No money spent? Why, dawg? So I can f***ing lose? So I can loo- No money spent so I can lose that y'all can have fun, huh? They were- We had play some sweaty games! God d***, dude! Why am I supposed to play f***ing Skimbo and Kiv and f***ing problem every f***ing game? Holy sh**, who do y'all play every game? I'm playing Bones again! This is the other dude I play. Bones and f***ing Lou and Mike Ward. And now Nick Hackles on the list too. I guess there's like four people play- Do you guys play All Madden? Am I the only person that plays All Madden? Everybody begged for All Madden and nobody ever plays this sh**. Okay, this is my rival, bro. All right, when he's flipped this way, it's a blitz. I swear to God, when his nickel is on that side, he blitzes me. Oh my God, bro. I was wrong. I was wrong, but he beat me last time because I kept getting f***ing railed. I still got shitted, like I feel like I had a step right there. Am I wrong that I had a step? All right, I put McAllister on the other side. Hurry up and remember that W. All right, I put McAllister on the other side. This dude is taking the scheme, bro, to another level. Come on, man. That's got to be a loss. Come on. No huddle. Come on. Y'all smell that? Y'all smell that? Anybody smell what I smell? Anybody smell that? Oh man, Brandon was seven months. Let's go, man. Flop would have never get this. Big baller Brandon two with nine months. Let's go, man.  I have zero tells on Nickel Normal. I have none, like zero tells on- What? I have none. Then this dude is random. Yo, did y'all see that? Did y'all see what Ronnie Lott was doing? This is man coverage, bro. I'm gonna eat my hat. I swear to God it is. Oh man, I got- Oh my God, I should have bulleted him. I knew that was match. Nice. Come on. This guy has the W.E. book, so I got to play myself here. He's actually really pretty good at tight. Stack them. There we go. Nice. Beautiful, boys. Real linebacker. Real linebacker. Let's go. Come on. Third and 14. Guys got cornered out. Yep. Come on. You called that? Like, oh. Good call. Knockout. Oh, come on. Oh, that's got to be a short knockout. Who do I got with both? Gilmore. No, sir. Good work. Good work. Good work. Good work. Good work. Good work. Good work. I shouldn't even clicked on him, bro. I shouldn't even clicked on that f***ing dude, bro. I shouldn't- I like- I wouldn't let me get any animation right there. I was just up his a**hole and didn't let me do anything, dawg. Like, come on. I'm being way too cute right now. Like we actually are being like way too cute right now. Like way too cute. Knockout. Oh, that's why he called Ben. She got threat detector, bro. Knockout. Easily. Nice job, man. Come on. Now, he gonna know these Blitzons. See, I gotta realize that he got- he got threat detector. Yep. That threat detector audible, bro. Audible. Come out on a cover four. He thinks you're not Blitzon. Audible at the last second. Come on, man. I'm second level, boys. I'm trying to tell y'all I'm second level. Take three. Come on. This is man Blitz. 100% man Blitz here. He like knows what I call against this sh**. He really does. I mean, them dudes had zero f***ing chance right there, bro. Like my boys had zero f***ing prayer. They had no chance. Dog, 68, are you serious? I'll lose those. Come on. I gotta have the heart to throw that sort of running back. I really do, bro. I really do. I gotta have that heart to throw that running back right there. I really do. I can't lie. Devonta gotta catch that juke for me, don't he? Like what the f*** just happened there, boys? Like, are you kidding me? Give me a chance if you Blitz. Feet? Shockey? Let's go, Shockey! Big-time players make big-time plays, boys. I don't know what he did. He had all his own shaded down. Like, he was wide open. No, this dude plays really good defense. I can't hold it. He's the toughest defense for me to play, is this guy. That I've played so far this year, is this guy. Lurker? Lurker?  Deep out of lead, bro. Get that sh**. That's why I use it on moss. Oh my God. We can't get a hit right there. All right, come on. Let's get a pick. Let's get a tip pick to one of my corners, and we can win this game pretty easy. We got Gilmore in that slot. We got in that spot. Nice. Exactly what I want. That's got f**king nine yards, dude. That ball of bull s**t just got nine yards. That one. Come here, kid. Come here, kid. Tackles, tackles, tackles. Good sh**. Come on. Third down. He's got threat detector now. He's got threat detector. He has threat detector right now. Easy pick. Let's go, man.  It ain't no way he dropped the ball. If y'all don't believe in DDA and this s**t.  Y'all just don't play enough mad. And I swear to God, there's nothing I believe in more than DDA, dude. Like the game's over. Like the entire game is over. It's 21 to 6. The game is over. And we just randomly dropped the ball. Y'all know, man. I'm spamming stick moves. Like, what do you think I'm doing? How do you think I do when I juke?  Is that what you think I do in open field? Is that what you've watched me this long?  Come on, dawg. Come here, kid. Swat. Pick it off, too. That's what makes me mad is that your defense never catches those passes, but the offense will catch the f**k out of him, won't they? Won't they, boys? Come here, b**t. Yeah. Pump my football, please, sir. Pump my football. Four's in the chat. Come on. This is man coverage. A man coverage blitz right here. 100%, dude. This guy knows that I'm wanting to f**king throw this running back around here. My right tackle blocked him. My right tackle. This is why the game sucks, dawg. Like, I do everything. I did a corner. We have perfect blocking, great route combination, an easy dump off, but my right tackle is f**king run blocking and let the guy walk right in.   And I can't lie. That's like 10, 15 years later, this s**t bothering the hell out of me, dawg. I'm a bull s**t skier. And you know, I'm, you know, trying to keep up with them. And I went down some, some diamond s**t dog. Not the move, bro. Not the f**king move. Yeah, I tried way too hard to be a f**king skier. No, it really wasn't bad. Like it hadn't been hurting me, but recently it's just been hurting the s**t out of me, bro. Yeah, I'm getting old. Mother nature is undefeated, bro. GG, GG, GG, GG, GG, GG. Super Bowl Champion, a clean, perfect record. Super Bowl boys. I know you guys are bored. I won like nine straight games of Madden tonight, man. It's time we hop on no money spent, so maybe I'll lose and you guys can have fun and call me s**t. You know how it works, boys. You guys know how it goes. Just won way too many games tonight, you know. But we'll take it, right? Super Bowl Champions of the World! And Roger's holding the trophy. There he is. The only usable quarterback in mud right now.


What this world need is for men to become men again You really need to return to the father so that you can guide the women in the right way to go because this country is going to hell in a handbasket and the reason is going to hell in the handbasket because the men Oh, we the women are taking over and the last thing you want is for a woman to take over Because it's not in her nature to lead women were not created to lead It's not in they don't know how even when you're raising children The woman need the man to guide her and how to raise his children and so men you got to overcome That mother's nature in order to become men again Because it's going to get worse if man don't wake up and you need to be able to deal with women straight up But without anger without hating them you need to be honest you to be of love And all the way you're going to become that way is that you got to overcome the fallen state and everyone can overcome it if you get to know yourself if you Really really want to overcome it. There's nothing that you cannot overcome And this has happened around the world when I deal with men It's the same problem it starts in the home and the women are going through the same thing because they're just like their mothers They resent their mothers and they become like her and so this thing goes on from generation to generation to generation And if you don't overcome it you'll find yourself living with mama until you 60 and 70 years old I literally know guys who are 60 years old and still living at home with mama They tried to move out when they were younger But the mother would not let them and now they're stuck and they hate themselves for being there and they hate the mother for keeping Them there so you really got to take charge of your life, but you're not gonna be able to do until you overcome the nature of the woman That makes sense Yeah, any question any question about that? Have you overcome your mother?  Why don't you care? Just doesn't matter to me. What does that mean? How old are you now? 31. Oh, what doesn't matter to you? Just having Honestly having my parents in my life doesn't really matter to me. Well, you don't need to have them in your life Right, you just need to overcome them so that you don't repeat the same Psychologically I have overcome them because I watch you all the time. You want me? Yes Oh, so you know what I'm talking. I know exactly what you're talking about. And so why have you are you afraid to go to her and forgive her? No, I think I just don't care Well, I don't understand what don't you want to help you were created to lead and if you if you don't care How will you lead? I have to forgive her to be able to lead. Yes Because right now you have her identity because I have not forgiven her right Okay, I don't really understand what you mean. I don't care. What is it that you don't care about? I don't know Do you know why you were created? No, you're not just created to be a select maker Right. Did you know that?  It's not a big deal. All right. Did you know do you know why you were created to? I'm sure it's got something to do with carrying out God's work or God's plan absolutely You create it so that God could create love through you the love from from him through the man Right, and if man love is happening on the earth and family We will have peace on earth but as long as it's coming through the woman We're just gonna have to hell that will a deal with you're supposed to care and when I say care You don't want her out thinking. Oh, I care. I care. I care, right?   What do you think about that? I agree and so How long you've been listening to me? Probably a year and a half and are you still a slap maker? Yeah


Recently, you may have heard some exciting news about updates to the Microsoft Donation Program through TechSoup Global. This video is a part of a series of short videos from TechSoup designed to help you further understand these updates. The Microsoft Software Donation Program for U.S. nonprofits and public libraries is one of TechSoup's most popular resources. Microsoft has made several updates to its donation program to make it easier for organizations to access the software donations they need when they need them. Let's take a look at some of our most frequently asked questions about the Microsoft Donation Program. What are software assurance benefits? Software assurance is a benefit offered through Microsoft on most Microsoft software requested from TechSoup. With software assurance, your organization can receive complimentary upgrades for two years on most Microsoft software that you receive from TechSoup. Please note that there will be a one-time shipping cost for some products if you wish to receive media, request backup CDs or replace missing disks, access online product training, and obtain special licenses for using some products on your home computer. How do we take advantage of software assurance benefits? That can be done directly through Microsoft. For more information on software assurance through Microsoft, take a look at bit.ly forward slash ms software assurance. What is the Windows Get Genuine Program? The Windows Get Genuine Program is designed for nonprofits and public libraries that are out of compliance with software licensing due to software piracy or other licensing issues. Get Genuine allows organizations to request donations of the full professional versions of the Windows operating system when an organization has an existing PC with one of the following operating systems installed on it. Counterfeit, pirated, or otherwise illegal, unlicensed, or improperly licensed Windows operating system. Home premium, home basic, or starter editions of Windows 7 or Windows Vista. Home or starter editions of Windows XP. Linux, FreeDOS, or other operating system. Or no operating system. The Get Genuine Windows product for small and medium organizations offers the full Windows operating systems. Windows 7 professional 32-bit Get Genuine and Windows 7 professional 64-bit Get Genuine. Please note that Get Genuine products are full operating systems not upgrades. Get Genuine products do not come with software assurance. How can we keep track of what donations we have received and what we can still request? At the Microsoft Donation Center, registered organizations can see the dates for their two-year cycle and see how much of their total allotment is still available to them. This page is accessible through a link on the authorized agent's member profile pages. You can access the Microsoft Donation Center in one of two ways. You can log in, click My Account, click Donation History Status on the top right, and then click Microsoft Donation Center. You can also log in, click Get Products under Get Started. Scroll down to manage my account on the left, click Donation Status, and then click Microsoft Donation Center. To find out more information on the Microsoft Donation program through TechSoup, take a look at your guide to Microsoft Donations through TechSoup at bit.ly forward slash Microsoft Donations Guide. This guide will help walk you through the ins and outs of the Microsoft Donation program. Wondering if your organization is eligible to receive Microsoft software donations? A good place to start is the TechSoup eligibility quiz. First, go to techsoup.org. If you are registered with TechSoup, log in first using the Log In button on the upper left part of the screen. The eligibility quiz can be found by clicking Check Eligibility on the left-hand side of the screen. Thank you for viewing this video. For more questions about the Microsoft Donation program, please contact client services at bit.ly forward slash tsgclientservices.


