Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you all are enjoying a great Christmas holiday. I had plans to do a couple of posts each day here, but failed completely. Instead I’ve pretty much had a full week away from my laptop, staying blissfully offline. I had an awesome Christmas: hanging out with family, eating amazing food and getting great presents.

It is still officially Christmas though, so I still have time to do some Christmas giveaways. Yay! One of my favourite books this year was Redshirts by John Scalzi; it’s Must Read for every Star Trek fan. I’m so excited to give a copy away to one lucky reader!

Redshirts_John_Scalzi1

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment behind with your favourite Christmas present. You’ll also get a second entry if you’re following me on Twitter and tweet about this giveaway with the hashtag #missgeeky. The competition is open to everyone and will end on January 4th after which I’ll randomly draw a winner.

Only 8 more days till Christmas! I can’t wait to see my family open up their presents, hopefully they’ll enjoy the things I’ve got for them. And of course I’m looking forward to see what I’m getting too. I didn’t want to leave you guys out though, so I’ll be hosting a couple of giveaways on MissGeeky!

les-miserables

This first giveaway is awesome. Thanks to Universal Pictures one lucky Miss Geeky reader will win a Les Misérables gift pack! It includes:

  • $25 Visa Gift Card for a night out at the movies
  • The Les Misérables Movie Soundtrack
  • A Les Misérables T-Shirt
  • A Les Misérables Journal

To enter the giveaway, leave a comment behind with your favourite movie musical scene. You’ll also get a second entry if you’re following me on Twitter and tweet about this giveaway with the hashtag #missgeeky. The competition ends on December 28th after which I’ll randomly draw a winner and is open to everyone.

I am so looking forward to Les Misérables, so I’m super happy that I get to giveaway this cool gift pack! The movie looks great: awesome songs, great actors (Hugh Jackman *swoon*) and gorgeous visuals. I get goosebumps every time I hear Anne Hathaway singing in the teaser trailer:

I can’t wait to see this! It’s being released in theatres in the US on December 25th and in the UK on January 11th (if you’re based in another country check out the IMDb release dates page).

Bacon! This one is for all you bacon lovers out there. After coming across a couple of bacon related products, I just knew I had to do an entire post around those. And there are some weird bacon things out there… I like bacon, but I’m not sure I like it quite this much. If you’re interested in my other Christmas Gift Guides, check out the gift guides for The Fantasy Reader and The Gamer Girl.

Bacon Poster

Show your loyalty to the Bacon Nation with this propaganda poster from etsy store Justonescarf.

bacon-poster

Bacon Pillow

I love the description for this product: “There’s conclusive, scientific proof that bacon is an intellectual food. It’s right there in the periodic table! Barium, cobalt and nitrogen. BA CO N. Read it and weep, bacon haters. This pillow makes it very clear that you’re not one to be trifled with when it comes to the ultimate food. Show your brainpower and bacon-lust in one easy decoration!” It’s $35 at YellowBugBoutique.

bacon-pillow

The Bacon Cookbook

Ooh, more than 150 recipes with bacon? At first glance this looks like quite a gimmicky book, but the recipes actually look pretty decent. It’s £15.59 on Amazon.

bacon-cookbook

Bacon Candle

“I love the smell of bacon in the morning”. Never go without it with this candle from bubbleandgeek ($9.25).

bacon-candle

Bacon Knee Highs

Which girl wouldn’t want to wear knee high socks like these? They’re $10 on SockDreams.

bacon-socks

Bacon Necklace

A necklace with a strip of bacon AND a fork! It’s £6.37 at Fwirl.

bacon-necklace

Bacon Scented Gummy Bear Shaped Soaps

Aw, these are so adorable. I wish they were actual gummy bears though, not just soap in the shape of them. There available for only $4 at FrostedCrossbones (awesome shop name).

bacon-soap

50 Shades of Bacon

And even bacon jumps on the 50 Shades of Bad Jokes bandwagon.

