Kristina Horner is based in the beautiful, rainy corner of the country known as Seattle where she works at Microsoft as a Partner Account Manager for their streaming platform, Mixer. Outside the 9-5 timeframe, she spends the rest of her time writing, making YouTube videos and participating in the cosplay community. She is best known online as the YouTube user italktosnakes, with a channel she’s been running for over 10 years that’s viewed by over 150,000 subscribers. Her channel is a bit of a variety show, but she tends to post “booktube” videos (book reviews, wrap ups and tags), travel videos, cosplay videos and regular old vlogs.

Cosplay has been a growing obsession, and Kristina usually makes between 4-6 costumes a year that she wears at conventions in Seattle and beyond. She likes making costumes (mostly completely by hand) based on cartoon characters most, and while many of her past projects have been Disney or Nintendo related, she likes to branch out now and then as well.

Kristina participates in a handful of online events each year of note. NaNoWriMo is an annual writing sprint in which participants attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days (Kristina has succeeded ten years in a row and hopes to publish something soon to share with you). Extra Life is a 24 hour gaming marathon to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network. Since 2012 Kristina has hosted an annual 24 hour live show with her friends that’s raised over $5,000. Last, the Project 4 Awesome is a YouTube based charity event run by the Vlogbrothers in which thousands of vloggers pick a charity and speak about it all on the same day. Kristina has participated in the P4A live show every year since 2007.

In the past she was also as a producer, writer and actor in the dystopian/comedy web series Job Hunters. Job Hunters has amassed over 16,000 subscribers and 400,000 total views. The crew was made up almost entirely of twenty-somethings from Seattle that knew each other in college.

Kristina was also the creator of a popular collaborative daily vlogging channel called fiveawesomegirls that ran from 2008-2010 and inspired hundreds of spin-off channels.

In addition, Kristina is a large part of the geek/gaming community and also started a YouTube channel dedicated to gaming across digital and tabletop platforms called Team Hypercube. She and her cohosts Justin Hammond and Joe Homes post gameplay footage of multiplayer video games as well as popular board games. Among these some fan favorites have been Dokapon Kingdom, New Super Mario Brothers U, Red Dragon Inn, and Castle Crashers. She also dabbles in game development, and in 2013 launched a successful Kickstarter for her party style card game, “Jetpack Unicorn”. The game is sold in stores and on DFTBA.com, where she also sells t-shirts and bookmarks.

Kristina spends a lot of her time reading as many books as possible, going to nerd-related conventions (Emerald City Comic Con and VidCon being among her favorite), speaking out about social issues she cares about, doing philanthropic work with various charity organizations, and being a full time fan of Harry Potter.

Her favorite TV shows are Parks and Rec, The Walking Dead, Clone Wars, Bob’s Burgers, Adventure Time, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Gravity Falls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Orange is the New Black, Veronica Mars and Community.

Her favorite games are 7 Wonders, Ladies and Gentlemen, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Red Dragon Inn, SushiGo, Machi Koro, Tsuro and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. She’s also addicted to no less than 3 app games at a time – her favorites are puzzle and sim games. She enjoys a healthy mix of geeking out and shopping for adorable things, has a growing fascination with Lolita culture, loves independent geek art, and decided at the last minute to throw eating in there too, because food.