We started really working on Season 2 of Job Hunters back in February of this year. Our Kickstarter launched in March; we started filming in June – and now, on a swelteringly hot weekend in August, we are finally building sets for our final large shooting weekend.

Part of me feels like my entire life has become a constant stream of Job Hunters work, and it’s difficult to imagine there ever being an end in sight. The other part of me can’t believe how close we are to wrapping.

If you came to this post in search of spoilers, you clearly don’t know me very well. All I will say is that I spent a large portion of the day painting these massive panels (that had been used for something else in a previous shoot) this lovely green color. Ooooh there will be green paint in Season 2!? What does it mean!? Maybe our heroes take a visit to the Emerald City! Watch out for the poppies!

I’ve been in such a state of panic/constant forward movement/my dwindling amounts of free time being out of my hands that I really don’t even know what things are going to be like when every single weekend isn’t tied up with this show anymore. I’m getting flashbacks to high school, when your play would open and you suddenly didn’t have to spend every hour at rehearsal. There was always that element of not knowing what regular people do after school and relearning what the sun is. It projects heat… and light? And it’s free??

There’s still at least another full week before i have to start thinking about that transition though, so in the mean time, I’m going to continue making lists, casting extras, and memorizing lines. Although… bonus! I will leave you with this picture of myself, Liz and our Props Master Jenn from yesterday when our building day got slightly derailed:

What. Like you wouldn’t do the same thing if someone randomly had BATTLE BOTS in their garage.

Note: I considered doing an outfit of the day in honor of our work party, but how about this. Grab your oldest shoes, a shirt you’ve already mentally decided to get rid of, and the jeans you wore last time someone asked you to help them paint. Wa-la! You’re gorgeous.

At VidCon this year I managed to hook up with the people over at Loot Crate — which was a grand decision on my part! I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been at other events that Loot Crate was represented at in the past, and it’s not that I wasn’t interested in it then… but just that at VidCon they were selling My Little Pony Funko Pop! Vinyl Figures. Which instantly attracted me like a bug to a flame. While purchasing said My Little Pony figurine, we started talking, and they welcomed me into their YouTube Loot Crate community. Don’t know what Loot Crate is? Watch the video!

I posted my first unboxing video on my main channel pretty much just to inform people that I’ll be getting these each month, so if you want to catch any subsequent unboxing videos, you’ll want to make sure you’re subscribed to my second channel! I post a lot of casual/supplemental content like this over on that channel, as well as daily vlog type stuff, fanmail videos, and a strange series I call “Questions of the Universe”.

I’m working diligently on getting my Cave Diving/Spelunking video edited… I am so excited to tell you guys all about this crazy adventure I had. That’ll be going up soon, so keep an eye out. In the mean time – what kind of videos would you like to see most from me? I just bought a new handy vlogging camera so I’m playing around with the idea of filming more stuff out and about, which is something I kind of stopped doing for awhile there. Let me know in the comments!

As a YouTuber, I often find myself saying the sentence: “Well, this is definitely the weirdest thing I’ve ever done for a video”. That single statement has included things such as “hatching” out of a fake “egg”, wearing a tutu, wrapping my entire living room in wrapping paper, being covered in fake blood and throwing paint at my friends – among many other things I know I am forgetting.

This time, though, I think I’ve taken it to a whole new level.

I’ll be transparent with you – Taco Bell asked me to make this video. They didn’t pay me… I just agreed for the fun of it. I appreciate and respect their keen marketing sense and their food is a huge guilty pleasure of mine, so yeah. When asked if I wanted to anounce the newest Doritos Locos Taco shell flavor, I said yes. And then proceeded to immediately text my roommate Justin, “Can you help me light a taco on fire?”

Bless him, he agreed enthusiastically without even asking why. THAT’S the mark of someone who’s lived with me long enough to know not to bother asking questions. Strangeness is the norm at our house, definitely.

Anyway, you can get the new Fiery DLT at Taco Bell early starting on the 19th, before it’s announced to the rest of the world on the 22nd. But the real point of this blog post is to make sure you watch this video, because I LIT A TACO ON FIRE. And apparently my hand, for a few seconds there. I didn’t notice until I started editing the video together. I promise though, we took all the necessary safety precautions, my gloves were fire proof, and we had a fire extinguisher within shouting distance.