Wait, I got one. Yo, what's poppin' boys and girls, ladies and gents? Today we're doing some surf fishing. So I've surfished before like maybe one or two times when I was super young. Nothing that I really remember. I know we caught like a few stingrays, a few sharks, a few flounder. But this is like technically my first time going surf fishing today. We're actually at Walmart. We're gonna walk in here, get some poles because we don't have anything for this. Get some bait, get some leaders hooks, everything we need, and head out to the beach and see if we can catch some big sharks or stingray or really whatever bites they got. Cody behind the camera, got Bob right there. What's up guys? And we're gonna make it happen. So let's go ahead and get inside of Walmart to see what we can get. Hey, we some shore fishermen now? Might be. Beach fishermen? Walmart beach fishermen. No more bass videos the rest of my life after this, right? Yeah, right. This is our bass fishing retirement today. I'm kind of excited about it though. I just wanna catch something big, man. We got three poles. We got everything we need. It's been about $150. We got three of these poles.  We got some line, we got some hooks, weights, things to put our rods in so we can just prop them up on the shore.  You think it's gonna happen? I think it's gonna happen. Let's go do it, man. See what we can catch today. You excited, Bob? Yeah, dude, I'm excited. Is that your first time too? Yeah, it's my first time surf fishing, so I gotta see what the hype's about. Yeah. Hopefully catch some. I hear the Reds are running right now out there too. Dude, I used to do this when I was younger. I know. Look at that. That's a little shark's tooth. Nothing big. You ever found one, Cody? Yeah. Yeah, a little tiny guy. That's a little tiny one. I was younger, like, that's all I used to do, man. I used to find some shark's teeth on the beach. We just walked down. I was like looking down, I happened to see it. So we just got one of these rods and rigged up some braid on it. We're gonna try this one out. Bob's already throwing one out. He just kept the standard line that was on the pole. But what I was gonna tell you guys, I really don't know what I'm doing. You know, I don't do this at all. So if you guys have any suggestions, don't feel no type of way about commenting down below. Like, tell us whatever we need to know to get more into this and get better. But yeah, so we're gonna give it a shot today. See what we got going. I'm gonna rig up this rod. Then we're gonna spool up this one right here. And hopefully we'll end up catching a few fish. You see some fish jumping out there. I just don't know what it is. Guys, I am not in my element right now, but I'm enjoying every second of it. It kind of drives me crazy. It's like, one, this type of fishing, like Cody knows too, even cat fishing, anything super slow, it's hard for me to do. So I'm just a bass angler, man. I grew up fishing tournaments. That's all we did, you know? Like super fast paced hunting for those fish. And then you come and do something like this, or cat fishing, anything on the bottom. It's a patience game. But we're gonna have some fun today, man. We're gonna see what we can do. Hopefully we can catch some fish. And if we don't, we're 100% gonna come back here and kind of perfectionize this and make this like a topic that we can do on the channel. Especially if you guys enjoy it. Like, I wanted to get into some different types of fishing.  We're gonna do just about everything. And let me know guys, like anything that you guys are like, hey, no, you're doing this wrong. You're like, hey, no, I would do it this way. Let us know, like I'm telling you. Yeah, we had some good feedback in the catfish stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like people weren't roasting us, but they were just telling us. What? Yeah, they're jumping out there where Alan's at. Yeah. I thought he had one. It's like, all right, so in your opinion, Cody, you guys comment down below too, how would you hook this? So I'll hook it through the head. I'll hook it through the mouth. It's like kind of like that. Bottom of the mouth up through the top, yeah. Just like that. Yep, just like that. Okay. I love doing this stuff too, dude, where I just don't know anything. Yeah, I like it too, because we're figuring stuff out. It just makes it more realistic, man. Like I want to grow. And a lot of you guys that don't do this as well, go out and try it, guys. Like let's go learn together, you know? If I hook it through the tail, probably. Yeah, either that or straight through the back. These things smell really bad. I can't smell it. Yeah, they do. Should we go out? So me and Bob are going to walk out. Look at the size of my screen. I probably should have left the stuff out of my pockets, bro. Shall we run over there real quick? Here we go, guys. I'm eating Bob out here. He has my fishing pole. I had to put my phone up. Last thing I want to do is get my phone on. Destroyed.  Look at that. That's wild. Dude, that's so cool. Oh yeah, there's a ton of bait. Holy cow. That was wild. Whole school. He just blew up on you, dude. Look, look. Oh, did you see that way out there? Is that just some mullet? Slammed? Don't take me the good time. Look at that. That's cool, ain't it? Are you still? Yeah, look. He ain't moving around too much. Look, there's another one right there, you see him? The lifeguard's yelling at us, Alan. Well, the lifeguard told us we couldn't be over there, so we just kind of rotated onto this side. I cannot tell you why. Maybe somebody can tell us in a comment section. Yeah. I'm going for it. Dude, that's awesome.  He's literally right there. If I had my baitcaster, I could dang near throw in there, bro. Yeah, dude, that's crazy.  Right here, right here. Bosses. Oh, he spooked. Does it feel big? It's kind of big. Dude, it's just stingering. Oh, it is. It's not a, it's a red? Bro, it's a red. Oh. Alan, Alan. It's a red, bro. Is it really a giant red? It is a red, bro. Cody. Cody. Dude, how are you? Wait, I got one. I got one. Guys, we're doubled up. What is that? Dude, it's a red Trump, dude. Dude, that's the biggest red I've ever seen, Alan. Oh my gosh. We need Cody right now.  Let's go, man. Where's your fish, bro? I don't know, dude. Dude, we got some big fish there. That's the biggest red I've ever seen. I think mine's starting to come up. Where's your fish, bro? I don't know, but yours is huge. He's got the drone above us, don't he? Yes. It's a huge red. Dude, Alan, we gotta get a picture with these, dog. Mine's still out there. Alan, that is a huge red, buddy. Dude, let's go. You gotta land this. We gotta land these fish. It's still out there. Alan, please land that sucker, buddy. What are we gonna do? Oh my God, dude, mine's huge. Mine might be bigger than yours, dog. Oh my God, you got that big one, bro. That's huge, Alan. It's my tongue in, bro. Look at him tongue in, bro. Let's go, baby. That's what we're here for. We waited like three, four hours, dude. We got it doubled up in some massive reds. Look how big he is. Oh my God, I'm shaking right now, bro. Both these are bull reds. Oh my God, bro. Look at that.  You just don't get tangled up.  We gotta get a crazy picture. Yo, wait, wait, don't come too close to me, though. All right, all right. Oh my gosh, Alan, these things are, man. Guys, this is what we've been waiting for. Oh my God, he's so big. Here, walk around me. Or no, you're good, you're good. Alan, this is crazy. Yo, this is crazy. Dude, Alan, they're so big, dude. I've never, we've gone red fishing three times, guys, but we never caught bull reds like this. Holy. Mine's a lot bigger than that. Bro, it's huge, Alan. Alan, I've never seen a red this big. Look at how big this one is. Oh my gosh, Alan. Look how big it is. Look, Alan, look. Look, look. I got him, dog. Where's Cody at? Where is Cody? I can't see him, dog. There's a drone's right here. You know Cody's flipping on the drone right now. He's in like three hours. He's a big red. He's the biggest reds we've caught, dog. There you go, bro. There you go, Bob. There you go, Bob. Let's go. No.   That is amazing. Yo, let's go. Yes, sir. That's a big boy. There you go. That's all right. This is crazy. Big boy. Crazy. Hold on. Hold on. Let's go, baby. Guys, first time. Last half hour fishing. We just doubled up. There you go. We got a whole audience. Look behind you, Cody. Sorry, guys. I got to show this crowd. Dude, we got to get a picture of this. All right, boys. First time surf fishing with Alan, Bob. Crazy. We got us. We doubled up on some massive reds. Crazy. We're gonna back in the water. Let's get him. This is such pretty red, man. I can't believe that, Alan. He's trying to kick off. I love the wine, sorry. He's kicking. Oh, shoot! Yo, Cody. Bro, that was legit, man. Look at him go. Let's go, baby. Let's go. Let's go. Good job, guys. Got the perfect high crowd, too. Awesome. That was awesome. All right, guys. We just got out of the ocean and I just can't even believe that. Like, we waited out there for like three hours and me and Bob were just chatting, messing around. We saw a bunch of dolphins out there. All of a sudden, Bob gets hooked up. We thought he had a stingray because, you know, we saw all three of those stingray swimming all around us and all of a sudden he's like, it's a big red. Next thing you know, my pole is getting pulled on and man, was that an experience. Our first time surf fishing to pull up and catch two giant bull reds back to back doubled up is just, it couldn't have gone any better.  Hit the like button. Maybe we can get this baby to 10,000 likes. Let's make it happen. Hit the subscribe button if you guys are new to the channel. I'll catch you all in the next video.


