Finding Advanced Screening Passes

Over the years I've seen a number of advanced screenings for upcoming films, but generally at the rate of one or two a year.

2016, however, had me check out nearly a dozen advanced screenings, and rather than simply brag about it, I thought I'd take a minute to show you how I've been doing it.

So I've been going to a site called http://www.advancescreenings.com which is simply an aggregator of advanced screening tickets broken down by location - so I keep an eye out for upcoming contests in my hometown of Edmonton, see if I'm interested in the movie and enter all of the contests that link from the site.  That's pretty much it, but it's worked out quite well for me this year.

I know that technically by telling other people about the site I may be decreasing my odds of getting to go to all these shows, but you know what - it's the holidays, and if my advice can get you into something you might be interested to see, then go for it!

Happy Holidays Y'All,

Your old pal Bookmonkey

Bookmonkey vs. Aerobics

About two months into my healthy living and I was getting kind of frustrated; although I was still eating well and had increased my walking and stair climbing (I’m up to 50 flights a day, three times a week, eventually hoping to get that elusive 250 flights in a day badge from UWalk.ca) but I had pretty much stopped in terms of weight loss. Starting at 254 back in April, I dropped to 241 by May 5th and pretty much stayed exactly there through the rest of the month.

Talking to a couple of my coworkers about it, they informed me I had probably plateaued and would be best served by a change up in my exercise regime. So I decided to give aerobics a try, and swung over to my local branch of epl to see what they had to offer. At first I came across a lot of super-fit folks looking angry or extremely intense, neither of which is something I’m really interested in dealing with while exercising.

And then I saw this guy.

And decided, what the heck, at least he isn’t frowning, and how hard could it be?

So twenty minutes into my first run through of Sweating to the Oldies, and I was huffing and puffing and feeling the beginning of a stitch in my side.

The workout was a lot of fun (I think I was grinning about two minutes into the set – darn you and your infectious smile Richard Simmons), and by the end although I was definitely feeling it, I couldn’t help but think, Yeah – I could do this for the next month.

So we’ll see how well the program works for me in June and I’ll check back in with you at the beginning of July!

Happy Mother's Day

Mother's Day in the Bookmonkey household has been pretty cool this year.

Our kids (21 and 16) left early to help ensure their mom could sleep in and then we ran a bunch of errands that my wife has been meaning to do lately.

Oh yeah, and also there was bacon.

So pretty much a great Mother's Day, Bookmonkey-style.

Hoping all of my readers (and my reader's mothers), have a great day today.

Happy Easter from Bookmonkey

Hello all,

Just wanted to take a quick moment from the long weekend to say Happy Easter!

(What am I doing this long weekend - playing Dead Space 3, watching BBCs The White Queen, and reading Zelazny's Trumps of Doom, pretty great all around.

Your old pal,
Bookmonkey

Happy Valentine's from Bookmonkey

Hello all,

Just a short one today as I'm spending my time giving my wife the Valentine's day she's been hoping for (which mostly means we'll be doing things on her to do list, like taxes and whatnot.)

So happy Valentine's to all my readers, can you believe it's been about four and half years since I started blogging here?

Anyway, I hope you all have a great day and get to spend it doing taxes with the one you love.

Your old pal,
Bookmonkey

Bookmonkey meets a Book Monkey (sorry, Book Orangutan)

As a huge fan of tales of terror and the supernatural, you'd better believe that I would be stopping by the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site if every I found myself in Philadelphia - which thanks to my attendance here at ALA Midwinter 14 is exactly where I found myself!  What really surprised me however, was the fact that I would finally end up with a photo of myself to put on this blog (for newcomers, I've been doing this for about four and a half years, but have so far stayed out of the pictures).

Anyway, while visiting the site, I entered the kitchen and found myself in a crazy situation; here I was, your old pal Bookmonkey, and there he was, a monkey from one of my favourite books (all right, an orangutan from one of my favourite short stories).  

So there you go, me and my monkey.

Here in Chicago at ALA 2013

So here I am in The Windy City for my first American Library Association Annual Meeting.  Although I'm from Canada, our library schools still need to be accredited by the ALA if we want to find work throughout North America, so it's a pretty cool thing to come down here and check it all out.  This trip is also a part of my Spectrum Scholarship, which has made for a great year so far, and means I've been able to meet the other Spectrum scholars in person, a really great group of people.

