So if Bitcoin goes up, everything goes up, rising tides affect us. If it goes down, everything goes down. We want a system that scales the billions of people. We want a system that's interoperable with other systems. And we want a system that's sustainable. We suddenly have the most decentralized cryptocurrency in the world, probably 50 to 100 times more decentralized than Bitcoin. Each year at a snowy getaway nestled in the heart of the Swiss Alps, the most powerful people in the world gather to decide the fate of the global economy. This is the 2020 World Economic Forum Crypto Valley Summit, brought to you by Cointelegraph. Hi everybody, we are here at Crypto Valley Summit in Davos, you're in the World Economic Forum, and I'm very happy to greet here Charles Hoskinson. Thank you very much for coming and to talk to us. So please let me know your first thoughts about the event, about the week, about the mountains, and what are your goals for this time in Davos? Well first, thank you so much for having me on. It's always fun to be chatting with Cointelegraph, it's a great publication. Davos is an interesting place and WEF is what brings everybody here every year. I think the population of the town increases by a factor of 10, and it's just remarkable. There's already I think 30 heads of state that have visited, I had dinner with the Prime Minister of Georgia, I was having dinner in a restaurant yesterday and the table next to us was the Prime Minister of Finland. So it's just incredible to see the amount of diversity and power that's here. There's over 100 billionaires who have attended the event, tons of industry leaders, lots of Fortune 500 CEOs, you know, Trump came here. So it's a little bit of everything. And what happens with WEF is that well that's the main event, there's tons of satellite events that pop up and they tend to suck people in and attract people who are wandering about and this is one of the events and there's several others that have been going on throughout the week. And these are just tremendous networking opportunities. You just never know who you're going to run into. For example, I ran into the drummer of Guns N' Roses last night, we had dinner and Matt and it's like, okay, I guess I'm hanging out with Guns N' Roses. Did he come here for the forum or? He came for the World Economic Forum for an unrelated event, but he has a personal friend here who's a friend of mine and he said, hey, I'm having dinner with him. Do you want to come? And I said, sure. That's fascinating. Let's see what happens. So does he know what is crypto? Not only does he know what is crypto, he wants to do a crypto project. So it's really amazing to see how broad our industry has gotten.  We're really talking about solving real life problems and generally the problems are always the same.  So you have the Airbnb's and the Ubers and the Googles and these other platforms like Facebook where their product is their customer. And basically they get so powerful, they get to sculpt an entire marketplace, whether it be advertising or commercial rentals or rideshare or whatever it might be. And then eventually they become predatory in those practices and they can't be displaced because they have a monopoly of scale. So a lot of people in various industries, whether it be the music business or the hotel industry, are looking for escape hatches so they can get out of these predatory systems and have a direct relationship with their customers so they can have fair commercial transactions, which are not only more efficient and lower costs, but also allow people to preserve their own data and allow people to preserve their own customers and the fruits of their labors. So it's lingua franca now, this kill the middleman that every industry is excited about and the music business is notorious for having these issues and Napster didn't solve anything. All it did is it just transferred from the record companies to the streaming services and they traded one evil for another evil. So any way to break those up and find a better way to do distribution and a better way to have a relationship with their clients is quite appealing to them. So it's just fun to have those conversations because when you think about their problems, they're not so different from banks or banking the unbanked and not so different from supply chain management and fertilizer sales and so forth. The technology is the same, it's just a different application of that technology and that means we have something very special in this industry. Interesting. Okay, the focus of this edition of the WAF is sustainability. So my question to you is what does this concept mean to you and what role should the blockchain technology play in building up the sustainable future? So sustainability is that to me, you know, kind of an armchair definition you can use is if you project yourself into some spectrum of the future because when you talk about sustainability it's always scoped within a time frame.  Like the Steve Miller song, take the money and run. You just want to take as much as you can, get out of there. But if your spectrum is I want to leave something behind for my children and their children and their children, then you kind of have to project out and say, how can we create an environment, an economy, an economic system, incentives in a way that a hundred years from now, people living in that time period will have the same quality of life and the same ecosystem as we do, at least the same or better. And if you're in a trend where over time you start draining more and more resources, destroying more and more biodiversity, polluting more and more, destroying quality of life, then you're not in a sustainable system. You're in a system headed towards extinction. And we see this everywhere. Like for example, we have an office in Ethiopia in Addis Ababa and we talked to a lot of the ministers there and one of the saddest things I heard from the agricultural minister was that Ethiopia over the last hundred years has lost 90% of its biodiversity. This is a country where the lion is the national symbol and there's only a few thousand of them left in the wild, which is just truly remarkable. And that's because their population's gone from 10 million to over 100 million and mostly through unsustainable farming practices and other such things. So WEF is really talking about, well, how do we achieve sustainability given that population is going to grow, given that we still haven't solved these big collective action problems like global warming and we see the consequences of that in Australia. Now in terms of the blockchain industry, it is a collection of tools that allow us to approach these problems differently. So when you talk about sustainability, it's not a personal issue. It's a collective issue on a global scale. So historically, how we solve collective global issues is we put somebody in charge, usually by force. So some empire forms, it could be the Russian empire, the American empire, the British empire. And then they set all the standards and they say, for the greater good, we're going to force everybody to collectively sacrifice. And you can't really say no because they have all the power. But with blockchain, what you do is you say, we can create a collective global agreement amongst everyone, but we can do that in a way that does not require to have a leader. It's all decentralized powers pushed to the edges. We've never had technology like that in human history. So it's a great extension to the conversation about how do we achieve sustainability. Also sustainable regulation, not just about financial regulation, but a regulation of the use of other technology classes. We have two pieces of technology that are really dystopian and terrifying if they're handled incorrectly in the 21st century. One is gene engineering, so CRISPR style stuff. And then the other is AI.  