There is a subtle beauty to the design of Fumita Ueda's games that words hardly do justice to. We can talk about the haunting alienation of Eco's majestic castle, the tragic conversion of Wander's quest in Shadow of the Colossus, and the frustration and intimacy conveyed in equal measure by the Last Guardian. However, these words seem reductive, even misleading somehow. The emotional resonance of these games emerges from conventional mechanics and aesthetics, but to experience them is to be enraptured by a world that transcends the very rules that enable them. But we do have words, and the expression assigned to Oeda's design philosophy is supposedly called design by subtraction, a term Oeda himself used to describe his design sensibilities. Essentially, it involves removing elements of design that are not integral to the core emotions or theme of your game. Eco is a story about a persecuted little boy, cast aside for his horns, who tries to escape from the confines of a castle with the Princess Yorda. The creative design here led to removing interface elements, embedding mechanics sound and play into the world itself, hampering the controls ever so slightly to communicate disempowerment and tying our health bar to Yorda's to convey selflessness, empathy and love. Shadow of the Colossus does the same in how it removes the filler between boss fights and instead focuses the game on encounters with gargantuan beasts. These stunning battles are further punctuated by the serene sorens we embark on to find them, and tragic inversion is encoded by the languid collapse of these titans as we slay them to the sound of funereal music. The last guardian took these beasts and made us forge a relationship with one, which was inspired by people's attachment to the horse and shadow. Trico's petrification in the face of ornaments washes away when he realizes we are in jeopardy. Love has been programmed into AI. The words we use then lead us to assign value to Oeda's legacy and how his games have inspired designers like Hidetaka Miyazaki, how their thematic way to inform journey's design, or brothers a tale of two sons. These games are classics in the canon of video game history, legitimizing it as the art form of the coming century. And yet, the words we use to describe both Fumita Ueda and his games are not his, but ours. We need there to be a method, a process, a reason for why these games are so singular and transformative. Perhaps we ought to let Ueda speak for himself. The more one listens to what little there exists in Fumita Ueda, the more his games confound, because design, creativity, and expression cannot be distilled to a single statement, like design by subtraction. It contains its own multitudes. You would think there is a method, a set of philosophical beliefs that inform these games' design. But here is his answer to the question about whether Shadow of the Colossus has ecological motifs, or if The Last Guardian has Aristotelian ideas of love and friendship. This is my personal opinion, but I don't really get conceptions based on expression media like film and novels upon making a video game. This is because I feel that clinging onto a theme is far too inefficient when making a video game. My thoughts is that it's closer to looking for words to fit into the squares of a crossword puzzle, rather than crafting sentences with whatever words you like onto a fresh sheet of manuscript paper. And so, meaning was never imposed. It emerged organically from the process of creation. There was ambiguity then, not just in the games themselves, but the process that informed its creation. It wasn't just subtractive, it was emergent. Video games are different from other media. In order to move the player, we have to create a believable world and then let them imagine everything else. I don't want players to try and think what my ideas for the story were. I want them to direct the story themselves. I want my games to have believable stories, but narrative imposes a set plot, predetermined ideas. That would be an obstacle to interaction. The aesthetics of his games don't exist in a vacuum, though. There are influences from other mediums. The cover art of Ico was inspired by Giorgio de Curico, which also infuses the design of his worlds. De Curico's work can be seen not just in the arches, the materials and architecture, but in his invocation of the surreal, of dreams and of the magic of childhood, themes that pervade all of Oeda's games. Other architects include Gerard Triniac and Francesco Piranesi, artists who are similarly inspired by the fantastical, the majestic, the otherworldly. Oeda's worlds feel both familiar and otherworldly. They stand as their own monuments in the hazy space of her own subconscious, both connected to and severed from reality. And in this way, his games are ambiguous and surreal, but with intent, by design, inspired by others, but containing their own space for player participation. What are the sort of things that inspire you? Are there other games that you like to play, books, movies, you know, to go to the museum and look at paintings? I have no specific or explicit message in my games, but I want them to be unrealistic and entertaining instead. One can say that my intention is to give players the building steps, a small introduction, and then let them experience and develop their own personal stories. As much as the worlds of Oeda's games invoke the fantastical, the mystical, the transcendent, they are games that need to be engineered, and perhaps something surprising about Oeda's philosophy is that he seems very pragmatic, grounded by the constraints of the medium he's operating with. The beauty here, of course, is that artists need not be limited by constraints, but can be emboldened by it. For example, on the subject of level design, Oeda stated, The worlds I have created were generated out of restrictions. Although they, of course, contain some preference for me as the creator, they were generated out of the necessity for functionality rather than backstory or setting. By this way of creating, I think the world created can be expressed with consistency and harmony, which will increase the sense of existence of the world expressed like that. Similarly, he did the same for the core design of the mechanics and aesthetics of the game. For example, when we're doing level design and we need a character to crawl or climb or hang, you may think, well, in real life it would look like this, but you can't just dump that in. At the same time, you can't create something totally artificial. You have to find the right balance of clearly showing the player how to navigate, but also being able to express what we want to. We sometimes resort to the hazy visuals because we can't illustrate beyond a certain point. Within these constraints, though, Oeda and his team try to ensure that the universe they devise feel like consistent, believable worlds, framed by limitations, but hidden by design ingenuity. The sword that the main character holds is like the divining rod that, you know, depending on where the light shines brightest, that leads you to the colossus. And this extends to the AI companions you have in each game. They are designed to communicate emotions beyond their pixels. On the subject of designing Yorda, he states, The main character never understands what Yorda says. The reason why we set up the language barrier is that we would not be able to express 16-year-old Yorda's AI naturally, even if we use the maximum power of the PS2. If she speaks eloquently with so much ready text, the player cannot help but feel it sounds cheap. Also, we wanted to fill the gap between the cinematic scenes and the gameplay and characters. So we concluded that subtle expressions such as holding hands and calling names are more natural ways of communication, and it somehow added philosophical meanings. For instance, outside of the gameplay, Yorda often makes strange movements. She strolls around, follows birds and points to things. And what this does is grant his world and his character's life, not by explicit rendition, but by the subtlety of restraint and working within limitations. I think Yorda is the same as Yorda in the game. I think AI is the only thing that can only be done on a computer. I want to make a game using that. In order to express something that can't communicate with words, we need to be able to read the words. That's the biggest thing. However, what I'm saying is that I'm thinking about the meaning of the words and I'm making them. So when it comes to the Japanese version of the game, if we play the two names, they're all translated. Yorda's games have a vitality that transcends reduction to words. In a talk he had with Hidataka Miyazaki, comparing their design philosophies, Yorda said this about bringing his worlds to life through animation. There is a sort of naturalness or beauty to life. Whenever animating multiple frames together, I first try to create that feeling and then in each of those animation frames, painstakingly look over and over again and try to correct those things that occur. It's very much like a craftsman that constantly goes over the same art over and over again to try and find the perfection. Additionally, when I create in fashion game worlds, I want to have the freedom to make anything.  So from my perspective, I want to have as much freedom as possible and really craft my own game world. It's important to have a static graphic expression that's not enough to be completed. There are still a lot of parts that are not enough to move. I think we need to make it more and more powerful. I think it's important to have a more dynamic expression that can be used in other games. I think it's important to have a more dynamic expression that can be used in other games. So these are some of Ueda's words, small snippets of what he values, how he designs and what he aims to communicate with his games. There is not just subtraction, but ambiguity, emergence, pragmatism, constraints, and well, life. There is a blending of form and function, aiming explicitly to express, but through vague symbolism that betrays explicit interpretation. But again, we are left with a gap between what Ueda professes to believe and the significance we assign his works. Designers are not always privy to what inspires their own work, and sometimes it is up to the critic to unearth this. In this way, although the obsessive length people go to to interpret and understand the world of eco and shadow the colossus, surprised Ueda. His very design invites this obsession. It invites people to imagine beyond what's expressed on the screen, to peer into the numinous that might be right in front of us. Ueda played with this divide between authorship and player-directed meaning, and a question he was asked about eco's ending. So eco doesn't die, but he dreams he sees Ueda when he wakes up. Nice. This assignment of meaning, not just to his games, but to Ueda himself, exists in the gaps, in the gap between the brilliance of his works and what little we have and how someone can design something so revolutionary. Many have assigned Taoist or Shinto ideals about ecological stewardship and imposed that onto the meaning of Shadow of the Colossus. It is a parable that talks about