Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime and we have a bunch of new stories for you today. Four pack, I believe? Maybe it's a five pack? I don't know. I already forgot. I've already been researching this for hours. What's going? My mind is, you know what I do know what's happening? You see this? We're giving this bad boy away. We're giving one of these away. This is actually mine. No, mine. Not yours. Mine. You can have one yourself. Now, the big thing about this giveaway is that you need to go down into the pinned comment or the description to enter and there's actually additional giveaways you can get every single day of this month. There will be a hidden code. In fact, I forgot yesterday's hidden code, so there's the code for yesterday, but don't worry. Stay tuned until sometime randomly later in this video. There will be another code for today and every day you can get 20 additional entries. So, you know, checking out our daily videos is probably a good idea if you care to win, although you know why you should really be watching because we got some amazing news coming straight to you. Editor, roll it. So, our first story deals with Square Enix. So, here's the thing. Square Enix is actually looking to do something very, very interesting. They had their earnings investors call last night and we learned a couple weird things about something happening at the company. And I say weird, I just mean different compared to how other companies handle their business. So, Square Enix financials like every other major company were down year over year and down over the last two years. Every company is reporting that coming out of the pandemic that, hey, you know what, people aren't buying and playing games as much as they were when they were stuck at home. Who knew? But Square Enix has a solution to one of their financial issues and that is that they want to lower their risk management when investing in games with their studios because games cost more than ever to make. So, to lower that risk, they actually want to take on investors and I'm not talking about people buying shares in their company. No, no, no. I'm talking about people buying shares in the individual studios themselves. That's right. They want to give up partial ownership of their individual studios to increase capital efficiency. Now, for those who don't understand what capital efficiency means, essentially, if you invest a dollar in a game and then the game releases and you make a dollar, you have a one-to-one capital efficiency. Basically, you made no money but you didn't lose any money. You broke even. Well, they don't want to break even. Companies want to make money to increase that capital efficiency. They want to lower their individual risk by letting studios come in, letting companies come in and invest in their game development studios and take part of that ownership. So, yes, Square Enix would no longer fully own certain development studios, although they're likely to maintain their majority stake. So, this lowers their risk and gets more companies involved so that the dollar you spent is split so many ways.  If there is only breaking even, well, you didn't waste so much money in that investment anyways because it lowered your risk. Okay? So, that is essentially what Square Enix is looking to do. And we've heard rumors about Sony in the past. And now, look, we got all this information from David Gibson, which is important to know because he was in on the earnings call. So, I want to make sure the source is properly talked about here. Link to all this down in the description because there's a whole lot of interesting details from this financial report if you really want to dive deep. But what I actually am curious about is who's going to invest? And according to David Gibson, Sony, Tencent and Nexon seem to be the likely candidates to invest. Now, no shocker, Tencent invests in everything. And Sony has been rumored to be going in on stuff. They obviously pay a lot of money to get Final Fantasy exclusively on PlayStation 5, at least for a set time period. So, I think though, Nintendo is someone that we need to pay attention to. And while David Gibson doesn't mention Nintendo, it's notable for a few things. One, Nintendo does get some console exclusive games from Square Enix. We're talking Bravely to Fault, Bravely to Fault. Two, Octopet Traveler, although that eventually will multi-console triangle strategy as well. Oh, and by the way, Nintendo already owns 92,000 shares in Square Enix. And I know that sounds like a lot. It's actually not that many, but they do own some shares in Square Enix. So, Nintendo has already invested in Square Enix as it is. So, it wouldn't be, I think, too crazy to see them go into the development studios behind Bravely to Fault, behind triangle strategy, and actually want to get some ownership over those studios and the benefit to them, just like the benefit to Sony would be, you could basically guarantee console exclusivity of those studios while Square Enix still maintains primary ownership. So, yeah, Square Enix is kind of divvying themselves up. Now, we've heard of the rumors about Sony outright buying Square Enix. Clearly, Square Enix is like, we don't know if we want to be outright purchased, but we are willing to sell stakes in individual studios. And maybe that leads to them eventually selling off individual studios like they did to Embracer Group. They sold off pretty much all their Western studios to Embracer Group. Hey, Embracer Group, congratulations on not owning Tomb Raider and Hitman 3 and all the rest. You guys got some top tier IPs. Please do write by them. But yeah, we'll see what happens with this. This is obviously a new idea for them. Other studios have dabbled in similar things like this before, but not studios to this pedigree. Capcom likes to maintain ownership of their studios. Nintendo maintains ownership of their studios. Ubisoft maintains ownership of their studios. It's very strange to give up partial ownership, but Square Enix is also beating to the beat of their own drum. And they've seen success over the recent years. So, let's just see what happens. This could end up being a really good thing. It could also lead to companies fighting over divvying up studios and Square Enix just being like, whatever, as long as you guys are paying us, we're good. So, we just talked about companies trying to invest and take over some of Square's studios. What if I were to told you 10 cent ain't done? Because, well, 10 cent might be involved there. 10 cent is attempting to purchase a bunch of shares in Ubisoft. In fact, they are looking to get a majority stake in the company. Now, they already, you know, own some shares in Ubisoft, but they're actually making a deal behind the scenes. So, it seems, though, it's being reported with the GMAT family. Now, Yeez, GMAT is the current CEO and president of Ubisoft, but his family is actually the major stakeholder. They own more shares in Ubisoft than any other individual shareholder, and the GMAT family owns about 15% of Ubisoft. The other 85% or so is divvied up between a whole bunch of public, you know, selling and stuff. And that family is actually considering selling a significant chunk of that 15% to 10 cent. So, we know that in the past, Ubisoft successfully warded off a hostile takeover. Vivendi was trying to actually get 51% of Ubisoft so they could get full control of the company. And, you know, Yeez, GMAT and, you know, his family didn't want that to happen. They talked to some of the bigger shareholders and kind of got everyone together to be like, we refuse to sell to Vivendi, preventing Vivendi's hostile takeover. Vivendi then went out to just sell all of their shares. So, 10 cent already owns a little bit of shares in Ubisoft. They're looking to get a high percentage from the GMAT family. And, by the way, 10 cents also looking to get a huge chunk of the public shares. Now, we don't know if they're trying to get to 15, 20, 25, 40, or are they attempting to get to 51%. We do know that 10 cent is stating that Ubisoft is a key partner for them, but it does appear, especially with the GMAT family, willing to give up some of their shares, that this could end up being a sort of a hostile takeover, a friendly takeover. And, I know that scares some people because a lot of people do not like 10 cent. So, for our third story today, we actually have some really great news for Xenoblade Chronicles 3. So, we have some