Hello there, this is Melissa Armo with the Stock Swoosh, and I wanted to go over year to date 2020 results for the Stock Swoosh Show Live Trading Room. So this is all the trades going back from the beginning of the year, January, through pretty much the end here. We're getting into the end of November, November 20th. And an advanced trader risk is around $2,500 per trade. That's the risk. In the live trading room, I call the entry, the stop, and targets and exits. So year to date, again, 2020, 931,481. So it's been really a very, very active year, and I think part of it is I've been home a lot, the market's been volatile, the trades have been there, and I've been taking advantage of the momentum and the volatility that really the market has given this year. If you'd like to learn what I do, you can email me at MelissaTheStockSwoosh.com, you can call me at 929-3200GAP, and you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. So right now we're still in earning season for the fall. Next earning season begins in January. There's four quarterly earnings seasons to trade. Those make the best times to do gaps. I only trade gaps. I trade something called golden gaps, which is the term that I named my system, which is a 26-point rating system that I used to determine what stocks to trade each day. And that's why I call all the trades that we're gonna go over with for the entire year. So it really is a good time to learn how to, how to master my system, to learn the skills, and then apply them before the next earning season starts, which again is January. So for an advanced trader risk, it's around $2,500 a trade. Some trades we did ads, where we doubled up, was like two trades in one. We don't do that every trade, and I don't do that every week even, but sometimes we've done that. Normally people can risk, according to what the size is of their account, you can open up a proprietary day trading account with as little as $5,000, and have 10 to one margin or 50,000 buying power. Obviously you would not have a $2,500 risk trade with a $5,000 account. You don't wanna risk 50% of your account in one trade, but you can set your risk accordingly with a $5,000 account, you could start out with a $250 risk. So you can use a beginner risk, or an intermediate risk, or an advanced risk with my system. I think that's a nice thing about my system in trading gaps. These are day trades. These are equity trades where you take the trades on margin. You also can use my system for options. You don't need margin to do options. But what we're gonna talk about here is only the day trades, and again, these are equity trades where you would have to have an account set up with a broker to short or go long stocks. And most of these trades really are shorts because I do prefer to short. Every once in a while we will go long when I see a good gap, and I do teach a bullish golden gap course too, but the main class I teach is the bearish class. So this is going all the way back to January. Seems like a long time ago, this is before COVID hit really the world and the United States and the market. So started off the year, took a couple days off, then got into it. A couple good ones are at the beginning of the year. Tessa really was a very bullish gap that we did at the beginning of the year. So Tessa was a big winner for the day trades and for the options to start out the year. We also did the market a bunch at the beginning of the year and some of the market trades this year were long, some of them were shorts. Again, January starts earning season. When I take a loss, it's because I take the stock. So I put in a hard stop. It's called a limit order stock. So it stops me out and then I lose. If I decided I want to take another trade, it's called a retake. I do teach that in the class as well. Some of these trades who were retakes some and were not, sometimes I don't do a retake or sometimes it doesn't set up. We did a number of earnings in January and sometimes I do gaps based on news as well. There's been a lot of news gaps as well during COVID but this was first quarter earning season. Here you can see when was the retake but it didn't work out. Two trades in win but it didn't work that day. MM, two trades here in the MM. One was break even, one was profitable. Two trades in PFE, nice PFE. That ended up working out really well. AMD was earnings, that was a 29th. And sometimes then I do trades with the market because sometimes stocks gap with the market. You had that in a lot of the high flyers this year. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple sometimes when we did them. Then there will be days. This was the beginning of February where I don't do any trades. Maybe there isn't any good gaps. It has to meet my criteria. If it doesn't then I don't do it. Snap was a good trade and remember that. That was earnings as well. I'd say most of the stocks that I trade are in the price range. I'd say between $20 and maybe $100, $150. So it's a wide, wide range. We're not doing any low float stocks. We're not doing any penny stocks. I really do anything even under $5 just so you know that. Every once in a while we do do the market though and the market can be expensive but you could do the market as an options trade if you don't wanna do it on margin. Twitter was a nice gap back here. This was earlier in the year in February.  This was a retake, first one lost, second one worked. Market, Lyft was a good one too. And as the month went on in February, again this was all before COVID, this was earnings season. And typically I'm very active during earnings season as well. But really, when I get up in the morning, I'll scan for as many things as I can find, then I'll make a small watch list. I won't rate a thousand things. I will make a small list and I will narrow them down to the ones I wanna rate and then I will do the highest rated ones. Sometimes I'll only do one trade a day. If I make my goal in one trade, then I'm just done. AAL, like here, take it, boom, out, done for the day. BXAS, same thing here. Tall, again, take it, done. BL&D was a really active one for us that we did a lot. We did that in 2019. Couple good trades in that this year as well. This was 228, that's the beyond me. Typically when I do more than even four things a day though, it's because the morning has started out where things weren't setting up right. Where you can see here, I took a few losses here at the beginning. So the more active I am tends to be that I'm having a difficult day. The best days I have, the most profitable days I have, the easiest days are when I'm in and out of something once, which you can really tell even looking through all the months, going back to the beginning of the year. Twitter was one here, it was three retakes. That just did not work out the way that I thought that it would. That was back in March and this was right before COVID hit. Boeing was another stock that we did a lot this year. My God, I can't even tell you how many trades between the options trades and the day trades, that was really, even now today, probably the number one short this year. For us, and my clients made a lot of money doing that. Again, every which way, but loose. It hasn't been working great lately, not that I'll never do it again, but I'd say the beginning part of the year, even into the summer months, BA was really one of the best shorts that you possibly could have done. Huge trades in Boeing. This was a day trade, 10,000 plus. This was another day trade here, 12,000 plus, why? The stock moves big, it moves fast. The setups were there, 29,000. This was again, during the time when the COVID hit. So this was 311 and you had all those airline stocks that were just tanking. Then we took a break because the market was halted a couple of days. The market was really wild at that one period where we just waited for the market to flush out. Wasn't a good time to train. Things were getting halted. This was right during the lockdown. Boeing, again, we did this here then the 27th. CCO is another one we did a lot. Another Boeing train end of March. Cruise lines hit them a ton this year. Beautiful trades, 14,250 and CCO, RCL too. JPM, the banks got hit. Remember all of this, another huge trade in Boeing. This was the start of April. Again, this was still during the period right when everything was shut down. Then it was the 30 days to spread. More trades in Boeing. Market, we did a bunch. And again, some days we won't do any trades because they won't be my criteria. Another trade in Boeing. I just like, here's another one. There were so many Boeing shorts this year. I literally couldn't even tell you. And there were so many that were huge. There was another big one, 7,800. And there was a few market trades that were huge too. This was 421. Spy, the Q's. And again, sometimes I will do things in a group with the market. We'll do them all together with the market. And the airlines were good too. Airlines or cruise lines were good this year during that period as well because they were tanking. UAL, huge trade here. Spy was a huge trade here. WMT was big. Another Boeing, another Boeing. UPS was good. This was earnings. Spring, ACAM, nice trade of 4,500. Twitter was a great trade here. Again, Boeing, Boeing. UPS, MCD, this was a big day. Spy, 9,200, TDoc, UPS and the Diamonds. It was an active day. That was second quarter then, earning season had started. And then into May, I remember the market was still really, really volatile at this beginning period. Even after the initial 30-day lockdowns. Like things didn't open up right away. And more Boeing trains. It was really just, I was picking the quality gap. And again, some of the days was the market. It was a huge trade in the market. This was May 1st and CCL 2. So if the market's a good gap, we will do it. We don't trade the market every day, but if there isn't anything else or the market's a good gap, then I'm gonna do it. Boeing, another one here, over seven grand and AAL, airline, beautiful trade. And then nothing on the 12th. CCL and BA again, spy and BA again, banks again. Urban was a great trade on the 20th. Target, BBY was a great trade. That was earnings in the 21st. And the room was closed in the 22nd. No trades of 26. HPQ is always a nice stock to trade. All the stocks that we trade are things that you would know. Companies that you would know, or most of them would be. No trades in the 1st and 2nd. Again, the market on the 3rd was really, really a very volatile year to play the market. If you knew how to play it, you could make money doing it, which we did. Again, these are all day trades. The room usually is, I usually start talking about 9.15. And we try to be done by 10, 30, 11. Some days it's open a little bit later, but I usually try to get in and out in the morning. Some of the trades though, if you're up, you can hold them longer. But if you have to leave and have to go somewhere, you have to go somewhere. In this year, I've been able to stay home and follow things through if they're continuing to go. This was another huge day here for the market, June 11th. Diamonds, Spy, Boeing, Starbucks was here, GS, that was an ice cap, WW, beautiful trade. And again, some of these things have really good price points, where you can really take a lot of size, where it doesn't cost as much with the buying power. Apple was a great trade here in the 23rd. Again, CCL, Boeing, here's Boeing again. Boeing was like every week. Nike, great earnings. Boeing, Mu, FDX was a good play. BA twice, room was closed here for July 4th. Apple was a nice trade here. We did the banks a bit this year too. Here was C, Goldman lost in the 15th. Netflix was okay there in the 17th. It was a win. Better trade here in the 21st, Urban lost. Snap was a winner. Next day didn't work, Microsoft lost. Big winner in Netflix on the 23rd. ITC was a nice winner. And there again, Boeing, if you can even believe it. Boeing, Boeing, Boeing. eBay's a nice sock to trade. Very easy, tight spread. Next day, a couple losses in here. eBay didn't work the second day. Boeing had a loss, Q's loss. Facebook won, Apple huge winner in the 31st. Snap won, nice winner here, Apple. Disney was a good one. We played Disney more, I think, last year. Disney again, has been struggling with the COVID period too. Any of these hospitality resorts. WDC was a good trade. BABA was a good trade in the 7th. No trades on the 10th. Microsoft again, had the retake. Cisco's fun to trade. Spidey was little one, no trades on the 17th. Targeted a couple of times on the 19th. Again, that was earnings. PLCE was a good one. There were days in there, it was slower. That was the summer. Boeing, Boeing, Boeing. Didn't work here though on September 1st. Spidey was a great trade. And Facebook there on the 2nd of September. CN one on the 3rd. There was Boeing again, another nice winner. Boeing again, the 9th. You know, it was just the follow through in that chart. It was unbelievable.  