[Books] Star Wars: Ahsoka Review

My love for Star Wars: Rebels oddly solidified when Ahsoka Tano was revealed to be the mysterious informant Fulcrum at the end of the first season. She went on to be quite the epic character including her massive duel with Darth Vader at the end of the second season. More than anything, the show helped confirm just how far along she has come since her rather tragic end during Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

Naturally there's a rather large gap between her leaking the Jedi Order and becoming the intelligence asset for the fledgling Rebel Alliance. And outside of the fictional side of things, there were a lot of untold stories meant for the succeeding seasons of Clone Wars before the show was cancelled. This book, Star Wars: Ahsoka, aims to fill in some of that void with an exciting adventure focused all on her.

And the book naturally makes for fascinating reading as the Ahsoka that we come to meet in Rebels is a lot more confident and self-assured versus the Padawan she once was. Beyond that she also had a more balanced view of the Force that speaks of a lot of growing up.

[Games] Tiny Epic Galaxies Review

The words "tiny" and "epic" don't seem be two terms that can work well together but the line of games that are a part of this odd little segment of games are more and more proving to be an interesting effort to balance both. The game does manage to cleverly capture the sense of galatic conquest using such a small set of components.

I wasn't sure how to take this game at first but it turned out to be quite brilliant indeed. And the way the game plays out with multiple paths to victory has made this one of the few dice games that I'm willing to play on a regular basis.

[Theater] Arsenic and Old Lace (Repertory Philippines) Review

Completing Repertory Philippines' season of straight plays is Arsenic & Old Lace, a surprising black comedy that uses the tropes of the farce to great comedic effect. I figured from the title alone that this would be a place involving murder somehow but the way things play out was beyond my wildest imaginations. And thus the source material alone already gave a great basis for a good comedic play.

The cast of talent brought together for this production was larger than most plays of this nature, at least versus prior productions in recent memory. But everything came together quite nicely and resulted in a highly entertaining afternoon for me and Tobie.

This just goes to show that investing in a season ticket for Repertory Philippines continues to be one of the best investments one can make when you're into live performances of this nature. Musicals are fun in their own right but these plays find ways to use their words and other methods at their disposal to deliver a pretty solid theatrical experience.

[TV] A Series of Unfortunate Events: Season 2 Review

The first season of Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events was a revelation in itself. I was a little nervous that it would just be a weird rehash of the Jim Carrey movie adaptation. But it managed to find a way to be a completely different spin on the story and one that is pretty darn amazing.

The second season of A Series of Unfortunate Events continues the miserable adventures of the Baudelaire orphans well beyond what the movie had been able to cover. And thus things can only get worse as we are right in the middle of a relevision adaptation of a 13-book young adult series of rather dark novels.

And this second season is quite the meaty one as it tackles more "books" than the first season did with an equal amount of love, devotion, and punny humor. So many annoyingly clever puns.

It's hard to get to explaining why this is brilliant entertainment coming from a paragraph like that, but here we go!

[Books] The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time Audible Review

During my initial Audible trials, one of the books I figured would be interesting to listen to was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, as I had already enjoyed the original book and so this was just another way to celebrate a story I already liked.

So it was sort of ironic that this was not the first book that I listened to and it took me a few months into my now regular Audible subscription to finally listen to this book. It was worth waiting for.

As the story was one that I was already familiar with, it certainly made it easier to focus on the performance related to the story and possibly any additional nuances of meaning one might glean from a repeat reading of a story.