I'm really happy that this year we're going to do the report of the Board as part of the public program in the past as part of our General Assembly and all of the same goes for working group reports which are going to be led up to this. So let's start with the report of the Board. As you might know, KDEV is the non-profit that supports the KDEV community and their support that is elected and responsible for all the things that the DEV does. We have Akir with our general board members and a board member and me as the president. So as ladies have, we are five persons in the board and some of you should already know that each board member has a term which lasts for three years. So since not all of us have joined the board at the same time at this academy and only my term is finished, I joined the board in 2015. So at our general assembly, which will happen on this Monday just after lunch, we will have the elections to choose a new person for this open position. So far we have just one candidate which is ND. I can see him here. So yes, Mondays, afternoons and your board position will be announced. We still can have new candidates stepping up at the last minutes since in our rules of association, new candidates can step up during the AGM. And now talking about members. We have two new members that's in rest, also running the board. And Stefan, thank you for joining. We only have two new members this year which is very, very bad at all your fault. Remember you have to invite the contributor to your project to join the EV because we need that in this academy. So last year we had 16 new people this year, just two. That breaks. We also have the individuals for the members. These are people who sponsored us lately, yearly. And we have about 50 more than last year, which is great. And 10 new campaign members, so thanks to all of them, it's hit them up. We have patrons, which are the biggest sponsors and we have supporters. But patrons are resistance, Google, through the compute company, Canonical and Private Internet Access. And we have Puzzlescom and KDEV as supporters of KDEV. One related thing, this is the KDEV advisory board where our corporate sponsors as well as other allies from within our ecosystem can advise us on the strategic matters and we exchange ideas with them. There will also be a bit bigger report about what the advisory board does in the working group reports. But I can say that we have these organizations there and Private Internet Access joining as a new sponsor and Debian joining as a new, yeah, allied, non-profit organization. Collaborating organizations are also some other special ones. Please predict things, project, the kids project that you own now. And random meetings, organizations, they are also community partners. This means that they have, well, closer relationships with KDEV. There's some different, well, there's some rules and some stuff that we share with them. It's been mostly to organize events in the past or to suck, mostly. Then we also have some other affiliations with different organizations. We have the local organizations, which is still just KDEV Spain and has only been in Spain for a while. If you're running a local group, I know that many of you are considered, well, affiliated with KDEV. I'm talking about a local group of KDEV, if you're doing a local thing or something else, you don't have to affiliate with KDEV. But if you're doing KDEV things locally, it makes sense to formalize this relationship. We are all international days, so it makes sense. We also have affiliates like S&P, OSI, OIS. Well, it's a lot of, but all of them are important to us. KDEV also has staff and contractors, specifically Petra, to have a board and make KDEV as a whole with accounting, travel booking, all these kinds of things. And she's a great help to make sure you all get here and get reimbursed and all these things. And two contractors who help us improve our outreach to the world. Paul and Ivana and Paul. Are you here? Also Petra? There's Ivana and Paul. Yeah, Paul, Petra? Probably, I'll say, making sure that things run out. All right. These have been submitted to us by Paul and Ivana and what they feel they've accomplished in the past year. We think we are very happy that Promo has become a thing again. Specifically, it has become an institution that others in the community can call upon and rely on to get things done. Quite similar perhaps to how CIS-Edmond has worked previously, where we're already accustomed to being able to reach out to CIS-Edmond to get help with something and we know what CIS-Edmond can do for us. It's become the same thing with Promo. We have managed to establish processes. We know when to invoke Promo and what they can do. And they have become a well-off machine in publishing stories for the community about our accomplishments. And I think we've seen the results in the feedback we get from the vital ecosystem and also starting from outside the immediate physical bubble, which is something that we're still going after. So, yeah, that's been going really well. Now, next year we want to have Academy again, of course. We put out a call for locations very shortly after last year's Academy. So far, we haven't received any submissions. That's a bit bad, but it's also not unprecedented. And we expect to get some very soon. And perhaps for the first time, we've made it very explicit that we are open to locations outside of Europe as well. This has technically been true in the past, but this time we decided to include it in the call for locations. We think we're ready as a community and also our funding situation allows for it. So, yeah, we hope that might happen. And very