I know I said I was going to take a little break from blogging this week for the holidays, but I wanted to compile a short list of the videos I’ve posted recently. YouTube makes it tougher and tougher to find the videos you want to watch, so I think it’s helpful to have a different avenue to look for them. Every video I post will also be mentioned here, on this blog, so please bookmark this page!

First up is my Thanksgiving video. This was my Fiesta Mission for the month, as well as a party I look forward to every year. My friends are so wonderful and I’m so grateful to be able to share these holidays with them. We talk about our favorite Thanksgiving foods, make hand-turkeys and take you right to the head of the table for our feast!

 

Next is the “Would You Rather” video I made down in San Francisco with fellow YouTuber Karen Kavett and my writing buddy/housemate Liz Leo. This is a fun one for those of you doing NaNoWriMo or anyone who’s ever tried their hand at writing, because Karen’s silly noveling scenarios were a hoot.

Lastly, I wanted to point all you Buffy fans in the direction of the new series over on Team Hypercube. Justin and I started playing Chaos Bleeds, a terribly Buffy the Vampire Slayer game we started playing with little-to-no idea what to expect. Needless to say, it had us rolling on the ground laughing.

 

If you’ve never watched one of our Let’s Play videos, this is a good place to start. Even if you think you’re not very into video games, that’s probably only because you haven’t seen me repeatedly throw a temper tantrum and kick at a locked door that claims that there’s “another way in” for nearly twenty minutes. Trust me. These videos are fun.

Hope you have a lovely holiday weekend and that your family get-togethers aren’t too crazy. If so, there’s always the internet. 😉

 

I posted a new video yesterday (it had been a little while, but it’s tough to make video amidst all this traveling!) and I was quite pleased with it. I actually got home from New York on Sunday thinking “shoot. I need to make a video this week… what should it be about? But then I saw Leviosaa’s response to this tag and I knew I had to do it too.

It’s a video about firsts! First car, first job, first movie you saw in theaters – the title is sort of a fakeout – I know, I know. But we don’t talk about that first. Anyway, this was a super unscripted, super fun video and people seem to really be liking it in the comments. At least the ones who can work their way through YouTube’s new G+ labyrinth of a comment system.

Tell me about some of your own firsts in the comments! I think it’s always fun to compare answers to things like this. Especially first concert. Find out what mine was by watching the video above!

I’m off to San Francisco today, but I should still be blogging along the way! Except more outfit of the day posts and my first bucket list post coming soon!

Last week, my good friend Tara of the GeekyHostess threw one of the strangest dinner parties I’ve ever been to. All we knew upon arrival was that we should wear “whatever you would normally wear to a reading of a will for a distant relative/acquaintance in his fancy home. ” I took this opportunity to wear a lacy black dress from H&M I don’t have nearly enough reasons to wear, black heeled boots from Cathy Jean, purple tights, emerald nail polish, a peacock feather pendant, a sock bun and my favorite piece of jewelry – a “poison ring”, which has a hidden compartment for storing things.

We arrived at Tara’s place and were met with the creepiest tea party I have ever seen. Don’t get me wrong: the food and drinks looked amazing (Tara always outdoes herself); no, it was the dolls placed everywhere with broken faces and bleeding eyes that set my teeth on edge.

Then, even though I was surrounded by my best friends, we entertained the most forced, awkward dinner conversation of all time – pretending no one knew each other and all had to discover how we were acquainted with the deceased (Harold Winchester the Third, a man who loved dolls more than anything else). It was the craziest meta-game ever. I can’t even explain it.

After dinner was the reading of the will, or rather, a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill where we were instructed to find Harold’s favorite room in the house so the will could be read there. The only catch – we were the characters in the game. Quite literally:

The game turned into a crazed hunt through the house to find the voodoo doll versions of ourselves and destroy them before Harold’s equally frightening attorney could kill us as keep us as dolls in his newly inherited collection forever. I was a paper doll, as seen above. I died.

I don’t want to spoil too much, as Tara is writing up a post on her own blog about the evening, and there’s a Team Hypercube video about the event as well. Basically it was another perfect example of how weird/awesome my friend group is, and how I don’t think we’re even capable of doing anything normal. Of course we’d attend a murder tea party. Of course we would.

Note: This post may contain affiliate or referral links.

My friend Rosianna is one the loveliest people I know, and she’s tagged me yet again in her annual LADIES SURVEY! It’s a chance for all of us, each year, to check in with yourself and your viewers on what you’re personally doing and thinking about women’s issues both on and off the internet. It always inspires such interesting, insightful discussion and I was happy to take part for the second year in a row:

 

Just a quick little blog update about this today, but I promise I’ll be back with something exciting again tomorrow!

So, a long time ago, YouTube implemented this new feature called the Channel Trailer. It’s a pretty good idea – basically you create a “trailer” that represents and sells your channel, and this is what new and unsubscribed people see when they click on your channel page. It’s a great way for people to instantly find out who you are and what you’re about, and hopefully subscribe for more!

This blog post is about how, for all my great work ethic and motivation, I put this off for an embarrassingly long amount of time. But alas! Yesterday, I posted channel trailers on both my main and second channels, and figured I would share them here.

If you’re new to my whole internet presence, you might learn something about me! If you’ve been around for ages, well, you should watch anyway – people’s minds have been blown since I posted this video because the color coding on my videos finally makes sense. That’s right: my videos are color coded! Surprise!

Here’s the trailer I made for my main channel:

 

And here’s the goofy one I made for my second channel:

 

I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for being involved in what I do, and for continuing to keep up by watching my videos and reading my blog. You’re all awesome, and make what I do possible. Thanks, guys. In the comments, please let me know how you found my channel and/or blog!

