Oh, look at you. Yes. Hello everyone and welcome to Jurassic World Alive. Well, boy, I say it every time. Every day we start an episode, but this time I really do mean it. We have a lot to go over. We have a lot to unpack because not only is there a new update, that update brings a lot of changes. Some good, some questionable, and we'll definitely get into it because it's kind of changed the game up and it also in a way shows for me anyway, a few of the game's flaws. Okay, so before we take a look in the actual game itself, let's have a look at the update. So there's, I mean, they've added creature markers, which I'm not really fussed about. Really, we're just going to jump straight into the most controversial one, which is the creature updates. So there aren't many creatures updated. Now it did seem for a while. Ooh, I'll take an endlodon while we're here. Why not? It did seem like every update, there was multiple creatures that were changed. So it wasn't just one, two, like three. It was basically every creature in the game was getting health up, attack up, things downed. And it was kind of hard to keep a track of us, especially when it was creatures that were never used. It was like, oh cool, poor source gen two is getting more attack. Late game, it's like, who cares about that, I suppose? But that aside, so there are new creature updates in this game. On this update. And the only ones that have been updated are the most used. And to be fair, I understand that. So let first off, let's start with Sarah Magnus. Here you go, Sarah Magnus. So what's that, like we know, if we just, like I'll quickly just throw my team up, whether I put it in or not, this is my team at the moment. And I think bar one or two creatures, this is the meta. Maybe not Utaran X, and maybe not the deer so much. But pretty, or maybe Scorpius Rex. But mainly, Mortar Rex, Sarah Magnus, Hadasaur Lux, Monal Rhino, possibly Tricasaur and Scorpius Rex, a lot of the meta at the moment. The schoonosaurus hybrid used a lot, Smalanemis, Griper Sutures. You mix up a few Unix here and there. But the updates, let's have a look. So Sarah Magnus, its attack has been lowered by 200 from 1500 to 1300. Its speed has been reduced by one, which could make a big difference. But I don't know, you've got the speed boost attack anyway, so does it make a difference? Apparently. And armor reduced by 5% and critical chance reduced from 20% to 10%. So basically now, I wouldn't say that's game breaking for Sarah Magnus per se. I'd say that mainly what the big changes that's going to happen is you're going to see a lot less crits. Half as many crits, basically. It was 20, now it's 10. So things that, you know, you'd see a swap and if you've got a crit, you'd be like, oh, for God's sake, that's not going to happen anymore. You'll be all right. And the next one is Hadasaur Lux. Now Hadasaur Lux has had a big change. So I almost think Hadasaur Lux might not see as much use now. People who use Hadasaur Lux, they would go for Rampage first turn and then Resilient Rampage next, depending on how much health it had left. So now, instead of having the Resilient Rampage, which meant it made the other the other dinosaur vulnerable and took off block, oh, sorry, cloak. And I think it cleans itself of damage reduction. Now, now it doesn't have that. It has decelerating impact. So it doesn't do twice as much damage as 1.5, I think, Attack 3400, but that's mine. So it's, and also not only that, its attack has been reduced not by 100, but by 150. So my Hadasaur Lux used to have about 2,500 attack. Now it has 2,300. That's a drop of 200, which is also a drop of 400 health when you go for Emergency Heal. The biggest change really is the lower of attack and of course the Resilient Rampage being now decelerating impact. I don't know, I feel like that. We're seeing this update so far with the two dinosaurs out of the four. Is it a change? Big updates to the meta. The next one to get an update is Mortum Rex. Mortum Rex now is resistant to Stunner from 75% to 50%. So way more chance of it being Stunned basic. And also its vulnerability resistance. Now, what would happen, or at least what I would see if I was against the Mortum Rex and I knew I could tank its first hit as a Hadrasaur. I'd hope that the Mortum Rex was faster because a lot of Mortum Rex's are. It would hit me, I'd survive. I'd get the, you know, the vulnerability onto him. And then I'd go for Rampage and completely hit him and KO him in one hit. Now that's not so much the case. My Hadrasaur Lux now can't really KO Mortum Rex in one hit. One of the biggest changes was a good match up between Hadrasaur Lux and Mortum Rex, especially now that, you know, Hadrasaur Lux has no need for it being speed. So everyone took their boosts of speed and put it onto health. So that it could basically tank a Mortum no matter how fast it was. But now Mortum Rex is invincible to a vulnerable. Its vulnerability cannot be touched. It is now 100% immune to him as well as speed. The only thing that it doesn't really have going for it is that, you know, its attack can't be reduced, but then it's got the cleansing in. And the biggest update to the creatures that is is that this guy, Tester Corbis, is a Tester Cornibus. Tester Cornibus. So it was used quite a bit because of its healing ability, its swapping heal ability. And a lot of people didn't like it because it's stalled. Now, it's a pain in the arse to take on if you don't have the right creatures for it. So if you've got something that goes through armor and can crit good like a Mort, if a Mortum Rex is against this thing, it will always be killed in two hits. But it's whether or not you get, you know, you Mortum Rex is out first and then it's out first then they probably want to swap out. Otherwise it's going to die. Unless it's quicker, which even then it's not going to do as much damage. So Mortum Rex would have been 100% in time. Tester Cornibus prior updates to Tester Cornibus caused it to become imbalanced and shoot up in the arena rankings too quickly. No, that was our fault apparently. We have reduced some of this creatures resistances and tweaked its ability kit to allow to work better in the overall meta. To be fair, I didn't really see it too much myself. And if I did, it wasn't too much of a problem. It just seemed like it had a stigma to it now that a lot of high level players could instantly get it. Because high level players get the best rewards because they've got the best creatures. It's basically the rich get richer in this game. Unless you want to spend lots of money you're going to find it hard to progress quickly once you get to the late game. Because like I said, people who got the best creatures end up winning the highest tournaments. I'd like to say that, you know, the Allied Alliance championship sort of thing has a bearing to it, which it does. But you know, you get these tournaments each time and, you know, if you've got loads of high level epic creatures which people can't afford because they're trying to get the main team leveled up, you're not going to see the big box. So what has happened to it? So now it no longer swaps in heal. So you can't swap in swap out sort of thing, which I never really used too much, but I'm sure some people did. And it's resistances. So it was 100% resistance to stun. Now it's 67. This was a big change to me last night when I got stunned. I was like what? And swap out prevention resistance. So I used to be able to swap out all the time. Now it's only 33% chance to swap out. Again, so Gripo, so basically you want to gripe a sutures on your team basically. In my team, the way it is now, test the Corbinus. I put 11 health boosts on. I've put one speed boost on it, I suppose. And I don't want to use it anymore. It can be stunned and it can be swap prevented. And I don't know. It was kind of like oh well, it's going to be used quite a bit. And it, you know, I just wanted to try something different. I wanted to try something that has strategy in it rather than just, you know, A beats B, B beats C, C.  It always felt like that, you know, in these battles. And the meta for me personally got boring very, very quickly. I know the last video I made on this game, I was like wow, this is so cool. I'm having loads of fun with this new meta. And then a month into it, I think it's been probably a month since I made a video in Drossel World Live. I've gotten very bored of it because every battle is determined on what dinosaurs you get. Because sometimes you don't get monlorino and sinus aerotops and other times your enemy does. And it's just, there's really nothing you can do against the swap-ins and you can't predict whether they've got it because, you know, there's a 30% chance that they probably will have it or there's a high chance they'll have it whether they drew it, you know. It's all a look at the draw now. It's a very swap-in meta and I don't know how they're going to fix it. Ooh, what do we go for Badge? 19,000 or Andrew. I think Andrew is low. We'll go for Andrew. We might have time to do both. Hey! So basically, that's it for the creature updates. And how this is having an effect on the actual meta of the game. I'll put this out there. The game does not reward experimentality or experimenting with your team because, let's say, like me, for instance, I really wanted to try out the Testic Orbiness and I wanted to put boosts on it and everything like that. However, now that I've done that and I've experimented and I've tried something out and, you know, maybe it was working. I was having fun with it. And then Lydia have just decided all of a sudden to pull the rug out from underneath me, nerf it quite a bit and now I've got boosts on a dinosaur that I no longer want to use. That's not my fault. I can take those boosts off. However, I'm only going to get 50% back. So I don't want to do that. And it just sucks, man. I really wish that they would make the shuffle thing a permanent stuff, maybe once every month, maybe the start of the month, that everyone can shuffle their boosts. So at least that way there's some sort of consequence. Or if you just want to have complete fun, why not just put boosts on everything? You know, why not, you know, well, be able to take the boosts off without any penalty? Why not make that a case, Lydia? I don't understand.  Especially now that you've changed everything. You see these dinosaurs just flip-flopping all the time. They're changing completely. You guys probably notice that all the time if you dart one thing and then you go back to the screen like, oh yeah, I can't wait to dart the other thing. And what do you know? It's changed complete. Dinosaur. That still happens and it's been in the game for a long time. Still haven't addressed it. But hey, I want to try other things. I fought a guy who had a level 30 comp and he beat me with it. And I had, you know, what do you call it? Apex dinosaurs. But he beat me with a compi because his team was made for it. It was like swapping in and it would heal when it swapped in. And the thing is, compi, there was one tournament that we did not too long ago where the compi was so OP. It was so good. I can't remember which one it was in part of the tournaments here. But one of these, oh, they've completely updated it. Never mind. It was one of these, had the comp unit and it just, it was just so good. And I was thinking, this guy is using a compi in the actual meta. This is cool. I want to try this. However, I've got my other compi hybrid, the unique hybrid. And I've already put about, what, like 15 speed boosts on it so I don't have enough speed boost to put on the compi to make it really good because his compi was like 166 speed or something like that. And I can't do that because I've got boosts on the other creature. But I don't want to take them off because, you know, that creature could be pretty good and I don't know, maybe it'll get a buff in the future and have wasted boosts to do it.  