much we want to talk to any of you who have locations in mind or are even thinking about hosting Academy next year. Now, sprints. This is another thing that has gone quite well. The number of sprints we as a community organized and held last year is up again, which has been great to see. We've heard good things from the people who have held sprints. People seem to be happy with how it's working. Next year, we expect this to continue. In fact, we might even have more sprints than this list. Namely, all of our gold sprints are upcoming, either in the second half of this year or perhaps early next year. So, in addition to the experience, we've been organizing our conferences for many, many years. And last year, we had Academy in 2017 in Almeria, many of you have been there. And we have this year Academy. We are here. And also last year, we had the first edition of the Qt conference in Brazil, which was the first Qt conference in Latin America. It happened in Sao Paulo. The second edition was organized by a group of Qt presidents. Also, there are a lot of conferences that are not coordinated by ourselves, but we have a sort of Qt presence in. In the last year, we started to have a lot of Qt presence, mostly in some conferences that take place in those places where Qt students doesn't have a very, very strong presence. That's the case for example, and for a higher level of stress in a lot of conferences in each area. So, last year, we held two fundraising campaigns. One was for the Rwanda sprints, and one was the end of the year campaign. They both went fairly well. Rwanda came close to hitting its goal. The end of the year campaign did very well. We were specifically saying thanks for putting a lot of work into that. The fundraising campaigns are also an example of what we just talked about on the promo site. We've seen our fundraising group work together with the promo community to get our campaigns out there, and yeah, that's been working really well. It went better the second time than the first time, and we expect to expand upon that with future campaigns. Then we got an unusually large donation last year from the Pineapple Fund, who is an anonymous guy who racked up a lot of money using Bitcoin, and decided to spread some of his wealth to many free software and other free culture organizations. We got $200,000 from them. This has increased our income dramatically and has posed us with the challenge of how to spend money, which is an ongoing discussion with the EV membership. We have gathered feedback from the membership and from the wider community for that matter on what they would like us to do with that money, and we have a decent set of ideas, and we are in the process of realizing them together with the membership. We have managed to bring more people than ever to Academy this year with travel support, and we have been able to fund the Academy social event, also better than ever. I can't confirm that we'll have pineapples there, but that would be awesome. Yeah, other things we've talked about is putting some money into improving our documentation efforts in a similar way, perhaps, as we've done with promo, and, yeah, we'll see what the results are in the coming year. It's going to be quite exciting. It's also a new thing for us. It represents the EV scaling up its activities, which is always, it involves learning and discussions. It's going to be interesting. Yeah, so, could you please publish a yearly report that would describe all kind of activities that have been going on in the last month? And it's used to be a quarterly report. In the PDF format, we moved it to our web format in an yearly break where we described mostly everything that we've done. So it's a nice reading if you are coming now to the community and so you can have a view of all these things and finally show the state tools and new members of KDD and so just, you can access this web address. And also, it's worth mentioning it's true regarding screens and conferences and if you want to organize any kind of KDD and a range of other conferences in your local community to try to grow a community there and bring new members of, or if you know some conference that you think it's worth to have a KDD talk presented there, just contact the board with it. One of the big things we've been doing over the past years is evolving KDD as a program. And over the last year, the key thing was that we put together collaboratively the proposals for the goals and voted on them and got three main goals top-notch usability and productivity for basic software, privacy software and streamlined onboarding for the contributors. And I'm super happy with those goals and I'm especially happy about that because two of the three successful proposals were proposed by new people who hadn't been a big part of our community before and it's really cool that this process empowered them to be a part of it and have their voice heard and our community agreed that their ideas were good. A lot of things happened you already heard in the privacy panel and your photos talked about onboarding and we'll hear Nick tomorrow talking about usability and productivity and the work that's being done around there. But one of the things we've done, for example, the three of us unfortunately was asked me anything on Reddit where people could ask us anything related to the goals and it went really well. People ask good questions and we're excited about that. I think we should do that more often for other things around the world. Now, the question for me is how do we go on with those goals and for that I would like to do about Monday to basically look back at how things have been going so