Hey everyone, welcome to, I guess, this is the Nintendo Prime Podcast, I suppose. Here's the thing, this isn't really episode one of the rebooted podcast, because this is like the pre-episode, the pre-amble, a pre-discussion leading into the first Nintendo Direct we have had in 531 days. I am, of course, Mr. Nintendo Prime Nathaniel Flajans, and for those of you who probably don't know, because it's been so long, to my left and your guys' right, probably, I have no idea, is Mr. Eric Moore. You guys still don't know who he is, it's okay, he's one of my best friends, he's been with the channel in this podcast from the very beginning, and we decided to kind of reboot things a little bit, so welcome to our new set, hopefully you'll like it, it's not fully complete, there's a few more changes, we gotta get some more sound panels, extensive things out a little bit.  Yeah, Mario, goodbye, and I don't know if you guys can see a little bit over there, there's some other stuff that's gonna be goodbye. We got the TV now in the middle, it's mostly just kind of the logo, but when we have a guest on, it's possible that Eric and I would just scoot over a little bit and then we'll have the guest appear on the TV, that'll be really really cool. I might try to make it work where like, literally, I don't have to do any post-editing, they'll just be on the screen, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's the podcast. I have a really long HDMI cable, but let's not get ahead of ourselves on that actually happening. Still, it's gonna be pretty laid back, we're gonna be talking a lot of video game stuff, mostly Nintendo today is obviously, we're just talking a little direct predictions, direct discussion, and I guess the first thing to really start off with is, how shocked are you that we're getting into Nintendo Direct when it's been 531 days?  Yeah. And so, I don't know, I'm excited. Well, did you think they were done with Direct? There's been like an ongoing thing that, well, we've gotten individual game Directs. We've gotten the Sakurai Presents for Smash Bros. We've gotten even like partner showcase Directs.  But like with COVID and everything, and as an example, Paper Mario, they just dropped it. They didn't do a special event for it. They just threw it out on Twitter and then it went on to be the best selling Paper Mario ever. You had Hyrule Warriors, Age of Calamity just dropped it out of nowhere and became the best selling entry in literally the entire Warriors franchise. And then you gotta consider, okay, what about Pikmin 3 Deluxe? They sent Pikmin 3 Deluxe out to die. It's now the best selling Pikmin game of all time. So like clearly Nintendo proved they don't need Directs. And I think that is what led to people thinking, well, they don't need them. So why would they do it anymore? And because the Direct name kept being drugged through the mud, connected to partner showcases, then they had like a Super Nintendo World, which is their theme park, and they called that a Nintendo Direct. And we're like, What is a Direct? Okay, so we're getting a Direct about a theme park in Japan that most of us can't attend because we can't even travel outside the country, let alone in the country. I get that it's cool and eventually we'll be able to go and they are gonna make one down in Universal, but down in Florida and stuff. And I think even out in Cali, but it's just, okay.  And now here we go. Yeah. It's February. Like, it's coming on the 7th, February 17th, 4pm central time. I literally for the first time in 531 days and planning a Nintendo Direct stream, an hour long pre-show, and the funny thing is my pre-show is pretty much as long as the actual Direct. That's crazy. 50 minutes. Let's put this in perspective, folks. This is a 50 minute Direct. They have not had a Direct go 50 minutes or longer since before the Nintendo Switch came out and it was the Direct to hype up the Switch in the launch, okay. So it was the big Direct that had Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 2, Xenoblade Chronicles. The entire first year was in that Direct. And that was the one that was 50 plus minutes. Before that, they literally have never had a Direct go over 50 minutes or even hit 50 minutes. Now they have had a couple E3, like they don't always call them Directs, but digital shows sometimes go over 40 minutes, but they've never had it hit 50. And now here we are, 531 days later, and we have a 50 minute Direct. Yeah. Nuts. Now, to clarify, in case you guys didn't read the fine print, it does say part of the Direct will be talking about new stuff for currently released games, and they talked about Smash Bros. as an example. So let's start there. Let's start there. New Content Pack. Let's start there. This isn't all that's going to be in the Direct, but let's start there. My thought process is there's three games they're going to add new content to. Smash, they mentioned it. We're going to get into character reveal. I guess we can start there. What character do you want revealed? Oh, God. I know my biggest problem. We got Banjo. We got Banjo. So now I actually have to thank you. I mean, Cocker, but that's never going to happen. Well, we thought that would Banjo, though. Yeah, true. But, I mean, is it really never going to happen? I think there's more games out there that'll probably be, you know, picked before that. Maybe. Yeah. I think in particular that might get picked. This would be interesting because he actually was in PlayStation All-Stars, the PlayStation Version of Smash that totally everyone played, right? Yeah. Crash Bandicoot. Oh, yes. Because we are getting Crash Bandicoot 4 and we did get the Insane Trilogy and Crash Team Racing. We got all of that on Switch.  The thing is it was never official. The PlayStation never owned Crash Bandicoot. It was always Activision, but it was only on PlayStation systems at the time. Now it's on everything, so it's like, you know, could Crash be kind of sneaking its way in as a historical figure? You know, obviously people always want Sora from Kingdom Hearts. Right. Yeah. You know, it's just some popular ones. Cocker doesn't even get brought up that much. I don't think people think it's realistic, but I don't really care. I don't care how realistic it is. No, that's what I want, but... If I can get a character that pisses on other characters, I'll take it. Oh, yeah, for sure. I'll take it. And you can have like his final smash, like the bears coming in with the machetes and... Oh, a frying pan. A frying pan. A frying pan. Yeah.  I don't know. I mean, the thing is it's a little inappropriate, but then again, it's a T plus rated game, so you could do it. Have the Great Mighty Pood. The Great Mighty Pood. Come up and swallow him. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many great things I could do for him, but I think we all agree there's going to be a smash character reveal. And Sakurai himself retweeted and kind of teased, there's going to be some smash news tomorrow. He was laughing at himself. Yeah. He's like, well, yeah. Duh. He knows what it is. It's already recorded. Beyond that, I think Animal Crossing, all right? We've been getting free updates. Yeah. We've been getting free updates for a while, but they've done DLC for things like New Leaf, and we're in New Horizons, we're going to be approximately a year out from when it launched. It is the most popular game in Animal Crossing history by far. It's not even close. And it might even, by the end of this fiscal year, be the best selling game on Switch. It feels like when they say we're going to talk about new content for games that are already existing on the platform, Animal Crossing has to be in there. Yeah. Literally, Animal Crossing was the best selling game on Switch in January. And January was the leading platform on pretty much every country it's in, in January for sales. True. So if Animal Crossing, almost a year out, is still the leading game selling, okay, they got to put DLC out, right? Right. We figured they would do this for games like Aria Odyssey in the past and they didn't do it. But Animal Crossing is different because they have a history of actually releasing DLC for that. So another game that I think it just makes too much sense, and there's a history for, Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity. They have had $20 DLC packs in the past for Hyrule Warriors and for Fire Emblem Warriors. All the DLC packs have been jam-packed with content. And pretty much every Warrior game, except for maybe in the very beginning, I've had it. And by the way, we are not sponsored by Diapepsy Cherry Coke. Actually, you know what? I just call it Diapepsy Cherry Coke. Yeah. It is what it is. Not a sponsor today. I just need a little caffeine kick and I feel guilty if I drink it alone, so drink. Drink it. Thank you, sir. All right. So that is kind of my thought process that we're going to get Age of Calamity DLC, Animal Crossing DLC, and a Smash character. We know we're getting something Smash. The only thing they ever seen reveal are characters. So do you think there's any other game you can think of that maybe they can be talking about? I mean, it doesn't always just have to be Nintendo First Party, too. Any games that have come out in, like, say, the last year that you're like, you know, maybe they could do some DLC for that. God, I've been sawing a gaming for, since we've basically stopped the podcast. Yeah, pretty much, guys. The podcast died and he died with it. I have had... Paper Mario last year. I mean, that could be... That could definitely get some DLC stuff like that. Goodness. Man, I'm not prepared for this. It's okay. It's okay. Like, this is... This is... The interesting part here is that I think this is going to be the part that people are at least interested in this direct. Not because the DLC is not going to sell incredibly well, but because, hey, look, these are the kind of announcements you could have just threw out on Twitter. We're actually... When we're talking big boy directs, we're waiting for the new content, right? No, no, no, for sure. And this is kind of where I have an idea of what might be happening. This would be a very, very crazy theory, but I'll save it for a little while. Okay. Okay. Let me start talking about the new stuff. Okay. So the other thing that's confirmed is going to be in this direct is updates on all the games in the first half of this year. So that would be from January, which has already passed, all the way through June. Now, we already know some games. Okay. We know Bravely Default 2. That's the next game coming out. Then we have Monster Hunter Rise next month. And then we have New Pokemon Snap the month after that. Now, what's interesting is we've already got a lot of information on all three of these games. Pokemon Snap, they could actually skip out on talking about because next week is the celebration of Pokemon's 25th anniversary. Yeah. So Pokemon Company is going to have a whole bunch of Pokemon stuff to talk about. And they could talk about it then. They could also talk about a new Pokemon game that is supposedly going to be coming out this year.  