launch figures that are showing that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is actually setting a new standard for both Monolithsoft and the Xenoblade franchise, breaking franchise record launch sales. Now, we don't have sales data for every territory. We only have Japan and a little bit of information on the UK, but the information with the UK is pretty important. So, let's first jump into the Famitsu sales charts where Xenoblade Chronicles 3 actually debuted at number one. It sold 112,728 units, which is notably a higher figure than Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Xenoblade Chronicles definitive edition, as Xenoblade Chronicles did in the charts in Japan. So, just physical sales alone, they're already the best-selling Xenoblade Chronicles game at launch. However, we need to consider a lot more things. There are a lot of things that play here that maybe you're not considering. One thing in particular is that the split in terms of sales in Japan is about 50-50 in terms of digital and physical and digital sales are not included in this chart. Also, because you had to go through Nintendo for this, sales of the special edition which sold out in Japan are also not counted because Nintendo doesn't provide any sales data directly from their store. So, in the end, it's highly likely that they debut sales in Japan were very, very close if not exceeding 200,000 sales. Now, we don't know that for sure, but you count the digital in, you count the special edition in, you obviously have the exact data for physical and you can paint a pretty good picture that it sold about 200,000 units in Japan. This also ended up boosting Nintendo Switch sales over 70,000, which it hadn't meant over in a few weeks. So, that's obviously really good news showing that Xenobade Chronicles 3 actually has a little bit of system sale power at least in Japan. Now, I mentioned that it also sold really, really well in the UK. Well, that's because it actually debuted at number one on the UK charts, which is always huge for a niche franchise like this. But what's also huge about this is, hey, did you know that it's now the best selling Xenobade Chronicles game at launch ever in the UK? That's right. It tops Xenobade Chronicles 2, which was the prior top selling game in the UK at launch. Obviously, we don't know if this is going to end up being the best selling Xenobade game overall. You know, we're going to need a long tail of sales before we actually get the full picture on that. But I fully suspect by the end of this year, by the end of this fiscal year at least for Nintendo, Xenobade Chronicles 3 is highly likely to be the best selling Xenobade game ever. And this looks like a tentpole title. Congratulations on the early success. I know I'm having a really good time Xenobade Chronicles 3. Maybe you're having a really good time too. And if you're not, but you've always wanted to try a JRPG, maybe this is the one to try out. Our final story actually deals with that new wave of DLC for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. You guys remember the Wave 2 DLC? Well, it looks like it's been datamined. What a surprise. Dataminers are always doing their thing and finding any little minute details left in the code base. And it turns out that the Wave 2 DLC actually had some stuff left in that essentially confirms possibly 14 upcoming tracks in the DLC pack. So not all of the remaining tracks, but quite a few of them. This is because the dataminers actually discovered that music preview files were left in this DLC. Let's actually go to the Nintendo Life's summary on this and, you know, get into what was actually leaked. So what is a music preview file? Because it may take some time to load a full music file from the ROM. A separate prefetch file is created of the first. It's about a second, which can be loaded into memory in advance. This prefetch is played while the full file is being loaded. Unfortunately for Nintendo, while they deleted the full songs of unreleased courses from the ROM, they accidentally left some of the prefetch files and they sorted them in a separate place. It's possible to identify several courses just based off that one second of music. Now this ended up coming from famed dataminer, Oatmeal Dome. So Oatmeal Dome is well known to actually be a really, really legit dataminer, but it's actually somebody else who then took this data and was able to interpret it into what the 14 tracks are. So let's actually get into what those tracks are and then who provided this information. So hey, let's look at the 14 tracks. So in the Rock Cup that's going to be added, we have London Loop, which is from Mario Kart Tour, Peach Gardens, which is from the DS game, Bull Lake and Broken Pier from Game Boy Advance, and Alpine Pass from the 3DS. In the Moon Cup, we have the Berlin Byways from Mario Kart Tour, Waluigi Stadium, and Wario Coliseum, so different names of it. From the GameCube, we have Mary Mountains from whatever, don't know, could be a brand new track, and Rainbow Road from the 3DS. Next up in the Fruit Cup, we have Amsterdam Drift from Tour, maybe we in DS? There's this little second in music, it's really similar to some other tracks as well. Boomerang Cup, we have Singapore Speedway from Tour, GameCube, GBA, and we have Los Angeles Laps from Tour. We have Feather Cup in front, we have Tour, Wee and Sunset Wilds, so a whole bunch of stuff in there.  Cherry Cup, we have Bangkok Rush from Tour, and that's also in GameCube and Super Nintendo, possibly. Acorn Cup is Vancouver Velocity from Tour, and Maple Trio from Wee, maybe some other things. Again, these are one-second clips, so the exact deciphering can be really, really hard. Spiny Cup Tour, GameCube, Wee, etc. You know, we don't actually know everything. We do have an idea of what games will have tracks, but we don't necessarily know anything else. Now, it's all this track information actually came from Fish Guy 6564. Now, I'm sure Nintendo is probably not happy to have this stuff data-binding out there. Nintendo did go through the foresight to delete all of the actual full music tracks, which really gave us all the confirmation we needed, but not getting rid of the pre-fetch, kind of an oversight. Nintendo and many companies have leaks coming through data-mines all the time, so I don't know how much Nintendo is actually embarrassed by this, but I will just say this. I'm excited by these tracks. Some of these tracks are among my favorites. Now, again, it's not the entire track list, and some things that we have leaks for are literally just, hey, what game it's going to be. It's going to be a Super Nintendo game. It's going to be a GameCube one. It's going to be from Tour, but we don't actually know what they are, so we don't know everything. That's important to know. This leak doesn't give us the rest of the tracks, but it does give us 14 of them, and I think that's kind of interesting. So, why don't you guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathan Ruffalo, Janssen from Nintendo Prime, and I want to thank you so much for being here, and I'll catch you in the next video.


If you'll remember, I told you back in the beginning of March I can't cover my brother's troubles. It wouldn't be fair. This is a unique and difficult situation and that's okay. I know where the line is. I'm wowed by what you did and more importantly I'm wowed by how you did it. This was very hard. I know it's not over but I hope you feel good about what you did for your people because I know they appreciate it. Let's call it straight. Look at the state, look at the numbers, look at New Jersey, look at Connecticut, look how they came together. Was it perfect? No. You tell me what is. Obviously I think you're the best politician in the country. Are you thinking about running for president? Tell the audience. No, no. No you won't answer. I answered. The answer is no. No you're not thinking about it? Sometimes it's one word I said no. Have you thought about it? No. Are you open to thinking about it? No. Might you think about it at some point? No.    You're feeling pretty good about yourself these days, aren't you? CNN's Chris Cuomo now says he's sorry that his loyalty to his brother prompted him to join conference calls that included the New York Governor's top aides, lawyers and PR people. Did Chris Cuomo do more than just listen on these calls? Yes, Chris Cuomo gave a lot of advice on these calls. He struck a fairly pugilistic tone.


