I’m back in Hong Kong to spend the holidays with my family. It’s great to be home! Mostly I’ve been shopping and eating, but yesterday I went to the Asia Game Show with Stephen to check out video games and cosplayers.

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.

It’s been a while since I posted any of my artwork here. Here are some of my latest drawings.

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.

I was curious to see if there was any election commentary on 4chan (the darkest corner of the internet) after the presidential debates. Here’s what I found in /b/ in one of the Photoshop threads.

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.

Attending weddings is fun. Planning weddings does not seem fun. If / when I get married, my wedding will be held online in IRC, so as to minimize planning. This is the conclusion I’ve arrived at after attending a ton of ceremonies this year, all of which were beautiful but seemed hellish to plan. Best wishes to the happy couples and I applaud you for orchestrating such beautiful ceremonies!

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)

Wow, it’s been six months since I last updated this thing. Polyvore has been keeping me super busy! Thankfully, the startup life has turned out to be everything I hoped it would be and more (I’ll write more about that in a future post).

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.

Last week I quit my job at Google to join a small startup called Polyvore. A lot of people have asked me how I discovered Polyvore and why I decided to join.

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.