Alright. Hello everybody. My name is Pat Maddox and I am talking to you today about a tale of two code bases. And if you read the talk description or looking at the slide and are thinking, what the hell am I going to talk about? I am right with you. Because I submitted a couple talk proposals and I got an email back and they said, hey, you're going to speak. I was like, really, you guys chose that one? How am I going to do this? So, with that said, that's my official title in the Ruby community, which you guys may not know, BDDMF, that stands for Behavior-Driven Development MoFo. Dave Sholomsky gave it to me one time, which is kind of cool. But again, thank you guys for coming out. This has been a fantastic conference so far. So, Pat and Mike and everybody else involved, I really appreciate you guys throwing this. And the content has been amazing. I've heard that Mountain West RubyConf is the best and it hasn't disappointed. So, as we're kind of ending here the day and the whole conference, I hope to carry the baton, you know, until the next dude. So, really quick things about me. I work for a company called Goldstar.com. We sell tickets. This is me at Goldstar, really excited because we're having an ice cream party after a really good day. And I tend to get excited about a lot of things. One of those is Ruby. And this is a completely made up plot chart of my excitement with Ruby over the last five years. I'm not really big into long background discussions of myself, but I think this kind of sets the stage for everything. So, if you see here at the very beginning, oh, and this is, there's no scale. This is relative to Java, I suppose, is what this chart means. So, you see at the very beginning, and I hope Matt's is right there, he did not leave for this talk. So, when I first saw Ruby, I said, dude, it doesn't even have semicolons. I'm not interested. Because I had learned C and then C++ and then Java and it looked really weird and I was not interested.  And so, I crossed the plane at some point over to, okay, this is a little cooler than Java. And then at some point, I wrote my very first Rails app, which was pretty fun. And I was like, hey, I'm getting a lot of stuff done here. I'm not writing EJBs anymore. So then, just a few months later, I actually made some money from Ruby. I had this website built in Rails. And as you can see, it goes way up. Because as soon as you go from, hey, I'm coding stuff for fun to, hey, I did something for fun and somebody gave me money for it. That's a pretty exciting event. So this was all a little over five years ago. Now, I guess, and after I had done that, a couple more months went by and I got to go out to San Francisco and work for my first startup. I was like, now I'm in the whole startup world. But pretty quickly after, I realized that $50,000 in Colorado goes a long way and rural Colorado goes a long way. San Francisco not so much. So it turns out that is the only kind of down point in my whole Ruby interest, which was when I'm like, oh my God, this is fun, but how am I going to buy food? So I got to go to my first Ruby conference. And this is where I kind of got involved in the community for the first time. I got to start meeting people. And as a silly story, I was a really big fan of Dave Estelle's work. You know, he wrote a test of a development book and an agile book. And I thought that was really cool. And my first day at the conference, I go in and I went to the bathroom and I was peeing right next to Dave Estelle's. And I was like, oh my God, that's so cool. And I actually got out and I texted my friend who told me about Ruby and Rails and I said, dude, I just peed next to Dave Estelle's. Well, this isn't on the slide, but about a year after that, I actually met Dave Estelle's and we became friends because somewhere in there I got really involved in RSpec and somewhere a little later, I got Dave added me to the RSpec core team, but I became friends with Dave Estelle's about a year after that. And then I think a year after that is when I finally felt comfortable enough admitting that story to him. So then I programming Ruby and I was with this company called Market 7 in San Francisco. And we worked with Pivotal Labs. I think there's some Pivot guys here and other phenomenal firm I had read about extreme programming for a long time and had done some of the practices. But when I went to Pivotal, that's where I saw how programming could be really, really, really fun. You get a ton of stuff done and it was just a really great experience. And then over the past year, I've been fortunate enough to go to Scotland and Hawaiian, Mount West, RubyConf and do all these really cool things. And I mean, I'm just like riding this highway right now. And so I'm telling you all of this because I hope it illustrates that I really love Ruby. And I don't mean I just like Ruby. Like it's fun to program and it's better than other languages I could be doing. But I love Ruby. I love coding this stuff. I love talking to people here.   And I thought, oh, God, everything that I've learned about programming is not the real world. And it turns out that playing online poker for living is hard. And so there was like a couple months where I slept in several layers because I couldn't pay the heating bill. So Ruby's pretty sweet. Now, but it really got me back into programming my whole life. All I wanted to do, well, I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot, but then I wanted to be a programmer. And Ruby got me back into it. And I was kind of very nervous about giving this sort of a talk, especially after Joe comes up here and fried my brain with that stuff. But it turns out there's some precedent in the Ruby community, right? There's DHH who we kind of know about. He says be happy. That's the whole point behind Rails. And Matt, he wrote Ruby so that you could be happy, right? Although I think in this picture, I mean, he looks really happy. But it turns out it's because he just like pulled the wool over the whole Ruby community's eyes with his Python buck. So, okay, so I love Ruby.  So I love Ruby because it got me out of, it got me back into programming. But there's some real reasons to it, too, I suppose. The first is, I'm like an object bigot, I suppose. I like learning about functional programming and stuff. But when it comes to actually designing my code, it's all about objects for me. And so Ruby is a very low-ceremony object-oriented programming language. And then some other things like the metaprogramming facilities in Ruby are so cool. You can spend so much time sitting there just thinking, how can I mess with these classes? And how do I get objects to do things that they never really should do? And if you don't know, I mean, I assume everybody here is a pretty good metaprogrammer. So the way I see it, like learning to metaprogram Ruby is kind of like learning to date super models instead of former high school cheerleaders. You're just at a different level and you feel so much more powerful and it's pretty fine.  And also open classes. Another program might have some really good ideas about how you should do things, but he doesn't know better than you do in your context. So having the power to open stuff up and say, okay, I like what you've done here, but I need to change it this way. And I don't need to write three different. I'm actually going to go kind of Yehuda style and say I don't need to have a decorator and a factory and a strategy to do some of this stuff. I can just kind of open it in, open up the class and redo whatever I want. That is another one of the reasons that has really hooked me into Ruby this whole time. So I love Ruby. That's cool. But I'm one dude. You guys love Ruby too. And a whole bunch of reasons I think that Ruby programmers love it, including the ones I just mentioned, but some other things like we're really, really frigging productive in Ruby. And it turns out that happy program or, you know, happy productive programmers are happy programmers. And that's kind of where I'm going at with this is that happiness matters. And that comes from the top down that comes from maths that comes from DHH. That is a part of our culture. And that's one of the things that separates us from some of the other programming languages is that your quality of life as a computer programmer really matters. So we care about a lot of things. We care about open source. They're not that, a lot of other communities are really big into open source. But we love being able to take some code out of our real apps and open them up and then come out and start to talk to people. So we love being happy. We know some of the things that make us happy. But it turns out that we tend to work for business people. I do. So how many people here have a boss and it's not you? So a lot of people, you're like coding Ruby to put food on the table. And what do bosses and business people like? They like money. Money makes business people happy. And I'm not going all communists here saying like they should not be happy with money. But what you have to understand is that dude looks really happy. I mean he is. He's got lots of money flying around. But he's also going to say I'll make you happy by giving you some money. But what you have to understand is like they're the hippopotamuses that eat the crocodiles.  