Welcome back to my channel. Today I'm really excited for this video. We're gonna be doing a mid-year check-in on how I'm doing with my big big goal this year of finishing series. Keep saying it, just keep saying it, keep saying it out loud and maybe you will convince hope. So you may have seen a video series I've been doing called series wipeout. If you saw my reading goals at the start of the year, if you've just been on my channel, you probably know that finishing book series is one of my biggest goals because it gets out of control. I just read the first book in the series and then I don't continue. So that's been our big goal this year and we're gonna chat about how I've been doing with finishing those series and we'll check about how many I've finished, how many more I've got to finish. But before we get into the video I want to say such a big thank you to the sponsor of today's video which is Upside Down Book. Upside Down Books, Book of the Man. Book of the Man is a super popular and fast-growing online service for readers. I love Book of the Month. I think they're one of the coolest bookish services out there. They always try to promote new and emerging authors while still I think they have a good mix of authors that they've had a few times on. So maybe if you've got like Lucy Foley, you've got the guest list in a Book of the Month edition, they had the Paris apartment as well. So I think they do a good mix of promoting new authors while still having authors back that they've had before. They go through every month and find the most exciting new releases, so you don't have to do that basically. It's not up to you to just scour through all the new releases list. They present your selection of five to seven books a month and you can pick the one that you want. It's risk-free because you can skip any month if any of the books just don't interest you that month and they have the best price for new release hardcover fiction. You can get your first book for only $9.99 using the code MegwithBerks. I mean come on now. I mean it's kind of irresistible. Something that is so cool is Book of the Month has launched a podcast called Virtual Book Tour. It's available to listen to on Apple or Spotify. I love bookish podcasts. I'm always trying to find more. I've really loved listening to this one. They like interview authors that they've had as authors in the Book of the Month selection. I often listen to bookish podcasts in the shower. That's like my prime listening real estate. I don't know. I just love listening to podcasts in the shower. It's getting weird. So I'd really recommend you go check it out on Apple Spotify. It's really really good. It's run by two of their editorial team. They're the ones interviewing the authors. It's recorded in front of a live audience which is really really fun and it gives you a look into the minds of the authors who are then being featured in the Books of the Month. I as someone who you know I always say I want to write one day. I mean it's not happening girl. Is it? I mean come on. But I've always loved listening to podcasts with authors talking about their creative process and it really gives you this insight into the wisdom and how they create these worlds and storylines they write. It's so so interesting. So yeah go ahead and listen to Virtual Book Tour on Apple or Spotify. I'll quickly just show you what my picks this month were. We have Upgrade by Blake Crouch. I've never read a Blake Crouch so I'm super excited to get to this one.  This is me all over. It's a wedding, isolated, murders start to happen. I mean come on. I am so excited. This seems right on my streets. Yeah go check out Book of the Month. Go check out Virtual Book Tour and make sure you use my code Make With Books to get your first book for only $9.99. Okay let's get into the video. So I have a few stats for you. Let's start off with the stats and then we're gonna go through all the series that I have finished so far this year. I started the year with 41 series that I was currently reading. Oh my god that's that's that's a lot. Bear in mind our goal by the end of year is 26. So far I have finished 12 series. I have completed 12 series. I am currently reading 33 so it's not quite you know minus 12 because I've started a few series. So yeah I'm currently reading 33 series which I'm pretty happy with at the midpoint. That gives us seven series to finish before the end of the year but obviously I'm gonna start a few more. I'm really trying to restrain myself but I will probably start. I mean I really want to start Finley Donovan. There's a few more Murder Before Even song that I really really want to start. Run a Caspidwa. I would love to start. So my guess is I'm probably gonna start at least five more series this year. Minimum. I mean like minimum. So we do have a few that we still need to read. So far this year I have started seven series. I started a few that I DNF straight away like Pet and the Gilded Ones. They're not included in this. So I've started seven series this year that I intend to finish and I've finished two of them already. So I think I'm doing a good job so far this year of not only starting less series but when I do start series prioritising getting them read. I've DNF'd five series. I've DNF'd five series so far this year. Two of which like I said the Gilded Ones and Pet are series I started this year and three series I've DNF'd. I came to the conclusion to DNF this year and I was just trying to cut more series out. So I've decided to not continue with the Legend Bond series. It just wasn't really for me. I decided not to continue with the Nouncy Dream Mystery stories because I initially listened to them on audio and I loved them by that but it's almost impossible to get the audio for those original like I'm talking the original series. It's really hard and I'm not really bothered about reading them physically. And the Year of the Witching technically I haven't DNF'd. It just doesn't seem like we're gonna get a sequel for that anymore. We worded you to get one called The Dawn of the Coven and the author spoke about how she was struggling to write it and so I don't think we're getting a series for that anymore. So it's under DNF technically. So this is a bar chart that shows you just visually how many I had at the start of the year, how many I'm reading now and what the goal is. I think we're in a pretty good position. I feel like it's going alright. I'm like quite happy with how it's going. Something that I thought was interesting. Interesting. That out of the 12 series I finished so far this year, eight of them I only had one more book to read to finish the series. Four of them I read more than one book to finish the series. So it shows you that yeah I haven't been reading a ton of like lots and lots of long series. A lot of the ones I finished I only had one more book to finish. And of the books, this is interesting, of the books still on my TBR, of the series still on my TBR. Fourteen of them have only one book left for me to finish but bear in mind a lot of them are series, a lot of those ones are series I can't finish because they're series that aren't finished yet. A lot of that 14 series I actually can't finish this year. And 19 have more than one book for me to read to finish a series. So that's where the issue comes in. Yes I done a good job of finishing a series so far this year but a lot of the ones I got out the way but ones I only had one book left to read and we don't have many of them left anymore. So that is the issue basically. So let's just get into talking about the 12 series I finished this year. I'm gonna try not to spend too long talking about these. It's more how I probably found the end of the series or the process of reading the series. So the first three that I finished I read in this vlog where you guys voted what series you wanted to see me read. All these are series where I only had one more book to read to finish a series. So the first series I finished this year was the Good Girls Guide to Murder series with As Good as Dead being the final one. This in my opinion is the best book in the series but a lot of people don't like it. It's very very marmite. I've been saying recently like some people say you shouldn't even read this book. Some people say it's the best book in the series like me. In the series Pip is investigating mysteries and in this book she is the mystery. It's all the drama Mick! I just love it! And I don't want to spoil too much but it's just so interesting how the subject of kind of stalker and then what the book descends into is tackled. But it's just crazy. Like the book is, you could never have expected it but the character development has been done so well throughout the series that it does make entire sense by the end of it. I just can't wait to read more Holly Jackson. Some of my patrons let me know that she might. I don't know whether to trust this. On Goodreads it says she's got a new book coming out in December. I don't know whether to trust it. I don't know whether to get my hopes up because Goodreads can lie. So yeah, I think this was the best end to the series I've read this year maybe or Jade Legacy. We'll get into that in a moment. But I just love how different it was to the rest of the series. Also can we just talk about how many series I'd finished before this year? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. I'd finished 12 series in my entire reading discography before this year. So I finished the same amount in six months as I'd finished in the previous like three years. Then I finished the Divinus series by reading the King of Crows. Sadly this series goes down here. Oh no, this has now gone down here. So in terms of my ratings, oh I've got the books the wrong way round. I gave the Divinus like a four star, Lair of Dreams five stars, my favorite in the series. Before the director I think of 2.5, King of Crows, I think I gave it like a 1.5. This ending to the series was just not, it wasn't it for me. I'm sorry it was not it for me. It was long, drawn out, boring. The characters didn't kind of have the resolutions that you would expect them to. It just went completely off the rails. I think what you love so much about the first few books just completely went, you know. What I found so great about Lair of Dreams in particular was Henry and Ling and they were really like brought up to be these like main characters and then they were ignored in the second and third one which I didn't feel like made much sense. Yes I think it's important that each character maybe has a book that they star in but that didn't really work. That Lair of Dreams is obviously Henry and Ling's book and then people might say oh book three is Theta's book or whatever but I didn't feel like it was as strong so then it didn't make much sense for them to be kind of ignored.  Yeah I just felt like for the villain the King of Crows has been built up since book one. He was boring. This man was boring. Then I finished the Brown Sisters trilogy by reading actor H.E. Brown. I really enjoyed this last one. These are just fun books to read, right? They're like enjoyable. They're all kind of like full stars for me. I think my favorite is still Get a Life Chloe Brown, the first one but I just think, I mean I don't have much to say about this series, I just enjoyed reading it and I'm glad that I've read them all now because it feels like you know it's a bit of a booktube staple so I'm glad I've read them all now. Talia Hibbet in my opinion should be getting the TikTok hype rather than Colleen Hoover or whatever like come on girls read this. Read something diverse for once in your life TikTok. Yes sis, pop off, go in. You didn't have to snap so hard. I would say this was my second favorite in the series. I really really did enjoy it. It's set in this bed and breakfast which I think is such a cute setting and their chemistry throughout the book was really great so yeah, I was very happy to finish that series as well. Then we have the first series that I finished where I actually had to read two books and I tackled one of the most, you know, scary books on my TBR. I read Jade Ward and Jade Legacy to finish the Green Blind Saga. My dad still has Jade City like in his room somewhere so I don't know why that is but I had to read these two to finish this series and wow, this blew me away. Jade City, I only gave a 3.5. I gave this a 4.5 and this a 5 and this was incredible.  There is so much depth. Probably one of the most detailed series I personally have ever read and I got so attached to the family and the characters and I had to read these pretty fast and it actually wasn't that hard. I really flew through them with the audiobook. Just the amount of layers that you have to the story and to the context by this last book is absolutely incredible. This is definitely up there with my favourite end to a series that I finished this year as well. If you're looking to read one of the best fantasy series ever, I would recommend picking this up. I think it's just absolutely amazing. The end of Jade Ward, I mean both these endings made me cry. Both of the endings of these books made me cry. Both of them are terrible. Both of them are absolutely terrible. And last thing I have to say, and an unwen. And an unwen.  I'm literally coming for you. Then I finished the Binti series. I read The Night Mask Raid which is the last one. For me this series went downhill as it went throughout. Part of me wishes I had just DNF'd it. I just didn't really love it. The last, I mean these are short novellas and the first book worked really well as a novella because it was kind of set in one day on this ship with this really high stake situation. But then books two and three are out in the world and they felt to me like they needed to be like 200, 300 pages longer for what the author wanted to do with the world building. That just really didn't work for me at all. I didn't really like this series. I kind of wish I had just read Binti the first one and left it at that. I don't think I needed to continue but I am a completionist so I get, you know, I find it hard to DNF series. DNFing those five that I spoke about earlier that was really cutthroat for me. That was tough. Then I finished the Raven Boys series where I had to read these three books to finish it. I only ever read the first one. This just wasn't 100% for me and I don't like talking about it because I know a lot of people love it and I don't want to touch that and I feel like I should have loved this. I mean what happened? Like I don't know. I just feel like for some reason I didn't connect to it. I didn't connect to the characters. I found the writing confusing and I should have loved this. There should have been like 100% my thing but I just kind of felt met about it all and I've kind of forgotten everything that happens in the series. I'm not going to lie to you. I can remember snippets but I can barely remember anything and I remember being really mad at how the series ended up. Like the ending of this book, I didn't mind the rest of the Raven King. I remember I quite liked it but the way this ended pissed me off. It just wasn't for me. But I am so glad I finished it because otherwise this would be a series that would stress me out because I'd had the first one. That's probably one of the oldest books. I'm sorry the second one, the first one I had to read. Probably one of the oldest books on my TBR at this point so I am very happy to have finished it. Then I finished a series that I started this year which was the Forward Collection. So this is a series of six novellas on Kindle Limited and Audible where it's all like sci-fi, futuristic-y kind of series. I enjoyed reading these. They were good to like get my reading go up, get the amount of books I read this year up because they're all very, very, very short. Like I think barely any pages. I can't remember. Like really, really short. Like 30 pages, some of them. My favourite one is still the first one, Ark by Veronica Roth which I could never have anticipated. Like I thought I would love N.K. Jemisin's more, Andy Weir or Blake Crouch but no, Veronica Roth's the first one in my opinion, Ark is the best one in the series. I enjoyed reading them but I don't think that a lot of these books are gonna stick in my mind. I don't read a ton of sci-fi so it was fun reading like a short series of sci-fi but I'm just really proud of myself for like starting this and then finishing it with a couple months. Like I really, I really did that. I really did that. I am so proud of her I could cry. Okay then we have another novella series which I finished which was the Steminist novellas by Ali Hazelwood.  