So the question is, well, how do we create a common rule set so that we can safely get the benefits of these systems, but then prevent people from cheating and doing things that could destroy us all? Just like with the creation of nuclear weapons in the 20th century, we had to put a very tight, aggressive regulatory global regime on that with force. Now we have to do the same with these two classes of technology, but there's just too many economic incentives. And these are much different than nuclear weapons. They can be done at a much smaller scale. So anybody can work on CRISPR, anybody can work on AI, and only a small team could cause a lot of havoc. So again, blockchain technology is another great global regulator in that respect. You can create a common set of rules without electing a leader that everybody has to follow and put things within that. So we love having those conversations. We get to kind of talk about the future. We get to talk about environmentalism. And we get to talk about, well, how do we set rules amongst people and enforce them and put people behind them? Interesting. So you're working with the governments. Is that really a new business avenue for Kadana? Is there a belief that governments are ready for the technologies? Yeah, there's many governments, especially developing nations, that are intensely aware of the need to upgrade. And in some cases, it's just simply being forced upon them. So let's say Starbucks wakes up and they're actually starting to do this. And they say, look, we want to buy coffee beans from, we want to buy coffee beans from suppliers that are fair trade certified, who are using sustainable agricultural processes, who aren't exploiting their workers, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so then you look at Ethiopia. It's one of the world's largest exporters of coffee. Well, when Starbucks says that, what they're basically saying is, unless you can prove these things, we're not going to buy your coffee. We'll go to Indonesia. We'll go to somewhere else, Colombia or Hawaii or Philippines. So what does this functionally mean to the coffee farmer on the ground in Ethiopia? They have to digitize now for the first time ever. And that means we have to put infrastructure in. That's not optional. They either can't sell their good or they sell their good at a tremendously lower rate, which creates poverty. So there's a lot of direct foreign investment in these jurisdictions to basically build new social systems and new commercial systems, which are digital. That's a great market opportunity for our industry because then what we can do is say, look, let's go for the whole banana. We can put a supply chain in, but not only that, we can put an identity system in, a payment system in, a voting system in, a land registration system in, and it has a common set of DNA across the whole country. And it's going to run in a transnational way, meaning that the rules will be fixed in the same. The merchants outside of the system know that the system is credible because Ethiopia, for example, can't change the Cardano protocol and so forth. So these are the kinds of conversations we're having, and they're nice that they're facilitated by market need. So there's a time limit on it. You have to get it done or else you lose market access. And it's great because you then get to talk about basically country 2.0, the future nation state, and how these countries are going to navigate through the 21st century. And what's really cool is once you've done it for one country, it's very templatable. So it's extremely easy to go into another jurisdiction with similar demographics and basically install a system like that. And then suddenly, both these countries are interoperable with each other. So everything gets so much easier from cross-border trade to mutual regulation to financial regulation, law enforcement, anything you can think about, it becomes dramatically easier. So when we look to Africa, the fastest growing, youngest economy in the entire world, we say, well, within the next 30 to 40 years, they're going to get very rich, we have a chance to build a pan-African system on blockchain, which can be as strong as the European system or the American system. And that alone, I think, will actually cause a tsunami wave, an avalanche, that will change the entire world to our technology. Interesting. Okay, let's get back to Kadana. We're all looking forward to the hard fork. So how do you think the community will meet the hard fork and what are the key developments that are involved in the hard fork? Yeah, so Cardano kind of had an unusual evolution. So it was an old way for a new industry. And because this new industry has never done things the old way, they didn't really understand what we were doing. So we started Cardano like a DARPA program. And we said, hey, let's just treat this like hardcore high-risk high-return research and development. So we started from first principles and we did a huge amount of science starting in 2015. We wrote over 50 papers, mostly peer-reviewed. And those papers basically mapped out the trade-off profiles and the capabilities of where this technology can go. And the key design requirements were we want a system that scales the billions of people, we want a system that's interoperable with other systems, and we want a system that's sustainable, meaning that it's low power consumption, it can pay for its own bills, and it has a way to evolve itself. So you don't have these contentious forks like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV and Ethereum Classic and whatever the fork of the week happens to be. So about two years into that research agenda, we developed enough knowledge that we felt comfortable to bring a product to market. And that was the Byron release of Cardano, which was kind of like Bitcoin and Ripple had a child. So it was good enough to get liquidity, get into market, get exchange listings, propagate the philosophy, build a community, these types of things. But by no means is a representation of that core research we've done. The most exciting release in the history of the project is just about to happen and that's the Shelley release. And that's for the first time ever where we're turning over the federation, so the driver's keys of the system, to the community and they can run stake pools. So we've been very systematic about this release. We started with what was called the incentivized test net.  So that people would have fair chance and opportunity to make real money and get real configurations and build a real brand in anticipation of launching the main net. So that incentivized test has been running since December and it'll continue running for a few more months. And then at the same time in parallel, we're starting an upgrade program to start turning on Shelley in the main net. So the first step in that is in February with your Boris BFT hard fork and the deployment of the new code. And that's not going to be a contentious fork. The exchanges are on board. The community is on board. So it'll just be very seamless. It basically just download a new client and it just works for the client. Nothing special there. But buried within that is all the necessary infrastructure so that we can begin then turning on upgrade by upgrade all of the Shelley features. And so the next milestone after that will be the Shelley Haskell test net. And the point there is all the people who deployed on the rust side can now configure their pools to run on what it's going to look like for the main net. And after we get that baked in for a bit, we'll just simply turn on the main net. And then we suddenly have the most decentralized cryptocurrency in the world, probably 50 to 100 times more decentralized than Bitcoin. And that's just an amazing achievement by itself. That said, we're trying to get into a release cadence where every month or two months, we just keep adding new features. So in the immediate future, right after Shelley, we'll do some additional Shelley improvements, but then we'll add smart contracts. And then in a few months later, we'll add some more capabilities, more capabilities. And eventually add Hydra, which is our scalability solution. And then the back end will be the governance solutions. That's the both. What's the timeline? Hopefully all this year, I think it's a little aggressive, but we have the engineers, we have the people, and you know, we have the proper foundations. The code that we're deploying this on, we spent over a year and a half rewriting from lessons we learned from the Byron release, and it's being rewritten with formal methods with a very large development team that's incredibly well trained. The average education's like master's degree or PhD and 15 years development experience. So these are very experienced Western engineers, mostly in the UK. They went to Oxford and other things