We've had it twice now. And they're just like this floating enigma that whether Ludia wants to do it or not, we just have to wait. Or you can change your boosts now and be penalized for it. Ludia needs to go on record to either say boost reshuffles are never happening again or they are. And it's going to be a common thing. That's what we need clarity on that. And I know that they watch my videos so please, Ludia, some clarity. I'd love it, please. Because I'm now in limbo like do I take my boosts off? Do I not? What do I do? We have new creatures! Something good! Wait! I mean, hold on a second. There we go. New creatures! Hey! Right, so let's have a look. What do we have? And my god, do we have some abominations? Let's have a look, let's have a look. So, all the way to the bottom because I have to scroll all the way down to even see them. Here are the new creatures. So, on the splash screen, there is the newest one which was actually a fan voted for dinosaur. That is the Indotaurus? I think it is, this guy? And the way they promoted it, they had like a dropdown on different menus of there was a different concept of each hybrids. There was like a really good Hadrosawon, which is the one I think I voted for. There was a Flyawon and there was this guy, the Indotaurus which was Carnotaurus and Indominus Rex. Okay, for a start, false advertising because it was up on its hind legs like a regular, you know, Allosaur, T-Rex animation, whatever. However, the one we got is on all fours. I don't want on its all fours. None of this creatures, animation parents are on all fours. I don't want another Indoraptor animation. Doesn't look that great if I'm going to be honest. I'll like or give it a unique one. No? Okay, fair enough. But the second thing about this creature is it's a Carnotaurus. Oh my God. I don't... Carnotaurus is one of these creatures and I've already gotten a sanctuary so I've got to wait 12 hours till I can get it back. That has so many freaking hybrids. I honestly don't know how people have already maxed this out or have enough DNA to even unlock this creature. For a start, this is the first hybrid that you need Carnotaurus up to level 20 so that's a good few thousand DNA just to get it there. And these are its ingredients. Sorry, it's possible hybrids. Indotaurus, which is already going to be 500 Carnotaurus a pop, I think, to attempt it. Then you've got Puritosaurus which itself already has two hybrids which is absolutely crazy. And then you've got Scorpius X-Gen 2 which is 50 Carnotaurus a pop which you need to get to level 20 which is loads. And that already has its own Scorpius X-Gen 3 to hybridize up.  The thing is, me, anyway, where I am Carnotaurus is rare. Like, I've only, I mean, it wasn't at one point I think I got it quite a bit that's how I was able to get Scorpius X-Gen 3 but now you've added another unique into the mix that is solely reliant on Carnotaurus DNA. What were they thinking? It's unbelievable because it will be like 500 if not a thousand a pop I think it's probably 500, maybe even a thousand because I think it's 2,000 for a common but let's have a look at the ones we can get so this is a new one, the Argentrix and I've seen a lot of people asking for Argentavis DNA I don't think, I think I've only doubted it twice but there have been events where Luigi's been very nice to, you know add it to the it was like an incubator so you got like 500 extra or something like that there was some sort of event where I got a lot of Argentavis DNA so that's nice of them Archaeopteryx was another creature that was in a rare event and I just made sure every time I saw an Archeopteryx I doubted it, that's where I got 4,000 but what's weird about these hybrids or this update in particular is all the new creatures or the new hybrids that have been added to the game are using really rare DNA to find so this guy, I mean Argentavis and Archaeopteryx are, you know, dinosaurs although I should say one of them's a dinosaur but prehistoric creatures that have either been recently added to the game are very hard to find Argentavis being the very hard to find and the same with Archaeopteryx I don't think I've ever bumped into it in the wild maybe once or twice but I mainly rely on these guys or to get these guys in events through the week basically or incubators or something like that and it's just kind of crazy and this isn't the only one all of them are super hard to come by oh that looks cool I like that this is a fluffier version of Archaeopteryx and Scratlia looks like a magpie kind of creature so here we go, we've got a little above strike so HP over 601, cleanses speed decrease and critical decrease increases critical hit lasting for two turns and does damage okay, if it is threatened then it does cleanse itself and does get more increase and crit chance for 35%, lasting three turns okay, so it's better threatened in other words, evasive rampage okay, not bad and fearless alert, another flock dependent, cleanse increase speed so cleanse itself increase speed by 10%, lasting for two turns 75% chance to dodge lasting two turns okay and all opponents reduce damage for 50% what's its speed ooh, 127 you see that would be a really good dinosaur let's try that, that looks kinda cool but I don't have the coin and I don't have the DNA for it and threatened, does it heal itself it looks like it heals itself increase speed by 10% 100% chance to dodge that's good and what does it do of two attacks, lasting two turns and rally, so it heals itself if it's threatened ooh, I like it now normally well actually the other alert flock or whatever, I think with the compies it needs to be threatened as well, below 1200 health which is if one dies so that's pretty decent it does have delayed cunning rampage, okay swapping distraction, good alert on escape, it heals itself if threatened, it rallies 600, otherwise it doesn't okay or is that on bay escape yeah, I like it so it presents 75% taunt, okay rent, meh, crit reduction meh, it's reductions aren't too great but that could be pretty decent in the right hands with the right boosts that would be really cool, I'm saving one I'm saving one because it is an absolute abomination I can't believe they've done this but this is the core heist this creature ooh, hey it's lovely yeah this creature ooh, it looks like it had fingers for wings but I don't think it does the common is, well was as I've recorded in this video out in the wild so I have been darting it a lot a whole bunch, because I'm like well it's one of the common, I think the best way to play this game is if you've got a common that isn't maxed out, just dart it and you'll see if I go into the alliance contribution I'll be all darted and all because last night, I may or may not have stayed up for four or five hours just trying to get Draco Rex to unlock the new unique hybrid because I actually don't spend money on this game as crazy as other maybe content creators do, or hack the game at the very start and got no penalty for it either I didn't GPS spoof it unlike other people who now still play the game and hack other games oh no, I don't do that actually don't, but other people do and still play this game, I don't know how I don't know what Ludi's criteria for content creators being allowed to make this game, I don't know oh you hack the game at one point it's fine, we'll just hope nobody saw it anyway I don't mean to point fingers it's the way it is, and apparently Ludi let people get away with it, so there you go oh they don't, but it depends if you've gotten a following they do apparently there you go, a ten for final, so let's look at this, I've never used the eagle that's why I've got so much DNA, I've never fused it but if you know it has a hybrid I don't see why not, let's have a look oh look at you, oh they got beakies now oh they look lethal, 130 speed though damn that's quick and the flock creature I mean a good thing to take on flock creatures is Gemini Titan or Dennis Maxima or Mortem even, I guess but you know, yeah it is what it is both of them have, or three of them have attacks that can hit everything, and you're probably going to kill two creatures or at least go through one and damage the other precise piercing strike okay fearless alert, which you've seen before precise impact and run I like it, yes restricted group destruction again, what I mean what the meta is right now is to put loads of dinosaurs in your game or in your team that are fast and can swap out and other dinosaurs like Monalorino and Sarah Magnus which means that if they swap in they do damage or basically if anything get things that swap out and then when other things swap in they do damage or get boosts or buffs or something like that, that's what the meta is right now and don't even take my word for it Lydia will probably change it and god knows what next later restricted group destruction, okay alert roost, so on a swap you cleanse or HP over 1200, you get self 75% chance to dodge lasting two turns, increased critical hit chance okay, but if you're threatened then you do the dodge again except for 100% chance to dodge whatever's coming in so these are basically negating Monalorino and Sarah Magnus that's what these are used for so if something swaps out to swap in you're good increased critical chance 50% for two turns okay that's it, so you're just gonna if you're gonna get hit then you're okay, basically if something swaps out to swap in stun, great 100% love to see it swap prevention, 100% love to see it and rend I guess quite a pursuit you so suppose but really not many other dinosaurs rely on rend, if I'm gonna be honest maybe the thick load phallus thing but apart from that yes, that's actually usable, only thing is I'm gonna run out of the lizard thing very quickly and in fact I do have a little bit of time to have a look around to see if I can just grab maybe one more, here it is oh that's in the wild okay well we'll keep that, is there anyone here we go we got one out, I'm probably gonna try and just max this guy out because well they're quite rare, saying that though we just so won in the wild, so we're gonna dart a couple of these and I, you know what I genuinely enjoy playing this game, I really do and I hate you know the reason why I rag on it and I talk about the problems with Jurassic World Live is because I care about it I want to see it do good because I genuinely have so much fun in this game the only problem is you know, the matter at the moment it's kind of sucky and the way that things get nerfed or buffed well and not really randomly but things that are used quite a bit get nerfed and buffed and you know people put a lot of boosts in them like I have, I've got a Mortem Rex with 20 attack boosts on it and now you make it, well you make it invulnerable which is good but you have to change it stun so now it can be stun, so monlorino and cyno saratops have a way better chance of taking it out especially sarah magna sorry does this sarah magna, I don't know what it said but basically sarah magna so you can swap in, do a hit maybe stun it and then what it just goes for speed boost yes, yes it will aww dammit it's a little bit far away but hey yo, at least we had a look hopefully I don't get taken back to the top but I will won't I you buck as you so one of the new changes to this game is that you can put markers on dinosaurs which I guess is a good way of you being able to find it and you can probably sort through the markers possibly, so we click on a dinosaur you click the little flag and there you go a nice little touch, something that's not too bad, next thing I would say you add to the game is a history ludia add a history of things you've darted you kind of done that with a high score because people like to keep tabs on how well they've darted make it more enjoyable, have a look have a look how many times you've darted a dinosaur have a look, you