A long time ago, I did a Lean Startup talk on “fake door testing”, which is a technique we use to figure out if our product ideas are good.

The talk is in the Ignite format, which means there are 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. Great for audience members who want concise, information-dense, 5-minute-long talks, but it’s super stressful for speakers! I hate public speaking.

The trajectory of a successful startup looks something like this, up and to the right:

It’s not a smooth, straight ride though. There are ups & downs along the way. These ups & downs can be caused by seasonal traffic changes, bouts of good or bad press, employees leaving or joining, etc.

If you’re lucky enough to have gotten from point A to point B on this graph, you should be happy, right? After all, B is much higher than A.

WRONG.

Unfortunately, humans are terrible at understanding absolute values. We are best at understanding acceleration and deceleration, or rate of change. For example, when you are on a plane it is hard to tell if you are moving at 300 mph or 500 mph, but it’s easy to tell if you are accelerating from 300 mph to 500 mph.

My theory is that a founder’s happiness is tied to the rate of change of their startup’s success. In other words, your happiness graph is the first derivative of your success graph.

Even though point B is 2x better than point A in terms of success, it is a deceleration from the moment before. You are happiest when your growth is accelerating. When growth slows down, you start to become less happy. When you’re not growing, you are in unhappy territory.

Some tips to keep from drowning when your happiness is below the line —

1) Remember where you came from. Celebrate your wins and remind everyone of how far you’ve come. When we opened Polyvore’s New York office, I made sure to remind everyone of how we used to work out of Pasha’s living room and in an old bike shop. You can see a big increase in the absolute quality of our offices and our furniture:

2) Great culture and great people are your glue. They keep your startup from falling apart in those moments of deceleration. Have fun events where people get to know each other. Create silly traditions. Enjoy the people you work with.

3) Don’t let your self-worth be completely defined by your startup. My friends keep me grounded because they always treat me exactly the same, no matter how good or bad things are at Polyvore. When things are bad, they are my support network. When things are great, they still troll me anyways.

Strangely, this comforts me :-)

4) Get out there and talk to other entrepreneurs. I’m an introvert. I hate networking. I’m awkward at dinner parties. For the first 3 years at Polyvore, I kept my head down, worked my ass off, and hardly ever spoke to other entrepreneurs. In hindsight, this was one of my biggest mistakes. Without any perspective from other founders, my only data points on startups came from TechCrunch, which is filled with overnight success stories and positive spin. Therefore, every one of Polyvore’s problems felt like the end of the world to me. After I started talking to other founders, I got the benefit of their wisdom, their encouragement, and their suggested solutions. It was a huge relief and good for my mental health. If you’re an introvert like me, I recommend that you meet other entrepreneurs 1:1 for coffee, instead of going to startup networking events. Silicon Valley has a very nice “pay it forward” mentality, so I find a lot of people are willing to share. Whenever I am forced to go to networking events, I look for the other most uncomfortable, awkward-looking person in the room and try to talk to them. :-)

If you’re an unhappy founder, just know you’re not alone. Welcome to the great startup rollercoaster!

What’s happened since then?

The end of my 20’s. I turned 30 a few weeks ago.

I got married to my best friend last year. The wedding was beautiful on the outside, but very nerdy on the inside. Our vows mentioned emacs. There were guests dressed in Star Wars cosplay. It was the perfect day, shared with all my favorite people in the world.

I became CEO of Polyvore in January of this year. My role continues to evolve as the company grows. We recently hit 18 million visitors a month and are now both profitable AND cash-flow positive. Yes, we’re that rare consumer web startup that actually pays taxes. We were also chosen as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Most Brilliant Companies in 2011, Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2012, and Fortune’s 40 Under 40 just this month.

(We’re hiring, btw.)

Resolutions for year 30 —

Going to try to blog more, at least once a month. Especially about startup stuff. I feel like what’s missing from the Silicon Valley dialogue is the authentic, honest truth about how hard it is to run a startup. All you read about on TechCrunch is the glory.

Healthy living. Those of you who know me know I subsist on coffee and small quantities of very fatty foods. While I can’t promise to start eating vegetables, at the very least I’m going to try to exercise regularly. Yoga Belly, anyone?

Drawing. I will produce 1 drawing a month and post it here. No promises about the quality of said drawings.