like that. So these guys and gals, they really know what they're doing. And they've been meticulously, systematically working using top techniques for a very long time. And it's created some very high quality foundations for us to quickly deploy things. So we're very optimistic about how quickly we can move into it. Looking forward, looking forward. Okay, what do you make of the recent press speculations that went viral? I tend not to speculate about individual prices. You know, the reality is our industry is still a macro industry and it's led by kind of two events, two forcing factors. One is the price of Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin goes up, everything goes up, rising tides affect, if it goes down, everything goes down. And then two, it's tend to be led by a counter cyclical economic tide. So if the US economy is not doing well and the stock market is not doing well, the Chinese stock market is not doing well, we tend to see an increased amount of interest in cryptocurrency and the prices go up. The US economies, you know, doing well, the cryptocurrencies tend to flatline or go down a little bit. Now that said, we're starting to see a tremendous amount of institutional infrastructure and investment. And we're starting to see a lot of real life use cases and demand factors starting to enter the cryptocurrency space. So institutional investment is going to probably drive billions of dollars of fresh capital into the cryptocurrency space. And by projection, that's going to rise everything up. Right now, the single biggest discussion is proof of work versus proof of stake coins. So will proof of work continue to be the economic paradigm of the cryptocurrency space? Because if you look at the top 10, the majority of value is still in proof of work tokens. Or will proof of stake now become the majority value of tokens? So a lot of institutional investors are taking time to build portfolios of proof of stake tokens. So they're taking some Tezos and some ADA and some EOS and they're going to take some ETH to whenever it comes out and put a bill to basket. And that will bring billions of dollars in it should normalize the price between the two. There's still a lot of questions around regulatory certainty and clarity. And there's this concept of, well, the next big wave is going to be the STO revolution. But the only reason we haven't seen that is because the regulators have not opened up the floodgates. There's still not a lot of liquidity with security tokens, not a lot of regulatory clarity. You can't do cross-border settlement. And there's kind of a patchy framework of how these things work. So they're kind of like the provenance of funding for the SMEs in the five to $20 million range, but they're not viable trading instruments. So where does Cardano fit into all of this? Well, you know, if macroeconomic trends improve, then of course I would be bullish. But I think long term, five to 10 years, the only thing that's going to differentiate us from everybody else is good old fashioned adoption and real demand, natural demand for the token. And the only way that's achieved is if we achieve making ADA a great payment system, a great platform for dApps, a great place to build side chains and infrastructure on. And if we can accomplish that, then I'm very bullish and I'm very excited about the future of the project. And given that we have a huge technological lead on everybody and given that we should be the preferred platform for Fortune 500 enterprise companies and governments, given the formal methods, nature of the code and the stability of the ecosystem, I think our prospects are quite good. I'm going to tease now that Charles Hoskinson will be a part of our top 100 list that we are going to reveal very soon. And so my question is, what do you consider your personal achievements, the biggest achievements of the last year? That's a great question. I mean, you can look at it from a strictly technical sense or you can look at it from an emotional sense. From an emotional side, I think the most humbling event that we had in 2019 was the graduation of our Ethiopia class. So we spent over a year from 2018 to 2019 working with the Ministry of Innovation and Technology and local university partners in both Ethiopia and Uganda to find a bunch of women who had technical skills who were willing to learn Haskell, which was not an easy task. And the Ministry actually requested that the class be all female and we said, sure. And we actually went through over 350 resumes and we went out it down to 23 very good candidates. And we sent our director of education, Lars Brunius, to live in Ethiopia for three months to train that class. And these women, they worked so incredibly hard. Some of them took public transportation two to three hours one way to get the class. It was unbelievable, the personal sacrifices they made, the Ugandan gals that came up. One of them had a child and she had to leave her young kid behind in Uganda with her mother while she trained for three months in Ethiopia. So she didn't see her daughter for three months. Very hard, but all of them graduated. And I went down to Ethiopia for the ceremony with the Minister and Lars and the rest of the gang. And I got to hear their personal stories and there wasn't a dry eye in that entire room. But what I was most proud about was that we figured we'd hire all of them. And so we made some offers and they were very competitive offers above market rate. And they said, no, we're sorry, we're taking other positions. And we said, really? And they say, yeah. And these girls were in a jurisdiction that the average developer makes $500, $2,000. And some of them were getting offers like six times that or eight times that from Western companies. And so we didn't quite get as many people as we wanted out of it. But we created high paying great jobs for a country that has had a lot of difficulty with female programmers. And that was just super humbling. And it shows you can really make a difference. We made a difference in their lives. And it showed us that that model works quite well. And just a little bit more investment, it could be scaled very rapidly. From a technological sense, the greatest achievement of 2019 was the clarity and completion of the Orboros roadmap. So in 2015, we said proof of stake is really cool and interesting. But we didn't know if it was actually work or if it was secure. It's an open theoretical question. And Aguilos Casas, our chief scientist, he has spent the last five years of his life meticulously with the team of some of the best scientists in the world from 10 different universities is systematically building up the entire theory of proof of stake and showing that not only does it work, it works just as well as proof of work. And you could build a global scale system with 10 kilowatts of power, the power of a large home. Unbelievable work. I mean, our seminal paper there was GKL published in 2015. It has almost 800 citations, which is just amazing. And then the same for the Orboros Classic paper and so forth. So just seeing that shape up, the rewriting of the core papers to make them more understandable and with lessons learned, and the firming of the tail end of that research agenda, which will end this year, was incredibly humbling. We solved probably one of the hardest problems in computer science.  And we did it in less than five years. And we did it with principles in a peer reviewed way with scientists all across the world, many languages. And as an academic, that's that's always a once in a career thing and a very satisfying thing. And so I'm super proud of our division. And I'm proud we can actually bring these innovations to market and allow everybody in our industry to benefit from them.


