was just like, oh my God, there's so many plays. I love your first touchdown, 2006 up against the Packers, I know them all, but now the NFL's different. It's changed a little bit, so you know, not that there ever would be another you anyway, but the rule changes are making sure that there's no more Devin Hester out there. There's a new rule that you can signal for a fair catch anywhere inside the 25-yard line, and the ball will be placed at the 25-yard line. What's wrong with the current NFL? I mean, I disagree with it, because then now you take players like me out of the game. Does it benefit me in the selfish way? Yes, because then now you could possibly find the next Devin Hester that takes over the return game. But as a player myself, I don't want a kid that comes around with the type of talent that I have to be short of being an opportunity player in the NFL because they're taking the kicks in the part-side of the league. One last one for you, quick. We're running up against the clock, and we thank you, Devin Hester.  The 2023 Bears will, dot, dot, dot, finish the sentence. Make it to the playoffs. What? Why? How? What? I think they will make it to the playoffs. Okay, that's all I needed from you. I think they will make it to the playoffs. Devin Hester, if you were ever in LA, I would love to meet you in person and go through all of your plays. It would take us 20 hours, a future hall of famer, an icon, a legend. We'll see you guys next week. Have a good weekend, Devin Hester. Thank you.