And it's not even intentional.  They're not aligned with us in general. Like what makes them happy? They're willing to sacrifice things that we never should and that they never even think about and that we're the ones that have to step up. But there is a business case for happy developers. It's not this us versus them. We know that productive programmers are happy programmers, right? And productive programmers make businesses money. If you have happy developers there's lots of things that go into it. You've got clean code, right?  We like our test suites and we don't just like having tests but we like having fast test suites and we like them to be explanatory of the code that we're working on. And we like them most of all to make us productive. And we even, this is actually really new to me as in after I saw Lauren's talk yesterday but we also like documentation with Yard. And so, so there's the programmer, you know, happy programmers are productive programmers and that's kind of a tautology because if you're productive then you're happy and if you're happy then you're more productive. But you also create this environment that attracts other really good programmers. If you have a team of talented programmers and they're really stoked to be there then you're going to start pulling in new good programmers to your team. You're going to be able to attract top talent. And that is, you know, something that every, that's something that your CTO cares about, that's something the project manager cares about but that's something that you should care about too is when you look to your left and right are those people as good or better than you or are you guys pushing each other and constantly taking things to a new level. So we want it, we want to be happy, the business wants us to be happy but we don't necessarily always agree on what to do there, how to get there. But one thing we can agree on is agility. Agility matters to us being able to respond to change, being able to add features really quickly, not having high bug rates but being able to get, being able to produce value on a consistent basis very quickly. So here's, here's this other chart that I made and this is slightly hand wavy too partly because I never actually worked in traditional software but from what I've talked to people and read. We have a, the development cycle is usually discussed in terms of months and years, right. People will work on the software for like this whole six month cycle and a year cycle and then maybe they release it at roughly the same interval. But if you look in agile literature and the traditional agile work, the developers work in cycles of days and weeks and they release in terms of weeks and months. Now this is of course, you know, not perfect across every single project but it's pretty representative of what the different groups do. Now Ruby is not really a methodology but if you talk to the Ruby programmers around here this is what you get. Programmers, Ruby programmers think in terms of hours and days. We finish, we create new units of business value in a few hours or in a few days. And we often release that on a weekly basis or two weeks, right. And is anybody here doing releasing their code three times a week, two or three times a week or every day? Anybody do continuous, continuous deployment? No, not there yet. Well, that's kind of cool. All that word, my code is definitely not there yet. But so this is called a tale of two code bases and basically I had this great idea for a story that I was going to tell that was going to explain how you approach solving all the inefficiencies in your code base over time. And I came up with this really great, I thought it was a great story. I told it to a bunch of people and they said it made no sense. And so I revised it and they said it made no sense and I tried, I did a couple iterations. And finally I threw in the towel so here's the picture of Jessica Alba commuting to work on a hippo. So back to agility. We can go really, really fast as Ruby programmers and that makes our business people happy. But sometimes it's important just to slow down. And Agile, the Agile community actually has a term for this. They call it sustainable pace. I'm sure you guys have all heard about sustainable pace. What this really means to me is that not all 40-hour work weeks are created equal. If you guys aren't familiar, I mean there's a, there is a programmer having a very good time on the beach writing, writing her Ruby code. And then here is a scene from Deadliest Catch where they, I don't know, they catch crabs up in the Arctic and it's really crazy and people die. So, and I don't know if they actually put in the same amount of work per week but you can imagine that in any given 40-hour work week or however many hours you work in the week, depending on different factors in your environment, you will either come out of the end of that week very energized and, well, I mean you're going to want your weekend still, but you're going to come out energized and excited for the next round of work, or you're going to gradually, like, your energy is going to be chipped away over time. And that's kind of, that's what we want to avoid.  So here's a little shanty town and I take this because Dan North, he's one of the original, well I guess he is the original behavior-driven development guy, and he talks about how software is built as a shanty town. That unless you do a ton of architecture up front, what you have is this little village of the system of small houses and markets and other buildings that all function reasonably well, but it doesn't scale, right, and it doesn't scale in, like, handling however many requests, but it doesn't scale over the long term, like, that is, if you want to have a million people live in that city, that's not really the way you want to go about it, right, and that's the difference between working on a software project over two months versus over two years, and this starts out perfectly fine, that this is, this is what you need to do, you need to get users into your community and you need to provide something that works, but over time if you live in a, in a town with, without roads, then, then commerce slows down, and if, well, I mean, if however much commerce they really have, and if you have, if you don't have sanitation, then people get sick and die, so that's no good. So you have to think about the different ways that, that we ever want to, to, to improve our projects so that we can continue to add value, continue to be happy productive programmers, and there are tons of different ways.  Well, you guys all know the bad parts of your code, all the things that you would like to change, if you're working on rails, and your test suite is slow, and if you're working on rails, then your test suite is slow, then you want to speed it up, and there are various things that you can do, you can start to decouple parts of the code, you can, you can move stuff in memory as much as possible, like if it doesn't need to hit the database, then don't hit the database. Other things, like you want to upgrade to the latest version of rails, or there's some new plugins, or you want to move, you want to start moving your stuff to no sequel, because as we now know, MongoDB rules, and these are all things that you can take, and I was going to give you the specific strategies for doing this stuff, and like how to test and how to refactor, but when I was doing the whole know your audience test, I realized like this is the group that already knows this stuff, you guys are not the ones that I need to teach how to refactor, you guys are the ones that I need to somehow get you so impassioned to go back to your teams, and drive this into their heads, like drive it into their freaking skulls, that this is the stuff that they need to be doing, because otherwise it's going to make your life miserable over the long term, and so the first thing that that we do is we demand excellence, and this is this is of ourselves, this is of our team members, this is of our bosses, this is saying that we know what needs to be done as as software engineers, and yes we make concessions sometimes to get stuff out to hit a deadline, but the majority of the time there is always time to refactor, there's always time to get the test in place, that's a fight that you can have with your project manager, but over time if you don't follow this rule, you will burn out, you will quit, you will drive the other developers away from your team, and this is, this requires immense focus, you have to be, because people are always trying to pull this, pull this spirit away from us, they're always putting their needs before everything that we're trying to do, that's just a natural human thing, but we have to push back, and if you're not focused then it's epic fail, and I would like to say that this came