far, what was good, what was not good and how we should go on with that and I would love to see many of you there. All right, and then to the middle. As part of these reports we always say what we want to do this year what we think is important for the organization to achieve and to do. And last year we said we want to focus on the advisory board and making sure that it is a healthier organization and that we maintain current activity and that has largely worked out that there's more kind of proof for the next year. For the economy we said we want to finalize the measurement strategy. We have done that, we have worked on the goals. So that's great. For the economy in 2018 we said we want to leverage the advantage that we have by knowing very early on where the economy is going to be. For example, by spending more time on the program spending more time on contacting sponsors, getting more people here to this event and so on. And I think to a large extent we succeeded in that. Again, we couldn't do that. It just worked out very well. In terms of fundraising we said we want an active working group that works together on our campaigns. We wanted to make more use of CBCM as a campaign in total and allow more campaigns, more with promo. And I think in that part we succeeded. We still have a lot of work to do to make use of CBCM and the working group itself is on the right track, I think. We need to put more work into figuring out how working groups as a whole can work better. But that is good. In terms of outreach we said we want to throw a sustainable team and share awareness and policy of how we're the indicated community and give the rest of the community more insight into what is happening around our products. And the promo team is doing much more, seems much more active and healthy than it has in the past. I think we can more in sharing what the promo team knows and has with the rest of the group. Which brings us to next year. What matters for your organization? Academy 2019 it should be a great event and we should find a good location soon that many people can come to and attend. For a while in the academy we need to figure out how to keep up to momentum that we have around the goals now and determine how we move forward with existing goals and editing goals. We also need to spend time in better understanding the companies and the organizations around us since over the last years new companies came into our ecosystem and want to work with us and that's a great thing but we need to understand this all better to really do the best of it for our community. In terms of HR we need to get a shared understanding with the membership and community at large around hiring and contracting when do we hire people, when do we contract people and for what kind of tasks and we want to spend some time improving our HR processes. And the last thing, as you have seen over the last year we only added 2 new members to the EP we think that is way too few so we want to spend some time recruiting new members to the EP and seeing what is preventing new members from joining the EP and if there is anything we can do about it. Thank you so much. Questions? Questions? Brilliant. It's mighty! As you have just signed up the EP is for the coming year and we are talking about the final elimination of our overnight situation so why is spending money not on this and what are you planning to do? Spending money is not the biggest big question. Quickly follow up on that. We have an application as an EP to spend the money we are because we are not a proper organization so this is actually the order we need. Of course spending money for the sake of spending money is not the order we can understand that and that's why we would love to hear more concrete about how we can actually make use of the money for any way or some things because I've never seen that opportunity but I don't see that as a special task. I think it's sorry one of the specifically getting the sharing understanding of hiring and contracting. What the money allows us to do is to spend it on getting things done for us. The conversation we've always had at KDE is when is doing the work thing, when is it a bad thing specifically it's always the concern if we spend money on getting work done for us then we risk losing the ability to do it from within our community do it ourselves.  On the other hand now that you have a calculator if you're very confident that you can retain that calculator you can get it on a high level and do more advanced math and personally I think as an EV we should find the confidence within ourselves to take those next steps because as an organization we are not actually all that unstable. We have a track record of being successful we are actually becoming more successful our funding is up our list of partners is up we have a lot of institutional experience we have a lot of experience from computers in the membership who we've been able to retain and I think we should look at that and consider that we're actually not all that bad at all to take those next steps and try new things and are well funded to actually take some challenges and take some risks and see that it takes them. So personally I think the next couple of years are going to be quite exciting to me it feels in many ways like it's the early days again in some ways because we're doing things we haven't done before in terms of engaging partners increasing our funding looking at new things to do I think as a community we tend to be very cautious which is a good thing that we've had about how to spend the money have perhaps been dominated by caution which is a good thing we should be careful but we should also decide to consciously take some risks and I'm hoping that the discussion moves in that direction moves forward and that we get a bit excited again about what we can do now that we have that money I think if we look at very recent decisions we decided to spend some money I think the return on our investment has been very high we've done the experiment with our marketing contractor I think it has succeeded I think the scale and the mood of this academy is partly a result of that and some of the new faces we've seen here we are seen here are a result of that and I think more of that that's my goal now I think we might be out of questions so thank you the most