Who DOESN’T love swag? If ask anyone (I mean anyone) what their favorite parts of a convention are, I guarantee “swag” will be at least in the top five. And if it’s not; they’re lying.

I’ve been talking about VidCon a lot on this blog, but it’s one of my biggest events of the year. And for those of you out there who didn’t make it, I want to try to at least give you a slice of what it was like, because no one wants to be left out!

So in this final VidCon write-up, here’s the swag I came home with. Let’s start with the free stuff:

• 1. Chapstick “business card” from bfftaylor. Brilliant! Functional! Adorable!
• 2. Endless Silky Eye Pen and Lip Blush from Pixi. Tried both already and I love them.
• 3. Lego themed moleskin (picked this up at the Subblime booth). So awesome!
• 4. YouTube branded phone screen cleaner. Incredibly useful!
• 5. Bare Essentials Marvelous Moxie lipgloss. This came in every VidCon bag.
• 6. “Nailed It!” nail art by Espionage Cosmetis. These just came out and they’re so much fun – check out the kickstarter they currently have running right now!

Next up, the stuff I actually bought at VidCon. Each year the Expo Hall gets bigger and bigger, and as that happens – it means more and more stuff to buy. Believe it or not though, I actually managed to keep it in my pants pretty well this year. My wallet, I mean. Come on, guys.

The first thing I purchased was this ADORABLE vinyl Pinkie Pie figurine by Funko (you can get them here on Amazon.com). I already have a small collection of Disney ones, but when I saw they’d started making My Little Pony ones, I was IN. I saw them for sale at the LootCrate booth, walked right up, handed them my money, and away we went. I have no regrets about this purchase. And I want more.

Next was the Cruella de Vil pin. I knew very little about the Disney pin trading phenomenon before this past weekend, but while I was at Disneyland my friend Sarah enlightened me. I don’t think I am ever going to be one of those hardcore back alley pin collectors, but I can see how it might be fun. So maybe I’ll get one pin per Disney trip. Or something. Anyway, I started with Cruella, since she was who I Disneybounded as that day. 🙂

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While in LA last week, my friends and I attended “Disneyland Day” for VidCon – which is like any other normal day at Disneyland, except the park is swarming with YouTubers. Rather than donning my official gray VidCon tee like many others, my friends and I decided to Disneybound:

This was my very first time Disneybounding and I decided I wanted to go villain. I chose Cruella de Vil; mostly on account of finding these adorable polka dot shorts. The puppy earrings were actually just white dog earrings I found at Claire’s (by walking in and asking the girl working to “show me whatever dog stuff they had”) that I drew black spots on with a sharpie. I tucked in a slouchy red shirt, grabbed some other black and white accessories and wa-la! If it doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will!

I never got a full picture of all my friends and I in costume, but we had among us a Dumbo, Christopher Robin, Scuttle, The Queen of Hearts and Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle. I love dressing up, so getting to do so, subtly, on a normal day is something I am all about.

Who should I Disneybound as next? Or, if you’ve done it yourself, show me pictures in the comments section!

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The final day of a con always comes much too soon. After what felt like a literal SECOND of parties and panels and pitiful amount of sleep, the final day of VidCon reared its ugly head in a mocking tone, one that shouted directly in my hungover, sensitive ears, “Kristina! You haven’t even explored the Expo Hall yet!”

So Saturday was a blur. I had a signing at 10am, which I had to forcefully roll myself out of bed for. This is why all dresses and skirts and high heeled shoes were left in the suitcase in favor of flats and denim jeans. Don’t get me wrong – my signing was lovely. Two hours of meeting people who watch my videos, who enjoy Job Hunters, who wait with bated breath for the next episode of Dokapon Kingdom – I live for that. But there was a giant mechanical shark that could literally chew its way through a chair in the Expo Hall, and I hadn’t even gotten to see it yet.

Immediately after my signing we gathered the Job Hunters cast and hung out at the Wyrd booth for another hour – taking photos with fans and playing our Season 2 trailer on loop for anyone that’d missed it at the panel. THEN Joe and I played Jetpack Unicorn with a kickstarter backer named Cate Neuhauser who was so good at our game that it made us look bad.

