Kitty’s birthday event this year has officially been sneak peek’d!!

What a pretty snowy place!

I earnestly hope that I will have time to play this, in between work, providing art for the Facebook game I am working on, and putting together a Web site for a friend of my Mom who is offering to pay me to do it. @_@

Things are getting crazy!

Now is inarguably the best time to purchase Hello Kitty Online Premium Edition. If you’ve missed all the news, the current promotion will net you $30 worth of in-game cash as well as the collector’s item box, game disc, full-color manual, and postcards for only $20. All you have to do is redeem your retail code before October 24.

My GameStop had it in stock. Its baby pink box stood out quite well. I laughed over it along with the guy behind the counter - he commented that his sister would probably enjoy the game.

The box:

The goodies:

I’ve searched around, and I haven’t found anyone else sharing what happens after you insert the game into your computer. Well, let me show you!

You get this nice little tutorial sequence. It’s the same tutorial that was once posted somewhere on the official site. I can’t seem to find it there any more, but I know that I have seen it before!

The installation itself isn’t particularly exciting. I was hoping for pretty pictures to look at. (This soon got uninstalled - I don’t have the space available for two versions of the same game. 6_6)

I wondered what I was supposed to do in order to get my Cash and special pet. It took some surfing, but I went to this page and then followed the Payments link at the bottom. From there, you select ‘Exclusive Retail Code’ and just fill out everything as it asks.

It took some more hunting, but I finally realized that the retail code that they were asking for was printed on the back of the white envelope that the game disc came in. XD

Woo! That’s a lot of Cash Points!

Er, wait, what happened to the 2,400 Cash Points? D:

I fire up the game to see what went through.

The coin shows up in your Item Delivery tab. Then I checked the Item Mall…

Hmm, only 1,200 Cash Points? :/ Now, are the bonus points going to be added at a later date, or should I be worried? I’ll wait a couple days before I contact a GM or anything.

Anyone else encounter this? If you have a Premium Edition success story (shopping spree, anyone?), I’d love to hear that, too!

Have you heard of the Sunday Social phenomenon? Here is my post for the 12th week’s question.

This Week’s Question:

What do you / did you want to do when you grow up and why?
If you are all grown up now, have you managed to make that dream come true?

My answer:

Ever since I was old enough to hold a crayon, I’ve known that I wanted to be an artist. The scribbles on papers that covered the refrigerator and plastered the walls of my bedroom were a testament to this. There was just so much that could be accomplished through drawing - I could create worlds, and people and creatures that resided withing them, and illustrate their fantastic adventures.

Oh, as I grew over time, sometimes I would change my mind about what I wanted to be. Sometimes I wanted to be a teacher, sometimes an author. But I would always come back to ‘artist’ eventually.

Looking back on it now, I can easily recognize what my influences were. I didn’t realize it at the time, but playing video games impacted my life in a major way. It was about when I reached high school that I realized that gaming was more than just an idle hobby. It was a passion. Shortly after, I realized why.

Video games were the culmination of what I had always tried to achieve in art. Wondrous fantasy lands, colorful characters that existed within them, and adventures. Lots and lots of adventures. Stories about small, unlikely heroes overcoming obstacles and conquering their fears and taking down the great evils that threatened their homes.

The bond between myself and my games was further strengthened as they grew up at the same pace I did. I was born in 1988 - the Nintendo Entertainment System had been around for a couple of years. Video games were comprised of lit-up blocks of color on a screen, accompanied with beeps of music and sound. It seemed that with every phase of growing up that I entered - starting school, moving on to middle school and high school, graduating from high school - my games evolved along with me. Nowadays you are hard-pressed to find games that don’t include a musical score consisting of an entire symphony orchestra, or mind-blowing graphics and art work that makes you squint and think Is this really just a game?

Of course it’s not just a game. It’s art.

I hardly think of myself as a grown-up, but I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as an artist. I have a portfolio hosted on my own domain and contacts with a handful of established artists. I’ve been taking the serious steps toward bringing my skills to a professional level for the past year (and, yes, I admit that I waited too long to work on making it all happen).

This morning, in my inbox, was an e-mail from Jonathan Chung, the lead developer behind the upcoming game-building software Stencyl. He wants me to be the lead artist for Stencyl’s first Facebook game.

Earlier today aired the first episode of the brand new My Little Pony television series!! We’ve been teased with trailers and pictures prototype toys, and now the wait is over!

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the new generation of MLP toys. The lead character designer behind their new designs is Lauren Faust, whose work you should recognize from Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.

This is the new cast of characters! Do you like them? Read about each of them ~here~.

I’m so excited about this! The characters and the world they live in is so cute! And Princess Celestia makes me go *o* Ooohhhhh, prettyyyy.

The first episode has been uploaded to Youtube by a kind fan. I can’t guarantee that these videos won’t be taken down, so nab this opportunity to watch them right now!

Fluttershy is just too cute!! When she squeaked her name like that, I lolololololol’d. XD

Okay, I… love Sugarbunnies. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, because they are bunnies. They are wonderfully adorable, fluffy, colorful bunnies. Secondly, they make sweets and chocolate. Oh my God.

Sanrio.com recently started a page up just for the colorful cast of Sugarbunnies. Their new minisite is right here.

There are all kinds of amazingly colorful downloadables. I always tend to download everything in sight, just to have tons of character references on hand. Is that weird? The nice PDF files even scale perfectly as you zoom in, so you can get some hugely high-resolution images off of it. This is the sort of thing that excites me. Seriously, am I weird?

Sugarminuet. As if the Sugarbunnies themselves weren’t cute enough, there have to be beautiful princessy ballerina bunnies in pink and white. My life. Is complete.

Hanausa and Momousa are another pair of favorites of mine.

Every aspect of this minisite is adorable. I could stare at the colors and cute scenes all day.

If someone gave you $250 to spend on Sanrio.com, what would you buy?

Don’t hurt your brain thinking about it. Just register for the weekly sweepstakes and take it from there.

I’ve asked, and even if you’re already a Sanrio.com member (and receive newsletters in your e-mail promoting updates), you DO have to fill out this form in order to register for the sweepstakes. But you only need to fill out the form once to be registered for all of the weekly drawings!

If you have multiple e-mail accounts, enter them all! It increases your odds of being drawn!

This little bonus popped up after I entered one of my addresses (as if the chance to win $250 wasn’t enough as it is):

This coupon expired yesterday, so you can’t nab the code off of there, but I’m going ahead and posting it here to further entice you to get going and register!

One last time, the sweepstakes link is here: Go go go!