Category Archives for Other nerdy stuff

Random miscellaneous nerdy stuff that I feel like talking about.

PopCon 2015: A Very Late Report

I have been so ridiculously busy lately that it’s not even funny.  With two conventions within a month, and moving during one of those conventions, plus finally getting a full time position at IT Training (wooo!), I haven’t had much time to actually post about my fun experiences at Indy PopCon last month!  So, here are my thoughts, in no particular order, along with some photos!

The biggest thing about PopCon this year was getting the chance to meet one of my favorite actors.  He’s been in Star Trek, Breaking Bad, Invader Zim, and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, to name a few of the many things he’s been a part of.

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Yes.  Ross and I got to meet John deLancie.  And I completely forgot how to form words, haha.

I ended up having him sign one of my favorite Discord-centric issues of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic, and I think pretty much everyone I know who’s a Star Trek/MLP fan hates me a little bit for getting to meet him, haha.  (Although if you guys want to hate me more for meeting famous people, remind me to tell you my Ian McKellan story…)

Anyhow, we also got to see plenty of lovely cosplayers, including Yamino of Yamino Cosplay/GeekGasm Boutique!  She was dressed as Faye Valentine on Friday, and Morticia Addams on Saturday – both very well done costumes.  You should check out her Facebook page and Etsy store – she’s done some amazing costumes!

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I also had the pleasure of running into one of my awesome IT Training co-workers, Rachel of the Five-ish Fangirls Podcast!

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And yes, we were both dressed as Pinkie Pie on Friday at the convention.  I also attended part of her My Little Pony panel, and she did a great job with it!  I’m hoping that The Crafty Nerd and The Five-ish Fangirls can get together to do some nerdy awesomeness later on. 😀

Overall, PopCon was even more awesome than last year.  They were still incredibly organized – even when the line to meet/get photos with Markiplier ended up being a mile long.  Photos and autographs with media guests were just as organized as ever, there were all sorts of interesting panels, and they upgraded the badges for this year too to nice plastic ones!

All in all, I was incredibly pleased with PopCon this year – and I can’t wait for next year!

And, of course, here are a number of awesome cosplayers and other nifty things I saw during both days of the convention!

And now… to get ready for GenCon.  Which is today.  Ross and I are leaving in ten minutes, in fact.  AND PATRICK ROTHFUSS WILL BE THERE.  *flail*  So, expect the annual Gen Con Report over the next few days!  It’s going to be… interesting this year.

Book Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora

127455 After my vacation in Florida towards the end of May, where I tore through a ton of books rather rapidly, I found myself lacking in the books-to-read department.  I’d finished the last of the new books that came out earlier this spring, I’d read through a couple of my favorites by Stephen King, and even read through the first book in the Mercy Thompson series – and couldn’t think of any other books I had been interested in reading.  So I took to Goodreads, and looked for suggestions based on the books I’d read (that I’d actually entered into Goodreads, anyway.)  And as I was poking through the suggested books, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch popped up.  I’d heard it mentioned around the internet as a good book to read, and so I figured, what the heck, I’ll go to Amazon and buy it.

And then I saw this review on Amazon, and absolutely knew I’d enjoy it.

“Right now, in the full flush of a second reading, I think The Lies of Locke Lamora is probably in my top ten favorite books ever. Maybe my top five. If you haven’t read it, you should. If you have read it, you should probably read it again.”—Patrick Rothfuss, New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Wind

If Pat Rothfuss, whose books I absolutely adore, says the book is good, then by gods, I should probably read it, right?  So I picked it up.  And I couldn’t put it down.

Continue reading →

March Book Madness! (and a contest!)

visioninsilverMarch seems to be the month of the year where all of my favorite authors conspire against my wallet and release books from their ongoing (or new, as in the case with one author I adore) series.  And this year is no exception – I have not one, not two, but three books from authors I enjoy coming out this month.