Then, around 3pm (when the Expo Hall would be closing in a mere two hours) I finally, finally got to walk around, check out the booths and get free swag. I blazed through that room with the determination of a shopper on Black Friday. I called it the “photo both tour”, collecting as many silly photos with my friends as we could cram in these final hours. Not to mention a quick pitstop in the ball pit, as well as a small detour in some sort of robot music video.

I’ll be doing another post soon about my VidCon swag, so never fear! All aspects of this con will be covered on my blog! I had such a great time, and the Expo Hall this year really pulled out all the stops. I’m so impressed with how exponentially this little con grows each year, and I’m so happy I’ve been there every year to see it firsthand.

This is a super cheesy thing to ask, but if you attended VidCon 2013, what was your favorite part? The main stage? The concerts? The vendor room? Or was it something VidCon couldn’t plan for and put on a schedule, like meeting a certain YouTuber or getting to spend time with friends you don’t see very often? For me it’s meeting the people who watch my videos. The yearly reminder of why I do this is so special to me, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

This was my favorite outfit of VidCon this year – hence why I saved it for Friday, when I had both the 5AG and Job Hunters panels. This is my brand new galaxy skirt from ModCloth.com, as well as one of my favorite slouchy black blouses from non other than Target. Completed with a cute little golden grenade necklace given to me by my friend Liz (not sure where she got it, but here’s a similar set of pendants on Amazon).

The first panel of the day was the Job Hunters panel. We showed a special VidCon exclusive trailer and then had a talk-back/Q&A with a roomful of lovely fans.

We’ve had a VERY tight lid on pretty much all information about Season 2, so the panel was both hilarious (“We can’t answer that. We can’t answer that either”) as well as a bit relieving when we did decide to reveal a few choice details. The biggest of which is that Season 2 will not only have 12 full episodes, but it will also have 12 additional “mini-sodes” that will take place on the train recruits take to and from the arena each day. Oh yeah, and we showed the trailer a second time – though that was mostly because even most of the cast and crew had never seen it before that panel, and we were all very excited.

Next up was 5AG!

The Fiveawesomegirls panel was seriously the most fun I’ve ever had on a panel. We sat in day order, we answered questions – but mostly we spent our hour reminiscing about the three years we spent making videos together, rehashing old stories, talking about what it was like behind the scenes, and laughing. It was so, so lovely to see the faces of our diehard fans in the audience, knowing many of the people in the room had been watching our videos since 2008. It was all very surreal, very nostalgic, and very positive.

Friday of VidCon also contained the fantastic Women of YouTube meet-up hosted by Laci Green, Rosianna and Lex Croucher. What a wonderful idea, to have a roundtable discussion out on the grass; it went so excitingly well and I really, truly hope VidCon takes notice of the lengths female content creators had to go to just to be able to hold a pseudo panel.

Closed out the night with a Fiesta Movement party up the street and had a great time catching up with some of my fellow agents. I had some spinach and artichoke dip that was, if I dare say it, the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. All in all, Friday was a pretty stellar day.

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For being a self-proclaimed geek of 6 years and counting on YouTube, you’d think I would know more about this GeekWeek thing that’s currently going on – but I’m just as in the dark about it as the rest of you. So while I sit twiddling my thumbs waiting to see what YouTube currently classifies as “geeky”, I took my personal geekdom elsewhere. To Subblime!

I’ve been casually talking about anime for a few months now, but I’ve never really made it the focus of a video or anything. I’ve never been a daily vlogger because I like keeping some elements of my life to myself, and my love of anime has stayed one of those things for quite some time. But in thinking about what to do for GeekWeek, I decided it was time to come out of the Japanese animation closet. I’m not the world’s biggest anime nerd or anything, but I do quite like it. I had wall scrolls on my bedroom walls as a child. I collected Cardcaptors glossy stickers in a notebook. I used to have a binder full of Sailor Moon drawings I had done. I genuinely took Japanese in school so that watching subbed anime would be more fun.

I fell out of the hobby for awhile during later middle school and high school (I’m going to blame Harry Potter for that one), only to be reunited in the past year or so when my roommate Justin and I started watching about an anime a month.

Meet Kero-chan, or Kerberos – the ferocious lion guardian of the Clow!

