What’s Up & Adventures – January 2022

Welcome to 2022’s first adventures post and its all new and shiny. If you missed the 2022 Upcoming Plans post, this year I’m trying out combining the What’s Up and Adventures. With the current state this month of Montreal, Adventures are rather thin although I’m going on a completely new journey internally and physically so that’s something. With that said, Adventures to begin and then we’ll wrap up with the What’s Up at the end for a monthly round-up of the books, films, games and TV that I checked out.

Letterboxd Year in Review

Films Logged: 219
Hours Watched: 472
Most Watched Actor: Samuel L. Jackson
Most Watched Director: Quentin Tarantino

Letterboxd Year in Review always arrives later than the year-end recap so here’s a quick overview of some of the stats there.

Booster Shot

Booster shot is done! It went much smoother than the second dose to my surprise. I was pretty happy about it though since it meant that I could still do some stuff during the weekend as I recuperated. Not much to say there. I just had a little pain in my upper arm and that’s about it.

11th Blogiversary

Its been 11 years of blogging with this blog! There’s been lots of ups and down in life and also a lot of changes in content and more projects coming and going. I had some plans for the blogiversary that kind of fell apart. There’s just a whole lot to be thankful for and really happy with how I’ve built this space even if sometimes it feels like blogging is a lot less popular and the familiar bloggers are slowly less and less everyday. Either way, I’m excited for this new year. Lots of fun stuff coming up that I’m just having a hard time getting off the ground mostly because of work deadlines and lots of overtime but that’s slightly better now so hopefully you will be seeing more frequency on the posting front!

What’s Up- January 2022

Welcome to the new style for the What’s Up as it pairs with the Adventures post! This time around I will leave most of the actual opinions to the reviews themselves which will be released within a month of completion for the most part. Might be a slow start yet again due to work schedule for this month however everything’s partially written. I usually do highlights as well for this section to share what I think stood out to me. In this new one, the titles will be in bold for those that I particularly feel is worth your time.

Books: Nothing yet. Books in transition to a new shelf.

Films:

• The Birds (1963)
• 6 Years (2015, Review)
• All The Bright Places (2020, Review)
• Howl’s Moving Castle (rewatch, 2004)
• Booksmart (2019, Review)
• Carrie Pilby (2016, Review)
• Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
• Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021, Review)
• Alligator (1980)
• Dude (2018, Review)
• Every Day (2018, Review)
• The F*ck-It List (2020)
• Aziz Ansari: Nightclub Comedian (2022)

TV:

• Light The Night (華燈初上, Part 1&2)
• Voir (Season 1, 2021)
• I Know What You Did Last Summer (Season 1, 2021) Review
• Love At Night (夜色暗涌時, 2021)
• The Silent Sea (Season 1, 2021)
• Deadly Class (Season 1, 2018)
• Too Hot To Handle (Season 3, 2022)
• The Wheel of Time (Season 1, 2021)
• The World of Fantasy (靈域, 2021)
• Hellbound (Season 1, 2021)

Currently binging: Shining For One Thing (一閃一閃亮星星, 2022)

Games: Currently playing: Genesis Noir

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for this Adventures and What’s Up recap!
Hope you enjoyed it!
What have you been up to?

My Weekly Adventures: The 8th Blogiversary

This weekly adventures is a tad later than usual…because of the big event that Tranquil Dreams is 8!!

It all fits perfectly because I didn’t have much that happened other than working on some personal matters that I don’t prefer to share here. On top of that, its a whole lot of overtime at work and you all don’t want to hear about that just as much as I don’t want to talk about it, I’d presume. Then there’s the obvious issue of being sick which I had mentioned briefly on a What’s Up. So all in all, not a ton of fun activities in the last two weeks.

 

Normally, I have the habit of an annual vlog to celebrate the blogiversary but let’s just say that the plans fell through because I forgot I had to film and ran out of time. I have to say that it might be for the better. Before we move onto the more Weekly Adventures bit, let me write a little on celebrating the blogiversary today.

