 Hey everyone, today we have a rather sad story, one I'm not actually looking forward to talking about and really hits home for me in ways that maybe it doesn't hit home for you, but it probably does hit home for some of you given the average age of my audience and where a lot of us are in life and it does deal partially with Nintendo Switch, although the Switch isn't necessarily to blame for anything in particular, it just happened to be the device involved with this incident. But before I get into that, I want to remind you we do have a giveaway going on for Nintendo Switch. OLED, an Xbox Series X at a PlayStation 5, sorry I was drawing a blank for a moment there. Yeah, we're giving away one of those heads of the gleam that I'll link down in the pinned comment or the description. I will note we have made the, or at least I have made the executive decision to extend this giveaway through the month of March just due to all the things I'm dealing with with the home renovation and the studio renovation project I have going on at this moment that is going to take up the rest of February. I will note that if you want to listen, I can give you a bit of an update on that studio renovation towards the end. I'll put a timestamp down below. Obviously, we timestamp all our videos so you can skip the intros, get right into the meat of it, or get right to whatever else I have going on. Alright, let's talk about the story and I sell this at Nintendo Life and it makes me a bit sad. And you guys might have already heard about the story, maybe you haven't, so let's just read the headline. It says, Microsoft close to sacking a senior developer who assaulted a seven year old son for refusing to stop playing his switch. Like, assault is a very strong word. Let's read this story written by Damian McFerrin earlier this morning. A senior developer at Microsoft has been sentenced to a one year community corrections order with a requirement that he performed 100 hours of unpaid work after he was found guilty of unlawfully assaulting his son after the seven year old refused to stop playing his Nintendo switch. The 41 year old Nicholas Lester, the court heard, throttled his son. Throttle is such a loaded term after losing his temper and was heard to scream, I will stop him breathing. The attack took place at his West Melbourne home on February 6th of last year. The Herald's son reported the boys face went red as he yelled for his mother who ran to his bedroom upon hearing the commotion. Lester faced the Melbourne magistrates court on Monday where he was sentenced. He pleaded guilty last week to unlawfully assaulting his son. Magistrate Carolyn Bolt said, your seven year old was effectively using his will against yours. In response, you placed him in a headlock and were heard to be saying the word to the effect, I'll stop you breathing. Your actions on this occasion raised the alarm of three independent witnesses who felt so concerned about what they had heard, the police were called. Children act up, play up, resist reasonable authority. That's what children do. That's what they will continue to do. As a parent, it is your responsibility to never resort to an act of family violence. The buck stops with you. There is never an excuse for family violence and the court expects that you make choices that will keep your family safe no matter how angry you feel or what the circumstances are. Lester had a history of disagreements with his now estranged partner over how to handle the parenting of their son. The boy refused to supply an impact statement to the court, but Mrs. Bolt or Miss Bolt in this case accepted he must have been terrified by the attack. Even so, the magistrate let Lester leave the court without recording a conviction and said she accepted that he had suffered from depression and had been proactive in taking steps to improve his mental health. She added the fact he had no prior convictions was in his favor and that his job with Microsoft was now in the balance, which that's not really a huge shocker on the job front. I am someone that believes that there is a certain separation of home front and work life where what you do in your private life doesn't necessarily mean it should impact your professional life. Just that your professional life outside of obviously making money doesn't need to necessarily impact your personal life. There can be a lot of crossover. I know this for a fact I've been working at home for a while. Obviously I do YouTube stuff so there is some crossover there but I try my best to separate it out. Like yeah, the things I do with my children aren't determined by what I do at my job. But there is this situation where obviously when it becomes public and Microsoft can kind of look poor form to continue to employ somebody who clearly had no problem essentially choking out their child. It's not a good look for the company and that's where your professional private life can cross when you do something in your private life that affects your public image, which can affect the public image of your employer. So that's not that here nor there. I don't know if he's going to lose his job. I think Microsoft's put in a tough spot because obviously the court recognized he had depression. So like you got rid of someone who had depression who made a mistake. But here's my take on this and this is coming from the fact that I'm a parent. I have three children ages 11, eight and five, six. Sorry, 11, eight and six. Man, it's been a long, we'll get into the renovation project later. So look, I am a full-time parent. I'm not a part-time parent. I don't live in a split home. My children aren't off somewhere else. I am literally parenting my children 24 hours a day. Even when they're at school, you can call it a break. If you want to start