I just spent a lot of time writing a long blog post with my thoughts on VidCon, but then when I hit “publish” – rather than, you know, my blog post going live… WordPress decided instead to delete it! Isn’t that cute? Isn’t WordPress so quirky and fun tonight?

I really can’t bring myself to re-gather all of those thoughts, so I guess that’s just gone to the ether, then. Here are the videos I made:

This first one is a video I filmed over the course of the entire trip. Basically any time I was talking to another YouTuber, I asked them what they were reading. I was very pleased with how it came together, and even more pleased to see literally every person I talked to was reading a different book. Can you believe it?

This second video is my more all encompassing “VidCon vlog”, and it contains a bit of footage from the panel I moderated (The Growing Community of Booktube), the Team Hypercube “Ultimate Werewolf” gaming meetup, and of course, the first annual VidCon Book Swap.

Okay. It’s been 2 days since “the great blog post crash” and I think I am finally ready to retype this stuff. I’m going to talk about the Book Swap for a second.

It was incredible.

There were things I would change. I would have a megaphone, for one. Or we’d not be doing it in the middle of a construction zone. I’d love to have music playing to signify when we’re just looking at the books and when we’re actually picking them, a la musical chairs. I’d love for it to be indoors, and potentially even on the VidCon schedule. I’d love to work with a sponsor in the future to donate books for those who might not have known about it beforehand, and I’d love an opportunity for participates to donate an additional book to a charity.

But even without all of these changes/things I learned this year, it was still really incredible. I loved seeing so many people gather in the name of books, get to know new people and share which books they ended up getting. I loved to see books getting new homes, seeing people walking away excited, knowing they could read a book its old owner maybe never read.

I was such a beautiful meetup and I can’t wait to do it again.

Regarding my VidCon video — if nothing else, you should watch it to see Joe and I duke it out in giant inflatable balls. You won’t regret it. VidCon was great. I can’t wait for next year.

After realizing I never made videos mentioning I would be at Emerald City Comic Con and SakuraCon this year, I decided something needed to be done. Here’s a video outlining every other event I currently plan to be at in 2015 – though if new events pop up, you’ll want to make sure you’re following me on other social media!

Are you going to any of these events? Do you know of any other cool conventions I might not have heard about? Leave me a comment!

I can’t believe how close we are to VidCon. Deep breaths, Kristina. Deep breaths.

I wanted to write up a quick little post to let you know everything I am doing at the con, since there’s a lot of it. From panels to meetups to running a convention-wide game — I’m gonna be busy! But as usual, I love meeting you guys, so please feel free to come up and say hello! And scan my QR code… but I’ll get to that later.

Here’s my official schedule:

 FRIDAY JUNE 27:

Striving to be Sustainable (206AB): 3:30-4:30pm
Making millions off your web series sounds nice, but for most creators, just the idea of making a living off your content — consistently, and without going crazy — is enough of a dream. What’s the secret to balancing life and work in the web video world on a long-term basis?

SATURDAY JUNE 28:

Job Hunters Cast & Crew (209): 12:30-1:30pm
 Join the cast of Job Hunters for a Q&A after a screening of not 1 but THREE episodes of the new season of their web series. Then stick around for announcements and fun surprises!

SUNDAY JUNE 29: (Disneyland Day!)

I’ll be hanging at Disneyland with everyone else, but what I really want to share with you guys is the Disneybound meetup I’m co-hosting with my friends Sarah, Leo and Joe. It’s going to be a lot of fun and I hope you’ll plan to join us if you’ll also be at Disney that day.

The last important thing to note is VidCon Arena — the convention-wide game Job Hunters is hosting. You’ll be receiving a QR code sticker in your VidCon bag once you get to the convention, and if you want to play you just need to stick it to your name badge. Then you’ll need to hunt down other players with their own QR codes, Job Hunters arena style. Rack up points and the top winners will get to play LASER TAG with the cast of Job Hunters on Saturday in official Maewin jumpsuits – and they might win some other great prizes!

I’ll just let this video explain it to you:

Please let me know in the comments if you’re attending VidCon, and hopefully I’ll see you there! I am nervous and excited and I CAN’T WAIT TO GET THERE AHHH.

It’s here it’s here it’s here! Season 2 of my web series Job Hunters has been a long time in the making and we’ve finally launched Episode 1! It’s a huge sigh of relief for our entire team, as we hate making you guys wait just as much we know you hate waiting. The episode has already been extremely well received, however, and we couldn’t be more excited to finally be sharing this with you.

