Last week was ‘House Pride Week’ on Pottermore, and even though I don’t ever use the site anymore, I was still compelled to make a video for their event. I was, of course, a week late since I only found out about the whole thing via an @reply someone sent me on Twitter, but better late then never, right? I’ll blame it on my owl getting lost while bringing me information about the project.

Anyway, I made this video musing a bit on my thoughts about being sorted into Hufflepuff (since I’ve had three years to think it over) as well as giving some reasons as to why I’ve finally come around to it. Fellow Hufflepuffs will enjoy this video the most, but there’s a deeper message I think that can be related to by everyone. 🙂

Emerald City Comic Con is this weekend and I couldn’t be more excited! This is definitely one of my favorite cons of the year – not only because it’s right here in my backyard (travel is so easy!), but also because it’s just totally fantastic. I’m going to be speaking on a few panels, exploring Artist’s Alley, and trying out my very first cosplay experience! If you’re also going to be there this weekend and you see me wandering around – please say hi! I’m pumped to get to meet some of you!

I’m only moderately busy at this convention, which should hopefully lead to a good mix of relaxing/hanging out and running around to get to things on time. In case you were curious where I’ll be at the con, here’s my personal schedule:

Friday: Nothing! A day totally to myself to hang out, walk around, meet people and go to panels!

Saturday: This is my big cosplay day. My roommate Eia and I are going as Anna and Elsa in their coronation dresses, and I am equal parts SUPER EXCITED and… a little nervous. If you see me walking around on Saturday, please feel free to talk to me or take a picture. We’re so pumped about these costumes and can’t wait to show them off.

I’ll also be on the following panels:

Makeup For Geeks at 3pm (Room 2B)
The geek-beauty channel I’m part of (OneUpMakeup) will be teaming up with Espionage Cosmetics and Atomic Cosmetics to talk makeup! It’s going to be a good one, with creative giveaways and fun geek banter – if you’re interested in makeup or beauty tips at all, I highly recommend attending!

The Couple The Games Together… at 5pm (Sheraton Issaquah Room – GAMING)
I am probably the most excited about this panel – Joe and I (along with three other fantastic geeky couples we know) will be talking about the trials and tribulations of being a couple that games together. I’ve never been on any panel like it, so it should definitely spawn some fascinating discussion about gaming with your s/o!

Sunday: Another relatively open day, thankfully! However, I will be at one event you won’t want to miss if you’re a fan of my web series…

Job Hunters Screening at 1pm (TCC LL2)
Season 2 is right around the corner, so why not prepare yourself by doing a re-watch of Season 1 with members of the cast and crew? We’re also going to be showing the teaser trailer for Season 2 on the big screen, which we’re pretty excited about. The space doesn’t allow for an official Q&A, but if you stick around after the screening and we’ll be happy to answer your questions – but no spoilers!

I’m also interested in attending the following events and panels (though I have nothing to do with them in any way… just a fan!)

Friday:

11:00am – Intro to Costume Craft and Cosplay [Room: TCC 302]

12:00pm – Cosplay Is For Everyone presents: Ani-Mia [Room: TCC 302]

2:00pm – ECCC presents Eliza Dushku [Room: MAIN HALL (6ABC)]

5:00pm – Punk Rock Business: A DIY Model to Releasing Your Own Tabletop Game [Room: GAMING (Sheraton Issaquah Room)]

6:00pm – ECCC presents Cary Elwes [Room: MAIN HALL (6ABC)]

8:00pm – Welcome To Night Vale Live Show and Thrilling Adventure Hour movie Sneak Preview [Room: MAIN HALL (6ABC)]

Saturday:

12:30pm – ECCC presents Andrea Libman [Room: HALL A (611-614)]

5:30pm – ECCC presents Cree Summer [Room: HALL A (611-614)]

8:00pm – NERDprov: The Return  [Room: HALL A (611-614)]

Sunday:

