My Weekly Adventures #59 Happy Year of the Dog!!

Its Lunar New Year! I used to say Chinese New Year since I’m Chinese and I celebrate the Chinese version of it obviously but we are a very multicultural world now so Lunar New Year includes everyone else that celebrates it. Its the Year of the Dog in the Chinese Zodiac and supposedly, I’m looking at a bit of a better year. Crossing my fingers on that one. Actually, I went all out this year. I didn’t only decorate the house with blessings and other related items but I pulled out the fake flowers and also went out to buy some expensive bouquet (since flowers around where I live is really ugly). I ended up doing a full-on deep cleaning of the house. We are starting fresh, my friends. I know its all superstition and its not like a new year changes all that much but at least I would like to think it will bring some nice things our way. Less problems would be nice. That is really all I am hoping for.

The last two weeks have been a mix of stuff that happened. Some I have talked about and others not so much so lets recap!

Montreal DemoNight 2018

Montreal DemoNight 2018 is an annual event that started with indie game developers supporting each other that has now turned into a public event to go check out some strict 5 minute gameplay presentations of recent or upcoming games. I had the full intention of going to the event but work overtime took over and I ended up catching it via the Twitch stream instead. Of course, we weren’t going to just let the event go so we also did a lovely little recap on That Moment In here. If you haven’t read it, there are some incredibly cool games in development. Can I just say that 2019 is looking like a fantastic year for indie games?

Super Bowl & Cloverfield Paradox

Super Bowl watching is a tradition that my husband got me involved in when we first started dating. Because we don’t actually have antenna or cable, we only ever end up seeing the Super Bowl because it collides with Sunday night dinners with my mom. Due to my husband’s work, he  had missed a lot of the Super Bowls for the last few years but finally, this year, he got to watch it. Since he’s not a Patriots fan, we were cheering for the Eagles and lets just say, it was a pretty fantastic game, especially since the Eagles pulled off some nice touchdowns and then won what I believe is their first Super Bowl (I think I read that somewhere). Anyways, it sure feels nice after 9 years of watching it to finally understand the game and follow.

Anyways, when we did go home, we also realized that Cloverfield Paradox, which happens to be one of my anticipated movies of 2018 is skipping theatres and heading to Netflix right after the game ended, so we hunkered down to get the watched. Why has the review not been posted yet? Well, Valentine’s Marathon is underway and its been a smush of stuff happening that has put everything in delay. It is coming up soon-ish. I have some rather solid thoughts on it. I know there’s relatively low scores for this one and some even question how it all connects in this universe. Let me just say that, whether you like it or not, the Cloverfield movies marketing team sure knows how to drop a movie.

PC issues + update

You can read the post about the PC issues here.

If you didn’t read the post above, in short, my motherboard fried. I guess thats the bad news but then I do still have my cellphone and my husband’s computer to work on for the blog. It is also why, even though things are done slower (which only I would notice), in general everything here still remains fairly functional. Game Warp has been the most affected by this PC failure. With that said, the change from since the post above till now is that, things are moving at a brisk pace to PC recovery. As of last weekend, we were just waiting for one more part to arrive and then my awesome friend will build my computer and hopefully, with some time for setup, we will be up and running next week. Will that happen? I have no idea, but it would be awesome. However, I will try to get the blog stuff done in advance so that I can focus on Game Warp and get things back on track. We still have the remaining Until Dawn playthrough to upload as well as the Year in Review 2017 show with a special guest. It always sucks when the show that gets held up involves someone else.

Either way, things are moving along. 🙂

Remy’s Dilemma Gift

A week or two ago, I finally read Remy’s Dilemma and wrote up the review. You check it out here.

Much to my surprise, the author Andrew Snook reached out to me on Twitter. He thanked me for the review and told me that Remy’s adventure continues very soon in a sequel to be released later this year. At the same time, he also offered to send me a Remy’s Dilemma gift. Now, I don’t say no to gifts and I was honestly curious what I would get. Plus, I love reading and the book was a pleasant surprise so Remy’s Dilemma has been a constant stream of positive events and that makes me happy.  Let me tell you that the efficiency is incredible as I received my gift last Friday. I probably should have tweeted it sooner…but I forgot.

I’m tagging Andrew Snook to this post so if he reads this: Thank you so very much! I love it!!!