Geek At Heart by Jess Lee featuring a black jacket

Hong Kong / Tokyo / Stanford / Google Maps / Polyvore / Comic Book Geek / Love to Draw / Enjoy Very Small Quantities of Very Unhealthy Foods / Fascinated by Internet Memes / Lover of Bad Action & Sci Fi / Commonly Dressed in Skinny Jeans, Black Jacket, Black Boots.

Anonymous fascinates me. It’s amazing that a loosely connected group of internet users can suddenly band together and launch a coordinated protest.

Today Anonymous declared war on the RIAA and MPAA, after learning that the MPAA had launched its own DDoS attack on everyone’s favorite torrent site The Pirate Bay. Anonymous launched Operation Payback is a Bitch, a coordinated DDoS attack on Riaa.com. Riaa.com has been down for the past 3 hours.

I was curious, so I joined the IRC channel where the attack is being coordinated. Here’s what I learned:

The attack is surprisingly well coordinated. There are 3-5 key coordinators who are telling the other 150+ people in the IRC channel what targets to hit and how to use LOIC. Right now the main target is the RIAA, but there’s a countdown until the next target will be announced (probably BPI, the British version of the MPAA). In terms of publicity, there was a press release of sorts (see below, it even has a logo) and the group even has its own Twitter account. Pretty savvy.

4chan is distancing itself from Anonymous. m00t, the owner of 4chan, has disabled all posting to 4chan so that it can’t be used to coordinate the attack. Interestingly, most of the people in the IRC channel are sympathetic to m00t and understand that he doesn’t want to take the fall for the attacks — “I’m sure he’d probably be behind this – but he is a likely target for retaliation whereas we are anon.”

Some members of Anonymous seem interested in protesting social issues. The media often portrays Anonymous as juvenile delinquents causing mayhem just for kicks, but I saw some discussion indicating otherwise. One person piped up suggesting a DDoS attack against Senator Frank Lautenberg in protest of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and in support of gays in the military. Another person suggested Anonymous take on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement because ideas should be free.

When people talk of the great day that the RIAA servers were down, when people spin tales of the brave souls who fought for freedom, they are talking about us, We are the holders of our future and rebels that inspire change in a system corrupt and inconsiderate, we are the freedoms we fight for incarnate, resistance is everything, defeat is impossible!

An Open Letter from Anonymous

I’ll never forget that Tory Burch was one of the first designers to give Polyvore a chance. Back then, Polyvore was only 6 people and I handled our ad sales. I was trying to find a big-name client to help validate our advertising programs. Tory was willing to experiment with us (she’s always been at the cutting edge of social media) and her community challenge turned out to be a huge success. That challenge became one of our flagship case studies, and it even got written up in the New York Times. Fast forward one year and now we’re on the radar of a lot more designers.

Thank You, Tory Burch!

The last few months have been particularly exciting…

Eddy & I are engaged! He proposed in a purikura photo booth in Tokyo on December 21st, 2009. The moment was captured on film, but you can’t see my face because I’m wearing a ridiculous fur hat (it was cold!). We’ve been together for 5 years. :-)

Polyvore has a new CEO. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy joined our team! She has a ton of impressive credits to her name, including that she ran Google Asia Pacific & Latin America, founded Yodlee, was the first bizdev person on Google Maps (bringing our Google Maps alum count to 5!), and has been on the cover of Fortune. I’m looking forward to learning lots from her. I’ve been lucky to have had some great mentors over the course of my career.

Style Advice is launched! Polyvore has a new feature that lets people ask & answer style questions. So far it’s doing great — the average response time is 8 minutes, and it goes up to about 4 minutes during the daytime. Questions range from “How do I wear harem pants?” to “How do I bring 80’s style into the 21st century?” to “What should I wear in a zombie invasion?” Huge kudos to Liz Xu Wilson for singlehandedly building this feature. Liz was the tech lead of My Maps and is one of my favorite people to work with in the entire world.

Polyvore was on TV. A big first for us! CBS Philadelphia did a great piece on Polyvore. They even interviewed one of our community members, a woman from Philadelphia named Shedgy who makes beautiful 50’s and 60’s inspired outfits. You can watch the clip at CBS3.com.

I gave talks at two conferences. I hate public speaking. I get terribly nervous and awkward onstage (some of the Google Maps team may remember my terrible speech at Geo Developer Day). But in the spirit of facing your fears, I’ve been trying to force myself to do more public speaking. I spoke at the Chictopia10 social media conference at New York Fashion Week, and I gave a talk at a Stanford Women in Business conference. Both had small friendly audiences, and both went well.