10:30am – Welcome to Night Vale: Turn On Your Radio and Hide [Room: HALL A (611-614)]

11:00am – IDW: The Super Secret Cartoon Network Panel [Room: TCC 301]

12:00pm – Feminism & Gaming  [Room: GAMING (Sheraton Issaquah Room)]

1:30pm – ECCC presents Jeremy Shada [Room: HALL A (611-614)]

4:00pm – ECCC presents Karen Gillan [Room: MAIN HALL (6ABC)]

Only a few more days! If you’re attending the convention, let me know in the comments below! Are you cosplaying? What are you most looking forward to?

Many of you saw pictures a while back from a secret project I flew down to NorCal to help out with and were dying to find out what it was for. Now that it’s released, I can finally tell you!

The super awesome costume/hair/makeup I got to wear on set.

The project was a favor I did for Wyrd (the company that helped Joe and I make Jetpack Unicorn) and their new app-making company Drawn by Clouds. We were filming a fun little web series called “Dev” to help promote their Kickstarter – and it’s live now!

This project was a bit different from ones I’ve worked on lately, ie. it was very low budget and a little silly (but ultimately still a lot of fun). It was deliberately made to look amateur-ish to show the struggles of an indie game company trying to bring a game to market, and it shows the team (of which I play the extremely grumpy lead developer) getting their project ready for a fictional kickstarter that runs in tandem with the real one:

It’s pretty rough around the edges, but I love these guys and I super want their game to succeed. No matter what you think of the web series, I highly recommend you check out their game’s Kickstarter because Fall Schematic looks like it’s going to reach extreme levels of awesome and I can’t wait to play it.

Yesterday was the laziest of lazy Sundays, and I mean that in a totally positive, awesome way. I had zero plans or pressing matters that needed my attention, so I got to relax and do whatever I wanted, all day long.

Of course, I used this time to embark on my quest to re-watch all 200 episodes of the 1992 original Sailor Moon anime, a project I’ve been itching to do for years. Not only was the last time I watched Sailor Moon back in middle school, but I’ve never actually seen the original Japanese version of it. Not to say anything too terrible about the English dub – of course, I’m much more of a purist now, preferring to watch most anime in its original form with subtitles – but that English Sailor Moon dub was my personal gateway into the world of anime. I was eleven, I had no idea Dic was changing the show as much as it was, so I had no clue I was even missing anything. There’s a soft spot for me for the English names, the English voice actors, but it is quite interesting to watch it in Japanese and find out what was poorly translated and censored.

Anyway, I digress. The reason I am painstakingly rewatching all of this Sailor Moon is in preparation for the reboot that’s currently softly planned to be released this summer, July 2014. There isn’t really a whole lot known about the reboot yet, aside from rumors (and hopes!) that it’ll both aim to become it’s own unique show while also taking care to follow the plot of the manga a bit more closely. This is exceptionally exciting, both as a life-long Sailor Moon fan and a “good book to movie adaptation” enthusiast.

It’s been said that the show will be released online in Japanese and subtitled in 10 different languages, which is outside the norm and also wildly exciting for fans of the series and the future of larger scale anime releases.

I bring this up to you in blog post form because something very interesting occurred to me later, while I was in my bed winding down and playing Pokémon X. Pokémon? Sailor Moon? I am 26 years old and literally still consuming the exact same identical media I was at age 11. Fifteen years later and I am still enjoying Pokémon games. I am still counting down the minutes to a new episode of Sailor Moon. Have I not aged at all in those fifteen years? Did I somehow time travel back to my youth? Is Japan doing a FANTASTIC job of capitalizing on mid-90’s nostalgia?

Whatever the answer is, I’m really not mad about it. I’ll probably continue to consume these franchises forever, as long as they stay good.

2014 has been a great year so far not only for starting new projects, but also for picking up old projects and dusting them off. OneUpMakeup was of course one of these such projects – but the other is Answerly!

