Gamer Girl Confessions: Creative Blogger Award

Way back in February, the amazing Pizza Maid nominated me for the Creative Blogger Award. I had a draft post half written once I noticed it in early March (d'oh! I'm so bad at my feed reader sometimes!), but then forgot about it when work ramped up, and here we are!

Pizza is someone that I happened to meet thanks to the ever-present #BelEffect, and we kind of hit it off with our shared love of Sailor Moon. She has since introduced me to the rabbit hole that is the world of Otome, and here we are, chatting daily on Twitter about whatever floats our boat. She's a wonderful person, and if you enjoy RP, anime, otome, and Final Fantasy XIV, she's a great blogger to follow!!

So, what are the rules? I mean, all of these awards have rules, no?

Thank the person who nominated you and include a link to their blog.
Share 5 facts about yourself.
Nominate 15 – 20 bloggers and add their links.
Notify the bloggers you included.
Keep the rules in your post to make it easy for everyone to know what to do!

I dislike the "nominate double-digit people" thing, so I'm just going to casually nominate five folks at the end of this so this is more of a slow trickle effect rather than a waterfall. I really liked how Pizza answered the facts portion, and I hope to do some of the same, rather than just some random bullet points and calling it a day.

Fact 1: Repeat Recipient

I apparently got the creative blogger award last year, in April. At that time I was nominated by Murf. I find it extremely interesting how things find their way around the internet, and come full circle. I wonder if this nomination is still a go-around of the one I received last year, or when it first started, or if folks have just re-started it up because they could. Regardless, being nominated for these things is fun, and it helps to build community, and I love it.

Fact 2: Blog Move Imminent

So, surprise! This past February, marked six years of intermittent blogging. At some point, I dropped the blog for about a year or two (I can't find the list of posts per month since starting that I had made...), but picked it up back in earnest in February of 2015 thanks to the ever-present #BelEffect (no, seriously). I had planned to move the blog to a self-hosted WordPress back in February, but finances didn't quite line up the way I had intended. I was going to use it as a way to clean up my labels and categories and the like. I still plan on doing this, hopefully sometime next month when finances settle a little bit for a few months.

Fact 3: I Hate Moving

I do. Chaide got a new job at a better school, which is awesome, but means we'll have to move again this summer. I'm so over moving. I hate moving. Not only because of all the packing and unpacking (which sucks) but because it also triggers my anxiety a bunch--all those things that have to be done, and the timelines that need to be followed... Which normally I'm fine with, but the fact that I have to settle into a new place... again... never feels good. It takes me months to feel "at home" after moving, and I was just starting to adjust to the apartment we moved into last summer. Ah well. At least wherever we move to next will be home for at least two years so we can save for a house...

Fact 4: I Really Love Visual Novels and Otome

I'd always been intrigued by Visual Novels, especially after a friend gifted Chaide Analogue: A Hate Story a few years ago. But I'd always heard that they were "casual" and "not actually games" and the like. So I held off from them. It wasn't until I met Pizza and her friend Sushi, and played Hatoful Boyfriend thanks to Grace that I really decided it was a genre I wanted to explore more in-depth, and that the negative connotations associated with it were a load of crap. Granted, there are eroge and bishojo games that are still something I'm not too keen on pursuing--mainly because they usually lack story and are just fanservice. Maybe one day I'll explore them a bit more... but I'll need to get through a large backlog of VNs first!

Fact 5: The #BelEffect Helped Change My Life

Image from Tales of the Aggronaut

No, seriously. I'm not being facetious, or silly, or anything of the like. Things were going really crappily in WildStar at the time. I was the most depressed I had been in my life, and my anxiety was just as bad. I'd started therapy about six months prior, and it was starting to help, but shit hit the fan in my gaming world--which I was using as an escape from the shit going on in my real life. And I just couldn't handle it anymore. I was contemplating leaving a hobby that I greatly enjoyed, and friends that I cherished because I didn't know how to reconcile the two to relieve my anxiety and depression.

So I put out a call on Twitter, saying I needed a new home in FFXIV while I figured things out in WildStar. Bel answered that call, inviting me over to play on Cactuar with all of his friends, and I found myself in a circle of amazing people that he's befriended, and some that Chaide and I have had the pleasure of befriending and hanging out with while we casually game our way through life. Having them as a sounding board and support system has been amazing, and I appreciate them so very much