My May Adventures

Its hard to think that May is over with and at this point, its been more than 2 months in lockdown mode. Montreal is getting into reopening phase so we’ll see how all that goes probably in the June recap as it hasn’t completely started yet, really just starting up. With that said, I still worked from home in May. Things have slightly slowed down but there’s a shift in my own responsibilities and whatnot. Its been a bit crazy, not just the general situation but the weather went from some light snow in the beginning of the month until this last week of May hitting the 30+ degrees Celsius mark so its insane. Not a whole lot to talk about in these adventures but I’m mostly following up from last month’s Adventures post with podcasts and gardening, etc.

Movies and Tea Update: We’re on YouTube FINALLY!

Last month’s adventures, I had talked about working on moving the audio podcasts to Youtube as a new platform to see if we can get some more audience there. After an entire month of trying to do it but never quite getting it done, I gave myself a kick in the pants and did it. The first episode of Season 1 of our archives is finally on. The plan right now is that archives once a week until our current season ends and then I will upload Season 5 in between of putting up archives in between. That way, the old stuff is going up and the new episodes as well.

I’m debating on whether to do some more content after all the main business is done! All up for discussion with my awesome co-host, of course…because as we always say, we hate free time. 😉

Garden Update

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#gardencentre #haul from last weekend at @jean_francois_dauphinais is all transplanted into the #garden and #container. #flowers #fuchsia #bacopa #marigolds #basil #lemongrass #cucumber #squash #butternutsquash #delicatasquash #peppers #hungarianwaxpeppers #snapdragons #lemonthyme #dianthus #containergardening #gardening #annuals #perennials #veggies #vegetablegarden

A post shared by Kim (@tranquildreams) on May 30, 2020 at 11:45am PDT

There’s probably more to update here. There are a few more containers as I also did try to grow almost all the seeds that I had in the house. Some came out and some didn’t but its still somewhat of a waiting game other than the butterfly garden flowers, which seem to be doing fairly well in both of the containers. I will probably share a picture of it once it has more progress than baby leaves.

The trip to the garden center was also decent. Its more that, probably because of COVID-19 and the later season and unstable weather, there was a very limited assortment of vegetables or plants or whatnot. For example, the zucchini was not even grown from seeds and I wasn’t going to take the risk so skipped it. All of this year’s vegetables are new trials: Butternut Squash, Squash, Delicata Squash, Hungarian Wax Peppers and Marina Cucumbers (which we’ve had before but never grown..my mom has though). It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it all. More updates next month.

The whole staying at home as given a whole new motivation to weeding though so hoping to take advantage of the nice weather and the extra time from working at home whenever I can to get the garden back up to how I’d like it to be.

Game Warp Podcast – New Episode

If the lockdown did anything for us, its getting us back into our Game Warp groove. I’ve definitely been gaming more even if its not for actual podcast recordings but its built up some backlog for game reviews and mobile game roundups to potentially go up as its all in the works right now. Above is our latest episode that you can give a listen!

Online Battle of Ingredients Group Hangout

No pictures here since I like to respect everyone’s privacy and online names and whatnot. We didn’t forget Battle of Ingredients and are waiting for this whole social distancing to go at some point to resume normal operations. We have thought about doing some online edition but its my fault mostly that work and changing seasons has added a lot to the to-do list so not a ton of time to think about it. However, the crew did get together for an online dinner together and then a Jackbox party together so it was a lot of fun. New times calls for new measures to still hang out with our friends and stay in touch.

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for this May Adventures!
Its mostly little updates on the different projects right now!

What have you been up to during this lockdown period?
Is your city reopening gradually?

My April Adventures!

As we step into April, the world is in a surreal state with COVID-19 running out lives back to the safety of our homes for those who aren’t essential services and/or can’t work from home. I don’t want to talk too much about it on the other posts but as Adventures is more of a personal offering, its hard to not touch on it. I’ve been saying whenever I mention this that its important to stay positive and with that said, we look at the pros of the situation (despite all the bad) and that is we learn to appreciate and be grateful that we still have this blogging community to hide away from the surreal reality surrounding us.

Working From Home

There’s not much to say about working from home other than the fact that April was a crazy month. March was just adjusting to working at home and then April hit so hard because staff decrease and I had to work a 2 person workload. Luckily, I had some help as I slowly got the office set up with the printer and getting new cartridge and stuff that took longer than usual to arrive because of the current situation. I’m starting to realize how hard it is to work non-stop for such a long time. Luckily, April is over and my staff will go back up to almost normal so I can work through May, hopefully more peacefully!