If it rates could, we're doing it. Even if it's three times a week, four times a week. That was, it was really like the go-to stock all year. Apple was a winner on the 11th. 16th, Apple was another nice winner. Couple losses in here. 17th was a tough day. Facebook was a winner on that day though. And again, all the market on the 21st of September. Huge market trade in the 23rd. Boeing again on the 24th. Market, Mew. Mew's a good stock to trade. Spidey was a break-in winner on the 2nd. Apple nice winner here in October. And now again, this was starting earning season two. WFC was a nice trade. Boeing again. Twitter didn't work out here in the 15th. WFC again, RCL. Again, these cruise lines were an airlines. We just did them so often. IBM was a nice winner. Q's big winner there again. Netflix needed a retake, which is fine. IBM worked here, Spidey didn't. Apple was a winner. Huge trade in the market. And again, the diamonds and Boeing were going together really a lot this whole year. And even now, another diamond trade. Lily, really nice trade. And these market trades were just huge here. This was the end of October. eBay lost, Spidey lost. That was the 29th. Twitter worked, needed a retake on the 30th. Again, I teach that in the class. 11-3 had a loser, but then a beautiful trade in PayPal. Boeing did not work here. Like I said, that's been struggling lately. WFC was a good winner on the 3rd. JPM won, BABA won, Spidey won off on the 9th. Facebook was a solid winner. No trades in the 11th. Boeing didn't work here either. This was just recently. Spy big winner, AL didn't work here, market winner. 16th, Zoom lost, Facebook lost. Twitter won and Netflix won. 17th, Target and Walmart and the Spy lost. That was a losing day. Netflix did not work. Low was a big trade on the 18th. And this day here, nothing worked in the initial point in the morning. And the Spy worked later and the diamonds worked later, Facebook. And then WDA, which was a beautiful trade on 11-20. So I think for me personally, the best trades I have and the most fun trades are when I can take something and make a lot, at least one risk unit in five, 10 minutes. I mean, that's ideal for me. Now, the risk unit getting back to what I was saying is an average of $2,500 a trade for an advanced risk. You can risk more if you want to. I would even say, even if you're risking 1,000 or 1,500, I would consider that really an intermediate getting close to an advanced risk. I would practice with lower cost stocks if you're not used to taking several thousand shares, three, four, five thousand shares of something. If you've never taken a position like that, I would practice. But again, I teach how to use stops in the class, and I think that's an important part of this. You can't take 5,000 shares of a position as a day trade. Stocks move too fast and not have a stop in. Because you could say, well, I'll kill it if it gets here, but things move too quickly. And as fast as you can make money, you can also lose it. So the stop is like the insurance that protects you. You have to have a consistent risk, though, in every trade. If you do not have a similar risk in every trade, you're not gonna have consistent results. And ultimately, you want to have consistent results. That's very important.  You can't let trades that aren't gonna work run them up. So that is why I really think it's important to use stops. And as far as some of the big trades we had, and I call them dream targets, I talk about the targets in the room, and for example, if I say if it's something a day where we would have a power trend going on, or if we'd have the market with you, and even if you were doing your specific stock, I talk about that and where you'd want to hold something. W-Day was one of those ones from Friday. Actually, that didn't really have the market with it, but it wasn't against it. But that was one that I said this can go to the dream target. So again, do you have to risk $2,500 a trade? No. But you can risk $100 a trade. You can have a small account. You can take 100 shares of something if you want. The idea is to learn the system and then to be green. You want to be profitable. You want to book money. You want to have more winners than losers. The only way you're going to get ahead doing this is having more winners than losers. And some of those winners will be big. Not every trade will be huge. Your goal is to risk one amount and turn it over into one amount. So for example, if you're risking $1,500, then your goal is to make around $1,500 a trade. Some trades will be more than that. Some trades will be slightly less, okay? But at the end of the day, you can trade with a small account. But if you have the funds and can take a risk of $2,500 a trade, you can see the day trading can be extremely lucrative. Now again, this was a very active year for me 2020. More so than any other year, quite frankly. And again, part of it was a volatility in the market. Part of it, there was a lot of gaps there to do. And also I was home. So because it was home and looking at my charts so much, I saw a lot of trades. I noticed a lot of things. I saw what was happening in the market. I saw what was playable. You can do as many gaps as you want, as many gaps that rate well per the system. So anyways, I teach a class once a month on my method. It's called the Golden Get Course. Just to give you an idea, if you don't understand margin or buying power, just to talk about it briefly here. If you have a $40 stock price, say, you have 200 shares, that would cost you what? $8,000 in buying power. Okay, that's an average price. So you could take that with a $2,500 proprietary day trading account, because you're gonna have 10 to one buying power, which means you would have 25,000 in buying power. You would need eight. So you could take a position like that. Now, if you don't know what a proprietary day trading account is, Google it. There's tons out there. And you also could open up an account with a retail broker as well. But getting back to this, if the stock was a dollar in your direction, you can make what? $200. It's $200 a day, $1,000 a week. Many traders are not making $1,000 a week. Many traders are losing, okay? $1,000 a week on average is totally doable, and it's four grand a month. And that is a lot of money for people who are currently losing in the market. And I know everyone wants to make big money, but you have to make small money, grow your account, unless you have the funds to risk large amounts. The confidence you will gain day over day, week over week, month over month, by being green and having more wins will help you once you build your account up to a large account. But again, if you have a large account and you wanna start out and you do the class and risk an advanced amount, then that's up to you. You can day trade with a beginner account, though, and risk the only difference is your share size is smaller. And then you can grow your account into a larger account. It's all about financial freedom. Everybody's at a different place in life. I think it is important to have goals. Not everybody does have goals. I think it's even important to have small goals. Like what's your goal for the week? What's your goal for the month? What's your goal for the day? Sometimes if you think of it like that, I call it chunking it out. It'll help you wrap your head around it. Sometimes people have a hard time thinking about these big, huge annual goals. They wanna make 200 grand a year trading and they just can't seem to grasp the concept of doing it if they've been losing for five, 10, 15, 20 years in the market. I think make it palpable for yourself. Break it down for yourself, especially if you have a small account so that you can see that it is possible that you can achieve your goals and get to the point that you wanna be. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. By doing what? By taking the right actions and by following the system. So the system that I teach is a Golden Gap 26 point rating system. The class is called the Golden Gap course. I teach this class once a month and this is the meat and potatoes. It's the rating system. Day one is a rating system. Day two is all the entries. Last class for 2020 is December 12th and 13th, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time. Class of the class is $69.99 US dollars. Class is online. You can be anywhere in the world and take it. So this is a weekend class. I always do it on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday. This is the last class for the year in December. That's it. If you wanna learn and start trading and get in the room this month or even in January, you have to do this class. The trends course is December 14th, which is Monday. It's a combo deal you save $500 by signing up for both, $74.99. Class, again, is online. So I'm doing a few sales for the holiday through this holiday week, Stockswish Savings. The two big ones for everybody that everyone's excited about that I'm doing for Black Friday is the class, obviously. You learn in the class what to do and if you sign up by November 29th, the Black Friday sale is, you get the trading room, the options that are free for one year for the same price of the class, which is $69.99. This is a great deal. You get all my trades for the year. Be in the room. Again, the trades were reviewed and this PowerPoint were all day trades. Okay. You would have received all the live calls in the live room, which I call live in the room. The options letters is an options newsletter you get to your email and those are different trades, just so you know. Sometimes it was overlapped but they're really different trades. The gap options newsletter, if you just want to do options, this does not include learning the 26 point system. You get the newsletter for one year and the gap options course free, which is a half day class. So that's just a half day class. You will not learn the 26 points in that class. It's an overview of options to help people starting out with it, how I look at them with the gaps and targets, but you absolutely need to do the golden gap course in order to learn the rating system, which is how I make the picks for the options trades in the newsletter. So again, last golden gap course for the year, December 12th and 13th, tuition $69.99. You must email me if you want to sign up. You will get the information from me to sign up. You have to fill the forms out and send them to me. I hope everyone has a safe holiday week. If you have questions about the class, day trades options, email me at melissathestockswush.com. And again, all the sales end November 29th. Have a good night.