from some random failblog internet picture, but this is actually my car over a ledge when I was, and the worst thing about it is that it was in front of a subway sandwich shop at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, which means that the tow trucks weren't working, and so for the next two hours I got to tell the story to people of how that happened, okay well that's not my fault, that ledge you can't see it when you're, when you're parked there, and according to the lady that works at subway that happened to three other people in the previous year, but I also never claimed to be a good driver ever in my life, so okay so we demand excellence, but the next thing is you can think of 10, 15, maybe 20 different things that you want to change in your code base that all require an immense amount of work, so the next thing that you have to remember is not to bite off more than you can chew, this I guess you guys just got in and out, good for you, this is a 100 by 100 patty, you know hamburger at in and out, and I have no idea where you would start with that or most of all why, but it is, but I think that that provides a good, like if you're thinking hey I want to have, you know, if I'm going to start eating hamburgers I'm going to eat a lot of them, like that will kill you, and trying to do the same thing in terms of your code base, if you're focusing, if you're not focusing, if you're spreading yourself then, and you're trying to change fixtures all the time, and you're trying to add new test coverage over here, and you're trying to migrate some stuff to manga, like that is, it creates such an emotional drain, because you're making very little visible progress, overall you might be inching towards your goals in four different areas, but it doesn't feel like you're getting where, there's no sense of accomplishment, and that's another one of those things that just really drains on a team, and like in terms of, and this is really important, I forgot to mention this, but buggy code, like we all hate buggy code, but there's nothing that causes programmers to fight more than buggy, difficult to understand code, like I don't know how many people have gotten in shouting matches or IRC shouting matches over buggy code, but I've definitely seen it happen, we got a couple takers on that one, I've definitely seen it happen, and so this is the, I think that there's a really strong business case for why, why we need to focus on this, and be absolutely committed to the solid engineering practices that that we know, in terms of how you actually go about and do this, well I said, don't bite off more than you can chew, but one strategy you can take is to do themed releases, and this is something that I had heard about, is anybody familiar with having themes for their releases? No? Okay, so a couple, my friend BJ Clark, who also did the, who's also the nature photographer slash paparazza, who snagged that incredible photo, he told me about themed releases, and the idea here is, it starts at a business sense, that if you're working on, if you're doing agile development, using something like Pivotal Tracker, you might have 200 stories in the backlog, but when you actually plan out an iteration, you want to create a theme for that, so we're going to work on search, or we're going to work on user management, and the vast majority of those stories that you work on will be in that specific area, and then with maybe a couple other high priority things, or easy fixed bugs, slipped in there. The idea being that you have a cohesive set of features that provides a bunch of value to your users that's visible, but at the same time, when you're working in a single part of code, like if you're working in a general part of functionality of your application, then that is where you really get the opportunities to make all the positive changes that you want to, because if you've got four programmers, or however many your team is, working in a single general area, and you all notice these efficiencies, it's hurting everybody at the same time, so in terms of making these sorts of changes, having business-focused themed releases is really important, really helpful, and you can also do that at a technical level. If you schedule a separate time for chores, developer chores, do the same thing, say we're going to focus for the next week or two or three weeks on only making these certain sets of changes, we're only going to remove fixtures, or we're only going to migrate tables over to MongoDB, we're not going to spend that much time on the other stuff, because we know that if we focus a bunch of energy at once, especially if we have the whole team focused on something at once, you guys got sneak peek, then we're able to make, then we're able to get to where we want to go much faster and ultimately have a better programming culture. So one other thing I want to talk about is I've heard about technical debt in the last six months or so, last three months, and it's really nice to hear, although I think the way that people talk about it is a myth. You guys are all familiar with technical debt here. Is anybody not familiar with it? Okay, so technical debt is the idea that you're making, you make trade-offs over time, where as you as you work on code you make certain design decisions that you know are not necessarily the optimal design decisions at this point, and it's going to cause you some pain, but it delivers enough value now that we will just fix it later on, and the metaphor is a debt metaphor because it costs interest. If I make suboptimal decisions now, I have to pay some interest on that in terms of the potential for there being bugs, the other developers not being able to understand a certain amount, a certain part of code as much, and just the mental context that you have to recreate anytime you go back into that. When you're working on, the best time to solve a problem is right now when you know what it is, because you've developed mental context for it, and if you go back to it six months later, whatever little things you've figured out, you're going to have to figure out over again. So that's technical debt, and I think it's a myth, although that's probably a bit strong. I think when people talk about technical debt for the most part, it's really an excuse. It's an excuse to not work on as great as technical debt is, the term, as far as providing programmers a metaphor, it's been horrible because you can sit down with your pair, and you can look at that part of coding and say, that is really bad, and since we're right here, I think we should change it, and then your pair goes, well that's technical debt, we don't have to do it right now. So this has been, put it on the credit card, and maybe that's the, I mean maybe because we live in the United States, and like there's a lot of debt and people, you know, it's a pretty common thing that, okay, so economic crisis will happen to your code, and so it's often used as an excuse, and so that's just something to keep in mind. Keep the technical debt metaphor in mind, but recognize that it, I mean that has to be a very, very explicit decision, and it's not something that you should really take lightly, and anytime you have the chance to chip down at your technical debt, do so. So final thing I've got here is, I don't know if you guys can tell, I'm really passionate about Ruby and I'm passionate about software, and this stuff is very important to me, and I know it is all for you guys too. You know, you're 300 programmers out of the entire Ruby and Rails community, you've been to conferences before, and people say that you are not the average programmer, you're the, you know, you're in the top 1% or whatever it may be of being interested in this, of solving problems, of creating new knowledge, of sharing this stuff, and so it's very easy, it's easy for me sometimes to get lost in the, you know, the trivialities of my daily work, and to lose some of this, to lose sight of this, and to not hold true to my principles some of the time, and that's something that I never wanted to, you looked at that curve like, I'm really, really fucking happy to be a Ruby programmer right now, this is a good place to be, this is a good place for everybody to be right now, and this is something that we are able to share with the rest of the people in the community, the people on the mailing list, the people that aren't here, the people who should be here next year, and that's most of all what I hope you guys take away from this, we have a brilliant community, we've got a beautiful language that allows us to be really happy, that allows us to make connections with people that might be difficult to do in other communities, and that's something that we can never lose sight of, and you know, just keep it going, so that's it, for me there's my very creative email on Twitter and GitHub, and I realized I kind of felt like an ass for not having any Ruby in a Ruby talk, so I've got a couple minutes for questions, and it's actually one minute and 30 seconds roughly, they're cool with it, so here's the other