know your most recent, a bit like pokemon has with the most recently caught and you know, that could help with somebody saying look I came across this thing, look it was right there history, I don't know just some, you know, just things to make the darting aspect of it more enjoyable because this game is very battle centric and boost centric and build you know, strategy, so make the darting fun, you know maybe people just like to go out and dart and collect dinosaurs I mean I think ok so, yes, let's address the elephant in the room or the giant monstrosity in the room, this thing now when it came to dressing world the game, I always wanted weird bonkers hybrids, I wanted dinosaurs with two heads, you know this, this oh my god, the megalotops it's so bonkers, I genuinely love it I do, also it might have said, well, carnitaurus is in a raid you're right, but I didn't expect to get another freaking dinosaur that would need carnitaurus so heavily so, yeah, my bad and I put carnitaurus in a sanctuary just because I was like I don't know, it's for carnitaurus then but I'm being penalized for that now because it has a hybrid although I should have known that, I think they might have released it to be fair but anyway, here we go, we go 30, 30, 30, I'm at a 20, ok well, another 40 would be great, a hundred would be amazing, I'd like that look at this guy, look at him I mean, it's sloth, but then it has like a monoceratops head and again, nuzutoceratops being another creature that has a fair few hybrids so this is another hybrid with a new creature the new sloth and nuzutoceratops another dinosaur that has had a you know, megaloceratops or testiculbinus or whatever needs the hybrid for nuzutoceratops to make or something like that so here it is, the hard to find kind of hybrid and wow, look at this thing Jesus I kinda like it, it's got a bit of an owl look to it with those eyes ok, so it's it's got 10% armor, 10% crit not too bad Determine strike cleanse, reduce damage and damage over time pretty decent for a regular attack and goes through freaking block I mean, dodge target highest speed, remove speed critical and damage increases wait, critical and damage increases ok, remove all of that that's really freaking good reduce critical chance 100% for two turns last one turn reduce damage 50% last one turn, precise attack and vulnerable for one attack wow, what the and the fact it has camouflage as well is it an epic? it must be an epic, yeah it's an epic wow, ok, cautious rampage another really good one the camouflage is distracting stunning alert, ok now is that a pat, is that on swap in? I think that's on swap in it should make a bit more clear so you swap it in HP over 900, highest damage 100% chance of stun so you will stun them if they can be stunned if they got no resistance or chance to stun ok, so if they got no health then there's less chance and they have an armor piercing counter and they get camouflage on escape what? what is this nonsense? oh, wow ok, so you think 3% chance to swap out on speed reduction decrease 75% chance yeah yeah, it's not got great resistances it's got great moves but this is a dinosaur that I feel like or creature that I have weird abomination hybrid looking thing that is probably gonna get a hybrid itself so I'm not gonna worry too much about leveling up if I was the highest ranked player and I had a gazillion bucks because I win everything and a gazillion coin because I win everything then maybe I can have fun but I can't because I don't wanna spend hundreds and hundreds in the game and I don't think I should I don't think I should have to spend that money to experiment but everything about this game like I said is just built to not it's to stifle your creativity it's like ok, this is your team you work on your team, you don't try anything else and that's it and even the field guide app which is the app that you use to, what do you call it to test out builds beforehand even that isn't their own app that's like somebody else made that so, I don't know man I don't know, I was just having a quick look to see yes, another one get him, another one in the wild wow they like that one don't they I like that one too wow so yeah like I said we got loads to go over we haven't even went over the what's coming up this week because it's a really good week I mean the dinosaurs they sent out the wrong dinosaur sheet to promote and then they were like oh god no it's actually this one which isn't as good but there's still a lot to grab so before we do let's just level up this guy and then see what we've got coming up in the roster this week also do not forget we have a link in the description below to get 50 free books in the game don't forget that it's very handy and if you're watching this on the device that you play just click on that and it'll open up you'll claim your reward and then you can do whatever so here we go we got four rex so this is probably a dinosaur that we're gonna see a lot of I don't even know what its moves are but I'm expecting it swaps in it can either stun or do damage that's probably what it's gonna do and we'll also have a rampage and run move oh man it's just gonna be killer this thing's really gonna be killer that's why I'm going for it it's one of the uniques that we've got so far it's probably gonna be the one that's the most likely to be used a lot I think into Taurus not so much I've actually looked at its moves and it's not that great and I was also very tempted if we look at Phosphoracus to level it up actually because I've already got level 26 because I was actually gonna use it in my team because if you look at its moves instant rampage is great then you've got delayed rampage and run and you gotta swap in chances done it's just really good and it's a bit fragile for the fact that the swapping meta is so apparent right now and it has its own swapping ability and it has a rampage and run yes, why not right it's just a bit weak in its armor which has none of and its health but we've got what we've almost gone on 246 we've got three more pops to this and oooh that is really good I really don't think we're gonna unlock it but you never can tell in the next video, don't worry there we go what we need another 100 and we've got one more pop we're so close to getting another pop but 20 we'll definitely get it next time and have a look at it it's got weird spines running down its back I don't even know where those come from so let's have a look here see if we've got any what's it called, any DNA to collect and I don't know whether anyone's done the recruit thing and they put it back in anyway, we'll just quickly go to sanctuaries and maybe it'll refresh dude, we got any Draco? or does it not want to load the Draco? brilliant, hold on apparently you need to go into the sanctuary you need to click on a dinosaur pet it, go back and then hopefully it'll fix it oh yeah, there you go oh I didn't get that one oh there we go, so what was it get the required amount of direct hits common DNA and fire I thought I would do that so here are the events we'll not go over Monday to Tuesday because we've just missed that one so Wednesday to Thursday you've got the Archaeopteryx, the Toujongasaurus the Sungaptras and the Quetzar if I was going to be honest I'd probably go for the Archaeopteryx that's probably the best one to go for especially when it's got that new hybrid that seems pretty decent Friday, this is where it starts to get really good Friday you've got Pachycephalosaurus, Compsognathus there you go, get it it's really good, if we get that tournament again Compsognathus is just a really good creature and I was quite tempted to maybe max her but again I don't have the coin or the boost so, thanks Lydia and Acrocanthosaurus really you've got 9 attempts, I'd go for Compi if I'm going to be honest maybe Acro if you're wanting one of the hybrids I'd go for Compi Saturday you've got the Scutoflution Bagunga, Gunga, Dunga out of those, I don't even know I think the Kula Bagunga is what you need for Gemna Titan it could be wrong but I think maybe that's what you need for it I don't know about the other one and Sunday, unfortunately you had one chance with these and it's either and talk to Gubernator or Smilingemmies, now most people will probably have Smilingemmies pretty high level because of the raids I don't because I just don't want to use it I should have been doing the raids to be honest and maybe I will, now on I think I've realised that I should have been doing the Conitorus raids and therefore I would have got loads of DNA and I would have been way closer to getting the new hybrid but it is what it is I'll do it from now on but the thing is, Joss will live accidentally posted this but instead of Smilingemmies it was the Titanoboa constrictor or whatever it was the unique hybrid and that would have been really sweet, hard to do, but really sweet but no, no, we don't get that we got Smilingemmies again but really out of all of these it looks like on the Saturday you might get Nemo'd because Wednesday, Thursday, Friday you got Attack Boost Help Boost, Speed Boost so we should be getting Attack Boost today as well as a Tujongosaurus incubator that kind of looks like what it is other incubators, you've got a Kompi freaking incubator on the Friday get him, that's awesome I love Kompi, Kompi so good I love Kompi like if there's one dinosaur that I could just max up 30 and get all the boosts on that I want Kompi would be the one, definitely and then on the weekend Saturday Sunday you've got the lunchbox things which I think is, maybe you only need to open one and you get the whole reward I'm not too sure but either way, it's there right with that being said let's quickly dawd an Urlicosaurus gen 2 ooh, yeee so guys, let me know what your thoughts are on the update because it does feel like the more stuff that Lydia puts into the game the more it kind of annoys people and the more they change already we've seen two people from what's it called the, oh what's the game press that's it, I think there's now been two that put out proper twit longers on why they've decided to leap the game and fair enough I honestly feel like, oh yes more more if you've unlocked everything and you've played this game's death and it probably would be boring it probably would be and I think that's the reason why you know, you pay to win works and it doesn't work because you spend all that money, you get what you want and then you're like, now what I don't know I guess if you've unlocked everything you've got everything up to level 30 or everything that you want to I probably would be bored too but what we'll do is we'll jump into like a battle, see what because they've just recently reset the tournament so the leaderboards that is don't know what I got I didn't do too bad in one of the tournaments I got 375 books I think it was hey look at that thing nobody wants you, bye bye right let's do a battle shall we alright come on what we got, what we got let's have a look it's not too bad it's not too bad what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and line up Eutoronix with the Sarah Magnus so I can get a good swap out here the rampage coming through, interesting interesting now I don't mind if Tricorex dies here or Tricosaurus ooh ooh I think he'll go for the greater healing rampage or emergency heal I don't know if he can kill me even with my vulnerability I don't think he can, I think he'll go for the heal here I think he will, he's probably just going to try and get me down a little bit more so that something can swap in stun me because I'm a Tricor which means I have no stun resistance if I was him that's probably what I would do let's see so he's going to do more damage to me there and I guess he could do a rampage now now what do I do here I just accept being hit is that what I do, or do I switch to Scorpius Rex? I think I switched to Scorpio I mean I kind of felt like something