Hello friends, and I'm back to talk about Lightlark again, because I, you know, I reviewed it months ago, around the time it first came out, and then I talked about it a little bit on my last World Building Analysis video. And now I just figured, eh, why not? Let's do another rewrite, because so many people have already done really long in depth, looks at why this book doesn't work on any level, and I don't feel like I could add anything new to that conversation, but I can do a rewrite just like before, you know, I did this with the Onision trilogy a few years ago, I did it with Trigger Warning not that long ago, and now I'm doing it with Lightlark. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. For those unfamiliar, basically this is going to be me taking the same basic story and trying to leave as much intact as possible, like as many of the major plot points and as many of the major character decisions and personalities, like leave all that as intact as possible, but tweak it to make it, you know, not terrible. And if you want a really in-depth summary of Lightlark, there's like 50 other really long videos that can go over that, so check out one of those, because this is going to be a pretty brief summary, and there may be some details that don't make much sense. If you have not read the books yourselves, but also even if you have read the books, the book, there's details that aren't going to make sense because Lightlark is incoherent. That's just, if I had to describe it in one word, it would be incoherent. Like people have been hating on it for months and not without reason, but honestly I can't bring myself to hate it because like it's more just incoherent than bad. You know, it's nonsensical. Nothing in it adds up, but there's nothing in here that really makes me angry or anything. And I think that's why this isn't as infamous as the other books I've done rewrites on before. Partially because, you know, it's more recent. It's only been around for a couple of months and been stewing that long. I think after a couple of years more and more people are gonna be familiar with Lightlark and how awful it is, but also because on the surface it seems like a typical fantasy young adult story. And I suppose it is in most ways. It's just not completely insane like stuff like Trigger Warning is. As I said, this book is more incoherent than it is bad. Think of like Reapers Creek if you want to know what I'm talking about there. But where Reapers Creek was just like 18 different stories that couldn't decide what they wanted to be about and so they just kept getting dropped partway through. Lightlark does at least have a solid premise and it is enough for me to work with and for me to say, okay, I think I could probably write that better than Alex Astrid did. Basically the story is about these seven kingdoms and the people on each kingdom all have their own special power, but a couple hundred years ago they all also got afflicted with horrible curses. And the story is basically about these kingdoms trying to find a way to end the curses by having something called a centennial where every 100 years people from all the kingdoms congregate on this central island which is called Lightlark. That's where the title of the book comes from. And then there's this again a weird tournament which is not explained very well. There's no real reason for it to be there. And then enter the super special main character who for whatever reason has no curse and she comes in and she saves the day. There's like you know there's something for me to work with here you know and from this point forward there will be a lot of spoilers so just just be aware of that. So a couple of things to mention before we get started like these are just going to be things to keep in mind throughout the whole summary and everything of the plot. These aren't like major things that I can mention at every point they become important but just stuff that if I don't mention them just assume it's being done. Like number one just better prose you know the actual writing of the book should be better like Lightlark's writing just isn't that good and it could use some improvements that's about it. Number two integrate the powers and the curses into society better like for example one of the kingdoms is the kingdom of the moonlings and their curse is that the every full moon if they go near the ocean the ocean kills them and I don't know if it's ever explained exactly how I'm just imagining like the water comes to life temporarily like grabs them and pulls them under maybe I don't know but and it says that dozens of them die every month because they go near the water and you'd think that they would just have that circle on their calendars say like oh hey stay away from the water so like it would be a bad curse but it wouldn't be killing dozens of people every month you know like that that's a detail uh another detail would be the sunlings their curse is that they can't go outside during the day so they would probably fulfill a different niche in society and my first thought was like okay they'd be like night guards you know while everyone else is sleeping they would be like patrolling the streets to make sure criminals aren't up to any good and they'd be guarding warehouses to make sure stuff doesn't get stolen you know like they would have to fulfill a different niche in society like just stuff like that you know a lot of small details like that would help the world just feel more real and more lived in number three just less explicit sex you know like you don't have to get rid of it entirely I think having it there is fine but end of the day this is still young adults and I don't think that those should have explicit sex scenes like if you're going to write for just a full-on adults then sure go for it but like not when you're writing for teenagers that's just that's just weird I don't like it and it feels almost like it's just trying to cash in on thrown of glasses success but whatever not important number four uh make some bigger social divides between the kingdoms because lightlark is an unusual island in that it's the only place where all the kingdoms regularly congregate but even after being isolated for a hundred years at a time these people haven't like merged into one big culture there doesn't seem to be much overlap between them they all seem to be their own thing like the sunlings still associate mostly with sunlings the moonlings associate mostly with moonlings the skylings associate mostly mostly with skylings and all that and like they've maintained their own little subcultures and shit it's it's weird but in this they also just they how do I put this even like they get along pretty well but in this version they there would be more stark divides and they would more clearly not always get along you know there'd be things like riots and there'd be occasional pogroms and possibly even civil wars because this has been going on for hundreds of years and these people might not necessarily like each other or get along and they might be fighting over things like resources or they might blame each other for curses you know like things like that and number five there would just be more contact between lightlark and the other islands because like I said it is isolated for a hundred years at a time which is just really strange like I'm not sure how that would be basically that I mean it's essentially the capital of all these kingdoms I'm not sure how that would work if it's you can't get to it for a hundred years at a time because there's a storm raging around the island 24-7 and it only lets up during the centennial so I would just say remove the storm thing at least make it so they can occasionally interact with each other and this is your final spoiler warning we're getting into the summary now so the start of the regular book the original book is that the main character Isla Crown amazing name by the way I I don't know why young adult characters have such strange names but they do she comes to lightlark for the tournament now in the original book there's really no explanation for why this tournament exists or at least not a good explanation it's basically just people congregate during the centennial when the storm lets up every hundred years to try and find a way to end the curses and there's like a really weird vague prophecy which says something about how one of the rulers of the kingdoms has to die in order to end the curse it like the the prophecy doesn't make sense and it doesn't honestly play that big of a role in the story but basically they just congregate and then the rulers of all the countries have this series of contests where like they show off their magic powers and they have a couple of fights and they just show off how good they are decorating shit it's like it's dumb and it doesn't make much sense so I'm saying we should change a lot of it so instead of that instead of having the centennial be every hundred years so that the people who