a break, I'm working. So yeah, I'm a parent all the time. And children are extremely, extremely frustrating. They are defiant. They do resist rules. They resist you, you know, trying to, if not tell them what to do, encourage them to do better things. They resist in many different ways and it only gets worse as they get older. Teenage years are going to be extremely difficult. I was difficult as a kid. I can only imagine what I'm going to be going through with three children and my parents only had two. So I understand the frustration of being a parent. First and foremost, I understand the anger that can come, the stress that can come, how it can make you feel. I know all of this because I deal with it. I've probably been the most stressed in my entire life over the last five days doing this renovation project because yeah, my kids are around all the time. They had a snow day today. They're around for that. You know, they had school one day where they went to school yesterday and then the two days prior, guess what? They were also around 24 seven over the course of this renovation project and driving me and my fiance, their mother, absolutely insane. Like, you know, we raised our voices when I, in hindsight, regret doing that. I wish I didn't resort to raising my voice the way I did towards my children because it's not their fault that their home is torn apart. That they can't play with their toys because there's nowhere to play. Like, it's not their fault but the pestering and the defiance when you're in the middle of intense manual labor, it literally never can get, you know, at least in my opinion, in my life, more stressful as a parent than it has been the last five days. Yet I have a line in the sand that's very black and white. Due to my own stress, frustrations, anger, whatever it might be towards my children, I will never lay a hand on them. Now look, we're not talking about spanking, right? Spanking is, you know, there are some parents that are okay with it, some parents are. Some people think it's abuse, some people don't. I can tell you right now, child protective services doesn't consider spanking to be abuse. There was a situation when I was a kid about this. Anyways, it doesn't really matter. The point is that maybe you're okay with putting soap in a kid's mouth or spanking them. I don't know. That's your own parenting techniques and I'm not gonna judge you. I personally don't do that stuff but I got spanked as a kid. I got soap in my mouth. I don't view my parents as any bad and it didn't make me necessarily want to spank or soap the mouth of my kids. It's neither here nor there. I think that that's not really that traumatic but I will say smacking your kid across the face for back talking to you. You are only thinking of the outside. Oh, maybe you made them bite their tongue or something sort of bleeding a little bit. You could also give them a concussion while their brains are still developing. You're not thinking that at the time. You're just thinking I'm mad, you didn't listen, you back talk me so I smacked you in the face. Yeah, that can cause head trauma. You might not be noticeable and the kid might not understand it but you can literally damage their brain and especially while the brain is still developing that's highly dangerous activity. Choking the kid out, headlock. Even if the kid could breathe which the mother when they came in said the face was turning red so that means the kid was having a hard time breathing. At least according to that eye witness take in the case. Even putting them in a headlock and threatening to stop them from breathing if they don't get off the switch. No. Look, kids are gonna be defiant. My kids have switches, tablets, my middle child Aiden bless his soul when I'm done making this video I have to tell him it's time to get off the tablet. It's time to get our bath out of the way. It's time to start getting ready for bed and calming down and read our books before the end of the day. And I know he's gonna throw a fit. And I know it might frustrate me. I already know this is going to happen because I know my child. He's not a baby, he's not a newborn. I'm not just learning about my child's behaviors. I know how each one of my three children are gonna react in pretty much any situation that I need to discipline them that I need to ask them to get off the thing they enjoy doing that I need to ask them to go do something else. X, Y, and Z I could tell you exactly how my daughter and my two sons are gonna react before I even say anything. And because I know them. This child that he did this to wasn't some newborn or just newly toddler, new three or like seven years old. I'm sorry. At this point, you already know how your child reacts when you tell them to get off your switch. This isn't the first time your child's told you no and refused to get off. Children are defiant. They wanna do what they wanna do. They wanna have fun. They don't wanna listen to adults trying to get them to do something they don't wanna do. They don't wanna listen. Children wanna think they know everything, that they know better, that they know what they should be eating. I want McDonald's and Domino's Pizza every day. I don't wanna eat my broccoli. I don't wanna eat this. I don't wanna eat that. I don't wanna ban. I want the junk. I don't want potato chips. I don't wanna just stare at my Nintendo Switch all day. I wanna stare at my tablet with a roll box for 20 hours. Like, I know I'm a parent. But violence is never the answer and I can appreciate that he has depression. I don't think depression is an excuse. I think it's a convenient excuse. I have depression. I don't talk about it much. I've mostly dealt with it. I don't really consider myself to be in that depressive state of mind anymore on the