The photo above is the view out my hotel room window, which is a pretty nice thing to wake up to - although I am missing the wife and kids a lot.

So far I've been here fore a day and a half and I'm pretty impressed with both the city and the event.  Today is my first day where I have a pretty open schedule, so I'm going to try and get around to seeing some sights as well as checking out the exhibitor's hall at the conference; both intimidate me a little, but as I'm here for a limited time I'm just going to try diving in and see what happens.

Happy Father's Day to Me!!

So for Father's Day this year my daughters put together an adorable Bookmonkey Sculpture.

Really nothing more to say - but check it out!

Mother's Day at Bookmonkey's Place

Just a short one today folks, as we're celebrating Mother's Day for my lovely bride.

Happy Mother's Day to my own mother, and all the other mothers out there.

Also - check out this bizarre/cool book art flower thingy my daughter Lorisia made for her mom (pictured right), pretty cool!

From the Desk of an embarrassed Bookmonkey

All Right, I’ll admit it – I got pretty focused on some school stuff yesterday and entirely forgot to put out a post.  So instead of ignoring the fact and bringing you a Genre Character of the Week, I’ll simply use this space to thank you for your patience.

Sorry Ladies and Gents – if you’re all taking the time to come here and see what’s new, the least I can do is put up new stuff in a timely manner.

Your deeply embarrassed friend,

Bookmonkey

Things I’ve Noticed: Saturday Morning with Bookmonkey

Overall I’d say I’m a pretty organized guy – on a normal day I get up in the morning, do my stuff (which surprisingly has included yoga three times a week for the last half year – who saw that coming?), go to work, come home spend time with my lovely wife and wonderful kids, hit the hay and do it all over again.

But then the weekend comes and my daily schedule gets CRAZY!

Okay, maybe not so crazy it needs capitalization.

Okay, I’ll admit, I tend to schedule out my weekends as well, but I tend to do it with a sort of whimsical abandon.  (if by whimsical abandon you mean - with a precise and clear schedule which lets me do all the things I like to do)

Here’s a small taste of my weekend schedule

Saturday (and yes, every Saturday, even if it’s my Birthday)

5:25am – Wake up, stumble to kitchen, grind beans, make coffee

5:35am – 6:30am play whichever video game is currently incredibly exciting for me, but tedious or too freaky for the ladies in my house (take break to get coffee)

6:30am – 7am – second cup, read, light (and quiet) tidy

7am – 7:45am – hang out with whoever gets up earliest, put together a grocery list

7:45am – 9:15am – get coffee/grocery shop/pick up breakfast – in my house Grocery shopping is Man’s work (or it was until my eldest daughter started coming along), so I hang out with my BFF Mike and grab some coffee at the local Starbucks and then do the weeks shopping, followed by grabbing some baked goods or breakfast sandwiches for the ladies at home.

9:15am – 9:40am – put away the groceries, have breakfast with the family, sincerely wonder why people all over my home town are still sleeping.

9:40am – put together to do list for Saturday and Sunday.

So there you go, a small taste of what a Saturday morning with Bookmonkey is like which only goes to show it’s a special kind of lady who can put up with my kind of crazy – so let me take a moment to say thanks to my lovely wife for putting up with her less than spontaneous husband.

Things I've Noticed: I've just entered 2007

So last week I finally decided to do what 3.3 million people did in 2007 and get myself a smartphone, specifically an iPhone4S – for those technical-minded readers among you. Although I held out for many a year, (since before my birth if you look at the original cell phones released in 1973), an instructor I had in one of my library school courses finally convinced me that I should join the modern era and get myself connected to all the texting, phoning and app-using people out there in the world who want me to join them.

The reason, you ask?  Pretty simple actually, he said that I should be handing out business cards at the many networking opportunities I will have over the course of my library school experience and that the number on those cards should still be a viable number if I move, change jobs or graduate – which means a home, school or work number would give my cards an expiry date – something you never want a business card to have.

For those of you I don’t know personally, I’ve had quite the reputation since the mid-90s regarding cell phones, mostly that they have little value, they make cell phone users into incredibly rude people to visit with and I’ll get one as soon as anyone can explain why cell phones need to be in the hands of anyone who isn’t in a job that requires emergency contact capability.

My kids have both had cell phones for years, and in their cases I can see lots of reasons why they should have cell phones, but for me?  I’m the kind of guy who still sends handwritten thank you notes through the mail, so the impersonal nature of cell phones freaks me out a little.

