Anyways, hehe, I love Tsum Tsums with all my heart and when I saw this fabric I knew I had to get it. I had no idea what I was actually going to do with it but I was going to do something. AND I ACTUALLY DID! *gasp* I know. I mean, do you know how many mounds of fabric I have in the “i got this because it saw it and thought i’m totally gonna do something with that and haven’t yet” pile? Too Damn Many.

The skirt was one of those first-time beginner skirt patterns and I made it in one day at a friend’s house. I was scared of the pattern but that’s because I’m scared of every pattern. And also sewing.

BUT DONALD DUCK. I needed to finish the project because look how cute Donald Duck is. He’s my favorite Disney character and his Tsum Tsum is extra adorable.

I really want to play the Tsum Tsum game again but when I got a new phone cause my old one was busted I couldn’t log back into my account correctly and I LOST ALL MY TSUMS. >:| In other fun facts, I own so many actual Tsums from collecting them over the years that we decorated a small Christmas tree with them one year and a Donald Duck Ufufy went on top.

It’s 2020 sure (and what an effin’ year it is :|), but I have to give a shoutout to my Game of 2019: Hypnospace Outlaw. It recently just came out on the Switch with some new content (said new content is also available on the other versions as well for free!) and I never properly admitted my love for it on any of the blogs since I played it due to the fact that all the blogs were being edited/moved/morphed into this one — so let me say it now: THIS GAME IS PERFECTION. Especially, if like me, you were on the internet for the Y2K/Geocities/weird era of the internet. Now even if you weren’t, Hypnospace Outlaw is an insanely interesting and fun look at an alternate timeline sort of thing — but if you were it has that added touch of nostalgia.

Back in February — before the major start of the pandemic in the U.S. — Nate and I went out of town for the weekend and I brought this dress with me that I had purchased months and months before. I thought it would be a fun dress for conventions and such (haha what are those and will they ever happen again) and I also thought I could do an Abandonworn post with it for Hypnospace Outlaw! So here I am, posting the photos of it eight months after taking them. :\ It’s okay though, I can say I was waiting to celebrate the Switch release with the post, hehe.

I’m a sucker for all things vaporwave and this dress was just that, plus it had a lot of fun touches that brought me back to those halcyon days of sitting on the internet at 3 a.m. and surfing fansites on Geocities dedicated to all my favorite video games and anime series and all that jazz. Hypnospace Outlaw did that too and I found myself remembering pages I visited and people I talked to on AOL while playing through that masterpiece. I had so many specific flashbacks.

The game got me hooked on the characters and storyline too — it’s not just a gimmicky “LOL LOOK AT THE OLD INTERNET KIND OF STUFF HEHEHEH” thing. The storyline and plot are kind of silly at first but then you start digging into it and looking into the characters and background on how the whole thing started and it makes you stop and think. Sure, on the surface there’s cute virtual pets and Squisherz (ARE REALLY COOL AND SO MUCH FUN) and Teentopia but diving into it shows you a whole side that shouldn’t have come to light.

Besides all that, the soundtrack is an absolute riot.

The visceral reaction I had to hearing Nothing Left for Me by Seepage for the first time stayed with me for days. When that popped up on ZANE_ROCKS_14‘s page I just stopped and took it in — I felt like I was in high school again and really, Hypnospace is this alternate universe’s internet… Seepage is this alternate universe’s Linkin Park.

I really can’t praise this game enough. One of my favorite things that video games can do is take me to a specific place or time — whether it’s a fictional place or a warm and fuzzy memory in time and this one manages to do both of those things. Between the style, the gameplay, the music, the attention to detail — it’s like an uncanny valley but instead of it being a creepily lifelike robot or piece of CGI it’s a universe/internet so close to our own (save for the headsets and such hahahah) that I find a weird level of comfort in it. I play it and I feel like I’m home in a way.

It’s so damn good, for real. GO BECOME A HYPNOSPACE ENFORCER.

(Also, somewhat related, you’ve gotta check out VAPORGRAM. It’s such a fun app for these sorts of edits like the one I did below.)