thing, you guys are all familiar with somebody making a very sarcastic, do you want a cookie, say like if you do something, we'll say do you want a cookie, and I think it's very disappointing when I say yes, and then they look at me like a dumbass, so to avoid the whole embarrassing scenario when I talk for 25 minutes and then get nobody to answer, ask questions, if anybody asks a question, I have cookies, how about that, okay right here, yeah come get one okay, but that's the last time somebody pulls that trick, any other questions, yeah up here, so I absolutely love pair programming, and that comes from very very good experiences at Pivotal, I got to work with some really cool people, you guys know Nick Callan, he wrote HasFinder that became namescope and then and then he like basically wrote Arrow, which is now, so like he's brilliant friggin dude, and the biggest benefit to pair programming is your, well two things, from a productivity standpoint, you are working eight hours for the day, like nobody's checking their email, you hear that all the time, but it's just like two brains think better than one, and oftentimes when you get in sync with with a pair, then you guys kind of finish each other's thoughts, or you, very small course corrections, right, if I'm going down a certain path and I'm making this, I'm about to make a small error, my pair might notice it because he's not, he's not digging into the details quite like I am, so he's able to look at it on a broader level, but I know that some people really don't like it, and various reasons for that social thing, like it's really fun to code alone, you know, I mean everybody here codes alone every once in a while I assume, and but other, if you have a negative pair experience, if you're working with somebody who hasn't paired with a lot of people, or he or she is a very, very dominating and doesn't accept your ideas, that is incredibly frustrating, nobody likes to go to work every day and be told that they're wrong all the time, and that's, I have seen that happen with pairs, so if you're pairing with somebody, don't do that because they're going to think you're an asshole and it's not going to be fun, and then the next time I tell somebody, hey, pairing is really cool, you should do it, they're going to be like, no, no, no, pairing sucks, and here's why, well that's because your pair sucked, so, want a cookie? Yeah! Alright, any other questions? Chains? Ooh, okay, that's really good, so the things that have been, okay, the books that have been most influential for me, supposed to be, I read Small Talk, Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck, and then he kind of updated it for Java with his implementation patterns, that was a really good one, the two other books that everybody needs to read is Design Patterns and Refactoring, who here has not read Design Patterns, okay, so a few, and Refactoring, same similar thing, so go out and read those, those are, that is like the basic mechanics of our craft, like Refactoring is the basic mechanics of how do we take our, like, it gives you detailed step by step by step, of this is what's wrong with your code, this is how you fix it, and this is why that's going to be a lot better, similar thing happens with Design Patterns, I know that we look at Design Patterns and say, oh well that comes from Java, although, is you heard it still here? Dude, there's no Java in the Design Patterns book, so stop that lie, C++ and Small Talk, those are the languages that are in the Design Patterns book, so the link between Design Patterns, Java, complete myth, those are the two, and you should be looking in your code base and you should be able to identify patterns, even if you don't explicitly put those in, they should, you should see them, you should, oh that's it, you know there's a strategy pattern there if you're making certain decisions, because it's not that those are a la carte design choices that you make, but rather they represent these proven solutions to various forces that everybody experiences, so whether you know it or not, whether you know that you implement a certain design pattern, doesn't really matter, but the point is you're going to, your code is going to be experiencing certain forces on it, and there are good ways to resolve those forces, and there are bad ways to resolve those forces, and Design Patterns helps you know what are the good ways, and what are the bad ways, and what are the various trade-offs, and not that you ever actually stick to everything listed in that book, but you should know it because it gives you all the trade-offs and all the forces, and that's pretty important, so I think that's it, well thank you guys very much, it was a lot of fun, and enjoy this next talk.


or EXO heroes episodes so today we will be talking about top five tips for arc first but before that if you want an updated exo's yours content please hit the subscribe button down below okay so since arc verse is still in its pre season I might as well give you guys some tips I've been playing last night this PvP real-time mode and more or less I was kind of excited on how the mechanics to the game mechanics of this game mode went and more or less you still have to prepare for this but for the tips that I'll be giving you number one is be sure to prepare multiple teams preferably different nations that you can build so at least two nations so again builds are very important because once you have only one nation and that general or a key component gets banned you will be you won't be able to survive picking other teams okay so also be prepared to what they call this be prepared with your probable ban list that's actually my tip number two for you because selection time this game is very quick so let's take a look at at the sample match so if I can if I can for example show you how quick the selection time so you only have 30 seconds more or less to select a hero ban so the first three bands actually this is third tip the first three bands are very crucial so fortunately I already have my selection in mind so more or less I'm banning generals for this for this match I was trying to select so I don't I don't use these journals so might as well ban them so okay so I'm going to select my key journal actually journal not journal a lieutenant so selecting then your opponent gets to select another two for him or herself key is also on what they're selecting so okay so more or less I know where they're going at let's try to select for myself as well trying to lock my opponent then we'll have okay so he again or she is actually selecting her third and my tip number four is for the next two bands other heroes usually ban other heroes most likely healers or crucial support based on the first three picks based on his first three picks I think I can actually ban rara because I don't want first guardians and I'm going to ban Ramji for the frontline so again the first three bands are very key so journals are usually recommended for the first three bands to disrupt any synergy any combos so that they won't be effective so he gets to select his fourth hero right now so I'm thinking for my fourth I'll be getting Maggie so he's going with I'm not sure what is going with here so but I'm going to get Maggie then for my fifth one hmm so more or less I need a I need Ansalo for this one to have a you know a frontline defense so more or less he got a bunch of a mix of picks so I actually got what I wanted in terms of my picks it's really up to gameplay on how this is going to play out okay so my fifth advice or tip for you guys is build non-meta teams because they will most likely survive the band so again most of your meta nations would be Linombe would be Greenland you also have Vagabond next four and five would be wasted red and Astoris actually North 1-4 steed right now is a good is a good pick so oh if I didn't see that he got FC Zeon let's try this out I'm not sure this is going to I don't have something that would disable Zeon but again based on his picks he doesn't have any he doesn't have any you know good heroes built up so this was pretty much lucky but again if his teams were built up already or less this would be a long game so again it would be crucial that you build again back to my first tip is prepare multiple teams because your first second and third team should be able to be to be very good because again you're bringing them in you're going to bring them in tag PvP anyway so again build one two or three teams if possible let's go into another match to see and more or less the the pairing system right now I'm actually happy even though it's it's still in pre-release or pre-season I am glad that I was able to try this out so same same bands for me I don't like these teams this nations because they're a bit tricky to to to fight against if I bring what they call this if I bring wasted red so most most of the time I realize wasted red isn't banned so I usually would go for for Rudd Lee first then I don't usually get Garf depending on the situation I would next go with Annie because with both red lean