how human greed and ambition degrades the land as our selfish impulses consume the world around us. Shintoism did after a while inspire Miyamoto when he conceived of the Legend of Zelda, and so it makes sense for Ueda as well. Also, some assign the weight of tragic inversion to the game. It is Heart of Darkness or Moby Dick in interactive form. But as Ueda himself states, through the production of Shadow of the Colossus, I started having doubts about simply feeling good by beating monsters and getting a sense of accomplishment. I tried thinking if there were any choices for different kinds of expression. Rather than try to deliberately create some sort of antithesis, I focused more on the consistency of the design as a product. Another lens people come out of Ueda from is comparing his aesthetic sensibilities to other traditions in Japan, most notably the concept of Ma. Ma is about negative space, about the moments of quiet that exist between action that's serene sense of eternity captured by lingering on serendipity. Hayao Miyazaki calls it the moments between the sounds in a clap, and in his films, it expresses itself in how he keeps the camera suspended on a moment, reveling in the quiet meanderings of every day. We see this in the prolonged sequences of solitude and eco, as you traipse through empty halls and hear the patterns of being expressed by the diegetic sounds, and the voyages through empty space and shadow, giving us time to contemplate on what has passed and what is to come. We can deign to infer the origins of subtractive design itself. However, this assignment of value, of aesthetic weight and of significance, can never be confirmed. The truth of what inspires design remains elusive, open for many to interpret, compare and categorize. Perhaps this is a warning about the liabilities of such a discourse, of assigning meaning where it might not be. But then again, maybe the way in which we ascribe significance to both Ueda and his works is simply a testament to what he has stated about stories all along, that it belongs to the player to do it as they see fit. Like stated, words don't do justice to the subtle beauty of Fumita Ueda's work. They exist as their own discourse, open for interpretation, aesthetic evaluation, and play.


All day and into the evening, Ellen and Anne-Marie had been thinking about and talking about their fear for the soldiers. They decided that they were going to call Ellen Anne-Marie's sister. They decided also to change her name and use her sister's name, Lees. Lees had passed away and Ellen was asking Anne-Marie how that happened. Anne-Marie said that Lees and her fiance, Peter, had gone away and then Peter let them know that Lees had died. If you're curious to know what happens, go ahead and read.


I'm Russell, and I'm Carrie, and the March What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers, big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. This is What's Neat for March 2021. I'm your host Ken Patterson, and this month we do have a great show. First of all, our drone pilot Dan Scheidel in Modeling Ideas from Above shares with us how our HO scale and O scale and N scale layouts should look in the wintertime. And it doesn't look too indifferent from these simple painted pine trees with the beautiful scenery that he shares with us over the Cascades, BNSF, UP, just amazing footage this month for What's Neat. Our friend Mike Buddy stops by and he shares with us how to wreck your HO scale automobiles. Of course, this can be done in any scale using simple aluminum foil. Dan Michio stops by and installs sound, TCS sounds from train control systems in this old Broadway limited alligator that I've had for better than 18 years. He makes it look simple. He shows us how to put the decoder, the speaker, and all the wiring together in a very fast segment this month for What's Neat. Also, we stop by John Schindler's layout. We've shared John Schindler's layout in the January 2020 show, but since COVID is hit, he's added lighting and balances to his layout, which brings out all the color, which was something that was always missing on his amazing looking HO scale layout. And with that, I'd like to say thank you so much to all the folks that watch the What's Neat this week video podcast that we record every Saturday night to keep you updated on what's new in our hobby. The best hobby in the world, model rariting. Also, thank you so much to Lombard Hobbies just outside of Chicago in Lombard, Illinois for sponsoring the What's Neat show. I checked out their website the other day and it's really complete. It shows you inventory. It's got pictures. It's a great website to order all your models and modeling supplies on. So check it out at LombardHobbies.com. And with that, let's continue on with the rest of this March 2021 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got our favorite Mike Buddy down here and he's going to show us some really cool automotive magic. Hello, Mike. Hey, everybody. Yeah, I've showed this before, but this aluminum foil trick that I used to model damage on my train cars and automobiles. This box car is a perennial favorite. The end is as aluminum foil as is this whole side here. And the way I did it was just by taking aluminum foil and rubbing it down over parts of the box car or the automobile, whatever I wanted to damage. Now over here on these vans, those are vans that were on an auto rack to derail and they've got a little bit of damage on them. And so I'm doing that the same way as I'm going to show you how I do this truck here, particularly. So everybody's seen these lifelike trucks. I have quite a few of them. So the first step when you want to do this aluminum foil stuff is to cut away part of the model that you want to damage. So I did that there. Next, you take a little piece of foil here until it's cut out of any area for the windshield. Now what you want to do is make an impression of the model and do one panel on each side that you're going to keep. Like on this truck, I'm not damaging either of these doors. So this gives me something to glue this onto. Then take a Q-tip or a clean X-finger tip, whatever. And this is going to be hard to do when I'm doing it on camera here. But the idea is to make a real nice detailed impression. And if I was working in my own conditions, I'd be able to do this a lot better. But I'm really messing it up on the video here. But the idea is get a very detailed impression, smooth this all out, and cut it out, and then you end up. This is what you end up with. So, and again, this is something I did fast so there's no grill detail on this. If I was doing a real model, I would make a whole separate grill and bumper and everything, separate sheet metal parts. But anyway, put some glue on the part that overlaps the door on each side. And then shove it on there and let it dry. So then when it's dry, you paint it. And you probably use primer because you'll be able to see the difference between the foil and the plastic. Then after it's dry, it looks like this. And it's ready to crash. So I don't know, I guess I'll smash it into this other truck. A rear end collision. Looks okay. Now I would separate the, again, if I was making a real model, I would cut along the edges of the hood, probably make a separate hood. You know, because I model the damages realistically as I can. But for a junkyard or model yard, this is a good way to get up a bunch of wrecked cars. And this one here was done the same way. And it was made to look like this car came and hit it while this truck was going that way. That's why the damage is pushed over to the right on this truck.  So I put a lot of thought into the damage too.  But they can look pretty good if you put a lot of work into the paint and the detail. And nothing looks like metal more than metal. People try and melt plastic to look like bent metal. And it just never looks right to me anyway. So one more tip that I use after I get something looking the way I do. I'll turn it over and I'll use Elmer's glue and I'll spray or not spray drip it all inside of there. Let it dry overnight or something so it gets hard inside of that aluminum foil. Then that protects it from people trying to poke it and everything which they do. So anyway, that's a quick little tip how to do aluminum foil modeling. I did the same thing with this box car, just reproduced the sides. This much is plastic up to here. And then the rest of this is foil with decals on it. And made smashed up pallets and banding wrap and stuff like that in there. And I modeled this off of a real train car that I saw burling to northern car in St. Louis. The side was folded in, the whole side was ripped out. I mean the end was folded in but it was just in a line of other cars, other train cars. Mike, that's absolutely amazing when you do that. Thank you so much for sharing this tip with the modelers of What's Neat. And that is this segment for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm standing with John Schindler. And you remember we've seen John Schindler's layout on the What's Neat show back in January 2020. And that was pre-COVID, wasn't it? Yes, it worked. And we had operating sessions down here and we showed a lot of your layout and how great it looked and I'm running some of those clips right now. But the one thing about your layout was it wasn't really bright. You couldn't see all the colors on it because you simply had these fluorescent lights running up the center of the room. And you've made some great improvements in the last 12 months. John, tell us what you've done. I've put up LED lighting on the grid ceiling and then put fascia to hide it. Remarkable difference. You can see the colors and everything and found a way to do it that's relatively cheap and fast. What kind of lights did you use to light this? There are some stuff called from Berea, bought them from Amazon. And you get six of these four-foot fixtures for $46. Because the reason I never did it in the past was because it was expensive. And that's where the lights are from and they get plugged into the outlets that were for the fluorescent lights so there wasn't any rewiring to be done. And then the lights are mounted on a 1x4. A lot of people use 2x2s I've seen around, but I want the light to get away from the fascia. So that's why I used a 1x4 and then put the light all the way to the pack of the 1x4 so it gives it better. But to mount the 1x4 to the grid are these things I buy from Menards. You get four of them for like five bucks. No, those are cool. Mounting clips. Yes. Now 15 months ago when we did see the slat, like I said, it was kind of dark. You always had operating sessions. One of the things that you put on it is, what kind of wood is that called? It's bassonite, quarter inch cardboard. And you painted it blue to match your backdrops, didn't you? That's right. And the other thing to look is that when I put them, when I started putting them up, I came down the steps and saw this ugly brown. So down they came and painted the back sides too. And it just made everything sort of disappear. It wasn't as noticeable. This is amazing. In another six or so months, when you start having operating sessions again, the guys are going to love all the colors. Yes. It really, it's brought