big was going to come in didn't expect the Mortem Rex I was actually quite tempted for the invincibility there that would have been completely wasted however this actually has worked out too bad he could swap back to Hadrosaur expecting me just to go for a little hate because that's what I would technically do instead of going for this big one but you know what in case he does want to switch back to Hadrosaur looks getting emergency heal off I'm just going to go for this do a lot of damage so at least next turn I'm going to kill him because it doesn't matter even if he goes for cleansing which he did do and he did get through I think oh no he didn't he didn't get through my block I'm just going to go for this one I mean it makes more sense I mean is this a speed yeah 132 is a big speed can I put like a little thing on his is that going to be on my Mortem or am I just like switched off and put a flag on his creature that would be so funny I think it's probably done it for me though like ha ha a purple flag for you your trigo could be purple as well ha ha so he's got his own here now what do I do what do I do kind of tempted just to switch to I'm just going to switch this trigo not the best tactic I'm just going to put off trigo he can do that not too fast I'm just going to go for a regular hit here because he might go for invincibility and at least then I'm going to yeah at least then I'm going to do some damage to him and I could have went for the bigger hit made him vulnerable but nah I'm not too fast not too fast about that okay okay so now now I'm actually quite tempted to go for oh it's a Mortem why do I think it's a Sarah Magnus I saw there was an apex so let's just do this then at least if Mortem Rex dies we can get the Utara next to switch into Scorpus Rex Gen 3 I think we're pretty safe to win this one I could be eating my words here but getting a Mortem Rex that's faster than yeah I think he's clear I think he's run nope I'm done he went no that's what he did oh yeah he's ragequit he's ragequit yeah I don't blame him I mean well I do blame him what was his other damage was does he really see my Mortem and go that's it I quit in a model of Rhino was he quit with that or was he just trying to delay my time let's see he might be you might just go for I'm going to go for oh I should have went for the cleansing ah damn because if he has disconnected that's what he'll default to bugger yeah well you can't win him all really I suppose I mean the highest I got was 5000 or 6000 and something I do occasionally very rarely but occasionally get into what you might call it the new blah shores I've gotten there once before stayed for maybe two games and then fell back down don't stay in there for long and you know what can I say the game doesn't want me to take things off my dinosaurs without penalizing me and I don't want that to happen so although this is the one but we've done it's a bit of a shame that it turned out this way ah but there you go we made a person uh rage quit there you go well done rojata or rojda 956 well done he's like no I'm quitting anyway guys we're going to leave it up here and maybe next time we'll get the new phosphor whatever it is uh unlocked but until next time I'll see you cuties later oh baby babies we should say bye bye


This is a map of Los Angeles. I want to route from Santa Monica to Griffith Observatory. Google estimates it'll take 39 minutes. But how does it do this? That's exactly what we'll be looking at today. So this is going to be a three-pass explanation where we start out with the big picture and drill down into the details. So buckle up. Now before we get started though, can you please give this video a like and please do subscribe for videos like this. Because I need to grow an audience and I want to grow an audience. Please do subscribe. Thank you and like. Back to the video. Let's start pass one with defining our problem. We want to determine the time taken to go from Santa Monica to Griffith Park. There are many points of uncertainty here that make it difficult to predict directly. So we can break this route down into road segments. And now we need to find the time to traverse each road segment, then sum them up in order to get the ETA. Simple enough, I think it is. Now what kind of model do we want here? The most straightforward solution is using a feedforward neural network. The input would be some encoded representation of the road segment and the output could be a single neuron that gives the time to traverse. So theoretically, I could pass in all the road segments along with the path one at a time and then get the corresponding ETAs one at a time or rather corresponding time to traverse one at a time. And then we can sum those times in order to get ETA of the total trip. Sounds like a nice implausible solution. Or is it? No, there's one problem here. Feedforward neural networks require the samples to be independent of each other. But with road segments, traffic on one road can easily influence the traffic and ETA of the neighboring roads. So there is some dependence between the samples. A good remedy for this would be to use neural networks that can parse sequence data like recurrent neural networks or even a transformer. In the transformer case, we could potentially use the encoder. Pass in the road segment simultaneously, get their corresponding embedding vectors simultaneously and pass each vector through a feedforward neural network to get the ETA for every road segment. Now I haven't seen this information online. This is just me speculating, but I do think that this is a possible implementation solution. But the main downside here is that we would need a lot of data. Transformers have no understanding of how road segments are related to each other. It needs to learn this relationship from scratch with a ton of examples because even in this case, two road segments that are extremely far apart from each other have equal say in being related to each other than two segments that are extremely close to each other that we would expect. If a transformer needs to understand this on its own, it's going to take a lot of compute power, a lot of time and a lot of data. And this only becomes infeasible for super large networks like roads. The cool thing here though is that we have a starting point. We know that roads adjacent to each other are more related than roads that are nowhere near connected. This is important prior information that we can potentially use with transformers. And the most intuitive way to surface this knowledge of roads is with graphs. So graphs consist of vertices and edges. In the context of Google Maps, let's take every road segment to be a vertex. And if two road segments are connected to each other, their corresponding nodes will be connected by an edge in the graph. So we can essentially create a graph for all of Los Angeles or any section of any city that you want. The input to the graph network is a node network. Once trained, we will have access to the embeddings of the road segments. Each of the road segments along with the desired path is piped to a simple feed for neural network. And the output is a single neuron that describes the time to traverse each road segment. We sum up the times to get the trip ETA. So that's a big overview and all for pass one that we have here where we intuitively define the problem and have a plausible model architecture. Now let's get into some details with pass two. For the graph network, we take every road segment as a node. And they are connected by an edge if the roads are connected. And the goal now is to learn the embeddings for the nodes. That is the road segments. And this is done by an iterative process called message passing. So let's talk about that with a much simpler example. Consider a graph with just two nodes A and B that point to a third node C. We're going to perform message passing for node C. The two sub steps here are first is create the message and then update the state of node C. Creating the message for node C involves taking the inbound nodes to C and applying some operation on the vectors. So it could be something as simple as a summation operation. So essentially we would just be summing the vectors A and B. Next we take this message vector, take the current vector C and pass it into another function to get the new state of C. This could be again as simple as another addition function. In the end, we just need an output of a vector that is representative of the embeddings of C. But perhaps the summation operations that we're using here might be a little too weak to actually get there and actually to get the embeddings that we need. But instead of addition operations in both places, we could potentially use transformers instead. So how this would work would be that, you know, we can take the two vectors that is for node A and node B that are inbound to C and then we can take information about the connecting edges, which would be AC and BC. We could throw all of this into the transformer encoder and this delivers the encodings of these vectors simultaneously. Next they are used by the transformer decoder along with the current node vector C in order to get the next state of node vector C. This is most likely to be a better in-term embedding of C than just like, you know, simple addition operations. And this entire flow that I just now described is message passing for one node that is node C and only for one time step. And this process happens simultaneously for all nodes in the graph network because each node state, the next state I should say, only depends on its previous state. In this way, every node's neighbors are encoded into its embeddings and we can execute this multiple times to get better and better embeddings. So on the first go of message passing, every node knows about its neighbors. On the second iteration, every node knows about its neighbor's neighbors and it's encoded into the embedding. And on the third iteration, even their neighbors are encoded into every node's embedding and so on. In the context of row networks, message passing allows each road vector to contain information about its adjacent roads, which intuitively makes sense. After some X passes of message passing, we have the road network embeddings then. Now, since the orientation of the roads doesn't change much unless some major construction happens, we can store these road embeddings into a lookup dictionary that we can use during inference time. Now these road vectors can be used to store road vectors contain information about location of the road itself and its relationship with the other roads. But we might need some more real-time information to get more accurate results, such as like traffic information, speed limit information, accidents. All of this can be incorporated too. And this is where we pass all of this information into a feed forward neural network to get the most up-to-date time to traverse the segment. I hope all of that was clear and this completes pass two of the explanation of the core of message passing. Now on to pass three. How do we train this entire behemoth of a network? What I mean by this is, how do we learn the parameters of the two major models used here? The first being the transformer, which gets the encoding of the road segments via message passing. And then how do we also train the network, which uses the road segment embeddings to compute the time to traverse the said road segment? So how do we train this? So typically training happens via back propagation. And in order to train, we also need an objective to minimize or optimize. In this case, when a car actually traverses the route, we have the ground truth. And so the loss for this sample as a Santa Monica to Griffith would be the absolute difference between the actual time taken to traverse the route and the sum of the model outputs for all the road segments that are along this route. So it's absolute minus predictions. And we want this number to be as low as possible. And lookie here, we now magically have an objective function that we want to minimize.  