Today, I became the internet.

So I wrote this big long comment on Melody's blog post about college and then Blogger deleted it, so here's my advice for making friends in college, in blog post form.

Having been a Freshman in college twice, at two different schools, I would like to think that I'm a bit more qualified than most people to talk about making friends in college*. So, here's my list of things that help you make friends in college.

1. The first week, unless you're naked or asleep, if you're in your dorm room, keep that door open. People will stop by to talk to you. You'll get to know people in your hall that way. Also, walk down the hall a couple of times and talk to people with their doors open. They're probably keeping their door open in the hopes that someone will come down the hall and talk to them.
   
2. Your instinct is going to be to try and hide yourself and fit in. Don't do it. DON'T DO IT! Play your music without headphones. Wear your nerdy shirts. Make sci-fi references in everyday conversation. People can't be your friends unless they know what you like, so be a nerd about the things that you're a nerd about, and you'll find people who are nerds about the same thing. (If you're scared of doing that, go to the cafeteria, face a wall, open your laptop, and start watching Doctor Who without headphones. People will come up behind you and watch it. Talk to them. #Polly'sSecretMethod)
3. If you get really lonely, go to either the Woman's Resource Center or the LGBT Resource Center and just be honest. Say that you just moved there, you're lonely, and you don't think you can stand another night sitting in your room watching TV shows on Netflix at a record speed.
   
4. Sit outside where there are a medium number of people and teach yourself a song on the ukulele. Seriously. If people stop by, put down the ukulele and talk to them. They may not talk for too long, but that's another familiar face that you'll know when you're in the cafeteria.
   
5. Remember people's faces. If you're in the cafeteria and you don't think you can stand another night of dinner alone by yourself, walk up to a group of people whose faces you recognize, and be honest. Say, "Hey, guys, is it all right if I sit with you guys so I don't look sad sitting at a table by myself?" Eat dinner with them, if you guys click and they're going to something after dinner, they may invite you along. If not, well, by now you should know a lot of people, like that girl over there who stopped by to talk to you while you were playing ukulele on the lawn that one time. Keep talking to people. Eventually, you'll find some friends.
6. WHATEVER YOU DO, don't develop an addiction to sewing and start forgetting to eat and spend all day in your room with the door closed. Looks great on your portfolio. Makes you miserable. LEARN FROM MY FAILURE.

Well, I hope some of that made sense in a vague way.
Also, join a club. Seriously. Join a club. I never did, but do it.

____
* I'm not, though. Of the schools I've attended, I had friends at one of them.

How to become rich doing costume design.

As we’re fast approaching a 1-year mark since I became head of costumes on Team Avatar: Adventures of the Appamobile, I felt like it was high time I shared with you my design process, because I’m TOTALLY AN EXPERT NOW AMIRITE GUYS?

Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never taken a costume design class or any design class at all. I have no professional training and I’m not really writing this to explain to others how to design, but really as a personal blog so that a year from now I can look back on this and facepalm. Feel free to gain any insight you want from this, but it’s not the industry standard way to do things, and it’s probably not the best way either. It’s what I found out from being thrown in the deep end with a cannon tied to my ankles. It may be useful. It may not. Good luck.

So, for me, the design process has a lot of steps: scribbles, research, sketches, and technicals. Sometimes they happen in different order from what I say here. Research and Scribbles have to happen more or less at the same time.

So here we go

Step 1: Scribbles

So here’s the kind of thing that I do. They usually happen on lined paper in notebooks or on the back of receipts or in my moleskine (If you don’t have a Moleskine, get one. It makes you look like a deep misunderstood artist, which is what you are, right?). These are not the sort of thing that my director would EVER see, or she would fire me and then probably start panicking.

A lot of these scribbles are just free flowing ideas, sometimes something like noticing how a woman’s skirt in a coffee shop lays and then sketching that, and thinking “OOH WOULDN’T IT BE AWESOME IF THE LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD HAD A HAT?!” sort of thing. Your scribbles need no logic. They just happen. Trying to make them good or trying to make them have reason is wrong.

Sidebar: Hang out in coffee shops and shopping malls. Look at people and look at clothes. If you’re trapped in your studio/dorm room all day, you won’t get to see new things, and design is all about seeing new things.

