Category Archives: Handy tools

RedShelf – Digital Textbooks that are helpful!

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This blog post has an affiliate link which if you use and make a purchase will supply me, the owner of Books-and-Games.com a percentage of sales which will go to continuing to pay for the use of this website.  You can find further information on my affiliate usage here: https://books-and-games.com/affiliate-disclosure/

Let’s be honest. Textbooks are expensive. Really expensive. You use them for one semester, and can only hope to try to sell them back for less than half the price you spent on them. And of course, if you made any marks on the thing, you’re stuck with the thing taking up space or just chucking it in the trash. You can’t even give it away because another edition will probably replace the darn thing next year. In short, textbooks are a hassle.

You are not doomed to suffer this, however! As there is RedShelf! Honestly, I wish RedShelf had been a thing in the time long ago, when I was a college student! RedShelf not only offers textbooks, but they are very useful. You can highlight without ruining a book (its digital after all!) define words, create flashcards and even have the book read to you! This is only a few of the options RedShelf offers. They really have everything you need to get your study on!

Also, even if you aren’t a student, RedShelf offers a collection of fiction and non-fiction. I plan on checking out their collection the next time I have to do some research!

Right now if you use my link to RedShelf, not only will you secure yourself an excellent study habit, but you will also help support Books-and-Games.com to continue to bring you honest reviews. You can find my affiliate link here! RedShelf Homepage

Bookroo.com – Book clubs for kids!

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This blog post has an affiliate link which, if you use and make a purchase, will supply me, the owner of Books-and-Games.com a percentage of sales which will go to continuing to pay for the use of this website. You can find further information on my affiliate usage here: https://books-and-games.com/affiliate-disclosure/

So if you have read any of my reviews for books aimed at children, you know that I take children’s literature very seriously. I have a few reasons for this, but the main one is I grew up with dyslexia and hated reading. Even beyond kids with learning disabilities, it can be hard to help a child learn a love of reading. Let’s be honest, the required reading in school is not always the most entertaining. So that is where a book club like Bookroo can come in handy!

Bookroo offers book clubs for children ages 0 to 12! That means you can find entertaining stories to help grow your child’s love of reading from the time they are in the cradle till you’re crying because they got their first crush in school!

You can check out Bookroo today with this link and not only will you find some entertaining book clubs for children, you will also help support Books-and-Games.com so I can continue to bring you content! Check out the link below!

Join our Middle Grade Chapter Book Club now! Monthly, 3 month, and 6 month subscriptions available on bookroo.com!

Grammarly – Helping you Proofread

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This blog post has an affiliate link which if you use and make a purchase will supply me, the owner of Books-and-Games.com a percentage of sales that will go to continuing to pay for the use of this website. You can find further information on my affiliate usage here: https://books-and-games.com/affiliate-disclosure/

If you write a lot for a living, or just for fun, you probably find that you spend a lot of time editing your content. Which can be time-consuming and difficult at times. The English language is a tricky one, even for a native speaker. We do not remember all the rules we were taught back in school. And sometimes you never even think of the more complicated ideas. Like, the difference between a comma and an Oxford comma. Thankfully in today’s modern internet world, we have applications like Grammarly, which help you quickly and easily fix your writing.

Grammarly is more than a spellchecker, so do not let that fool you. It also displays how well you are doing right on your screen, telling you the correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery of your writing making sure that beyond spelling correctly, your writing also makes sense. Now these are just the free features, the premium also offers you even more, such as punctuation in complex sentences and word choice suggestions!

I used Grammarly to write this affiliate post, and I strongly suggest people give Grammarly a try, and if you use my link here with this post, you can also help support Books-and-Games.com with your purchase. Check out Grammarly here: https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=864277&u=2915328&m=26748&urllink=&afftrack=

ProWringAid – A useful tool

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This blog post has an affiliate link which, if you use and make a purchase, will supply me, the owner of Books-and-Games.com a percentage of sales which will go to continuing to pay for the use of this website. You can find further information on my affiliate usage here: https://books-and-games.com/affiliate-disclosure/

So there are a few products that I use religiously. ProWringAid is one of them. ProWritingAid is very similar to other grammar checking products with one major difference. It actually tells you why you are making the edits! After all, we aren’t all English majors. 

Naturally knowing what you are fixing and why can not only help you improve as a writer but also help you decide if you want to ignore that grammar rule. It all depends on how you like to write after all. 

I use ProWritingAid to edit all of my work, including this little affiliate post! If you spend a good portion of your time constantly writing different documents that you need to edit, ProWritingAid is a great product for you to try. Feel free to check out ProWritingAid at this link for more information!

Try ProWritingAid for Free!

ShareASale – A great place to get Affiliate merchants

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This blog post has an affiliate link which, if you use and make a purchase, will supply me, the owner of Books-and-Games.com a percentage of sales which will go to continuing to pay for the use of this website. You can find further information on my affiliate usage here: https://books-and-games.com/affiliate-disclosure/

So it can be hard to make a living doing what you love. In my case, this would be blogging about books and games. And if you are a regular reader, you know I try to do so as often as possible. I have been lucky enough to be able to put ads on my WordPress site, but it takes a lot of ads to be able to get a payment out. So, like many people, I decided to go looking for ways of gaining affiliate partnerships! In doing so, I found ShareASale!

ShareASale has hundreds of merchants you can get affiliate partnerships with. This site makes it easy to apply to different merchants as well as keep track of the various links you need to be able to share and promote the merchandise. As well as keep track of sales! I have found it particularly handy to have an easy view of all the information I need to know how well the links I post are doing, instead of having to search through various websites and find the information!