But never let it be said that I can’t admit when I’m wrong, and also that I can’t spruce up my new phone to make it look a little more book-ish.

Things I've Noticed: The Bookmonkey FAQ part 1

One of the things I really enjoy reading on other peoples blogs are the various “Frequently Asked Questions” sections they have, and have decided to follow suit.

 

Only one real problem – I’m not frequently asked that many questions.

 

So.... I guess I’ll just ask myself some questions and then answer them, but I’ll list this as the Bookmonkey FAQ part 1 so that if I get some other questions in the next month or so I can answer them as well.

 

So here we go; questions 1 – 5

 

Where did you get the name Bookmonkey?

Totally easy – I’m a huge fan of the Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and my favourite character in the series is the librarian of Unseen University, who happens to be an organutan. The internet being what it is, Librarianmonkey, Oragutan-Librarian, Orangu-tarian, Discworldmonkey and a number of other names already existed, but Bookmonkey was up for grabs!

 

Why “The Wisdom” of Bookmonkey? 

Someday I hope to be remembered as a pretty wise guy (not a pretty wiseguy) and also I thought the title would be catchy and therefore easy to remember.

 

Whatever Happened to those “You Owe It To Yourself” posts you used to do?

Well, I got a good ten of them out there and then started worrying that they may be coming across as too lecture-y, so I took my favourite one and changed the topic to Genre Character of the Week.

 

Speaking of those different posts (You Owe it to yourself, Genre Character, Things I’ve Noticed, etc.) Whatever happened to my favourite Why I Love Horror

Honestly – I kind of lost track of that one, but should really get back into it.  Also I should figure out how the folks at Blogger will let me put links to each of those topics from my main page.

 

Finally, You spend each October looking at a popular topic in Horror (Re-imaginings, Twilight, and (mild Advertisement) the upcoming look at the Saw Franchise), so why don’t you dedicate a month to Fantasy or Science Fiction each year?

Honestly?  Those month-long sessions take a lot of my time; I need to design artwork and get my BFF Mike to create a new banner, I actually have to watch/read everything I want to talk about, and finally, my wife only has so much patience for me to spend time focusing on a topic of little interest to her (October 2010 – The Twilight Saga, was a long and lonely month for her).

 

So there you go – if any of you out there have questions you’d like to know the answer to, feel free to send them my way, either by the comments or a simple email to bookmonkey00k@yahoo.ca

 

Things I've Noticed: I'm a Spectrum Scholar

So taking a quick trip out of my love of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction; I thought it would be cool to mention that I just got chosen for a Spectrum Scholarship by the American Library Association!  You can read about it here or here.  It’s really cool as it means that the debt I’m going into for Grad school will be significantly reduced and I’m in a pretty small group of people as only 50 of these scholarships go out each year and they can be given to any successful applicant attending any ALA-accredited library school in North America.  I’m one of only three from Canada and am also the first person at my school to get one.

 

And now for the really interesting part; as part of the scholarship I’m going to get to attend next years American Library Association Conference in Chicago, IL!  I’ve never actually been there before, so if any of my readers are familiar with the area, be sure to let me know what kind of must-see stuff I should be checking out.

 

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Happy Mother's Day

Just a quick one today as I'm busy doing stuff with my wife (and the mother of our two lovely children)

Happy Mother's Day all, from your old pal Bookmonkey!

The Reimagining of Bookmonkey

Day One: Remakes versus Reimaginings.

This month at the Wisdom of Bookmonkey we are going to be looking at a recent phenomena of popular genre films, the remimagining. Before I begin reviewing the various films however, it is important to separate what I'm talking about when I say remimagining.

For ages, horror has been a genre of remakes; as both a character and a story, Dracula has been remade so many times that it is virtually impossible to simply say your favourite film is Dracula. Do you mean the Bela Lugosi one? How about Christopher Lee?

Personally, I don't mind remakes - the genre has had remakes since the beginning and it is interesting to see a new productions take on a classic tale.

For me the trouble comes with a recent trend in horror of remaking all the ones I grew up with as a child. I'm okay with films from the '40s, '50s, and '60s being remade, but as soon as you start looking at films that came out in the '70s you start hitting the films of my childhood. (all right to be fair I was born in '76 but as I grew up watching horror films from my local video store in the early '80s, so I grew up watching them late at night at home on video).

