I was a bit late to the game on grabbing the newest installment in the Pokémon series – when it came out last Friday, I was on an airplane, and then I was much too swamped at NYCC to stop by a game store. Trust me, it was tough collecting street passes all weekend and watching the “what I played most recently” show me Pokémon over and over again. But alas! I got mine last night, only six days late.

I made the arbitrary decision to go with X, based solely on aesthetics. The celestial fairy deer looks cuter than the flame bird, in my opinion. According to a bit of reading that I did, the games are virtually identical, so here’s hoping that holds true.

The most important question of all comes in the first five minutes of the game – not your name and gender, of course – I’m talking about your starter Pokémon. This was a hard decision for me! I was a diehard Squirtle fan growing up (starting at the very beginning with Pokémon Red), and that allegiance has kept me on Team Blue Starter in nearly every subsequent Pokémon game I’ve ever played. But look how cute Fennekin is!

I was really interested in the fire/dark type split he becomes, especially since he literally becomes a fire wizard. He’s got a little wand that sticks out of his tail that he pulls out during battle. It’s adorable. And since my main character in WoW is a fire mage… I couldn’t resist.

The real question is what I’ll pick as my secondary starter. This is new to this version: apparently a bit into the game we get to pick again, between the three classic starters. My gut says to pick Squirtle, obviously – but the smart choice could be Bulbasaur. My opponent will pick Froakie, the advantageous type to my Fennekin, so I should pick grass to combat that. But… Squirtle, though. It’s been a rocky twenty four hours for my morals, guys.

Anyway, I’m not very far into the game, but I am hoping to be able to keep you updated as I collect my gym badges and make my way through this amazing game of out-of-this-world graphics. Playing Pokémon always takes me right back to being 11… my parents got me a Gameboy Color and Pokemon Red for Christmas, and I remember ignoring all the kids at my birthday party (on Dec 27th) because I wanted to play so badly. It was truly innovative, and the first moment I really considered myself to be someone who liked video games.

It’s amazing (and a little emotional-making) to think back to playing the game then, and what it looked like… knowing fourteen years later it can still captivate my attention.. and look like THIS:

When I think about things that have been there with me for my entire life, Pokémon is definitely siting incredibly high on that list. I’m just fortunate so many others feel the same way, and that we can still all enjoy it together.

Did you play Pokémon as a kid? What was your first or favorite version? And have you picked up X/Y yet? Let me know in the comments, so we can all Poké-geek out together.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of taking a brief but enjoyable trip to the wondrous New York City, with the purpose of attending New York Comic Con.

While I’ve been to New York on a number of occasions, I’d never attended their Comic Con. I think if you’ve been to at least one comic con you probably at least have a pretty good idea of what others are going to be like, but it’s always a treat to get to walk around and explore the expo halls of a con you’ve never been to before. I didn’t get quite as much time to just meander as I would have liked, but I was there on a mission for the Ford #FiestaMovement, and they made sure to keep us agents busy.

Friday I arrived quite late in the evening, but I arrived at the same time as fellow agent Deena Marie, who was lovely and strolled around Times Square with me (neither of us wanted to go to bed right when we finally got to the city, even though we both regretted it when our alarms went off bright and early the next morning). We gazed at the glowing signs advertising broadway shows, found a cute deli that sold adorable little macarons, and I tempted fate by ordering a Brie Sandwich. I don’t know what I was expected, aside from a sandwich filled entirely with brie cheese, but my stomach wasn’t too happy with me that evening.

It was worth it.

The next day began with a trip to “Burgers and Cupcakes” for breakfast, where I order neither a burger nor a cupcake and opted instead for a breakfast sandwich.  Then two of the team headed off to Comic Con to begin their challenges and my team was sent around on a scavenger hunt tour of the city. This is what eventually led me here, a place I can never fully describe to anyone who wasn’t there with us:

No joke, this place was a tiny little comedy club… and the only audience members were dolls. The dolls were places on chairs with little tables with varying degrees of sobriety – some were prim and proper dolls and others were slouched over next to empty glasses and only half clothed.

But that’s not even the weirdest part.

A woman was running the place, and asked us if we wanted to tell any jokes to the dolls. Deena was delighted, but told the woman she didn’t have any jokes. “Not a problem!” we were informed. “There are jokes hanging up there for you!”