Game Warp Podcast
(& Learning About Headliner)

Game Warp is slowly coming back to life as we settle through our direction and how the shows that we’d like to do in the coming while. Our latest podcast is a review discussion on Life Is Strange 2 which recently won the BAFTA Games Award for Best Performer in a Leading Role with its character of Sean Diaz. We did record this before the whole awards thing so its just a coincidence that we released it at the same time.

As I struggled through how to structure the audio podcasts to be more appealing, my wonderful co-host told me Headliner which is how I made this video. Learning about new things is one of the fun things about blogging and podcasting. Hopefully you like the podcast! Of course, you prefer the audio version, you can find us on Anchor and a ton of other platforms.

Right before this post went live, we released another episode for Game Warp as a list/discussion piece on Greatest Female Characters as well as listing our favorites.

Garden Coming Alive

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This might be an unusual time but we can still be grateful for the little things like the #garden coming alive. The #perennials are starting to peek out of the ground . #spring #gardening #sedum #rhubarb #greenonions #tulips #plants #backyardstroll

A post shared by Kim (@tranquildreams) on Apr 4, 2020 at 1:26pm PDT

I do have a bunch of pictures for another Instagram post but then I never go around to posting it up. The garden is indeed coming alive and much more vibrant than the beginning of April. Blueberry is starting to show signs of life along with raspberry and strawberry. The trees are coming back as well. Then we have the perennials especially the new ones last year in the bee garden are mostly all coming back! I promise to share pictures soon on Instagram!

Movies and Tea Podcast

Nothing like blogging more and recording more for podcasts during this time. Movies and Tea is releasing on a good schedule now as we are having a decent backlog! Its all thanks to my awesome co-host Elwood who gets all these shows edited and released, of course! Ang Lee season is almost over. Above is the penultimate episode of Ang Lee for Lust, Caution.

On other news, which I hoped to share with you all this time around, Movies and Tea Podcast will be on Youtube soon. Its a new avenue and will be done with Headliner in the audio format as well. The channel is set up but its mostly putting up all the archive episodes gradually. I’ll give an update in May for sure!

New Objectives

Everyone is trying to make the best of staying at home as something that they are tackling. I’m sure when you flip through your feed that you see a ton of your own friends tackling baking, cooking, entertaining others through music, streaming, etc. For myself, I’m more of an introvert and while I did say that I would stream if I got to work at home during this ordeal, things didn’t quite turn out that way, as explained in my “Working at Home” section above. However, I did set myself a new goal and that’s to pick one song to play on the piano really well (maybe not perfectly since I’m far from that) but be able to play it and sing at the same time. I’m mostly doing separate practicing right now: piano and singing done separately but soon, I might be able to start putting it together. The song that I picked is Encounter by Stefanie Sun, which is one of my favorite songs and I used to sing it well enough but singing is a tad rusty nowadays. Call it practice or whatever but its been really fun doing this.

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for this April Adventures!
What adventures, right? Shameless self-promotion is what this mostly consists of!
I’ll try my best to get a better routine down in May once I have more time!

My October Adventures!

Welcome to the October Adventures! Its been a crazy month full of lots of things going on. Suffice to say other than cooler weather and some really windy and rainy days where we got some of the closing gardens and other preparing the house for winter thing going on (which I won’t talk about because I’m not sure anyone wants to know about it), it was a clash for festivals. Let’s look back and see what happened!

Hiking: CIME Haut-Richelieu at Mont St-Gregoire

I’m not sure how many more hikes we can get in before the season is too cold to go, but we’re taking them as we can between festivals and other commitments and getting the house ready for the winter season and whatnot. After a much debated weekend with bad weather looming over our heads, the weather finally changed and we decided to go for a hike a little closer to us and went to the nearby tourism area and found CIME Haut-Richelieu at Mont St-Gregoire which had a very reasonable 4km hike. It was steep and rather quick elevation with lots of steps and stairs and rocks to walk over. We took the panoramic trail and got a pretty nice view of the area around.

Festival Du Nouveau Cinema (October 9 to 20)

Festival du Nouveau Cinema kicked off on October 9th with the program mostly starting the next day (since press doesn’t access to opening and closing films). With that said, this is the first day doing media to cover this festival so a little of the jitters as this festival has some rather deeper films and a lot of the films themselves are all about taking chances with the synopsis provided as well as having very limited evening timeslots to fit them all in making the scheduling very time-consuming and constantly going through changes during the festival. However, that is behind us now and things went fairly smoothly. I had wanted to do on average one review per day and overall, I managed to achieve it.