Under One Roof was definitely my favourite. This is one with the couple, you know, the boy and the girl. They end up each owning half of this house so they have to live together but there's like enemies to lovers. Ali Hazelwood often does Grump Sunshine and I think I love Grump Sunshine. I think, yeah, I think that's it for me. I think I like Grump Sunshine so Ali Hazelwood is definitely my favourite romance author. Stuck With You I didn't love. That was the one where these two characters are stuck in elevators together and they hate each other. That one I didn't love because it was like a non-linear storyline that I just didn't vibe with. Like the present day they hated each other because of something he'd done in the past and we were kept going back into the past to kind of see them falling for each other and then he did something to ruin it. That just didn't really work for me. I preferred the kind of more like normal linear timelines in the other two. Below Zero I really enjoyed as well and Ali Hazelwood just gets what I want. She does get it. Ten out of ten. Ten out of ten. Yep. Yep. Then I did a video where I finished three geologies so this is like a really good way of me to like knock out some series. Where is the Monarchs? I finished the Ravens series with the Ravens and the Monarchs. This is such a strong YA series. We're following this sorority of witches at this college. We follow two girls in particular. Viv who is like the new girl and oh my god I've forgotten her name. Scarlet. Scarlet who is one of the older girls in sorority who's hoping to kind of lead it as they have to protect their sorority, protect their sisters and do witchy stuff. And I just really enjoyed this. This was just solid YA. Both of them were like four stars for me but like good four stars. Not disappointing four stars. Like that was a really enjoyable read. I had a lot of fun reading it. I've intrigued if I should read anything else by Kas Morgan and Daniel Page because I enjoyed these so much. Kas Morgan wrote The Hundred and Daniel Page wrote Dorothy Must Die and I've never been intrigued by them. So maybe I'll wait and see what they each these authors come out with next and then maybe I'll pick that up rather than going back to their backlist. I don't know. But I think if you're looking for a witchy YA series that has sorority college vibes, this is just so fun. Like I really think it's very well written, plotted so perfectly. Like very little room for plot holes or anything like that. It was really really good and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Then I finished the silver. Is this this green hollow? Yeah, green hollow duology. Silver in the wood is the first one and drawing country is the one I finished. This didn't work for me. It's kind of set in these woods with like men who exist in the woods and it's very fairy tale like. We have like fantastical forest creatures. But this second one follows the other man. This follows Tobias and then this follows Henry in terms of like who the narrator is. Here's the thing. Tobias's narration is very like whimsical and detached and uh comp-com-completative. Is that the right word? Where he's like thinking. He's very thoughtful. I don't know. Get the dictionary out girlie. I'm a massive fan of the dictionary. Whereas drown country, Henry is very like bold and brash and like quick to act you know. It wasn't what I wanted from the series and also it starts off very confusing because it refers to things have happened previously that I thought did that happen in this book? It didn't. It didn't. It's not until the second half of the book that you learn what happened in the past. So it was just a very confusing reading experience for me. But again I'm glad I finished it. It was very an easy series to tick off um because it's so short so at least says that.  Then I finished The Stranger Dreamer Geology. I didn't really like music nightmares. It was like a three star.  But um the first one here is following Laszlo Strange as he discovers he can go to his long loved mythical lost city of weep. This book is very different. Laszlo is no longer the main protagonist. He's like the second protagonist I guess but we're not kind of viewing everything through his eyes like we did in the first book. It just really didn't work. Like the villains in this didn't work for me. Nothing happened. This book is what 500 pages? Yeah over 500 pages it could have been 300. Like literally 200 pages could have been nixed from this very very easily. The romance that has been set up in the first book in this didn't work for me. I didn't feel the chemistry. Lady Taylor I have this issue with her. I love her writing. Her plots I always seem to have an issue with. I always seem to have be something about the plot. Even in Stranger Dreamer it would have been a five star but the middle section of this really dragged for me with the plot and so I gave it a four star. I feel like she needs to edit her books a bit more. I don't know I feel bad because I feel like Lady Taylor is like a whisker away if we just fix this one thing from being my favorite author. But the plot is such a big part of the book especially for me. I'd say writing is most important. Then plot then characters. I'm not usually a character girly. So yeah I don't know this was just really disappointing for me. But at least I finished it. And then the last series that I actually just quickly finished was the Mystery of Black Hollow Lane. I read The Secret of White Stone Gate which is the second one. I don't think there's going to be any more in this series. I don't know it's like here's the thing. This is like a middle grade mystery series that Aaron recommended to me when we did her booktube twin test. And I didn't love the first one but I was like I'm gonna finish the series. I'm gonna finish it. And the second one was even worse. This is an example of following this girl from the US who comes to school in the UK like a boarding school. And she very quickly realizes that her life is in danger because of stuff to do with her dad that she hasn't seen since she was a baby. Again the plot's a bit meandering but particularly how it wraps up at the end strikes me as the author was hoping she would get more books in the series but didn't know if she would. And so had to resolve the biggest issue within the story very hurriedly in a way that really felt like not worth it. Not a good ending to this kind of big mystery that we've been having throughout the whole series. And I feel bad. Like she had to, she probably was hoping for like a three, four book series and then it was like this might be the only book I have so I need to wrap this thing up somehow but also leave it open for there to be more books if I do get that which is a really tricky situation to be in. I read it in one day via the audiobook while I was like getting work done. It was super duper quick. So yes at least we finished it. So that is all the series that I have finished so far this year. I am happy with that. I'm happy with 12 finished in the first half of the year. Hopefully we can match that or maybe we can do a bit better. In the second half of the year I don't know if we will. I want to finish at least 10 because that gives me you know scope to start three which I feel like is the bare minimum I want to start this year, the rest of the year. So I will put actually quickly a screen recording in here of the series that I still have on my TBR and you guys let me know which of these you would most like to see me read. I'm gonna have again a couple more series wipeout vlogs coming this year. So yeah let me know which of these series you would most like to see me read. If you've gotten to the end of the video comment a butterfly emoji and thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you for supporting me in my series escapades. I hope you have a good rest of your day. I love you and I'll see you very soon in another video. Bye!


I want every kid in Oregon and Washington and Vermont to understand that if he or she does their schoolwork seriously, does well, takes school. Now you see this little bird doesn't know it. I think I think there may be some symbolism here. I know it doesn't look like it but that bird is really a dove asking us for world peace. No more wars!