Which is why, in the fall of October 2013, I had my standup debut in front of a bunch of skeptic dolls that didn’t like my jokes. The woman in charge had a laptop and would play an audio track of the babies cooing or laughing if they were enjoying your set. They were a tough crowd.

It didn’t cost us any money, there wasn’t a donation box anywhere – we had no idea what the point of this place was or how we had even stumbled onto it. The entire room was maybe twenty square feet, total, and the women seemed so, so pleased we stopped by and participated.

Just a strange live art installation, I guess. Guess I can cross “tell jokes to dolls” off my bucket list, or maybe “fulfill some women’s crazy fantasy”. Jury’s still out on that one.

Anyway, Saturday night in the city was a blast; then Sunday was our team’s turn at the con! We started the day taking photos for Gawker, but then got to wander out on our own. I bought some fun nerdy things I’m sure you’ll see soon in an outfit of the day post, as well as a few early Christmas presents for friends (started shopping early this year!) and ran into a couple of friends. My biggest regret of the weekend was not getting into R. L. Stine’s panel (UGH) but… next time, I suppose. It still stings. Let’s not talk about it.

It was such a short, crazy trip – but I had a great time meeting some of the other Fiesta Agents I hadn’t known before, catching up with the ones I did know, and spending a bit of time in a city I just don’t know all that well yet. Thanks for sending me, Fiesta Movement!

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. 🙂

This will be my eighth year participating in NaNoWriMo. I sort of can’t believe it. I remember so vividly how I found out about it and honestly, it feels like no time has passed… but in fact, seven novels worth of time have passed since that day (and here I am mentally preparing for number eight).

I was at home in my bedroom at my parent’s house. This is really embarrassing to admit, but I had this “friend” on AIM that I had never spoken with, but kept her on my buddy list because I thought her away messages and buddy profile were funny. I don’t even entirely remember, but I think she was a fanfiction author I had admired but never worked up the courage to say hello to. It was 2005; I was 17 years old, give me a break. Around the time of November, her away messages starting referencing this project she was working on, something called NaNoWriMo. After a few days my curiosity got the best of me and I finally clicked the link.

What I found on the other end quite literally changed my life.

I wrote a lot of fanfiction in middle school and high school. I had always loved writing, and fanfiction seemed like the only way to get other people interested in reading your words. People love hearing about what new capers Harry, Ron and Hermione got themselves into – so I wrote my crappy fanfiction – and people read it. It was a beautiful thing. But as I got older, I didn’t just want to use other people’s characters. I tried my foray into fictionpress.com (fanfiction.net’s sister site for original works) and people just didn’t care. It was disheartening. It made me want to stop writing.

But then I found NaNoWriMo. A site dedicated to encouraging writers to do what they were meant to do: WRITE. Constantly. For a whole month.

I will preface this by saying that even after seven novel attempts, I still haven’t shared much of my work with any other living, breathing humans – but that wasn’t the point of NaNoWriMo for me. While I craved the comments and feedback on my fanfiction, NaNoWriMo made writing a whole new animal for me… rather than a solitary task I did alone in my bedroom against the protest of my mom who wanted me to come out and actually interact with people sometimes. Suddenly NaNoWriMo gave me not only a supportive community of other writers to talk with and gain encouragement from, but it managed to somehow turn my favorite lonely solo activity into a sport. One where people root for each other!

It’s been such a positive force in my life, even when it means I am ignoring plans with friends, falling behind in TV shows, or working myself into a stupor. It’s the kind of exhaustion you earn after a job well done, and I look forward to it year after year. I learned that writing is much less about those immediate comments you receive on fanfiction.net, but about cultivating the skills required to take on such a gargantuan task on your own. About learning discipline, and powering through something even when it seems impossible, and how good it feels when inspiration truly hits.

I recommend NaNoWriMo to anyone who has ever had even the smalled nugget of an idea for a story in their brains. If you want to follow my progress in the coming months, here’s my profile. And if you’re at all interested in helping out the nonprofit behind this wonderful event, I’m raising money for their annual gala on my personal fundraising page here.

My friends Mike and Tifa got married yesterday, and their wedding was an absolute geek haven. Not only was I tearing up watching two lovely, deserving people merge their lives into one, but there was 8 bit music playing in the background, dice bags at every place setting and magic draft sign ups at the reception table. It was fantastic.

