Staircase Wit

Cristin Milioti (the eponymous Mother in the TV series How I Met Your Mother) portrays Hazel Green, wife of tech billionaire Byron Gogol (portrayed by Billy Magnussen). She is never allowed to leave Gogol's tech palace. He controls her nap time, the games she can play, the books she can read, and the movies she can see. She does not own a phone. After learning that her husband implanted a chip in her brain that will let him see, hear, and feel everything she does, she finally escapes her abusive marriage. Imagine divorcing, say, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, then take it up by a hundred notches by making him controlling, obsessive, and immature, and you have the premise of this TV series. Cristin Milioti is an amazing actress. She can be elegant, demure, and sophisticated one minute, then a neurotic and ungraceful hot mess in another. Billy Magnussen is equally talended, playing a douchebag who actually sincerely believes he is doing everything he is doing in the name of love. Made...

  In this sleek psychological thriller, Rosamund Pike goes Gone Girl Level 999. She portrays Marla Grayson, a predatory guardian. Her hustle? She looks for rich elderly people, "arranges" to have herself declared as their legal guardian, puts them in an overpriced retirement home, then sells off and milks their assets under the guise of "taking care" of them. Everything is going well for Marla until she chooses a prey with very powerful friends. Everyone in this film is a villain. Everyone in this film is an asshole. Marla Grayson makes herself even more unlikeable by spewing off cheesy girl power lines, when all she is is a greedy grifter. Rosamund Pike's acting is so convincing, she makes you want to shove her stupid vape stick down her throat. Why should you watch this film? 1. The scene where Marla Grayson negotiates and has a verbal showdown with a lawyer representing her latest ward/prey is worth the price of admission. 2. Peter Dinklage with a performance...

  Finished watching the first three seasons of the TV series Billions. Billions ​is the perfectly addictive and entertaining mix of legal, finance, and psychological drama. Think Suits meets The Wolf of Wall Street: the two main characters are a US Attorney (the equivalent of an Assistant Solicitor General here in the Philippines) and a billionaire hedge fund mogul. They are both shady antiheroes with oversized egos. They are both stubborn, vindictive, and morally gray, and at the same time devoted husbands fiercely loyal to their respective wives. They are mirror images, but operating from opposing camps Billions does not pretend to be an intelligent show. While they may spew off legal and finance jargons left and right, it just wants to entertain you with its witty dialogue (chock-full of sneaky pop culture references), supporting characters as interesting as the leads, and a soundtrack so apt and fitting to the complex moods of our two antiheroes (ranging from Metallica to Fran...

Husband went out to buy pan de sal  daw down the street. Returned after 40 minutes with these lovely roses. <3

Ready Player Two, just like its predecessor Ready Player One, endlessly references 80s pop culture. It's very nostalgic, and acts as if no good film, video game, music or book was ever written or released after the 1990s. The plot was compelling enough that I forced myself to finish the novel, although some chapters dragged. Did those chapters drag because I did not know enough about the movies/musician/video game they were referencing? Probably. But a novel is not supposed to punish me for not knowing about names, events, and facts it has not even discussed. It's even supposed to make me care and want to learn more about them, which, sadly, Ready Player Two failed to do. If it's my fault that I didn't enjoy the novel fully because I am not familiar with 80s pop culture, then the novel gatekeeps more than it entertains. However, I think the ending saved the book, although it felt like a combination of several Black Mirror episodes. (Yes, I know I just complained about b...

Four siblings are promised a huge amount of money from a trust fund, which they will receive once the youngest of them celebrates her 40th birthday. They call this fund 'The Nest', and they have always been impatient to receive it. Then one day, the siblings are shocked to find out that most of the money is gone because of the eldest brother's scandal. This is an intelligent and witty story about a dysfunctional family, a reflection of how people can get lazy and unimaginative when they feel that huge amounts of money is their birthright. This is a story filled with selfish, greedy, but interesting characters. While the characters are not particularly likeable, the novel is a pleasure to read.  

Super happy with my new Onyx Boox Nova 3, which lets me do the following without the glare of normal cellphone, tablet, and computer screens: 1. Read ebooks; 2. Read the news; 3. Browse websites, especially those with lengthy text; 4. Access the content of my Scribd and Kindle Unlimited subscription; 5. Jot down notes; 6. Annotate on PDFs; and 7. Download Android apps. So yes, you can access your email, your files on Google Drive, etc. It's about the size of an iPad Mini. It does everything a tablet does, but it feels like you're reading on paper.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, and President Coriolanus Snow's origin story. While the Hunger Games trilogy showed us the life of a teenager from District 13, Ballad offers the perspective of an ambitious and self-entitled teenager who grew up in the Capitol, bitter and disgruntled because his family lost all their money after the districts' First Rebellion. Coriolanus Snow is a complicated and interesting antihero. He is calculating, but he somehow still has a moral compass. He always thinks ten steps ahead, but he can still fall in love. While there are so many other characters from the Hunger Games trilogy with more colorful back stories, The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes is still an entertaining read. Worth reading if you're a fan of the trilogy.

  The main protagonist in this Wong Kar-Wai film is a nihilistic fuccboi named York, who seduces beautiful women and coldly casts them aside. It makes you wonder why these women want to stay with him, or why they even all in love with him in the first place. The story may be simple, but the execution is perfect. This is an intense, beautifully shot film. The tone is pensive, brooding, and infinitely sad. The characters' long silences convey their despair, frustration, and nonchalance so vividly. As with all Wong Kar-Wai films, Days of Being Wild is spellbinding and mesmerizing. Everything about it is nostalgic and heartbreaking; there are layers upon layers of missed opportunities, unresolved conflicts, and unanswered questions.

At a time when travel for leisure is extremely difficult if not impossible, Kevin Kwan (writer of Crazy Rich Asians) releases the perfect escape from this seven-month long quarantine. Sex and Vanity is an over-the-top modern rendition of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View. So what if we haven't been to anywhere interesting since March? This novel can take us to a grand wedding in Capri, to lavish apartments with gondolas in New York, to country clubs and trendy bistros in the Upper East Side. To be honest, the characters seem to be a photocopy of the characters in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, and the love story is ridiculous and flat at the same time. Sex and Vanity may be the same circus with the same clowns, but just in a different venue, but who cares? It's the same exciting, ostentatious, and entertaining circus and clowns.

We have been planning our wedding since October last year. It was supposed to be a church wedding, and we wanted to celebrate it with 150 of our closest family and friends. Of course the pandemic made large gatherings impossible, so we decided to postpone our church wedding until next year, and just have a civil wedding ceremony close to our original wedding date. Planning a wedding in the midst of a pandemic is truly challenging: It was risky to get a professional to do your hair and makeup, so my mom and sister did my makeup. We couldn’t book hotel rooms to use as our wedding preparations venue, so we did our wedding preps photo shoot at my fiancé-now-husband’s house (which is now our family home). It was not safe to go out to buy wedding dress and shoes, so I shopped for mine online. Our first civil wedding date (August 5) was even cancelled because Metro Manila was suddenly put under the stricter Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ). The moment MECQ was lifted, we contacte...