Step 2: Research

So, you’ve got Team Avatar. Team Avatar is Avatar: The Last Airbender set in the modern age but not really but kind of but not really but sort of, and Team Avatar wears superhero costumes because Sokka is silly. So, of course, when you’re coming up with designs, you look up the source material and superheroes.

Sometimes, you end up with much more vague things. I have had a director tell me, “It’s like the 1990’s, if the 30’s was in the 50’s.” In that case, you look up all of the eras, save all of the pictures that inspire you in any way.

Now you need to branch out. You look at the technology of the era. What materials can you use (Aang is a vegetarian. He probably wouldn’t wear leather, maybe not silk)? What materials were available in the era? What materials capture the feel of the era?

Sometimes, I rely on Google image results to do some of the work for me. If I’m really stuck, I try to break the character down into a few keywords and then see if anything weird comes up (For Bumi, I searched for “Crazy modern king,” and got a picture of this guy in a storm trooper helmet with cases of beer stacked from floor to ceiling behind him).

Now, you’ve got a crapload of pictures. Time to take them in photoshop or print them out, cut them out, rearrange them, tape them on your wall, stare at them, get confused, go get coffee, scribble some more, come back home, get really confused, call your friend in New York and talk about how confused you are, feel like the world isn’t making sense, scribble some more, and go to sleep.

The next morning, you look at those scribbles you made, put them into your collage, and repeat the process.

Step 3: THINK ABOUT IT

Now you have like 400 little things that you’re thinking about that are floating around in your mind and slowly driving you insane, and you need to think about it. Costumes aren’t enough to just be logical. Everything tells the story. So you’re not creating a fancy costume. You’re just coming up with an everyday outfit for a main character. Costumes are part of the story. Who is this character? Did she pick the outfit? Did her big sister buy it for her? How does it show her personality? Even if someone else picked it out and dressed her, she will add her own personal touches. These are important. The costumes are an extension of the characters. You know you want the Lord of the Underworld in a hat. Why? Why is he in that hat?

Inherently, more scribbles will happen here, and you will probably start talking to yourself and your roommate will program the school’s therapist into her speed dial and wait for you to have your psychotic break.

Step 4: Finalize it

Now you know what you’re looking for. Draw it. I love watercolors for this because they’re vaguer than any other medium, and this sketch is about vagueness. You CANNOT attempt to nail down every detail on this. Details kill creativity. Don’t think about how you’re going to do it. Just get things on paper.

Draw your model. How does your model stand? She reflects the feel of the design. Don’t worry about keeping her neutral at this point.

**Key point!** You need to make at least 3 designs, 4 would be better, of each design you need. This way, when you show them to your director, they will pick their favorite. If you show them, it’s a matter of “I like it,” or “I don’t like it.” Four designs, one almost always gets chosen unless your director was thinking along totally different lines than you were.

in between step: MORE RESEARCH: You probably drew things without thinking about the fabric that you’d use and things like that. Time to look at fabrics and think about how you’ll do things. Nothing drawingwise is needed, just know how you’re going to do this.

Step 5: Technical Sketches

Now you break down every piece, every detail of the costume. What does the jacket look like on the back? Where are the pockets? How do I do that? (These are really only necessary if you’re giving the designs to a costumer or your costume designer demands them. If you’re also costuming the show, you can work off of your sketches usually.)
I like to do my technical sketches with just a pigment liner, very little variance of line weight. You know all of that emotion that you poured into your watercolor? Yeah. This is the opposite of that. Technical sketches are not emotional. They are the transition between the emotion that you put on the page and the emotion that the actor will put into the clothes. They must be emotionless and technically accurate.

Step 6: Make it.

Step 7: Put it on the actor.

Step 8: ?????

Step 9: Profit.

So what exactly is this YouTube thing?

hello and welcome to Polly's Updates about the vidcon, day 2.

apparently my shift key does not work as well as i would like it to.

i am blogging to you from my phone, live in my hotel room, waiting for melerdy to get out of the shower and for my muffin tops to thaw.

that is a sentence that makes less sense out of context. aparently there is this weird LA thing where you can buy the top half of a muffin.

so i did. i bought four. they are defrosting now and then, breakfast.

goodbye, bloggiepeople.