You can check out ShareASale here for more information! https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=47&u=2915328&m=47&urllink=&afftrack=

Readability

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This blog post has an affiliate link which, if you use and make a purchase, will supply me, the owner of Books-and-Games.com a percentage of sales which will go to continuing to pay for the use of this website. You can find further information on my affiliate usage here:

As someone who grew up coping with dyslexia, I can say for sure that reading, or learning to read, can be pretty difficult for a child. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to help with that these days. One of those is Readability. 

Readability is a fantastic application that turns your phone or tablet in to an amazing way to increase your child’s reading skills and comprehension. Your child will learn with interactive questions and answers and real time tracking to help you monitor your child’s ever growing skills. The application also helps your child with pacing and pronunciation. 

Now these are just a few of the benefits you can take advantage of using Readability with your kids. Check out the link here for full details! 

Turn your phone or tablet into a professional virtual reading tutor

Proven to Increase Reading Level in 90 Days

Humble Bundle

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This blog post has an affiliate link which if you use and make a purchase will supply me, the owner of Books-and-Games.com a percentage of sales which will go to continuing to pay for the use of this website. You can find further information on my affiliate usage here: https://books-and-games.com/affiliate-disclosure/

I love video games. In fact, there are very few that I have played that I do not enjoy in some manner. That was how I first stumbled on Humble Bundle. The promise of a variety of games easily pulled me in for a fairly inexpensive amount of money. It was even better to find out that some of the money I was spending was going to a charity. I love to support a charity when I am able. When Humble Bundle added more than video games, I was super excited. I have purchased quite a few of their book bundles now as well.

Now the catch is Humble Bundles change regularly and while some of them are amazing, some of them may not be for everyone. The important thing is to check regularly and see if you can find one you like. So is Humble Bundle worth using? If it has something you like? Yes! It very much is.

Right now they have the Find a Cure bundle which has tones of assets people who are looking to create games can use!

If you are interested in checking out the Find a Cure bundle and gaining hundreds of assets for your future game, you can find it here! https://www.humblebundle.com/software/find-cure-software?partner=tmolina&charity=1214569

My Three favorite WoW Addons

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So I do not talk about it much here, but I play a lot of World of Warcraft. More so, as is probably easy to guess, I am a massive nerd who plays on an RP server. If you do not know what RP is, it stands for Role Play. Now there are a lot of addons for World of Warcraft, but we are going to go over the main three I used to give myself the nerdiest, and easiest time of thing. That being said, I have found a few of handy addons throughout the years that make this experience much more pleasant.

The first is Total Roleplay 3. Now this is an addon used commonly on RP servers, it allows you to write a profile about your character. With various template options, you can get as basic or detailed as you like. There are also a few addons for this addon which allow you to expand your role play experience, such as, if you get the TRP3 Extended addon for TRP3, you can create your own items and trade with people who also have the addon.

Next one I enjoy is Musician! This addon is another popular RP addition, though not as commonly seen as TRP3. You can use it to play MIDI files of songs in the game. This is great for more social RP gatherings.

This next addon, WIM, is a super useful one. Now if you can remember the 90s clearly, like myself, you can probably figure out this stands for WoW Instant Messenger. By default, your whispers simply show up in your chat tab. Sure, you can make new tabs for them, but that can get hard to manage. WIM has whispers pop up in individual boxes, you can move around the screen and open and close easily! Much like the old messenger applications of by-gone days. This makes keeping track of various conversations at once!


If you are interested in these, you should download the CurseForge application for your desktop. Yes, I know the rumors about this application but I have been using it since it came out with no issues. Plus, it is the easiest way to install new addons!

Global Investigative Journalism Network

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What is the Global Investigative Journalism Network? Well, it is more or less exactly what it sounds like! GIJN is a group of multi-international investigative network for journalists all over the world. The group comprises over 8,000 journalists in 140 countries. They provide these journalists with recourses and the best training possible.

So why am I a blogger of books and games doing writing about this group? Because in this world of social media drowned half-facts taking from nonobjective single sided secondary and tertiary sources, there needs to be knowledge that there are still people who work to expose truth and facts.

I first learned about the Global Investigative Journalism Network when I did a brief article on MuckRock some weeks back. I was pleased to find a site and learn that there are others who get their information from reliable sources and FOIA documents. How novel to get your information from a primary source! Yes, that was sarcasm in that last sentence.

If you want solid news from reliable sources, check out the groups tied to GIJN.

MuckRock

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So when I started this blog, I had intended it for book and game reviews. Though as I went through the internet and discovered fascinating sites to help me when I picked up interviews with streamers and authors, I found OTranscribe, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. While learning about OTranscibe, I learned it was part of the MuckRock foundation, which naturally made me curious. What the heck was a MuckRock? 

How I had not known about this group previously simply proves how little the average person knows about the process of filing for public records. And in that I poorly segue in to what exactly MuckRock is!

MuckRock is a news site that collaborates with everything from researchers and journalists to activists and ordinary people. The site holds thousands of pages of government files and information on how to request one you need for your personal research projects. Now I will not be going in to this process here as, honestly, I am no expert at that and my knowledge of public record law is limited. I would, however, suggest MuckRock to find out this information as their site has helpful information you can use to figure out your process.

This site has an interesting type of journalism that I find refreshing in a world where the major new outlets have all taken a political side. So if you want access to actual record based information that has not been watered down by opinion and left or right ideology. I suggest MuckRock for your research needs.

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