Giveaway: Win a Costume From CostumeSupercenter.com!

Need a new costume for an upcoming convention, theme party or planning in advance for Halloween? CostumeSupercenter.com would like to give you a new one! Any of of Costume Supercenter's costumes worth $75 or less could be yours. To enter, just use the Rafflecopter widget at the bottom of this post and follow the instructions to get up to four entries. You have from Sunday May 4nd through next Sunday May 11th to get your entries in. The contest is open to residents of the USA and Canada.

I'm pretty partial to Star Trek costumes myself right now, specifically Next Gen. Check out this awesome guide to Star Trek Uniforms!

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

E3 2013

It's a bit late, but I think this is as good of a blog post this experience is ever going to get.

It's been my dream since I was probably about 12 years old to go to E3. Growing up and seeing the news stories from magazines and online. Even after they really reduced the size of the show I still dreamt of going.

And what do you know, this year I finally got to! Cross that item off the bucket list.

Maybe it was because I had none of my normal con-going friends there with me and was left to be my awkward, shy self all alone. Maybe it was because I had been to PAX and this didn't feel all that different. Maybe it things going on in my personal life drowning out all the fun. It just...didn't impress me as much as I thought it would've.

Since I have nothing of real interest to write, especially since this is 6 months late, here have a bunch of pictures!

Maker Faire 2013

In keeping with my "write about everything a month later" style of blogging, back on May 18th and 19th I went to the Bay Area Maker Faire for the first time. I was told there would be exploding sodas, and how could I pass that up?!

EepyBird doing their Coke and Mentos Extravaganza

PAX Prime 2012

So..um..yeah. Am I back to only having 30ish readers? Cause I'd totally be okay with that.

After work on Friday I headed on over to the BART and down to SFO for another weekend trip, this time on my way to Seattle for my first ever PAX Prime!

My flight was delayed, so I decided to save myself some time and do my hair and makeup in the airport (and looked really goofy in my "going out" makeup while still wearing a Pikachu shirt). Once I finished, I found a place to get a hearty meal to prepare me for the drinking I was sure to be doing later.

After getting into Seattle I headed straight to the hotel to meet up with my con partner-in-crime Cathy, and Molly, who were all ready to go to the Frag Doll / AC III / Twitch.tv party and ordered a cab as soon as I came in. I quickly changed and we headed out!

I immediately ran into some of the PMS Clan ladies, plus many other friends I had met at previous conventions or on Twitter. So many hugs! It was like one big reunion...which it really shouldn't be for me anymore since I now live in the same city as a handful of them. That's what I get for being a recluse the majority of the time, I suppose. Unfortunately we didn't do the Assassin's Creed III photobooth cause the line was too long, and they kept playing Gangnam Style - who can pass up dancing to that?! After they shut the bar down we headed to Noc Noc with a few others to continue dancing, but stayed only briefly before catching a cab back to the hotel for sleep.

OPPA GANGNAM STYLE. Also they kept playing AC3 trailers on repeat on that screen.

Woke up pretty early (damn you internal clock) and while waiting for a cab we saw two other friends, Stu and Kayla, who had rented a car for the weekend and we got a ride with them to the convention.

Molly had gotten in a day before Cathy and I, and knew the floor by then, so I wandered around with her to see where the important things were. We stood in a very, very long ZombiU line for a while before saying "screw it" and wondering to meet up with Cathy. I scored a New Super Mario Bros 2 shirt from Nintendo (extra large though, anyone have any good tips for making it into a dress or more fitted shirt without a sewing machine?) and, of course, tried to get as many pictures, StreetPasses and swag as I could!

Mmm hmm.

 Maro pls

 Woo! Shake it Shep!

 This guy. Best. Zombie. Ever.

Hobo Stormtrooper

Before heading back to the hotel to rest for a bit we grabbed our official PAX Swag bags! Lots of Magic The Gathering stuff, including 30 card starter decks and coloring books and crayons! I later spent part of that evening coloring. :3

No orange? The hell?!

We said goodbye to Molly before heading out to the Notch .party() since she was flying out that night to be in a wedding the next day. She is super fun. I wish she could have gone to the party with us, and definitely can't wait to hang out with her again.