Fifty-Shades-Bacon

Bacon Jelly Beans

Try these at your own peril; the Amazon reviews about it are horrendous.

bacon-beans

Bacon iPhone Case

Clothe your iPhone in style! For $39.95 this bacon case can be yours!

bacon-iphone-case

Bacon Lube

Seriously? This actually exists?!? You can get it on BaconLube.com (obviously) for $11.99.

bacon-lube

Bacon Of The Month Club

The ultimate bacon gift: the Bacon of The Month Club. Each month two pounds (= 0.907185 kg) of different kinds of bacon will be delivered at your doorstep. Awesome. They do a lot of flavours, like Cajun, Apple Cinnamon, Jalapeno, Honey BBQ, Maple, Brown Sugar, Vanilla Bourbon, Sun Dried Tomato, Pepper, and Hickory Smoked.

bacon-club

So bacon lovers would any of you be actually happy getting any of these bacon gifts for Christmas? Or is it just too much bacon?

Time for the second of my Christmas Gift Guides! Today we look at gifts for the Gamer Girl. Some of these gifts would of course also work for guys, but at least half of these are definitely more aimed at female gamers. If you want to check out my first gift guide, it’s for the Fantasy Reader.

The main things to keep in mind when buying gifts for a gamer is the following:

  1. What console does she play on? An obvious one, but worth repeating for completion’s sake.
  2. What games does she already have? Check out her bookcase/box/benno/floorspace-around-her-console to find out what games she already owns. Or if you don’t have access to that, friend her on whatever console she owns network, and take a look at the games she’s played (not going in specifics here, cause it does depend on whether she uses Xbox Live or PSN). If she uses raptr.com, you’re in luck; if she’s set it up right, you can easily see which games she has, what achivements she’s gotten and how many hours she’s played (here’s my raptr profile).
  3. What games are her favourite? If you don’t know, try looking at the amount of achievements/trophies she’s gotten in the games. It’s not always a good indicator of which game is her favourite, but it will tell you a bit about how many hours she might have put into them. Again if she’s uses raptr, take a good look at what games she’s played the most.

Games

Let’s start with the obvious one. Gamer girls of course will want more games to dedicate their lives to. If you have no idea what game she wants, keep the three things from above in mind: what console, what games does she already have and which ones are her favourites. Try to pick a game from the same genre of games she already has; does she like first-person shooters, role-playing games (RPGs), racing games? Are they all fantasy based, or sci-fi based, or set in the modern day world? Don’t just pick a game in a shop cause the cover looks pretty or cause it looks similar to another game; google it and check out the reviews to see if it’s any good (Wikipedia tends to do nice overviews of how a game was received).

Also take the price of the game into account. There are certain games that I would never get for myself when they were full price, but that I wouldn’t mind trying out when they got cheaper. Besides that take a look at older games; I prefer playing a good game from 5 years ago, then playing a crappy game made this year.

Here are a couple of games that I enjoyed playing this year, but of course as I’ve said above it all depends on what your gamer girl likes. If you’re really stuck, feel free to email me or tweet me and I’ll see if I can help.

Official Merchandise

The next step would be looking at the official stores of your gamer girl’s favourite games. There are a lot of game studios that do great tie-in merchandise, like t-shirts, hoodies and accessories: the Valve store (Portal, Half-Life, Team Fortress, Left 3 Dead), the Bioware store (Mass Effect, Dragon Age), the Ubisoft store (Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell), the Halo store, they all have some great products.

I love for instance this N7 Hoody from the Bioware Store and this plush Companion Cube from the Valve store (anything Portal related will make me happy though).

Jewelry

I love showing which games I love by wearing cute necklaces and earrings! There are a ton of awesome designs out there, covering most of the current popular games. You’ll of course need to know what the favourite games are of your gamer girl, but if you do, jewelry will make a great present.

My favourite etsy store for necklaces is Land of Rapture. They do a lof of different cameo necklaces, with designs from Assassin’s Creed (I’ve got the one below), Portal, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Half Life and Dragon Age. They also do custom designs, so if you have an idea message them and they should be able to make it!