Annie having silence I could pretty much disable any team on the battlefield as long as I don't usually have the my problem is usually first first gargantz again Rera is there ready we'll see what happens so Morris again he's picking a mixed team who do I get getting Maggie for first gargantz then for the bands for this team I would do a band again for Ramji and I would do a band for Talia because I hate healing for the enemy of course but again for my team I need heels I don't like Ramji Talia so those are my secondary use that's actually matching his team so Talia I don't really like her as an opponent so again she's been banned so let's wait for it's my turn 13 sorry it's blabbering and blabbering going to get a band garf I don't really need Garf at this point in my team I don't really need him I most really need Rudd Lee Annie in Maggie so yeah Zeon and I think his last would be Baraka pretty much I have Iris I don't have a problem I think I still get I'd still get tantalo for this one oh he got tantalo so who am I going to get front line that was unexpected for the front line who do I get in seconds left going to get let's go with this I'm not sure I actually he he was able to get tantalo and ban garf so again I'm going I'm I'm rolling with the punches here see if I can still win this the front line isn't really crucial in this team of mine but again it will really be you know it will really be a pity if I don't have anything for the front line so again I would be going first with tantalo I think to the front at least he doesn't have a healer so that that was actually in my mind he can't heal not a single healer so I can actually withstand this match and I have Iris so that's pretty much very good so again picking depending on what the enemy you know reacting to what the enemy gives you is actually crucial for this game I still have my go to go to teams if rudley gets bad I usually go with the storage republic but for the meantime he is here so no problem Morris with that moustache Morris moustache critical hit rudley is oh my god what I do next I hope rudley doesn't get attacked for anything damage immunity I would go with that one silenced silenced that little rat little rat try to silence another one rare he dodged it let's see tantalo first doesn't have damage immunity so trying to turn him into something else just do a basic attack so that I could prepare more manifold he doesn't have damage immunity no kill tantalo kill kill kill if I can kill him yes out the back line left so far so good so far so good try to I hope rudley holds on on rudley holds on to what life he has left but I think he's going to die spoke too soon deads he's dead I don't know why he got so low in his life didn't really didn't know that don't know why because of Morris's attack at least I have FC anesthesia left so I was just going to be dead I think I'm going to lose this one crucial picks actually oh oh I still have a chance that was crucial the saving saving gray so it's Morris see again even if you're up but if your heroes are not built well they're still squishy so again it really boils down on how in how many teams you build this was actually lucky because he was actually ahead of me but with maggies s2 he surrendered anyway guys that's it for me so more or less that is or those are my tips for you for archers again this is just preseason but again try to build your teams already you have time to practice team building and time to practice banning and picking heroes so again you have time before the season starts so the rewards for now is just 500 sets across the board but more or less if if archers is going to be the successful in terms of in terms of pairing in terms of not dying on us so again I wish that they would push this to season already but again you guys still have time build your teams build your roster so that you could have a team two or three teams for archers to choose just in case the others are bad okay so those for those who have been or stayed this long in this video um please do subscribe to my channel also please um click the bell icon so that you don't miss any exo series videos also guys put put comments below on this archverse episode so that I may know your thoughts take care guys stay safe this is the warden and I'm out of here


So this was Robbie's suggestion, this phrase, the question of beauty, and I'm very, very excited because I've had a little bird's-eye view into the email exchanges around it from Carl Hancock-Rugs and Daniel Alexander-Jones, and then the responses I've just started to introduce so you could make your entrance. Oh, yes! Yes to that! That's right! Oh my god, now I'm scared again. You know! This is like a picture. You know! So our last star has arrived, and we will come to you all on the question of beauty. So hello everybody, I'm Daniel Alexander-Jones, a performance artist living in New York City, and we're going to do the following. I'm going to give a little brief introduction to the concept, and then everybody's going to introduce themselves. And then Carl will open with a statement, and then we're going to have a conversation. So Robbie invited us to think of the question of beauty. And when I saw that, you know, I got all excited because I'm like, what does she mean? And I'm like, what kind of beauty? But at the core, I had a brief conversation with Robbie and she said, you know, I'm very much interested in how we are able to keep doing what we do. So what an interesting contrast to the thought of the question of beauty. How did those two ideas go together? And that became the groundwork. And Carl and I talked a bit, and we invited everyone to think of a brief response rooted in these ideas.  So this is going to be, when we do start our conversation, we've asked everybody to think of a very brief statement of initial response. But even now, before we begin, may I invite you to think of this question of beauty and its relationship to an idea of continuance or practice, resilience, resurgence, even. So maybe can we just go down the line, introduce ourselves, and then we'll hear from you. I'm Kim Moore. I'm a director and an educator. I teach at Brown, and I have a small company called Anti-Gravity Theater Project. And so I'm thrilled to be here and try to answer the question. I'm not making statements. It's just who I am. I'm not making the statement. You are. You're always making the statement. Always trying to get it right. I'm Karolga Brooks, a multidisciplinary artist. I'm a writer, a performer. I think that's about as multidisciplinary as you can get. And all that needs to be said, I'm going down the list. I'm Nikki Paraiso. I'm an actor, performer, writer. For the last 16 years, I've been also a curator and programmer at La Mama Experimental Theater in New York. And helping younger artists fulfill their dreams. Which is another question. My name is Pamela Snead. I am a poet. I'm known as a poet, but I am an interdisciplinary artist. So I work in theater and I work in performance. I'm a professor. At School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I don't live in Chicago. I'm laughing at my own jokes. Yeah, and that's what I do. I finished a book and it's called Aname for me, Tina Turner, and all Black women survivors. And it's being shot. And then I have a chat book coming out with Bella Donna in June. And it's called Sweet Dreams. So, of course, the charge came to investigate the notion of beauty, which was a challenge in so many ways. But not a challenge in that way that I think... Well, it was a challenge. It was an absolute challenge. And at the same time, it became so freeing for me personally. Because the minute that I knew that Robbie wanted beauty to be part of this panel, I was sending some exchanges back and forth with Daniel, actually. Trying to get clarity about what that meant or what needed to be said. And then suddenly it wasn't a question anymore. It became clear from me, I guess, that we would have a discussion about beauty right now, beauty as a practice, beauty as a concept. But I just wanted to share some things that directly, for me, came up. And which connects me also, I think, to my relationship to even the very first time that I saw Robbie and Collie's work on stage some years ago. Well, it wasn't the first time. I'm sorry, that's not true. But one of the most impactful moments that I saw Robbie perform at the kitchen when she did Salish Ray. And how it was absolutely, and it's not left me since that moment, because it was absolutely a moment of beauty. A very clear moment of beauty. So let me just read this very quickly. One of the things I'd written to Daniel was that I wanted us to think about beauty as a Socratic practice. And it made me think about Diotima. There's that moment in the dialogues where this mysterious woman comes up, that we know little to nothing about. And her name is Diotima. And Socrates says this, telling the story continues his discussion of love by restating an account given to him by a woman named Diotima. And he claims that he once held the opinions expressed by Agaton and that Diotima