competed in it last time are long dead by the time the next one starts or at least most of them are because some people are magically immortal in this series for some reason but instead of that have the tournament be every 10 years and this is the key bit whoever wins the tournament until the next one so for 10 years their kingdom does not have any curse so like if the sunlings win then for the next 10 years they can all go out in the sun no problems if the starlings win then they can like their curses that they all die when they're 25 and so for the next 10 years like they can live as long as possible but then if they lose the next one and somebody else gets it then the curse comes right back and the contestants can't just be anyone from these kingdoms they have to be members of the ruling families like the royal families of these kingdoms like so that would be an explanation for why it's nothing but royals and I mean I know this is sounding kind of similar to the Hunger Games and kind of like you're ripping off the Hunger Games but I mean the original book is already trying to market itself as fantasy Hunger Games and it was kind of similar to that so I mean just lean into it you know just just be honest with yourself about your intentions and in the original book the characters did not know where the curses came from which is makes it extra weird why they're doing this tournament in the first place like you'd think they would just search the island for a while and search for the origin of these curses or something I don't I don't know exactly but in this version we'll have it so that the characters just know where the curses came from and that can be pretty much the same as it was in the original book basically hundreds of years ago there was this girl named Aurora who found this flower which is like the heart of lightlark and her boyfriend was cheating on her so she was really upset about it and misused the power of lightlark but also she killed her friend and like that was the real reason why the curses happened because she killed her friend in cold blood it's I I know I'm not explaining that well and it doesn't make a lot of sense but it's not explained well it doesn't make sense in the original book either so like that's that's the best I can do but anyways the point is people would know where that came from and they would know where it came from because Aurora the person who did the curse would still be alive and in the original book she is still alive but she's like in disguise whereas in this she's still alive and she decides okay I hate all you people because X which is part of why she did the curse or something like maybe she knew that the curses would happen if she killed a friend I don't know like there's so many little details which come together to make this just a hot mess so some of them I just have to say and then shit makes sense for a while but in this version Aurora will you know still be alive and everyone will know who she is and what she's done but she's immortal so they can't kill her and she's doing the tournament and keeping the curses and everything because she just hates everyone and is toying with them like this is her entertainment for hundreds and hundreds of years and she is also the judge of the tournament so she's the one that sets up the rules sets up the competitions and makes sure everyone follows the rules and if they like cheat or something then she kills them or inflicts some other harsh punishments now in the original book Isla had no curse and she also had no power she's from the kingdom of the wildlings and they actually have two curses like they have to number one their curse is that they don't eat regular food they have to eat human hearts and they eat like one per month and then they're good but in their second curse is that if they fall in love with someone then they're guaranteed to kill that person and in the original book she has no curses but also doesn't have any of the wildling powers where like they make plants grow and stuff and I think the reason for that is because the author realized that they they would notice that she had no curse that she needed to eat hearts like they would notice hey wait a minute she wants to eat regular food and she doesn't have to subsist on hearts the curse is gone with her but they would not notice that the curse of her killing whoever she falls in love with wasn't there because they would probably just assume that she hadn't fallen in love with anyone and they would just assume the curse was still there and so rather than just tweaking the curse or something like that the author just decided add another one on there even though it completely throws the world building into whack so in this alternate version we'll just get rid of the heart-eating thing entirely we'll have it so that the wildling curse is just that they kill the ones they love and Isla still does not have that curse but she doesn't know she doesn't have it she just assumes that okay I haven't fallen in love with anyone which is why I haven't felt the urge to kill any of the boys that I've been kind of into I guess that wasn't true love and the reason that her she didn't have a curse was because her parents were actually from two different kingdoms her mom was a wildling and her dad was a nightshade as they're called and at the end of the book it's meant to be like a big twist you know like it it's a big twist oh your father was a nightshade it like it's a secret or something even though you think that would be somewhat well known and the thing is that's really stupid because you would think at some point over the hundreds of years like two people from different kingdoms would have had children together and they would have noticed hey wait a minute they don't have any curses but also like the book contradicts itself and it just says that they only get the powers and curses from one of their parents instead of just being cured I don't know again this book is just such a mess man I think there's only so much I can do but yeah Isla not knowing that she doesn't have a curse would make it more of a twist when they reveal okay your parents were from two different kingdoms and if you want to make it even more of a twist you could have it be that people from different kingdoms just cannot have children at all like if they try then nothing will happen like it's part of something Aurora did to them in order to because she knows that if they crossbreed then that then the curses will be gone and she doesn't want that happening so she just makes it okay none of you are able to have children with each other but Isla's parents found some way to do it and then rather than dying because the curse suddenly came back and they weren't able to suppress it anymore then they just have it so that Aurora killed Isla's parents and maybe tried to kill her but she was like spirited away or something because she didn't want the word of this getting out you know like again there's just there's so many details that just don't quite add up but I mean there's only so much I can do with this guys now from the beginning part a lot of the plot of this will be similar to the original book you know like there will be the tournaments Isla will be there trying to search away for a way to end the curses and like because I mean she doesn't know that she doesn't have the curse but she'll be thinking for whatever reason that it is possible to end them like maybe she searches for a way to kill Aurora or something you know again not important the devil is in the details and I like I can't just go over every small plot point of this and try to fix that because we would just we would just be here all day I can't do it but over the course of the story just like in the original she will fall in love with Grim and Oro now Oro is the king of the sunlings and Grim is the king of the nightshades and we find out later that she actually knows him but her memory is gone we'll get to that a little bit more later and she mostly falls in love with Grim again just like the original book where they like actually are sexually active with each other and stuff but uh just you know there there is a love triangle there we'll leave that intact now we will cut out most of the scenes where it's just like a fancy ball where they get to wear really nice dresses and dance and look at pretty boys and stuff or Isla just