So we can learn by back propagation of the weights through the feedforward net all the way back to the transformer network. Sound fun? Sweet. Now to wrap up, how exactly do we make inference and predictions of ETA? Well, step one would be to first determine the start and end points on your map. Step two, use some algorithm to find a path. Now, this doesn't have to be the shortest path, it just has to be some path. I haven't touched up on this part much, but we could find the shortest path in a similar way that we're doing here. But honestly, this might be a little convoluted and it might warrant its own video. Let me know if you want that video. For now, let's just say that we have access to the path that we want to take. Step three would be to determine the road segments along the path. Step four, during the train phase, we could have stored all the road segments and embeddings into a dictionary, like I mentioned before. So during inference now, all we need to do is just reference each road segment by ID to that dictionary store and get the corresponding road segment embedding or road segment embeddings. Step five is query some real time features of traffic, accident speed limits and pass them all along with the embedding vector into a feed for neural network to get the expected time of traversing that segment. And step six would be to sum all of the times to get the ETA from start to finish. And that's it for the main algorithm. But wait, there's more. In order to get more accurate time estimates, we can further defy these road segments into smaller segments. Typically, this isn't feasible since the computation power increases by several fold on doing so, but it's Google, they can do it and they mostly do. And it's because of this that their ETAs are pretty stellar and on point. And that's it. Please do note though that a lot of the ideas presented in this video are pure speculation. They don't really mention too much of transformers being used anywhere in their networks, but I do think that all the ideas presented are a plausible solution of how Google could actually present and come up with ETAs. With all the scant resources that have available and I have referenced for this video online, I put them in the description down below. But do let me know your thoughts. Do you think this is how Google could work? I would love to know. Until next time, take it easy. Please do give this video a like, share and subscribe and I will see you very soon. Take care.


Good evening. Welcome everybody and a special welcome to our friends and partners in the Living Knowledge Network across the UK. My name is Jamie Andrews. I'm the lead here at the British Library for our cultural programming and our learning and education work. I'm delighted, we're all delighted to welcome the forward prizes for poetry to the British Library for the 2020 prize giving ceremony. You can probably see I'm here in the British Library in London. We are reopening our sites here in London and the north of England and here in St Pancras many of our reading rooms and our exhibitions are now open and our major new show Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights launched just this Friday. But for obvious reasons our cultural events programming has gone digital this year and that's of course different. We will miss the warmth of all your human presence and company and energy but it's by no means a diminution. Indeed it's quite the opposite. Already with our digital online program we found that we're reaching more people than ever we could in a physical theatre reaching more people from across more of the UK and in fact even further beyond and in a more open and I think inclusive way. So those circumstances have forced our hand. We hope, we truly believe that this year's forward prizes will be the biggest and the best yet. Forward prizes were founded by William Seacart. They are run by the Forward Arts Foundation and they are of course the most prestigious awards for new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. And each year the prizes and the wonderful forward book of poetry you can see here they distill and celebrate the best of the year's poetry for us. It's actually the first year that the library has partnered with Forward and we're delighted to have done so and I'd just like to thank everyone who's made this event happen. My colleagues here at the library in our cultural events team, thanks to our friends and our partners at the Forward Arts Foundation, thanks to all the judges and an especially big thank you to all the poets reading tonight for your contributions that we've digitally stitched together in a way that I hope is worthy of the way that you bring words and ideas together so beautifully in your shortlisted works. Have a wonderful evening. I know you will. And now with great pleasure I'll hand over to the founder of the Forward Prizes William Seacart. Thank you Jamie and thank you to the British Library for being our partner and the host for this year's Forward Prizes for Poetry. I say prizes because we've got three prizes, the best single poem, the best first collection and the best collection in this our 29th year. Before we start just a few thank yous, first of all to bookmark content, formally forward publishing who've been sponsoring the prize since its inception. That's 29 years of art sponsorship, something that happens very rarely in life and we continue to be immensely grateful. We're also grateful to the late Felix Dennis whose estate continues to sponsor the best first collection prize and it's very generous of them. Thank you very very much. Most of all though I need to thank our judges the chair Alexandra Harris, the poets Kim Moore, Roger Robinson, David Weeter and writer and journalist Leif Abothnott. Now over to you the chair of our judges Alexandra. Hello it's really thrilling to be here at the culmination of a long and absorbing judging process and to have the chance to celebrate with all the digital sparkle we can muster the amazing richness and vitality of this year's forward shortlisted poetry. I knew that it was going to be a major experience reading several hundred poetry collections back to back. I didn't know of course that we'd be reading day in day out as the world changed utterly around us and as I sat in my chair I I did sometimes think should I be out doing something else and then magic would happen on the page and I'd hear the voices of the poets sounding through time and and space and and be certain all over again about the power of literature in the hardest times its capacity to carve out alternative spaces of concentration and imagination. It's way of helping us to unpick the baffling reconfigurations of of the present so I'm so glad that we were able to carry on especially since many of the books have not had or the usual fanfare that comes with book launch parties and festivals. Thanks to the irrepressible conviction of Susanna Herbert and the tremendous dedication and foresight of Holly Hopkins the books arrived on judges doorsteps 50 60 at a time judging meetings went ahead on zoom and we were able to host a series of gripping meet the poet interviews. We read poetry of exquisite stillness and reflection and poetry that seemed to sound out like a chorus charged with the rhythms of common feeling. We were drawn to focused craftsmanship and startles by how often that kind of carefulness cohabited with wild energies and and force fields that knocked us straight off the beaten path. We all had different passions as judges and bought different bodies of knowledge and experience and of course that's just what made our discussions so exhilarating. Everything on these short lists was debated and fought for. I really want to thank my fellow judges for their feats of rereading and weighing up and for the eloquence with which they advocated what mattered to them. Now let me introduce first of all the short list for the forward prize for best single poem 2020. Each of the poems you're about to hear establishes its own intricate dynamics and I hope you'll enjoy the sheer range. Fiona Benson bends down to talk to a cockroach on equal terms in her poem Mama Cockroach I Love You which appeared in Poetry London. Malika Booker gauges the unpredictable strength of inner storm winds in a poem about love and care The Little Miracles published by Magma. Reggie Claire's Uncertainties was published in Mislexia and it won the Poetry Book Society's Women's Poetry Competition. It's a sustained questionnaire that can never finally be answered. Noctan for a Moving Train published by The Poetry Review is a haunting piece of work from Belarusian writer Valzina Mort with a political charge or the stronger for its mutedness and Sarah Zhang mixes comedy absurdity disgust and tenderness in dick pics which appeared in the moth. My name's Fiona Benson and this poem is called Mama Cockroach I Love You it's part of a longer sequence of insect poems recorded for Arts and Culture at the University of Exeter as part of an audio pamphlet. Mama Cockroach I Love You because you cozy with the aunties in your reeking slums and are intimate and sweet.  Because you are joyfully promiscuous. Because you pouch your young and hide them in the sweaty creases of the house near superating food so they'll hatch to a feast. Or keep your eggs with you in a special purse shaped like a kidney bean and clutch them fast. Or reinsert them into your abdomen and womb them there. Or carry them as yolks and give live birth. Then feed your pale brood secretions from your anus or your armpit glands like milk or deep in the flesh of a rotten log pass them a bolus of predigested food mouth to mouth.   Because strokenly you caress your offsprings backs and gentle them with pretty pheromones and chirps.  Because you would leave your body for your offspring to dine upon all the liquors and gravy of the obscene world. Your work in the crannies delivered to the living. Because you are despite all rumours mortal. And what if you are crushed before your eggs can be delivered. What if your sisters drive you hissing out. What if your kitchen is fumigated. What if the mongoose the lizard the snake a muscular tongue prying at the warm and greasy interstices of your stubborn occupancy takes you in its mouth. Someone must care for the dirt. My name is Malika Booker and this poem is called The Little Miracles. Since I found mother collapsed on the kitchen floor we siblings have become blindfolded mules harvested to carts filled with strain lumbering through a relentless storm wanting to make our mother walk on her own again wanting to rest our palms on her left leg and arm like Jesus but constellations do not gather like leaves in a teacup so what miracle of what blood of what feeble wishes do we pray happy no nails hammer plywood building a coffin to house her dead weight happy her journey crawls as we her children hold out like drought holds out for rain learning what it is like to begin again start with the the the dog the cat the date the ear the stroke the brain the fenced in walls she struggles to this mantle brick on brick she cannot break this be reason watching her left hand in her lap a useless echo we chew bitter bush swallow our howling storm reluctantly splintering under the strain of our mother's alien bed rest we smile at each of our feats right hand brushing her teeth in late evening head able to lift without the aid of a neck brace her offspring's names Malika philip and quacy our chance repeated over and over as if staking us children as her life's work her blessings showing how much we are loved the day she sings walk with me oh my lord over and over walk with me oh my lord through the darkest night and i sing with her my notes flat to her