Patriot Prime Reviews is a channel for adult collectors and may not be suitable for children under 13 years of age. Viewer discretion is advised. Hey, what's going on guys? Patriot Prime here once again with another Transformers review. But before I start talking about today's featured bot, I need you guys to do me a favor. If you're watching this video right here and have not subscribed to Patriot Prime Reviews, please hit that subscribe button right now. It won't cost you a thing, but will help me and my channel out tremendously. Now, on to the figure. And the figure I'm taking a look at in this video review is 2002's Armada Megatron. Now, the Armada series was a very gimmick laden series. I mean, all the larger Transformers had all these different ports that you attached smaller minicons to. Minicons were like little micro-master figures that according to the story of Armada, when a larger robot attached a minicon to him, he became more powerful. So the more minicons you collected, the more powerful you became. So in the Armada line, there was three packs, four packs of minicons that you could get and you could attach them all over the figures. So it was a very unique and very playable toy line. I just wasn't a big fan of the figures. I think a lot of them, especially the Autobots, looked like play school toys. I mean, hotshots specifically. I mean, he was horrible.  Now, the cartoon series, I couldn't get into that at all, even though it had my favorite voice actor playing Megatron again, the outstanding David Kay. But it was just, I don't know, the cartoon was just weird. So I never got into it. It's on 2BTV right now. So I may give it another chance because for what I hear, the last seasons get pretty good. So anyway, enough of me rambling on about the figure and the figures history. Let's take a look at the toy itself and welcome to Patriot Prime Reviews. Now, before we take a look at Megatron, first, let's take a look at his minicon partner, Leader One. No, not that Leader One. This Leader One. Leader One turns into some sort of artillery truck. Very tiny little figures. You've got lots of nice molded details all over. Painted windows. Nice bulky tires. A very simple little figure. Now, the whole idea with minicons is they interact with the larger figures via this little hole right here on the figure itself. Now, within these holes, there is another little peg. And how that works, I'll go over momentarily when we take a look at the bigger figure. Now, the Transform Leader One, very simple. You just simply fold the back out, take the laser guns, bring them up, and there's Robot Mode. Super simple transformation. His arms are kind of molded in right there. They're like smokestacks or something. They have a perma-bend elbow. Not much articulation. The arms can do a complete 360, and the legs can move back and forth. He does have a knee bend if you move the laser cannons out of the way. So very little posibility with this guy. Minimal paint apps. Kind of a very plain-looking face. At least they painted his visor. Now, a Minicon, such as Leader One, is about the same size as a Siege Battle Master. So that's pretty much it for Leader One. Let's go ahead and transform him back into vehicle mode because we are going to use that here in a bit with Megatron. Megatron himself is a really cool, big, beefy, bulky tank. Now this type of tank, from what I understand, is called an H tank. For obvious reasons, it looks like an H. This thing is massive. It's heavy. It's loaded full of electronics. It's got wheels underneath so it can roll pretty good. It's got a barrel that can go up and down on nice-clicking ratchets and the turret can spin. And as you can see in here, there is electronics. Now the turret can also fire. It's a pressure-activated missile. You just simply pull back and it launches the missile right off my desk. And it's a pretty cool feature. When you pull back on the barrel, you get that awesome firing sound. Megatron's tank mode is also laden with Minicon gimmicks. And as I stated earlier, the Transformer Armada line was all about the playability with the Minicon figures. As you can see, these ports or these pegs all over the figure are used to interact with Minicons. You just simply take a Minicon and attach it to the figure. And there you go. And the story is Minicons are able to power up the larger Transformers. Now as I showed earlier, the Minicon hole that each little figure has with the little extra peg on the inside is used to activate gimmicks on these larger figures. Now the pegs, such as this one here and this one here, they're hollow. So these pegs are just used for storage. You just attach your Minicon here or there and nothing really happens. But you have pegs up here on top. If you see there's an actual button in the center. There's a button in the center of this one and a button in the center there. And how that works is when you slot the Minicon over the peg, the little peg on the inside, pegs, holes, pegs, holes, presses down on the button, which unlocks a feature. Now by plugging them on top of the tank, you turn the hatch and you get a machine gun sound. And you can see the light right there. So there's that gimmick. Quit shooting me. Right here where this purple lever is, place the Minicon on the lever, activate to switch. And when you pull the lever back, let's see here, it swings forward this rocket launcher. So check it out. And you can actually slide all the way and lock that in place. Now the rockets actually fire. They're spring loaded. There's little buttons right there. Let's see if I can give them to work. There you go. But what's supposed to happen when you press down, there's a button right here. So when you press down, it's actually supposed to make this sound. This doesn't... I mean, it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, but you get the idea. Other Minicon ports and gimmicks on this tank is if you flip this switch right here, it pops these out. So you have one, two, three more little Minicon ports. So you can attach one there. I've got this character here, put him on. And I've got this jet guy that, well, he doesn't fit, but you get the idea. So you've got extra pegs there on the side. You pull this out and open up. And it's some kind of Minicon jail. But unfortunately, I don't have a Minicon. It actually fits inside where you can close it up and capture him. So that one, well, you get the idea on how that works. Now flipping the tank around, you've got this little gimmick here. You can attach a Minicon on top, flip over and attach another Minicon on the other side. So that one just mainly used to attach more Minicons. Take those off right here. This is a... I'm not sure what to call this, but you pull this out, flip this down. You have a ramp and a capture claw. So I guess how that works is a Minicon would not realize this is Megatron. Roll up, capture claw comes out and captures him. So yeah, you've got that going on. Lots and lots of gimmicks in Megatron's tank mode. A really, really cool looking tank that I forgot one gimmick. Let me put these back. You have to put these back in a certain order. One, two, three. Here at the front of the tank, he has captured pinchers. So the Minicons hanging out. Boom. He gets him and can drag him back to the Scepticon headquarters. So there you go. That is pretty much all of Armada Megatron in tank mode. Now let's get him into robot mode. Transformation to robot mode is fairly simple. Start with the rear of the tank.  Those will form the robot toes. Flip these back. Those will form the robot heels. And then just simply bring these down. Those of course form the robot legs. You're going to now twist at the waist. If you get that turret out of the way. Twist at the waist. And now you're going to stand the figure up. Now from here you're going to rotate the turret down to the side and then bend the barrel forward. So you've got that going on. Open up the side of the treads. And within you see the robot arms. Just simply fold those down. If you can get a grip on them. This arm. There we go. Is a pain. Fold that down. Other side. Same way. This was a little bit easier to get out there.  Now there's a little lever right here. Bring that down. Revealing Megatron's face. And there you have Megatron in robot mode. Megatron in robot mode looks a lot different than what we're accustomed to with our Megatron figures. I mean he's got these huge tank treaded shoulders. He's got antlers. I mean he's definitely different looking. Now let's take a look at this face sculpt. I have dozens of Megatrons in my collection. In my opinion this is one of the worst Megatron face sculpts. I just do not like that one at all. Now he's got really nice molded details. He's got Decepticon logos molded in on both shoulders. And a little Decepticon logo molded in right there. What looks like diamond plating there. Molded details on the chest. The abs. I mean he's molded really really well. And I love the coloring on the guy. Just don't like that face sculpt. Now as far as articulation is concerned. The arms could do a complete 360. But they're going to hit that turret back there. He also has an elbow bend. And the arms can go up and down. There is a waist rotation. And the legs can go side to side. And that's pretty much it for the articulation of Megatron. Now he has quite a few Minicon ports. All over the figure. Up here on the shoulders. Down here on the forearms. And here now there's right here is a Minicon gimmick. You can take a Minicon here. Attach to the side. And this activates a switch blade. So yeah. Megatron cuts you man. Now you really don't need a Minicon for this one.  You can simply just slide that forward and back. Now another cool feature this Megatron has. If you bring the arms up. You can actually extend the body. Take the turret and spin around to the front. And lock the body back in place. You have this version of Megatron. You face the cannon forward. We'll unlock these missiles. And this is what's called Mega Blast Megatron. Now what's supposed to happen is there's this little crank right here. I'm supposed to be able to turn that and this whole mechanism spins. And you hear Megatron say Decepticons attack. Now for some reason I can't spin this to make it work. But if I spin the turret the crank turns. So I don't know what has happened with the internal mechanisms for my Megatron figure. Now I like to display my arm out of Megatron by taking leader one and folding him out. To look like this, leaving those guns out. And attaching him to Megatron's forearm.  