The first one is Vision in Silver, by Anne Bishop, which was released on March 3rd, 2015.  I’ve been following Anne’s works since 2004, when a friend of mine gave me a copy of the Black Jewels Trilogy, the start of what turned into a seven book dark fantasy series.  He said “this isn’t really my style, but maybe you’ll like them?” as he handed me the stack.  I devoured all three in roughly three days, and then got excited when I learned she was still publishing stories in that universe!  Vision in Silver is a novel set in the world of The Others, an alternate universe to our own filled with Anne’s unique take on supernatural creatures.  You’ll find shapeshifters, vampires, and prophets in the world of The Others.  The setting for the books is a modern-day society where these Others are more populous than humans – and don’t take kindly to humans trying to encroach on their territory.  Vision in Silver is the third book in the series – I’m currently finishing the first book, Written in Red, to refresh my memory before I read through Vision in Silver.

PrudenceCoverThe next book I’m excited about is Gail Carriger’s Prudence, due to be released on March 17th, 2015 – it’s the first book in the Custard Protocol Series.  Gail’s already written two book series’ in this universe, a steampunk version of our own world set in the late 19th century with a heaping dose of the supernatural.  I’m excited for this series – Gail’s first books, the Parasol Protectorate series, got me incredibly excited about the steampunk genre.  Her writing style is sassy and sometimes over the top, her characters are strong and likable (especially Alexia Tarabotti, Prudence’s mother), and there’s a liberal dose of humor sprinkled throughout her novels.  Plus, the way she writes her vampires and werewolves is refreshing – a different take than most books.  Her vampires are fashionable and almost prissy, and her werewolves are humorously rough around the edges.

With this being the first book in the Custard Protocol series, I’m not entirely sure what to expect.  What familiar characters will we run into during Prudence?  What sorts of ridiculous adventures will we get to read about?  And – the biggest question, for Gail’s fans – will everyone’s favorite vampire, Lord Akeldama, be making an appearance?  With this being a new series, readers who’ve never dipped their toes into the world of Gail Carriger’s novels can jump right in and not be lost, and then read through her other two series (The Parasol Protectorate series and the Finishing School series, a set of young adult novels set in the mid-19th century in the same universe as her other books) if you decide you want more.

Diamond-Conspiracy_finalAnd last, but certainly not least, is the latest entry into the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series, written by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris – The Diamond Conspiracy, set to release on March 31st, 2015.  The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novels are also in the steampunk genre, taking place in the late 19th century as well, and focus on two characters who are just about as different as night and day – Wellington Thornhill Books, the Ministry’s dashing archivist, and Eliza D. Braun, a field agent for the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences.  Where Books is quiet and calm, Braun is very in-your-face.  They take very different approaches when it comes to solving problems, and as you might expect, eventually opposites end up attracting… one of the sub-plots from the first book ends up working its way to a more major plot point as Books and Braun end up developing feelings for each other.  The books (of which The Diamond Conspiracy is the fourth) are full of action and adventure, mystery and intrigue, and interwoven with various subplots that help tie the stories all together, with a heaping helping of steampunky goodness thrown on top for good measure.

I’m so excited over having a month of good books to read, some of which I’ve been waiting a while for – and I’m going to share that excitement with you, with The Crafty Nerd’s first ever contest!

The Crafty Nerd’s March Book Madness contest!

The rules for entering are simple: post a comment on this entry with what book you’re excited about that’s coming out soon, and the winner (chosen randomly) will receive a $10 Amazon Gift Card!  Pick up the Kindle version of that book you’ve been wanting, or put the gift card towards a hardcover copy of something you’ve been looking forward to reading!  The contest will run until March 20th – so tell me what you’re looking forward to reading soon!

Discovering Star Trek

I’ll admit, in some ways I’m a bit of a late blooming nerd.  I may have been playing video games since I was in kindergarten, in the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I’ve been a fan of science-related things (especially anything related to the solar system) since my dad brought home the Adventures in the Solar System book and book-on-tape combo when I was six.  (And yes, that link takes you to the same audio book I listened to as a kid, although with a different book cover.  Oh, the nostalgia…)  But I’d never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer until 2013.  I hadn’t read Ender’s Game until I was in my late 20s.  And I hadn’t seen any Star Trek, aside from Generations when it was in the theaters (it was my first date ever!) and the reboot movies, until very recently. Despite having a mother who really enjoyed Star Trek, though, I never really got into it.

Now these guys all feel like my best friends, haha.

