Attention, nerdlings!

Let's take a quick break from make-up and grab our X-box controllers! I spend a good part of the last fortnight playing THE SHIZ out of Skyrim: Dawnguard. If you haven't bought or played it yet, or you're just curious about it, I have posted a giant review over at my other internet home, Comicbooked.com. It would mean a lot to me if you would go take a looksie. You can also share it on Facebook if you have nerdy friends there.

If you're a fellow Skyrim fan, here are some awesome things I found on Etsy:

 

From  here

 From here

From here

Back to make-up, did you know there's a company with a Tamriel eyeshadow collection? They're only shipping to the U.S. and Canada at the moment, and there's not a lot of reviews for the company online, but I've already been offered a CP from Heather, so I maaaay indulge when I have cash to spare. Which will not be soon, alas, because I lost my day job and I need to find another one. BOO, HISS. I'm going to go play some more Dragon Age II now.

Felicia, I am disappoint

To promote her new Youtube channel Geek and Sundry, Felicia Day and the members of webseries The Guild have released their third music video. I watched it, danced along to it, laughed and bought it on iTunes. But then something weird happened.  The more I listened to it, the less I liked it. Nothing to do with the video itself (which admittedly isn't as funny as the first two) or the music (which is the third style they have explored).

The idea that geek is 'in' and that we've been flooded with a volley of faux-gamers in hipster glasses is not new. Neither is the backlash against these perceived intruders by the 'real geeks'. The proliferation of geek litmus tests and evaluations of newcomers has been around for a while now, as a way of protecting the subculture, which has been a safe haven for underdogs and rejects for so long.

What I take objection to is the way geeks are clutching at the umbrella of 'cool' as it floats on by. You see, I dislike the word 'cool'. A lot. The way this song, sung by a group of geek icons, has embraced the word is what's left me a little disappointed and sad.

 At school I was a nerd. I didn't like sports or fashion, I liked reading and learning. I had glasses and braces and no clue what to do around boys. I was bullied, teased and ridiculed by the other kids in my classes. I was not in any way 'cool'. So what I began to associate with the word 'cool' was obviously not very positive, and what I began to associate with myself and the things that I liked was decidedly 'un-cool'.

It took me years, but I embraced that. I embraced myself and the things that I liked and the things that I was good at. And suddenly I became glad I hadn't tried harder to be 'cool'. By staying true to myself, my passions and quirks and by not bullying or mocking other 'uncool' kids, I had become a better and happier person. To me, 'cool' is about the pressure to conform to an ever-changing ideal. To be constantly censoring yourself lest something 'un-cool' slip. It's a state of constant judgement of yourself and those around you. It sounds exhausting!

As much as I'm glad that reading, gaming, fandom and other 'nerdy', geekish pursuits have become more socially acceptable - even with the added difficulties of sorting through those who are genuine and those who are faking it - my issue with 'cool' is that there's always an 'un-cool'. Competition. Judgement. Exclusion. Do those things sound good to you? Do those things sound like they belong in a community that was a home for the socially ostracised? Don't get me wrong, I'm not so stuck to my high horse that I wouldn't love to make those bullies understand exactly what they did and how they hurt me back at school. But jumping onto the bandwagon of cool is not the way to do it. Not only will there be a backlash once geek is no longer 'chic', but many people will be left with those horrible cool-people attributes of scoffing and back-stabbing and geekier-than-thou-ing. Who wants that? I don't think that being 'cool' is worth the time and energy that is required to maintain. Not worth damaging other people's emotional well-being and not worth the confusion it causes about your own identity. 'Cool' is just a collection of habits and values that changes so often.

To be clear, I'm not actually disappointed in Felicia Day. She is an absolute inspiration to me. She pursued her dreams to act even after being told she was not "beautiful enough" for Hollywood (which is total BS, I'm glad she's not fake-beautiful like most Hollywood actresses) . She's an amazingly talented writer, a genuinely wonderful person, and she understands what it's like to be socially outcast and misunderstood. She's made friends and connections in the entertainment industry and pioneered the webseries movement, changing the landscape of entertainment and social media alike. Lonelygirl15, eat your heart out, Felicia is real and she's here to stay.

In one of the many panels (this train of thought starts around 8:30 if you're not keen on watching the whole panel) on The Guild, Felicia talked about how internet friendships allow you to bypass the visual trappings of society to make friends with people as intellectuals and personalities - to make connections you might have missed in real life. That's reflected in the storyline and characters of The Guild and is one of my other favourite things about the geek community - overcoming social boundaries. After all that hard work, I hate to see 'coolness' becoming a preoccupation for Felicia. That is the system that created social inequality, why would we want to perpetrate it?! Why are we so eager to become the people that tormented us for so long - who gave us baggage many will carry for years to come (see this interview with Chris Colfer about being bullied at school. I remember the names of everyone who bullied me, too).

I have a proposition. How about we stop worrying about being 'cool' and focus on the things that make us happy? On learning new things and being better people, better friends, better geeks? Let's celebrate what we have in common AND what makes us different. I don't want to be cool. I want to be me, whether or not I'm wearing my Dr. Horrible t-shirt.

Well hello there

Scroll to bolded bits for important beauty questions! Go and read about my geeky adventures during Supanova weekend!