The party was probably the best party I have ever been to - even considering all that happened. Cathy and I arrived very very early, VIP was empty and the floor was only just filling up. We grabbed some drinks, said hi to my college friend, Ryan, and rushed over to the photobooth before the party filled up.

Drink refills, dance, repeat until more friends showed up. Then of course it was more dancing, more photobooth-ing... repeat! After a few hours of this I slipped off my heels and replaced them with the flipflops I had in my purse. Eventually some Stormtroopers and a Steve head and Creeper head that were out on the dance floor came up into VIP too. Oh. And the man himself, Notch.

Hmm this picture looks familiar.

Notch!

We went down on to the main floor every now and then to dance in the crowd. And there was tons of socializing with both old and new friends who were there. Also I found out that you can get a cup full of maraschino cherries at an open bar event if you ask! They were delicious. At some point confetti starting raining down around us, and I kept scooping it up off the floor and throwing it up around my friends, because I can't resist confetti.

The next morning we walked to the Denny's down the street for breakfast before heading back down to the convention. I stood in line to play Halo 4, which I cannot wait for. So. Good. We then headed to meet our friend Jon to get lunch down near Pike Place. Most hilarious lunch ever, my abs still hurt from laughing so hard. Did you know someone bothered to make magnetized silverware? Totally bizarre.

Found this on the 3rd floor of the convention center. Centaur and human orgy painting?!

After lunch we went around saying our hellos and goodbyes to friends on the floor. The end of a con is such a bittersweet moment.

We then had dinner at this amazing pizza place, Via Tribunali, with Jon and Chris (another online friend I met for the first time) before Cathy, Jon and I headed back to the hotel. We spent the rest of the night napping and being lazy, since all three of us had 6am flights back home. And that more or less put an official end to another great trip!

Can't wait to go back next year, a PAX Prime is definitely something to be experienced.

Los Angeles and WWE SummerSlam!

Last Friday immediately after work I hopped on the BART straight to SFO to catch a flight to LA for the weekend.

Why LA? Because the beau was there for work, flights were cheap ($160 round trip) and I could just stay in his hotel room! So all I really had to pay for was my flight and my food.

Also, the hotel he was staying at has a 4th floor rooftop pool. I think that helped sway my decision to go a little bit too. ;)

Where I spent most of my Saturday and Sunday morning and afternoon.

IGN Pro League, Soccer and Bad Disney Sequel Night

I didn't actually plan on doing much this past weekend, what with Rich being in Hawaii without me (damn you, expensive flights!) and all. Actually, I was thinking of just having a nice weekend, holed up in my room, with my cat, playing video games and browsing the web.

But then I got a message from my friend, John, telling me he was going to be in San Francisco this weekend at the IGN Pro League Face Off: San Francisco Showdown for work.  I haven't ever watched much e-sports, other than the Starcraft 2 tournaments that were shown at Blizzcon of last year, but I enjoyed those enough, and I enjoy my friend's company enough, that I got myself a ticket and decided to at least stop by.

Then, on Friday night, I got a text from another friend asking me if I'd like to go to a Major League Soccer game on Saturday night. Well sure I do! I love sports and I've never been to an MLS game before so why  not? Plus I doubt I'd be staying very late to watch League of Legends at IPL.

So I MEANT to get to the IPL event around 10 or 11am since it started at 9:30, but instead ended up sleeping until 10 and not getting there till around 12:30. Oh well, sleeping in is what weekends are for, right? So I get downtown, meet up with Jon and start watching some pro-SC2.

It was the Team Arena Challenge going on this weekend and it was Team Liquid vs team LG-Incredible Miracle. When I got there TaeJa from Team Liquid was on a winning streak and was about to face Nestea next. I've seen Nestea play before, and he's one of the best in the world. I think he would've had the match, but then his computer crashed and they had to restart the whole thing and TaeJa ended up winning the rematch. TaeJa ended up winning 7 matches total before finally being defeated by Seed in the second Best of 9.

Pretty decent sized crowd for SC2! 

In between matches, and sometimes during matches that we didn't care much for, John and I would go wandering and eat. He managed to get me some AMD thundersticks and an IPL shirt by telling the IPL booth workers that my boyfriend works for IGN (which I don't think they believed, but gave me the shirt anyway). At one point we went on a venture to get gelato from a place down the street and John took this amazingly flattering picture of how ridiculous I looked with my pack and thundersticks.