convinced him. He was mistaken through a series of questions similar to those of Socrates. And the conversation was about beauty and about love. And having been convinced that love is not beautiful or good, Socrates asks Diotima if that means that love is actually ugly or can love be bad. And Diotima, this woman argues that not everything must be either one thing or its opposite. For an instance, having unjustified true opinions is neither wisdom nor ignorance. Wisdom consists in justified true opinions of woman hardly called a true opinion ignorant. And she points out, in spite of himself, that Socrates has denied that love is good altogether. In fact, that Socrates has denied that love itself is a God. And they have concluded that love is not good and beautiful because he is in need of good and beautiful things. And no one would deny that a God is both happy and beautiful and yet love seems to be neither happy or beautiful. Which absolutely connects me to the moment that I saw Sally's rape, which is a very clear correlation for me. In this moment of beauty, this Diotima, this mysterious woman, the body of Robbie Macaulay on stage 26 years ago, beautiful, nude, gorgeously beautiful. In this moment that was reflective of an ugliness and a painfulness which had to deal with history and American slavery and the female body. And what happened for me at that moment. And I'm very clear about, and I wanted to say this a little earlier when we talked about who we are now. And almost in a way in response to what Nikki said a little bit about being the boy in the room. Without disagreeing, but almost saying that, Nikki please excuse me for saying this, but I guess what I became clear is that in that moment that that work happened to me 26 years ago when I experienced it. I began the process of no longer being the boy in the room. In fact, I let go, it was the beginning of letting go of that gender cell that constricted me to a masculine, you know, patriarchal place that defined what I had to say, how I had to say it, you know what needed to be birthed out of me. And it made me connect to something else very clear. I mean the idea of creation, beauty as creation, beauty as something that you give birth to. And there's just a little bit, something else I want to read to you because this is very clear. So I guess it exposed for me what Robbie did in that moment. Robbie McCauley with Lori Carlos with those people did for me in that moment was, it was, it became very plain and very clear to me that this beauty that I was being surrounded with that was neither, you know, happy, nor good, but could also be beautiful yet could expose ugliness. Yet was coming from female bodies and was reaching out to me led me toward understanding something else. And there's a, there's a writer that I'm in love with, there are many writers that I'm in love with, but there's a specific writer that I'm in love with, Helene Sisu. Some of you may know her, yes. Okay. And of course I'd come to her by way of Julie Krusteva, yes, a Belgian scholar, they both Belgian, but I wanted to read some things that she says about the female body and she says, and I think this deals with the topic and all of you can respond to her if you will. She says, Helene says, we should write as we dream. We should even try and write. We should all do it for ourselves. It's very healthy because it's the only place where we never lie. At night we don't lie. Now we think that our whole lives are built online. They are strange builders. We should try and write as our dreams teach us shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very, every human being.  In our dreams we are criminals. We kill and we kill with a lot of enjoyment, but we are also the happiest people on earth and we make love as we never make love in life. Sense of the body and use sense of breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself because your body must be heard.  I too overflowed. My desires have invented my new desires. My body knows unheard of songs. Time and again I too have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst, burst with forms much more beautiful than those which were put up in frames and sold for a fortune. And I too said nothing, showed nothing. I did not open my mouth. I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid. And I swallowed my shame and my fear. And I said to myself, you are mad. What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the abominant, infinite woman who has not been ashamed of her strength? Who, who, who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives? For she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a divine composure, has not accused herself of being a monster. Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short to bring out something new, has not thought that she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble. Why don't you write? Writing is for you. You are for you. Your body is yours. Take it. And then this last note that she says, which is, again, above you.  That women aren't castrated. That they have only to stop listening to the sirens. For the sirens were men. For history to change its meaning. You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. She's not deadly. She's beautiful. And she's laugh. So this became very clear to me that this moment of discussing beauty, of Socrates having this chance discussion with a woman who begins to define what helps him define what beauty is, its ugliness, its painfulness, its shit, its history, is a giving birth process that actually stops him from, or I believe, removes him, maybe in a better way said it, and maybe it's said better, transmogrifies his masculine body to come to something much more feminine, which is a fullness of understanding, a fullness of creation, a fullness of knowing, a fullness of acceptance, a fullness of what is good and painful and joyous. The male body, as we all know, is so limited in its experience of pain and joy. The female body is so complicated, almost from birth to death, right, in the fullness of its physiological experience of pain and joy. So I think that beauty strips us of gender assignment in a way, or maybe it moves us toward a femaleness. I know that at the moment that I saw Robbie on that stage, nude, 26 years ago, it stripped me of a certain kind of gender assignment and a way of seeing myself toward understanding something beautiful. That was ugly, that was also ugly and painful and gave birth to an intertextuality and a way of being in the world that I now have. And I think that's why I would like everybody to speak to me. I have two moments, so the saddest thing in the world has got to be when you love someone unable to provide the love and support you need. And staying with them would be a form of suicide. It took all I had to leave her emotionally. She still has a part of me. A year of therapy to resolve something, an honest conversation I've solved. Now I'm stuck with everything I didn't say and she's not here to say it to. I tried to pretend it didn't hurt as much as it did. I searched all over this earth for a safe place and I can't walk up to somebody and ask that. To give me back to myself, just keep searching inside open to find an answer.  Maybe she's my father. Maybe she embodies all the insecurity I ever felt and that's why I keep coming back here. Over and over I ask myself, is it love? But it isn't desire that drives me back towards the fact she has a piece of me I want. So anyway, that's an excerpt from Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery. I did it here at the Theatre Offensive and Robbie was my director advisor. I guess that was more than 20 years ago. I remember her saying to me, just do it real still. You don't need anything. Just do it real still. Then I was also in my fear and all kinds of stuff was going on. She said, what part of you wants to be here? Focus on that part of you that wants to be here. She directed me more than 20 years ago in that piece and those are the things that stand out to me. That's the beginning of your influence on me. I had this idea and so anyway, it's been in my mind forever that I wanted to do a research paper. I wanted to add it to the canon of black women in theater because I believe it needs to be there. I wanted to start with Sadiah Hartman's scenes of subjection and her thesis about slavery and the plantation as scenes of terror and resistance. I wanted to talk about the two most seminal theater pieces in my life.  I remember Robbie standing on top of an auction block in the theater after instructing the audience to chant, bit them in, bit them out, bit them in, bit them out. She was then standing there naked with a piece of white cloth covering her and there was an absolute stillness when she said in the words of Sally, I didn't want anybody doing it to me down on the ground.  