Now these guys all feel like my best friends, haha.

Ross, however, grew up on Star Trek.  He can rattle off the specifications of half the ships in the show, and tell you about all sorts of connections between the various series of Star Trek.  Heck, he just flopped down next to me with the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual and is reading it while I’m writing this.  And me, being the curious person I am, and looking for something new to watch, and having enjoyed the reboot movies and shows like Firefly and Farscape, figured I’d see what Ross enjoyed so much and jump in with Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The only knowledge I went into the show with was that there was an android in there named Data, that Patrick Stewart played Jean-Luc Picard and was generally pretty damn awesome, and that LeVar Burton was in it (I watched a lot of Reading Rainbow as a kid, and was pretty excited to see him in something else).  And Whoopi Goldberg was in there somewhere.  And that they were all on the USS Enterprise.  But that was it.

Now, a couple months after watching my first episodes of The Next Generation, I’m following the entire cast of TNG on Twitter.  All my alert noises on my cellphone are various alert tones and computer noises from Star Trek.  (I get very confused when the Enterprise gets hailed when I’m watching TNG, as I’m not sure if the ship’s just received a message or if I have)  I watch at least an episode a day, if not more, and I’m almost halfway through season six of The Next Generation – and I just started season two of Deep Space Nine.  I’m seeing what pulled everyone else into the world of Star Trek.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed about watching Star Trek is that some of these episodes really tug at your feelings.  I’ve become attached to the characters, and care about what happens to them.  I freaked out when Dr. Crusher mysteriously disappeared for the entirety of Season 2 of TNG, and was incredibly relieved when she came back for season 3.  I watched Wesley grow up from a whiny little teenager and enter Starfleet Academy.  I felt so many feels every time Data would long to be human, and would try his hardest to emulate human behaviors to become more like his crewmates.  I eventually grew to like Counselor Troi, and I can even tolerate her ridiculous mother now.  (Barely.)  Watching Worf deal with the fact that he’s got a son, and watching him be a parent, is equally touching and hilarious.  (I may have recently watched Too Many Datas, and spent half the episode laughing…)

And there’s more to it than the feels I get when watching particularly good episodes.  I’ve gotten sucked into the fandom. I spend time poking around on subreddits dedicated to Star Trek, and enjoy reading through new fan theories and interesting discussions.  I watch ridiculous videos of You Tube captions failing horribly when it comes to captioning video from a Klingon video game.  I make up lyrics to the opening theme songs.  (Just ask Ross.  They’re ridiculous, and change almost every time I watch an episode…)

And I realized, once I run out of episodes of The Next Generation, that doesn’t mean that I’ve run out of Star Trek.  I still have all of the original series to watch, and Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and Enterprise if I’m feeling desperate (I’ve heard it’s not very good), as well as all the movies.  And there’s even more than that.  There are books, and websites, and even more to go explore.  And it’s ridiculously exciting.  I feel much like I did when I discovered Sailor Moon, or My Little Pony – absolutely hooked.  I may be a nerdy late bloomer, but I’m glad I discovered my passion for Star Trek when I did.  I think I’m enjoying it more now than I would have had I tried to watch more than one episode on my tiny black-and-white TV as a kid.  You have no idea how excited I am to watch more episodes of the show, read more crazy fan theories (like the one where Guinan is apparently a time lord), talk about what I’ve seen with friends, and learn all there is to learn.  Ultimately, the Star Trek fan in me is what grew out of the little girl who used to sit in her dad’s den, listening to Adventures in the Solar System on the surround sound, looking at the brightly colored pictures of the planets and listening to the somewhat sci-fi-esque adventures of a little boy and his robot that can turn into a spaceship.  That little girl loved learning about space and the planets, and daydreamed about going out there herself someday – and this grown-up woman, well, she still dreams about it, and while she can’t exactly hop on a spaceship and go fly around the galaxy, she can lose herself in the stories of characters who do.

Game Review: Pairs (or: What to do while waiting for GenCon housing access)

Well, I found myself with some unexpected time on my hands today, and I’ve been intending to review this game for a bit, so….