The Dance Central series is one of my favorites. Not only did it get me off my ass and get some exercise, but it helped inspire me to try new techniques in costume building and it even helped me get out of a writer’s block. With the news yesterday about Microsoft halting production on the Kinect, it made me look back on the series and my love for it and I figured I’d repost the second part of this set since I already posted the first!

A few months ago we posted the first part to this crazy little project. Last weekend at our aptly named Basement Con (the 6th BC!), our Emilia (Bria of White Hot Room) from the first round joined us and we put together outfits for three more Dance Central characters. Well, two more – since I had already done a Jaryn outfit for Katsucon. I put together another outfit for her while Nate put an outfit together for Oblio and Bria looked fabulous as Miss Aubrey. We were originally going to do Frenchy and Marcos for this part, but one of Marcos’ outfit pieces has gone missing, SO OBLIO AND JARYN IT IS!

Many thanks to Roger for taking these photos!

Parts of Nate’s Oblio outfit are going to be modified into parts of his Murder of Crows/Crew Look. Mainly the jacket and the crow’s foot necklace. The jeans he wore will also be the jeans he’ll use for the MoC costume when he gets it all finished! And you know no Oblio look is complete without some sort of nail polish, so Nate went with a couple of fingernails the mint color that Oblio had in the first Dance Central. The shirt, well, that just really seemed like a spacey Oblio sort of thing. We tried to find another space cat shirt, but none out there could match the magical feel of the first Oblio space cat shirt. As for Nate’s facescruff, we just rolled with it for Oblio, figuring he might be too busy meditating for a week to shave or something. Come on, YOU KNOW WE LOVE OBLIO. ;D

For Jaryn, I cut the collar off of a Lady Gaga t-shirt, put a black sequined vest over it and wore them with a pair of black leggings. The giant rock I had on my finger had a number of colors in it – pink, silver, purple, green, yellow, which is why I went with purple bangles and green makeup (there was also the pink in the Gaga shirt). The wig is the one I cut and wore with our DC3 Haute Blooded Glitterati costumes. The shoes were a thrift store find! And they are heels so like the last Jaryn outfit, this is not a dancing one either!

To see Bria’s post on this second bit of Fashion Central madness and more photos of her sassy and gorgeous Miss Aubrey, check it out over at White Hot Room!

I haven’t had the time (or budget, hahah IT’S BEEN $60 FOR SO LONG) to play Danganronpa 3 yet but I told myself I was going to play the first two again before touching the third. I got the PS4 versions of the first two games this past Christmas, so I’m prepping to go through them again (possibly on the stream?) and I’m really excited. The characters, story, and style of the series are all stellar and pull you in very easily.

And of course, one of the main A+ parts of this series (besides the fabulous hot pink blood) is the main villain + mascot, Monokuma — a stuffed(?) bear with black fur on one side, white fur on the other and a sassy streak miles long… also bear puns for days.

I figured it was time to put together an outfit for this little punk, especially since I’ve been wearing this cardigan a ton lately. It’s one of my favorites (I have a hoodie/pullover/cardigan problem so this is one of Too Damn Many) because it matches everything, isn’t too heavy OR too light, and has everyone’s favorite jerky-ass bear on the back. It also has a really nice embroidered patch on the front of the Hope’s Peak Academy crest on it.

The nails were something I had to do because I’m a dork and this is me we’re talking about. I’ve always liked using multiple colors on my nails and having the nails of one hand painted white while the nails of the other were painted black (with a couple painted the color red, for Monokuma’s red eye) felt pretty obvious and straight-forward, but I liked the way it turned out.

The wind was damn crazy the day Nate snapped these photos (thank you, Nate! :D), so a lot of my hair was flying every which way, but I had some of it held back with a Monokuma-inspired Perler bead bow that I made a few years back. It matches the half and half style and even has a few red beads in the shape of Monokuma’s eye. It can be found in Equipped Inventory’s shop if anyone was interested in picking one up for your own bear-y stylish self! SORRY I HAD TO W/ THE BEAR PUN. D:

Since it’s (finally) getting warmer here, more Spring/Summer video-game inspired outfits are on the way!