But this just felt a bit like, okay, like why should I care? But I don't like the man. Don't like the man. Don't care if he's running this amazing circus or whatever. I'm like, it literally tells you. And I'm like, that's what the whole conflict is. 50 pages on the head. Yes, I am superficial when it comes to books. Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. I hope you're all good. Today, we're going to start a brand new channel, a brand new channel. That's too much work. I don't want to go nine to five job. I just want to focus on my inner peace and just have a good mind. A brand new series on my channel called Judge a Cover. So I have always been so obsessed with book covers, book cover design. And so in this series, we're going to see whether you can really judge a book by its cover. I've just been becoming increasingly interested in how book cover design works and what makes me pick up a book. Because I think I'm becoming increasingly superficial and materialistic and being really into like book covers and special editions. And part of me wants to see like, does that actually have any bearing on how much I enjoy a book? And in this first episode, we're going to start by reading my most beautiful books. These are the books that I think beautiful is a very specific thing. These are not just necessarily my favorite covers that I own, but these are the books that I think are like ornate or aesthetically gorgeous and beautiful. Not necessarily the core list, the most original, most unique, but the most beautiful to me. This is all subjective, right? First we have got, I absolutely love this cover, Fat Chance Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado. Now I feel like this doesn't really do it justice unless it's in person. It's got this gorgeous like peachy design. It's got this gold lettering. And I think it's absolutely gorgeous.  I feel like this book looks just so gorgeous in person. I just love it. I think it's so gorgeous. It's probably why I have prioritized picking this up over a lot of like other YA contemporaries that come out. I don't read a lot of YA contemporaries. And when I do, I typically read the audiobook. So that's probably why I have prioritized this. So we're going to see whether I enjoy this more than like other YA contemporaries. Then we've got another 2021 new release. 2021 had so many gorgeous books. Thank you. We have got Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth McNeil. Now tell me you're not obsessed with this cover. Like I love the embossing. I love the gold on here. Like how shiny it is. I love the circus design. I've shown this before. I love the end pages.  I love the hardback itself with this dainty, dainty design. I think it is absolutely stunning. This is like one of my favorite books that I own. So we're going to see, do I actually love the inside as much? I've never read from this author before. I really don't want to expect. And probably my favorite edition of a book I own. I want to collect this whole series. This is The Mystery of the Blue Chain by Agatha Christie. Look at the blues and the oranges. So this is like a special hardback edition that Harper Collins have done of like quite a few of Agatha Christie's books. This is one of them. And I'm reading the Urquiparo books in order. So it just works out really well that this is the next book in the series. This is the sixth in the Urquiparo series. I know we've got Mystery on a Chain. I did love Murder on the Urn Express. That was the first one I read and then I've read them in order since. So I'm hoping that I will really enjoy this. I love a like isolated murder mystery as many of you know. Like an isolated closed circle murder mystery. So I feel like that's what we're going to get with this. I'm really excited. So what do we think? What do we think? What do we think? Do we think that I'm going to love these books more because I love the covers? Or do we think it's going to be like some three stars? Like I don't know. I don't know what to expect but like I am so excited to read these books because of the covers. I'm not going to lie to you. It's what makes me like really really want to pick them up. I think I'm going to start with Fat Chance Charlie Vega. I am on my way to London to go and meet Emma and Tasman for the first time. I am so excited. I can't believe we're finally going to meet in person. And I have bought Fat Chance Charlie Vega with me to read on the train. So I am halfway through Fat Chance Charlie Vega. Oh, firstly, hang on. I haven't spoken about this. It was so lovely to see Emma and Tasman in the flesh. I still can't really believe it happened. I'm kind of in shock but it was so lovely. I was so much fun and it was just like the best time. But I am halfway through Fat Chance Charlie Vega and you guys, I'm really enjoying it. I think it's already on my favorite like straight up contemporaries. Like looking at my other contemporaries, a lot of them maybe are like told in verse or like have some kind of like other unusual element to them. But this is like your traditional YA contemporary romance and it's one of my favorite of those. So in this we have Charlie Vega who is Fat. One thing I think this book does so well and this is something that I have struggled with myself. You know, I don't know whether body image on YouTube. I find a strange thing to talk about because I'm fine being fully open about like my body and like what I think of myself or whatever. But I never want to like make anyone think something about themselves.  