It’s hard to believe that Polyvore has come so far over the last 2 years! Not so long ago we were 5 people working out of Pasha’s house. Now we’re one of the largest fashion sites on the web and have managed to attract a huge talent like Sukhinder. There’s nothing more rewarding than working on a product you love with a community who loves you back, on a team that’s like a family. A huge thank you to Pasha, who I would follow to any other company, even if only out of curiosity. :-)

The past few months have been especialy hectic. In August, we raised $5.6M in Series B funding. I got to participate in the fundraising process, which was pretty interesting. The funding announcement got some nice press coverage, including pieces in The New York Times, TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

We were also incredibly lucky to be profiled in The New York Times on the front page of the Business section. It was a great article that helped drive a decent amount of traffic and has led to subsequent press coverage. So far we’ve gotten coverage in WGSN, The LA Times, Min Online, and twice in Advertising Age.

Traffic-wise, we’re doing great. According to Google Analytics, we have over 4 million unique visitors per month and over 150 million monthly pageviews. According to Compete.com, we’re now larger than Style.com and InStyle.com, making us one of the largest style/fashion sites on the web. Our incredible user community continues to amaze me with how talented & creative they are. Every day I’m blown away by their artistry.

Our team has grown too. We’re now at 9 people and are starting to hire for more specific roles, rather than having everyone do a little bit of everything. I love our team to pieces and feel really lucky that I get to work with such a cool, talented group of people. One of my favorite engineers from Google recently joined us. Liz Xu was the tech lead for My Maps (one of the projects I PMed at Google) and I’m super excited to be working together again.

My own role at Polyvore has evolved in rather strange & unexpected ways. Although I’m supposed to be a Product Manager (or technically, VP of Product Management, but that sounds kind of silly when you only have 9 people :-), over the 18 months I’ve done everything from writing code to washing dishes to pitching VCs to hiring janitors to selling ads to finding our new office. It’s been a crazy whirlwind of just doing whatever needs to get done, which I guess is fairly typical of a small startup.

But the most unexpected part of my job so far has been my work on revenue growth, building our ad sales pipeline. When I was a PM at Google, I never touched monetization, so working on the revenue side of things has been an entirely new experience for me. At first I didn’t even know what an IO was (insertion order, a common advertising term), but over the last 6 months I refined our ad opportunities, wrote our media kit, pitched to ad agencies, responded to RFPs, negotiated deals and trafficked a bunch of campaigns. There have been plenty of times where I felt like I was in over my head and didn’t know what I was doing, but I guess those are the times when you learn the most. Polyvore has been an incredible learning experience so far.

Some interesting campaigns I’ve worked on include the Gap “Born to Fit Jeans” Challenge (which was featured in Ad Age), a Nike Womenswear campaign, and contests for Marc by Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch, Bloomingdale’s, James Perse, and Piperlime. And I’m particularly excited about the contest we’re doing with Lady Gaga, who I’m a big fan of.

And now I’m heading to New York for Fashion Week! How surreal is that?

Compared to US geek conventions like Comic-Con or Anime Expo, it was a lot smaller. But much more crowded.

Sony was the major sponsor and took up half of the exhibition hall with booths dedicated to PS3 and PSP games. Little Big Planet was heavily featured.

So was Metal Gear Solid 4, the best game of 2008 according to IGN. Here’s a statue of protagonist Solid Snake.

They were also playing trailers for the latest Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy XXXLLLVVIIIIXXXXXXASDF.

They had playable demos of the newest Naruto fighting game, Narutimate Storm. Here’s Kakashi’s special, Raikiri.

There was an 18+ only area for the more violent games, like Resident Evil 5. We didn’t go in because the line was too long.

The other half of the exhibit hall was filled with vendors selling everything from laptop bags to cosplay costumes to SD cards. The cosplay costumes were pretty cheap, only HKD $150, or USD $20.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a con where there wasn’t someone selling cute fuzzy animal hats.

One vendor was selling hentai pillow covers — one side had a distressingly young-looking anime girl and on the other side she’s in a state of undress. Ew.

I’d say the biggest difference between Hong Kong cons and US cons is the cosplay. In Hong Kong the vast majority of cosplayers are young women, whereas in the US there are probably more male cosplayers. Also, the average level of attractiveness is probably higher in HK cosplayers. Plus there were a ton more rabid fanboy photographers circling around the cute girls at the Asia Game Show than at any other con I’ve ever been to, except maybe Comic Market in Tokyo.