 

Pairs: The Review

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I’ve had this game on a shelf since September, waiting for the chance to get to play it.  I discovered the Kickstarter for Pairs through Patrick Rothfuss’ blog, sometime last spring, and eagerly backed the project and snagged three decks as a result.  (I mean, come on, Pat could put his name on anything and I’d be likely to back it.)  There were many decks available to choose from, and I picked three with artwork from Pat Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles series, as I do love those books and was curious to see Shane Tyree and Nate Taylor’s artistic interpretation of the characters I’ve enjoyed reading about.  Once the decks finally got delivered, I opened them all up, looked at the beautiful artwork, and then set them in my “let’s play this later” pile on my bookshelf.

There are even more games, but they don't quite fit on the bookshelf...

There are even more games, but they don’t quite fit on the bookshelf…

Fast forward to today – the day housing access opens up on Gen Con’s website!  I eagerly awaited the coming of 12:00 pm, to see how long of a wait I’d have to get to the housing portal…

WHAT

WHAT

So, Ross and I figured this would be a good time to pick up Pairs and play.    Based on what I’d heard about it from the Kickstarter page, and what I’d read in the rules when I’d first opened the games, it seemed pretty simple – points were earned by getting a pair of cards, and the person with the highest score lost.  So, going off of that, we figured we’d shuffle the cards (which turned into an ordeal, due to the fact that neither of us can properly shuffle a deck of cards without turning it into a game of 52 Pick-Up) and start a game!  I read off the rules while Ross and I took turns slowly shuffling the deck – and the rules ended up being a little less straightforward than we initially thought…

It took Ross and I a little while to put the rules in terms we could wrap our brains around...

It took Ross and I a little while to put the rules in terms we could wrap our brains around…

Gameplay, for Ross and I, went as follows: Whoever dealt took five cards from the deck and put them face-down to start the discard deck, as the rules suggested, and then the dealer passed out a card to each of us – whoever had the lowest card went first.  Then, we’d take turns drawing cards, hoping neither of us would end up with a pair – especially a high scoring pair.  (The deck is a pyramid deck – there’s one 1, two 2s, three 3s, and so on, making your chances of getting a high numbered card pretty large.)  When one of us ended up with a pair, that ended the round – we’d set aside a card from that pair to keep score, and the rest went into the discard pile.  We repeated that until one of us hit 31 points, the suggested “losing” score number that the rules gave us.

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A round in progress…

 

It was actually pretty fun – and once we figured out what we were doing, we enjoyed it.  I think we ended up playing three games – I lost twice, Ross lost once.  It didn’t help too much that Ross kept commenting on the artwork on the cards – it hinted at what cards he had, haha.  The artwork for the Commonwealth Deck (the one we played with), done by Shane Tyree, is absolutely gorgeous. While I wish the art focused on specific characters in the Kingkiller Chronicles, the game is mentioned to be played in the universe of the stories – and characters from the story seeing themselves on a card, well, that’d be rather odd.

Steve enjoyed the game, too. He thought it was tasty.

Steve enjoyed the game, too. He thought it was tasty.

Overall, it was a pretty fun game, and a good way to kill time.  I think it might have been even more fun with more people playing, but for Ross and I, it was pretty good too.  I might even bring this along with me if I’m going out to eat with a group of people, as a fun way of keeping everyone entertained while waiting for food.  If you want to learn more, visit the Pairs page on Cheapass Games’ website!

Well, killed some more time...

Well, killed some more time…

And it meant a half-hour’s worth of time not spent looking at the computer, anxiously waiting our turn for housing.  (At the time of this writing, I’ve got fourteen and a half minutes left – I hope hope hope there’s still room in the JW Marriott or even the Hampton Inn…)

Convention season is upon us!

Ohhh, it’s the most wonderful time of the year… no, not Christmas!  It’s the very beginning of convention season! My favorite conventions are announcing their dates, opening up pre-registration, and in the case of Indiana Comic Con, the convention itself is rapidly approaching!

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Oh my gosh this is SO EXCITING

 

This year, I’m planning on attending the same three conventions I did last year:  Indiana Comic Con, Indy PopCon, and GenCon (of course!)  And aside from knowing that I’ll be Pinkie Pie, I have no idea what I’ll be cosplaying!