After going back and forth on it a few times, I decided to dress “normal wedding formal”, with one tiny geek element (you can’t see it but I am wearing a minuscule lightning bolt necklace). I can’t for the life of me remember where that dress is from, but the magenta tights are from Nordstrom Rack and the shoes are from ModCloth (currently out of stock, but here’s a very similar pair).

The invitations and program for the wedding were Adventure Time themed, as I’m sure you probably gathered from my picture. Each guest got a cute little satin dice bag with a d20 and a bunch of small d6’s that were extremely useful for those of us that ended up drafting.

The MtG draft went well – personally, my favorite part of drafting is the actually pulling of the cards and deck building (I went green/blue; a stall deck with the intention of either a] pulling out huge enchanted creatures or b] using switcheroo to steal the opponent’s kill card and use it against him) and ended up winning my first match and losing my second one. Losing at a wedding isn’t too bad though, because it freed me up to eat cupcakes and play in the flip-book photo booth with the others who got out early.

It was overall a hugely enjoyable night, a good time with friends, and an exceptionally well done geeky wedding. What are the best themed weddings you’ve been to or heard of? What fun little personal elements have really stood out to you at weddings you’ve attended?

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While I was at PAX, I kept a notepad list of all the games that caught my eye. From console games to app games to indie games, there’s just so much exciting stuff filling the halls of this convention that it would be impossible to remember everything. As promised – today’s blog post is going to be the list of games I wrote down on my list.

Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time: This was a co-op indie game I watched a demo of that looked colorful and fun and potentially good for the Team Hypercube channel. It takes place in space inside a pink Death Star where you’re running around controlling a ship while simultaneously fighting bad guys in space. Keep an eye out for playthroughs of this one.

Escape Goat 2: This was a simple but fun puzzle platformer where you play a goat progressing through a dungeon. I got to test this game out and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Mount Your Friends: I actually don’t remember how this game got on my list (because I didn’t actually see it at PAX), but I think someone just recommended it to me? From what I have read online, you use your friends bodies and a goat to climb to certain heights? Or something? I don’t know.

Four days of PAX was a whole new experience – but it was nice to have that final day to make sure we saw everything. I opted for a comfy outfit for this final day; I’d been saving this fantastic Power Rangers dress for last for that very reason. Paired with a simple pair of black leggings, sensible black sneakers and the same Threadless cardigan from the day before, I was good to go (go power rangers)!

I was a little preoccupied the whole day because I finally had the good sense to bring my DS and collect Street Passes. I had never experienced the magic of Street Passing at a video game convention before, and I have to say, it sort of changed everything. Maybe it was annoying that I was multi-tasking with Warrior’s Way while doing everything else that day, but on the other hand, my army is now 30,000+ strong after a single day. So… no regrets.

We spent a good portion of the day hitting up raffles (tried again to win hardware at the MSI booth, then Liz and I succeeded at winning a GIANT Magic the Gathering card at the MtG raffle, which was hilarious and awesome albeit awkward to carry around the rest of the con) checking out a fun board game called Dungeon Run, and then painting another miniature over at Reaper. It was a nice, calming way to end the con.

In an attempt to prioritize games and fun on Monday, my group somehow ended up forgetting to eat for most of the day – so the last thing we did was GORGE ourselves on Mexican food over at Pacific Place mall. Let me tell you… enchiladas have never tasted as good as they do after four straight days of conventioning. I could have eaten chips and salsa all night if the restaurant had let me.

I have a huge list of games I wrote down over the course of PAX that I’ll be checking out in the near future… I’m thinking tomorrow’s blog post might go through that list. Let me know if that would be interesting!

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This was my favorite outfit of PAX so far — I called it BMO chic. I incorporated a lot of new PAX purchases into my standard everyday clothing, and I was extremely happy with the result! First of all, the top is a body suit/leotard from We Love Fine, with BMO detailings on both sides. I love it. I paired this with a pink skirt I’ve had in my closet for ages, a pair of black tights, gray ankle boots from Forever21 and a gray cardigan I got from Threadless. The cardigan has a tiny little hidden unicorn on it as well, which makes it one of my favorite pieces of outerwear. To finish the outfit, I added the Mario Star necklace I bought in the Expo Hall the day before from Sanshee.