Another etsy store I like is The 17th Bit. I’ve got my eye on the Companion Cube necklace from Portal pictured below, but they also do various cute rings.

Also take a look at the ThinkGeek Jewelry section. My current favourite there is the charm bracelet (you can buy each charm separately though). I love the little bling mushroom and the cute companion cube:

Heels

These awesome custom painted heels are from etsy store magicbeanbuyer. The left pair is $115, the right pair is $75, but this doesn’t include the cost of the actual shoe (you need to send a pair for them to paint).

T-shirts

Besides the official merchandise stores, there are a couple of t-shirt companies out there that do great game designs too. Check out the following stores, they all have a great selection: J!nx, Insert Coin, Split Reason, Nerdy Shirts, ThinkGeek and Threadless.

Custom Controller

Who doesn’t want a controller in their favourite colours? If you’re confident enough in cracking gadgets open and messing around with them, just head on over to ebay to find all the parts in the right colours. I first heard about changing the buttons of your controller on explodedsoda’s blog (check out her blog posts about her custom PS3 controller and her custom Xbox controller) and have been dying to try it out for myself.

If you’re not that handy with gadgets or just don’t want to be bothered doing it yourself, there are a couple of companies out there that will do it for you. Evil Controllers has their own controller creator where you can specify the colours for each part, with a wide range of different colours and materials, and they also have a section with already fully themed and modded controllers. ControllerModz is a UK based company that provides a wide range of custom modded controllers and also allows you to send your own controller for modding to them.

Makeup

When I came across GeekChicCosmetics I just knew I had to include it here. They do various ranges of eyeshadows and lipsticks, all inspired by games, movies and TV shows. There’s a Portal range with eyeshadows like Portal blue, Portal orange and Companion Cube pink. Or the Mass Effect one with Element Zero blue, Archangel sage (I would have chosen a dark blue to represent Archangel though) and N7 red. My favourite is the Babylon 5 one; all those colours look so shiny!

Bras

This one is sadly not an option for Christmas, cause it takes too long to be shipped. I still wanted to include it here though: hand painted bras! There are a couple of Etsy shops that I could find that do them: SceeneShoes (the bra on the bottom left), RainbowKidShop (the bra on the bottom right) and HeartMyGeek

So what else can you think of for a gamer girl?

It’s 2.5 weeks to Christmas! How far are you with your Christmas shopping? I’m almost done, but then I always like getting my Christmas shopping out of the way as soon as possible. So to help those of you out that might be struggling I thought I’d do some gift guides the next few days for different types of people.

First up: The Fantasy Reader!

Books

Obviously. You can’t do a gift guide for someone who reads a lot without recommending a couple of books. Of course I couldn’t pick out just one book to recommend, so here are 9 cool fantasy books that any fantasy geek would love to get. Assuming he/she doesn’t have it already, but that’s a problem you’ll have to tackle on your own (a tip for book geeks: put a link to your GoodReads/library-app-of-your-choice on your wish list so that people can see what you have already. Alternatively, create a list of writers you have already and share that with them). What other books would you recommend?

2013 Fantasy Pin-Up Calendar

I don’t really use calendars anymore, but I love this Fantasy Pin-Up Calendar. The artist Lee Moyer has worked together with each of the writers to create a good representation of their characters. Plus each illustration is done in a different style, paying homage to past pin-up artists (you can read Lee Moyer’s blog post about it here). The image below on the right is of N.K. Jemisin’s Oree from The Broken Kingdoms.

Bookends

This completely depends on what type of books your Fantasy Reader enjoys, but I thought these book ends look awesome. The top left Tentacle and Pirate Ship bookend is from Etsy store KnobCreekMetalArts for $49.99. The top right ReadBooks bookend is available on PBteen for £28.40. The Gear Bookend is from Etsy store graphicspaceswood and costs $55. The Portal one is available for $29.99 on ThinkGeek.