You can also take the other Minicons. Attach one to his shoulder. And this one here to the other forearm. Extending that blade. So yeah, with these Minicons you can hang them all over this toy. And just like Jeffrey Epstein, they don't hang themselves. And now for some quick size comparisons. Here is Transformers Armada Ultra Class Megatron. With Generation 1 Megatron. War for Cybertron Siege Generation Selects Combat Hero Megatron. And Combiner Wars Armada Megatron. Transformers Armada Megatron is a fun figure to mess around with. He's got tons of playability thanks to all those Minicon gimmicks. I just wish I had more Minicons to actually utilize them with him. He's a very unique looking Megatron. And once you can get past that, he's not a bad figure to have. But I still don't like that face sculpt. So there you go guys, Transformers Armada Ultra Class Megatron. So, does the Transformers Armada Megatron belong in your collection? Well, if you're an Armada fan, most definitely. You have to have the leader. If you're a Megatron fan, I don't know. He's unique looking. He's different, but he just doesn't scream Megatron like some of the other figures in my collection. So, your mileage may vary with this guy. Not to mention if you're trying to hunt one down, you have to, one, make sure his electronics work. Make sure he comes with all of his missiles. I've seen many of these where the antlers are broke off. So yeah, you really got to know what you're looking for. So, this one, this one's all on you. And guys, I want to thank you for stopping by and checking out my video. Don't forget to like and don't forget to subscribe. I've got a lot more bots back there on that back wall that I want to put in front of this camera. Guys, I appreciate each and every one of you. This is Patriot Prime, signing out.


Russians set out to liberate Bryansk Oblast from Putin's regime. Andrei Yusof, a representative of Ukraine's defense intelligence, believes that the events in Bryansk Oblast of the Russian Federation indicate that Russians are beginning to fight against the regime of Vladimir Putin. Yusof predicts that such uprisings may happen again. It is a fact that the full-scale invasion by Putin has caused a deepening of problems within the so-called Russian Federation itself. Russia is an unstable entity within which there are a huge number of complex, unresolved issues, contradictions and conflicts, inter-regional, inter-ethnic, religious, social, political, and others. And the fact that today the citizens of the Russian Federation in a certain area rose to overthrow Putin's regime is actually a natural development after the invasion of Ukraine, he said. According to Yusof, all of Russia is an artificial entity. So it is not surprising that such uprisings happen. He predicts that this is neither the first nor the last such unrest. The intelligence representative believes that the events in Bryansk Oblast are the beginning of the liberation of their own country by Russians and atonement for the crimes of the Russian Federation and Putin. He believes that such events will ultimately lead to the transformation and democratization of Russia, the destruction of Putin's regime and the bringing of criminals to justice. As a representative of the Defense Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine states, Russians may now realize that the war has come not only to every Ukrainian's home but also to every Russian. On the 2nd of March, the governor of Russian Bryansk Oblast, ordering Ukraine reported that allegedly a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group infiltrated into the Oblast took civilians hostage and fired at a car. At the same time, Ukraine's border guards reported that the situation on the border with Russia is under control, information suggesting that there is some Ukrainian reconnaissance and sabotage group. On the territory of the Russian Federation is an informational provocation by the aggressor country. Later, the Russian Volunteer Corps declared that it was not a Ukrainian reconnaissance and sabotage group but their soldiers who entered the territory of the Russian Federation on the 2nd of March to show that free Russian people with weapons in their hands can fight against Putin's regime.


Our guest today is Dr. Joel C. Rellehan, and Dr. Rellehan is professor in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, or GLAM, at Whedon College in Northern Massachusetts. His research interests include late, classical, and early Christian literature, such as Apolaus, Lucian, Romance literature, Augustine, and Boethius, medieval Latin literature, and Minipian satire. He is the author of Ancient Minipian satire, and has produced many wonderful translations of, among other figures, Lucian, Boethius, and Apolaus. So Dr. Rellehan, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. It's a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a very long time. I was actually just reading your translation of Cupid and Psyche. I like to read translations together, so I'm reading Sarah Rudin's translation and your translation back to back because I retain better that way. I took some Latin in college, but I'm not like native in it. And my Greek is all, it's been a long time since I worked on my Greek. So we're going to be tackling one of a group of texts that you've worked on extensively, the work of Apolaus's Golden Ass and a Greek novel sometimes attributed to Lucian of Samosita called Onos. However, before we jump into that, I feel it's important to provide the viewer a basic outline of the story. That being said, can you provide a brief rundown of the story and the genre of the Golden Ass and Onos?  And I thought it might be useful to tease these apart just a little bit. It's easy to call all these things novels these days. And I always want to push back against that. You know, novel is very modern.  It's more like that. But if you're going to talk about genre or style, those terms are only going to be meaningful if you can think of expectations that a reader might have that could be met or frustrated. If they don't have expectations, then there is no genre. So there are a number of things that I'll get around to that people would have in their heads when they would read these stories. And maybe they're genres and maybe they're not. I will talk about style, but I really like your your term brief rundown of the story, because that's about as generic a term as you can get. It avoids the minefields of technical knowledge. Oh, yeah, I can give you a brief rundown. The story is a young man, gables in man, loses its shape, regains it after a year of wandering and suffering. Now, if I were to ask you, Jason, why that wasn't enough, what would you say was missing? Certainly for something like Onos, it would be sufficient. But for Apolaus and what he does in the Golden Ass, he doesn't just focus on the main character. He focuses on a lot of other stories like Telefron. He focuses on the story of Socrates. He focuses on Cupid and Psyche, of course, right? That that wonderful story in books four through six. He also tells the story of the robbers, those insane kind of facts, but he's using these all for a higher purpose, right? That gets culminates in book 11, right?   I say he loses his shape and regains it.  I could try another synopsis of the story.   It's a story about magic. It's a story about time, but that's still kind of unsatisfactory. So we might try this. You have a young man who goes to Thessaly, proverbial land of witchcraft in order to see magic.    He's redeemed. Now, that's a better accounting of the story, though it doesn't say anything about any individual inset story, because how can you summarize the story and say, oh, and then there's a story of telephoto, which in its details has nothing to do with the rest of it. You can say after many experiences he's transformed. The problem is there are so many stories in Apollaeus does summarizing the book involve summarizing the other stories? The answer has to be no. I never thought of it that way. I was thinking more in terms of like how Apollaeus starts out the book. There's always the problem of like the genre of like the Greek novels or the romances, like people didn't think of these things in the genre sense back then. I think I was more just thinking in the terms of like Apollaeus starts out the book and saying he's doing a story in the Malaysian style, the Malaysian tale. I'm thinking like a Malaysian tale, like has those short kind of titillating scenes in them. I think it's just because I was drawn to the different stories in Apollaeus, you know, they're almost like campfire stories in a way. In book one, there's a fantastic story about witches. This is a story of Socrates and its beautiful details about the witches and his and the man's partner and how he watched the witches slit the guy's throat, pull his heart out, put a sponge in, sew it up. And the story is told by these travelers that our narrator has fallen in with. And it sets the tone. This is a story about magic and witches.  And our narrator, Lucius says, oh, I think anything is possible. And it establishes our guy as a dupe. You know, our narrator thinks the stories could be true. And what people don't pay attention to, I think, or it's not enough, is that these people are guiding him to the town he wants to go to, which is Haipata in Thessaly, where he wants to find witches. And by the time he gets there, it turns out they're celebrating the Festival of Laughter. Lucius is their sacrifice for the Festival of Laughter. The whole three first books are how he's been pranked by these people. I figure that those two people he meets on the road are setting him up. Or as you say, they're just winding him up to get ready. And they goes in and they got this witch and the servant girl, Fotis, and he's invited to a banquet. That's where the story of Telefran telling the story about how he was the corpse watcher. And he said, stay awake all night.  They bite off his ears. And he tells the story of the next day.  He says, and of course, they were humiliated.  Did he lose his nose? Or is he telling a story to a guy who's getting drunker and drunker, which is totally unverifiable in the first place. And I would say an obvious lie. Again, winding this guy up. Then there's the event, the robbers, which is you ask me, the best part of the whole Mademorphosies is the festival of laughter sequence, where the whole story gets told three different times. It's like Rashomon have to figure out what's the real version of the story. And finally, there's this big revelation in the amphitheater. And they pull off the cloth and there are these three bodies, which are just stuffed goat skins. Yeah, he's been pranked, right? The whole thing must have been intended from the beginning.  