soprano just as you change the wind and walked upon the sea conquer my living lord the storm that threatens me and we sing and sing until she says malice please stop the cat wailing before your voice make rain fall and look how the weather nice outside air then we laugh and laugh until almost giddy our mood light momentarily in this sterile room where each spoonful of pureed food slipped into her mouth like a tender offering takes us a step away from a cheating from the feeding tubes and we're so thankful for each miniscule miracle my name is Reggie Claire the following is an extract from the beginning of uncertainties the poem is written in multiple choice format and i've dedicated it to my sister Marian Vera who died three years ago almost to the day of this recording uncertainties my sister once gave me a an ultramarine silk scarf b a star-shaped candlestick of clear glass c a guardian angel made from clay and driftwood my sister loved a her family b her partner c kayaks my sister's partner loved her his family kayaks my sister and her partner loved adventure sports water to sea my sister and her partner had been on sea kayaking trips before we're familiar with that coastline we're offered a guided tour trusted their abilities and experience my sister sent her children a whatsapp message saying how excited she was about that day's 10 kilometer kayaking trip a picture of the mirror smooth sea a selfie in a swim vest emojis of dolphins my sister's postcard to our parents was sent before the kayaking trip was sent by hotel staff after the kayaking trip arrived 10 days after the kayaking trip before her funeral my sister died on friday 13th on saturday 14th my sister's partner did not die on friday 13th on saturday 14th my sister died at sea alone soon after sunset in a storm in the dark in a storm at dawn after a storm in sunlight on the morning after a storm my sister's partner clung to his kayak at sea alone from sunset to fall stone throughout the storm from sunset to sunrise throughout the storm and the calm hours beyond from sunset to sunlight morning throughout the storm and the calm hours beyond my sister died because she and her partner had spent time on a series of beaches along the coast picnicking shell gathering sunbathing resting she and her partner had spent time exploring a disused submarine tunnel under the cliffs she was afraid of the dark inside the tunnel and so she sang seated in her kayak as a partner listened sang her heart out for the soaring echo of it and the echo could not bear to lose her and her voice my name is valgena mort and i'm reading my poem nocturne for a moving train the trees i've glimpsed from the window of a night train were the saddest trees they seemed about to speak then vanished like soldiers the hostesses handed out starched linens for snow passengers bent over small icons of sandwiches in a tall glass a spoon mixed sugar into coffee banging its silver face against the facets the window reflected back a figure struggling with white sheets the posts with names of towns promised a possibility of words for what flew by in lit up windows people seem to move as if performing surgery on tables chestnut parks side the size of creatures capable of speech radiation and the etymology of soil directed into the future prepared a thesis of the new origins of old roots on secret disfiguring missions of misspellings on the shocking betrayal of apples on the uncompromised loyalty of cesium my childish voice my hands my feet all my things that live on the edges of me shna the chestnut parks i about to speak but now they vanished i was extracted from my apartment block chained to the earth with iron playgrounds where iron swings rose like oil wells i was extracted before i could take a language out of air with my childish feet i was extracted by beaks storks cranes see the conductor punching out eyes of sleeping passengers what is it about my face that turns into a document into a ticket stretched out by a neck why does unfolding this starched bedding feel like skinning someone invisible why can the spoons head down in glasses stop screaming the chestnuts i about to speak my name is sarah ime tiang and i'm going to be reading dick pics two dicks sitting in my daughter's inbox like men without hats waiting for any door to open citing a stranger's penis used to be rare remember raincoats like a flash of lightning like a scratch and wind ticket sometimes glittering knockoff watches sometimes a soul flapping penis shivering in the electric air an overcooked hotdog an aborted fetus a close-up of a thumb rolled bologna on a lonely deli plate we have whole monologues for vaginas but i can only imagine a penis as silent which isn't the same as listening the lighting is never good harsh taken in haste no one ever drapes a dick in folds of linen the head never looks back one pearl earring shining instilled patients on every tunnel schoolyard crumbling brick wall a graffitied cock standing on balls pointing to the night sky like a fallen constellation women were for portraits nudes lounging stuffed into frames luminous and arch they were heads and breasts and feet and buttocks they'll never speech you must pay and cross the velvet rope to see them the penis stood alone in filthy bars and bathrooms in wooded parks the shadowed alleys whistling a moonlight tune now every penis is everywhere like posters for one act to play plastered on every telephone pole bench building on every mailbox on your kitchen chair so that you have to push through piles of them great snow drifts of penises just to reach across the room and tuck a stray hair back into your daughter's braid thank you to all the poets we've just heard thanks to Fiona Benson for those foul gravies and empathetic beauties of mama cockroach i love you to melika booker for the little miracles with its lightness and its weight and its feeling for the rhythms of care to reggae claire for the tamped down plainness and between the lines surges of doubt and grief in her multiple choice poem uncertainties thanks to valzina mort for the sleepless disquieting lullaby of her nocturne for a moving train and to sarah's yang for the baldness of her confrontation with what we keep trying not to see now over to william he'll announce the winner and the winner of the best single poem prize is melika booker with the little miracles wow thank you i cannot explain how extraordinary it is to have shared a short list with some of my favorite poets and i'm not going to lie the single poems in this category are pure fire as a poet i write to capture moments that we can miss this prize is testimony to the long journey i have made in the british poetic landscape from a little 11 year old black girl being bullied in the playground where books were my only friends to a caribbean diasporic woman writer bold and unafraid i'm a firm believer in the power of community and i'd like to take the time to thank publicly my mother clara booker boys and her sister rita charles two women who shaped me into the woman writer dreamer that i have become this poem the little miracles is the result of a collaboration with larry doubtweight a lecturing psychological interventions at the university of central Lancashire i also thank adam low and yvonne redrick for um for magma um and commissioning this poem huge thanks to bernadine everisto and root bothwick also who started off my writing career by enabling me to take part in workshops when i could not afford it thanks to to people tree press who has publishers see and understand not only my work but many other black caribbean british writers karamakarthi wolf tyambadges gelding collage susanna lane natalie tidler kwami doors mimi kovati pascal petite and bill herbert i thank you too the fellowship of the complete works carvey karnam and malikas poetry kitchen and of course my cousin's margaret bambiji and yudin charles for their faith and dedication congratulations to the other forward winners i am honored and overjoyed to have won the forward prize for best single poem thank you hi my name is roger romsson and it is my great pleasure to be introducing you to the shortlist for the philips denis prides best first collection in the forward prizes 2020 first on the list is elef frais shine darling from offered roadbooks then we have will harris rendang from grantor poetry ratio long my darling from the lions from picador nina ming your powers manolia nine arches press martha spraklin citadel from pavilion poetry the truth is is writing a book for the first time is hard it's very hard and finding audiences for that book can sometimes even be harder it's like lighting a match and then deciding to look for gas whilst walking into a headwind that's the importance of the forward prize it connects writers with readers but more importantly it starts to create confidence in the writer that their instincts are worth something and that will lead to their longevity i wish all these writers good luck and i will look out for their work in the future hi i'm elef frais and this is f***ing in corn f***ing in corn the rain is thick and there's half a rainbow over the damp beach just put your hand at my top i've walked around that local museum a hundred times and i've decided that the tiny stuffed dog labeled the smallest dog in the world is a fake kiss me in a pasty shop with all the ovens on i've had a warm new egg on a farm and thought about f***ing i've held a tiny green crab in the palm of my hand i've pulled my sleeve over my fingers and picked a nettle and held it to a boy's throat like a sword unlace my shoes in that alley and lift me gently onto the bins the bright morning sun is coming and coming and the holiday children have their yellow buckets ready do you remember what it felt like to dig a hole all day with a plastic spade just to watch it fill with sea i want it like that like water feeling its way over an edge like two bright red anemones and a rock pool tentacles waving ecstatically like the gorse has caught fire across the moors and you are the ghost of a fisherman who always hated land thank you from the other side of shooters hill you saw an ambulance speed past a row of stationary cars though at a distance you couldn't hear the siren and it looked to be moving slowly like a police car in a silent film driving slowly so as to appear at a normal speed and playback and you thought you saw the keystone cops crowded into a single car chugging along the road to your little niece's birthday party where they would fall over themselves in the heap at her doorstep and you started crying and when you arrived at my flat you told me about the ambulance and the keystone cops and started crying again i did too and i asked if everything was okay yes everything's okay you said suddenly embarrassed but wait why am i telling you this don't you dare think about using me in a poem making me into some sad female cipher in my life a series of symbolic events the ambulance representing mortality in my niece i don't know a hysterical desire for kids hey hey i said what about the keystone cops how do they fit in if i say this in a poem it isn't to defer responsibility but because i reject the possibility of narrating any life other than my own a need of voice capacious enough to be both me and not me will always clearly be me fine you said pouring us a cup of black tea once i said changing tack i was given a pellet gun for my birthday and without my knowing a friend started aiming at the passers-by or he claimed a pigeons into a neighbor called the police in his defense he asked how anyone could mistake the puck of a pellet gun for that of a real gun he sounds like a real jerk he said starting to relax to laugh you told me about a recent dream in which you were trapped in a silent film your every movement seen as slapstick no one able to hear you scream maybe we should watch some Percy Stowe i said and put on how to stop a motor car a