I’m gonna be real with you here, readers. I have had a crappy October/beginning of November — especially the last couple of weeks. I’ve had health issues that aren’t fully solved yet, house issues that are gonna take some time/money to fix and our 20+ year old cockatiel had to be put to sleep. It’s still weird hearing nothing when we get home since we used to hear her chirp from outside when we’d get out of the car.

Something that’s really been helping me lately has been gaming. There was a period over the summer where I didn’t play much of anything except Overwatch here and there, but lately, I’ve been playing more multiplayer games with some good friends and family. There was a lot of Halloween Overwatch stuff, getting really into Killing Floor 2 and in the past couple weeks, it’s been Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 — two games I used to play religiously every weekend with my sister, my brother-in-law and our friend Ashley. Later, it would be any combination of the previously mentioned people with Nate and/or Ashley’s boyfriend (now husband) John. Whenever four of us were online, that’s what we did.

We used to all play on the Xbox 360 but recently Nate, Ashley, John, and I installed (or reinstalled, in the case of some) both games on our computers and went to town.

Seeing the characters (and even the damn special infected) again kind of felt like coming home and gave me a warm, fuzzy, gross, slimy zombie feeling I had missed. Especially seeing my precious children Louis and Ellis.

I thought I would push through this bad period of time not by ignoring other things like this blog and National Novel Writing Month (which I’m trying to actually complete this year and have 10,000+ words at the moment!), but by saying screw it and going for it. Writing makes me happy, this blog makes me happy, Left 4 Dead makes me happy — so here’s this post.

I’ve had this hoodie for around 8 years and it’s one of my favorites. I actually wore it the first time I went out to dinner with Nate. And you can probably most definitely see how out of it I am in these photos, uh, I mean… dark circles under your eyes is a new trend, right? :B

I couldn’t resist bringing these bad boys with me either because PILLZ. “We have no idea why this shit works. Keep away from Louis.”

And in a final touch, my Nintendo DS has a little clay charm of one of my favorite characters — not just from L4D, but from any media, really. I love Louis so much. <3 I got this at Tekkoshocon 2011, I believe and it was from MandyPandaa! I ended up getting my sister a tiny Francis since he was her permanent go-to character when we played and we were in Pittsburgh for Tekkoshocon/visiting her and my brother-in-law.

Really, though, I have been a mess because everything has been a mess but I didn’t want to keep pushing more posts back so I thought I’d forget about getting all fancy, get real with you guys and show my love for the Left 4 Dead series. It’s helped me before and it’s been helping me again.

Thank you guys for putting up with my… just me in general, really, hehe.

The Dance Central series is one of my favorites. Not only did it get me off my ass and get some exercise, but it helped inspire me to try new techniques in costume building and it even helped me get out of a writer’s block. With the news yesterday about Microsoft halting production on the Kinect, it made me look back on the series and my love for it and I figured I’d repost the first part of this set (the second will come soon!)~

Let’s get on with it!

A little while back, Nate & I threw together a few sets of photos featuring a couple of the characters from the Dance Central series we had done costumes for before in “casual” settings. Jaryn & Oblio questioning Oblio’s wardrobe choice at a “party” at Glitch’s place, Kerith & Aubrey having a sleepover — we just enjoyed joking around with what these characters might be doing and wearing when they weren’t out dancing up a storm and/or snarking at Dr. Tan (or snarking at everyone in the case of the Glitterati).

(Click the above images for descriptions!)

When talking with Bria of White Hot Room one day, we thought it might be fun to expand the idea and include other characters — figure out outfits for them to wear; accessories and clothes that would fit their style and personalities. Plus, we just apparently really like goofing off as these characters and Katsucon was the perfect opportunity to bring all of it together!

Together with Bria & Lin, the ladies of White Hot Room (who were Emilia and Dare, respectively), we were joined by our friend Denis (as Glitch) on the Thursday night of Katsucon for the start of this project. Later in the weekend, we’d all be dressing up as the same characters in some of their outfits from the games for costume shenanigans!