And then he goes back to Fotis says, oh, I'm sorry. It was a mistake. I didn't mean to do it. What do you mean she didn't mean to do it? She tells a story about the Be-Ocean boy and the and the hair that she gathered at the barbers and how she accidentally animated the goat skins because she was forced to leave the hair behind. But if that was accidental, then he couldn't have been pranked. So she's obviously lying to him. And I figure she's lying to him also when she puts the wrong potion on her.  And then the whole story is turned upside down when the robbers come. And then all of Apalaeus's ability to tell a complex, interrelated story, those first few books, is chucked out. So he's going to tell a series of episodes. And the episodes in terms of plotting are not nearly as interesting as the pranking of books one to three. Now, he'll insert stories that are very interesting on their own and he'll make some stories that comment on the whole story. And Cupid and Psyche comments on the whole of Metamorphosis because it's a story of curiosity, punishment, wandering, near-death experiences, transformation, divinity, ascension to an upper world. But the story of the three sons who were killed by the nasty neighbor. If it weren't their music, some stories are better than others. But there's a price that Apalaeus pays when he shifts from being a really good, I'm almost a novelist, to a teller of episodes. And much as I like the Apalaeus, take a look at the latter half and I say, this isn't as good as the beginning. But would you say that's a consequence of him having to work with the common lost Greek source that he has in front of him that onus obviously follows that chronology pretty well? Apalaeus knows he has to tell a certain story and maybe he can't find places to insert. But yeah, you're right, like book three, you even see like with Lucius himself. When he tells the story, he's kind of like embellishing it. When he originally tells stories like I couldn't see anything. I was like scared out of my wits. And then he tells this like elaborate story about the robbers and how one of them was bigger than the other. He was going to bash my head in with a stone and I had to defend myself. I think they're all unreliable narrators. And that's what I love about the Greek romances and the romances and the novels in general, because you always have these unreliable narrators. One of my favorites is Lucapean Clydefon. Clydefon is a complete blockhead. He's like the main character of the story, but all his slaves and everybody else are doing things for him. And he's just bumbling along. And that's kind of the same thing here. Lucius is like this. I was well learned and versed in his paideia and his training at great orator.  Like you said, the first three books are just everybody playing a trick on him. And that's really interesting. You brought up about how all of these people that he encounters are kind of playing him for a dupe.   And I kind of thought that I didn't think about photos in that way until like the ointment. And then I'm kind of like, she's like, well, just wait here and I'll bring in the roses in the morning. I'm like, well, why couldn't she just bring them the roses now? You know, it would take you like maybe five minutes. So easy for people to say it was a mistake. And I'm convinced in my own mind that it was just the next humiliation. And Appalaius doesn't know how to end the story very well. For his inset stories, he builds up to a conclusion. Then the conclusion is very quick and he runs on. The ends of individual books are rarely well constructed. Now, Cuban psyche, you know, that's that's that's pretty well done. But his trouble ending well, he starts well. But, you know, the naive character romance is a stock character. The young man has to grow up. The young man can't start out as some kind of suave James Bond character. You know, he has to move up and into his place in the world. And he's going to be helped by slaves and strangers. The way people are helped by animals in young Ian folk tales. He has to be assisted because he can't do it on his own. That's reasonable. But you said that, you know, is Appalaius constrained by the boundaries of the Greek metamorphosis that he inherits? Well, there are a lot of things that are in the same order. You know, there is the the magical mistake. There are the robbers. There's going to the robbers layer. There's a maiden who is abducted on her wedding day. There are the robbers are captured. The donkey is sold. You get the Syrian priests. The Syrian priest episode has a real life of its own in Appalaius, I presume, because the frauds that are the Syrian priests are contrasted to ISIS. You have the mill. You have the farmer, the soldier. Then the two brothers who are the cooks who feed him, learning how to eat and drink in the banquet. The matron who wants to sleep with him. The restoration of his shape and the end of the story. So there is that sequence, the evil stepmother who poisons everybody. I presume he put that in there on his own. Why? I say, if it were gone, would you miss it? Did the book need to be as long as it is?  And certainly the author of the onus has no patience for inset stories. We know that there were stories in there that he decided to cut. And the key one is the story about the couple that Appalaius calls Karate and the Clopolomus, the woman who was abducted, the one to whom Cupid is psyche is told. There's just this confused sentence in which somebody brings the news that they were walking along the seashore and they were swallowed by a wave. And that was it. So there was a story. And I think that on us just decided this is a donkey magic story. There's really no room for the pretentious insertion of these other stories. We're going to narrow it down. So you can kind of like the onus for that. But here are another couple of ways to summarize the whole story. You could say, maybe it's a morality tale.   How does he learn to be fully human?  Can he reject that and look for a definition of humanity beyond it? You know, as I say, in the celibate arms of Isis, or does he embrace it returning to his matron when his shapers are stored only to be rejected because he was better as an ass? It should be a story of how a young man, a naive man, that the man of the romance is educated and grows up and takes his place in society. But that's not what you get in the onus, which just refuses to have any kind of edifying ending.  And eventually, because of love of her, he loses the ass's skin, inherits the kingdom from the father-in-law, becomes a fully functioning adult male.  And inspired by that folktale, which exists independent of these stories, says, ah, I'll write Cupid and Psyche, which is the woman's side of that.  So the story of how do you grow up? The main thing I took away from Cupid and Psyche is I would really hate to have Venus as a mother-in-law. But the main thing is like there's a lot of ambiguity in there for me when I read Cupid and Psyche. When she's first being courted, so to speak, by Cupid. Psyche is terrified. Psyche is it's in the dead of night. She is terrified for her virginity. She, Anapoleus puts this in, he said, by force of habit, it became easier for her. So it's terrifying at first. Is this happening at first by consent? Or is it just like, you know, by force of habit? You know, that's kind of my response to it. Well, well, it's a perfectly reasonable response because it is rape.  She's all alone. It's a bedroom. He rapes her.  And the fact that there might be such a thing as happiness on the other end of it. Well, I guess that's what we'd hope for. But it's a brutal reality turned into a folk tale. One thing that you have to say about this is that Cupid is in his own way devoted to her. And the story makes it, I just don't want my mom to figure it out. Yeah, you know, ultimately, he's Cupid is just like this impetulent teenager. As in a romance, he's the naive young man who eventually has to learn to stand up to his mom. A mom who looks exactly like the girl he's fallen in love with. Remember, everybody says that she looks just like Venus. So this is bad, bad news. I would not advise any young woman to go for a guy who thinks that she looks like his mother. He's a guy who's got to stand in his own two feet, tell a lover. And he grows up in the context of sex. Sex implies social order and the marriage at the end of Cupid and Psyche is a restoration.  But it's all a story about sex leads to stability and society.  And I think that Cupid and Psyche and the ISIS book are mirror opposites. Similarly, the Olympian heaven is comic and the Isiac Egyptian heaven is ineffable. You know, mysteries that cannot be spoken. All the initiations, our narrator accepts that he has been transformed by the acceptance of a service of a goddess who requires salivacy. And he knows that after he dies, he will have a better afterlife than anybody else. And I take that ending totally seriously. The beauty and the faults of Appalachus is that like any good, second, sophistic orator and learned young man, he knows all this stuff and he'll take any opportunity. No matter how focused the story should stay, he'll he'll do all these asides and tell you about mystery cults. He'll tell you about these little stories, even in Cupid and Psyche.  But you know, a boy meets girl and boy has to stand up to his mom to be accepted and say, this is this is your daughter in law, whether you like it or not, ultimately.  