I don't know if it's in either. Okay. Interesting. So I want it to be Let's Go, but I think it's just going to be like a traditional remake, maybe? Or I don't know. A new TC game? A new trading card game. A new trading card game? I don't know. Because their board game did just win Game of the Year. I know. I know. Their trading card board game did. Yeah. So it's very well possible. Want to elaborate on that story? I actually just read that. I just saw the headline. They saw the headline. I didn't actually read it. So Pokemon had a new board game style aspect to their trading card game and it won board game of the year or something like that. Yeah. Toy of the Year. Toy of the Year. I think it's Toy of the Year or something. I don't remember. I mean, proving that the trading card game is not just there for collectors to make lots of money, it's actually fun to play. Yeah. And that's what I thought as a kid and I still think that today. I don't know. The rules have probably changed a little bit. Oh, right. I'd have to check, but it's still part of the same basic concept. Yeah. Take out the other guys' Pokemon. Right. Right. I could go for a new trading card game. Yeah. New trading card. The old Game Boy trading card game. That's what we're talking about. Like a new one of those. I'll get a new Pokemon Snap. I don't think anything's possible. Yeah. I mean, I know we still haven't got a new stadium slash Coliseum. That would be another good one that they did. Another just ghost drop. Yeah. But again, that's Pokemon 25th anniversary. I don't think any of that's going to be here. New Pokemon Snap potentially, but I kind of think Pokemon companies do in their own thing. Oh, right. They traditionally aren't Nintendo Direct. So we might not see Pokemon Snap. We're going to see something on Monster Hunter Rise and we're going to see something on Brotherhood Fall 2. Both of those games have had public demos. I don't know how much more we need to see of them to sell them, but they're going to be mentioned. Yeah, they're going to mention them. A minute or two. The Crash Bandicoot game was recently announced, but we haven't seen footage of it yet on Switch. I think we'll see that. Beyond that, I mean, they could choose to show off anything they want. But I think at that point, you're leading into games we don't know about. Right now, we don't know about any major Switch game in April or June. So that leaves potentially two major games that they could slot in there. And these are Nintendo Directs. Normal, regular, full-blown Nintendo Directs. No subtitles, no whatever. Just called Nintendo Direct. Always say, we're going to talk about games in this period. And then they end up teasing games that are outside of that period every single time. And that's one reason we get so hyped for this, because we know they're going to talk about games that are going to be not just in the first six months, because that's what they always do.  Now, this is something people are afraid of. Every time Smash Bros. gets like a new character announcement, it takes like 25 minutes. No, for sure. Do you think half of this Direct is the Smash Bros. character? I hope not. See, my hope is that they always have a Sakurai Presents show after they reveal a character. And I'm hoping they be like, here's five minutes. Quick look. Boom! Sakurai Presents happening later today. Right. Just leave it at that. Or it happening after the Direct or something. It will be directly after the Direct. Just please, Nintendo, announce the character. It is worthy of being on a Direct. But like, don't dedicate a massive part of the Direct to something we've already been getting consistently over the last year. I think that's more of a, yes, put it in the Direct, but don't make a majority of the Direct about it. And that's my one fear, is that a majority of the Direct will be about one individual game. And I don't want that to happen. Unless, and this is where we get into new content. Yes. Okay. There's a lot of potential for new stuff here because a lot of things happening right now. Eric, you have some thoughts or an idea, something percolating. Why don't you share it with everyone here? I don't even know what it is. So there's what, three things that could possibly happen that could theoretically possibly happen. We talk about Switch Pro. Okay. It is possible. Can't dismiss it. We mentioned this, show it off a little bit, which then goes straight into... They have to release that soon though, if they're showing that off, right? You figure. Because they're going to nerf sales of Switch at the moment they show it off. So they have to release it soon, like March. Right. March 3rd? Yeah. Anniversary Switch release? Right. Anyways, go on. So there's that, which then goes into... By the way, I don't actually think they're going to do it, but it's possible. Yeah. Can't dismiss it. We have no idea. Right. I have no inside information. No, I'm just all hyperspeculative. It's okay. That's what this is about. That's how we normally go. We're not going to go big and go home. But this is how we do it. This is the speculation. Right. Pre-podcast. Right. So, which then leads me to some sort of anniversary edition for Legend of Zelda. Okay. And then from there, we get... Do we get Mario Odyssey 2? Or some sort of... So, my thought is... Some sort of Mario game? Are we more likely to get Mario Odyssey 2 or Mario Kart 9? Oh, sorry. Oh, yes. Good call. Because technically, we can count home circuit live. That's fine. But that's not Mario Kart 9. Right. No, no, it's not. We technically have not had a mainline Mario Kart game that's brand new to Switch yet. Yes. And people are like, but you can't. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is doing so well. Well, about that. Shintura Furukawa came out and maybe he's lying out his teeth. I don't know. But he says Nintendo thinks the Switch is only just entering the halfway point of its life. That means we have another four years minimum of Switch. Whether they extend it with Switch Pro, whatever they do. Four years minimum. Perfect time then to get Mario Kart 9. You got a four-year runway with that. Yeah, for sure. And then right into... Right when Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is about to lose the sales lead. To Mario Kart X. No, to Animal Crossing. It's okay. You can lose the sales lead because actually, we got Mario Kart 9 and that's going to instantly sell for 10 million and we don't got to worry about it. No, no, no. Which then leads into Mario Kart X for the next... Oh, the next gem. I want to see what you're doing there. Yeah. Because of course they can't just say 10. So I think if... So the ideas you brought up, I think both of them are interesting because we talked about how maybe a large section of the podcast could be about one thing. If it's Switch Pro, that would be like 20 minutes. Guaranteed. I doubt it's like, oh, here's a new improved Switch. Go buy it in two weeks and we're not going to say anything else about it. No, it'll be like a 20 minute presentation on that. Or you mentioned Zelda's anniversary. So the 35th anniversary happens on the 21st. So what happens four days after this direct is technically the 35th anniversary of Zelda. If they mentioned Zelda's 35th in this direct, they could potentially make half the direct just about that. That's true. Because look at what they did for Mario's 35th. They had a huge presentation for that. For sure. They could literally make half the direct... Look, it's Zelda's 35th anniversary.  If they do a collection. We got Zelda 35 where we're racing through dungeons instead of racing through levels like in Mario. You know, we have... Whatever else they decided to throw. I have no idea. Zelda Dungeon Maker.  Remember, in Link's Awakening, they tested out a Dungeon Maker and it worked really well. Imagine making it into a full-blown game. That could be a thing. Obviously, the big thing floating out there, Breath of the Wild 2. For sure. And that's when we'll see is that happening in the first half of the year or really should we be looking at it as like that's the game to end the show with and it says coming in 2021? Maybe. You know, that's... Yeah. But the thing is, is do you take the... Because I would see them starting out. I don't know if I necessarily see them ending with... You think they kick it off with Breath of the Wild 2? With Zelda. Just say screw it. We're getting the Zelda out of the way now. Like, boom. Opening. Breath of the Wild 2 trailer. Done. Out of the way. No more worrying. Are we getting Breath of the Wild 2? Just do it right away. That would be huge. Just set the expectations high and then just see if you can live up to it the rest of the time. I mean, there's the thing. If they start with Breath of the Wild 2, which Nintendo's done this before. They started with a massive game at the beginning of a Direct. And it's been 531 days. So, I mean, then them starting big wouldn't even be surprising. They start with that.  