enjoying chocolate and walking around the town on lightlark and it's really quaint and nice and not like shitty how you would expect it to be like you know we'll we'll leave out most of that and we'll replace it with time devoted to simmering political conflicts because again remember every time somebody wins this tournament they are actively fucking over all of the other kingdoms and in the process of the tournament they're probably killing some of the royal family members of other kingdoms as well because I mean if we're gonna make this tournament seem like a big deal like at least some of the contestants have to die you know it doesn't have to be like hunger games last one standing wins but at least some of them have to uh and so this would cause some resentment among the populations and among the leaders of those populations like I said there would have been like civil wars and stuff in the past however aurora would have prevented them from like killing off any of the other peoples entirely because I don't know maybe she would say okay if if uh representatives from every kingdom doesn't come to every tournament then the curses are just gonna keep going on forever or maybe she'll say if a representative doesn't come to every tournament then you will all be inflicted with all of the curses simultaneously or you know something like that you know uh so these people like don't really like each other and they don't really trust each other and they do fight sometimes but they can't completely get rid of the others you know they're they're forced to be together uh and one of the biggest sources of conflicts would be between the night shades and the sunlings because one of them can't go out during the day and the other one can't go out during the night so the people there would just rarely interact with one another and so there'd just be a lot of distance between them they would probably occupy different niches in society and they just they wouldn't trust each other now in the original story there's a twist about how grim and isla actually knew each other for years and they actually like fell in love and grim took her virginity and you know things like that but then uh when they were going to the tournament he basically he didn't want to distract her from her goal so he erased all her memories of him without her permission and he didn't ask her because he thought she would say no which which is like a horrible a horrible thing to do but it's also dumb because he doesn't want to distract her and then he still spends all this time with her and still falls in love with her and basically takes her virginity a second time which is like such a creepy thing to think about it's dumb it's creepy but so in this we will change it so that grim still erases her memories of him like they still fell in love before and he still erases her memories of him but he does it because he finds out that oro the king of the sunlings has some sort of plan to genocide all the nightshades like again it's never been done before because it was against the rules but oro seems to think he has found a loophole you know maybe he has found some sort of spell or something that will prevent the curse from spreading or maybe he thinks that if he just kills everyone except the sunlings then the sunlings will be cured of their curse and so he thinks okay we just need to win this tournament and then our curse will be gone for 10 years and over the next 10 years we'll just wipe out everybody else like you know something along those lines like grim finds out he has some sort of plan about that and so grim says okay i am a nightshade and as much as i love isla i have to protect my people so he just erases her memories of him but he still knows all about her that way he can when the tournament starts he can get her to like him and he can also manipulate her more and without having to worry about her manipulating him or anything in return so in this instance like his motivations would be sympathetic and we would understand why he would do something like that it's still pretty bad though like it's still an absolute betrayal of easeless trust and it granted the original book like seriously i hate this thing so much but the original it seems to imply that grim is going to continue being the main love interest from this point forward because there is heavy sequel baiting at the end and i don't i don't like that because like how and why would she ever get past that but in this version at least maybe isla could forgive him for it and they could move past it i would still say in the sequels have her say like you know what i get why you did it and i forgive you for it but at the same time i can never trust you again so like whatever romance they had is just it's just over now forever like that's how i would do it and we'll have the ending be kind of similar like maybe there'll be one last contest in the tournament where characters are fighting or something maybe it's just a fight to the death but whatever the case maybe isla and the others finds the heart of light heart of light lark and then they kill aurora and they defeat all the curses the curses are all gone and it's not happily ever after because again there's heavy sequel baiting they find like a magic door and walk into it but you know that that's the end of this story at least and it's hard to say where things would go after that because the sequels have not been written yet but i don't know it like if i had to continue it based on what i've come up with this so far i would say maybe just have some conflict between all the kingdoms take up the rest of the series you know like the curses are gone but like they have old scores they want to settle and people are trying to get used to life without the curses and everything so that just causes strife and conflict between people like just things like that you know i think you could write a series about that sort of thing and i know a lot of that is vague and i apologize for that but like so much of this book is just pretty dresses pointless fights and bad exposition you know like and i wish i could talk more about the characters and try to make them a little better as well but most of them are so ill-defined that like they're not even two-dimensional you know a two-dimensional character would be like a villain who just kills people because he likes being evil and he strangles puppies and throws uh ties women up in train tracks and stuff like that just for fun like he doesn't have any deeper reason for it but that that's two-dimensional but because he at least has some dimension you know you can point to him and say yes he has that which defines him whereas most of the characters in light lark don't even have that like they're they have no personality they have no motivations they don't do anything in the story there's like there's just nothing to say about them uh only things i can think of to improve upon it would be like maybe make grim and oro not immortal you know maybe have it so that they're younger and closer to isla's age and that they've both uh only recently taken over their kingdoms and so they're like feeling like they're in over their heads and they're kind of impulsive and just things like that which might cause them to act irrationally the way oro does in this version of the story i don't know uh i would also say uh let isla keep her powers you know let her keep her wilding powers because it's just kind of weird that she was able to hide them or to hide the fact that she didn't have any for that whole story uh but also get rid of her teleporting star stick or whatever the fuck it was called i like it's literally right i could literally check it right now but i refuse to do so this thing has taken up enough of my life uh but yeah the teleporter she has like just get rid of that because that's too much of a get out of jail free card and also just describe her training a little better because like at one point when it's describing how strong her arms are it mentions that one time like literally just one time when she was like 12 her trainer had her hang from a tree branch for several hours and it really hurt her but now her arms are super strong because of it and like that that just doesn't make sense you know doing that once wouldn't make you strong forever like maybe if she hung from a tree branch for an hour every day and then did sword