I know it’s been almost two weeks since I last posted, and for that I apologize. Between finals, preparing to fly to the east coast for the holidays, and the spring internship search, I’ve been insanely busy lately. But I haven’t forgotten about you!

What are some of the nifty new things in my life, you ask? I’ve had a lot of thoughts that deserve their own posts recently (expect them soon! I’ll have more time to write while I’m on winter break), but there are two that are relevant to games and worth mentioning here.

The first is the Blizzard Holiday party. I was invited by one of my friends from this summer, and it was pretty incredible. The first half of the night was dinner at the Disneyland Hotel, and the second part of the night? They opened up half of California Adventure Park just for Blizzard. We didn’t have access to everything, but they did have the Tower of Terror operating, both of their karaoke venues open, and two showings of the ElecTRONica laser show (oh, and an open bar!).

The best part, however, was the private viewing of their World of Color show. This is because afterwards, they had a 5-minute Blizzard IP-themed show. No joke. It was one of the most epic things I’ve experienced in my entire life. The video doesn’t do it justice, but it’s still definitely worth checking out:

Amazing, right? I don’t think I dorked out this much since I found out I would get to be working there.

The other item (which doesn’t really hold a candle to that one but is still worth mentioning) is that the IGDA is starting a Student Perspective column in their monthly newsletter, and my submission was chosen to be the inaugural piece. It’s a little higher level compared to how I usually prefer to write – meaning it’s more theoretical and potentially ‘Ivory Tower-esque’, not more advanced – but it’s got a decent point behind it that I think I communicated well.

And it’s kind of exciting. The IGDA site gets a collective 6k+ unique monthly viewers, and while I don’t know how many of them go for the newsletters, it’s still a neat feeling. I’ll post it here when it’s actually published if anyone cares to check it out.