minute long silent film featuring a car that slices a policeman in two before bouncing off another man's butt hilarious right but it stows 1908 version of the tempest that's his masterpiece he has aerial freed from the bowl of an oak tree do a curtsy she's just a child and scare off caliban by turning into a monkey how great is that but the cast you said who are they a bunch of edwardian amateur actors and enthusiasts the goat plays aerial might even have been the daughter of one she must be dead you said obviously i replied but by this stage in the evening i was tired my lips moving slowly and though i could see you in distress it was like the ambulance you saw moving slowly silently across the other side of shooters hill i do want children you said but not yet not in this world in playback i knew not only would we appear to be talking comically fast but it would be impossible to tell who was speaking i'm Rachel Long and this is hotel art Barcelona we're eating roses on a rooftop the med beneath us they serve clouds here too i say light starter wink are they fluffy or black the waiter doesn't answer every table is white except ours we sit at a naked woodblock antique there's enough of an age gap here me they have added 200 years the razor clams arrive in straight lines what's the matter we discuss kids maybe it's the wine or because my belly is beginning to push against the bones of my dress you say i don't think i'll identify with a brown sun excuse me i rise spill your sparkling water you only notice your steak contorting myself three ways in the toilet mirror i decide i won't look like this forever i don't even look like this now dessert is air from a porcelain pump what if he has your eyes i dare after another glass back in our borrowed bathroom i throw up rose foam a blade of grass who says he isn't a daughter i join you on the balcony you hold me from behind lean us over count we're as many stories up as our age gap why do we always have to shush you lift my dress i shoulder with my legs is love not this gripping a fence in the sky i'm nina mignopouls and this poem is called The Great Wall which is also the title of a movie directed by Zhang Yimou which came out in 2016 The Great Wall when Matt Damon saved china by driving his spear into the alien's mouth i was distracted by Lin Mei's long braided hair and the way she holds herself so still ready to strike down her enemies with a knife in each fist but some things are fixed in the white saviour narrative like the exotic love interest who will risk everything as ancient cities crumble around her and when you asked me what i thought afterwards in the autumn rain i wanted to say some parts were beautiful like the bogota of iridescent glass shattering into pieces of pink and blue light just as Lin Mei lets loose her arrow and also when you whispered something in my ear and i was hit by the shockwave caused by my body and your breath existing in the same moment in the same universe months later you told me you cried during rogue one the scene where two men hold each other weeping beneath the palm trees and light beams blasting the leaves apart and their hands shaking moments before a star destroying weapon obliterates this small ripped portion of universe i didn't know what to do with these face opera feelings only that i had to exit this particular narrative in which our knees are just touching and we are laughing while the city disappears around us as if we could reach back through hyperspace to touch the silver holograms of our past selves as if we could go back to some other time on some other planet before the first particles of energy let go of themselves like the thousand paper lanterns released into the sky above the great wall a thousand tiny fires trapped inside i'm marthas brackland and this is huana and bartha in therapy from citadel this is what they have learned their putative son imprisons them calls them mad instructs the wardens to hurt and hold them some days he doesn't exist at all and they are free to go out to go into the center of town without a pram to read books and eat a saucer of olives the sun is too big for a pram surely is almost a man time is complicated especially at these distances the crackling string of this makeshift telephone between two empty tins of cathedral stretches five centuries and is desperate to forget but they too must stay on the line must work together if they are to escape and write this they are in the bland room above the prep at bishop gate trying to understand the walls of the mind are deep and moted they had six children in nine years they have no children will harris's rendang is a book of connectedness but yet unconnectedness it's as if the strange things that happen during his daily life make comments about his cultural connection or disconnection reach along my darling from the lions is a book that trips in melancholy it wrongs you with every turn and makes you have different ideas of what a strong black woman is or can be nina mingya powers is a interesting absorption of culture from popular media but in a spare nearly zen-like frame of poems citadel Martha Spratland is able to jump between histories and find alignments and help us to understand suffering over history shine darling by Ella Freyres it's a book that sometimes when you read it you think oh you're not supposed to save that in current company but that makes it bristle with the energy of the everyday also put into strong form in judging the best first collection we were faced with an incredibly strong group of writers who seemed seasoned way beyond the experience of a first book which made it incredibly hard to make decisions it seems that with these first collections that the future of poetry seems very strong indeed but what was also quite impressive is how seasoned these writers seem how they were able to put little details into their work to allow us to understand that they are really really really good writers even from a first book far better from most first books I've read I wish all these writers the best of luck and I'm convinced that I will see their work over the next decades and the winner of the Felix Dennis Prize for the best first collection is Will Harris for Rendang hello again I've tried to record this several times now and it's a hard thing to be doing and so strange thing and sorry if I sound awkward it's not because I'm not grateful it's because I'm kind of overwhelmed and don't really know what to say and I'm not going to try and give a speech for anything I just want to I'm just going to thank a few people quickly like the judges thank you for engaging the work I'm really proud to be here alongside Ella, Rachel, Nina and Martha whose books I think are genuinely amazing and exciting thank you to all the people who make the book happen namely specifically Rachel Allen who edited it and shaped it thank you to Eleanor, Carr and Sam and everyone at Granta for their support and work on it as well thank you also to Eleanor Nelson who was my first editor and believed in my work when I really didn't thank you to Nikki Chang for her support over the last few years thank you to Bernardine Everisto, Natalie Titler and the whole Complete Works family for supporting me and changing my relationship to writing making me feel less lonely as a writer and thank you to Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parma among who among many others have done so much to not just mentor and support writers but to change the critical culture around work by poets of color in this country and finally thank you to my parents for understanding and Kusayan Kalyan I'm just going to read a short poem oh no I'm going to read a short little extract from a poem called all the birds your husband one day I heard a woman started writing poems to a friend with cancer not to comfort but to mock him and when he died she wrote poems to his wife mocked her too she told her that the birds in her garden were him her husband so she would sit outside and feed them stale crumbs until they flapped away and then she raged strange things started happening her lights blue strings snapped on an unused harp she shouted at the new birds one of them flew straight into her room shitting screaming what of the poet she scolded the wife in her most rocking poem yet no all the birds your husband now is the time for me to tell you about the forward e-magazine creative critics 2020 award the prizes run in partnership with the English and media center and invite 16 to 19 year olds to read poems shortlisted for the forward prizes and then write a creative response to them in the form of a poem along with a short reflective commentary this year's prizes were judged by poet and forward prizes alumni Julia Copas who said I was deeply impressed not only by the ingenuity and range of the poems but by the erudition of the accompanying commentaries in the best entries the commentaries shed light on both the model poems and the newly minted response the winner of with the 200 pound prize is Joyce Chen from Westminster school for cuttle fishing off the coast of Hong Kong inspired by a single stanza in will harris's holy man the two runner-ups with 50 pound prizes are Ariba Said from London Academy of Excellence for her untitled poem beginning what the hell I still play hide-and-seek written in response to Caroline Bird's rookie and Katie Capatrick from Hills Road sixth form college in Cambridge for things I'm freezing to come back to later based on vicky fevers the larder highly commended poems were Kid by Luke Timworth from Little Heath School Tilehurst a second evening by Ikara Nassim from Lord's Wood Girl School and sixth form centre in Birmingham pastime by Tarani Suresh from the Royal Latin School in Buckingham and Vilnius by Yale Katz from Habadasha Ask schools for girls in Elstree it's time for me to introduce the shortlist for best collection I think as judges we all wished we could shortlist about 20 books and howled quietly at the loss of a few very ardently loved ones along the way but were very proud indeed of our shortlist and of the winner we talked a lot in the meetings about the shape of these books as holes about the way trajectories were held and ideas bought into land about how some point of light at the beginning might shine out towards the end we talked about the way these poets got hold of the past and came with utterly modern voices to invent the future you'll have to read the full collections to enjoy all this for yourselves but we're going to hear from each poet now luring or shocking or bewitching us with a single poem Caroline Bird is nominated for the air year published by Carcannet it's a work of phenomenal energy and economy surrealist refractions and diversions aerial dances above deep wells of love and despair postcolonial love poem is a magnificent second collection from Natalie Diaz and it's published in the uk by Faber it's giant in its emotional range and political engagement and yet it's so sensuous and intimate in its scale and touch i want i want by vicky fever is published by cape we deeply admired its tight sprung lyrics that burst upon the mind it's a book about childhood midlife and age about all the ages of women it's a fierce and loving book about family art and ambition David Morley's fury is published by carcannet sonnets meet pantoums in this festival of loves and voices the air is full of birds fury meets gentleness and every poem is deeply interested in what language makes of us tiger girl by pascal petit is published by blood axe it pushes deep into the wilder places of the forest and the human heart it shimmers with the colors of bee eaters and flycatchers and rages at the darker regions of environmental exploitation and quality i think we've got a major treat in store as we listen to them read hello my name is caroline bird and i'm going to read my palm dive bar this came from a commission about gay pride um