This girl, dressed as Haruhi Suzumiya, had a pack of 20+ guys snapping photos of her for at least 20 minutes straight. It was like Britney Spears being mobbed by the papparazzi.

Except unlike Britney and the papparazzo, she was working her poses for them.

Naruto was the most popular series amongst the cosplayers. Here’s a 9-tail Naruto.

Sasuke from Naruto.

Will Sailor Moon ever go away?

D-Gray Man.

This was the only white cosplayer I saw. He was a captain from Bleach, but he didn’t have a number painted on his uniform. I think he bought his costume in the exhibit hall and put it on right there and then.

Vampire Knight was also pretty popular.

Skip Beat.

US cons are always filled with Star Wars characters, but I only saw one at the Asia Game Show, a Darth Vader.

A goth loli French maid.

The hair looks like Dragon Ball but I don’t recognize the clothing.

At every con there is always a dude in a dress. This guy was a good sport and let people take pictures with him.

There were lots of characters I didn’t recognize. If you can identify them, leave a comment.

For more pics, check out the full album.

A pretty boy. He turned out rather angular.

Kate Bosworth. The proportions are a bit off but I managed to finish this one very quickly.

She was supposed to have freckles, but I chickened out at the last minute and decided not to draw them for fear of messing up her skin.

This was an exercise in drawing hair. I HATE drawing hair.

The assignment was to draw a mechanical bird. I attempted to do a steampunk hummingbird. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish this piece, because I prefer drawing people.

Halloween ghouls. My second (ever!) attempt at color pencil. I chose a limited color palette so I could focus on blending technique.

If the candidates were search engines…

If the candidates were phones…

If the candidates were Star Wars characters…

If the candidates were video game consoles…

If the candidates were characters from Heroes…

If the candidates were 4chan memes…

If you recognize any of these obscure memes (I did not), you are a true /b/tard. The answers are IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER, Cockmongler, The Bayeux Tapestry, Epic Fail Guy.

Irene and Shaw (thanks for letting me be in the bridal party even though I didn’t help organize anything :-)

Jonathan and Atsuko

Sheena and Eli

Daisy and Leon (for some reason I don’t have any pics of Leon…)

Robby & Jeanne (the wedding proposal rap)

Polyvore is now at 8 full-time employees — 5 engineers, 1 bizdev person, 1 PR/marketing/community/office manager, and 1 PM (that’s me, although I spend most of my time writing code nowadays). Here’s a picture of us crowding around Jianing’s computer, celebrating the dropping of a table that reduced our overall db size and made the site much faster.

The other big update is that after almost a year of squatting with FriendFeed (thank you guys so much!), we finally got our own office on Castro St in Mountain View. It’s a huge retail space with floor-to-ceiling windows and lots of light. It’s definitely unique and the rent’s cheap, but the downside is that it lacks a kitchen and random people keep walking in because they think it’s a store.

Here are some shots of our new office. Keep in mind that we’re not done with decorating yet, so it looks kind of empty.

My friend Thai showed me Polyvore back in October. “Check out this site my friend Pasha is building,” he said. I instantly fell in love. It was like a combination of online Photoshop and Flickr, but for art instead of photos. I was fascinated by all the cool things people were creating using Polvore — fashion, interior design, artistic self-expression, caricatures, logos, postcards, etc. I started making my own sets and was surprised by how quickly they got comments and “Likes” from the user community. I ended up winning Polyvore’s Halloween contest.

I got so excited about Polyvore that I sent a long email full of comments, suggestions, and complaints to Pasha, even though I had never met him before. After a few email exchanges, he asked me if I wanted to join Polyvore. I’ve always wanted to work at a startup and felt like Polyvore was a good fit — great team, great product, just the right size (3 people at the time), healthy growth, etc. It also happened to fall at the intersection of many of my personal interests (tech, art, shopping, fashion, user-generated content). Although I was pretty happy working on Google Maps, I felt like I wasn’t learning as much new stuff anymore, and I knew that a startup would have a really steep learning curve.

Some of my friends thought I was crazy to leave Google, but I thought back to the advice my former boss Marissa had given me to always take the more challenging, more risky path (this was the advice that made me choose a job at Google over a job at Intuit), and decided to follow that advice once again. So I decided to take the leap.

