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!

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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Hello, blog readers! I started this trip to LA exhausted, so really, it’s only fitting we’ve come full circle here right before I leave for the airport to head home. Between very little sleep, dance parties, signings and a full day at Disneyland… VidCon 2013 was a fantastic success, but oh my gosh am I ready for some quality time in my bed with Netflix and a box of wheat thins.

Honestly, when people ask me what I’ve been up to lately, a genuinely fitting way to sum up the entirety of my time this past week (month, year, etc.) is by saying I’ve been “cramming more into my hours than should be humanly possible” – but that’s depressing, so here’s a picture of me in a ball pit:

So anyway, here we are; another VidCon come and gone. The reality of the situation is that no matter how you decide to spend your time, which panels you go to, which parties you check out, you’re likely going to be surrounded by familiar YouTube friends, people with cameras and more booze than can even be consumed in a single weekend.

No matter how much fun you have, how little sleep you accept yourself to deserve, how much you party hop – you’ll never see everyone or do everything, but that’s totally okay! That’s the beauty of the Internet, of social media, and of knowing that VidCon isn’t truly over until everyone has sufficiently documented it online.

So over the next few days I’ll be posting my VidCon wrap-up here, complete with photos, my outfits from the event as well as my thoughts on the goings-on that happened there. Did we meet at VidCon? Let me know in the comments so I can match usernames to faces!

Welcome to my new blog! This is that necessary, generic, boring post one must create to like, start the blog. Every subsequent post can only be better than this.