Hi, I'm Matthew coast head dating coach and founder at commitment connection comm and today We're going to talk about how to deal with loneliness So loneliness can be a horrible horrible problem that makes you have all kinds of negative thoughts that can Completely destroy your life. And so, you know, I've actually suffered from loneliness in my past and and let me tell you some Of the ways that I got over it and some of the things that you can do to get over it yourself And so the first one is allowing yourself to feel lonely So a lot of times what we do is we'll feel these emotions and then we will like push them away You know, because we don't we've been trained in our society that there are certain emotions that are negative that we shouldn't be feeling and When you push that emotion away, it ends up becoming a part of your shadow It becomes this part of you that you're afraid of that you hide that you try to Suppress but it always ends up coming back and blowing up in your face. And so the first Way to deal with loneliness is just to embrace it and just feel the loneliness, you know, just experience it you know, go through it and and allow yourself to really feel it and That that in itself can can do a lot to get rid of it The second one is expressing your feelings in whatever way you need to and you know Maybe you'll get the loneliness will turn into anger or maybe it'll turn into You know sadness or you know, whatever it turns into just allow yourself to feel it and allow yourself to express yourself From that place because it's that expression that allows us to to kind of move through it There's this saying that goes the only way out is through, right? And it's like one of those Chinese finger traps where you put the the the trap on your finger and the more you pull out You know, the more you try to pull away from it the more your finger gets stuck But it's when you push your finger in that It it releases your finger and then you can just pull your finger out and it's it's kind of the same way with a Lot of emotions, you know if you're feeling these emotions you need to go into the emotion and experience it fully and express yourself from that place and usually Doing that can really be a powerful way to release that emotion into the Away from you and into the world And the last one is getting support a lot of times people feel like they need to take things on by themselves But you don't need to you can get support from friends and family if you don't have friends and family that you feel Could really support you there are plenty of Groups out there that you can get involved in you know a great groups are like personal growth Communities personal growth communities a lot of times have great support systems in place where you can you know go and talk to people You know if it's really really bad you can go and see a therapist or something But go go and get some support and go get around people that you know care about you and want to see you well because they're probably people like that in your life and You know if you open up to them, I think you might be surprised that at what kind of a Positive experience you can have from it So that's it for today if you want some information on how to attract a quality man into a committed Lasting relationship make sure you go to my website at commitment connection calm and take the quiz there I'm Matthew coast and I'll speak with you again soon


OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Hello everybody, my name is Ian Summers. I'm a project specialist for OTAN, the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. I'll be your host for this OTAN Tech Talk. Title for this month's OTT is Utilizing Collaborative Online Tools to Enhance Lessons and Engage Learners. Our presenter today is Cindy Woslowski, an OTAN subject matter expert. Cindy, go for it. Thank you Ian, and welcome everyone. Besides working for OTAN, I'm also a retired ESL instructor with the San Diego Community College District. And most of my career was teaching beginning level ESL students. So some of my samples today or examples will reflect that. But anyway, thanks for joining me today, talking about collaboration tools. And let's look at an overview. Why collaboration tools? Well, first and foremost for adult ed, we wanna prepare our students for the workforce or higher education. We wanna promote teamwork, improve communication, engage our learners always. And it gives them an opportunity to experience different perspectives, right? And also of course increase their technology skills so important in today's world. The three collaboration tools that we can find online that we're gonna discuss today are Padlet, which is a digital bulletin board of sorts. Google Docs, which you're probably very familiar with, that digital word processor and Thig Jam, a digital white board, which is kinda newer for me. I was very used to using Google Jam board, but since that is sunsetting, I'm trying to get more familiar with Thig Jam. And so for each of the tools today, we'll look at some general information, I'll throw out a few samples and then include some lesson ideas for all of you. And as we're going along, think about your particular teaching situation, the level of students you teach, think about how you might be able to adapt to your situation. And the focus is gonna be on teamwork, maybe just the activity itself or the follow-up activity. And I'm defining teamwork as partners groups or all class together. So the first one we'll look at is called Padlet, and which is that digital bulletin board. Padlets are ideal for posting text, images, audio, video, links, and much more kind of in small boxes like you would find in a traditional bulletin board. So I'm gonna share this as a PDF to you later. And if you're not familiar with Padlet, you can get information with the link there. Currently for new accounts, you can only have three active Padlets as a maximum. If you signed up for Padlet years ago, you might have many more Padlets that you're allowed to use. I have my first account, I have 27 Padlets, and I know teachers who have even more than that because they signed on very early. But currently, if you're not signed up, it's gonna be three active Padlets. But you can always delete them if you don't need them anymore or there's a way to archive them so that you can kind of push them aside and reactivate them as needed as long as you just have three active that is very workable. If you have, you know, think about your school, and if you wanna have unlimited Padlets, unlimited students and have 10 or more teachers interested, here's the link to get more information about an educational Padlet account, which is very worthwhile. In my former school, we had that and was very beneficial. So here's an example with a low-level ESL. You know, you could just do a simple writing about any topic like family, career, a favorite color, hobbies, weekend, hometown, goals, for example. So here's one I did with my students a number of years ago. And as we know, even though you'd make a model, the writing is not gonna be perfect, of course, especially on the first draft. So this was always good for a follow-up with partners or groups. You can make a scavenger hunt, who has five brothers and which students don't have any children, you know, things like that. You can categorize rewrites. If you're ever doing rewrites and, you know, looking at errors, I usually make sure there's no name attached so that we don't wanna embarrass anybody. So you can have people post without putting their name or you could, you know, decide on a different way to have that happen. You could generate questions for more information. You could change the first person to third person. You know, lots of things you could do as a follow-up to get that collaborative angle going. Here's another one we did, which was a lot of fun. And that was to take a photo of a partner, post that image and describe what they're wearing. That was for a clothing unit. And usually the lower levels, we focus a lot on life skills, right? So then, you know, we have all the pictures posted on the one padlet on the big screen.  