It’s hard to believe that when I graduated from Stanford 4 years ago, I had been planning to take a job as a tax software engineer. During my Google interview, Marissa convinced me that this was a bad idea and I decided to join Google’s Associate Product Manager program instead. That turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life! Working at Google has been an amazing, life-changing experience. It’s an incredible company with a unique, quirky culture and tons of passionate, talented people. I feel very lucky to have been able to work with so many brilliant engineers on such fascinating products used by millions of people.

Leaving Google was a tough decision for me. I was very happy working on Google Maps and oftentimes felt like I had the best job in the world. I became the Maps PM at age 22 and was blown away by how much responsibility they were willing to give someone so young. The work was fun, challenging, and very rewarding. I wasn’t looking for a new job, but a great opportunity fell in my lap that I felt I had to take. More on that in a future post.

On my last day at Google, I decided to bake cookies for the Maps team one last time. Since it was Pi Day (3/14), I made Rolo pie cookies and passed them out at 1:59pm. Get it? 3/14 1:59 = 3.14159 = pi.

I also took some photos on my last day, but I wish I had taken more.

A lot of people have been part of my life at Google, but I’d really like to thank John Hanke, Brian McClendon, Prakash Janakiraman, Elizabeth Hamon Reid, Elizabeth Windram and Evan Parker for building and leading a kickass organization that was awesome to work in; the My Maps team for being the best project/team I ever worked on at Google; the whole Maps team for all the launches and lunches; Thai Tran, Chikai Ohazama and Bret Taylor for teaching me how to be a PM; Jonathan Goldman and Kenson Yee for the yogurt and the floaty balls; Nina Kang, Jim Muller, Dan Egnor and the folks in the geo-team chatroom for the daily snark and chitchat; Matthias Ruhl for the 4am craziness of the Movies Onebox launch; the Froogle team for toughening me up; and the APM Class of ’04.

Thanks for a great 4 years, Google!

1) Meeting Jim Lee

Jim Lee is a god in the comics world. He’s the genius artist behind Batman: Hush and Wild.C.A.T.s, and the founder of Image Comics and Wildstorm. Like a complete fangirl, I lined up to get his autograph and photo.

When my friend & fellow comic fan Dan Tran saw Jim Lee, he said “Oh my God, I want to kiss him.” Jim Lee overheard and gave him a funny look. Here’s Jim Lee pretending to ignore Dan.

2) The Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles panel

This was a really fun panel to watch. It featured Thomas Dekker (the actor who plays John Connor), Summer Glau (the Terminator who protects John), Brian Austin Green (Derek Reece, John’s uncle), writer Josh Friedman, and producer John Wirth.

– Brian Austin Green surprised me. He was very humble. Clearly he realizes that he’s best known for his role on Beverly Hills 90210, which doesn’t give him very much credibility as an actor. He was very grateful for the opportunity to play a more serious role. Wirth and Friedman both raved about how he nailed his audition for the part.

– Green trawls online forums to see what people are saying about the show. When fans first heard about him being on the show, the comments were very negative. But after a while they stopped referring to him as “Brian Austin Green” and just started calling him “Derek” (his character’s name), which made him very happy.

– When asked what he’s learned from the show, Green said “I’ve come away thinking that sci fi rules.” This earned him lots of cheers from the audience.

– Summer Glau doesn’t like reading about herself on the internet because it depresses her. But sometimes her mom sends her positive articles, which she does read.

– Glau is a trained ballerina. She’ll be doing some ballet in the next episode of Terminator and is also working on a ballet together with Joss Whedon. She said that her ballet training was helpful for doing martial arts scenes in Firefly, but as a Terminator she mostly just picks things up and throws them.

– Glau has a boyfriend. She managed to convince him to let her practice shooting a bb gun at him. Ouch.

– When asked “How does it feel to be back on the network that canceled your show [Firefly]?”, Glau responded “I pray really hard.”

– Thomas Dekker was a bit obnoxious and kept interrupting other people while they were talking. But he’s clearly passionate about the show, which was somewhat endearing. Lots of people predicted the show would suck, but Dekker really believed in the story & the characters, and felt vindicated when it got good reviews. The experience taught him not to back down.

– Dekker hopes that his character will get to punch at least one person next season.

– Dekker clearly has a crush on Summer Glau. He kept touching her and hugged her once during the panel.

– Dekker was supposed to wrap up the Zach storyline in Heroes but couldn’t do it due to scheduling issues. He played Claire’s friend Zach, the guy who helped film her miraculous healing powers.