up, you see stuff now you didn't see before, don't you? That's right. In this room, I started on the end where the camera is and I was working up and I turned around and looked away. Wow! What a difference. What a difference. What a difference I would have never thought. This is amazing, John. So for those folks out there that want to do lighting, check these LED lights out. These look like fluorescent tubes, but they're not. It's that new technology, LEDs, saves on electricity, adds great color to the layout. And as you can see from John's layout, what we've shown you here, it really works. Yes. So thank you, John, so much for sharing your valence and your newly lit layout with us. Glad you could come over and see it. Thanks, John. And that's this segment for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Dan Michio in the studio today and we're going to take this wonderful alligator, otherwise known as an RSD-15 locomotive. And this is an old model I've had for about 15 years. Santa Fe came out with these around 1959, 1960, and these ran well into the 70s. And they're an absolutely unique looking locomotive. I love them. And Dan, I'm looking forward to knowing what you're going to do to this. We're going to put sound in this today. We're going to put a decoder in this and a speaker. Tell me what we're going to put into it. So we're putting three things into this model to replace the existing parts. We're starting off with an IBM V2 motherboard. And onto that, we'll be installing one of our Wild 121 diesel decoders. And in place of the original speaker, we're going to be using a high base 28 millimeter 4 watt speaker. Wow, this is really cool. You're going to add new life to this locomotive. So let's watch now as Dan does his magic and adds a whole new sound to this wonderful model that I've got. To start the process, Dan removed the shell from the locomotive. He then pulled all the plugs, the front truck plugs, the rear truck plugs, the motor plugs, and both LED plugs off of the original sound board. After the plugs were removed, Dan removed the four screws that held the original sound board to the top of the locomotive motor. The installation of the IBM V2 motherboard is very simple since the same four screws that were removed to take out the original decoder are used to mount the motherboard. We're going to be replacing the original speaker in this unit with the TCS 4 watt 4 ohm high base speaker, which conveniently fits into the A frame that's in this chassis. To remove this speaker housing from the model, we flip it over and you'll see two screws located right ahead of the rear truck. We'll take our screwdriver, remove the two screws, and then the speaker housing will come out. I removed the three screws holding the enclosure together, and now it simply lifts apart and I can remove the baffle and the original speaker, leaving us with an empty housing. Into this housing we're going to install the speaker. In order for the speaker to fit into the model properly, the outer ring of this gasket needs to be removed, so I'll start by pulling that apart now. To secure the speaker into the housing, I'm going to use this hot glue gun and run a bead around the perimeter of the speaker. Notice that I put the speaker in parallel to the body so that the speaker does not interfere with the drive shaft. So now that we've allowed the hot glue to set up, I'm going to use this two pin JST connector and solder the wires onto the speaker leads. This connector can plug into the board, making this a very easy plug and play installation. Your model may already have this same style of connector, and if it does, you can reuse it. In order to hook up the LEDs on this model, we have to replace the existing connectors on either end. TCS makes a specialty harness for the IBMB motherboards, which is a single inline 6, which plugs into this socket at the front of the board. This connector has wires for the forward and reverse headlights, a common 12 volt, and wires for functions 1, 2, and 3. We will only be using the white, yellow, and blue wires for the headlights in this installation. So I've gone ahead and run the wires to the LEDs in the front and the rear. Since the IBMB2 motherboard has onboard resistors, I don't need to add my own, which means I just needed to run the wires to both ends. The speaker housing has also been reinstalled using the two screws, and I'm going to now take all of these plugs and plug them back into the board. So we'll start here with the speaker, and that's going to go into this socket here for the speaker. This is the motor. We have the rear truck, which will go into the track power, and the front truck, which will go into the other track power. And then the final step in the process is to install the WoW 121 diesel decoder onto the motherboard. And with a click, it's done, and we can lace up the wires, pop the shell back on, and get on with programming. You know, Dan, you really made this look simple. I mean, we've only been working over here for just a few minutes, and this is going to be a short video I have a feeling. Now, according to the book I've got here, this says that the RSD-15 has got this 251 turbocharged engine in it. How do we arrive at that? So, Ken, since the WoW sound decoder has come loaded with all of our entire library on each one that we make, I didn't have to pick out a particular decoder. I could just use the standard WoW 121 diesel decoder. And I can use our AudioAssist program to change the prime overset along with a variety of other options to set this up to be more realistic. So, we started it up, we powered it up with the default sound set, and so I'm going to enter into AudioAssist by pushing button number eight on my controller. What is AudioAssist? What is AudioAssist? AudioAssist is TCS's exclusive auditory feedback programming tool. It's entirely integrated into the decoder and allows you to be able to do programming for things like sound, lights, and a handful of other things without having to touch CDs. So, you're going to make this look more of talk to us? That's right, yeah. It's kind of like a telephone answering service where all I have to do is just push the buttons on my handset, listen to what it has to say, and then make it do what I want it to do. Dan, you're in Missouri. It's a show me state. Show me. Alright, so the sound programming is exactly what we want, so I'm going to push button one. That is something we are going to do. This speaker does put out a lot of volume, and I'm going to bring down everything all at once just by using the master volume. That's what we're going to do. I'm going to push button one to decrease the volume. Every time that I push the button, it'll play a sample at the current volume, and each time that I push the button, it'll decrease or increase by 5%. So, I'm going to bring it down to a level that I think is pretty good. Wow, so you can just turn it up and down just like that. That's right. And I understand that's a ringtone you guys offer on cell phones too, isn't it? It is, yeah. How about that? Well, people know about that. And now that I've come to a volume that I'm comfortable with, I'm going to push button number eight to save the change. Saved. And now that's already taken place. So, the audio is what you want it to volume wise. Now, how do you get the locomotive motor, the sound that we want? So, I'm going to go back up a couple levels. Out of the volume settings, back up to the main sound programming menu using button nine. This is the main menu for sound programming, where I have options to change volumes. I can change button mappings, or I'm going to use button three to select a prime mover. Dude, this is amazing that it can talk to me like this. I don't have to memorize CVs. That's exactly right, I guess. The other option that we offer on all of Articode's prime mover options is the option to dual enable them. So, if for example, I want to have a conscious running and I have a sound decoder and a non-sound decoder, or if I have a new unit that has multiple engines in it, I can use any prime mover that I want, and I can dual enable it to have up to two at a time. But, this is only one, so I'm going to scroll through here until I hear... And all of these are built into the decoder. That's exactly right. And we're looking for the 251. Yeah. That's exactly what we want. So, now I'm going to save that change to eight, and now I can exit the program by using button zero. And there's an Alco 251. Yep. The next thing that we can change is the horns. Articode's, like I said, they do have all of the sounds loaded onto them from the factory, from us. And so, I can start off with the default horn by pressing two. And I can now change that horn now that I've played a horn sound by pushing button number nine in sound mode. The direction will change alphabetically as it rotates through based on the locomotive's direction. So, in forward, which is what it's currently set to, the horns will rotate in alphabetical order. If I were to change the direction, they would go backwards in reverse alphabetical order. So, let's say I come across something I like, but I keep going, but I want to go back to it. All I have to do is change the direction. I don't have to go around the horn a whole lot of time. So, this has got a three-chime horn on it. So, let's take a listen and see what sort of three-chime horns we can play. There's a couple that are available off in specific language. This one's pretty cool, right? This is a single-chime horn off of a V-O-1000 that we recorded. But let's keep going and find a three-chime. Who doesn't love a good kind of cock-air whistle? But that's not really prototypical of this engine, so let's keep going. What kind of a throttle are you using to program all of this? What are you using? This is amazing. Show this to the viewers. We're currently running on your Digitrax system, your DCS-100. And I'm hooked up over in LNWI using our universal Wi-Fi throttle, the UWT-100. This is your throttle can. And this is connected over Wi-Fi to your LNWI display to your system. And so I'm able to talk to your layout without having to worry about a wire or the wireless system that you have. You can use this throttle. Wow. So that's pretty much it. This project's almost done, isn't it? That's right. Yeah, there's plenty of other things that you could adjust should you feel so inclined. And it's very easy to do with audio assist. Like, say, for example, I want to change around some buttons or something like that. I can map any sound to any button. And, you know, do a couple other things as well, like I could change the way that the lights work, you know, things like that. If this engine had more lighting, it would have. This is amazing, dude. You've given new life to my locomotive. And in fact, you've done three of these. That's right. So let's do this. Before we close out this segment, and I look at you and say, that's this segment of What's Neat. I want to follow this up with a really cool run-by showing you these locomotives working in all their glory and their sound. Thanks, Dan. What a flatter that is. That's awesome. And that is this segment for What's Neat. All of the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois. Or order online at LombardHobby.com.