Basically, as a teacher, as a professor, I say, if you want to know what you can do in theater, then you must view Sally's Rape by Robbie Macaulay. I wanted to talk about black women in the use of the auction block. That's something that Sidia Hartman talks about. Danitra Vance, again, I saw her, I don't know, it was 30 years ago. It was one of the first pieces of theater that I've ever seen. She took off all of her clothes and she was standing on top of a black box and she was showing her mastectomy scars. Then, flash forward and then I see Robbie, Sally's Rape. Then, I guess about 10 years ago, I made a theater piece called Calm. At the end, I'm sort of talking about who was at the Rwandan Massacre and they found the guy who orchestrated the Rwandan Massacre and he was dead in a ditch. I remember I was naked and I said, I'm glad, I'm really glad he's dead. I was referencing Robbie and Danitra. Some of that history hasn't been told but I wanted to, again, take the auction block and to show black women's aesthetics in theater. Anyway, I hope to one day do that paper. I couldn't be a theater practitioner without those pieces, without your piece. It has stayed with me. I didn't even do any research. That was in my mind. I didn't want anybody doing it to me down on the ground. I never recovered, really. That's my moment of beauty and thank you. Since we're modern in the Rwandan Massacre, I have to say this one thing. I'm going to give myself permission to respond to what you just said a little bit, which is that I don't know if you remember it. I was sitting in the Rwandan Massacre. You have to meet your show. I don't remember that. I was sitting right behind you. To have seen that night, the way that Danitra Vance orchestrated it, again, back to this notion of beauty and ugliness, was she was in this moment where she was orchestrating the feminist triptes. She had been leading up to that all along, saying that the show was called Danitra Vance and the Mellow White Boys.   Every time they played during the show, she would tell them to be quiet, because she hadn't given them permission to play yet. Only when she gave them permission to play was the moment when she finally decided to string. We're laughing and laughing and laughing. She's wearing this military garb, remember? She starts to do this thing. The burlesque kind of music or whatever. I remember that moment so clearly, because I think it impacted all of us. Not just that night, but everybody saw it. The audience was, you know, we were caught in laughter. She's doing this triptes. The way that she conducted the moment was that she would ascend to this auction docket of this high place to remove the final piece of clothing and throw her hands up so that, and at that moment, all the lights in the public theater came up, including out in the audience, like every light. It was no longer the separation between audience and performer. And there she stood with her one breast and where she had her mastectomy scar, she had two huge white pieces of tape, not huge, but made as an X over that. And she died only maybe a few months after that. And our hands were up like this. And we choked back on our laughter. It was absolutely one of the most profound moments of theater that I've ever seen, that I continue to teach and talk about. But you almost can't talk about it without wishing the people that have been there, or bringing people back to that moment, because it was so impactful, and it was so clear what she was doing with her body, how she was creating beauty and uglyness and music. Right, and Robbie... Yeah, and Robbie doing Sally Shrave, it's like the hand of Black women's use of the auction block is just stunning and historical. Absolutely.  And it, you know, completely changed the pan in the theater. Right, absolutely. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, when I got the message, you know, we were talking about beauty, different ways of making beauty, just in the Socratic sense. And immediately I thought about the primary lesson I got from Robbie, which was that vulnerability was a strength. This was something that I grew up in a pretty strict West Indian household where vulnerability was seen as, you know, not the way to be in the world. And I remember seeing Robbie up at Dartmouth when there was this big, I don't know, something about Black theater, and obviously something like that, a big symposium. And the big takeaway from that whole event, I hardly remember who was there, was that Robbie walked up to a podium, and so she's at the podium and she says to the audience, I'm a solo artist, but I don't perform alone. And then she moved away from the podium and came and stood next to the podium and said, I'm a solo artist, but I don't perform alone. And she said it several times, and I started weeping in the audience. And I thought, oh my God, look at this person allowing themselves to be seen.  Because you know these actors who come on and they're like, don't look at me, but they're on stage.  And I thought, oh, that's an actual strength. That's an actual thing you can be in this world. And Robbie gave me that permission. That's one of the key permissions. And it is vulnerability, you know, when I heard you, Jesse, I thought about my own kid who's not here, but also called me at six this morning to move his equipment from my basement because it might flood. That's another story. Vulnerability is a beauty that I think we don't cop to or afraid of. And what I appreciate, another thing I appreciate deeply about Robbie is that she not only allows herself to be seen, but she sees us, right? And that's, I mean, everyone, people have said this, but it's the looking back. Even if she's on a podium, there are a million people out here, if she looks here, you go, oh, she saw me. And we want, when you're seen, you belong, right? We feel connected. And I found that incredibly powerful. So, you know, that was the thing I wanted to offer, but I have been reading this incredible book that I keep at my bedside and I grabbed it on my way up here this morning. And so I'm just going to read a little bit. Maybe I'll get through the whole poem without, you know, breaking. But it's David White's book called Consolations. Yes, honey, you need to own it. It's great. And it's Consolation of the Solid Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. And when I think of this book, I think of you, Mourabi. It's quite powerful. So, of course, I was like, of course this guy's written something about vulnerability, but I hadn't gotten that far in the book. And then I found it. And so I'm just going to share this with you, because I think it says it all. Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing in disposition, or something we can arrange to do without. Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present, and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature. The attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not, and most especially to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the health needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential title and conversational foundations of our identity. To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely, illusionary privilege. And perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human, and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with the same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers, powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath. The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully or conversely as misers and complainers reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. I thank you. Yes, I was thinking of this question of beauty and what I came up with is kind of like a snapshot or a moment. Maybe I think the Socratic metaphor is apt here because there's something very special and ineffable in the relationship between teacher and student and that it's true that Robby has that gift for seeing the person in front of her and it's true, again, that when having been a solo artist we bring those spirits into the room with us. So we are not alone even though the physical body is alone on stage. There are many spirits in the room guiding and whispering. So this is what came to me when I was thought about Robby and the question of beauty. When I first met Robby McCauley, she was a young teacher and I was completely as yet unformed to a certain extent as a young, closeted gay man of 22 years of age. It was 1974. Sound effect, yeah. We were 10. President Richard Nixon, it bears repeating, had resigned his presidency on August 9, 1974. That's when my class was beginning at NYU. The American presidency, quote, was the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office, unquote. The parallels to this time are disturbing and cautionary. A time of great turmoil in the mid-70s and uncertainty in this country and also in the lives of many who opposed the Vietnam War and were questioning their next move. So there was a movement, I think because we were so out there protesting against the war and now we were in the mid-70s, there was a movement towards an internal research, a more private investigation of self. And may I say that Robby at that time became one of the enablers, if I may say that in a positive way, of enabling this private investigation of self. The East Village was the most dangerous spot on earth on many levels. A performance renaissance was about to begin.  