– Josh Friedman originally wanted to bring back Kyle Reece, John Connor’s dead father. He was told “you’re gonna get fucking killed [by fans]” for the storyline discontinuity, so he decided to create the character of Kyle’s brother instead.

– Friedman thought “The ultimate nuclear family” would be a great catchphrase/slogan for the series :)

– The characters on the show do their own stunts, which Friedman really likes, because using stunt doubles is time-consuming and never looks as good.

– Friedman has the next season planned out in his head.

3) Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay panel

I came in late and caught the tail end of the Harold & Kumar preview. All I saw was a Ku Klux Klansman urinating on Harold’s head. There was also Q&A with John Cho (the actor who plays Harold) and writers/directors Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg.

– John Cho is hilarious in real life. When asked how his preacher father felt about him playing a stoner, he said “Smoking weed doesn’t make you a bad person.” Actually, he repeated this several times throughout the Q&A.

– When asked where Kal Penn (Kumar) was, Cho joked that Penn was in rehab for quaaludes. Then he admitted that Penn was “off somewhere trying to get Barack Obama elected.”

– John Cho plays Sulu in J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek movie. Cho said he idolized George Takei (the original Sulu) while growing up and was proud to be filling Takei’s “giant slippers.” He refused to give away any details about Star Trek, but Hurwitz jumped in to say that Sulu has an Australian accent in the film. I’m pretty sure he was joking.

– Hurwitz & Schlossberg said that their biggest regret about the first movie was that it didn’t have enough nudity. They made sure not to make the same mistake twice. Schlossberg promised that HK2 has “more full frontal female nudity than any other widely released Hollywood film.”

– They’ve done several test screenings for HK2 so far and the audience reaction has been fantastic. The movie is premiering at South by Southwest and will also be playing at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March.

4) The Iron-Man panel with director Jon Favreau

The panel was pretty short, but here are the highlights:

– Jon Favreau previewed a hilarious clip of Tony Stark testing out his jet boots for the first time. Stark takes off too quickly and slams facefirst into the wall. An overenthusiastic fire extinguishing robot keeps spraying him even though he’s not on fire.

– Favreau admitted he pays attention to what fans are saying online. He considers the internet to be a huge watercooler and finds it useful to monitor the feedback.

– If Ironman makes a lot of money, Favreau might get to direct an upcoming Avengers movie.

– When asked about the rumor that the characters from the Incredible Hulk movie would be appearing in Ironman, Favreau dodged the question. He said he wanted to keep up the “white noise of uncertainty” around the film and not give away too much.

5) Cosplayers

Here are the best cosplayers I saw.

Midna & Wolf Link from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Cobras from G.I. Joe

Grimmjaw from Bleach

More Bleach characters

Dumbledore from Harry Potter. He told me not to be late for school.

There were a ton of Star Wars cosplayers. That was definitely the most popular series amongst the cosplayers.

Harry Osborn in Green Goblin gear from Spiderman 3. His board was amazing — it glowed green, had spinning parts, and there’s even a tiny LCD screen embedded in it that was playing the Spiderman movie.

Sandman from Spiderman 3.

Probably the best Sailormoon I’ve seen at any convention.

Dr. Who

I couldn’t tell what this guy was supposed to be and had to ask. Turns out he’s an alien from the movie Aliens. His costume is made of black garbage bags and a black shoebox.

All my pics from Wondercon are here.

This is my favorite of the three. It took about 45 minutes to complete. I tried to loosen up my drawing style and make it look more sketchy using dark, soft pencils.

I dislike this one because the outlines are too crisp and her eyes don’t match.

I really dislike this one. I sort of gave up on it halfway through.

If you haven’t heard of her, Magibon is one of the most popular vloggers on YouTube. She’s currently the 75th most subscribed user of all time and is dominating the People & Blogs section, with four of her videos placing in the top 15 for the past month.

Magibon doesn’t do anything in her videos. She just stares, blinks, and smiles at the camera. Occasionally she’ll say something in badly accented Japanese, like “pizza is delicious” or “I am studying Japanese.” Magibon looks 16, but claims to be 21, and is actually white, not Japanese. She’s very cute, has huge eyes, and resembles an anime character.

Despite doing nothing in her videos, Magibon has somehow amassed millions of pageviews and has spawned a huge following of fans, haters, and imitators. She’s even been invited to appear on TV in Japan.

This is Magibon’s most popular video, with over 2.4 million pageviews. It’s 30 seconds of her doing nothing.