Like people and I look so different in camera. Like I have makeup on half the time. Even when I don't, you look different on camera. I struggle knowing to talk about like maybe my fitness journey that I'm on at the moment or stuff like that because I don't want to like upset anyone. But anyway, there's definitely parts of this book that I can relate to, especially as well for my childhood. Basically when I was a kid, I was a whole head taller than everyone else. I was this high when I was about 10. I'm five, six, five, seven. When I was about 12, I remember I was wearing an adult size 18. So my weight is definitely something I struggled with in high school. I mean, I went to an old girls secondary school, so it wasn't that bad. But I can definitely relate to a lot of the feelings that this character is having. So one thing, getting back to my original point, just get to the point. One thing that I think this book does so well is examining the contrast that you can have as a fat person or, you know, a person who doesn't fit into society's norms. Being fat positive for other people, but struggling to apply that narrative to yourself. Sometimes being proud of your body and like who you are, but like not all the time. And I think that's done that so well. And basically Charlie, she has his best friend and she is used to her best friend like being the one that everyone loves. And she has this crush on this boy. This happens all fairly early on. It's not a spoiler, but he like asks Charlie to prom, but he only asks her to get her friend there, and then is upset when her friend doesn't turn up. And it's just really heartbreaking. But she's starting to have this kind of like romance with this boy that she works with, Brian, and it's a really sweet relationship. It hasn't really started yet. I think it's gonna be quite slow build. And I feel like the characters are acting like teenagers, like they're swearing. I hate in YA when like you can tell the author wanted to swear, but they were scared. And I'm like, girl, come on. Just give me the F word a couple of times. But I love the discussions that are happening around the complexity of being fat. I would say maybe if you struggle, it's hard because I think people who want fat rep should read this. But also I can see elements of it that may be triggering. Like her mum is always trying to push weight loss shakes onto her and they have a very fractured relationship or you know, when it comes to like shopping for clothes and just bought self-body image. I think like make that judgment call yourself over whether you think it may trigger you or whether you think it could be a really helpful thing to read. But it's such an easy read. I'm absolutely flying through it. And that's my favorite type of contemporary when you have the joyous moments and the romantic moments with also a journey that the character is going on in their attitudes for themselves or something in their life. That's my favorite combo. Really, really loving it. Okay, so it's very late at night. So I loved it, you guys. I loved it. It almost made me cry. No, in fact, it did make me cry. You know, when you get like tears in your eyes and they congregate and they spill over the lash on a bit and you get witness here, not a tear roll, but like throat hurting kind of like crying. You know what I mean? I don't know why because I very rarely get like attached to romances, but maybe in some ways I could relate to the character and like what she was feeling. The conflict in this made me cry. It made me cry. And like, if you told me that, I would have said no. That's not happening. But it did. It was like, oh my God.  I did not expect it.  Their relationship, the romance in this, I got so into it. I loved all of the characters in it. I loved like the complex relationship she has with her mom, the friendship that she has. I thought it was just such a well-written YA and I think I would have loved to read this when I was like 16. It took me back to when I was 16. That was my first relationship. Well, I've never been in one relationship, but that was my first relationship. And just that feeling of like being 16 and being in love. Because she's 16 turning 17 in this and I was 16 turning 17 in my, when we started going out. So like, it took me back to how that feels to be that age and to like, be in love. Maybe like, read my show. The journey that Charlie Vega goes on throughout this book is just impeccable. The fact that it's a debut, we love to see it. Now, one thing I would say, if you want to read this, don't look up the synopsis. Don't look up the synopsis. I have never seen such a bad case of this. Legit? I actually can't. I actually can't. Something that's in the synopsis doesn't happen until 50 pages from the end. It tells you the big conflict, Corsa. In the synopsis, why would you do that? Why would you do that? Why would anyone do that? Why do you think that's a good idea? Then we don't do that in this household. You don't do that. Surely someone who writes synopsis would know you don't do that. I can see you're getting angry. Angry? No, I'm not angry. I'm livid. There's no hints