For one, its a massive thank you to everyone who has stopped by here, liked a post and the other bloggers and podcasters that I’ve worked with. Its pretty fantastic to think that I’ve been doing this for eight years and that now its part of my daily life and the content has grown and changed as well. Its also been a journey where I’ve learned a lot not only in finding my writing style and simply writing better but also the fact that without here, I wouldn’t have learned video editing and audio editing and learned how to be a part of podcast co-host and co-host a blogathon as well. At the same time, I never thought that I’d get the opportunity to cover festivals and review screeners and all that fun stuff. All in all, a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone whether you drop by today or later on or before this post existed.

This past week was a nice little work up to this because I had one announcement and one little decision in the making which is the only Weekly Adventures worthy parts…

Ultimate 2000s Blogathon Announcement

In case you missed it, Drew and I announced out Ultimate 2000s Blogathon on Monday. Sign up and submissions are open for 3 weeks. We are looking forward to it all. Its the 4th year that we are doing what we have called the Ultimate Decades Blogathon this time of year and the 2000s has such great movies that we are looking forward to what picks show up.

If you missed the announcement, you can find it HERE.

To Come: Videos, Vlogs, Discussions and more

Ever since I stopped doing What’s Up videos, I’ve been pondering this video business for a while. To be honest, I’ve been thinking about this even during that phase. Doing every other week seems to be hard to keep up with mostly because it just falls out of routine and seems a bit redundant. So I decided to do a monthly What’s Up roundup sort of thing. At least thats the idea for now. The goal is to eventually get something much more entertaining like discussions or compare and contrasts on movies and adaptations or their remakes or reboots or sequels. Something that I like to talk about preferably so it can really be anything. I might do audio and just do clips in the background more than myself showing up in the videos.

I still have some decisions to make but I think its a nice way to liven up the Youtube channel a little and do some extracurricular video editing practice. I did think about doing like a podcast style as well or maybe just doing an audio version as well.

All in all…

We’re 8 after all! I’m looking forward to changing things around and a part of me wants to go back to where it all started with a bigger focus on food and baking which I honestly miss a lot. I miss the days that I watched a lot of Chinese and Taiwanese TV series and Hong Kong movies and I guess its the years that its been here that I’m not as afraid to take those risks so I’ll slowly get that going as well. Its been on my mind for a few years now and I never figured out how to integrate it so I’m going to just go for it once I find the right structure and angle.

That’s it for this special Weekly Adventures!
Thanks to everyone for being a part of this journey!
Being here for 8 years means that I’ve seen many bloggers come and go.
As for myself, I see myself going further a little longer 🙂

We’re 7! [Vlog]

Hello all! Today is a special day! Tranquil Dreams turns 7 today! 

According to WordPress, my blogiversary is actually in October but I launched the blog officially back in 2011 on January 17th as I started up the mission to be positive and from there, its truly expanded into a slightly imperfect, most times disorganized, full of procrastination and a journey full of lessons and new things sort of versatile little world.

I’ve wanted to do a vlog for my blogiversary for at least the last 3 years but always bailed out due to not liking it so much. After 3 takes and still not being too satisfied with it after a ton of editing, I decided to just upload it! Its slightly longer than I would like, but I tend to ramble, more so when I’m sick apparently, so forgive me if this gets boring. The idea is that I’d like to thank you all for being a part of this Tranquil Dreams journey!

Thanks for watching! 🙂

At least you can see here why I shy away from vlogs so much or any video content with myself talking..haha!
However, I am serious about the idea to have more video content and probably things less lengthy at about 5 to 10 minutes.

We’re 6!!

Today’s post is going to be short and sweet!

WE’RE 6!!

In the heart of the next Disney movie in the Baking Through Disney line-up, I just couldn’t resist to use this one as the happy birthday to Tranquil Dreams!

I figured a gif day would be fantastic to just save up my gibberish and these thoughts really capture what my daily moments and possibly the things that started up this blog six years ago!

Pretty accurate way of saying it. I think a lot and probably overthink much more than I should. The amount of stuff in my head is sometimes incredible. If only, it meant something more and to be honest, having a blog makes those pieces of odd opinions and thoughts have an outlet. Sure, I’m not quite as skillful and write as well and coordinate my thoughts as a lot of you here and I really need to thank you for sticking around because I know I’ve improved and its been fantastic to be blogging with a bunch of such fun and awesome people like you.