Comic-con

So you remember how I was going to blog about comic-con and the preparations therein?

Yeah. Didn't happen.

At some point I'll stop and think about what exactly happened on each day, but for now I'm just kind of like, BRAIN I CAN'T DO!


Tomorrow I leave for VidCon. Yep.

I'm going to be SO burned out by the time that I finish this weekend.

But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about pie.

So near where I live, a lot of Himalayan Blackberries grow. This is, by all accounts, not a good thing as they're not native to this area and crowd out other plants and disrupt ecosystems but you know what they ARE good for?
Pie.
Himalayan Blackberries are the big blackberries that have crazy intense thorns and hurt like a mothafucka when they stab you and they make AWESOME pie.
And cobbler.
And jelly.

However, there's something worth noting about piecrusts:
You need to keep the fat REALLY cold when you make them, or they don't flake and if they aren't flaky then what good are they? I mean, you intentionally make them with the perfect balance of flaky and tender and that's EXACTLY what pie is about, right? Right?
So this is tough when you don't air-condition your house and your kitchen is about 80 degrees F (that's 27 c for you non-USers) and you need to keep the butter REALLY cold.
This means many, many bowls of ice water that other bowls sit on top of.

Uh, yeah, that wasn't really relevant to anything else.
My brain is still all dead.

We are ninjas from the dead.

Times have changed and so have I

So this year I'm doing the 50 book challenge, in which you read 50 books in a year or roughly one book a week.
I have finished 14 books.
For those of you wondering, I am only 10 books behind.
Yeah.
But one of my rules is that they have to be books that I haven't read before. I make one exception to these rules.

You see, when I was little (Read: from the time I was born until my senior year of high school) my parents would read bedtime stories to me. When I was really little, they were picture books, and as I got older they progressed to chapter books. They'd alternate nights reading, and we'd usually have two books going on at once. When I was in third grade, my dad bought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and that changed my life. We ended up reading the first three together until I decided that I wasn't happy with the one-chapter-every-other-night pace and I think I got through Goblet of Fire in a day and a half.
Back to bedtime stories.
So as my sister and I got older, the books that we'd choose of my parents would choose got more mature, and in some cases the books were a bit more mature than I was ready for (I think I was in 4th grade when we read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and after re-reading it I realize exactly how much I missed*).
So now, as an alleged adult, I'm rereading a lot of the books that we read together.

It's interesting to see how much more I'm getting out of these books that I heard so long ago.

I think I'm really lucky that my parents encouraged me to love reading so much. Until I was in 6th grade, we didn't have internet or video games in the house** and whenever I was bored or we had to wait somewhere we would always read books. My mom and I got through a lot of books when I was in 5th grade, because my sister's school started a half hour before mine did and the other kids in my class were kind of mean to me, so instead of playing on the playground before school we'd just sit in the car and read. Good for my reading skills. Not as good for my social skills.

____
*All of it. I missed all of it.
**We had computer games, though. I have memories of playing Zork and Doom and Quake with my father. Doom was "Big Bad Guy Game." I was pretty young back then, and the one thing I really remember is that I wouldn't watch him play unless he'd enabled Godmode, which I called "White Eyes" because the eyes of the sprite that represented the damage you'd taken glowed. By the time he'd gotten Quake, I was a bit older, and we used to always say, "The only good type of Skraag is a dead Skraag," because both of us hated those flying monsters.

I wish I understood

Here's just an angsty thing that I've been feeling.

I don't know what it is, but I feel like the angst is contagious.
Like we get stressed out and then we take it out on other people, who then get stressed out and the cycle repeats itself.

And you may think that you're breaking the cycle by not taking it out on someone else, but the stress has to go somewhere and if you aren't taking it out on someone else, you're taking it out on yourself.
And then that means that you're making others worry about you.
Which, trust me, they are.
And then they get stressed.

Anyway, that's all I have to say.

Today, is Thursday, right?

I have a really, REALLY good reason for why I didn't do a blog post last night.

REALLY GOOD.

I'm just not going to tell you what it was*.

But there ya go, that's my blog for yesterday.


And now it's July, meaning that it's time for the SDCC PREPARATION BLOG.

Yup. That it is.

But I'll do that later. Just saying. A little bit later.



____
*It may have been called "Farscape party with Beth"