So, if you want to head on over to my Subblime list, I’ve just posted a list of the anime I’ve seen with little blurbs about why I liked them. There’s also a giveaway – enter and you could win a complete season set of Ouran High School Host Club, the anime I am currently watching!

While I was away at VidCon, my roommate texted me saying a large ominous black box had arrived in the mail for me… from Taco Bell. This box; we’re talking big. It’s big enough to hold at least six puppies comfortably, or thirty pairs of shoes, or at least two hundred soft tacos.

Being that I was gone for almost a week though, I really desperately hoped two hundred soft tacos hadn’t been rotting in my swelteringly hot bedroom. Here’s the unboxing video I filmed as soon as I got home:

I’m not exactly sure how or when it happened, but Taco Bell has sort of become that super weird best friend you can’t quite remember how you met but are glad you get to hang out with on a regular basis anyway. I met their head marketing guy at VidCon (he was incredibly nice), and was super impressed with their t-shirt printing booth. Did anyone see my friends walking around with those stupid tees with my face on them? Thanks a lot for that, Taco Bell.  -_-

Photo courtesy of Kassie King. <3

Anyway, the last thought I want to end on is that… sometimes I forget how weird my life is. Being a YouTuber for as long as I have starts to desensitize you to it – and the weirdness starts to become normal. For instance, Liz came home to this Doritos photo shoot happening in my room last night and she didn’t even bat an eye. “Oh course Justin is taking pictures of Kristina while she’s covered in bags of Doritos,” Liz thought as she arrived home from work. “Can’t wait to help her eat all of those Doritos,” was her only reaction.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever received in the mail? One time a friend of mine sent me a postcard from a road trip she was on that was entirely made out of tree bark, but I think ten bags of chips has stolen first place for me. Leave a comment and let me know!

The first day of VidCon (Industry Day) was surprisingly low-key. I wasn’t speaking on any Industry panels this year, so I got to wander around, eat pastries and actually sit in on a couple of panels.

My first outfit was a casual one; I paired my brand new shark attack shirt with a yellow bandeau, denim shorts and red sandals. This outfit was inspired by both my love of Sharknado, and the rapidly approaching SHARK WEEK! In fact, it’s currently Shark Week right now as I write this, and I can’t wait to get home and get my Discovery Channel on. Overhyped or no, I’m not gonna pretend I don’t love Shark Week just as much as everyone else.

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah. VidCon.

So Industry Day was a mix of panels, running into friends, and generally soaking in the feeling of finally being at the event you’ve waited all summer for. Also free snacks. Seriously, I ate this cheese danish they had on a tray outside the panel rooms that I swore was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten.

In the evening a handful of my friends and I donned our party outfits (I sported this super cute new top I picked up at another favorite clothing store of mine called Papaya along with another bandeau in gray) and hiked our way to Downtown Disney for the Nintendo Brand Ambassador’s party.

Before we got there, however, something AMAZING happened. I’m sure not all of you follow the Sephora Disney Collection news as closely as I do, but some drama went down recently that made it very difficult to get the new Ariel Palette. I was devastated, naturally. But! On our way through Downtown Disney I saw a Sephora and realized it couldn’t hurt to try. Sure enough, there were two palettes, looking lonely in a giant, empty display case. I snatched them up immediately (one for myself and one for my friend Eia) but only found out later that local Sephora locations send their extra Disney stock to this store (because they sell better near Disneyland, obvs) and even then, I got the last two. And they’d only been put out hours prior. BOOM. So pleased.

Anyway. VidCon. Stop letting me get so off track!

The Nintendo party started small, so I grabbed Joe and Liz and we took up residence outside on the empty outdoor deck (after snagging some surprisingly large glasses of wine). Eventually we ran into more friends (I had invited Tara and Alexander Theoharis as my guests; we also saw Meghan Camarena, Alex Carpenter, Jason Munday, Maxwell Glick, etc.) and it became a genuine party. Also there were these vanilla macarons on the hors d’oeuvres table that I swore were the most delicious I’d ever eaten… clearly I am fickle with my superlatives.

My favorite part of the night was the fact that because it was a Nintendo sponsored party, there was a DIRECT correlation between the amount of fun we were having (read: the more free drinks we consumed) and the amount of giant green Luigi hats that ended up on people’s heads. It was a beautiful evening. And so typical.

All in all, a great first day of VidCon.

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