Answerly was and has been an advice channel I made weekly videos for, discussing the ins and outs of being a nerd. My co-hosts were Joseph Birdsong and Hayley Hoover, discussing love and college life, respectively. We made two straight years of videos before we decided it was time to give the channel a face lift.

As we rounded the corner to the new year, we relaunched the channel with all new branding as the Answerly Book Club, a place to read books together and talk about them and interact much more than you ever could before with Answerly. Joe’s reading comedy books, Hayley’s tackling books by women, and I will be finding out what’s new and hot in the Young Adult genre.

My first book is Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell and I’m immensely enjoying it. I hope you’ll join us with these first books of the year, and stick around to see what we’ll be reading next!

I am so glad we found a way to take our tired old channel and really breathe some life into it… as well as encouraging ourselves and others to make more time for reading! God knows we all could probably use a bit more reading time.

It’s that time of year again, folks… the PROJECT 4 AWESOME! As a dedicated nerdfighter, this is one of my favorite projects of the year and I am so stoked for everyone to see the video I made for it. I feature a different charity each year and this year I chose to finally talk about a personal favorite… National Novel Writing Month.

I’m gonna be hanging out in the live stream for most of the next 48 hours, and I should also be hosting it later on tonight or tomorrow when John and Hank need a break (or to like, sleep/eat). If you’ve never heard of P4A or never participated yourself, please go check out the Project 4 Awesome website, donate at the indiegogo page (there are so AWESOME perks, including a handful of UNCUT SHEETS of Jetpack Unicorn that will be going up soon!) and watch/like/comment on as many videos with this year’s thumbnail as you can.

We can get so caught up in the holidays and shopping and gifts that it’s nice to have this annual reminder that we can use YouTube as a force for good, bringing real humans together to donate money to things that really matter to us as a group. I am so proud to have been doing this for seven years and I can just tell this will be a P4A to remember.

Did you make a P4A video this year? What charity did you choose and which are you voting for on the site?

I was so dedicated to not falling behind in word count on my trip to New York, but I came home exhausted and about 2,300 behind anyway. I was disappointed, but, by some crazy force of madness within me, I managed to write something like 6,000 words in 2 days and hit 20,000 right on time last night in an hour long word sprint I hosted on Twitter. It’s been a crazy couple of days, guys.

And it’s only about to get crazier.

I’m heading down to San Francisco tomorrow on a road trip to finally, finally attend the Night of Writing Dangerously, a party/write-a-thon for donors to the Office of Letters and Light. It’s a time to dress up fancy (I hear the theme is Noir) and raise a glass (and a pen) to the organization that tirelessly brings us NaNoWriMo, year after year. I couldn’t be more pumped.

I have always wanted to go, but it’s never been practical before to figure out a trip to San Francisco amidst the already crazy time-management of writing 50,000 words in a month. However, this summer I had the pleasure of meeting NaNo staff at LeakyCon, and combined with the perfect storm of also still having my Ford Fiesta, my main writing buddy Liz and I knew this year was the year. We’re taking turns driving (and, subsequently, writing) as we embark on the trip of a lifetime. What should I wear? I haven’t even started packing!!

I’ve been running a funding page for the event I’d like to point you in the direction of – the amount you need to raise for the event is $250, but this program has done so much for me that I am really trying to raise double that. My goal is $500 and ultimately this project will be the video I make for the Project 4 Awesome this year, so I really would love if people could check it out. Donating to my page sends the money to the same place as if you donated it directly to the Office of Letters and Light. Helping them reach their funding goals ensures we have NaNoWriMo for years to come!

On that note, who’s on track with 20,000 words today? How crazy is it that we’re nearly at the halfway point? This November is flying by, and I’m happy to report I am still enjoying my story this year. But then again, I haven’t hit the 30,000 blues yet…. that should happen right on schedule around the time of the Write-a-Thon this Sunday, so hopefully being in a room full of insane writers (I mean that in the kindest way possible; I’m one of them) will help drive me through that.