I mean, I’ve got some ideas.  Some of them are more feasible than others…

  • Ross and I were thinking of going as Rainbow Dash and Pinkie in full Grand Galloping Gala gear – however, this could get expensive.  And I want to be able to do it right, and look absolutely fabulous, you know?
  • I could just buy a Star Trek: The Next Generation era scientist outfit, dye my hair red, and go as Beverly Crusher.  Because she’s awesome.  Maybe Ross could be Data… maybe… his hair might be a little too long by then, though.
  • There’s always LazyPie and LazyDash – wigs, sweatshirts and jeans.  I feel like I’m cheating whenever I wear that combination of clothes, though…
  • … I have wanted to do “Good Morning Pinkie Pie” – with a tousled wig, my Rainbow Dash bathrobe and slippers, some ridiculous pink pajamas, and a coffee mug.  I’m envisioning Ross doing something similar as Rainbow Dash but with his Star Trek TNG bathrobe.  Which could be amusing.  This could be a thing.  I’ll have to think about it.
  • My steampunk costume could always use some love… I keep adding things to it, too.  It’s going to look pretty epic, whenever I get the chance to wear it again!

And aside from costumes, there’s a wealth of panels to go to at every convention.  I’m going to try to find all the My Little Pony themed ones I can, and enjoy the heck out of them!  Last year, there weren’t many pony-related things at PopCon and Indiana Comic Con (although I did get to buy a page from the Twilight Sparkle issue of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic book micro series at Comic Con!), but there were some things at GenCon that I wanted to go do. Sadly, the lack of a hotel room (rooms sold out crazily quick last year for GenCon!) made it hard for Ross and I to make it to later events – we ended up driving from Bloomington each day, an hour and a half-ish trip, and by late afternoon we were wiped out and ended up dragging our tired selves home around 5 pm.  While I’m not sure if we’ll be getting a hotel for Comic Con or PopCon, I’m gonna try my hardest to get a room for GenCon so I can provide much better convention coverage than last year!

I’m definitely excited to get the chance to see some of the guests at ComicCon.  There’s a ridiculous amount of stars coming, including….

  • Carrie Fisher (known better as Princess Leia! OMG)
  • Jenna Coleman (Clara from Doctor Who)
  • Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo!  *swoon*)
  • Billy West (who hasn’t he voiced?)
  • Paige O’Hara (the voice of Belle from Beauty and the Beast)

Needless to say, Indiana Comic Con is looking to be pretty exciting.  I hope it’ll be a better run convention than last year!  Meanwhile, I’m eagerly awaiting the guest lists for PopCon and GenCon.  PopCon is currently asking for suggestions for guests on their Facebook page, and I suggested Lil’ Bub – I love Bub, and she’s from Bloomington!  And she’s way better than Grumpy Cat.  For GenCon, I’m really, really, really hoping Patrick Rothfuss comes back.  I have more things I need him to sign.  Like a card game I’m working on a review for, and my Kindle.  And more books of his. Plus, he’s just an awesome guy!  I’m wondering if other authors I might know will show up – I’ll have to wait and see who gets announced!

So, in short, I’m really, really excited for this year’s convention season.  It looks as if it’s going to end up being exciting and fun-filled!  I’ll share updates on my convention preparations as things happen – especially if I figure out what I’m wearing and build new costumes!

NaNoWriMo 2014: not quite ready yet

Yes, my wonderful readers, it’s that time of year again…

Participant-2014-Web-BannerYes, November is almost upon us, which means National Novel Writing Month!  And I am nowhere near ready.

I at least have a plan.  I’m rewriting an old novel entirely, the novel that earned me my first NaNoWriMo win – previously known as Love, Lies, and Sand, it’s been renamed as Caught Between and so far I have three chapters planned out.  Three.  By this point when I’d originally written Love, Lies, and Sand/Caught Between, back in 2010, I’d outlined maybe ten chapters and was nearly vibrating with the need to write.  This story needed to come out, and oh, when I started writing I couldn’t stop.  I was so incredibly excited.  And things weren’t too terribly different then – grad school, working, etc.  So why am I so far behind this year?