daily, like I once was. But I mean, the thought still crossed my mind here and there. Definitely over this house project. My fiance has severe depression. She had depression when I met her over a decade ago and it only got worse as we had kids because there's postpartum depression and when you already have depression and then you have postpartum depression, it just compounds and sometimes doesn't go away. And we've been trying our best to deal with that and she struggles. But even she has a line in the sand where at her worst state, she would never, ever choke out my kid. Choke out our children. She might send them to the room. She might yell at me to get home right away no matter what I'm doing so she can leave and go for a drive. She knows when she's at her worst, the best thing for her and her children is to step away and take a breath. Breathe. Give it a moment. Don't let yourself get to the point you do something that hurts that kid. And I could say this beyond the shadow of adult because I am with someone that has the severest of severe depression. The point that suicide has been a contemplated thing and attempted in her life. And she would never lay her hand on that. She would sooner walk away. Take a moment. That's how you deal with these situations. Look, your son, I don't know if you're ever gonna hear this, probably not, but if your child has a Nintendo Switch, in this case that's why we're talking about it, but it could be any device and they refuse to get off it when you tell them to. It's pretty simple. Don't get violent. You give your kid a choice. A, they give you that device willingly or they're grounded and not just grounded for like a day, for a week and they will not see, if you have to physically remove that device from their hands, which that's the thing you can get physical with, you can grab that device and pull it from them. That's fine. If you have to take the device away from them because they won't willfully give it up, yeah, they're grounded for a week and that device won't even be in the home. Go drop it off at a friend's house, grandparents work, get out, get out of the home. Make it so they can't even find the damn thing. Because that's what children are gonna do. They're gonna look for it while you're sleeping. I don't know, because I did it when I was a kid. That's how you discipline. You don't smack the kid, you don't choke the kid out. You give them a choice and if they make the wrong one, then you take the device from them and ground them. And yeah, grounding as parents sucks. A lot of children, and I'm sure we have some children listening to this, think that parents just love grounding kids. No, we don't. You don't watch grounding sucks. Having to constantly monitor you to the point that we have to pay attention to, oh my God, did my daughter, my daughter's grounded right now. Did she slip out of the room and start watching TV? Before I woke up, I had to pay attention to that. I had to lock my TV down in a way that she can't even turn it on. And that affects my boys who aren't grounded from it. So it sucks as a parent. We would rather have our kids be happy, well-behaving, never defiant, do what they're supposed to do, try and really harden school, putting forth the effort, doing the physical activity that they need for their health every single day. Like we would love our children just to willfully do all this. And that's just not the way kids are, because they don't think like that. They don't think about the future. They don't think about good routines built now, brushing your teeth every morning and night, how that impacts them 10, 20 years from now. They don't think about that. They're only worried about in the moment what I want to do. In the moment, I want to play Roblox. In the moment, I want to play Mario. In the moment, I want to play, you know, Astro Bot on PlayStation 5. Like in the moment, that's all the children are worried about. They're not worried. They're not thinking ahead. To be fair, most of us as kids weren't thinking ahead either. Most of us didn't know what you wanted to be when you were 10 years old. Maybe you had an idea. Most of us, some of us still searching in our 30s for what we want to do with the rest of our life. The point is, this is crossing the line. I don't know what's gonna happen with him in terms of, I mean, I think he got off a little light. I know it's a first time offense. I understand he has depression, supposedly, and he's getting treatments. And that's all well and good. But I mean, we're to a point that this is just the first time he's been busted. Usually the first time you're caught is not the first time it's happened. Because if the parent went to that so quickly off the kid just refusing to get off, just instantly went to that. That tells me this is not a first time offense. Now you might go with the child and say anything and that's fine. Children, when things become normalized in their life, they think it's okay. They don't think anything of it. The trauma comes later in life. It usually doesn't happen instantly as a kid. It can, by the way, the trauma can affect you as a kid. But usually the effects of it, like the trauma from my fiance, didn't affect her as much as a kid. She was still a happy, go lucky kid, but has affected her as an adult. That trauma has affected her today. Still affects her today. So you don't think about that in the moment because the kid will act normal and fine. They're not gonna be normal and fine later. So I hope that this is just, it never happens again. This person does it on their lesson. I don't know what this $100 to work without pay means. Are they forcing them to work at Microsoft? Is this just how Melbourne handles community services? Just another way to say you gotta do $100 community service? I