In 2003 a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released to less than stellar reviews but had a lot of folks checking it out in theatres and so the trend was born - the b-grade horror films of my youth have become grist for the mill and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

The thing about these newer films however, is that they are being billed as reimaginings, stories that take aspects of the original films but then try to tell stories of their own. Sometimes this works (not nearly as often as I would like) and sometimes it crashes into a waste of 90 minutes of my life, but for the next month we are going to visit almost a dozen of these films, and see how they stand up to the classics.

Welcome to...

The Reimagining of Bookmonkey.

Book Review: Let the Right One In

So a few months back I had a strange experience online. I was looking for an older post I had written on the Justin Cronin novel, The Passage, and rather than combing through all of my old posts I figured it would be simpler to Google the terms bookmonkey, Cronin and passage. I did get directed to a post about the book The Passage (a great post-apocalyptic vampire novel, by the way), and it was done by Bookmonkey, but it was a different bookmonkey.

The weird thing was, even though this bookmonkey was from a different country, and was a girl, she was reviewing a lot of the same materials as me, and in one specific review, had done a book I had been meaning to do for a while now, John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In.

So last week I finally got around to reading this novel and you know what? It is pretty awesome.

Having spent last October reviewing Twilight, I've got to say there are a lot of easy comparisons; 1) both books feature a human starting a relationship with a vampire, 2) both films were released on the same day in North America, 3) Both book helped change my opinion on vampire fiction.

Let The Right One In follows a young boy named Oskar who is consistently being bullied by kids at his school, his parents are separated and life is not going to well for him. Then he meets the new girl who has moved in to his apartment building. Eli has some pretty strange habits; she only comes out at night, her father doesn't really act like a dad and her arrival is strangely timed with a recent string of murders.

Here's the thing about the book - it is really, really good. It works as a young romance, a horror novel and a vampire novel. I will say this about it compared to Twilight however; Twilight is an excellent gateway book for young adults to get into supernatural fiction, while Let The Right One In is pure horror - if you're not sure if you like scary stories, you might want to warm up with some other stuff first.

Not for the faint of heart - Let the Right One In is definitely on my must-read list for great vampire stories.

The 100th Post

So here I am, seven and a half months later, having done 3 posts a week since last August and this is it - my 100th post.

For those of you who've been around since the beginning - thanks! For those of you who joined along the way - it's been a lot of fun, for those of you who are coming here fore the first time - Hi, I'm Bookmonkey - nice to meet you.

For today's post I thought I would tell you a little bit about myself, so you could learn a bit more about the blogger you've been reading all this time.

Bookmonkey's top five things you should know about Bookmonkey

5. I have a pretty well rounded life

In addition to blogging I do a lot of stuff; I'm married, have two kids, am in my 30s and am a part-time university student. Past that I'm working on becoming a healthier me (both emotionally and weight-wise), and have ambitions to get paid to write someday.

4. I'm focused on doing my best at what I do

Whether that stuff is being a husband, father, BFF, Canadian, fan boy or whatever - I try to ensure that I a little time each day focusing on the most important aspects of my life. I'm also the kind of guy who only plays one Wii game at a time, an hour or so a week, until I finish it - then I move on to the next one.

3. A lot of my spare time as a kid was spent doing Role-Playing Games

Starting with basic Dungeons & Dragons, I moved through Fantasy games in Elementary, then SF and Super-Hero games through High School and finally ended up doing White Wolf horror games for the majority of my twenties. Although I haven't touched on this a lot in my blog so far - it will begin to have a focus for my second 100 posts.

2 My favourite Genre is Horror

Which is a little odd as I'm not a fan of gore - sorry, I haven't seen the Saw series and don't really intend to anytime soon. I am, however a huge fan of Horror novels and comics as well as classic and clever horror films - my favourite last year - Drag me to Hell, my favourite overall, probably the works of John Carpenter.

1 I am really, really big into finding connections between things

This originally started when I realized there were a lot of Best Picture winners that I had never seen - and as I went through them, I began to notice that I was starting to understand a lot more pop culture references. Then it moved onto references in novels and non-fiction and eventually comic books. I like seeing where ideas come from and understanding the history of the things I like.

So there you go - these five bits of info may help you see deeper into my writing, giving you a little background info into the guy you've been reading all this time.

Here's to the next 100,

Your pal, Bookmonkey