It might be because I’ve had at least two 10-hour days a week at work for most of this month.  It might be due to homework and that crazy midterm for Representation and Organization that was due last week, that made me want to bang my head on the wall because I couldn’t formulate good answers to ANY of the questions, let alone three of them.  It could also probably be that I’m struggling with depression, too.  Who knows.  What I do know, however, is that come Friday night, I’ll be here, at my computer desk, a bowl of leftover Halloween candy by my side and a mug of coffee fueling my creativity, ready to write when midnight strikes and it’s officially November.  I’ve got my NaNoWriMo scrabble tile necklace ready.  I’m going to crank out a new “Novelist at Work” sign for my tablet probably today or tomorrow.  I’ve at least got three chapters outlined.  I’ve got a bunch of print quota on the campus printers I can waste on printing out the old novel, so I can tear it apart and write it anew, hopefully well enough so that I can feel comfortable sharing this novel with the world.  I am going to hit 50 thousand words.  I may even surpass 75k, the amount of words that Love, Lies, and Sand/Caught Between hit when I’d finished it originally.  I might even hit 100 thousand words.  How amazing would that be?

I can do this.  Even though I’m not ready at all.

 

Comic books, markup, and geeking out with an academic purpose

For those of you who’ve been following the blog since I started writing early last year, it should be no surprise to you that three-quarters of the year, I’m up to my nose in school work, earning my Masters degrees in Information and Library Science.  (And yes, that’s right, two degrees – I added the Library Science degree on at the end of the spring semester last year.)  And as most of you know, I try my hardest to work my nerdiness into, well, everything I can.  You’ve seen my cube in my office building, covered in My Little Ponies.  You saw Scooterlou with her yarn-covered wire basket.  (And I saw Scooterlou recently – and she still has her basket cozy attached!  A fellow crafter bought her, and is considering sewing beads onto her cozy, but I digress!)  So, it should come as no surprise that I’ve managed to work my nerdiness into my graduate work – and that it’s come effortlessly, too.

One of my professors (and my academic advisor), Dr. John Walsh, is a comic book fan.  A large one.  There’s a big chunk of his office dedicated to action figures.  He’s even created a markup language entirely dedicated to comic books: Comic Book Markup Language.  I learned about CBML during the Digital Humanities class I took with Dr. Walsh last semester, and of course got very, very excited about it – in fact, so excited that I delivered a presentation on it for one of the presentations we had to do.  In short, CBML is an extension of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines that gives digital librarians and archivists a markup language that’s more appropriate for documents that combine both text and graphics on a page – like comic books, for which the markup language is named.  You can use it with the TEI guidelines to mark up an entire comic book – sound effects, scenes, advertisements, news, and fan mail.  (If you’re interested in learning a little more about CBML, you can either check out my presentation from Digital Humanities last semester, or you can read this article by Dr. Walsh from Digital Humanities Quarterly.)

A snippet of a page from the Twilight Sparkle issue from the My Little Pony comic micro-series. You can see a scan of the original inked page in the background of the header - I actually own that page!

Part of my presentation from last semester: a snippet of a page from the Twilight Sparkle issue from the My Little Pony comic micro-series, all marked up. You can see a scan of the original inked page in the background of the header – I actually own that page!

One thing that I noticed while doing my research on CBML for last semester’s presentation is that aside from a few snippets in the Digital Humanities Quarterly article, and from some examples on the CBML page itself, there’s not really any large-scale projects using CBML out there for people who are interested in seeing exactly how it works, and how an entire page from a comic book may look when it’s completely marked up.  I talked to Dr. Walsh, and asked if he’d mind if I started putting together some examples of CBML so others could see how it looks when it’s in use for existing comic book pages, and maybe build up a small repository of comics.  He said it sounded like a great idea, and while it’s been off to a slow start (moving got in the way, and then sorting out a schedule for the new semester), I’m currently working my way through marking up the first issue of Captain Marvel Adventures.  And once I have that put together, I hope to put together a small website where people can actually view the marked up pages, and download the XML files that are working behind the scenes to display images and text together.