This has been a video heavy week for me! I posted a few more videos of note, in case you missed them. First off is the BEST TAG EVER, a ridiculously silly video tag that’s been going around YouTube lately. I was tagged by the lovely Kiri Callaghan, so I really couldn’t refuse.

 

I don’t tend to do a lot of tag or challenge videos, mostly because I have a lot more videos ideas that I just think are better than trying to eat dry cinnamon or tell the difference between coke and pepsi with a blindfold on… but every once in a while a tag video slips through the cracks, and this one turned out to be quite weird/funny.

Next up is this in depth review of Monstermatic. Monstermatic is an app I mentioned in my September favorites video, but I wanted to do a followup. It’s an app that allows you to create these custom monsters on your phone, and then gives you the option to actually get that monster 3D printed… so he can come to life and live on your shelf! I think it’s super uniquely awesome and I was so pumped to get to try it out:

 

Their kickstarter only goes for a few more days, so definitely go check it out if you think this sounds like something that would be fun to try! The app won’t exist if they don’t get funded!

I’m going to be in New York this weekend, for NYCC! Will you be there? What should I definitely do with my 48 hours in the city?

In addition to being in up to my eyeballs in Halloween party planning and putting together another epic 24 hour live show for Extra Life – I’ve also got the pre NaNoWriMo jitters something fierce. We’re still three weeks out, but I find it creeping into the back of my mind pretty regularly already. What am I going to write? How am I going to make the time? Is anyone going to do it with me?

That’s why I decided to post a pep talk video early this year, to make sure those of you on the fence about it have ample time to mull it over. Here is that video!

 

I will likely be posting more videos to help participants along this year, as well as hosting my usual word sprints on twitter. Make sure you’re following me if you want to join in the fun!

I’ll also be heading down to San Francisco for the Night of Writing Dangerously – it’s a gala/write-a-thon they throw every year to raise money for their organization (as well as their free creative writing programs in hundreds of schools and communities all over the place), which I am all about supporting. I am trying to raise $500, which is minuscule compared to the amount this project has done for me over the years. If you’re interested in donating, here’s a link to my funding page.

How do you decide what to write each year? Usually I start with format – do I want to write a “diary” book? First person? Letters between people? Back and fort POV between two characters? Then I figure out the genre I’m interested in, and then start to flesh out the details. Let me know your methods in the comments!

 

And as usual, if you get stuck, you can always rewatch my NaNoWriMo music video. It’ll be trapped in your head for days, at the very least. 🙂

It’s time for this week’s video roundup! I know I post a lot of videos, and YouTube has been making it increasingly more difficult to find the videos you want to watch… so here’s a quick post updating you on everything I put online this week.

We are well into October now, but I think there’s definitely still time to talk about the list of things I discovered last month! My September favorites video went live yesterday, and it’s absolutely bursting with all the fun new games I probably shouldn’t have gotten myself quite so addicted to.

 

I also posted this month’s Loot Crate unboxing video recently, which featured a ton of fun items all related to animation and cartoons… which was totally right up my alley:

 

And lastly, Team Hypercube put a quick pause on its regular scheduled programming to bring you another BOARD GAME WEEK! This time, we featured Jetpack Unicorn, the game that was created by none other than myself and Joe (in conjunction with Wyrd Miniatures). I’ll post Episode One below, but make sure to head over to the channel and subscribe if you want to find out who wins!

 

Thanks for watching my videos, and more importantly, for reading my blog. You guys rock.

I don’t know what the exact date is, but Justin informed me recently that we’re at approximately our one year Team Hypercube birthday. So… happy approximate birthday, gaming channel! I promise when I actually have kids someday, I will pay much more attention to these types of details.

In the year that we’ve been posting to this channel, we’ve made 284 videos. 85 episodes of Dokapon Kingdom. We’ve played 23 games, gained over 6,000 followers and hosted multiple live shows. It’s been an awesome ride and I will be the first to say that I’m extremely excited to see where the next year takes us with this project.

Here’s the the most recent Checkpoint Vlog we’ve posted on the channel:

 

And here’s Episode ONE of Dokapon Kingdom, for those late to the party:

 

Sometimes I find it crazy how much effort we’ve all put into this little project, how much it has taken off, and most importantly – how awesomely dedicated our fan base is. I adore this channel and I look forward to even more people joining in the fun in the future. Thanks for watching for the past year!

This week, I did a collab video with Tara of the Geeky Hostess – this has been a long time coming! We actually first met because our mutual friend Justin set us up on a “blind friend date” since he knew we both loved Internet/marketing/video/blogging/etc and had to get to know each other. We’ve worked on millions of things together since then (our old blog Zaxy, Job Hunters, Extra Life) though somehow, we’ve never made vlogs together. But that ends now.

First we made Butterbeer Mug Cakes on her channel, then we sat down and enjoyed them while talking about our theories and excitement for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts movie.

I’m super curious what other Harry Potter fans and looking forward to most about this movie, so please feel free to leave your theories and hopes and dreams in the comments of this post!

Also, if you’re interested in winning a pair of the Marauder’s Map leggings from the awesome new Blackmilk HP line, check out my new Subblime list! I made this one to coincide with the HP themed videos, and it’s got a bunch of my other favorite Potter themed products on it (as well as the most exciting giveaway I’ve done yet)!

 

How great are those leggings? I’m just sad I can’t win them myself! Be sure to go sign up for the giveaway, and if you’re not using Subblime yet – what are you waiting for? It’s super fun!