towards it or there's very few hints towards it. And I only picked them up because I knew it was coming. But like, it literally tells you. And I'm like, that's what the whole conflict is. 50 pages from the end. Like why? Why? Why? It doesn't make any sense to me. So I just think go into it blind because I don't think you should know that. That shouldn't be in the synopsis. That angers me. It angers me. I was very angry. I was very angry. I was angry. I was angry. Obviously other than that, it was a success. So this gives a point towards beautiful covers, beautiful insides. So I'm going to read fact of wonders now. I'm so excited to read this. Oh my god. I'm so excited. I really hope I'm going to love it. Victorian circus. It's everything I've ever wanted. Can we just talk about how gorgeous it is even without the dust jacket? I just keep looking at this and I'm obsessed. Like the daintiness of these lines. Oh my god, it makes me want to cry. I am about a hundred pages in to Circus of Wonders and I am enjoying it. Not much has happened yet. It's been a bit of a slow start. So Nell has been born, I think it's like a birthmarks. By the way, if I sound locked up, I have had like an attack of hay fever today and like I am struggling to breathe. Like talking is hard. Yeah, Nell was born with like birthmarks on her body. So the circus people have kind of been referring to as leopard girl, which is obviously like a fence. Like you wouldn't call someone that today. And her father, when he was drunk, sells her to the circus and she's going to be like dressed up to be like an icon in the circus basically. And we are following three perspectives so far. We follow Nell's perspective. We follow Jasper, who is the owner of the circus and we follow Toby, his brother. I really like Toby and Nell. I don't like Jasper, but I don't think Jasper is there to be liked. These white men are dangerous. My guess is that over the course of the novel, he's gonna like abuse his power and he does so already maybe, it's kind of suggested. I'm not like 100% sure, but I don't like the man. Don't like the man. Don't care if he's running this amazing circus, whatever. Toby is very soft and caring and he obviously cares for Nell. So I'm really enjoying like their dynamic and Nell is a really like headstrong, interesting character, but it's very slow. I am enjoying the way it's told though. I can't put my finger on it, but I feel like you'll understand what I'm talking about. Books written for this particular audience, like historical, I don't know whether it's literary fiction, not really, but like adult historical fiction that always like big up in Waterstones. Like Think the Nightingale by Kristen Hannah. Do you know what I mean? Do you know the kind of books I mean? No! It's in your head! It's in your head! But they're all told in this way that like feels like I'm only supposed to read these kind of books if I want to read this book. Does that make any kind of sense or do I sound crazy? I feel like you know what I'm talking about.  So I was hoping the writing would be a bit more whimsical, a bit more like magical, but it's not really. But nothing has really happened yet. I'm enjoying the start of it, but like nothing has really happened. Nothing's really happened. Nothing has really happened. I'm gonna go read some more. Hopefully when I see you in the morning I will, uh, I'll be able to breathe. And yeah, I don't know. I'm enjoying it, but it's not like everything I want it to be yet, but it like nothing has gone bad. Nothing has annoyed me. That means it can't become that. That means it can't become what I want it to be. We love each other so much. I have just read like another 130 pages-ish of Circus of Wonders. And I'm enjoying it, but like I don't know, here's the thing, it's a very pleasant read. I'm enjoying the reading experience and having fun reading it. I feel very absorbed in the world, but like I don't think I'm gonna give this like five stars. Like I don't think I'm that girl. I don't think I'm necessarily the girl that this book has written for. And that's okay. I feel like the atmosphere of the circus is really well created. I love a lot of like the characters we've got the circus. One thing I think this does super well is showing the truth of like these you know circus owners at the time, like curiosities, circuses like Pete Barnum, which if you don't know, the movie The Greatest Showman is about him.  And I feel like that's why this book was written. I feel like this book is a response to the success of The Greatest Showman. Because it kind of, it makes sense timeline wise that the idea would have been spurred by that because obviously that film paints him as like like just like this lovely guy. We all love Hugh Jackman. I mean like he's like the person we love the most. Is that true? It's very true.  He was not good. He like prayed, you know, on these people who society cast out and made a lot of money off of them. So I feel like this this book is doing a really good job of showing the truth of these men and how cutthroat and like cynical and like abusive of their power they were. So that is probably one of my favorite aspects of it. Although I hate the character Jasper. I just find him incredibly annoying. I'm much more interested in Toby and Nell and their relationship and their storylines. I think Toby might be my favorite. He's like this soft gentle giant. Both him and Jasper, their brothers, I think I mentioned that. They served in the Crimean war together. Toby was a photographer actually. He wasn't a soldier. He was a photographer there. And he's obviously got like some dark secret that keeps being hinted at. But he's very like affected and scarred and suffering from PTSD from the war, which I don't think was very well understood back then.  