All the complexities or we were looking to that one standout idea which we believe was unique in that particular sector


Well, hello everybody, and welcome back. I'm sorry to keep the breaks a bit short, but I know some of you've got to get back vaguely on time, so we'll try and do this. Now, we've got two speakers in the next session, which is broadly speaking about working in Asia and with Asia in different sorts of ways.  And so each speaker will do about 15 minutes and then we'll take questions after that because there may well be different answers to the same question. Better doing it that way than questions after each presentation. And our first speaker is Nick Hinton, who grew up in Asia. He actually studied here at SOAS. He's a colonel in the Gherkers, served all over the world with them, but mostly in the Far East and then worked for IBM in India and China. And as happens, if I might say it as one, advances in life is now trustee of various charities and organisations working in the pool. Nick, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Adrian. If you talk to any lady, she will tell you that one of the easiest ways to make a man happy is just to get into talk about himself. So I hope it goes without saying that I'm delighted to be here today to talk about myself specifically about my work and experiences that I've had in Asia. Now I'm pretty ancient, so I cook back on for hours about all the things that I've done, but I'm not going to. I only have about 15 minutes. So what I'm going to do is just to gallop quickly through some of my experiences and try and draw out of those some points of interest and some insights that you may find valuable. So I started off very young as a toddler. In fact, as Adrian mentioned, I lived with my parents in Singapore. They remember a great deal about it, obviously enough, but I do remember the beautiful Jacaranda trees, the beautiful purple trees in our garden. And also my lovely armour, the nanny who looked after to be a Chinese lady called Armey, who made my life absolute paradise on earth. And that lasted for two or three years, and then I moved with my parents to the Middle East, and we lived in various countries around the Middle East. And I think that was also a very salatory experience. To some extent, we lived in an expatriate bubble, as you might expect. But at the same time, my parents were quite enlightened for the times and we're talking about the late fifties and early sixties in that they and I had perhaps more interaction with the local population than many others. And so I got to play with local children and there's some lovely pictures in the family albums of me playing out in the desert with Bedouin children. And I'm told that at one point I actually spoke better Arabic than I spoke English. Long since lost, I have to say. It's an interesting experience and I think to some extent sort of set my aspirations and interests for the future. But then, when I was about 10 years old, I was packed off to boarding school back in this country. And some people say that they actually liked their school days. I didn't. My, my abiding memory is of appalling teaching by extremely old teachers in their 70s and 80s, most of the data from before the Second World War. I remember disgusting food. I remember being perpetually cold and being herded out onto sports pitches in the driving snow and icy rain to play rugby and hockey and so on. And, of course, being thrashed with an itch in my life, which is what happened at boarding schools in those days. But it was character building stuff. And so when I eventually finished the school, I was able to move on and join the army, which was a great improvement. Now, Santa's, to some extent, was a sort of replica of boarding school. And I, after I was commissioned from there, I went into the into the parachute regiment. Now, at that stage, and we're talking about the very early 70s, the Northern Ireland emergency was in full flow. And so I found myself on a sort of conveyor belt between sunny older shot and Ulster. And so I was getting older shot Northern Ireland, older shot Northern Ireland, older shot Northern Ireland, which was not a great deal of fun. And so I was very lucky that after about 18 months of that and bouncing backwards and forwards, I went off with with my regiment to Oman, where they were just sort of putting the finishing touches to the do far war, the insurrection in the southern part of Oman. And that reminded me that there was actually a lot more to the world than Northern Ireland and all shot. And so on the strength of that, I decided to transfer to the Ghercas, which was probably one of the best decisions in my life I ever made. I'll come back to that in a moment because, but more or less the same sort of time that I made that decision. The army offered me the opportunity to go to university. And believe it or not, I came here just so us. And I read Indonesian and Malay studies. It was a revelation. I have to say I enormously enjoyed it, and it opened my eyes to the wonderful richness and diversity of history and culture in that part of the world. I went and spent about to two terms out of what it was nine in the University of Georgia Carter in central Java, which really brought home to me what that part of the world is all about. Now, I don't know probably some of you know more about Indonesia and Malaysia than I do. But at the time, I wasn't aware of the amazing number of cultural influences that Malaysia and Indonesia had. The fact that you know the streets of Malacca sort of main path of commerce and business runs through the centre of that area meant that all these diverse influences had have had an impact which meant to in a way Indonesia and Malaysia are microcosms of the culture society and history of what goes on in the whole of Asia. Which I'm most grateful for because it meant that not only did I learn about those parts of the world and learn the languages and so on, but I also get a far broader education of what that part of the world is all about and how it works. And by extension, good insights into what happened worldwide. So I count myself enormously lucky. I also very much enjoyed my time in Indonesia. I was fortunate to live in a house on the other side of the road from a Gamaland school. Now, for those of you who have not heard the word before, Gamaland is the Indonesian percussion orchestra. It has a wonderful sort of tinkling sound. It's made up of gongs and cymbals and a few drums. It is the most wonderfully therapeutic sound. And if you haven't heard it, look it up on the net and you'll be able to see what I mean. So I was staying in a place with Gamaland music on the other side of the road, which woke me up every morning and soothed me to sleep every evening. Absolutely fabulous. I also spent more time than I should have done, going down to the bazaar to watch the wine and coulets, the shadow play, with all the wonderful stories from the great Hindu ethics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, with their cast of larger-than-life characters all carefully manipulated on the shadow screen by the Dalang, the puppet master. And they usually took place overnight, so I quite often found myself going back home at sort of five or six in the morning having been up all night watching these wonderful stories. So that was all very much to the good. However, my time there did bring home to me as well that just as in our culture there are downsides, so too there are in that part of the world. There is, and there was, and still is, a lot of poverty. There's a tremendous amount of corruption. And also there's a dark side because of the way their society is constructed. And only a few years previously, to my going there, there had been an extraordinary episode which goes by the rather sinister Indonesian acronym of Gestapu. And Gestapu stands for in Indonesian gerakan september tigopulu, which means the 30th of September movement, which is when it took place in 1965. And it was a very complicated set of coups and counter coups involving all sorts of different segments of the Indonesian population. And sadly, it resulted in the most enormous bloodletting in 1965, with literally hundreds of thousands of Indonesians being killed, mostly by their neighbours who were settling scores. But there was a distinct racial element to it as well in that they were killing off a lot of Chinese, because in many cases the Indonesians owed the Chinese a lot of money and they thought by killing them their debts would be written off. So there's the most extraordinary complex of really dreadful things going on in the 60s. And actually going there and talking to some of the people who'd experienced that brought home to me that in societies of that sort, there can be quite a grim underside to all the very pleasant and attractive aspects that superficially appear. So that was an important lesson. So back to the ghercats. When I finished at university, I went back to join my regiment and I joined them in Hong Kong initially. It was an enormous privilege. The regiment I joined had been raised in 1815 in the wake of the Anglo-Nepoleese War, 1814 to 1816, in which the British were hugely impressed by the Ghercats. In fact, for most of that war, the Ghercats were winning. And it was only laterally, and particularly as the result of one particular British general who knew what he was doing, that the British got the upper hand and eventually in the Treaty of Segali, the arrangements put in place, part of which was that Ghercats would be employed in the British Army. And so I was the beneficiary of that legacy. And so, 180 years later, I joined that regiment who had already established themselves with a very strong and admirable reputation for war fighting. More importantly, perhaps from the point of view of sharing an experience with you, I learned a huge amount from Ghercats, really on two counts. First was just militarily. Now, I've been pretty well educated going through sound tests and doing various other training courses and so on. But Ghercats are quintessential soldiers. They're extremely tough. They're very determined. And above all, they have a good nature, which actually brings a very good sense of values to what they're doing in a war. I need to give you an example of that during the rebellion of 1857 in India. My regiment was particularly proud of the fact that, unlike a lot of British regiments who went around looting, pillaging and raping after they subdued the mutineers, my regiment did. They were always very solicitous and thoughtful for the civilian population. And I think those of you who keep an eye on what's going on in Israel and Gaza today will recognise that that is a very important part of military operations if you want to be a good fighting force. You have to take account of what effects you're going to have on the civilian population. So I learned a lot militarily from them in terms of their skills and their outlook and the way they approach things. But I also learned a lot in terms of life skills because working very closely with them, I also learned how well they approach things and the extraordinary value system, which they brought from their own culture in terms of helping each other, and that extended to helping their British officers as well. Thank goodness. They were very solicitous, particularly in the early days when I was still learning the ropes. I mean, for example, I had to learn the language very quickly. And at the time when I joined, very few gherkers spoke much English. And so I was packed off into the Borneo jungles where the platoon of 30 gherkers, none of whom really spoke any English to speak of. And I was thrown in at the deep end until not to come back until I could speak a reasonable gherkali. So I was out there for several weeks in the middle of nowhere, and sure enough, I came back able to speak the language. So for those of you thinking of how you can learn a language, I wouldn't necessarily advocate going to the middle of the Borneo jungles, but