What's that? Oh, we have one more thing and it's just this big mind blowing thing you didn't see coming. Metroid 4. Ooh. I just see Metroid. Metroid is not as big as Zelda, but they do treat it. Pikmin 4. I don't know if Pikmin 4... Pikmin 4, I don't know if that would be... I mean, God remember, we're talking Breath of the Wild 2, 20 million seller. Yeah. I mean... Mario something is the only thing I can think of. Anything Mario. Mario Odyssey 2. Yeah. Or do they shock the world and go... Do they end it with the switch purple? No, no. Mario Galaxy 3. Ooh. I like that idea. Just out of nowhere. I like that idea. Oh, everyone's all mad. We're not getting Galaxy 2. It's because it's being packaged in with Galaxy 3. There you go. No, everyone's like, oh, we're getting an Odyssey 2 someday. But what if it's really a Galaxy 3 we're getting? We're going back to Galaxy days. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, I'm just hoping because Mario Galaxy on 3D All Stars looks so good in HD. Like, I really want a game built for Switch Up. Yeah. Here's the thing. We're going to get something Zelda. I just have a feeling. Yeah. I don't know if they're going to say 35th anniversary. I hope they do. Maybe they'll just say, look, here's a trailer for whatever. We know you want to see Breath of the Wild 2. Here it is. But guess what? We have more announcements on a direct next week for the 35th anniversary. Maybe. And they can do a Zelda only thing then kind of keep a lot of those announcements for then. Yeah. That's always possible as well. Just like they could say, pay attention next week for Pokemon as well. I was just saying, but are they going to compete with Pokemon? I don't know. Would they put it the same week as Pokemon? I have no idea. Do you think it's possible we could have too much news? Is it possible? I mean, We didn't have E3. And it felt like we really were missing out. Right. There were these Ubisoft 4 words and other events that happened, you know, Summer Game Fest. But it never really felt like we had enough news culminated at one time to create, like, like an undeniable, like Nintendo has all the momentum right now. Right. Like literally PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are selling out and doing incredible. That's fine. 3.5 mil during launch for Xbox, 4.5 for PlayStation 5, doing fantastic. But also mired in the fact no one can get their hands on them. And currently anyways, if you guys are honest, there isn't a single killer game for either platform. Now Ratchet and Clank might be that killer game for PlayStation. And I don't know what's going to be. The medium ended up not being the killer app for Xbox. Is it going to, are we just waiting for Halo? I don't know. So right now, neither platform has a killer game. Switch has several. And is outselling all of them in unit sales. And it has having a hard time staying on the shelf, but is still more plentiful than the rest. And has three major games coming out in the next three months. Right. And it has a few more speculated large games coming. And we know Band of the Threes in development. Right. We know METRO2 and we know METRO Prime 4. And there's also technically a new No More Heroes in the works as well. Whether or not they consider that big enough to be in this Direct, I don't know. But I know there's some people out there that want to hear about the new No More Heroes game. There's just, there's so much to consider when you were looking at what this could be because normally when we head into a Direct, if you remember back in the old podcast, the olden days, we'd always be like, but like we'll talk, we'll hype, but then we'd like to temper our expectations. Directs never live up to the hype. The only time I recall any Direct actually living up to the hype I had beforehand was the one that exceeded it. And that's when they dropped Breath of the Loud the sequel at the end. And I nearly had a heart attack in the hotel room because it just came out and no one expected it. It was like, no, like this is 2019, it's been two years. No one expected a sequel that quick. Right, for sure. We just wrapped up DLC like a year prior. No one expected to see that. And then all of a sudden it wasn't just like a title splash, like Metroid Prime 4. It was a literal trailer with actual new content. And you're just like, what? Okay, that, and then it was already really, really good up until that point. Then that just put it over there. I see now the cake. The thing is, it's been 531 days by the time this one comes out. I just, I think it's okay this one time 50 minutes, 531 days. I think it's okay for all of us to expect the moon. We're all going to be disappointed. We're all going to be, just so you know, like we're talking, think of what we're talking about. We're trying to switch for all. Breath of the Wild 2, Odyssey, Galaxy 3, Mario Kart 9, Pikmin 4, Bayonetta 3, but we're literally throwing every game we can think of. Let's get a new F-Zero. Just bring that franchise back from the dead, right? Bring the death wheel back. Like just bring everything back. We're getting another Star Tropics now. Suddenly we're getting Mother, we're getting Mother 3 ported over after we've been begging for it for like our entire lifetime. Like we're just going to get everything, right? Everything, we're getting Xenoblade Chronicles 3. We're going to get, heck, member Pandora's Tower back and we were getting that. Heck, we sports, so bring the Wii Sports back and now we're going to get Wii Sports 3. GoldenEye. We're getting Wii Sports COVID Edition or something. Wii Sports COVID. We're getting GoldenEye. They're going to get that GoldenEye leak from XBLA. Suddenly, hey, guess what? We're getting that remade on Switch because somehow we got all the licensee worked out out of nowhere. Even though Nintendo was the one that blocked it last time. The point is that we're hyping this thing. It's going to be the greatest direct, the greatest showcase any company has ever put on. But honestly, I will not say Nintendo owes us this because they've been giving us games even last year. It ended up being an OK lineup. It wasn't great. If we're honest, Animal Crossing and Age of Calamity aside, it really wasn't a great year. Lots of ports. Lots of ports. Pikmin 3. Tokyo Mariah Sessions. Xenoblade Chronicles definitive edition. Pikmin 3, I think I already said that one. I don't know. There was a lot of ports and they were good ports and all of them added a little bit of new content. I think besides Tokyo Mariah Sessions, I don't think they did. But it's like they added new content. The extra content in Xenoblade Chronicles definitive edition, perfect. The extra content in Pikmin 3, all of our missions, great. But like, you know, even now, new Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario 3D World plus Bowser's Fury, so many day Mario titles. OK, long-winded. And the Bowser's Fury mode, which is absolutely fantastic. Yeah, I actually was having fun playing it. It's fantastic. But like, none of them are new games. We have no currently known Nintendo created in-house games slated to come to Switch anytime soon. Zero. Zero. Those three major games coming? Not made by Nintendo. Published? Not made by. We know they're making Breath of the Wild. We know they're making Metroid Prime 4. What else do we really know Nintendo is making? That's it. That's it. We know Retro Studios is making this. Zelda Team is making that.  I don't know. That's what's crazy. Because Nintendo has said nothing for so long, we know nothing. Nothing's leaped out. We have a right to be hyped because Nintendo's teams, even during COVID, had to be doing something this whole time. Eat whole. Something. Eat whole. OK, Smash. That's great. Sakurai's been doing content anyways from home. But what else has been... Nintendo, are we talking... even a new Mario Tennis game, or a new Mario Sports game, Mario Baseball, Mario Strikers. Something like that. It's just something. I know we're talking a lot to Mario. Nintendo puts out a lot of Mario games. Let's just be honest. But it could be a new IP. It could be a Kirby game. We get Kirby games every year. It could be Kirby. A Yoshi game? New Yoshi game. There you go. Another DK? Donkey Kong. It's its 40th anniversary this year. You want to talk big anniversary. Donkey Kong is the oldest IP Nintendo has. Predates Mario technically because it was originally called Jump Man. Right. So Donkey Kong is Nintendo's oldest IP. 40th anniversary. Feels like they needed to do something. And you know what's ripe, by the way, for Donkey Kong? They already had Tetris 99. They had Mario 35. DK 40. Where you're racing in old school Donkey Kong levels. I mean, come on, Nintendo. It's right there. And it was originally a competitive arcade game anyways. It makes so much sense. I mean... To have a DK 40. Even a DK level builder. Oh my... Oh my... That would be awesome.  