Valentine’s Marathon & Twilight

Valentine’s Day has passed us by. And well, I mentioned it earlier as something I’d considered doing the first time ever and that is to extend the marathon this year. With Ultimate 70’s blogathon being moved up one week and the PC issues, things have been slowing down. I still have a few movies to write up that I saw for the marathon. Since I was going to make Twilight a February highlight franchise, I figured I’ll just make this a lovely romance themed month. I still have a few movies I want to catch up on anyways so it all works out. With that said, welcome to a month of Ultimate 70’s Blogathon alongside an extended Valentine’s Marathon! Hope you all enjoy it!

Cute Kitty Pic

Upcoming:

• Ultimate 70’s Blogathon (going on now..check this page for daily updated entries)
• Valentine’s Marathon & Twilight franchise (ongoing…all links here)

This wraps up this Weekly Adventures!
What have you been up to?

Remy’s Dilemma by Andrew Snook

Remy’s Dilemma is another book that I picked up at Toronto Comicon last year. It has been sitting on my desk for a while in the TBR pile and I finally decided that it was time to start it.

Remy’s Dilemma
By: Andrew Snook

The world is coming to an end. That’s what Remy Delemme believes, anyways. While double-checking his lifelong to-do list to ensure he has led a rich life, he realizes he hasn’t come close to completing his goals. Panicked and short on time, Remy embarks on a chaotic road trip to complete the most important item on his bucket list – finding the answer to man’s greatest question. There’s just one problem. Detective Tobias Gray, the most respected criminal profiler in the Toronto Police Department, thinks Remy is a serial killer; and he’s not the only one who has come to that conclusion. Armed with a green crayon, smiley-faced stamp and a pack of cigarettes in a race against time, Remy carves a path of hilarious destruction, baffling and infuriating the police, his government and every other person he encounters. – Goodreads

From start to finish, Remy’s Dilemma is odd. Its so very odd. It all dials down to Remy’s character and all the things that happen around him that are both out of this world and unexpected. Sometimes it was purely nonsensical. However, while it did take a while to adapt to the oddities of the story, once you do, it is quite a mesmerizing read if not to just see what happens to Remy and how he manages to achieve his bucket list before the end of the world. To be honest, reading this book reminded me a bit of when I read Mailman by J. Robert Lennon.

Being in Canada all my life, its hard to not feel a little more connected to this book. The author Andrew Snook does a great job at setting up this alternate reality or maybe a future scenario of Canada being broken down where the province of Quebec has finally broken apart from Canada and turned into their own countries. Only those quite familiar with the situation will feel the connections of it all which somewhat adds on to the absurdities of what this book gives to the readers, especially when you consider that his lifelong to-do list might seem quite normal but then he manages to tick off a few of these boxes on his little road trip and for a few categories multiple times. The structure of the book follows both Remy and Detective Tobias Gray both having their own ways of measuring their progress be in figuring out the suspect or getting closer to doing everything on the bucket list.

As silly and as crazy as this road trip with Remy becomes, the story never forgets to shed a little bit of a deeper light on its main character. As the story pulls to the ending, we start seeing something of a glimpse of what perhaps motivates Remy even if it is in somewhat of an unrealistic way. Why would this be realistic when almost everything else that has happened to him also is quite unrealistic and fairly nonsensical. Remy is a very colorful character full of weird decisions and its almost like he’s the guy who walks around and explosions follow him in those CGI heavy movies. Of course, while Remy is an intriguing character, the book is full of other characters like Tobias Gray who also has quite some depth to his character and brings some more serious vibes to the story. However, the story is also scatter with this cameos of characters that Remy encounters that all have their entertaining aspects.

Remy’s Dilemma takes a little getting used to its oddities at the start but it is also these oddities that escalate during the story that makes it a page-turner. Its a fast read. However, its setting might prove to be a little more welcoming to Canadians (particularly living in Ontario and Quebec). However, the geographic story doesn’t quite make that much of a difference here as the characters and scenarios more than makes up for all the entertaining elements. I can’t help to think that Remy’s Dilemma might not be for everyone as it is a rather dark humor sort of story and humor is quite subjective to everyone.

Toronto Comicon Weekend Haul!

This past weekend was a fantasticLly awesome one as I headed out to Toronto for Comicon (just like last year). Its been a crazy process getting back and having everything cleaned and put away and getting back on routine so today, I am doing a simple one to talk about my haul.