training for another two hours like you know something like that like just describe her training a little better and make it less dumb um and then some other like smaller details about the world and stuff we could make it so that the skylings might be sort of a neutral party who are sort of friends with everybody because you know the skylings their powers that they can't fly and their curses the powers that they can fly and their curses that they can't fly excuse me uh so they probably wouldn't care all that much about lifting the curse like they wouldn't put as much time and energy into uh trying to win the tournament as everybody else so they wouldn't you know be killing people in other royal families and they wouldn't be screwing over other populations as much and they wouldn't be like you know backstabbing and dirty fighting and you know all the stuff you would expect to accompany this sort of thing the skylings wouldn't be doing that and so everyone wouldn't really have much reason to hate them and they'd be you know sort of good at being liaisons between everyone you know like just just a small detail and i would also say that rather than having this endless storm which just cuts off lightlark from everyone else uh just have the storm be like around all of the kingdoms and have them cut off from the rest of the world but they can still see each other all they want like you know that that would just make more sense because like the idea that there's no communication between lightlark and anyone else but they they still like maintain similar cultures and everything it's just i don't know it's just it's just weird uh and then we can also have like each kingdom or the members of each kingdom dominating one area in society you know like maybe one kingdom uh makes up the bulk of the sailors in the world one kingdom makes up the bulk of the army and also the army would probably have to have something to fight like monsters or something that are wandering around maybe aurora put them there maybe they're there before i don't know but it would make the world seem at least somewhat dangerous uh and then we'd have one kingdom that is makes up most of the merchants and like maybe the wildlings make up the majority of the healers in the world because you know they can like grow medicinal plants and stuff really quick just things like that you know make make it so it seems like each people is taking advantage of their specific powers and trying to find a way to overcome their specific curses and so they just each fill a role in society and they wind up leaning on each other like that and i'm sorry this this book just gives me so little to work with you know even though i do like the premise i think the premise is pretty good like a magical island that's only available every hundred years and you go there to end a curse and everything like it's it's it's pretty good but like there's just nothing for me to work with here and it's a very good example of how the devil is always going to be in the details you know it doesn't matter how good your premise is if you cannot uh do anything with it and you can't find a way to make it make sense and you can't find a way to properly build up to it and execute it like if you can't do that then your your good premise means nothing you know like the only big character moment that i can think of that i i could even add here for any of them would be like isla deciding to do whatever it takes to stop the genocide of the night the nightshades like you know like even though they're not her people she just decides okay i have to do whatever it takes to stop this like i i don't like grim much right now but i understand why he did what he did and so she like in some way depending on how the final contest is set up she will prepare to sacrifice herself uh but then she'll like have an epiphany or get an opportunity or something and she'll finally defeat aurora i i don't know like again it's impossible to go into a whole lot of detail about it without just essentially writing a different book you know i i can't make this thing good like i i just can't know i spent many hours thinking it over and coming up with different ideas and then scrapping them because light lark is just too powerfully incoherent there there's just there's not anything for me to work with here so i can't make it good without essentially changing the whole thing you know like i would have to completely change the uh world and set up for the plot and a lot of the characters and their personalities and everything like i would be changing it so much it would essentially be a different book which is really not the point of this exercise like i can't make it good i can only make it coherent mostly coherent even though i don't hate light lark the way i hated all the other books i've rewritten so far at least the authors of the other books i i've done this rewrite exercise for uh they at least understood that there have to be like powerful character emotions and big character moments and stuff you know like jake rivers in um trigger warning is not a good character but he has moments where he like decides okay i'm gonna go save the day like he doesn't just default to saving the day or anything you know like just as an example like he has uh some aspects to his personality same with all the uh protagonists from the onision trilogy like they they aren't likeable people but they are at least definable people and isla just doesn't even have that you know like they understood that for a story to have any sort of point to it there have to be like big moments like that and i don't mean big moments as in like like explosions and fights and everything but like just big moments for the characters and for their own personal uh both physical and emotional journeys so otherwise there's just no point to it and i think that really is where light lark fails the most is that it feels like there's no point because the characters and everything else is just so undefined like not even bland just undefined like i can't point to what they are or what they're supposed to be and i don't know that's the biggest shame of it all but i have nothing else to add i'm rambling for too long please like the video and comment on it and subscribe to my channel subscribe to my other channel as well it's called the other james and um yeah it's about it goodbye wow you you're still watching i i mean i guess i appreciate it but i'm not sure why i mean at this point all that we have left is all these names here these are my patrons and including my ten dollar and up patrons aposavalanan olivia reyan brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay dan ancelia vich dark king don deo echo flax carcat kitsune lexie delorm lisa rudakova lord tiebreaker micah phone mist boy peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vei victus and wesley these are all great people you know let me let me just let me tell you if you want to get your name on here then consider donating to me once a month become a patron or if you don't feel like doing that or you just can't because you know you're like poor or whatever no shame in that uh then just you know rate the video comment on it subscribe share it around spam it to all your friends and uh yeah goodbye