Yes. Let's do it. Yes. Let's bongo our way to the top. Yes. Like there's... It's okay, I think, this one direct. To just have our expectations reach to the moon. Because honestly, Nintendo has to have a lot to give us. I think the worst thing that could happen with this direct. Is they spent half of it... Not even half of it. Is that a majority of it, let's say 48 minutes of the direct. They have one, say they have one big announcement. Whatever it is. Maybe it's the Breath of the Wild 2 trailer. I don't know. Which would be hype for me. But let's just say that is the big thing. They throw that at the end. There's your Breath of the Wild 2 trailer coming this year. Okay. Awesome. I'm happy. But if the rest of the direct is literally just stuff we already know. Like games that have already come out. And games we're already aware of. That is where you're like, why did we have this direct? We're talking about DLC. Yeah. And then you're just talking about games that we already have a lot of coverage of. And already have release dates for. Right. Like why are we not talking about what the hell your studios are working on. And then we're going to be like, well when the F is the next direct. When they have to talk about something. Right. Because they have to eventually talk about their own games. Yeah, for sure. So even as much hype as the Breath of the Wild 2 is a capper. It's like, but we already technically know that game exists. Right. No, for sure. Yeah. Metroid Prime 4. It's Metroid's 35th anniversary this year. Now I personally don't think we're going to get Metroid Prime 4 this year. It would be cool to see a trailer. Because we have not seen the game at all. Yeah. Just to know it's alive. No, it has a heartbeat. Right. But things like Metroid Prime Trilogy. That's been rumored to be done for years. Maybe they throw that out in this direct. You know, in HD of course. There's also been a lot of rumors around Resident Evil. And this outrage game. And how it has the same budget as Resident Evil Village. And is supposedly a time exclusive for Switch. Is that unveiled now? Because as far as we're aware, Switch isn't getting Resident Evil Village. Now, Switch did get Resident Evil 7 streaming in Japan. And now we have control as a streaming game in the US. It's possible that we end up do getting Village on Switch. And that can be announced as a streaming game. I don't know how hyped that is going to make people. I think it's better to have it as a streaming game. They just not have the game at all. It's always better to have. Because there's going to be that person out there that doesn't have any other way to play games. And just happens to have good enough internet to stream it. So I always think it's better to have a game than not. Even if I don't think it's a good fit for most people. I think if it comes out on Switch as a streaming game, but you literally own any other platform, you should just buy it for that platform. Yeah. Yeah. Unless the streaming version is significantly cheaper. Which it's probably not. It's probably going to be the same price as the rest. So, you know, another thing to throw out there. Someone floated this out during a live stream earlier. You know, we're both big sports fans. Yeah. What about MLB, the show? They announced it for Xbox. Xbox, yeah. Which we already knew it was going to be a multiplatform. What if the reason it wasn't announced for Switch is because they knew it was going to be in the direct? Now, as a sports fan, I know a lot of you guys out there are going to be like, who cares? Yeah. Dude, as a sports fan, the show is legitimately a great sports game. Yeah. Hasn't been messed up yet. Yeah. Yeah. This will be the one version that does. Oh, this will be the arcade version. Yeah. Yeah. We can't get a full version. There's like when we got Madden on 3DS, it had to be some walkie thing around. It had to be some weird family arcadey. It's like, oh no, if I want NFL Blitz, just give me NFL Blitz. Right. I want simulation football. Right. For sure. Madden's got its own issues at times. Oh, for sure. This year's Madden's been the worst Madden in a while. And that's saying something. Yeah. I can't get back to the glory days. Even like when we talk about 2K5. Yeah. Like, also Madden 2005 has also happened to actually be a really good Madden game. Yeah, 06 is probably the best one. Yeah. When they had the training camp. The training camp was great. Yeah. It actually felt like it mattered. Like, you could actually improve your kickers as an example. Right. In today's game, you literally, your kickers pretty much never get better. But like, then you had a training camp and you could actually do field goal challenges and actually make your kickers better. It was nice. Not just that. It was just easy. Like, they did, what they did with Madden is they took training camp and they made it so you can do between game practices. Yeah. So some of the stuff from training camp is now in the practices. It's just not all of it is. And that's, I think, the problem. They added practices, which is fine. And you can improve your players through that, but they didn't make it so you could do everything. You're not targeting quarterback. You're not targeting the whole offense on the whole, the whole defense on the whole. There's no special teams targeting to improve your puncher and kicker. Right. And, you know, and the fact that I can't put these points in awareness. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Oh yeah. They changed that. They changed that. They changed that. But I can't. I still question if that's a better choice in Madden. In these. But this is, this is the chance for, and by the way, I don't want to say Madden. No. But I think that it's okay to be hyped for this particular direct. And it's okay to be let down. I think we all should just expect to be let down, but be okay feeling really hyped headed in because we deserve this. I think the gaming industry deserves this. Nintendo has a chance to show everyone that, hey, you had a year to make a digital event better than us and you failed. Here's how you really do it. Right. We made them anticipate for 531 days and then we just gave them the baller of balliness digital events and now literally, what's a PlayStation 5? Yep, right. What's it? Well, you guys are still fighting over the little squabble when Target releases three systems at 2 a.m. That's great. That's great. Well, you know what I'm doing. I'm playing Breath of Loud 2. I'm playing Metroid Prime 4. I'm playing Odyssey 3. Odyssey 3, right? We're just skipping. Yeah, we're just gonna skip 2. We're gonna go straight to 3. That's the biggest announcement there. You know, I'm just... I think it's time to be hyped. I haven't really been hyped. I've been hyped for certain little Nintendo things here and there over the last year, but I haven't really been hyped maybe since Breath of Loud 2 dropped at E3 in 2019 and it's funny because we only really had one major direct sense then in September. Do you have any closing predictions, thoughts, opinions on what to expect? Because by the way, we're live streaming this thing, so we'll be live reacting and there's going to be a podcast episode coming out later this week, probably this weekend, trying to think about the timing of it. Anyways, we're gonna have a guest on and everything and we'll all be talking about all the direct stuff, of course, and any other big news that drops this week. But I really want to know, this is it. People on my channel, this is the last thing they potentially are watching before this direct happens. Any closing thoughts for them? Oh gosh. You know, as someone, you're as casual of a Nintendo fan or gaming fan as it comes, but even you, dude, it's a direct, like, I'm there.  Unless it's like, yeah, but then you get let down. What's the last thing you got hyped for, remember? What's the last thing you got hyped for?  Yep. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered. Yes. He was so hyped for it. He wanted to play it. I didn't even own it. I just bought it on a whim digitally to play it with him and it was maybe the worst spending of money in my entire life as a gamer and I'm someone who bought E.T. back in the day. Like just because there was an expectation based on how good the original was and don't get me wrong, some of the qualities are there. Oh, yeah. They messed up the multiplayer which was the primary difference in this game compared to other Final Fantasies and they messed up the core aspect of it. Anyways. So, closing thoughts. Closing thoughts. Let me retouch on a couple things. Sure. That should be really kind of cool though. If they do go with Breath of the Wild Breath of the Wild 2 or some sort of Legend of Zelda. To tie that into Smash releases. Where we get the the God dang it, what? So we get like Mipha and the four champions. That's the word I'm looking for. Thank you, good god. No problem, gotcha. My brain went My Nintendo knowledge wheels have been turning like crazies. That would be kind of cool to see that kind of kick into into Smash. Bringing the four champions or even tie into bringing the four champions in and then have the skins of the original four to tie that in. That would be freaking amazing. As for what I'm expecting Honestly we've covered most of it. It's I'm going in hot Expecting to get disappointed because But just ready to just basically fall over and jizz all over the ceiling in the middle of the We're gonna need lots of change. You know what, I think we're gonna need to bring a stack of pants to get ready to change. We might. Just on the off chance that happens. And you guys know I'll have the shots of flowing because it's Nintendo DirectTime.  It's time. It's Nintendo DirectTime. Thank you so much for tuning in to this pre-limb episode. Technically like a preamble to episode one of the rebooted Nintendo Prime Pocket. I did a new logo, by the way. Shout out to the people who may, I don't know, I'll put a link down in the description to the company that made this for us. Really great, great logo. I also made the Nintendo Prime logo you guys have seen on some of the live stream thumbnails. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I'm the Tanner Overjads. This is Eric Boer and hey, if you're watching this video version you want the audio, links down in the description. If you're watching the audio version or listening to the audio version and you want the video version, go to YouTube. You know I'm a YouTuber, right? Unless you, maybe you just randomly found us on like the podcast app. If you have, go to youtube.com slash c slash Nintendo Prime TV. I can't believe that I still know that that's the URL. Search Nintendo Prime. But then you might get Amazon Prime or you might get I don't know. Nintendo Prime. I hope so. I can't guarantee it. If you search Nintendo Prime. I can't guarantee it. It might bring up the website that's currently down. I have no idea. It's definitely possible. You really should pay the bill on that. I don't know why though. I have no use for the site. Maybe just to redirect to my YouTube channel. Anyway, thank you guys so much for tuning in. We'll catch you guys in the real episode one happening at the end of the week. Peace out. Later.


