#and happy birthday to my main queen...Lara Croft!

[miyku]

happy Tomb Raider I-III Remastered day!

[acecademia]

What are your favorite games? What are book festivals like?

Hi, nonny!

I listed a few of my favorite video games in an earlier post, but I can elaborate on those (and name a few I missed and some awesome board games while I'm at it)! I'll put that below the cut and talk about book festivals first, though.

I went to my first book signing at 14, my first kind-of book festival (in that there was a book festival attached to a Harry Potter convention) when I was 16, and my first full-on book festival when I was... also 16 just a few months later. Since then, I've been to a bunch of book festivals. Mostly, I go to youth book festivals, but I've been to a couple larger ones that weren't age-specific, too.

The general structure of most book festivals I've attended goes like this:

Some sort of keynote

Panels/breakout sessions

More panels/breakout sessions

Yet more panels/breakout sessions

Maybe a closing keynote

Book signing

The one I've been to the most is the North Texas Teen Book Festival (NTTBF) which has a day exclusively for teachers and librarians and educators and then a full festival day that's open to the public. It's free to attend, and they get like 60-90 middle grade and young adult authors to attend. It's HUGE. It's grown a lot since I first started going in 2016 from about 8,000 attendees to like 15,000 attendees or something insane like that in 2019. I know 2020 was even bigger. It was the last thing I did before lockdown, and it's kind of my birthday tradition because it tends to happen around my birthday and makes me really happy.

I love getting to hear authors talk about their books. I get to hear authors I love talk about their work, and I get to hear authors I didn't know before talk about their books or even brand-new authors talk about debut novels that are coming out. It's a great way to keep up with youth lit--what's trending, what's coming out, which authors are attracting the most attention from librarians and teachers but also which authors are attracting the most teens and kids.

I met Angie Thomas at NTTBF like a month after The Hate U Give (the novel) came out, and she had like no one in her signing line. I'd been convinced to pick up the book by someone on Tumblr a day or so before the festival, so I asked the girl behind me to hold my spot in another line while I ducked over to get my copy signed by Angie Thomas. The next year, her line was insane. That's one of my favorite things about attending book festivals--you get to see that explosion of love for an author's work almost happen in real-time.

Also, I've met Ally Carter so many times now that she knows me on sight 😂 And Adam Gidwitz has dragged me over to a couple of authors now like "hey this girl was my student guide at a festival in 2013 when she was in high school, and now she's in GRAD SCHOOL and is a librarian! Wild, huh?" and it's super fun lmao

There's just something really lovely about being surrounded by people who love books and stories as much as I do. It's always completely confounding to me when I talk to people about going to school for youth librarianship, and they're like "oh-ho kids today don't read" and I'm like *gestures wildly at the 15,000 people who attended NTTBF* "literally where."

But yeah, book festivals are also one of the few places where my anxiety-override cheat code activates. By which I mean that I'm normally super anxious and very rarely interact with people I don't know and get really uncomfortable when I'm out by myself in public. But at book festivals (or honestly a lot of fan conventions), that just disappears??? And I'll like talk to strangers and initiate conversations and can somehow just exist in the world without stressing over it. It's amazing.

Games I love time!

Video Games:

Gone Home - amazing storytelling. (Also, there are no dead lesbians no matter what media has trained you to assume will happen)

The Stanley Parable - fun, creative, hilarious, and a great examination of the dichotomy between player and character and the player's relationship to narrative agency (aka exactly my jam)

Dragon Age - high fantasy awesomeness and also you can declare yourself queen in the first one (which I did). Dragon Age 2 is fantastic and narratively the best in the series but reuses the same handful of locations/maps over and over and over... and over.... and over again. I still need to finish Inquisition, and I'm super hyped for the fourth one

Tomb Raider - Lara Croft is my girl. The first one is the best one, the second is bomb af, the third is both fascinating mechanics-wise but not as interesting narrative-wise imo

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask - I love most of the series, but Majora’s Mask is my all-time fave

Fallout - sci-fi post-apocalyptic with a futuristic 50s vibe. It's a bit of a mixed bag (Fallout 3 is good, New Vegas is 💯, and Fallout 4's main plotline is boring AF and not engaging at all)

Assassin’s Creed - the Ezio trilogy is great, didn't really care much for AC III, loved being a pirate in Black Flag, skipped Rogue, stopped playing Unity because I got annoyed at how much it tried to push co-op, loved Syndicate, working my way through the rest

Overwatch - I play on PC and I'm a support main (Moira and Mercy, for the most part)

The Sims 4 - I make people do things and give them good lives 🥺

Long Live the Queen - fantasy stat building game where your goal is either to survive the game or to die in the most interesting way, depending on your preferences

Board games:

Mysterium - you're psychics solving a mysterious death by communing with a ghost who can only communicate using really vague and trippy art cards (great to play with people you know really well, also there's an online version and I have played it so much since the pandemic started)

Codenames - spies and word association hell yeah

Letter Jam - cooperative word game with spelling and limited communication

Ex Libris - you get to be a librarian in a fantasy library (enough said)

Castles of the Mad King Ludwig - you gotta build a castle for a king who has weirdly specific tastes