I will take a few days this week (probably two) to share the Toronto experience because just like last year, as something of a reward or whatnot, I met up with Drew to hangout and visit Toronto and Comicon together. And just like true movie bloggers, we got in a movie as well amd even made it to a party (comicon related) as well as a sightseeing location. Lots of fun and a packed schedule but I think it turned out pretty great. Look for those posts while I get those new segments finalized (something I ran out of time last week for).

Lets check out what I picked up both before and at the Toronto Comicon.

Before the Comicon, I had a little bit of time before Drew arrived so I went out for a little shopping. I had a few stores on my list to hit and they were:

HMV
(because they are closing out of Canada so lots of discounts)

Disney Store
(never been to the one at Eaton Centre)

David’s Tea
(spontaneously remembered  was running out at home)

Toronto Comicon was a weekend thing and we bought the weekend pass so we went on Friday to scout out the show and then did most of our shopping on Saturday after all the Q&A panels. Here’s what I picked up:

Movies & Video Games

I got a super sweet deal for Uncharted 4 at Iceman Video Games which was also there last year. I’m pretty happy about it. They had some awesome choices and selection.

However, I really want to talk about Raven Banner where we stopped by to look at horror movies. They were fantastic and we had a great talk about horror indie films in general. Not sure they’ll read this post but that chat was a highlight of the ComiCon for myself. It really defines why we do this movie blogging thing and meeting people who are equally passionate about this. It was a fun and enlightening chat.

Novel and Comics

Let’s look at this from left to right.

• Toronto Comics‘ Yonge at Heart is a Canadian comic author that sets in Toronto. This is a free preview to get a snippet of their comic for their Kickstarter campaign running right now till beginning of April, I believe. I saw them on Twitter before the trip and really liked the art style and the idea of using a Canadian setting. You can check out the Kickstarter here.
• Remy’s Dilemma by Andrew Snook is a novel with this plot below from their website. A part of selling your work is being passionate about it. And Andrew does a great job at it. To be honest, his enthusiasm as he told his story and the joy he had recounting the story was so genuine that I could feel the awesomeness in the story. I haven’t started reading it yet but this looks like a fun journey with Remy especially when its set in two provinces in Canada that I’ve visited numerously  and live in.

The world is coming to an end. That’s what Remy believes, anyways. While double-checking his lifelong to-do list to ensure he has led a rich life, he realizes he hasn’t come close to completing his goals. Panicked and short on time, Remy embarks on a chaotic road trip to complete the most important item on his bucket list… – Snook Books

• Moonshot & Titan from AH Comics: Moonshot is an Indigenous Comics Collection (Volume 1) with various stories from different artists. With the purchase of this one (inspired by my peaked curiosity after my playthrough of Never Alone a few weeks ago), they also gave the gift of their graphic novel Titan: An Alternate History, which is great because then they saved me having to decide on which one to get with my purchase.

Artwork

Foiled Art makes this beautiful little pop culture pieces. They do a lot with gold or silver (or both for limited edition) but I honestly thought that this galaxy one looks superb. It really brings out the art and pops. This is going right over my work station at home because its so fantastically awesome!

Howl’s Moving Castle by Chasing Artwork

I love love love Miyazaki art and Chasing Artwork is a great artist. There are two comics out currently which I passed up on but these pieces are so atmospheric and creative. I actually stood there pondering which to get. He also has one for Nausicaa which just took my breath away. I’m personally a huge fan of Howl’s Moving Castle so this one is great.

Betty and Veronica by Dan Parent (with autograph)

For those of you who don’t know (which you might not because I don’t review comics), I love Archie comics and really I haven’t looked much at the newer ones although they do look cool but these traditional ones. I know I have a few volumes sitting in a box after we moved. I just can’t remember where so I couldn’t take it with me but Dan Parent was there who does a ton of these illustrations. I particularly loved this print and look he signed it also. Consider me a little star strucked when I saw him because I wanted to say a ton and just couldn’t.

The haul could have been so much more. There was so many great writers and artists that the choice was hard to make. However, I retain the idea of picking up stuff from the ones that I skipped but has an Etsy shop or other form of online retail. I have to say this was a pretty successful weekend!

What do you think about the haul? Anything that catches your eye?