Saturday also brought about day two of the Big Bear wrestling classic in Castlake with numerous area wrestlers fighting for the top spot in their weight class. Picking things up with the 113 pound championship staples, Motley Spencer Miller gets the take down on Morris Ryan Nosebush. He would win by decision 4-2. Moving up to the 170 pound match, Park Rapids Cody Dravis taking on Rosels Blake Skogestad. Early on, Dravis gets the take down to take the 2-0 lead. But Skogestad would control the rest of the match, getting the reversal here in the second period. Followed by the near fall to end the period, he'd win by major decision 14-6. Then the 182 pound championship Park Rapids Justin Dravis controlling the match early on against Staples Motley's Alex Erpilding. Dravis gets the take down and the near fall to take the early 5-0 lead but Erpilding would respond scoring 8 straight points through the next two periods to win by decision 8-5. And that is his 150th career win. Congratulations Tim. Here's a look at your team scores from the weekend. Hutchinson taking it. Staples Motley and Bertha Hewitt, Verndale Parkers Prairie rounding out the top 5 at 3 and 5. And then Black Duck, Cast Lake Beena and Park Rapids Area sitting at 6-7 in the bottom half of those standings.


Good afternoon everyone thank you so much for joining us for Governor Wolff's first-ever Facebook Town Hall yesterday. We asked you to submit questions for the governor and so today he's here with us live answering your questions on Facebook. Governor welcome. Thank you Meg, it's good to be here. Yes well let's get started. We're going to talk about a topic that a lot of people have been talking about and that's property taxes. Ed from Quaker Town has our first question. Why not eliminate property taxes? What changes would you like to see to House Bill Senate Bill 76 in order to sign it into law? Of course that's the property tax independence act so why not eliminate property taxes? Yeah that's a good question. I'm trying to to reduce property taxes dramatically. I heard throughout the campaign that people want property tax relief but I also heard that that people want to invest in education that we need to have schools that that can actually teach and that where teachers and educators have the resources they need to teach. So House Bill 76 Senate Bill 76 while it does a nice job in in reducing the property taxes dramatically it doesn't make I think the investment in the public goods and in education specifically that I think we need to to make. So I've tried to do this in a way that creates 3.8 billion dollars of tax relief property tax relief in a way that we can afford and in a way that still allows us to make the investments we need to make in a great future. And if your plan passes and reduces school taxes as you'd like to see what measures are there to then prevent these districts from raising property taxes once again? Yeah what you don't want to have happen is that we do all this work to reduce the taxes and then local school boards down the road increase the the tax. What I've done and what I'm proposing in my budget is to take the reserve which right now if your reserves are between it depends on the school district between 8 and 12 percent of your annual budget if it's below that then you can raise property taxes without a referendum. In my budget I propose reducing that cap from 8 to 12 percent down to 4 percent and that would keep the overwhelming most almost all the school districts in Pennsylvania from from being able to raise property taxes unless there's a referendum and the assent of the voters to do that. We have to make sure and my goal is to make sure that this is dollar for dollar property tax reduction that that 3.8 billion dollars in property tax reduction that I want to see actually goes to property tax reduction and that's that's important. So this is my plan my proposal for doing that obviously open to any suggestions as to how we can improve that I want to make sure that's dollar for dollar property tax relief. All right and into our next big talking point regarding your budget is public education. Lisa from State College tells a story about her son who attended cyber school and asks what are your plans for cyber charter schools? Well my plans are to try to make it apparently she was very happy with the education her son received there and I want to make sure that that all cyber charter schools are held to the appropriate accountability so that they provide their students with as good in education. So I want accountability in our charter school program including bricks and mortar but also cyber charter schools and I also want to make sure that the taxpayers are paying an appropriate amount I think we need to make sure that we're not overpaying. So I propose since we have intermediate units public education many of our intermediate units are already providing public option on cyber education that and using the same software that that actually we know what that costs and I'm proposing to reimburse cyber private cyber charter schools that amount plus ten percent as a cushion that should save us a hundred and sixty million dollars so what I'm proposing again is accountability to make sure that every child gets a good education in a cyber charter school and also proposing a formula for reimbursement that should protect the taxpayer from from paying too much. Roger from McClure and this is a direct quote upon moving back to Pennsylvania two years ago I noticed a serious lack in my local school district with no marching bands and no instrumental instruction my question is will some of your education funding go to improve the music fine arts programs within our schools. Well first of all welcome back to Pennsylvania but yes the the idea of the good basic education system is science technology engineering and math but also the arts and and a good education has to include that and and part of the reason that schools some schools have eliminated those programs is because they don't have the funds. My investment in education is premised on the idea that that all students in Pennsylvania will get a good education a full education they won't be robbed of some of the elements of that educational program including music and art and so while I focus a lot on the reduction of property taxes I've also focused a lot on the investment side we need to invest more in public education I've proposed in my budget to do that and one of the goals is to make sure that every student has access to the programs that he correctly identified as is unfortunately being eliminated from too many schools. Okay let's move on to higher education. C. Elam from Belfont says how does your administration plan to expand financial support for commonwealth public and state related higher education? Well in my budget I simply propose giving money restoring the cuts that prior administration had made to higher education and I'm doing that over a two-year process two-year cycle so that over the next this year and next year 100% of that those cuts will be restored and and that's still my goal so that 50% of that restoration is in this budget and the second 50% will be in the next I hope in the next budget. Okay let's shift gears medical marijuana big talking point these days Teresa from Lackawanna County what is your stance on legalizing it? Well as I said throughout the campaign I'm for legalization of medical marijuana and I'm working with two senators one Republican one Democrat right now to support them in their efforts to bring a legalized medical marijuana bill into B so I have strongly supported that I think doctors really ought to be in charge of prescribing medication they think their patients need most and so we give doctors the the ability to prescribe much stronger drugs than that and and and I think we should do no less in this case give them the ability to to prescribe the medication they think will best help their patients. Okay sales tax Linda from Dallas Town and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania want to know more about the sales tax component of your budget plans so can you explain why you're changing the sales tax at all in Pennsylvania and then how does that relate to property taxes? Well I'm trying to to create we're addressing a number of deficits I think we have an education deficit we're not investing a much in as much as we should but we also have a structural budget deficit just in general we're looking to consume more public goods and we're willing to pay for that's the structural budget deficit that means no matter how much your economy grows revenues just aren't going to keep up with what you need so we have to bridge that that gap I'm trying to do a number of things at once here invest in education