And then having written this, I'm speaking about myself as well. Pensive, searching eyes, trained and concentrated on mine. In that moment, I felt my whole being and desire to be an actor was in question, in a good way. Profound, profoundly deep and good. And there was born trust. A voice tutorial where I barely remember making a sound. Although what I do remember is my own abject terror and discomfort. The fierce determination and concentration of this beautiful young woman trying to get my locked jaw to open. There was beauty there, hovering and trembling, hovering in expectation and uncertainty. I was there for the taking. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale of breath. The body is a vessel, a vehicle, an infinite receptacle of breath and sound. Elemental, although to be expressed and articulated, a phrase, a sentence to be completed and communicated. Little did I know it would take 43 years to grasp what that even meant. Inhale, exhale, and how it could become a thread, a lifeline to some understanding and even a modicum of wisdom and beauty, transformation, transformative. And then I remember the ghosts in the room as we were remembering this morning at the hotel. Omar Shapley, Nora Dunphy, Peter Cass, Laurie Carlos, Fred Holland. Beauty. They were all embodiments of beauty and their spirits are still hovering in expectation over us as we sit here today. What if beauty is made? What if beauty is found? What if beauty and grace have a very much intimate relationship? What if beauty is made? What if beauty is found? What if beauty and grace have a very much intimate relationship? So I want to tell you two stories of being trained as an actor that were extracurricular, that had to do with two of my mentors, Laurie Carlos and Rodney McCauley. I was in a reading of Aisha Rock's mom's module in the Seiso playing the young son who comes in through the window, enraged and is like tearing up the house of his parents and yelling and supposed to be like, you know, young George Jackson energy Black Panther boy. And Laurie Carlos was to come in and direct this, but she was late on the train. So we had started working and I was with Aisha and the other actors and Laurie walked into the building and stood next to Aisha and watched as this scene was unfolding. And I was in it, y'all. And Laurie said to Aisha at this volume, oh, where do they teach them this? It's awful.  And she came up to me and she grabbed me as I was acting right here. And she said, read one story, two. I have been cast in my first professional equity show St. Paul Minnesota Penelope Theatre Company. Robbie was directing. Laurie was, I was starring alongside Laurie Carlos, Lou Bellamy, Catherine Gagnon, or at least Yerbie was choreographing. It was an extraordinary birthing into the professional world. And I was performing as a young, homeless, spoken word artist poet.  I was like, you know, serving beauty, what I thought beauty was. And the scene was done and there was a silence and I was like, yes. And I heard Robbie in the dark of the theater say, Daniel. And I said, yes, ma'am. And she said, come here. And I walked to the edge of the stage and got down, bent down, and she came face to face with me this close. And I tell this to every student that I teach as a performer. And she looked at me as I'm looking at you right now. And a long time went by. And in that moment, I had this feeling of myself at that age that I'd had since I'd gone into the world, left the sanctity of my home, my community where women were in charge, where it was a black environment where I knew myself through the reflection of the world. I had a sense that she was seeing behind the mask that I had made for myself. And that people were distrustful of me because of that mask. People were distrustful of me because I was a pretty boy. Distrustful of me because I was biracial and calling myself in a black context.  All of these distrustful things that I would put up this bullbark against. And she was standing there looking at me behind the mask that I was trying to use to act with. Right? And she leaned forward and she said, what are you afraid of? And I went... Right? And I started to feel this vibration in my body. And it was a vibration that sat right behind the same place that Lauria grabbed. And I said, I... I... And I took a breath in like that. And she yelled. She said, right now, play the scene. On that breath that I had taken in and I exhaled the first line and my world changed. And I came to understand that behind the mask there was, if you will, go with me here, a trembling matrix of concurrent impulses. Many things all at once that refused to be caged, refused to be boxed. And that if I were to allow myself to breathe into them, acknowledge them, and as she taught me, and this is the quote that I always come back to, seek not to resolve your contradictions, but rather to house them. And that was beauty to me. So for me, beauty is made. It is made in the gesture of outreach that we give as a mentor, as a friend, as a collaborator, as a student. It is found in the moments of vulnerability that we allow ourselves. And there is a deep relationship between that beauty and what I think of as being grace. And I can't know myself in the world without again saying thank you because you embody grace and that you saw me. And you know, this is the thing. We're all in this room together in Trump's America. Let's call it. We don't have to set beyond the boundary of our self-hood. We don't have to offer something to somebody that would cost us something. But you did. And Jessica Hagridhorn, you did. And Lori Carlos, she did.  And that to me was evidence of what I think of when I think of beauty. It's made. We don't just find it. That's beautiful. Just the hoping about being where we are in America right now, I just want to share that and beauty, and who Robbie has always been, who Jesse has always been, who Dale has always been to me as well, who Pamela has always been to me.  We were trying to just deal with things. And it was so great because Jessica's voice was always on the phone because there'd be many conference calls. And then Jessica was always the calm voice and I was always trying to be the, I was reverting back by the way. I was reverting back to this masculine kind of like, you know, I got it. I'm like, yeah, what do you get me to do? I'll take care of it kind of thing. And Jessica was like, you know, everything was calm and beautiful and wonderful. And it was this moment when I was at home and, you know, Lori was going through chemo and high on, what was the drug? What's the... Oxygen. Oxygen, right. And she, I was, she had called me, which was really crazy because, you know, honestly, you're going through, you're in chemotherapy right now and, you know, you're high on oxygen and, you know, you pick up a phone for me. I called him.  We've been here before. All of this, we have been here, all of who they're electing and we have been here. We've seen them. They're speaking the same thing. They said it in 1960. I was there when they said it in 64. I heard it in 75. I heard it in 1980. It's the same faces and the same people and all I said was yes, Lori, the whole conversation. She was like, so do your work. That was the charge. Do your work. And the last bit, which was brilliant to me and so incredible was she said, you're not going to understand this, but I'm also going to tell you you are not your work, but do your work. And she was right. I didn't understand that at that moment. I didn't understand that until after passing. And then there was this incredible thing that somebody said about someone who's not forgettable. They were being asked about he was an actor, he was on TV and he had this, he was being interviewed. In fact, it was Morgan Freeman. Thank you. Thank you, Universe. It was Morgan Freeman and someone was interviewing Morgan Freeman about his PBS special about how he's investigating God and all this stuff. I don't know if you've seen that, Morgan Freeman's then he goes around the world and he's investigating the nature of God. And so they were in different spiritual practices and someone was interviewing him about whether you're an actor. You've taken on this project of going around the world to investigate the nature of God and to make this sort of episodic documentary. And he said, and they said, would you rather be acting or is it strange for you to kind of take on this role as a documentary filmmaker now or take on this role as a narrator. And he said, I'm not defined by my vocation. I define it. I'm not defined by the work I do. This is the work I'm doing right now. And tomorrow I'll get up and I'll make a film or I'll do whatever. You know what I mean? That's it. This moment doesn't define me. It does for you but it doesn't define me. You know, I'm fluid that way. You know what I mean? And so is Lori and so is Robbie. Beautiful. And we are at time. We're at time.