You know how we feel about the Glitterati (<3), so Nate and I thought we’d put something together for them. We knew they had to be similar enough to one another to work for Kerith & Jaryn and we wanted to stick with dark colors to balance out the light hair – also for the fact that we wanted Jaryn’s necklace and Kerith’s bracelet to pop more. The wigs we wore that night are actually the unstyled wigs we’ll be using for their DC3 outfits for PAX East! Everything for their outfits was black except for our gray shirts and my giant disco ball heels. It was nice to actually be somewhat within a foot of Nate’s height instead of a foot below and since these were “casual” outfits and not outfits to dance in, I could wear heels! GIANT. DISCO BALL. HEELS.

The other things that weren’t black and/or gray were Jaryn’s necklace and Kerith’s bracelet, which were both purple Firejewel necklaces and lit up – you know we can’t resist shiny things! We figured all of these items together would work as small callbacks to both of their outfits from Dance Central 2 without being too over the top. Just a casual outfit for a night of snarking at people and having a drink or two, not amazing the world with their uber-dance skills (HA, we wish we had those).

As for our dear friend Denis, he wanted to put Glitch in something classy and wore a suit with a color scheme that matched DCI’s colors. Basically, he got all fancy and as you can see, the Glitterati are questioning this quite heavily.

Below are a couple more shots we took that night. We had a lot of fun with this, as silly as it grew over the course of the evening (Emilia was singing a song from The Lion King to Kerith at one point – thank you to whoever was playing that in the Gaylord National atrium ;D) and we always look forward to working more with these awesome people (which spoiler alert: WE WILL BE *cue ominous music, etc.*)!

Many thanks to Nic & Bria for taking any of the shots that Nate and I are a part of! <3

For more photos and also info on our lovely Emilia & Dare, check out their post on Casual Central over at White Hot Room from earlier today and keep your eyes peeled for some more of this project – and other Dance Central projects – in the future (we’re already planning other characters/outfits)!

No, I chose Reaper. Because Reaper.

Also, because then I could do the shrugging pose.

I ended up with an outfit that had a touch of 90’s goth to it (I love those boots) and thought that would be a great look for cheering on my favorites in the Summer Games. I mean, wearing all black would be perfect to go sit out in the heat to watch a game of Lúcioball, right?

Have fun with the Summer Games event and may all your loot boxes be filled with legendary things! ♡

There was a thing going around at some point last year — I saw it on Twitter and Facebook and so on — that asked you to describe yourself in three fictional characters. The three I chose were Kinzie Kensington, Gudetama and the little darling on my shirt above, Napstablook. This little ghost is from the game Undertale and with as many amazing characters, events and things that are in that game, Napstablook is my favorite. If I had a dollar for every time I basically embodied the image to the right, I’d be rich.

Last Christmas, I got this shirt as a gift from my husband who knows just how much I love and relate to Napstablook, hehe. It is an awesome shirt called Space Junk with art by Ian Wilding and can be found on the always amazing Fangamer! Besides being my favorite character, Napstablook is also part of one of my absolute favorite moments in Undertale — the visit to Napstablook’s house. Where you are told about the family’s tradition of eating and then lying on the ground and feeling like garbage, you listen to some kickass music (SPOOKWAVE 4 LYFE) and then you lie down w/ Napstablook and space out (which is when one of my favorite songs from the soundtrack plays). Every single time the precious baby came on screen I would get excited because it would be another round of “OH NO THIS POOR ADORABLE BOO I LOVE YOU SO MUCH NAPSTABLOOK” — really I can’t help myself LOOK AT NAPSTABLOOK. DAT FACE.

Anyways, THIS SHIRT.  Besides having my favorite ghostie goo on it, it also brings in the whole space theme — and that plus the colors of the shirt bring this to a whole new level of love for me. The purples and blues are really rich and I knew when I saw the whole thing that I had to put an outfit together. I already had pants, glasses and the jacket in mind.

