Category: Notes

Time travel, part science-fiction, part fantasy. The one thing we all wish we could do to prevent ourselves from doing something stupid in the past. Unfortunately, we all have to keep cringing about it every night before bed. In the meantime, there’s nothing like enjoying a good time travelling story. Here’s the thing, I’m not here to go all physicist about time travel, and what is realistic or not, I’ll leave that for the Einsteins of our generation. I’m here for Hollywood time travel. Fiction. And I’m going to going all out on my overly specific rules for time travelling. Back to the Future 1-3 (1985) I can’t talk about time travel and not mention the best movie series about it: Back to the Future. There isn’t much that I criticize about how time travelling works in the three movies. Are 88 miles per hour enough? I don’t care. You …

Usually, we bookworms are the advocators of “read the book before seeing the movie”. Obviously, this isn’t some sort of law, and it does not improve your enjoyment of said movie – probably will take most of it away. And all because we believe that the books are always – probably most of the times – better than the movie. But there are times when I can’t squeeze in another book in my TBR, or I honestly don’t bother, and I go see the movie anyway. I always thought that watching the movie first was me just giving up on reading the book. The mystery is all gone. I already know how the story is gonna go. Why bother taking hours reading something that I already know how it’s going to end when I can rewatch the movie instead of in an hour and a half? Yet, I found myself wanting to read …

One of the top apps for the past few years to learn any language is Duolingo. People seem to be obsessed with this smiley-faced-but-actually-wants-to-murder-you Owl. While I’m on my long journey to learn Japanese all by myself, I want to try the more hip and helpful free apps on the market. To be completely honest, I just haven’t found the right app or source that allows me to learn the way I want, so meanwhile, I’ll be trying everything. After A LOT of Duolingo memes, I decided to finally sign up. I was determined to see what all the fuss was about. And… I never got so mad with an app in my life. Seriously, it was nerve-racking! At first, I was trying to understand exactly how everything worked. I took the initial test to evaluate my level of Japanese since this wasn’t my first rodeo… It got me nowhere! …

OWLs 2020 is officially over – it has been over for 4 days already – and I decided to compile the last two weeks into one post. After the second week, it started to get a little complicated to keep the momentum. These are some exceptional times we are living in, and not every day is a good day. Also not having a book like Pachinko that would give me a lot to think of and to share, didn’t help. But now it’s time to conclude the OWLs and turn the page to start a new month. Wednesday, 15th April 2020 Well, there goes my posting schedule! I haven’t done anything today other than resolve tech issues. First, I was trying to understand how some memory cards work in a Wifi IP camera and others don’t. Having all that figured out took me hours, not even counting testing time. Then, …

Another week of reading books for the OWLs 2020 is done. It wasn’t as productive as the first one, but I’m still reading and that’s all that matter. Wednesday, 8th April 2020 Last night, I entered the third and last part of Pachinko. The book is divided into three parts, each one sort of following each generation, and now I’m in the final round. This part is going to focus mostly on male perspectives, and I’m not excited about it. The characters that I’ve been loving are going to stay in the back and the ones that are being pushed forward I’m not as connected with. I hope this doesn’t affect my enjoyment. And day three of yoga complete. I have to say that it’s a challenge to try and do yoga or any other type of exercise with a bunny hopping around, jumping on top of you, and sniffing …

Back in 2017, I did a little readathon of my own to countdown the days until Christmas, and I was posting updates of my reading regularly. And last month, when Noura from the blog The Perks of Being Noura did a reading blog where she documented her weekend while she was reading Chain of Gold by Cassandra Claire, she got me thinking that maybe I could do something like that for the OWLs. When I started writing this, I wasn’t too sure about this idea – and I’m still not sure. What am I going to write about? Will I have anything to say? But I kept on doing it day after day, pouring out the thoughts I was having at the moment about the book I was reading, about tv series, about my day. So here it is the first week of the OWLs 2020: Wednesday, 1st April 2020 …

About a year ago, I was testing out different apps to help me learn Japanese. And now, I’m coming back with two other resources that I’ve been using and enjoying a lot. Before I explore into each one individually, I want to start by talking about the SRS. No, it has nothing to do with your car’s airbags or software development, SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System. This is a learning mechanism to help you memorize vocabulary by increasing the interval between reviews every time you are correct. The idea of the system is to focus on the vocabulary that you are struggling with instead of wasting time with the ones you already know. The system kind of works in levels. For every right answer, the word goes up a level while answering wrong brings it down. And the higher the level, the less frequent the word appears in the …

Once again I’m diving into the TV series that unfortunately have been cancelled. This time, it’s all about the comedies! And who doesn’t like a good laugh?! A lot of people do, reason why most of the series I’m going to mention have more than 3 seasons. I divided the post into two sections because some of these series were cancelled before the final season, which means it got some sort of ending, instead of leaving it on a cliffhanger – thank you! -TV series that got their “ending” Chuck (2007-2012) I went really dip into the closet to find this one! When I saw Chuck it was back then when you actually needed a DVR to record manually the TV so you wouldn’t miss out on an episode – now I feel old! Sadly, I’m sure I missed a few episodes between all the seasons. Although if I’m not …

My passion for Japan and their culture has been growing bigger and bigger over the years. Probably was the countless hours I’ve spent watching anime or the taste of my BFF for Japanese music. Either way, I’ve fallen in love with this intriguing, different, and “strange” culture. One of the reasons I wanted to learn Japanese was because of a manga: Ao Haru Ride (Blue Spring Ride in English). I loved it soo much I wanted to buy it to have in my shelf, but it was only translated into French, German, and Spanish (at the time). I didn’t want to buy a copy just because, I wanted to be able to read it as well. And if I had to learn a new language to be able to do that, then I might just learn Japanese. I don’t want to become fluent in it, so far all I want …

O.M.G. I opened an Etsy shop! I’m so f*ing scared right now. It’s such a big step. This isn’t playing with dolls anymore. I actually have a little shop online where people can buy stuff made by me. I can sell to anyone all over the world. I. Am. Terrified. I can’t believe this day actually came. Since I discovered Etsy it was always in the back of my mind trying out to open a little shop there, although I never knew what to sell. But that thought was always just that, a thought. Last year, I graduated from Uni and took a gap year to focus on the blog and see if it was something that I would like to invest for real. And having a blog as the only source of income is almost impossible, so I started thinking, what could I do to generate more income? I’ve …

I don’t know what it is about science fiction, but the shows have the tendency to be short. Sci-fi is one of my favourite genres, and it breaks my heart every time a TV series gets cancelled just because they didn’t meet the numbers the company wished for (it also happens with all genres, but today I want to focus on this one). Another harsh realisation is that TV series produced in the US only track the viewership inside the country. Since I live in Portugal, when the shows are broadcasted here, it doesn’t matter if it has a great success or not when it’s time to decide to renew the show for another season.