And, you know, think of it as like maybe like a person in slavery. You know, like all the Greek novels, all the all the romances emphasize this role reversal of people in elite status being sold into and having to endorse the trials of slavery. And Onos, more than any of the others, I think, really emphasizes that dehumanization, that fear and the violence, everyday occurrence of somebody going through this situation. He is like you say in your introduction to the text, right? The first, whoever wrote Onos, whoever took this story that both he and Apollaeus had at the same time, roughly 150 to 180 common error. And he looks at it and he goes, this is ridiculous that they're putting this carnal story of, you know, low lives in this, you know, this Malaysian tale and then they have this supposed lofty ambition at the end. No, so he excises all that. There's no redemption. It's kind of like when you read Satirakon, we don't know how Satirakon ended, I guess, but it's all about low lives, right? It's a view of life from under his back. Ultimately, the author of Onos is stripping away all of these lofty ideals. And he's like, this is the reality. And I think that it really comes home at the end. Just how Apollaeus' version of this story doesn't fit because he adds this really lofty middle platonic Isis and Osiris narrative at the end. The person who wrote Onos is like, this is ground zero. He's lapped out of the building and then he goes home and that's it. It's a point made and I found this persuasive in Stefan Tilg's book on Apollaeus, he figured that the Greek original did have transformation in Egypt. The Apollaeus did not make up the idea that there would be divine transformation at the end. He did it with a level of detail and you might even say commitment that would have not been in that original. And Onos is cutting out a religious end. But I might push back against the notion that it's about dehumanization. If the ending is also so throw away. If our narrator doesn't learn anything from being dehumanized. If all he wanted to do was go back and sleep with that maiden again and is disappointed to discover that he was better as an ass, structurally, the problem with the Onos is that it builds up to that bedroom farce of an ending. And it's funny enough, but it's too much build up, you know, by cutting it down to one Mylesian tale, 45 pages long. It is as we used to say when I was a kid, a long run for a short slide. You know, it could have been a better constructed story that built up to that disappointing, unedifying ending. But if your theme is the dehumanization of slavery, what is the point of your ending? Ah, she threw me out. I ran naked down to the dockyard and I got a boat home. Is it that that is human nature? You know, that we are still on an animal level, you know, don't talk to me about transcendence. We're all just beasts here. It's good for a laugh, maybe. I mentioned in the introduction to my translation of Onos that there's this new abbreviated translation of the golden ass by Ellen Finkelpurl and Peter Singer, the animal rights activist, among other things.  It's because it's too boring. There are too many extra stories. You cut out the stories. What you get is a story about compassion for animals. It's an animal story. So how animals are mistreated and how bad that is. And the rewrite of the story seeks to improve our modern consciousness to give us greater sympathy for the wretchedness that animals are forced to endure. And people are on record as saying that, you know, Apollos is not about sympathy for animals and the Onos is not about sympathy for animals. But when they trimmed away all the stories that they thought got in the way of the real storyline, they said it's a story about animals. And people would like it more if it were a story about animals. And the remarkable thing to me was that they then wrote a new conclusion. They just wrote it as a joke. You know, they're not serious about it.  But what that underlines is that Lucius in all of the stories has to decide at some point what he's going to do because he's been the recipient of a miracle.  And he's got to decide what to do about. Now, in Apolaus, in the full book, the guy says, I've been redeemed by ISIS, I should do something in the world to show my thanks. And he doesn't just say I've got my salvation for myself. He goes into the world to be an example to people. And he is there, as I say, he encourages people to look up. He's got a social function because he has to be true to the reality of his miracle. In Onos, the roses are not given by a priest. The roses just happen to be in that amphitheater where he's supposed to go through with the donkey show.  He has nobody to thank. He never has to confront the question of whom do I owe my thanks to? And so he is unregenerate because he cannot be thankful because no one gave him a gift. The fickle pearl singer fantasy ending. He decides that his obligations to ISIS are too onerous. He turns his back on ISIS. He is making a conscious decision not to accept his miracle for himself, but to read a vote himself left below. He encourages people to look down, to look downtrodden, to look to the animals. And that's where I take the end of Apollaeus. Seriously, these are the beliefs that he has because he really was transformed and it really was by ISIS. How could you doubt it? Having read the book, having read the mechanism by which he gets the roses, how would you doubt it? Why should he doubt it? Why shouldn't he be transformed? I think my reaction to the ending of that new translation was just in his relationship with photos as a whole is not too realistic for me at the end because he wasn't really, he was more in lust with photos than he was in love. He really used her as more of like a means to an end. And thinking about it just in our conversation, Fotis really was leading him on a lot just in terms of making him look foolish or making him do foolish things. So it doesn't seem realistic that they would get together and start a farm to save animals. But I know it was a joke, but they don't want to be held held to it. But I just found it illuminating. Now, to go back to Fotis, imagine at the festival of laughter, imagine the amphitheater, imagine all the people sitting around waiting for the unveiling of the corpses, waiting for Lucius to see what had happened, to go from horror to bewilderment and then just imagine the whole amphitheater of people bursting in the laughter. Imagine how powerful that would be. And then in the stands, you know, if you were filming this, the camera would zoom in on Telefran, taking off his wig and his mask and being totally normal. You would zoom in on Fotis and she gets to be pointing and laughing. We take a look at the magistrates slapping their knees and he just look around everybody and his host, the witch, everybody, the people he walked into town with in book one, they'd all be around in a circle, just laughing at him and his humiliation. And Fotis would have been part of that. Absolutely. And just after this conversation, I'm convinced she was absolutely leading him on. I think it's more her character in Onos than in the golden ass, though. I think she has actually more of a stronger character in Onos. Yeah, is that how you say it? In both texts, they're, you know, very self-assured. I like how, even though she's a domestic slave, when Apollaeus flirts with her as like this young, amorous, oratory loverboy, she she gives as good as she gets and she gives probably even better.  Wonderful line. I dialed it up in front of me. What are you laughing at?   This is what I know how to slaughter in skin and cut up fine. But what I love most of all, I get my hands on the guts in the heart, you know. So yeah, she's great.  But in Onos, she's giving him wrestling instructions. So she's really taking the lead. And I love that about the character. Now that I think about it, too, just in our conversation, like, if she's assisting her mistress with all these. Magical rights, right? And she she's being shown the the the the vials to use to give the witch the pharmacos to change back. She's not going to make that mistake. She's done it probably lots of times. So it's like, oh, I can't believe it. I am sorry. I I got the wrong one. So yeah, she's just she's a great character. She's a great who that I am. But yeah, she she's much more aggressive, you know, on us.  And he's saying I'm ready for battle. And in an Onos, he's a little bit more demure in bed, I guess. But it's still police are taking the lead in that text. And I love that she's the one really in charge of the situation. Even touch it burned with that fiery brand. You'd be bound to my service and no one, not even a God, would be enough to heal you. I don't want to burn you. I had another thought on on how you surprise the experience of the books, our trio of texts, so you could be kind of meta about it. What is the book about? Well, an author confronted with a popular text about a donkey man and his adventures is inspired to try his own hand at it. Should he treat the text as porous, infinitely elastic, allow the dog has an unobserved observer to see an anthology of only loosely related stories. It'd be Apollaeus's approach. Or if he concentrated on the donkey's experience only, show the misery of the animal as a degraded human being. This is the approach of the Onos. The former sees a redemption narrative and stresses how it's only through the goddess Isis that the narrator can find peace. The latter sees a bedroom farce. But we could say that the book is about how books get written, how authors make choices, how they deal with their source text. And as I say, the Onos reads the Greek metamorphosis as something to reject. And it's not just trimming it down or cutting it or bridging it. It certainly isn't trying to clean it up. But it's trying to remove its pretensions and make it a different book. And when you make it a different book, you have a different ending. And that's what the Singer version taught me. A different book requires a different ending. Our Onos author just decides that the medium is not appropriate for the message. And this is where genre becomes an interesting question. There may be something that you were expecting, a Mylesian tale. But Apolaus is the one who's frustrating your expectation of genre. It's just way too big. That's no Mylesian tale. Even, you know, their collection of by Cicena, first century BCE of Mylesian tales, we're not exactly sure about it, but it's probably just a collection of separate stories. Weaving them together to make a narrative in which our narrator's life is illuminated by the stories he runs into. You can say that's pretty sophisticated. You can also say it's just too much. At least that's what I think the Onos author does. He rejects that bid for complexity. And note how he changes the title because metamorphosis, Latin or Greek, is plural. And it's abstract. Narrator's not named. It's tales, changes of shape. The Onos author says donkey. You know, just think about that, you know. Oh, you think it's called tales or shape? Of shape, chef? Shape shifting? I'd say donkey to that. And he gives donkey story. You know, it's aggressive. It's an aggressive insulting, relabeling of the whole thing. Because he does not accept it as... He does not accept the genre as a medium appropriate for the conclusion that either the Greek metamorphosis met or... Of course, the Greek author of Onos never read Apollaeus. I'm not going to say that. But he's just not going to believe that a Malaysian medium can bear this kind of weight. It's pretentious. And it's minimum. The ending of Onos is death to pretension. There is no meaning here. Onos is very on the ground. It's very, this happened, this happened, this happened. That's it. You know, it's very bam, bam, bam. Apollaeus wants to be flowery and middle platonic and oratory. I really loved researching these texts. Thank you so much for these amazing, wonderful translations. If you have anything you feel you want to add to this that we didn't go over, feel free to do that. All of these stories are written in an environment in which there are other stories that are told.  