I don’t plan a whole lot for my blog. In fact, the organizing and planning really just started in the last few months. Also, the benefit of making a blog even if that is hard. Then we have living. Do you know how many more reasons I have to go out and embrace being a foodie or going to see a movie or especially checking out all these great events and hiking trails and just having a ton of fun outside of my blog? I never do it deliberately for the blog but it makes me want to experience more and share it with all of you. As much as it seems really odd to say that I’m living more because of owning a blog, I am. I’ve met and collaborated with awesome people, made some cool friends in the process and even started up projects.

Back to that 2 hours planning thought, six years ago, I started this not really knowing what I was doing. I didn’t know what to write and it started off a pretty personal affair, looking at photography and recipes and just random daily prompt writing and look at what it is now. Not only that, Tranquil Dreams has gone to writing about gaming over at That Moment In, spent a part of of the last year part of That Moment In podcast (also known as The Random Chat Show for a while), then now, I’ve even expanded to our gaming podcast with Elwood Jones, Game Warp. All of this are things I wouldn’t have imagined ever.

I probably talked about this some time before or whatnot but writing in college was those things that my English professors thought I did not have any talent in. If you only saw my marks, man, were they depressingly bad. Its quite a miracle that I’m now writing a blog post every single day. If you aren’t surprised, I’m still embracing that every day and being so happy that you all drop by and check out what I have to say about whatever I choose to write on.

Suffice to say, this blog here has gone through a lot of change in the past year along with the projects I’ve taken on. The experience is irreplaceable and honestly, the last six years have been great for life and just having here as an outlet to have fun and be myself really makes it just so awesome!

Rambling done! To end this…

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I LOVE YOU ALL!
I have so much for the coming year!
My virtual glass of wine is raised in celebration for the next year in the blogverse!

We’re 5!

Can you believe 5 years went by already?

So much has changed in my life from when I first started blogging till today.  There are days I think, “Maybe its time I go do something else”, but then, I just love blogging and all of you lovely awesome friends that I’ve met here.  Its a journey all on its own.  If anything, I’ve learned a lot from this experience and it has been an amazing and awesome one!

The New Year’s was just two weeks ago so I’ve pretty much done all the announcements that I need. You can go check it out HERE! Pretty much everything is staying the same.  Except last year was highly unproductive in meeting any of my goals from long-term projects like Baking Through Disney and The Classics Adventure, even my Reading Challenge was one short and lets not even talk about the PopSugar Reading Challenge that I totally forgot about.  I’m not perfect and that’s okay.  A lot of things happened last year and while not much happened, a lot also did happen.  I’m trying to be more involved and this year, I’m trying to comment more.  I’m still working super hard on catching up with all of your posts. Its a work in progress but one that I try to take my time to do as much as I can.

However, this post was supposed to be a vlog (like I say every year).  Five years is a milestone.  One that I’m extremely proud of.  The versatility and diversity of the content has really grown from that first year when I was writing in my little corner and struggling to write up one post a week to now where I try to get on average on post a day and finally learned how to plan in advance and be more organized.  All very great accomplishments that are useful not only for here but for my life in general.

Tranquil Dreams has always been about staying positive and experiencing new things, trying something different and all that lovely stuff.  Its about living life and even though, I go through surges of talking about movie, I’m working hard this year to balance out the things I enjoy and talk about that.  The last two years have been a little crazy with adapting to being a new homeowner (and the renovations) and then wedding planning and getting back energy after the big day.  Its all done and things have settled down so I’m ready to take on this year heading into Year 6 with much more energy and many more fun things that I plan on doing.

I was trying to get something special regarding upcoming changes for this post but after some debate, I’m giving it a little more thought so I’ll do another reveal soon.  I want to really take my time in making sure that its going to be exactly how I like it.  For now, its a secret 😉

I never really know how to approach these blogiversary posts. What I really do want to say in short (since this is already kind of long) is that…

THANK YOU! Thank you so much for being here, stopping by and doing everything you do.  I appreciate it so so much! Meeting new bloggers, making friends, joining in to blogathons, being a part of The Random Chat Show and That Moment In, etc: its all a great experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  If anything, I’m working hard to make here better every single day! 🙂

Thank you again and stay awesome! 🙂