I do think that total immersion does work. So that's my lesson from that. I also got to know the culture of the gherkers extremely well. And one of the most fascinating aspects I found was the dichotomy that there was between Hinduism and Buddhism. Now, the British Army sees things in black and white, like most military organisations. And so from their perspective, gherkers were Hindus. That's it. If you're a Hindu, you needed a priest, and therefore the army issued one Hindu pundit, one Hindu priest to each gherker battalion. That's it. In fact, many of the gherkers were Buddhists, particularly the Gurung tribes. We recruited from the sort of west central part of Nepal, principally from among the Gurung and Magar tribes. And the Gurungs in particular had absorbed a lot of Buddhist thinking over the years and in private were quite happy to tell you that they were Buddhists rather than Hindus. And saw Hinduism as an aberration and to a great extent something they had to sign up to in order to get enlisted in the British Army, because that's what the British Army said. But that contrast, I think, brought out for me the ambivalence that there is in that part of the world between a lot of conflicting factors and also emphasised the extraordinary diversity which many of these organisations have in terms of their outlook in terms of the influences which have formed them. So I learned a huge amount, and I think as a last sort of lesson from my time with gherkers, I'd go back to the late 1970s when in Hong Kong, as again some of you may know, there were huge influxes of illegal immigrants. Brought about by massive numbers of people trying to cross the Chinese border with Hong Kong in the north because of conditions in China and also because the Chinese authorities at that stage were prepared to allow it. So literally hundreds of Chinese people coming across there and hundreds, thousands of Vietnamese boat people crashing almost every night onto the western beaches of Hong Kong. And so we spent the best part of three years rhyming these people up. And I think there were two lessons from that that I learned. The first one was that it emphasised for me the enormous compassion which gherkers have for people like that who literally were coming to Hong Kong with the clothes they stood up in and not much else. And the second thing I think I learned, Sally and I were talking about this earlier, is the fact that it doesn't matter where you go in the world and particularly in Asia, most people, the vast majority of people are simply looking for security and stability in their personal lives. Very few people actually have an agenda based on ideology or anything else. The vast majority just want that security and stability for themselves and for their families. And I saw at first hand how the gherkers took account of that and also recognised that they were prepared to go one step further and actually help these people on their way through their compassion by feeding them, by making them comfortable and by simply by talking to them in whatever language it happened to be speaking. And I think that was an extraordinarily good life lesson for me and I did my best to try and try and emulate it. So, I think only one other point I'd like to make is the fact that while I was with the gherkers, I also was able to go to many other parts of Asia and on overseas exercises and training with other armies. So, I was lucky to get an insight into several other cultures as well as the Nepalese, which was, again, fascinating. But all things come to an end and I was extremely fortunate that in my career I rose up the greasy pole, slid it up the greasy pole, got to the top and eventually ended up commanding my regiment, which was an enormous privilege and the culmination of any regimental officer's career. And having been top dog, that was it, there was nowhere else to go in the brigade of gherkers, that was the top job. And so after that I could have stayed on in the army, but a number of factors suggested that I should move on to other things. Apart from the fact that from there on in, the military secretary was obviously, because of my other qualifications, was obviously determined to stick me in a desk job here in Whitehall, which might have been a little bit interesting but didn't really thrill me at the time. In addition to that, my children were becoming coming to an age when they needed the stability for their secondary education. And above all, my long-suffering wife, who in 18 years of marriage had lived in 18 different houses around the world, which must be some kind of record, deserved a bit of security and stability of her own. And so I, after much heart searching, decided to jump ship and move on to pastures new. So I moved across to IBM because I was fortunate enough to have technical qualifications, which endeared me to them. I was also very lucky that they quickly spotted my sort of very diverse background, and therefore put me into global roles, which meant that I had the opportunity to not only see a lot of the world, but also maintain my connections with Asia. It was a very different environment, and I'm sure you'll appreciate that IBM being a corporate organisation is all about money. And so I spent most of my time in Asia from there on in, in the main centres of population dealing with major financial, industrial and manufacturing organisations that could pay the literally billions of dollars that IBM demanded for its products and services. That was interesting, its own right. And I was fortunate too that I managed to play hooky from time to time when I was travelling around and go off and see other parts of the countries I was visiting and, you know, experience that at first hand as well. I think two particular things I draw out of that. The first is that I, at one stage, Lashley, I had a team of about one or several teams worldwide, but I had about 250 engineers based in the city of Chandigarh in North India. They were mostly Sikhs. I had not come across Sikhs or mass before, and it was a wonderful insight into the very proud and very capable approach which the Sikhs have towards their lives. I learned a huge amount from them, besides, you know, respecting and admiring their skills as engineers. I also had a large team in China. That wasn't quite such an enjoyable experience in that we had some fairly significant communication difficulties. At that time, the engineers in China were technically good, but unlike most other engineers in the information technology world at the time, they didn't speak particularly good English. My rather basic Cantonese that I picked up from my time living in Hong Kong simply made them laugh.  They only understood about 30% of what I was saying and tended to be grinning from ear to ear when I was talking because of the weird accent that I had compared to the Hutong Hoa that they were speaking. So it wasn't entirely a satisfactory experience, but again, it brought home to me the enormous contrast between the different parts of Asia in ways that you perhaps sometimes might not expect. So that was IBM, and I continued with that job as a wage slave until I finished in 2018 and retired from full-time work. Since when I've kept my connections with Asia, and as Adrian mentioned, I've also built on those relationships by becoming the chairman of the Britain and Nepal NGO Network, which is an umbrella organisation trying to bring non-governmental organisations, charities together, British charities, to try and get them to collaborate. The founder of Brango, as it's known, worked in the sector for many years and identify that the British NGOs in Nepal sometimes worked enormously inefficiently to the extent that you could have one village in the hills where one charity might be building a school at one end of the village, another different charity could be building another school at the opposite end. Clearly a ridiculous situation where the two of them should be talking together, pooling resources and making far better efficient and more efficient use of them. So it was really on that sort of premise that Brango was formed and it's been flourishing. We have something like 450 associates now linked into Brango with a core of about 65 fully paid up organisations who are the central membership. And there's a very rich exchange of information on all sorts of levels about what's going on, what they're doing, the various policies affecting non-governmental organisations in Nepal, and so on. So I keep my hand in and I'm also trustee of various other trusts related mostly to Gherkers in Nepal, so I'm very fortunate that I'm able to keep my links going. I think I'll stop there because that has, as I said, has been a very quick gala through some of the things that I've done. Just in closing, I think I would say that my overriding impressions of Asia are of this tremendous richness of culture, the tremendous diversity, the tremendous contrast that there are between all sorts of different aspects of what goes on there. So if you are thinking of moving out into the world, I can strongly recommend Asia as a part of the world, which will not disappoint you in terms of the interesting and a lifelong fascination with everything that goes on there. So good luck. Thank you very much indeed. I'm very grateful to our next speaker, Sally MacDonald, who allowed her arm to be twisted at 36 hours notice to step in and talk as some round chakra party couldn't get here from Belgium. Now, Sally had little choice, really, but to agree, since I've known her husband for the best part of 65 years. She's got a long distinguished career in finance working extensively in with an around Asia. She's currently a senior director at JP Morgan on their Japanese Investment Trust, and she's also a trustee of the helping the Burmese Delta charity. So again, you know, you put in, you take out and you put in. Sally, thank you very much indeed. Adrian, thank you very much for the very kind introduction, and please forgive me any of you if I mentioned things that already been talked about earlier on today, and I know I'm going to cover some of the ground, some of the ground that Nick's just covered. So, I'm talking about working with Asia, rather than living in Asia, because I have never actually lived in Asia, because I have family all over the region, and it's quite something being mobbed every time you go to a region when all the family are there, but also for cultural reasons and family commitments over here. I never actually lived there. When I travelled there between two and four times a year for the last, well, more than 30 years, so who am I? I think Adrian gave me a little bit of introduction there. I'm a non-exec director now, which means that I don't actually take the decisions any longer. I make sure that other people are taking decisions within the law and as they should do and looking at the strategy where things go in the future. I worked as a fund manager for almost 40 years.  