You know, questions like that. How many students are wearing jackets? And the students really enjoyed that. Now, one thing to note is when you're using photos of your students and posting them online, it would be wise to get their permission for that. And in fact, your school might have a release form of some type that the students would need to sign. So if you don't have that, you know, not every student would be willing to have their picture posted. And that's okay, we work around that. But just an FYI. Padlet has a new AI image generator. And it's kind of cool. And I tried it here. Here's an example. I haven't used it with students, of course, because I've been retired a number of years. But so you start a new post and you look for the I can't draw. A little symbol there. And then you type a description of say an imaginary place. So I picked an island with purple trees and many dogs. And then it comes up with a few examples. And you can pick one and post it or what they call as publish. And so it seemed like that would be interesting for the students and they could share and describe their imaginary place. Padlet now has a slideshow feature. So after you create a padlet, you can select the play button, which is in the right hand column in the toolbar. And instantly a slideshow will start. So that would be a great resource for focusing attention, post by post. Again, you could correct errors, ask comprehension check questions, add to the content, practice reading. They also have a way you can set the autoplay from one to 60 seconds per slide. So that would be great, especially for low levels to practice reading aloud and kind of trying to control how long they have per slide. And you might start slow and speed it up, another day to help them with their reading skills. Padlet now also has a poll feature. So you could ask a multiple choice question to get some instant feedback. Again, you start a new post, you choose that the red three dots, the more button and you select poll. Write your question, you can have up to four choices. You add it and then publish it. And then you have your students vote. And that will give you some good teacher feedback. And also Padlet allows you to pin a poll or pin any item actually. So if you do want something to appear in the top left corner, always of your bulletin board, you can pin it. So the three dots that are kind of in the corner here, the top of the poll, you just click there and you can select the pin. So that could be for anything. Maybe you're making a Padlet and you have a lot of directions that you want your students to always have access to and you could pin it to the top left corner so it will always be visible to them when they open the Padlet. And there are tons of things you can do with Padlet. Here are just a few examples. Introduce yourself, post an image, then pick two students to ask questions. With Padlet, you can comment. If you activate the comment, you as the teacher activate the comment feature and you can have them ask questions to get more dialogue going. They could post an image of a place they'd like to visit and why students could do likes to vote on that, who was the most convincing with their reason to visit. You can add gifs of how they're feeling today. One nice thing about Padlet is the default is like a wall, just random boxes. But if you go to the layout setting, you could change it to sections. So then once you have a lot of posts, then you can move things into different sections so you could start categorizing things. So that's a nice follow-up activity for groups to do or the whole class. You could post a photo of a hometown memento and explain the significance. Partners can develop a follow-up question to ask for a couple of the assigned posts. If you're wanting to do just something kind of fun, post a picture of something red in your house or something tall in the community or something that they would consider complex or funny, and then you can all categorize them together. For example, like the color red, is it a clothing item? Is it something in nature? Is it a food item, household item, et cetera? And some more padlet ideas. You can tell I really like padlet. But you could ask a question and students respond with audio, video, image, or text. They have the options. And then students work with a partner who used a different format and do the same as the partner did. So they're supporting each other in posting in a different manner. The students could upload documents or slideshows and you can house them all in one place. And then maybe they're responsible to read them all or read a certain number of them. The teacher could create a scavenger hunt. Then for the partners to find the key information that they've learned from the documents or the slideshows. Padlet is also great as a place to post resources for a current topic. So you could add links and YouTube videos and articles for the students to review or to learn about a topic. Partners could add summaries and other resources or comments on something. Again, you're bringing in the collaborative nature of it and having them work with the content in a different way. After reading an article or story, students could type questions they have that were not addressed in the reading. Groups could be assigned to answer those questions either by researching or using their imagination depending on if it was a real article or if it was a fictional story. Some teachers like to do this. You share a padlet at the beginning of class and students can post questions as the lesson continues and progresses. And then towards the end of class, spend a few minutes to look at those questions, clarify some confusing parts of the lesson. And that also offers students an opportunity to kind of be anonymous with their questions. Not all the students would speak up but maybe they would type a question anonymously. And so this would be great feedback for the teacher as well. The second one I wanna talk about is Google Docs, that digital word processor that we've all used. And maybe you have multiple Google accounts like I do. So you have Google Docs all over the place. But it's great to create and edit. Very easy to share. It's housed in your Google Drive account. Or you can go to docs.google.com to see all your documents. And I just did that a couple of days ago in preparation for this. And I can see I need to clean out my Google Docs because you'll find some really old ones in there. You can start a new doc quickly with the shortcut docs.new If you haven't done that before, try that. You need to be logged into your account, of course. And you could encourage your students, depending on their level, to create their own Google account and then teach them how to share links or add email addresses so that people could be added that you want to be able to edit or view or comment on their work. One of the features Google Docs has that I don't think too many teachers are using, but it is a good one. And that's the voice typing. Sometimes you might just do it for yourself, but to make it more collaborative, maybe have partners create a dialogue or conduct a short interview using the voice typing. So for example, a pair would be working on one document. And you would just go to tools and then voice typing to find that feature. And Google Docs then will automatically type what it hears. And you can even say question mark or period or exclamation point. And it will type that for you. But pairs then can fix the punctuation or the little errors as needed, perform it, share it with others. And it's kind of fun. So they're using their auditory skills, but then also making sure the text is reflecting what they've said. So try that if you haven't. I think that's a good one. You can create an instant table of student information. Students could type their own information or a partner. So you just make a table with a series of questions. You assign them a number. If you don't assign them a number, they might start typing on top of each other when we're sharing the document. But you can follow up with pairs generating sentences of the content or a paragraph. Sometimes I would have student number one is gonna write about student number two. Student number two writes about three, et cetera, so that everyone is writing about someone else efficiently. They could write some more questions to add, compare and contrast, a lot of things you can do. And one thing I like about a table is that information is right there. I can see everybody typing at the same time. And then we can use that information immediately. Google Docs we know is often used for lengthier writing. So you might have your students doing some peer reviewing or you would be doing that. So there's that editing toolbar on the right side of a document where you could add a comment and emoji or a suggested edit. That's this symbol on the right here. So for example, the toolbar automatically connects to wherever your cursor is on the document.  