I plan on documenting the process as I go along – and what better place to talk about it than here, on The Crafty Nerd?  After all, marking up pages from a comic book feels partly like assembling a craft project – you look at the page, and assemble the markup pieces to build the textual version of the graphical page.  And, come on, we’re working with comic books here.  This project will be right at home here. (And besides, I’m not quite sure if I want to start a third blog just for this project, unless it really takes off and becomes something huge.)  I hope to post something here every few weeks about the progress I’m making, and even show some of the work I’ve done!  And if any of this sounds of interest to any of you, my readers, feel free to get in touch with me – I’d be happy to ramble on about CBML with you.

Instant Reaction: Sailor Moon dub episode 1!

I’m sure many of you have already heard that Viz has released a new version of the Sailor Moon dub, far better and more accurate than the DiC version from the mid-’90s.  Well, the DiC version was the one I grew up on – and while it’s what sparked my nearly two decade long love of Sailor Moon, it was incredibly cringe-worthy.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So, when I found out that Viz had redubbed the English version, and remastered all the original Japanese music, I had to give it a watch.  I wasn’t entirely sure I’d like it, considering how very used I am to the old dub voices, but I had to watch.  For science. (And, conveniently enough, it’s on Hulu!)  And as I started watching, I caught myself posting my reactions to Twitter – and then realized it might just be better to collect them all here, to share with everyone!  So, here’s my in-the-moment reactions to the first episode of the new Sailor Moon dub!

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What I’ve been up to these past few weeks

“Hey, Beth! You seem to have fallen of the face of the Earth entirely!  What the heck happened?”

Yes, I’m sure that’s exactly what you’re asking right now.  Yes.  So I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to, in glorious picture format!

Sleeping kitty = such cute

Sleeping kitty = such cute

Taking pictures of sleeping cats!  Because kitties are cute, and I now have one living with me.  His name is Steve.  He likes to watch Battlestar Galactica, enjoys kicking the carpets in the bathroom around, and his favorite pony is Pinkie Pie.

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WE ARE IN THE FUTURE

Playing with my new smartwatch.  Bryan says it’s a fad, they won’t last, but honestly?  I love it.  I partially justified the purchase by saying that it’s research for when I re-write an old NaNoWriMo novel for this year’s NaNoWriMo.  Since it’s set in the future, I gave the characters wrist communicators, and, well, HERE IT IS ON MY WRIST RIGHT NOW.  Granted, it needs a cellphone to work with, but we’re getting closer!

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Getting a jump start on Christmas crafting!

Punch embroidering, because I haven’t done it in years.  I’m making a couple of Christmas stockings, and then I might see if anyone wants to commission me for anything, because gosh do I enjoy doing this and I forgot how fun it is.  Plus, it’s getting harder and harder to find punch embroidery stuff (apparently the place I shop from online is now the ONLY online store selling punch embroidery supplies!), and I may as well do it while I can, right?

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I love Digital Libraries.

Doing homework.  And yes, my most recent bit of homework involved reviewing an online digital archive of comic book art.  Have I mentioned how much I love library and information science?  Because I do.  I really do. 😀  My next bit of homework, for Representation & Organization, involves writing a script of how a typical grocery shopping trip goes, and then comparing it with the actual process of shopping in order to spark discussion about mental models and how they match up to the actual process or task that one is trying to complete.

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On the banks of Racquette River, with its banks of blue, stands our honored Potsdam College, stirring sight to view…

Drinking lots of coffee and feeling rather homesick.  This is the time of year I really miss Potsdam – even though the stupid lack of sunlight and the near-constant dreary grayness made my seasonal affective disorder crap way worse than it needed to be… I miss the trees changing color, the nights getting downright chilly, and the hint of winter in the air, even in September…

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Yes, this is pretty much a tiny Chun-Li.

Getting minis ready for painting!  It’s been entirely too humid out to prime minis, but that doesn’t stop me from scraping off the extra plastic bits and filing the rough spots down so I can prime and paint when the weather is good.

And that’s what I’ve been up to, in illustrated form!  Now that I’ve settled in for the semester, posts will occur more regularly, and I do have some exciting things in the works!  Have an idea for a topic you want to see on the site?  Leave a comment on this post, and chances are, I’ll cover it. 🙂  I’m always looking for new crafty and nerdy things to talk about.