Cookbooks

Cookbooks?!? Yep, there are a couple of fantasy inspired cookbooks out there. Who wouldn’t want to cook up a feast worthy of the residents of Winterfell? A Feast of Ice and Fire is £29.99, Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is £7.69 and The Unofficial Recipes of The Hunger Games is £11.99.

Jewelry

If you really want to give something special, how about an officially licensed piece of jewelry from their favourite fantasy book? Badali Jewelry Specialists worked together with the authors to create the designs from their stories. They’ve got jewelry from Lord of The Rings, Mistborn, Wheel of Time and The Kingkiller Chronicles! Having just read The Name of The Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, those designs are my favourite; it’s so cool seeing them in “real life”. The pieces below are the Talen Pipes from The Name of The Wind and the Aes Sedai Serpent Ring from The Wheel of Time.

What do you think of my suggestions? Which ones do you want for Christmas? What else would you suggest for the Fantasy Reader?

It’s snowing! Sort of. London hasn’t been hit yet, but it’s started to snow where my parents live… So we can expect snow any minute now, right? I love it when it snows; it’s another of those signs that Christmas Is Coming!

In a snowy Winter Wonderland every girl needs a proper Winter Wonderland dress! This dress from Modcloth is aptly named It’s A Wonderland Life. I love the snowy cabin print; it’s so different than most dresses I’ve seen out there this winter. It’s currently out of stock, but normally would be $155.99.

What do you think of the dress? Have you seen other snowy winter dresses anywhere? Let me know in the comments

It’s the 1st of December! That means it’s only 24 days till Christmas (or 25 depending on how you include the days you count, I never quite know what’s the right way to do it), meaning: I can play Christmas carols again!

This video from the Muppets came out a few weeks ago to celebrate the launch of The Muppet Christmas Carol on Bluray:

I have to say though, it’s not as funny as previous videos from the Muppets (I was expecting more than just the chickens, come on, give us Kermit or Miss Piggy singing!). I still really like this one (and turns out I don’t think I’ve ever posted it here on MissGeeky):

Wow, the last couple of weeks have been so super busy, I’ve again managed to neglect this blog. Sometime soon though I should have something exciting to share with you all…

Anyway it’s the day before Christmas and I need to catch up on Christmas posts! This awesome song from Tim Minchin has been doing the rounds the past two days (it was sadly cut from tonight’s Jonathan Ross show):

A very bleated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everyone! It’s been way too long since I last posted something here. I’ve been sick for the past three weeks with an annoying flu, and I’ve only just recovered from it.

Christmas

The week before Christmas we visited family in the Netherlands to celebrate Christmas there slightly early, but for most of it I was feeling so weak and ill. We flew back on Christmas eve without any problems (other than me being way to weak to carry the suitcase) which kind of surprised me. With the snow and everything I was completely expecting for something to go wrong. Anyway, this was the first Christmas that me and Cristiano were alone for and we thought we’d do our own 4 course Christmas dinner. Yeah… we were both way too sick. We stopped after the second course to nap for a couple of hours.

So my holiday has pretty much been lots of sleeping, watching movies, playing Mass Effect (I finished both 1 and 2, yay me!) and cuddling the cats… hmm, pretty sure if I wasn’t sick, that would have been my holiday anyway!

Tags: Christmas

I’m not in a great Christmassy mood right now; my 6am flight this morning was cancelled (which I found out at 3am, half an hour before we had to actually leave the house), I’ve still got a horrible cold, and I’m running way behind on blogposts. Still, no need for everyone to feel glum, so I’ve got a cool giveaway for you guys!

Space Paranoids

I’ve got an awesome Space Paranoids pin from Tron to giveaway! Just leave a comment behind about your favourite moment in Tron (original or sequel, doesn’t matter). You’ve got until Christmas to enter. Btw, if you re-tweet you get an extra entry!

I’ll be doing a couple more giveaways the next couple of days, so stick around (or subscribe to the feed or email updates).