I mentioned this in the notes to Onos. It's very explicit and supposed to be funny. You know, I forbear to quote it here. But there were other donkey stories, not necessarily the same as the Greek metamorphosis. The Greek author of metamorphosis also had a group of texts to build on. We know that there was a story about a donkey man. And that story goes underground and turns into that medieval story, the Asenarius that I was referring to. We also know as far as Cupid and Psyche is concerned, that there are lots of stories told about Cupid and Psyche, about Eros and Psyche, about Eros is sort of more of a philosophical principle. How is it that the soul returns to heaven? It is at the guidance of love. Plotinus refers to the many versions we see of Eros taking Psyche to heaven. But we also know popularly there's lots of art in which there's a little papyrus drawing. You have a man with bird wings, evidently in bed. Behind him is a woman with butterfly wings, because Psyche is supposed to mean butterfly. And there are stories about the relationship between these two winged creatures, Psyche the butterfly and Cupid the bird. We know that there are stories told about women getting their revenge on Cupid. There's a wonderful late classical poem called Cupido Cucchiatur, in which down in the underworld all of the great lovers, the women in mythology, who have been driven to suicide or something because of love, they finally get a hold of it and beat it. So there are stories that were being told about Cupid and Psyche in a philosophical context, Cupid and Psyche in an erotic context, so that a reader of Apolaus brings to the golden ass a knowledge of Plato and a knowledge of stories about people turned into donkeys and a knowledge of stories about Cupid and Psyche. There's sort of a rich stew of popular tales, folk tales, popular philosophical stories, a well from which all these authors drew. If you really want to handle all these stories, what you want to do is read Cupid and Psyche and the onus side by side, each of them is a response to the Greek metamorphosis. For Apolaus, Cupid and Psyche fills in a gap, tells a woman's story, tells a different kind of transcendence, talks about love and the restoration of society. Onus takes a look at the Greek metamorphosis and rejects a lot of it, tells a more animal-based story, a story about lack of transformation. And if you view each of these as stories produced by the way that the original irritated their authors, irritant in the sense of that which creates a pearl inside of an oyster. Metamorphosis is an irritant to Apolaus and leads to Cupid and Psyche. The Greek metamorphosis is an irritant to the author of Onus and leads to Onus.  We really wish we had it because it drew forth very intelligent if widely different responses from people who managed to tell good stories out of it. Dr. Rellahan, this has been an absolute blast for me. I love talking these stories with you. Thanks for inviting me. I have to say I didn't know what to expect, but now that it's over, I'm very happy to have been here. Thank you very very nice narrator of your own. You tell a good story and I wish you luck as you tell more stories to more people.


Banana plant agro-based domestic waste was used to extract Musa Paradisica L blossom petal, MPBP, fibers which were analyzed using x-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric, and differential scanning calorimetry techniques. The MPBP fibers have a crystallinity index of 56.71%, size of 16.38 nanometers, thermal stability up to 220 degrees Celsius, two thermal degradation temperatures of 368.1 and 476.8 degrees Celsius with kinetic activation energy of 62.43 kJ, tensile strength of 108 MPa, Young's modulus of 1.05 GPA, and strain at failure of 11.15%. This article was authored by Apreethavirajan, P. Noriyonisomi, Naif Abdulla Uldabi, and others.


What's going on guys? So in this video it's gonna be a little different than what you're used to seeing from me and the content you're used to seeing from me on this channel. It's gonna be around a topic that is literally on everybody's mind right now and that is the coronavirus, right? It's a scary time for millions of people. Millions of people are getting sick, people are dying, businesses are going under, events are getting cancelled, I'm getting married in a couple months and I'm worried about my wedding getting cancelled or getting postponed or something like that, right? So yeah, it's a scary time for a lot of people and it's a very uncertain time, right? People don't really know what to do and what's gonna happen. But what I want to do in this video, I don't want to add to the fear, I don't want to add to the shock and sensationalism. I want to have a real conversation with you and talk to you about five things that you can do during this period, especially if you're an online entrepreneur or business owner or aspiring entrepreneur, five things that you can do during this time instead of panicking about the coronavirus, right? Five things you can do to move yourself and your business forward during these uncertain and scary times, right? So let's jump into it right now.  So let's jump into these five things right now. Number one is to turn off the news, right? So turn off your TV, stop watching the news, your local news, the national news, stop reading social media tweets and Facebook posts and watching the live updates. This stuff's only gonna pollute your mind and it just creates fear and shock and sensationalism.    Can you imagine if on the news they talked about every time someone got into a car accident or every time someone got a heart attack or something like that, right? It would kill your brain, right? So turn off the news and if you really do want to learn something about the coronavirus, be proactive about it, right? Seek out a reputable resource like the WHO, the World Health Organization, right? Seek out reputable companies and reputable sources and information rather than being reactive and just watching the updates from all of these news outlets and media companies that are designed to just hook you in with this fear and with this like viral content, right? So yeah, turn off the news. Like, don't be reactive. If you want to know about what's going on, just learn from reputable sources, okay? So that's number one. Turn off the news. Number two is spend this time investing in the learning and personal growth, right?  Use this time as a time of growth and learning for you and your business. So yeah, read, spend this time reading a book or taking a course and learning some new skills and practicing those skills. This is not a time for you to take your foot off the gas and just sit around and wait, right? This is a time and an opportunity for you to invest in yourself and get a step up over your competition and who is just watching TV and waiting for things to happen, right? So yeah, use this time. Number two, invest in learning and personal growth and business growth, right? Number three is to keep on selling. So if you already have a business, maybe your agency owner, your freelancer, service provider, consultant, whatever you are, that's most likely what you are after watching this channel. Keep on selling, right? I saw this post in a Facebook group that I met a couple days ago and it was an agency owner and he made a post about one of his clients requested to pause their campaigns because they were a local business and they're getting hit hard by the coronavirus, right? And I understand a lot of local businesses and brick and mortar stores are catching like the rough end of the stick, right? The wrong end of the stick. So this agency owner, because of that one client wanting to pause his campaigns, he mentioned that he was thinking about deciding to stop prospecting and stop selling for his agency, which is a huge mistake, right? You don't want to stop your business during this time just because you're uncertain and you're seeing like businesses getting hit, right? You want to keep on selling, keep your business moving, keep it going, business as usual, right? We're not stopping anything. In fact, we're doubling down on all of our selling and prospecting activities, right? It's a time for us to get a leg up from the people who are not doing the daily selling and not continuing what their normal business activities, right? So if you are already in business and you are like you're selling services or products, don't stop selling during this time, right? Continue pushing your business forward, continue getting better, continue growing, okay? That's number three. Keep on selling. Number four is to adopt an abundance mindset. So Warren Buffett said, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful, right? What does that mean? Well, everybody's fearful right now, right? Everybody's afraid of the coronavirus. Everyone's afraid of the uncertainty in the market and in businesses and all that stuff, right? So what does this mean and how does this apply to your life and your business? Well, I want you to look at it this way, right? Imagine you are going into your whatever department store, wherever you shop for clothes or whatever it is, right? So let's say, maybe let's just say Nordstrom, for example, right? So you walk into Nordstrom and you see all of your favorite clothes or things that you're going to buy for 30, 40, 50% off, right? What do you do and how do you feel? Well, you feel happy, first of all, right? Because everything's on sale. You can get everything for cheap.  Whatever that discount is, right? Now, how does this apply to your life and your business? Well, let's talk about finances first, right? The stock market is going down right now. It's tanking, right? The stock market economy, it looks like it's tanking right now, right? So most people, the masses, they are panicking. They're getting scared. They're selling all their investments. They're getting out of the market. And they're afraid of what's happening right now, right? Because they see it going down, right?  