Hey everyone, before I get into this video I want to remind you to enter our Animal Crossing New Horizons giveaway. You can do that by commenting down below, leaving a like on this video, subscribing to the channel, and hitting that bell icon. You can do this for every single video we post in the month of March all the way through March 18th, and the winner will be announced on March 19th. It will be a digital code, it will be the North American version, which isn't a problem since Switch is region free. I got two stories to talk to you about today.  The other thing is that I do want to briefly talk about an indie world showcase, which is happening tomorrow as announced by Nintendo through all their social media platforms. It's happening tomorrow at 10 am Pacific, so for me, 8 am Central Standard Time, you can do the conversions to your local time zones from there. You know we will be live streaming that. I'm planning to do a live stream of about 30 minutes, start at 30 minutes ahead of time. The actual indie showcase only lasts for about 20 minutes, and then we'll do maybe a half hour or 40 minutes or so after that, just talking about what happened in all that jazz. And that will kind of be our general reaction video for that showcase. But I'm pretty excited because this is some positive news in the world we're in right now with the pandemic going on and everything. It's great to have some positive gaming news to kick off our week from Nintendo. Obviously this might lend credence to the Venture Beat Report that we will be getting on Nintendo Direct next week because I said we would be getting the showcase this week. Although Sabi also said we would be getting the showcase in the month of March, so maybe they just guessed and got it right. I don't know, but hey, this does also maybe lend a little credence to Hype for next week for Nintendo Direct. And this is already on top of the fact that the Xbox Series X basically got fully unveiled today, which is pretty crazy. We got all the specs, we got to see it completely torn down, we got to see different games running on it from the Xbox One. Obviously we're not seeing Xbox Series X specific games because those will be shown during E3 or Xbox's digital event they're now doing instead of E3. So I don't know, it's pretty crazy though to see all that. So yeah, let's get into the other part of this video. Maybe the more important part for you guys and that's the Animal Crossing reviews. So Animal Crossing has a 91 on Metacritic and this matters because the highest rated Animal Crossing game of all time on Metacritic is Animal Crossing New Leaf at an 88. So this is officially or unofficially or however you view game reviews and view Metacritic, the highest rated Animal Crossing game of all time. It is widely considered a masterpiece. In fact, the lowest rating of this game currently out of the 55 reviews counted is an 80. So yeah, and that's being really, really critical of it and still an 80. That is crazy how highly reviewed this game is becoming. It has 100 by Forbes, which says, no, that if you're overwhelmed with the world stuck outside a drift in a life that you know will look totally different next week, get Animal Crossing, Telegraph saying with the game this broad and lengthy, there's more to discuss than I can fit in one review. But the size that the say, this is a game that Nintendo have clearly worked incredibly hard to get right. It shines at every moment from the wind rustling through the trees to the sunset glinting off the water to the jaunty tunes in the start of the day. Fading into more relaxing melodies in the evening at dozens of much needed quality of life features. A low player customization autosave couch co-op and eight player online and it all adds up to the perfect do it yourself recipe for the most chilled out relaxing and engaging life simulator ever VG 20, you know, VG 247 saying, hey, New Horizons is everything I hoped it would be. And yet it's another stellar release that showcases a confident Nintendo at its best. Nintendo Insider says above all else, Animal Crossing, New Horizons is an unbeatable feel good experience and an essential purchase for anyone who owns a Nintendo Switch. Trusted Reviews comes out as New Horizons is the best game I have played this year. You know, you have VGC coming out and saying Nintendo is controlling life sim is a tranquil haven at a time the world needs it most. And I think that's what is so perfect about Animal Crossing New Horizons. It is almost a transcendent event in gaming, not just because the game is amazing and it's been eight years since we've gotten a new, a true brand new Animal Crossing, not, not amiibo festival or happy home designer or pocket camp. I mean, a true blue Animal Crossing game. It's been eight years, but it's coming at a time when the world needs it the most to act like our lives aren't impacted by this pandemic is a bit of a misnomer. Even if you don't have COVID-19, don't have the coronavirus, you don't have any family members affected by it and your life is mostly normal. Grocery stores are being shut down.  Public transportation being shut down. All the sporting events are essentially canceled at this point. Besides NFL free agency, which doesn't involve players having to actually be in a room together. So like we are at this point that so much of our life is on pause, so much of our entertainment's on pause. There are movies that are being postponed. The New Fast and the Furious movies postponed a year.  This is crazy. We are in a world where we have never, at least in my lifetime, been impacted this worldwide by a pandemic. And yet here we are with maybe, I don't want to say, the most deadly pandemic in my life, but definitely the one that's affecting everyone in one way or another. And this game's coming out at a perfect time when we're going to be holed up at home or when we're supposed to be, you know, what are they calling it now, social distancing or whatever we want to refer to it as. Whatever hot button term is being used these days. I think that this is the perfect game to come out at the perfect time for really the ideal audience, which is the most popular platform in the world right now. And to have this game come out right now is just, it's perfect. We get to simulate a life that isn't so crazy as the one we're currently existing in. And it's just a beautiful, beautiful thing, a beautiful escape from reality. And I, for one, I just can't wait. And it's not even just this game. You know, let's not forget, we're getting Doom Eternal. You want to go completely opposite side of the spectrum. Doom Eternal is coming this week. And that's going to be another escape for some people and to a much more fantasy-like experience where you're killing demons and it's like the end of the world and all that stuff. Like that's just another polar opposite experience out there for those that are looking for heck. You know, Xbox dropping the news this week and we're waiting on Sony to kind of open Pandora's box here. We know Ghost of Tashima is coming this summer, you know, from the Sony side of things. Obviously there might be a Nintendo Direct next week in the world showcase. There's a lot of positivity going on in the gaming space. And I really, really hope that this kind of starts to permeate into other entertainment avenues and we start to get more positivity from them as well because it's easy to panic. It's easy to just look at how dreary the world is right now. But these are the kind of things that lift us up and give us something to look forward to, let alone something to do in the moment. And as of this Friday, we'll all be able to enjoy Animal Crossing New Horizons together. In fact, be sure to tune in to my live stream of Animal Crossing New Horizons this Friday. I don't have a time for it yet because some of it's going to depend on when I'm able to play the game, if it's available to play at midnight or if I have to wait till the next day, all that jazz. But I do plan to stream at some point on the 20th, Animal Crossing New Horizons and I will be giving away a second copy of the game at some point in that live stream. I don't know if I'm going to do it at the end of the stream, in the middle of the stream. I'm not really sure when it's going to happen. Probably at the end, if I had to guess. But I can't wait to do that giveaway. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be awesome. Obviously, I have the other giveaway where you enter down in the comments. That's really good too. I'm trying to give back at a time when I think there's just a world in trouble, a world in pain, a world in fear. And it feels good to give back to part of that world to give back to our fan base here at Nintendo Prime. And just to have something together to look at and be like, this is a good thing. Animal Crossing New Horizons, even if you're not an Animal Crossing fan, it's a good thing. Doom Eternal is a good thing this week. The Xbox News dropping today is a good thing. Indie showcase tomorrow. Good thing. Let's keep these positive vibes going for the rest of this week. I am the Thunder of a Dance from Nintendo Prime. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and enjoying this video. Our first video in a long time in 4K. True 4K. Pretty crazy. Hopefully I get the color correction right because it's a little, I look a little pastier than I do in real life on the base recording, but that's the magic of editing. All right, folks. I'll catch you guys in the next video.