Good, hardly anybody. So, what fund managers do, it's a part of finance where we go out all over the world and we look for companies that might be a good investment for the people who are investing with us, that might be your life insurance policy, it might be your pension, it might be your personal savings, it might be any money that you want to set aside for a particular objective, somebody has to make that money work and that's us, the fund managers. And I started off, I did seven years looking at UK markets and then I switched to Asian markets and I'll come on to why I did that anon. And as you can see, my work has taken me really all over the Asian region. So, as an Asian fund manager, the job was to go out and find companies whose growth prospects could give a return to shareholders to unit holders to anybody investing with me. That would be strong and appropriate for what they want, the right amount of risk and the right amount of time span and so on. And so that involves finding the companies first of all, and it could be anything anywhere within the remit. So my remit was everything east of Pakistan, everything east of Pakistan, that is a huge region, 15,000 listed companies in that remit, 4,000 alone just in China, but when I started, there wasn't a single listed company in China, I have seen the listing of every single company in the Chinese market over my career. So I've looked at these companies and you put them together in a way that you hope will provide a balance. So you want a company that's going to go up in good times, but of course when bad times come, that company probably goes down. So those are different company that goes up in the bad bad times, and that probably doesn't do so well in the good times. Together, those make what's called a portfolio. And those portfolios are what you pay your managers to try to put together. The charity trustee for a little tiny charity called Helping to Burmese Delta, I just stepped down in December actually. Just four people, two in the UK, two in Myanmar, absolutely minute, with finances that are hand to mouth every minute of the day. That charity built 36 primary schools, one middle school and one high school in a period of 10 years. It trained more than 200 traditional birth attendants to help people all around the Iowa division of Myanmar and set up a livelihood scheme as well. There is an enormous amount that you can do with very, very small resources. So, what's my office like? It's quite diverse. So, at the bottom, you'll see the bottom on this six set of photos, you'll see the type of workshop that people generally start at in Asia. These particular photos are from Indonesia actually, and that's a guy beating something with a big bit of metal. He's got a roof over his head to do it under, so he's not inundated when it rains, and his aspiration is really to get from there to the top right picture on that same set of pictures, slightly bigger workshop, more stock and something else to sell from there. The aspiration is to go to a little premises with concrete walls, and you can see a picture of me with the management of an industrial estate as in Surabhaya in Indonesia, and we were talking about how this industrial estate might develop, what type of companies could come in, how it can help to grow the local economy, and there's the plan, you can see, bottom left here with which companies were going to occupy what parts of the industrial estate, and there's a finished factory. That's all in Indonesia. Top right is the port in Yangon, and that's in Myanmar, and the bottom right is me standing on the roof of a semiconductor factory in Malaysia. And bit more about Asia, bit more of my office. It's my office in Tokyo, Jakey Morgan. It's me in Singapore, Singapore Airport, this is Singapore, my office at Fidelity in Singapore. The reason is that shopping malls in Asia, if you're an investor, of course you invest in shopping malls as well, and then I think these are houses in, that looks like Niko in Japan, I think, up there. And of course there's always the office in the UK, which really does look like this. There's no possible way you can see me over the piles of piles of paper in my office. So, if you want to be a fund manager, what do you need to do? Well, can you write well? Do you do history, English, any essay subject? Because that's going to be necessary. If you want to write a report, you need to know how to structure an essay. If you want decent understanding of basic maths, solid stats, you need to be able to listen quite carefully to everything that's being said and pick out what's important. Think logically, follow a story all the way through into its conclusion. Any degree at all will do. If you're going to invest in an engineering company, having an engineering degree means that you will understand what that company is telling you better. If you want to have, if you want to talk to somebody in, oh goodness, I'm trying to think, in a biopharmaceutical for company having any kind of science degree is handy. But actually, arts degrees are very, very helpful. Unusual degrees help you stand out and they give you a different point of view. And that's valuable. Languages are tremendous for pattern recognition. I've done almost 40 years in financial services now. My degree was classics. I did nine ancient languages at university, mostly squiggly, and that's quite handy because I learned more squiggly languages in Asia when I was there, and actually I did six years of Burmese here at South. So they're fantastic for pattern recognition. And if you join a financial firm, you're going to have to do more professional exams anyway. So I was doing, I did 70 years in the UK. Why did I suddenly change to Asia? Well, I was headhunted. Somebody came up and said, what about it? What do you think? It is an absolutely phenomenally exciting and intoxicating area of the world. I'm sure I hope you've had the impression so far today. And at this time, it's a long, long time ago, people view Asia as a bit, oh, why do you want to go there? It's not much to invest all your financial career, terrible. And I thought, well, I've got a load of friends there. I've a lot of family there. And the person who was just about to be the best man at my wedding and actually didn't manage to be the best man at my wedding because he would, he snuck off to the Karakorau mountains instead. And so we had to choose my Singaporean cousin to be the best man instead. It was one of the reasons why Asia didn't seem that scary to me at all. So much history, culture, languages, and of course, the food. Nobody can say they don't like Asian food because it is so diverse. There is so much stuff. There are a few things that you might not like, but so I give you a lovely quote, which I'm sure you will know from Robert Frost saying it's from his poem The Roadless Travel. I should be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence two roads diverged in the woods and I, I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. I have no size I have no regrets because Asia is absolutely to love of my life. So what will you find in Asia. So first of all, and I'm sure people have emphasised this to ready today, it is really big. I mean how big. So it's about a third of the earth's surface. It's about 45 million square kilometres in size and that's just, that's just the landmass that's not including any of the islands and what have you. 1,300 languages minimum in the Asian region. So, yeah, sure, choose, choose an Asian language. There are plenty to choose from, really lots to choose from. There are more than 300 in China alone. There are at least 120 and I think that other other counts put it more like 200 and something in India. And it stretches from the Arctic of an Arctic circle all the way down to the equator and further. There's no, you can't possibly say oh I don't like it because it's too hot. Go somewhere cold. Plenty of cold places in Asia. Don't like the cold because somewhere hot. There's everything there. The, the diversity is extraordinary and I think in the west here. We have this perception that Asia is quite poor and quite backward economically and that that is true in some countries, it remains true in some countries, but it is absolutely not true everywhere. There are phenomenally wealthy countries that are phenomenally well developed with most exciting cultures. Nick mentions about religions and the whole spread here panoply of religions across Asia. I think that I believe every single religion on the planet is represented by quite a significant group of people in Asia and they might be one or two that I've missed aren't. But certainly, I mean, yes Christianity Islam, Buddhism, animism, Hinduism, I'm just trying to, what I've missed in terms of major religions are just, it's all there, it's absolutely all there. Business is generally done in of course the local language in whatever country but also in English because English is a unifying language for business everywhere so if you love the idea of Asia but you're kind of iffy on the whole language thing. It's not a problem. It's really not a problem. I want to talk also about the diversity in in science and technology. So we think that Asia is being less advanced than us technologically. I hope not have some countries. Yeah. Okay. But actually, Asia is way ahead of us on, for instance, 3D bio printing. I chaired a conference on 3D bio printing back in 2014, where companies from China and Korea are leading the world in 3D printing human body parts. Next time you have a broken leg and it needs to be replaced or you need a new part of your body, it can be 3D printed now and that reduces your time in hospital increase increases your opportunity for survival and better recovery and Asian companies lead that. In terms of other technologies, semiconductors, you've probably read all over papers, Asia is far ahead of the West in terms of leading age semiconductors, TSMC in Taiwan, Taiwan's semiconductor is the only country in the world, only company in the world capable of producing computer chips at just three nanometers. So Samsung is on on about five Intel is languishing way up the scale or something like 14 or something, and microphone and the others are not even close. So far in a way ahead. Looking at the companies that you see. When I meet when I meet companies as a fund manager you go and you talk to the board, you talk to the chief financial officer, the managing director, the founder. Every one of them are run by really switched on intelligent engaged people. It's so exciting. It's absolutely intoxicating. Asian students. They travel the world to study these this data is from UNESCO. And the arrows show you where people are going at where that they're heading for their studies now actually not totally visible on this. There's some reproduction here but China is sending is sending its students, literally all over the world to study. And so China is gathering an understanding of the way that the whole world thinks. And that gives it a phenomenal advantage. South Korea is to they are also sorry the very fine arrows have not come out on this. Slide at all. South Korea doing the same for Western students we tend to America sends most of its students as you can see to Europe and a couple of others to English speaking speaking companies of countries and a few to Japan. And the UK, not much better to be honest we tend to send them to America to Europe and to Australia and just a few go out to study in Asia. But there is an opportunity if you want to have to earn money for the rest of your lives, being unique what you do being the road less traveled is the way to have people coming to you and saying, I want to hear about your expertise tell me more. And Asia is absolutely an untraveled area in terms of study. And the facts. Well, okay, attitudes to women vary, they vary everywhere in the world. I'm not going to pretend that there are not problems for women in Asia, I've traveled on my own in Asia, so just short of 30 years, or it's just more than 30 years or this quarter 40 years of my work, but the world's changed a lot. I'm a female working in my entire company for most of my early career in various different companies in the UK, and then in global companies and I've worked for UK companies French companies Canadian companies, American companies, Japanese companies. There's a whole variety of different companies and frankly women have had a pretty tough time in the last 40, 50 years of work. It's improving. It's definitely getting better. If you're good at what you do, you will be fine, whatever. Prepare well and attention to detail. If you love the food in Asia, there are exceptions. There are exceptions and Indochina, particularly Cambodia, they really are very fond of fried tarantulas and it's just not my thing. And then of course there's the jet lag as well. I think you probably gathered by now that my heart is in Asia and really strongly this quotes is from Kipling, but I feel it every day. If you've heard the Easter calling, you won't never heed nor else. Thank you.