I'm not giving you financial advice. I'm just telling you the way that I think. If you were to look at this from an abundance mindset, the way that you would look at it is not as a time to panic. You'd look at it as a time to get everything cheap, right? On the cheap, on sale, 30, 40, 50% off, right? And then you get to reap the rewards when the market goes back up, which it always eventually does, right? That's just the way the market works. It always goes back up eventually, if you stay in the market long enough. Now, that's the way that I'm looking at it from an abundance mindset in terms of finances and stocks and all that stuff. Everything's on sale. Everything's cheap, right? How does this apply to your business? Well, there's so many entrepreneurs out there right now. I've seen them in groups. I've seen them on forums. I've seen them, you know, online, social media, posting about how they're afraid of what's happening right now in the economy and with businesses and their clients, right? So they don't know what to do. And a lot of people, a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs right now are taking their foot off the gas, right? They're stopping, they're selling activities. They are not continuing what made them successful, right? They're not putting content out there. They're not prospecting. They're not pitching people and selling their services, right? They're waiting and seeing what's going to happen. Now, what does this mean for you? Well, if you adopt an abundance mindset instead of panicking and freaking out about this period of uncertainty, you are doubling down, right? You're doubling down on all your selling activities. You're doubling down on the things that you're doing to grow yourself and your business. And you're looking at it as a time of opportunity where there's not many people who are doing what you're doing, right? If you're actually looking at it from an abundance mindset, right? So if you're continuing doing business like usual and doubling down and doing more of it instead of taking your foot off the gas, you can look at this as a time of opportunity to get in and get a leg up over the people who are taking their foot off the gas, right? Which is a lot of your competition, okay? So that's number four.  Number five is to double down on delivering value.  So what do I mean by this? Well, I am doubling down on the content on YouTube, on my Facebook groups, to my email list, right? I just started a daily email to my list of subscribers, my email subscribers, right? So I thought, how can I double down on delivering value? Well, first of all, I'm going to be consistent with posting Tuesday and Thursday on YouTube during this time. I'm not going to stop posting because I'm scared of what's happening right now. I'm not going to start watching the news and wasting all my time doing that. I'm being consistent with my YouTube posting, right? The other thing is my Facebook group. I post five times a week in my personal Facebook group. And the other thing I just rolled out for doubling down on delivering value is that daily email and sending out to my list, right? I know people are freaking out right now. They don't know what to do. More people are at home than ever watching their computers, their TV, consuming content. So I thought, why can't I double down delivering value since more people are watching more than ever before, right? There'll be more people watching my videos, reading my content, reading my emails.  Especially your clients, right? So figure out ways that you can double down delivering value and use this time to your advantage.  Use it to deliver more value instead of just consuming content and being fearful of all the situations and circumstances right now, okay? So let's revisit these five things again. Number one, please turn off the news and if you do want to see or seek out information about what's going on, seek it out from a reputable source and be proactive about it, okay? Number two is to invest in learning and personal growth and business growth, right? Invest in books, courses, training programs, developing new skills and practicing those skills, invest in yourself and learning. Number three is to keep on selling, right?  Keep on selling and keep on going with your business as usual. Number four, adopt an abundance mindset, right? Don't look at it as a time to panic, don't look at it as a time to sell everything and stop and take your foot off the gas. Adopt an abundance mindset and look at it as a time of massive opportunity for you if you take advantage of it, okay? And number five is to double down on delivering value for your audience and your clients and your potential clients, right? Your subscribers or wherever they are, okay? So double down delivering value, there's more people watching and consuming content than ever before because everyone's working from home and all this stuff, everyone has to stay inside right now. So double down on delivering value, right? Start that podcast you're always looking to do. Start that YouTube channel, start that email list, start that Facebook group, whatever it is, look at ways that you can deliver content and deliver value and double down on that, okay? So that's it for this video guys. Those are five things that I'm doing that I recommend you do as well instead of panicking about the coronavirus and turning it into more of an opportunity rather than a time for gloom and doom and all that stuff, right? So I hope you guys like this video. Let me know, give it a like if you did and comment below with any questions or concerns that you have during this time. I'm happy to answer them. I do answer every comment that is on my channel, all right? So I'll see you guys in the next video.


Everybody, Dr. O here. So hopefully you've already watched the videos that covers the major arteries and you understand a lot of these terms like subclavian and axillary and the like. Now we're going to go through the veins. So the veins are more complicated than the arteries because since veins have such low pressure there have to be superficial and deep veins to carry your blood back towards the heart. So there's going to be extra veins that weren't there with the arteries but most of the veins still have the same name as the artery in that area. So if you already know your arteries you're going to be pretty much three-quarters of the way there when it comes to the veins. So here you see all the veins but I'm going to dive into the closer images and help you out again here. All right. So here we're looking at the head here. We have the vertebral vein running in the same place as the vertebral artery. When I think of the head and neck I primarily think of the carotid arteries going up and the jugular veins coming down. So you have there you have the internal and external jugular veins then at the bottom we have the subclavian running under the clavicles again and the axillary vein there in your armpit region your axilla. All right. Here again with the abdominal cavity I don't ask a lot of questions here mainly because I don't like asking you to know blood vessels without seeing where they're coming from or where they're going at least at this level in your education. But you can see pretty good look there at the vertebral vein at the top. There's your internal and external jugular veins again the subclavian running under the clavicle axillary under the in the armpit region of the axilla. We'll do a separate video where I cover the arm but you can see the cephalic vein here as well but I'll ask you to know it when you can see the entire arm. There you do have this is a great place to see the superior and inferior vena cava remember the superior vena cava is the largest vessel draining blood from above the heart the inferior vena cava largest vessel draining the blood or pulling the black blood back up from below the heart. Those are probably the two key ones on here. You can see the renal veins I may ask you that one because the kidneys are still there so you know where that blood vessel is attached and then at the bottom you can see the common iliac veins that are connected to the internal and external iliac veins. So at the arteries the common iliac arteries branch to the internal and external but now we're going the other direction so really the internal and external iliac veins are connecting to form the common iliac vein on the way back up to the heart. All right this is the most important image when it comes to veins this is where students struggle the most understanding the veins of the arm to me is the most complicated so we'll start there at the top you see the subclavian vein again I've mentioned it several times it's the part of this vein that runs underneath the clavicle. The axillary vein is the part that runs in the axilla region there you see at the top you see the cephalic vein and the bacillic vein these are two brand new words you didn't see with the arteries we did have a brachial artery and we still have a brachial vein but there are extra veins running up up the arms so the cephalic vein and the bacillic vein are the two new ones to learn here there's not really any great tricks just remember where they are and memorize their location so that's the cephalic the brachial and the bacillic veins in the upper arm or the arm region now we're down into the elbow you see the median cubital vein this is one that I always ask about on identification quizzes because this is the primary vein where you're going to get blood if you're drawing blood from someone they don't you don't have to use this one but that's where you aim that's the median cubital vein and then now we're down into the forearm so we do have radial and ulnar veins just like we had radial and ulnar arteries but there's a couple new ones to remember here we still have the cephalic and bacillic veins down here but if I'm going to ask you about those I'll ask you in the upper arm just so you know so the last new one here is the median anti-brachial so the anti-brachium is your forearm the brachial region is your upper arm the anti-brachium is your forearm so this is the median anti-brachial vein and then lastly I did ask the digital veins you'd have digital arteries in your fingers too that's your digits so the digital arteries and digital veins would be there all right so this this is this is by far the most important image spend most of your time as far as veins go learning this one because there are several new ones that you didn't see when you learn the arteries of the arm all right here we see the lower extremity so we have the common internal and external iliac veins again another new one we have the great saphenous vein this one's famous for being the longest vein in your body so you can see the great saphenous there both on the anterior and posterior view that's a very important new one again femoral vein same place as the femoral artery popliteal remember popliteus means behind the knee so same thing there and then we have the anterior and posterior tibial veins so hopefully like I said if you've already conquered your arteries and know them then you'll recognize most of these terms so the brand new ones think great saphenous the ones in the arm there those are going to be the key new ones and then your regular veins in your in your head and neck okay those are all the major veins I hope this helps have a wonderful day be blessed