So to be specific, you could highlight the text that you are referring to. And then you can see the example on the right. Maybe you've asked a question, maybe you've got a comment. And later the author will see the highlighted text. And here it's in yellow. And so they know that there's a comment. And if they don't see it on the right, they can click on the highlighted area and see what someone has written to them. Some other ideas, you might want to post images of how to do something and with a partner, you know, cooking, baking, playing a game, gardening, something like that and write about each step. Pairs can share the directions with other pairs, right? You can do that through Zoom or another format. Sometimes you might have groups, each have their own document. As one student begins a story with a couple of sentences or a short paragraph, the next student adds to the story and they keep building the story till everybody's had a chance and they finish the story. And they, as a group, they pick a title, add some images or at least one to reflect their storyline and then share with another group or the whole class. Lastly, here's an example. There's a new checklist feature which you can use directly in the document for groups to list tasks and they check them off as they've accomplished them. So you can find that checklist icon in the main editing toolbar above the document. So it looks like the traditional bullets or numbered lists but it actually has some checkmarks next to it. So that's where you'll find that. So that will help your students stay organized too and collaborate like, you know, I'll do that task, you do that task, then they check them off as they've completed. And the last collaboration tool we'll talk about today is Fig Jam. And hopefully some of you have heard of that. I don't know if you've used it yet but it contains your typical whiteboard items like pens and eraser and sticky notes and shapes and text boxes. But Fig Jam really does have a lot of other interesting features like the thumbs up and thumbs down or it has an editable clipboard agenda if you're gonna use it for a meeting of some type or just to let your students know what's on the agenda today. They have a voice recorder that's pretty easy, a photo booth, a way to easily insert a table and they have many, many, many, many templates which is nice because Jamboard did not have built-in templates. So that's one big plus for Fig Jam. So the parent company is called Figma and you can sign up for a free educational account and they have said, you know, that it will always be free for educators. So there's a little sign up process and then they verify through your school email and students can also sign up for free. And this is recommended right now and because Fig Jam does have some limitations, I'll talk about that in a minute. It's best used on a computer or tablet. It does not interact well with cell phones at the moment and I did a workshop a couple of months ago and the participants could not use their cell phones at all. So I already reached out to Fig Jam and asked them to, you know, on behalf of the adult ed community that a lot of our students only have their cell phones. So we would like to see it interact with cell phones. So who knows if they will make that change but they appreciated my input. And if you wanted, you know, once you have an account going, the shortcut to start a new Fig Jam is figjam.new. They all have little shortcuts to get started. If you're not familiar, I just wanted to throw out the couple of toolbars. There's the bottom toolbar where you find most of the general items. But that's where you also find sections off to the right there and tables. They have stamps and emojis. I think, you know, currently it's used a lot with K-12. So they were big on stamps and emojis but can be fun for adult ed as well. And then there's a top toolbar. So once you have an account that very left there that that's where you'll find your menu and you can get to all your files. You can set a timer built in timer. You can do a little vote. You can play some music while the timer is going. I have not tried the AI generated design yet but here's where you find all the templates, lots of templates and you can also add comments to certain posts. So that's a nice feature as well. So here's an example of a four corners template that I found and you could get students opinions on a prompt that you type in the middle there. And then you have your students open one of the stickies depending on if they agree, disagree, strongly agree, strongly disagree and type in their name. And then you could follow up with four groups to discuss and write reasons that they are voting. Make their case for the debate that you have in your advanced ESL class. Here's another example you could brainstorm what you know about a topic and what you need to learn. From the feedback, you could determine common threads to inform your lesson planning. Students could vote with thumbs up, the stamp on the sticky of the most important ideas. So here's an example I did with the path to citizenship what you already know, what you need to learn. And then you can see at the bottom if they voted with their thumbs up, what's the most popular. There is a voice memo widget, which is kind of fun to use. You could dictate sentences, have them ready to go on your fig jam and I thought just to make it easier for your students, you could include a text box next to each of the dictations so that groups know which dictation their sentence are gonna listen to and they work together and type what they hear. And you could make many, many, many, depending on how many groups you have and how many people are in each group. Some other ideas, pros and cons for a topic, you could use for a pre-writing activity to get them focused as an exit ticket after a lesson ends, ask your learners, how can you apply what you learned today in your own life? And then they answer that onto a text box or sticky note. And then you could use that information for a group discussion another day and to determine if transfer of information or skills has occurred into their actual lives outside of class, which is always exciting, that's the goal, right? Another idea you could post a story or text and then volunteers use the marker, the pen or highlighter to find the answers to those questions. Groups could plot out a plan for their group project using the shapes and arrows. We're gonna start here and we're gonna move towards this. And after that, we'll go there. And then next, they could use a table, make a table and then groups could determine what tasks are gonna be needed to accomplish their project, what's their timeline and who's gonna be responsible for each task. Now currently, here's the caveat about FIGJAM. When you share a FIGJAM with students who do not have accounts, with adult ed, at least in the program I used to be in, it was open entry, open exit, students are coming and going at all times. So to remember to get everybody on board, that would take time. And that you may not have. But anyway, if they don't have accounts, there is a 24 hour time limit when editing can occur with people with no accounts. They call it an open session. And FIGJAM will automatically close that after a 24 hour period has run out. So this may or may not meet your needs, but that is a FIGMA policy at this point. And FIGJAM is working with Jamboard to smooth the transition as Jamboard winds down. So there's already an import feature in FIGJAM to import current Jamboards.  And they say they may streamline that in the future so that you could do multiple Jamboards imported at the same time. And the way it works now, if you're familiar with Jamboard, they had frames or slides. So multiple frames will appear as sections in FIGJAM. So they do kind of separate them into sections, but it's all on one big FIGJAM. And that's a wrap. Thank you. Thank you, Cindy, for that presentation. I'd like to encourage viewers at this time to subscribe to OTAN's YouTube channel where instructional tech videos related to adult education can be found, including tech talks like this one. All this information and more is available on the OTAN website at www.otan.us. Thank you again for watching this OTAN Tech Talk.


Tajik migrants were beaten by Russian police for refusing to fight in Ukraine. Some Tajik migrants working in Russia say they were beaten by police and deported on fabricated criminal charges for refusing to fight in Ukraine according to Radio Liberty. The allegations come as Russian officials continue to target migrants, migrant workers from Central Asia in an effort to shore up Moscow's depleted troops in Ukraine according to migrants and rights activists. Mansur Hodyev, a 30-year-old Dushanbi resident, was deported from Russia in October just weeks after declining to sign a contract to join the Russian army, the former migrant worker says. Hodyev told his problems began when he approached migration officials in September to complete paperwork to obtain Russian citizenship. During my appointment at the Migration Office in the Svedlovsk district in Perm province, on September 12th, officials told me that I need to sign a contract to go to war in Ukraine or my citizenship application would be rejected, Hodyev said. The holder of a valid residency permit, Hodyev said he didn't sign the contract and decided to continue living and working in Russia without trying to get citizenship. But two weeks later, Hodyev was summoned to the Migration Office where officials allegedly demanded that he sign a statement admitting to taking illegal drugs. Four masked men handcuffed me there, put a plastic bag over my head and pushed me into a van like a cow. He claimed they drove me to some forest attaching wires to my arms and legs and giving me electric shocks. Hodyev told Radio Liberty that under duress, he signed a fabricated confession that he was caught by police while taking narcotics. Rights defenders and migrants in Russia have reported dozens of similar cases of Central Asian workers being pressured into signing contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry amid Moscow's efforts to bolster its troops in Ukraine.