And he's got this storyline. I don't want to spoil it obviously because it's a spoiler. Oh, okay, move away from me then. I don't know. He's just trying to get closer to her. Can you see how obsessed he is with her? He's her son. Yeah, he's got this storyline, which I'm not going to spoil, but it's like making my heart break a little. Like there's something, he's got my friend done something and it's just like heartbreaking. I love the like Victorian setting. I, listen, we all know I'm a hoe for Victoriana. Like forever and always a hoe for Victoriana. So yeah, I'm enjoying it, but it's not like a new favourite. But I would recommend it so far, especially if you like Victorian settings like me. But it's not boring, but do you know what I mean when these books always written a bit like, oh, I'm clever. Like I'm a great book. You know what I mean? It's like, this book is saying to me, I'm a great book. Do you know what I mean? Do anyone know what I mean? Anyway, I'm going to finish it. I'm just hoping it goes somewhere like a bit unpredictable in this last 120 pages. So I finished Circus of Wonders last night and I think I'm going to give it like a 3.5. So I am a bit disappointed because this was like my favourite cover, like in the world, my favourite cover. It's sad, it's sad, you know? It's, it's a shame. The ending of this for me just didn't 100% hit the mark. I just, yeah, it just, I was just a bit bored. I was just a bit bored. It didn't quite give me like, I don't know, I don't know. And the writing never fully got me. I will say, I think this book did such a good job of like trying to give a voice to the performers of this day in these Circuses who were so mistreated, had so little agency, how they were just seen as a means to an end, a means of a profit. I thought it's such a good job of that and of like, I guess dispelling some of the romanticism of these, of these Circuses that has been dreamt up by films such as The Greatest Showmen. So I think it did such a great job of that. It's obviously such a well-researched book and I would recommend it just for that, like just for like the history aspect of it. But in terms of like, how much I loved it, I just feel like it's going to be a book I forget. You know, I think at the end of the year, when I'm looking back on the books I've read, this will be a really forgettable book. Like I don't think I'll think about it that much. But I just felt like it was always just a step more removed from me than I wanted it to be. I always struggled a little bit to like visualise some things. I would say there's a relationship in this between Nell and like a young girl that like comes and joins the Circus and that was one of my favourite aspects of it as well. Like the love that she feels for that child and how protective she is of her. So yeah, I don't know. I just feel like it's a bit forgettable and I don't, I didn't have like very strong feelings upon finishing it. The epilogue was heartbreaking. I did have strong feelings upon finishing that, but just like on the because a whole, it just felt like a step removed from where I wanted it to be. Now I have actually already read half of the Mr. LaBou train. I'm going to be honest, the whole time I was reading this, I was kind of looking forward to reading this. Boy, did I cheat like mud. It's been about like nine months, I think since I've read Agatha Christie and I just really enjoy them. They're like short, they're quick reads and I just, you know me, I love a murder mystery. I love a murder mystery, what can I say? I think we all need to be reading more murder mysteries. I've spoken about this in another video the other day, but this is basically the book that was the next book that Agatha really wrote after she went missing and her husband had a cheat on her and she kind of had a breakdown because her husband was cheating on her. And this book is about this woman whose husband is cheating on her. Is it a coincidence? Is it a coincidence? I ask you, is it a coincidence? And she gets murdered on this train. And like I feel like, girl, this is a bit of a self-insert. Like I really hope you're okay. I hope you're fine. And like because I know stuff about the story, basically Agatha's mom really warned her off marrying the guy she married. And in this, the girl's dad is like, I told you not to marry him. And there's just so many things on like, girl, I hope you're okay.  And this was like, you know, 100 years ago, when did this even come out? I could not tell you. This was a long time ago, but I'm just like, girl, I hope you're okay. I hope you're good. We spent the first 60 pages meeting a lot of our different players in the story. The girl, her dad, her husband, this other woman who's a bit mysterious. And then they got on the train and then the murder happened and then everyone's off the train. So it's not like murder on the Oregon Express where if you don't know, they're kind of like, they are trapped on the train. We don't really have that like claustrophobic atmosphere of the train that I was like expecting. Like you're trapped, you're isolated with the murderer. Like it's not that everyone's just gone off and is doing their own thing and the French Riviera like poodling about being rich. I thought this book, you want it to be the cheating husband because he was on the train too with his mistress. But I think it's a bit too obvious. I don't think it's going to be him. But yeah, it's strange because it's not what I was expecting in terms of how the storyline is playing out. I'm intrigued