Here’s the full list of films if you missed any of them:

• Little Joe
• Color Out of Space
• Family Romance LLC
• Diner
• Adoration
• Sole
• J’ai Perdu Mon Corps
• Mickey and the Bear
• A White, White Day
• Dirty God
• Carte Blanches Shorts : Aujourd’hui ou je meurs; Pluie sui tole volée

Highlighted are my top 5 in no specific order. If you want to know my top movie, its Diner. Hands down, no competition because while the other films were great, this one has rewatchability in its favor.

Sherbrooke Met La Table & Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook

Like previous years, we take a day out to the Eastern Townships to go check out a restaurant part of Sherbrooke Met la Table. This time, we decided to go back to one of the first ones we tried called OMG Resto which is actually located in a what used to be a church. We went for the lunch menu but ended up getting the normal.

After that, we headed for a little hike at Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook. We had previously gone at night for Foresta Lumina. Its a nice little family trail although has a lot of steep stairs and slopes.

Toronto After Dark Film Festival (October 17 to 25)

Overlapping the last few days of Festival du Nouveau Cinema was receiving the approval for remote coverage for Toronto After Dark Film Festival for its short films, which was a lot of them. About 95% of the films were available and I managed to review almost all of those available. All the movies are above and I’m not going to list them all separately but just in how I batched them in the posts and then share my top 5 (which will be hard).

• Shorts 1: We Three Queens/Eyes Open/Make Me A Sandwich
• Shorts 2 Blood Machines: Turbo Killer/Far Horizon/Flip
• Shorts 3: Ocimokw!!/Grave Sight/Down the Rabbit Hole/Hearth
• Shorts 4: Barbara-Anne/Kakatshat/Schism/A Noise That Carries
• Shorts 5: Dark Before Dawn: Convoy/Patterns/The Changeling
• International Shorts After Dark
• Canadian Shorts After Dark

I don’t review a lot of short films over here but this festival’s shorts definitely opened my eyes to some very creative premises and some outstanding stories. With that said, these are my top picks:

• Turbo Killer
• Hearth
• Barbara-Anne
• La Noria
• Moment
• The Haunted Swordsman

Lambcast: Evil Dead Franchise

Nothing like a little last minute podcast call-up to add into festival season. However, it did help binge watch the Evil Dead Franchise to prepare for the Evil Dead discussion over at The Lambcast with a bunch of people with rather interesting opinions about this one. Its always a fun time at Lambcast recording so head over to check out the episode HERE.

Battle of Ingredients

With the summer and warm weather going away and festivals slowly fading in the background with events and such, we’re back on track with Battle of Ingredients. October Battle of Ingredients is the Fall BBQ. The post is a bit delayed but its currently in the works. Expect it up next week some time.

Other than that, November Battle of Ingredients is always hiatus due to our checking out the MTL a Table event. We will be checking out three restaurants this year if all goes to plan so I’ll be talking about it as it happens!

Game Warp Podcast is Back!

We’ve been on a huge podcast hiatus for Game Warp. While we have been getting back on the blogging side of things, which is always a great start and will continue to be focused on the blog. The podcast is back in our recording schedule. After some changes a few months ago and the festival coverages and such, we have moved ourselves onto Anchor and be an audio podcast from now on. I’m sure I mentioned it before. The episodes will be audio format only available on Youtube as well.

To kick things back into action, and to show our diversity on this whole rebranding thing we’re doing, we start off with something a little different and that is a discussion on Essential Horror Games!

You can check out the episode over on Game Warp HERE.

Halloween Marathon Wrap-up

With all the crazy stuff going on in the final 2 weeks of October, suffice to say that the marathon somewhat didn’t quite happen although Toronto After Dark did work in my favor on that level. I still have one double feature to come out for the marathon and it will be done ASAP. However, in general, things are wrapped up here! Its been a fun month and I actually got quite a bit done in the first half of the month.

Upcoming November Events: MTL a Table, MEGA MTL, Blood in the Snow Festival

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s it for the October Adventures!
What have you been up to?

A Busy Day For Podcasts!

Last minute changes and something I should do more frequently is do a round-up of podcasts release!

Holiday hiatus is finally over and we’re getting back into the action of things on all projects and last week and specifically today, we just released three podcast episodes. Why not share it with all of you.

Let’s go project to project and at the same time, divert you all to their respective blogs so you can follow it if you are interested and haven’t already.