We have a bunch of news regarding what we’re doing at VidCon (most of our team leaves for the convention tomorrow!) so keep an eye out for those updates in the very immediate future!

Thanks for sticking with me on this, guys. It means so much to me. I hope you enjoy episode 1.

Who DOESN’T love swag? If ask anyone (I mean anyone) what their favorite parts of a convention are, I guarantee “swag” will be at least in the top five. And if it’s not; they’re lying.

I’ve been talking about VidCon a lot on this blog, but it’s one of my biggest events of the year. And for those of you out there who didn’t make it, I want to try to at least give you a slice of what it was like, because no one wants to be left out!

So in this final VidCon write-up, here’s the swag I came home with. Let’s start with the free stuff:

• 1. Chapstick “business card” from bfftaylor. Brilliant! Functional! Adorable!
• 2. Endless Silky Eye Pen and Lip Blush from Pixi. Tried both already and I love them.
• 3. Lego themed moleskin (picked this up at the Subblime booth). So awesome!
• 4. YouTube branded phone screen cleaner. Incredibly useful!
• 5. Bare Essentials Marvelous Moxie lipgloss. This came in every VidCon bag.
• 6. “Nailed It!” nail art by Espionage Cosmetis. These just came out and they’re so much fun – check out the kickstarter they currently have running right now!

Next up, the stuff I actually bought at VidCon. Each year the Expo Hall gets bigger and bigger, and as that happens – it means more and more stuff to buy. Believe it or not though, I actually managed to keep it in my pants pretty well this year. My wallet, I mean. Come on, guys.

The first thing I purchased was this ADORABLE vinyl Pinkie Pie figurine by Funko (you can get them here on Amazon.com). I already have a small collection of Disney ones, but when I saw they’d started making My Little Pony ones, I was IN. I saw them for sale at the LootCrate booth, walked right up, handed them my money, and away we went. I have no regrets about this purchase. And I want more.

Next was the Cruella de Vil pin. I knew very little about the Disney pin trading phenomenon before this past weekend, but while I was at Disneyland my friend Sarah enlightened me. I don’t think I am ever going to be one of those hardcore back alley pin collectors, but I can see how it might be fun. So maybe I’ll get one pin per Disney trip. Or something. Anyway, I started with Cruella, since she was who I Disneybounded as that day. 🙂

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While in LA last week, my friends and I attended “Disneyland Day” for VidCon – which is like any other normal day at Disneyland, except the park is swarming with YouTubers. Rather than donning my official gray VidCon tee like many others, my friends and I decided to Disneybound:

This was my very first time Disneybounding and I decided I wanted to go villain. I chose Cruella de Vil; mostly on account of finding these adorable polka dot shorts. The puppy earrings were actually just white dog earrings I found at Claire’s (by walking in and asking the girl working to “show me whatever dog stuff they had”) that I drew black spots on with a sharpie. I tucked in a slouchy red shirt, grabbed some other black and white accessories and wa-la! If it doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will!

I never got a full picture of all my friends and I in costume, but we had among us a Dumbo, Christopher Robin, Scuttle, The Queen of Hearts and Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle. I love dressing up, so getting to do so, subtly, on a normal day is something I am all about.

Who should I Disneybound as next? Or, if you’ve done it yourself, show me pictures in the comments section!

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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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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!

Ah. The airport look. The look that screams “this was the heaviest stuff that didn’t fit in my suitcase, so I’m wearing all of it!” The one day of your trip that it’s not required to look fabulous, because you’ll likely change the second you arrive at your destination. Let’s break it down.

I’m wearing:

• The only pair of jeans I packed
• The only sweater I packed
• A watch, so I don’t have to keep pulling out my cell phone to make sure I haven’t missed my flight while browsing the airport bookstore
• Boots, because they didn’t fit in my suitcase
• Hair in braids, because it’s early and my hairdryer was already packed
• Bright under eyeliner to mask the giant dark circles hiding underneath

I’m currently sitting at my gate in SeaTac airport armed with a bagel breakfast sandwich, a bottle of water, and an eagerness for airplane naps I can’t even describe. VidCon is going to be a whirlwind of excitement, of friends, of parties, of events and laughter and memories – but right now, this 2 1/2 hour flight is beckoning me with a soft caress and promise of upright eye-resting, and that is the greatest thing I can imagine.

It’s been a long week, and it’s only Wednesday.

I can’t wait to see everyone this week! VIDCON, HERE I COME!