as to why this is one of the books that has got this special edition, like one of these, because there's not been many of them in this special edition. And I guess maybe this is one of her most popular ones. But I'm intrigued like why something, I feel like the murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is fifth in this series, is such a notorious book for how great it is. And that was a really good one. That's probably my favorite, that's my favorite Aki Parou one I've read so far other than murder on the Oregon Express. But in terms of like the ones I've read throughout this series chronologically, that is my favorite one. And that hasn't got one of these editions. So I'm intrigued as to why this has been chosen. I feel like it has to be great. I'm hoping for like really good things. I want something shocking. And I also want Agatha to like bunk off the cheating husband somehow because it's what she deserves. It's what she deserves. It's what she deserves. I just finished it. Didn't take me long. Like this took me maybe like three to four hours to read somewhere in that bracket. I am going to give it three stars. I'm going to give it three stars. My success with Agatha Christie is not good but I think I'm just very picky with her because I know what she can do. So my problem with this is that it felt a bit dispassionate. For me, Agatha Christie at her best is when there is a twist to the whole concept of the murder. Not just me not being able to predict who the killer was. It being something like I could never have predicted about like the reasoning or the context behind the murder if that makes sense. How the murder actually occurred. That's when I rated her highest. I think she does that so well when she does it but this just felt a bit like okay. Like why should I care? Clap if you care. Clap if you care. I could read that in like a thousand other books and I come to Miss Agatha for something a bit different. There's a thing. It's like wonderfully crafted especially for its time. Like I could never have predicted this was what was gonna have happened but at the same time I just wanted something more. I want something different because I know she can do it and I'm like why did this get the special edition when the murder of Roger Atcoyd is right there? Because now I have one of the most beautiful books I own and I didn't love the inside of it but I'm never too sad if I'm a disappointed and like Agatha Christie because there's so many more out there. I recognize that some of her books because of the context of the time I feel like some of them are kind of like filler books. Do you know what I mean? And then she has like the heavy hitters. There's something that is comforting and cozy about reading Agatha Christie book even if you don't love it. Like I still enjoyed the experience of sitting here today and like reading this whole book in barely any time at all. So in this video we started off very successfully. We had probably one of my favorite like YA contemporary YA contemporary romances of all time with Fat Chance Charlie Vega. Then we slipped down a little bit with Circus of Wonder and then we slipped down a bit with Mystery Libby Train. I was so confident after I read this I was like this video this video I'm about to prove beautiful covers equals beautiful insides but I have kind of done the opposite. I didn't like disc like any of these books but these two were definitely a bit disappointing when going into this. All of these were like 4.55 star predictions for me because they're so beautiful. I would still recommend this. I think it was still a lot of fun. I think I wouldn't recommend this unless you like want to read like a cuporo books in order. Like I am. I think you know Murder Roy Jackroyd Medal of the Express like kind of like her bigger name one are where I'm seeing a success so far. So this wasn't successful improving beautiful books equals beautiful insides but I hope you've enjoyed this vlog. I'm very happy with the books that I've read these ones I really wanted to read so I'm really glad to finally get them off my list. Let me know what some of the most beautiful covers you own are that maybe you want to read or you have read and if you're going to end the video comment a heart emoji. Comment a heart emoji because we love. We love love. And yeah I hope you're looking forward to the rest of this series. Obviously covers there's endless things we can talk about so there's endless videos I have got planned for this series that we're going to do over time and we're going to see can you ever judge a book by its cover? This third episode said no but we're going to test out some different things so we'll see as time goes on. And yeah thank you so much for watching I appreciate you all so so much and I'll see you very soon in another video. Bye.


As the weather warms up, we're back on the river and today we're talking about kayaking and core strength. Two exercises you can do that are going to help prevent injuries. First one is a plank. Remember when doing a plank to keep your shoulders back and down, keep your back flat and always contract your rectus abdominis. Start at about a 30 second interval and work your way up to a minute, a minute 30 and even higher. The second exercise is a Russian twist. When you're doing these, make sure you contract your transversive abdominis, you breathe with every rep and you always keep your back flat to prevent any back injuries. Start at three sets for about 15 to 20 reps and you can always work up from that. And as always, when you're on the river, make sure you use a life preserver, proper sunscreen and always stay properly hydrated.