Some of her fans have created loving tribute videos. This one is set to “Hey There Delilah” and features a Magibon montage.

The people who hate her have created parody videos. This one is by Jason Tobin, the actor who played Virgil in Better Luck Tomorrow and was also in Tokyo Drift. Make sure to fast forward to 1:00 to see Fake Magibon (Jason’s real-life girlfriend) getting beaten up by Jason.

A creepy Magibon fan site came online fairly recently at Magibon.com. It claims to have been created by an obsessive fan named Frank and features a grainy black & white video of a masked man clutching at a wall with Magibon projected on it. Some people speculated that Frank and Magibon were part of an elaborate marketing campaign for a Japanese horror movie, but it turned that Frank was just a viral hoax created by a digital media artist named Danung.

Magibon has become so popular in Japan that Gyao (a Japanese internet/TV broadcasting company) invited her to come to Tokyo to work with them. Their YouTube message says something along the lines of “We saw your comment on YouTube about wanting to visit Japan. If you are interested in appearing on Gyao, we would like to make a Magibon show. We’ll await your reply on YouTube.”

Magibon responded saying she’d love to go anytime.

It’s amazing that this girl is getting offers to fly to Japan, just for posting some videos of herself doing absolutely nothing. It’s yet another YouTube miracle, up there with Esmee Denters (the talented singer who uploaded videos of herself singing and got signed to Justin Timberlake’s record label, which she announced through a video of herself singing together with Justin Timberlake) and Tay Zonday (the guy who wrote Chocolate Rain, performed it on Jimmy Kimmel, and got tapped to star in a commercial for Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper).

The power of YouTube is truly amazing.

For Week One’s drawing session, I decided to do an anime-style drawing in ink. I picked this picture, by an artist named Haccan.

I was feeling lazy, so I was pretty sloppy about copying the original picture. I left out the little kid, skipped the background, changed her clothing slightly, and messed up the proportions of the arm. I also learned that my Copic Multiliner SP pens suck. At $6/pen, I figured they must be really great pens, but it turns out that the nibs are really fragile. If you press too hard, the nibs get bent out of shape and the ink stops flowing. It was really frustrating trying to ink this drawing.

Next I scanned the drawing and started coloring it in PhotoShop, following this tutorial. I picked my color palette with the help of Kuler, a neat site that Chieze introduced me to. However, I ran out of time and only got as far as the flats, so there’s no shading yet. Here’s the work in progress.

For Week Two’s drawing sessions, I decided to make up for the previous week’s laziness by doing something more challenging — a photorealistic pencil drawing. I flipped through Allure magazine and found this beauty editorial.

Here’s the final drawing. I did a better job of staying true to the original than the previous drawing, but there are still a lot of problems. Her eyes are looking in different directions, her nose is too long, and I got really lazy with the earrings. But if you didn’t see the original drawing, I think it looks alright. I used Derwent graphite pencils 6B, 5B, 3B, 2B, F, and 2H.

I’m a little surprised that so many people showed up to the protests. Anonymous has done a good job keeping up the momentum. They even managed to get a nice article in Newsweek. I tried logging into Anonymous’ IRC channel but found that I’ve been banned. :( If you’re looking for more info on Anonymous’ war on Scientology, check out my earlier super long blog post on the topic.

Over 200 people braved -29 degree Celsius weather to attend the Toronto protest. Fast forward to 1:30 to see an interview with an ex-Scientologist, who thanks Anonymous for helping scared ex-Scientologists like herself to “come out of the woodwork.”

Here’s a TV news report on the protests in Clearwater, Florida. It includes a clip of the protest organizer telling people, “Keep it clean. No shenanigans!” (0:10). It also features a comment from a Scientology director of public affairs (1:10), who says “They’re just whipping people into a frenzy about something to discriminate against my stated religious beliefs.”

Rickrolling the church in Washington DC. Epic lulz!

Video of the Atlanta protest set to the “All your base are belong to us” song. Go to 0:33 to see a shot of 30 riot police in full gear, ready to shut down the protest in case it got violent (which it did not).

Over 300 protesters gathered in Los Angeles (credit: LA Times and blogging.la).

But only 30 people showed up to protest in Mountain View (credit: the forums at Enturbulation.org).

Protests also occurred outside of the US, in Canada, Australia, England, and Scotland. Here are some pics from the Sydney and Adelaide protests (credit: News.com.au).