An added bonus with this outfit though was a few days later when my birthday hit (my birthday is less than a week after Christmas) and I got the Celestial Fireworks LED bracelet from ThinkGeek as a gift! It was also from my husband (and he was v. proud: I GOT IT ON SALE! He loves sales.) — it’s like he knows I like space and things that light up. I guess I married him for a reason. XD

But that matched the shirt as well and I knew it would become part of this outfit too! SPACE! I LOVE SPACE. ALSO, I LOVE NAPSTABLOOK.

See, you let me ramble about my baby and space and I will go crazy. Here are some more photos of the outfit! Purples, blues, and pinks, man. SPACE. Thanks to Nate for taking the photos! And for knowing me too well! (P.S. naturally, I couldn’t leave the headphones out).

(My other favorite song on the soundtrack is Waterfall.)

To start off 2017, I have something a little different for this feature. It’s an outfit inspired by a game — but it’s a board game and not a video game. HEATHER THIS IS A VIDEO GAME BLOG THOUGH. (2020 note while reposting: I originally posted this on a video game themed blog. ;D) I know, I know. But anyone who plays board games a lot can tell you it’s just as easy to get lost in one of those as it is to get lost in a video game. Betrayal at House on the Hill definitely does that for me.

Wikipedia gives a great basic idea of the game on their BaHotH page: “Players all begin as allies exploring a haunted house filled with dangers, traps, items, and omens. As players explore the mansion, new room tiles are chosen at random; accordingly, the game board is different each session. Eventually, the “haunt” begins,

with the nature and plot of this session’s ghost story revealed; one player usually “betrays” the others and takes the side of the ghosts, monsters, or other enemies, while the remaining players collaborate to defeat them.”

An expansion was released for the game this past fall and I’ve been playing it whenever I have enough people who want to play. It’s creepy and entertaining and I FINALLY got to be the traitor for the first time over the holiday break! (My haunt was called Cat O’Clock and I had to fill the house with angry kittens to appease a hypnotizing cat — named Precious Buttons — who had me under her spell. I almost won too!)

In November of last year, Nate (the other half of zhobot) and I headed up to Pennsylvania to Selma Mansion for a cosplay photoshoot (we wore our Layers of Fear costumes and it worked out beautifully! :D) and I brought this outfit (along with a couple of others) to get some photos for this blog. Many thanks to Nate for the photos! ♡ I couldn’t resist an outfit inspired by Betrayal at House on the Hill due to the setting (the mansion was perfect!) and I had a lot of fun figuring out what to wear for it.

I went with blue as the main color because of Madame Zostra/Vivian Lopez’s dress (we always cackle cause somehow in every copy of this game we’ve played, her piece is always tilted at a weird angle, like she’s doing the Michael Jackson lean) even though I’m usually one of the kids when I play — then brown as an accent. It was cool so I wore leggings and a sweater, along with tall boots. My favorite part though was the accessories. My earrings were bronze moons, I made a bracelet with a heavy skull bead as an anchor point and then made a necklace.

The necklace made me geek out when I realized the pieces I had and could use for it. The base of the pendant was a key (old house with locked doors and all that jazz) with a small clock hand attached to it (limited time before the haunt is revealed) and then the three small charms I attached to the key were a small spiral bead, a bull skull, and a few feathers — each one representing the backs of the categories of cards in the game. I’m sorry, I’m a nerd. Especially for this game.

I can’t say enough how entertaining this game is — you should definitely check it out if you get the chance.

I stuck with black and red mostly, with a cream-colored shirt to break it all up and I couldn’t help adding the paintbrush. And the apple, because you know… they’re running out of them apparently. Another note: black nail polish (any really dark color actually) really sucks to take off. I’m sure that’s already known by the world but I needed to reiterate.

And I couldn’t resist the necklace that only comes out when the jacket is off. I’ve had it for so long and have never really worn it because I haven’t had an ~excuse~ …I’ll be wearing it more often now.

(Did I almost make a piece of jewelry with a fake eyeball for this outfit? Maybe. (¬‿¬))

Abandonworn is a feature that has traveled from blog to blog over the years, taking on a few different names before settling here at Neon Shores. The feature contains photos of outfits I’ve put together that are inspired by a video game, a video game character, or some other aspect of a video game! Sometimes they can be inspired by different types of games too, so keep an eye out! ;D