Sunday started a bit late for Liz and myself (four days of PAXing really starts to take it out of you!) and we meandered downtown on the bus around 11:15. We stopped off at a Gamestop before heading to the Convention Center, because Liz wanted to buy a 3DS. Once she had it in her hands, the entire convention changed for us (as I had brought mine along as well). I’ll admit it – I’d never used StreetPass before. I know, I know. I’m a terrible nerd. We watched in awe as we collected new friends, filled up our region maps, and started collecting puzzle pieces. Having a 3DS at a geek con is the best! How had I not done this before?

So aside from walking around with our gameboys in our hands, we spent the rest of the day hitting up parts of the cons we hadn’t seen yet. The biggest one of note was the miniature painting room, where we situated ourselves for over and hour.

I’m not particularly great at it or anything, but I really enjoy the hobby. And attending these painting sessions at cons is great, because everyone is so friendly – so you both end up meeting cool artsy people, and getting a lot of great tips from people who have been doing it much longer. I want to get better at this… especially faces. Man, faces are hard.

We walked around the Expo Hall more and tested games/spun prize wheels/dabbled in a bit of pin trading before meeting up with some of our friends and deciding to try our hand at this complex game called Mansions of Madness. It was fun, if not a bit ambitious for a “quick game”. It took us well into the evening, where we ended the night with an inspiring crafting panel and then raced over to the best show we saw all weekend… the Late Night Dub Fight. It was a panel of improvisers dubbing over crazy old cartoons, and it was hilariously brilliant. I had such a great time.

There’s one more day left, and I’m currently heading out the door to get there. PAX has been so much fun this year, and it’s crazy being at day 4 – a day that previously didn’t exist for our Seattle geek con. Here’s to another full afternoon of nerdy adventures!

Day two of PAX was fantastic and amazing and exhausting – and to celebrate, I decided to go with a unicorn and space-cat theme. The dress is a simple LBD I picked up at Ross a few months ago, the necklace was a gift from a subscriber of mine, and the leggings were a purchase on day 1 of PAX from the We Love Fine booth.

We spent a large portion of the day wandering the Expo Hall, mentally noting which booths to come back to for playing games and buying stuff. I did make one purchase yesterday (well, really a co-purchase with Liz) and that was a pack of eight Pokémon gym badges in the form of pins. I mentioned recently my introduction to the Disney pin-trading world – well, PAX introduced a new thing called “Pinny Arcade” this year and it’s been extremely difficult not to join in. Pins are so expensive! People have been losing their minds over it though, so I cracked and split this one set with Liz.

We attended a couple panels in the afternoon, grabbed lunch at Chipotle, and made our way over to the Magic The Gathering party. This party is exactly the opposite of what you’d imagine a MtG party to be like – with crazy lights, music, drinks and a booth that allows you to get your face printed on a Magic card. We ducked out of that party a bit early (armed with packs of cards) and stopped by another party (this one with free drink tickets) before creating our OWN party over at our friends Tara and Alexander’s place… where we proceeded to play MtG until we were too tired to remember turn order. Or when to keep our eyes open. As you can see below – this game didn’t go well for me.

Now I’m dating off to Day 3 (can you believe this con is only halfway over??) where I am determined to paint miniatures. It’ll happen today. I can feel it.

Yesterday was the first day of PAX PRIME and I couldn’t be more excited. On my first day I wandered the Expo Hall, signed up for raffles, purchased a few things from the We Love Fine booth that I’m sure you’ll see popping up in future Outfit of the Day posts, demo-ed games, stopped by a variety show at the Triple Door and ended the night with a hilarious nerdy improv show! It was an amazing first day – and although my feet already hurt, I can’t wait to get back down there and do it all again today.

For the first day, I decided to go casual. I wore a super fun Adventure Time shirt I got from TeeFury a while back, and my brand new blue striped shorts from ModCloth. For the record, I got two compliments on those shorts from strangers, and one crazy bus lady who told me to “wear clothes over my underwear next time”. I’m going to say all press is good press on that one…?

Lastly I threw on my old but reliable Steve Madden boots, grabbed my standard convention bag with the emoticon face on the side and strapped my PAX badges onto a My Little Pony lanyard. I felt awesome – and was never once uncomfortable. I plan to dress up for some of the other days, but shorts and a t-shirt was a solid choice for Day 1.

How do you accessorize a plain t-shirt? I’m curious about your tips – because I usually struggle to find ways to make the embarrassing amount of nerdy tees I own work beyond night shirts. Let me know in the comments!

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