I’m waiting on several packages and trying to figure out how to best swatch Fyrinnae Arcane Magic and Sobe’s new duochrome blushes. It’s bloody hard! Also I’m much more reluctant to get out of bed during winter, so I haven’t found any time to photograph EoTDs L

I should have some reviews over at the comics/books blog soon, and I’ll be chronicling my JulNoWriMo adventures since I had a brainwave. On the 30^th of June. For a graphic novel script (pretty much the only format I don’t know how to write in…)

Before I forget – PLEASE ADVISE ME! I’ve been getting dry patches on my face (since its winter and there are heaters turned up high everywhere) and have reluctantly decided I need to find a nice tinted moisturiser. Any suggestions for olive-y, oily skin? I'm thinking about the new Illamasqua Skin Base stuff, but there isn't a counter in Perth yet, so finding a match will be very tricky.

Those ladies who don’t use Seche Vite top coat, what do you use? I need to find an alternative L between shrinkage and how rough I am on my hands, my polish is only lasting 1-2 days before I get obvious tipwear. I don’t like applying work-safe polish 3-4 times a week! IT IS NOT FUN.

Review which is definitely upcoming because photographing it is easy: Lanolips review. I couponed. TWICE. IT WAS GREAT. 

Crappy phone picture because I can now connect 

my laptop to my phone via Bluetooth. ALSO VERY GREAT.

Nude nail polish

On my quest for the perfect nude polish to wear to work, I've come accross some downright duds. I'm looking for something opaque, and not too pink. Unfortunately, a lot of nudes are intended to be used for French manicures, so they're really sheer. A lot of the opaque ones are decidedly pink as they're meant for decidedly Caucasian skin. I have an olive skintone, and I'm not really a pink fan. I thought I'd shove all the the 'nail polish disappointments' into one post to save time. There's ONE good one at the end.

Culprit 1: Australis Nail Colour in Satine.
Now this is the same company (Creative Brands) that owns Mode, so I had high hopes for these. I even liked the squat, tubular bottles.
Streak-free? Check. High shine? Check. Intense colour? Ummm.

This is two coats, so... yeah, not really. Hi, nail line! It has great shine, nice consistency and pretty quick drying time - it's just waaaaay sheer. It'd make a great French, and I wouldn't be averse to trying out sone of their other colours if they have the same smooth formula and finish.

Culprit 2: Cutex Quick 'N Go in Ice Coffee Rush
This polish claims to have '1 stroke, 1 coat application', and to either apply or dry in 45 seconds. Not sure which. The wide, flat brush was remarkably good after I got used to it, and it did dry lightning fast. However, one coat:

Sheeeeer. And not a nice sheer like Satine, this made my nails look stained. So by the time I layered it up to three coats:

IT WENT ORANGE. Not orange the-colour-of-the-fruit, orange. It looked like I'd put fake tan on my nails. Maybe it's just my skin tone, but that did NOT look like the pretty peachy-beige in the bottle.Also, you can still see my nail line. If it wasn't so utterly off-putting, I'd have tried other colours, because the drying time was really amazing.

Culprit 3: Mode Cosmetics in Ooh Baby.
This is a pretty, pale pink which I thought would do for those days when I don't mind being a bit girly. However, I had the exact same problem with this polish as I had with all the others. You have to layer this a LOT to get anything but a sheer, streaky mess. They have a white creme, So Parisian, which has the same application issues. This is three coats, and even though I was really careful, there's still bald patches and visible nail line.

Culprit 4: Revitanail in Barely There.
This I did not buy, thank goodness. Revitanail is expensive. I snitched this off my mother because my nails were splitting and breaking all over the place and it was driving me crazy. Well, this thin, streaky polish drove me just as crazy.

This is THREE coats. I did actually wear this for a while, in an effort to strengthen my nails, but I put a coat of Satine over the top of it to even out the colour before I left the house.

Culprit 5: Orly in Cosmic Kiss

Not technically a nude, but I thought the rainbow glitter might soften the starkness of the white. Yeah, totally not needed. I was really disappointed by this polish, as I've heard a lot of great things about Orly. It was completely sheer, the glitter went on really sparsely, despite the amount present in the bottle, and the glitter really stuck out when it dried. Needed a topcoat, but I couldn't be bothered wasting topcoat on how ergh it was. This is three coats here. I consider three my absolute limit; if a nail polish requires more than three coats in order to look good, I pretty much won't use it.

It's also a giant pain in the butt to remove.

Pleasant surprise: Natio Cosmetics in Brandy
Now, I have walked past Natio stands in chemists and pharmacies many a time, bypassing them entirely. For that I now apologise. This Australian-made, Australian-based company pleasantly surprised me. Resigned to another sheer bit of blah-ness, this $9.95 polish was not only the colour that the bottle delivered (take notes, Cutex) but BECAME OPAQUE. First coat was slightly less sheer than all the others, though quite streaky. Second coat: ahhh!

This stuff dries amazingly fast, as well. This still didn't stop me denting my right thumb and smudging my right index finger. It's not the polish's fault, though, I found out that a little company called The Hub Productions are bringing Christopher Judge and Corin Nemec (or, Teal'c and Jonas from Stargate SG-1 as some of you might know them) to Perth in two weeks. This revelation led me to call my boyfriend and squeak "Teal'c! Jonas! Perth!" over the phone to him a few times til I calmed down and was able to use important words like "in two weeks", "we have to go" and "I'm so stoked right now, this is amazing, I can't believe I didn't hear about this earlier, oops I smudged my wet nail polish."

This post took so long to do, becauseI don't really like swatching nail polish. I'm far too impatient! I will definitely keep it to one polish per post from now on. And yes, I will be blogging about the convention.