reduce property taxes reduce the corporate income tax and one way we can can do that is to change the personal income tax and the sales tax which I'm proposing to to do my proposal on the sales tax calls for raising the rate by six tenth one percent from six to six point six percent and to keep that as modest as that by broadening the base and making sure we're in many ways bringing the the sales tax from the 1950s which is when it was first established to the 21st century where a lot of new products and services are being sold and consumed that weren't in the 1950s the economy is different now and I think that tax should be brought up to speed if we broaden the base it means a much more moderate increase is necessary to fund the things we need to fund and and having to do with property taxes at the same time well and as I said that that allows us to produce the huge reduction in property taxes that that I'm calling for a 50% on average reduction in property taxes for funding public education I think we're allowed I'm going to be allowed to do that with this modest increase in the sales tax talk about your budget Denise from Bucks County how will you build a strong collaborative relationship with legislators that will then enable you to move your agenda forward well that's that's an important point I'm a new governor so I haven't been through the budget process before but I understand that that I need to to build consensus and I'm basing my goal here of the building consensus and the means to that end on the idea that the legislators Republican and Democrat heard the same thing I did from the voters of Pennsylvania they want property tax relief my budget has that in a big way and I'm assuming that they'll agree with me that that's important I heard from my constituents as I'm sure they heard from theirs that we need to invest in education I've heard from many people over the years that we need to reduce the corporate income tax all these things are in my budget and so the the fundamental area of agreement I think is that we all want those same things and and so we can start from that point and there'll be areas of disagreement but I'm hoping that that I can build support simply by the elements that I've put into this budget health care art from Erie wants to know is your new Medicaid expansion plan really an expansion and when does it take effect it really is an expansion and and the idea is is to do what we've done before we've had Medicaid since the 1960s I think in Pennsylvania and so we're familiar with it the people who are Medicaid clients understand it and what we're talking about here is simply expanding that and extending that to an extra 600,000 Pennsylvanians it's not creating a new bureaucracy it's not creating new layers of services just doing what we've always done the goal is to have the first phase of that in place by early June and the fully implemented by the early fall late September early October the goal is to have a clearly understood clearly defined system that is as efficient as possible for the taxpayers of Pennsylvania that is also something that the clients can use. On to the gas drilling and energy industry and that would like to know I'd like to know if you have any plans for moving our state forward with renewable energy and starting to move away from fracking. Well I think I want to impose a severance tax and I want to do that because I think the industry the gas industry could be not only a source of revenue for the state for education for example but a source of new jobs but I also see that the severance tax as the as a place that we can raise money for building a bridge to a sustainable energy future. We used to have a pretty robust system of tax incentives of grants that would allow people encourage people to put photovoltaic cells on their house to build and use wind farms to generate electricity. We need to do more of that kind of thing so in my budget I have a 675 million dollar bond issue that would be serviced from that severance tax about 50 to 60 million dollars a year that would provide the funding to build that bridge that she's talking about. And Linda would like to know will counties still receive funds from gas companies if the new tax is enacted? That's a really important point the severance tax replaces the impact fee but embedded in my severance tax as a proposal to make sure that that localities where drilling takes place and they're heavily affected by it continue to get the fees they got before. So I've actually targeted the impact fee amount at 225 million dollars which is I think the high point that was reached in the impact fee which is two or so years ago to make sure that that they are guaranteed that 225 million dollars moving forward in my severance but that's the first cut in my severance tax. Minimum wage Chanel from Philadelphia wants to know where you stand on raising the minimum wage she says it's been long overdue and will tremendously help those working an hourly wage and putting themselves through school like me. Yeah it will help individual workers but you know it's it's also going to be a good thing for the economy there are a lot of ideas out there about the minimum wage right now it's a seven dollars and 25 cents I'm proposing to raise it to ten dollars and ten cents an hour right now somebody making the minimum wage and working full-time it makes about fifteen thousand dollars a year if you have two children you can't live on that that's that's that's below the poverty level. I don't think as I said my budget address that someone working full-time in Pennsylvania should be living in poverty. So I think from her point of view and from the point of view of people making the minimum wage this this is a big deal and over 80% of people making minimum wage are adults people over 20 years of age so this is this is a big deal but it's also going to help the economy. In my business when I went back to turn it around it was flat on its back and one of the first things early things I did was to raise the rates for hourly workers dramatically. My own minimum wage increase from what I thought were pretty good wages before to even better and not only did it not cost me jobs it actually increased my productivity and increased the number of jobs and improved my company I mean we've done quite well turned it around and I think part of it is that so there's a lot of theory to suggest actually increasing the minimum wage increases aggregate demand it does a lot of things to make our economy more efficient and better and that's why I support it because it's going to help families it's going to help our economy. Let's switch gears one last time to a topic we've been hearing a lot about in the news this week out of Indiana. Kevin would like to know Governor Wolf in light of what has been going on in Indiana will you finally be the governor who pushes for equal protection in employment housing etc based on sexual orientation and gender identity. I have been pushing that throughout my campaign and I think yes I and I've continued to push for that since I've been inaugurated as governor so yes that's that's absolutely essential and as I pointed out throughout the campaign it's not just because it's the right thing to do it is but it's because it's smart in my business I was inclusive and I practiced diversity because I wanted to make sure that I was looking at a talent pool that was as broad as it could possibly be I was getting access to the best talent out there and and I think that's what we need to do and it's also something that we need to think about as Pennsylvanians this Commonwealth was founded by William Penn on the basis of freedom tolerance for religion freedom of conscience he came to Pennsylvania and the ship called the welcome and I think we need to make sure that Pennsylvania continues to be welcome and open to everybody regardless of who they are who they love religion they profess and and I think we all need to look at inclusion as something that's not just right but something that's also smart that's going to do it for us I just I guess I had one last question about social media in general since you were sworn in as governor you've done a Twitter town hall and now this Facebook town hall how's it been going and why do you think it's so important to interact with Pennsylvanians in this way well I think in a democracy you should look for any possible way you can interact with with the people who hired you the voters of Pennsylvania voted for me for governor and and I need to continue the conversation that I think I engaged in in the campaign and social media has been a great way to do that just one-way television or letters don't do it but I've had a Twitter town hall now that this and I'm 66 years old so this is this is new for me but but it's something that I think is really important and I'll keep looking for new ways to reach out to make sure that I'm communicating and listening and hearing what I should hear from the people who I serve thank you thank you so much for watching and feel free to weigh in on today's live stream Facebook town hall on Governor Wolf's Facebook page


Group B streptococcus, GBS, is a life-threatening disease in newborns caused by pregnant women colonized with the bacteria which can lead to sepsis, meningitis, pneumonia, or death. A GBS vaccine administered during pregnancy could potentially address this unmet medical need and provide an adjunct or alternative to IAP for prevention of invasive GBS disease in neonates. However, low disease rates make efficacy studies difficult, but licensure using serological criteria as a surrogate biomarker represents a promising approach to accelerate the availability of a GBS vaccine. This article was authored by Judith Absalon, Raphael Simon, David Radley, and others.