don't know. That's not that you're nor there. I just, I cringe anytime I read stories like this. And the fact that it happened because the kid was playing a switch. Oh my gosh, guys, I'm a parent. I know what this is like. I literally am a YouTube channel. I'm a kid that's like, oh, you're a play switcher anymore? I'm like, yeah, I deal with this. I know. Not an excuse. There's not an excuse. You gotta find a way in that brain no matter how angry and depressed and whatever crap you're dealing with that you have a line you refuse to cross no matter what, just like me and my fiance do. We walk away. We walk away. Not the right way to deal with the kids when it comes to violence. You walk away. Get someone responsible there to help you so you can get a bright breather so you can separate yourself from your frustration. Take a moment to compile yourself before you take the next steps in your parenting. It's important. Now, for those that stuck around this long, you're just here for a quick studio update. One, some people noted in my last video that, man, that microphone you're using, ironically, it only sounded bad during the ad. Well, that's because I'm not using the same microphone the rest of the video. The microphone I'm using, guys, is the Algato Wave 3. Came out in 2020. It's not really any different than the Wave 1. Outside of like, there's some extra physical button stuff including a physical mute button. And that's gonna be useful while you're live streaming. But again, it is more expensive than the Wave 1. Not really a real reason to get it. There's software attached to it as well. I haven't even touched the software. The reason I went with this is because I'm using a different style boom arm with my streaming setup in the studio. So this is gonna be the microphone I use for that. And obviously, it conveniently works on the go. I still have a Blue Yeti microphone, which is really, really good as well. But it's big and it's bulky. And I just, I wanted to get away from big bulky microphones like that in my streaming setup. So this is what I'm gonna be using. And you guys, what do you mean streaming setup? Isn't your streaming setup just your set? Again, you guys will see all the differences soon enough. Well, hopefully by March 1st, it's gonna be pretty insane when I give that final studio tour and start making content in that renovated studio. That's for the renovations. We have completed all of the tear downs, repainting and everything else that needed to be done before the floor gets put in the floor. I will, should arrive tomorrow to be installed. Should take two to three days. We'll see how long it takes. We'll move furniture, I gotta do a bunch of stuff. And then once the floor is installed in the studio, I can begin the full renovation of the studio where I can finally set things back up, finish building out some of the sets that we just unfortunately needed to wait for. The floor to get here, so we can make perfect exact measurements of things that are gonna be either on the floor or coming up from the floor. Hard to explain till you guys see it. But I can't wait to show that off. I think it's gonna look incredible. I'm really thrilled. And then there's a piece of the studio that doesn't come to next week anyway. So one of the sets that might appear in the final studio tour vlog is going to not necessarily be complete since that piece won't arrive till next week. And my fiancee surprised me with it. So what's funny is someone's gonna see this thing that I'm gonna put on one of my walls and they're gonna be like, oh yeah, you're just copying. Copying what? My fiancee doesn't even watch. She surprised me. She doesn't even watch any YouTubers. So it was just an idea we had based on what I'm doing for that set. Now I'll say this guys, my sets are not wild and crazy. They're simplistic. They're clean, but they're gonna look good. And I can't wait. One of the things I'm dreading the most is actually one of the new tables for one of the sets between the base and the table itself. It's like 300, 400 pounds. It's insane. But we'll deal with that. Eric and I will deal with that. I know my back's killing me. By the way, if anyone has any suggestions on specific lower back stretches and maybe even a couple upper back because I know I have a strain on one of my upper back muscles, it just doesn't hurt as much as my lower back. Let me know. I know some of the basic stretches. Like any of the common ones you think about, I used to be an athlete. I know all those. So I'm looking for maybe some uncommon stretches that could just help relax those muscles and stop, maybe make my back spasms not happen so much. And I've never had back spasm problems. This is all new to me. So maybe if anyone's got some suggestions, I'm always open to that. Obviously I know the internet's there and I've Googled things. But I'm always willing to listen to the community. Some of you guys are even personal trainers out there. So it's good to just try out different things. Maybe even give me suggestions of specific videos to watch that can just help me lessen that pain. I know my muscles are gonna recover with rest and relaxation and stuff. Warm baths, hot towels, ice packs, et cetera. But I'm talking about just something to help me in the moment while I know I still have more physical labor to head to help me continue to push forward and get things done and not feel like I need to be better at it. And I do, by the way, I know the pain tolerance thing and I got a really high pain tolerance. So I'm fine. It's still, hey, you know what? If anyone's got some tips and pointers, I'm all ears. All right, folks. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. You guys are amazing. Find a way to smile to end your day and I'll catch you in the next video.