which i thought i would feel simple about because i've known i was gay since i was 13 but gay pride is different from everyday pride in the way that it's it's complicated because it's a counter emotion to being told to feel ashamed and so it's got hurt inside it as well and anger and sadness and shame paradoxically and it's as if every sequin represents the amount of darkness that it's had to overcome and we're going to need billions of sequins forever i was researching this club called the gateways which was one of the few places that lesbians could meet safely in London in the 1930s and 40s and the description of it on wikipedia is through a green door down a steep flight of stairs into a windowless cellar and i thought it was rare that the literal description of a place is also a metaphor for how it made you feel dive bar through a red door down a steep flight of stairs into a windowless cellar with sweating walls an ingenue in a smoking jacket sits astride a piano as a host of swaying women sing your secrets safe with me and one invites you into the privacy of a kiss all these dark clandestine places and you find yourself imagining a very tiny woman walking straight into her mouth through a red door down a steep flight of throat into a windowless cell with breathing walls an ingenue in a smoke jacket sits astride a piano as a host of swallowed women sing your secrets in a safe the barmaid shakes a custom cocktail she calls a private kiss all these dark half-eaten faces and you find yourself imagining a tiny tiny woman walking straight into her mouth through a red breath down a dark thought into a swallowed sense with shrinking walls an innuendo in stomach acid slops astride a piano as a host of silent passions mouth your secret is yourself inside the belly of the world all these dark dissolving spaces and you find yourself imagining a windowless woman breaking walls down in herself sprinting up the shrinking halls and up contracting corridors and up the choking fits of hard stairs through dark thoughts and dead laws through the red door as it swallows shut behind you now you're spat out on the pavement with the sun just coming out i'm Natalie Diaz and i'm reading Waste and Sway i never meant to break but streetlights dressed her gold the curve and curve of her shoulders the hum and hive of them moon glossed pillory of them nearly felled me to my knees how can i tell you the amber of her the body of honey i took it in my hands oh city where hands turned holy her city where my hands went undone gone to ravel to silhouette to miles at the mercy of the pale of her hips hips that in that early night to light lit up to shining sweet electricus to luminous and lamp were eight to drink i did till drunk were in her rocked the dark zikmund her by then a cathedral tower one breast rose window one breast room of alchemists where from her came a tolling the music of yoke and crown of waste and sway wanting her was so close to prayer i should not but it was july and in a city where desire means upstairs we can break each other open the single blessing i had to give was mouth so gave and gave i did every night has a woman for temptation every city has a fable for fruit like in the castle gardens where jackdaws waited glazied along the walls for a taste of new of figs unsweet yet yet barrel bright enough for wonder not jackdaw but not different i how i destroy myself on even the least of the sweetest things the salt of her burned not long on my tongue but like stars i never meant to break but love the hymn and bells of her even now there are nights i climb the narrow stairway to an apartment at rad shanny square where a door opens to a room and the shadowed fig of her mouth cleaved sweet open and in me ringing my name is vicky fever and my poem is called the surgeon's widow she dug all night in the company of moths drawn from the dark to the bright beam of her torch recovering first his skull last the phalanges of his toes finally at dawn her bag full she carried her husband home she laid his bones damp and cold from the grave on a rug by the fire then found a drill pliers and a coil of wire aided by the diagrams in his anatomy books she reassembled his gaunt frame the night of their wedding he swung her off her feet waltzing her from room to room before carrying her up to bed now she held him and danced the same route stumbling almost falling on the stairs once they'd made love in the bath now lifting him gently into the tub she washed him like a muddy child scrubbing with a nail brush at green and amber stains on his porous bones his hand she left till last soaping fingers famous for their delicate skill with her fingers crooked and clumsy with arthritis finally rinsing off gray suds she dried him with a warm towel she slapped as before his death his knees slotted into the crook of her knees her buttocks cradled by his pelvis her head on the pillow beside his dreaming of his breath on her neck hello my name's david moorley and this poem is called romany wounds me the place names that i've mentioned of the poem horse mondan kenlaworth derham applebee stow in the world are all traditional gypsy traveller horse fairs romany wounds me is dedicated to the writer damien labar wherever i travel romany wounds me as i held into the horse fair at stow in the world between cotswold chint shops and the roving road hgv's hunkered after our wagons on the fosway cursing us with airbricks and grunting gear ships at kenlaworth fair with its tail backs to longbridge roundabout vado's bottlenecked behind ponies from persia rocks rammed on the verges of all the villages between by neighborhood watches with the policemen's nod at darham fair i crowbarred those stern stones from the wayside and flattened fat molehills under by four by four and snored under the stars of headlights flying across the bypass and slung my kettle above an illegal blaze a gressin hall swatham and peter bro the pubs were barred to me what do the gentiles want these polite people who curses were Romanian or worse than a copper pulls us over and barks for passports mate i can from rotherham laughs one gypsy although it's foreign country around these parts and as we sleep europe drifts away across the sea the kling net of england closes our caravans are ships with their engines flooded our lives are drowning strange people the english they say this land is ours but they don't rove beyond their commutes or school runs imagine the police rocking up at their caravan sites meanwhile england keeps on traveling always traveling backwards in my dream our flotilla of caravans set sail from dovis chalk shore as though the little boats of dunkirk were our own gypsy vados as though we were machine gunned by our own spitfires and those brothers on the beach were our own strafed kin which we were when we were borderless and one between the horse fares of horse monden and apple bay at all the stopping places where i wake and in every face i see wherever i travel romany wounds me i'm pascalpiti and i'm going to read one poem from tiger girl jungle outlet what you didn't tell me is how poachers cut off their claws and break bones in one wing so they can't perch or fly that their eyes are sold as poojas boiled in broth so herdsmen can see in the dark you didn't say how sorcerers keep their skulls their barred feathers their livers and hearts or how they drink their blood and tears you didn't mention how a tortured owl will speak like a young girl to reveal where treasure is buried my kind granny who took me in when i was homeless who sat down this very evening after i had gone to bed and wrote mother a stern letter telling her that she must take me back it doesn't matter where paris wales timbuktu no more excuses you are tired and here your slanted writing is almost illegible but what i think it says is that you cannot look after a teenage owlet you use your favorite pet name i've never spoken of this before i call it up my gullet from the pit at the bottom of my 13th year along with my crushed bones my stolen blood and i spit it out through my torn off beak in language that passes for human congratulations to all five poets and thank you for reading from five phenomenal collections well the decision for the judges here was really really hard i can tell you uh we ran out of time and had to go into overtime in our debating as soon as we managed to put aside one of these books we missed it and someone would say please please can we have it back again um so all these books we deeply admire we know they will last and we urge you to read and reread them our shortlisted poets caroline bird for the exuberant courageous the air year nasally dears for post-colonial love poem with all its suppleness and ardency vicky fever for i want i want a bold surprising book that climbs ladders to the sky david moorley for fury which controls its furies with ever-inventive craftsmanship and pascal petite for the alarming mythic beautiful tiger girl and the winner of the forward prize for the best collection of poetry in 2020 is caroline bird for the air year thank you um this is much more surreal than any poem i've ever written and i'm pretty sure i'm going to wake up any minute but before i do thank you so much thank you to the forward thank you to the judges thank you to car connect my publisher and in particular michael smith for everything for for answering that letter that i wrote to him when i was 14 and continuing to support me ever since thank you to my parents for um valiantly putting up with every poem that i thrust into their faces when i was a teenager and letting me believe that being a poet was a thing that i could do and thank you to david moorley and pascal petite and vicky fever and nathalie dias for being literally some of my favorite poets in the whole world and it has been a profound joy and honor to have been shortlisted alongside them um thank you uh to arvin i remember going on my first arvin course when i was 13 everything happened when i was 13 probably and um uh picking books off the shelves and thinking i can't believe there's so much poetry in the world i have all of this rage and lust and bitterness and joy and hope and regret available to me in these books and and it's not going to lie to me and the poetry world has always been a world that i am happy to be alive in you know unlike that one and it's always made sense to me because it doesn't have to make sense and i'm incredibly grateful to be part of that world and that community so thank you and um thank you to my partner eliza who i love so much and this book is full of love as well as being full of all the other emotions as well um it's very personal i can't i can't believe people are reading it what are you doing um i'm going to read uh the first part of the book it's called midair thank you there is a corner of the city where the air is soft resin step in and it hardens around you suspended in amber we made the mistake of kissing there i mean here our mouths midway across the same inhalation like robbers mid leap between rooftops if kisses were scored by composers they placed the breath on the upbeat oh god music preceded by midair when the baton lifts the orchestra tightens and before the one two three and the sunlight is meticulous and the river holds its tongue and your silver earring steals like an aerialist hoop caught midspin a note almost sung locked in the amber of the and we just want to land or be landed on well that concludes this year's forward prizes for poetry i'd just like to thank again the british library for hosting us all our judges for their hard work and the wonderful shortlisted poets who you heard reading their work this evening every one of them i hope will feel that they're a winner don't forget that the forward book of poetry is out and please go out and buy it and look forward fingers cross that this time next year we'll all be seeing each other again in person good night