This morning we saw the release of the bushfire outlook for autumn. We're going to see a wetter than average period from March through to May with some good rainfalls across most of Victoria ranging from 25 up to 100 mils. Interestingly enough the maximum medium temperature is likely to be exceeded across most of the southern coastline and into central Victoria which will mean some warmer than average days but along with that we're going to see some cooler than average nights. What this means is those fuel recoveries overnight are going to be a lot less which will bring milder fire conditions across the state. We're going to see a real milder conditions in the bushland areas which will mean those traditional long story bushfires that you would see are not likely to feature in the next three months. What we will see however is an increase in the preparation for some planned burns as some of the weather outlooks does indicate a really good chance to conduct some of that essential hazard reduction activity. Fire danger periods are in place across Victoria. For now you still need a permit to burn and be careful on those hot dry windy days. For more information about what you can and can't do during the fire danger period go to cfa.vic.gov.au forward slash can.


So here we're going to be talking about scaling argovents for enterprise from Intuit. So go ahead guys, thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Antonio and here is my colleague's primer. Today we will talk about how I work into it on scaling argovents for our enterprise scheduling system. So last year at argocon, our colleagues actually present how Intuit batch processing platforms utilize argovents to orchestrate the interdependencies among different pipelines. So as an example, like in this diagram we have a deck of relationships among different pipelines. And when the pipelines complete, it sends the events to argovents, and the argovents will notify the downstream pipelines to begin executions. So in today's talk we will go over, like as we will go over the challenges, when we try to scale this platform up to like more than 10,000 pipelines, and we will briefly describe our work in addressing those challenges to support the scalability of our platform. So here is the agenda for today's talk. So I will give a little bit more context about how our platform utilizes argovents. And then I will go through the different problems followed by a brief description of our solutions. And then I'll pass over to Prima to talk about all the different optimizations that we did followed by a brief demo and she will conclude with the impact of our work. So in our platforms, what we call PEPs, again we utilize argovents to orchestrate different dependencies among the pipelines. So as you know, the argovents contains the event source and the sensor, and both of them communicate through the event bus. So in our platforms, when a customer or a user defines pipelines, we provide an SDK. We provide an SDK and SDK will actually translate the definition of the pipelines into the definition of a sensor. And usually the sensor will run in an H8 mode and so usually that sensor will spin up at least two sensor parts. So as we scaled our platforms to more than 10,000 pipelines, we start to see a few challenges. First, back then when the versions of argovents that we used were still using Nest Streams and the Nest Streams version does not have a persistent store. So whenever there is a need to change the definition of a sensor, it will always result in a restart of the port. And when the port restarted, we experienced data loss or stage loss. And because of the stage loss, we are not able to trigger the downstream pipelines. Also the sensor definitions and the sensor runtime specifications are coupled into a one sensor specification. So when there is a change in the pipelines requirements, we will have to modify the sensor definitions. And because of that change or because of the coupling, when we modify the sensor definition, you will trigger the restart of the sensor port. And again, when you trigger the restart sensor port, we experience stage loss and prevent the triggering of the downstream pipelines. Another challenges that we are facing was in our organizations, there is actually a limit on the number of ports available within a Kubernetes cluster. So because of the limitations, we are only able to support, because of the limitations and how every pipelines correspond to one sensor specifications, we are only able to support like 1,800 pipelines within the cluster. And this also results in some inefficient use of the port resources, because some pipelines are running more frequent than others. So that means some ports are actually much busier than others while sitting there idle most of the time. So to address these challenges, we actually extend our events in several ways. First, we actually decoupled the sensor specification into two portions. One that we call a sensor definitions or we call a sensor metadata, which actually specify the dependencies and the triggers of the original sensor. And the sensor runtimes, we actually contains the runtime specification. Also, we also have like a centralized deployment of the sensor, which is like a centralized pool of ports to handle all the events. So this actually utilizes resource-impacted resources utilizations, because all the ports are actually listening for events and processing events all the time. We add an external persistent store to hold the intermediate state of the sensor or the trigger definitions. So even in the case where we have to restart the sensor port, the states are kept in the external store, so we can prevent lots of states. And finally, we actually add a Kafka implementation of the ARGO-UNC Rampus, which can support much higher TPS. So this is a very high-level refined architecture of our changes. So again, we have an event source, and we still have a sensor port. And the event source and sensor port communicates through an event bus. But within the sensor port, we define two components. One we call a condition handler. The other is we call a trigger handler. These two components also communicate asynchronously through another topic of the Kafka event bus. The condition handler basically is responsible to handle the evaluations of different conditions, of different triggers. When the conditions or triggers is matched, you pass the information to the trigger handler, and the trigger handler will take over and will be responsible in firing the actions to run the triggers. The sensor port has communications with an external persistent store, which is holding the current intermediate states of every trigger evaluations. So this highlights the refined changes and shows how the refined runtime will look like. So again, the pipelines, we have multiple pipelines. The definitions of pipelines, we still provide SDK to translate the decisions of pipelines into our events. But instead of creating a sensor, the new SDK actually creates the sensor metadata with just a specification of the definitions of the trigger. And then we have a centralized pool of sensor parts, which is responsible in handling all the processing of the events. So next, I'm going to pass over to Prima. She will go over all the different optimizations that we did. Thank you, Antonio. So I hope we now have a good understanding of our design. So I'll now discuss two significant enhancements that we have done to achieve this high performance. Our objective was to have a high scale of 15,000 pipelines and approximately 25,000 dependencies. So this was our goal, and we were running towards that. So let me talk about the first optimization that we have done. So initially, we had one event source per pipeline. So let us say we have event source A and then event source B. Event source A has two eventing servers, server one and server two. And then the event source B has eventing server one, which is going to filter the events for the pipeline B. We had the filter at the event source level. So let's assume that we receive an event for the pipeline A, then the pipeline B event source, it's going to ignore that event because that is not intended for pipeline B. And the eventing server two of pipeline A is going to ignore that as well because it's still looking for the pipeline C. So the pipeline A event will pass through pipeline A event source via the eventing server one. And then meantime, let us also take a look at how the sensor spec would look like. So this is how the sensor spec currently looks like. So we have the trigger definition all over here. And then we have the condition as P1. So that is a dependency that it is dependent on. So the dependency definition would look like this. The name of the dependency, the name of the event source name, and the name of the event name. So going back to our presentation, so whenever a sensor is created with that definition, the sensor will create a mapping between the event source name and the eventing server name. And in the value, we are going to have the entire dependencies. So let's now assume how a pipeline A event would work. It will pass through the event source and eventing server one. This is going to add other information to the event, which is the name of the event source and the name of the event, eventing server. So when the sensor receives that event, it now knows through which event source and the eventing server it came through. And it sees through this map and then gets back the dependency and then