Nice thumb placement, John.

Starcraft 2 finals were supposed to be done around 3pm, but ended up going until way after I left around 7pm. The way the Team Arena Challenge is laid out is that the finals are between two teams, the winner of the Winners' Bracket from qualifiers (in this case, LG-Incredible Miracle) and the winner of the Losers' Bracket (Team Liquid). The Losers' Bracket winner must win two best of 9s to win, and since Team Liquid won the first best of 9 with TaeJa just dominating everyone, they had to do a second Bo9. Had LG-IM won the first best of, then Starcraft 2 finals would've totally been done on time.

So around 7pm I left and met up with Stone so that we could go to the soccer game! It was in San Jose and it was the San Jose Earthquakes vs Seattle Sounders. Stone is a Seattle fan and we were sitting on the Seattle side right next to the crazy group of fans that I guess are referred to as "ultras" and damn are they crazy. Jumping up and down and singing songs and chanting. Was very entertaining.  We wandered around a bit, looking at the different food trucks and meeting up with one of his friends, we even got Hawaiian leis randomly from a little kid!

 Well alright.

Ultras waving Seattle flags and setting off blue and white smokebombs.

We left a little early to beat traffic, but also because Stone had a midnight flight to Boston to catch.

The next morning I woke early to a text from John telling me he wasn't going to be staying at IPL much later than noon that day. So, since I didn't really care to see pro-LoL or be at IPL alone, I decided not to go and again slept in till 11. Later that night I knew my roommate was having a movie night with some friends, so I decided to be social and join in on that, even though I knew it meant I'd have to put on pants.

Apparently the theme for the movie night was Bad Disney Sequels. We watched The Fox and the Hound 2, which is far less depressing than the original, has voices by Patrick Swayze and Reba McEntire and was full of so many facepalm worthy puns. So many puns. It wasn't all that terrible though. Second up was Belle's Enchanted Christmas, a midquel to Beauty and the Beast, and wow was that shit terrible. I mean it was bad. The songs were bad, the voices were bad (even though it was apparently the original voice actors!), the story was bad. But despite being bad, it was certainly fun to mock with good people and good food (and booze)!

For a weekend that I didn't plan on doing anything I certainly ended up doing a lot!

Till next time,

Ky

California Extreme 2012!

This past Sunday Rich surprised me with a trip to California Extreme in Santa Clara with a few of our friends.

What is California Extreme you ask? Well for those of you that didn't click the above link it is an annual celebration of coin operated pinball machines, video games and other novelties you once found in game arcades. It was $30 to get in on the Sunday and all the games were on free play. There were lines for a lot of the games, but waiting was worth it and most attendees were courteous and would move on after finishing one game.

After working in an arcade for 7 years (although one not nearly as awesome as this, my arcade was mostly redemption/ticket spewing games for kids) I fell in love with pinball machines, so the majority of my time was spent playing the different pinballs they had, icluding ones that were so old they had wooden play fields. I also played a few other games just for the sake of playing them, like Donkey Kong, and a few that I had played years and years ago, like Qix and Terminator Judgement Day.

Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball, which had the most amazing ball launching mechanism.

 

 Addams Family pinball, that I've expressed my love for before. I didn't play this one though because, as you can see in the picture, it was hooked up to some sort of bike which helped power the machine and the triggers on the bike controlled the flippers. Awkward much?

TOS pinball!

Hell yes Mario Pinball, circa 1992. I got a score of 103,000,000 on the right one.

Fucking. Terrifying.

Doctor Who pinball! I loved the Dalek on the top of the machine.

Old School Nintendo games.

 Me playing the original Donkey Kong!

What is that woman doing to that poor clown?!

I love Rampage so much. There was always a line to play it while we were there.

This game was hard as hell.

Hell yes TMNT game. Unfortunately the screen was kind of messed up.

This show really doesn't get enough publicity, I didn't have any idea it was even going on! Thank goodness Rich did! I had a great time there and hope to make it an annual thing for me. It's also renewed my desire to someday own a bunch of pinball machines.

Till next time,

Ky