Let me know your mid-month NaNo thoughts in the comments below, and I’ll be sure to report all of the fun goings-on at the event this weekend.

Hello blog readers!

Today is one of the craziest days of the year and of course, because fate is cruel – I’m a big pile of sniffling, achey congestion. So even though tomorrow I plan to play 25 hours straight hours of video games to raise money for Seattle Children’s Hospital, and it’s the start of my month-long novel writing marathon… the only thing I’m working toward today is seeing if it’s possible to use an entire box of Kleenex in a single sitting.

Currently I’m winning.

I’m also currently sitting at 315 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, because I’m a boss. And by “boss” I mean “really disappointed that the first year I’m finally not hungover from post Halloween shenanigans, my head feels like it’s going to explode anyway”.

Anyway, every word I type here is both taking up energy I don’t have and keeping me away from working on my word count (…or napping) so I’ll make this short and sweet.

1. If you interested at all in Extra Life, the gaming marathon to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network, you can check out our live stream starting at 8am on November 2nd and going until 8am the following day. We have a whole list of activities planned that you can read about here, and if you feel sufficiently moved, you can also make a donation here. It’s for the kids. 🙂

2. If there’s any part of you that ever even once thought “NaNoWriMo sounds like fun…” today is your day. Just start. Start writing and see where it takes you. Finally give yourself the gift of time and focus and just start. Sign up on NaNoWriMo.org and add me as a writing buddy!

And if you want to send any good, healing thoughts my way… that would be much appreciated. I’m quite tired of this cold and would like to get on with all the marathoning I have planned for this month.

Let me know what you’re writing about for NaNoWriMo this month in the comments. I love hearing what other people are doing! And good luck!

I was checking out this website today, that tells you the “Secret Language Names and Personalities” of people based on their birthdate. It’s kind of interesting; rather than being totally made up (like a lot of astrology) the Secret Language Name is derived from a study done on over 20,000 actual people over a period of forty years. The data is supposed to reveal your “true identity” based on the information collected from other people born on your same birthday. I’m a total sucker for stuff like this, so I plugged in myself and a few of my friends, and here’s what I found:

I mean… that sounds about right. I can’t deny that. Generally I’m of the mindset that this sort of cultivated life advice is generally nothing more than that: advice. Maybe the day we come into this world really does have some effect on who we become (how cool would that be!) but even if it’s all just coincidence – who’s to say it’s not still helpful to take a step back and evaluate ourselves and how we operate now and then?

The way this site works, having scrolled through it a bit now, is that it breaks down your personality traits on a few different planes. First it gives you a breakdown of the type of person your particular birthdate has made you. Then if you scroll a bit further, it takes you to the Week of your birth, and then there’s a section about your Path and your Way. Then it jumps out to the Month and then the Season. Each one obviously get a bit broader, but the larger picture shows you how it all fits together to make you a complex high functioning person rich with a lot of these traits.

The part that spoke to me most from my results was actually from my Path. There was a section about what my “fulfillment” is, which was the following:

Again, maybe it’s not that I was born on the 27th of December that set my path as someone who makes their own rules – but I think there’s definitely something to be said about that fact that I was able to sift through a huge page full of information and pick out this quote, realizing it to be true about myself. Now this statement is something I’m thinking about. Now it’s something that will help me make future decisions; not because some horoscope told me to, but because it helped me realize it was part of who I am already. I think that’s interesting.

I looked up a few of my friends to see if there was anything I thought was true or interesting about them, which was a lot of fun.  Most of them were pretty accurate, surprisingly, but this particular quote about my friend and roommate Eia made me crack up, but mostly because she always sleeps until midday:

Anyway, there’s a whole bunch of information to read through and it’s all pretty interesting, so if you have a bit of free time and wanna check it out, you’ll probably learn something about yourself!

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

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.