GAME WARP PODCAST

Game Warp Podcast kicked off the year pretty much in style.  This month, we had quite a few shows go up already. After ending the year with our Top 10 Games Reviewed in 2018 and our Year in Review 2018 (for gaming, of course), we started the year in a great way by doing a review for a new free Steam game called What Never Was which is only about an hour long so, the show itself is only 10 minutes long to avoid spoilers.

Fast forward back to today where we release our latest feature piece. Last year, we did our Top Anticipated Games as a written post, we’ve decided to change it to podcast format and combined it with the look forward to 2019 that we usually do. In today’s episode, we take turns to discuss our Top 15 Anticipated Games of 2019.

If you like gaming and haven’t followed us yet, you can find us over at our blog HERE.

MOVIES & TEA

Its been over a month since our last podcast for the second season. A lot of reasons for this but we finally did get around to recording and editing and it finally was released today. The next movie in our second season Guillermo Del Toro journey is The Devil’s Backbone, his third directed feature film. Its a movie that I’ve personally heard a lot of great things and have been recommended to me over and over again. Finally, I have ticked off my list and I’ll be getting the written review up there soon.

However, today is about the podcast and we had our first guest on Movies and Tea join us and that’s Greg from The Debatable Podcast/Action A Go Go. You can listen to it below.

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You can also find our podcast on a ton of avenues including Podomatic, etc. If you haven’t followed us over at Movies and Tea, head over there via HERE.

We have our individual takes on each of the films we’ve done podcasts on and some other random features that matches with the director that we’re highlighting that season. 🙂

That’s it for this Podcast recap!
Things get back to normal programming soon!
I just wanted to give some love to my other projects today. 🙂

Game Warp Podcast: All the E3 Coverage!!

It just hit me that I actually hadn’t shared the Game Warp Podcast coverage!

These shows take a lot of energy and to edit and extends E3 for at least another week. Don’t get me wrong! I’m not complaining, just stating the fact. I already explained how it did cut into blogging time and I have to say that I am fairly recuperated from everything now. Also, if you want to get timely Game Warp Podcast videos, you can subscribe to the channel HERE! Help us out with growing the channel! There’s a ton of stuff there from playthroughs to impressions to demo/betas and event coverage and features.

Let’s just jump right into it!

Let’s start with the big shows as we take a look at the titles that were presented and some highlights of what we liked, didn’t like and frankly was a little disappointed with, when it applies.

E3 Impressions Part 1
EA, Xbox, Bethesda, Square Enix

E3 Impressions Part 2
Ubisoft, PC Gaming Show, Sony Playstation, Nintendo

For the next two shows, as per our tradition, we like to do our Top 10 Triple A Games and Top 10 Independent Games for this year’s E3.

That’s it for this E3’s coverage!
You can find the full coverage at That Moment In.

When E3 2018 Takes Over… #E32018

Hey everyone!

The last few days have been quiet. To be honest, I’m pretty impressed that I only missed 2 days out of the tentative schedule. However, I’m working on the next few posts. Unfortunately, it probably won’t happen for today. As with the previous two years, Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka E3, is currently underway. While Game Warp doesn’t have the resources to be on site, we are covering it remotely. The event has officially kicked off to the public but the whole weekend from Saturday to Tuesday was six conferences. We did a great job because we planned ahead. I know this because I feel more alive and managed to work efficiently and we managed to work through the time zone differences to get the recaps sent to That Moment In in a timely manner. With that said, it took over that entire time frame. Its surprising that I did get some home chores and other must-dos.

After some thought, as a little bit of a transition piece before I got back to some regular programming later this evening or most probably tomorrow, I’m going to share the links to the recaps that Elwood and I worked very hard together. On top of that, I’ll share the one stand out game for myself in each conference just to add a little of my personal touch here.

Electronic Arts

For our full EA conference recap and impressions, you can find it HERE.

Microsoft Xbox

You can find the full Microsoft Xbox Briefing recap and impressions HERE.

Bethesda

Check out our recap and impressions of Bethesda Conference HERE.

Square Enix

You can check out the full recap (including of course the Kingdom Hearts III recap which I did enjoy, but these two games look great) right HERE!

Ubisoft

Now for the very awesome Ubisoft recap and impression, where I just can’t put everything I’m excited about, right HERE.

PC Gaming Show

And for the PC Gaming Show round-up HERE.

Playstation

Of course, the big show to end the main conferences is Playstation. Find the recap HERE.

Nintendo Direct

Nintendo Direct’s full recap is HERE.