it processes it. So it all looks good now. But let's say we are going to have a 15,000 pipelines. Then we don't want to have a 15,000 event source part, which is going to process all of that. Moreover, we were using the Kafka event source. So what we thought is maybe we can have a single event source, which can process all of the events. And then we moved the filter to the sensor. Now, let's assume that all of the events are going to come through this event source. And all of the event is going to have the same event source name and the same event name, because all of them are coming through the same event source now. And the sensor, the mapping would look like the event source name underscore underscore the eventing server name. All of the dependencies now have the same key. So let's assume this event, we are passing 150 transactions per second. Then per second, for a single event, we need to process 25,000 dependencies. And if it is 150 events per second, then per second, we need to process 150 times the 25,000 dependencies. This were impacting our performance. So let's take this with an example. Let's assume that we have four different doors, D1, D2, and D3, D4. And we have the corresponding buildings, B1 to B4. And in the reception, we have a mapping between the door and the building. Let's see who entered through the door D1. They get identified as D1. And they've mapped to the corresponding building. And now we replaced all this door with a single door. Now all the people are passing through the one door. Now the mapping looks like all the people who are coming through D1, they'll be mapped to all the buildings. They'll have to go to each building to identify whether they have any intention over there. It is such a tiring process. So what we thought is maybe instead of having the unique feature at the door level, maybe we should pull some unique identity from the person itself. So maybe at the door, whenever a person enters, we can get the name and give them a badge. And in the reception, we will also have a mapping between the name and the building. And now when a person enters through the door, he now has a badge. He can get to map to the right building. With a similar fashion, what we thought is maybe we can introduce a new identity to the dependency. So now our dependency would look like this. So in the dependency definition, we added a new field called identifier value. This is going to, in our example, this is going to have the name of our pipeline. So whenever we define the sensor metadata, now we are going to add the unique identity that we will be interested in. So now the mapping would look like event source name, eventing server name plus the identity. And we also added the identifier path to the event source. So all the events that are coming through the event source will now have an identifier path so that that path helps us to pull the identity value from the event itself. And when the sensor now receives this event, it knows to which map it should look at and pulls the right dependency and it processes the right dependency. This were giving us a performance benefit of 85 person. And the other performance optimization that we did was, let's say we have the BPP users and they are doing some CAD operations on their pipeline and it comes to our BPP platform and then BPP in the underlying layer, it creates the sensor metadata and the Kubernetes. So in the existing architecture, all the metadata is tightly coupled with the sensor. So whenever there is a change in the metadata, the sensor part used to get restarted and it always had the most recent updated value. But in our case, since we decouple the sensor metadata at the runtime, we need to know what is the actual metadata that exists at the runtime. So we thought maybe our sensor can pull those sensor metadata from the Kubernetes, but at 150 TPS and 15,000 sensor metadata, we were facing more than 10 seconds delay to fetch the metadata from the Kubernetes. This was giving us a huge processing delay. So in order to address that, we thought to repurpose our sensor metadata controller. So it will watch for the events of the sensor metadata whenever it is created, updated or deleted, we would persist the same in our RDS. And during the runtime, our sensor can now pull the latest metadata from our RDS, which gave us like less than five milliseconds, we were able to get the updated metadata from our RDS. And let's go for a quick demo. I have already prerecorded the demo. So this shows us that we have 15,000 pipelines, which corresponds to 15,000 sensor metadata definitions that we have. And then when I just go and query the database, and it shows we have 15,000 runtime instances that are in the pending state. And now if we see the count of completed instances, it is zero right now. And our aim is to have 15,000 here and zero here because after this performance test, we wanted to process all of these pipelines. So for this performance test, we took 20 sensor pods, just 20 sensor pods, and we thought to run our performance test. And this is a way to simulate the events for us. So we had a topic, and then the number of events is 25,000 events, and at 150 TPS. So this program simulates 25,000 events at 150 transactions per second. I'm gonna fast forward that. So if we see we have sent 25,000 events at 160 seconds. So immediately after sending all of these events, if we go back and query our database, we notice that 14,955 events, pipelines have been processed, and when we queried it again, we noticed all the 15,000 pipelines have been completed, all the events have been processed within just few seconds, and we processed all the 15,000 pipelines. And we made this with just 20 sensor pods. So this is huge. Let me get back to my presentation. So when we talk about the impact, right now in BPP we have 35,000 pipelines that are running in our production environment. If we haven't gone through this scaling mechanism, then we could have ended up with 70,000 pods in the production, which is huge for us to manage. And then we also notice that sometimes at low TPS, it's really the resources haven't been used efficiently. And we might also ended up managing the even bus cluster. With this new architecture, we noticed that with just 12 pods in our centralized cluster, we were able to accomplish 35,000 pipelines. And we also replaced the Kafka cluster with our intuitive even bus cluster because we already have a well established and reliable Kafka cluster. So we provided an exotic option to connect to our intuitive cluster. So as a BPP batch processing platform, we were able to provide our users an isolation to do credit operations on their pipeline, though we have a centralized cluster, but it is way abstracted from the users and still they have isolation to control their pipelines. This is an impact that we had after this change. And soon to be in our production, we are expecting more than 50,000 pipelines in which we'll end up with more than 60,000 dependencies. So this is our journey of scaling the Argo events. Thank you so much. So we have some time. Oh, sorry. So we have some time for some questions. So if anyone has a question, there's a mic up there. You can go ahead and queue up over there and ask some questions. Hi. So given the amount of workflows that you guys seem to be processing, did you ever run into situations where at CD was throttling or kind of backing off because it couldn't handle a load? And if so, how did you kind of handle those situations? Yeah, exactly. So when we wanted to pull the dependencies, I mean, when we wanted to pull the sensor metadata directly from the Cuban, it is we noticed that it tries to pull from the at CD and it was pretty slow because the rate of operations on our pipeline were pretty low. We didn't face any issues while the pipeline is created or getting updated or deleted. But when we wanted to fetch the pipeline metadata, that is where we were facing issues to address that whenever a pipeline is getting created or updated or deleted, we persisted that in our RDS. So we pulled that from RDS to overcome that. Any issues in particular when like adding so many pods potentially at one point to the cluster? When we have, do you want to answer that? So when we have too many pods in the cluster, we followed the CIDR 18 mechanism. So that had the number of IP addresses per cluster limit. And as our Intuit Kubernetes system, they also have some wrappers utilizing some of the IPs. So we were in limit of using the number of pods because of the IP issues. That is one of the issues that we faced. Thank you. Thanks. Hi, quick question on the sensor. So you guys said like sensors are centralized. Are they decoupled on running an independent cluster from the actual workload? Or is it like on the same clusters? So they are decouples from the actual workflow. So sensor is just, before it was a definitions of the dependencies and the conditions for the triggers and what are the actions for the triggers. And now the sensor is mainly just the specifications of how many pods, et cetera, the specification of the runtime.  Got it. So are they running in an independent infrastructure or like different cluster from the actual sensor or even source deployment itself? The controller is running on its own control name space and the sensors pods are running in a separate name space but it's within the same cluster. All right, thank you so much. Cool, any other questions? No? Once, twice? All right, thank you very much. All right, thank you everyone. Thank you.