Game Warp is still working on some other material for E3 so its still now done yet.
However, the conferences ending and all the recaps done means I can get back to normal programming.

TV Binges, Book Reviews and Double Features are in the horizon! 🙂

I know this isn’t normal stuff but if you check out Transference, you can see Elijah Wood’s debut game. At the same time, Joseph Gordon-Levitt also made an appearance at Ubisoft for Beyond Good and Evil 2 talking about working with them and his company, HitRecord. Lots of very cinematic games in the horizon also. Its pretty awesome!

Game Warp Podcast: Spectrum Break Interview

The next Game Warp Podcast is here and we’re sitting down with a solo game developer and talking about his recently released game called Spectrum Break.

Spectrum Break is a colorful synth-infused physics platformer. Playing as a little surfer dude, you have to light up all the blocks however zero gravity also plays into this game so that whenever you touch a block, it shifts, making it harder to reach where you need to go. It was released earlier this year at the end of March.

For all the info, you can find it in the description of the Youtube video!

Hope you enjoy!
Remember to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already and/or share your thoughts in the comments!
It helps us out a lot to grow!

No time for writing..how about some videos?

Happy Friday everyone!

I’m sure hoping all of you are having a fantastic and awesome day! The fact that I managed to get posts up almost every day of this week is a miracle in itself but today, I’m out! This is the 5 minutes on my break I have to just get something quick together.

I had a beautiful book review in the works but just not time to wrap it up and I’m not in the habit of posting subpar material (since I’m already not that skilled).

With limited time to get this together, let’s see…*thinking*…what to share?

How about some fun facts for Game Warp and my gaming habits!  Since I only post up the podcasts here, maybe this stuff will peak some interest and I can get some new subscribers over there as well. That would make my weekend.

• I started up a new series doing monthly roundups of mobile games that I’ve checked out! This is the latest one!

• Life is Strange is what started up the podcast even if we didn’t look at it as our first game to debut the show. With that said, last year’s prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm is our April featured game and here’s the first episode of the game. Its heavy on story and choice-based. If you want to watch a movie-like game, this is a nice choice for the most part, plus you can laugh at how I make bad choices and decisions. There are five parts to the video making it into digestible morsels of viewings because its like 3 hours (to my surprise) for one episode.

• All our gameplay/Let’s Play/playthrough (whatever you want to call it) videos are no commentary so you can experience the game for yourselves and act as walkthroughs as well.
• My husband is also part of the Game Warp team. While he started out just helping out with the first person shooter games, he started running a racing simulator games series for both Gran Turismo Sport and Assetto Corsa this year. Project Cars 2 is in the works and should make an appearance later this year. Here’s the latest video!

• I have an addiction with rhythm games and story driven experiences and am absolutely horrible at first person shooters because I can’t multitask in gaming to save my life but am a fantastic multitasker with everything else. Not sure why….

That’s it! Some shameless promotion here, I know!
Its a fun little Friday posts and reminds me that I’ve worked hard on something this week other than my job.
Building a Youtube channel is super hard and we’re at that beginning phase where its just pushing through, but its still a lot of fun!

Are you a gamer? What type of games do you play?

Game Warp: Interview with Pandemonium Interactive

And we are back with our first interview of 2018!

This episode on Game Warp Podcast, we sit down with Alex from Pandemonium Interactive to talk about his upcoming game N.U.T.Z. which is currently in a Kickstarter campaign. N.U.T.Z. is a 2D non-linear action platformer inspired by Megaman and Metroid. Its set in space and you play as squirrels fighting space dinosaurs. Wondering how that idea came about? Watch the interview and you’ll know all about it as well as the future of N.U.T.Z. and what are in the plans. Hope you enjoy!

You can find the Kickstarter campaign for NUTZ here.

Thanks for watching!
Consider subscribing to our channel!

Game Warp Podcast: The Cave – Review

And we are finally back on track.

Well, everything is kind of relative, right? The little detour because of our mostly technical (but other issues did occur) situation finally seems to have been caught up. We’re only about a week later than usual for the featured reviews and that is pure awesomeness in my mind at least.

With that said, 2013’s puzzle platformer The Cave, developed by Double Fine Productions was our March featured game. Its one that I dabbled in years ago in the demo and kept waiting for a discount and always forgot or just missed it. Whichever it was, I finally got to check it out.

In this podcast, we review it and discuss what works and what doesn’t.

Thanks for watching!

Have you played The Cave?
Subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed and not miss any of our future reviews & playthroughs or feature pieces!