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Tara Voelker's thoughts. A lot about video games, a little about life
So, as always, a long time has passed and I haven’t posted anything. To be exact, I haven’t posted anything since June. Why haven’t I posted? Well first the standard reason – I’m horrible about posting, and then the second reason – crunch. (For those of you who don’t know what crunch is, it’s a game industry term for working stupid amounts of overtime. In my case, 12 hour days with occasional weekend work).
But what’s sad is that I’ve actually had some cool (and one not at all cool) things happen during those few months. So I decided to make 1 giant mass dump of everything I didn’t post. So here we go!!
And now here we are. I could have made larger post about most of these things, but I don’t have the time and I still wanted to share. Eventually I will ship this game, and have more time for things like… oh you know, life and blog posts again.
So a couple week ago, there was nothing more I wanted to do than post this picture on Facebook or Twitter.
It’s the first you see when you walk into Irrational. It’s life sized and awesome.
But I couldn’t. My trip to Boston was a secret, and only a handful of close friends and family even knew I was out of town.
I had applied to the Irrational Job on a whim. “Oh, how bad ass would it be to work there?” I thought. I quickly updated my resume and put together a short cover letter and sent it off. I mentioned it to my husband, and then just sort of left it drift out of my mind. “It’s Irrational,” I thought. “They could have who ever they wanted.”
You then, of course, could imagine my surprise when I got an email requesting a phone interview. I agree and it was scheduled. And to be honest, I didn’t think I had done very well after it was over. At some point I couldn’t remember what perforce was called. I was blanking on things I knew and got super anxious. The group interviewing me was on speaker phone and I kept having to ask them to repeat themselves because they were sort of muffed and hard to hear. I felt like I must have seemed bland and barely qualified.
You then, of course, could image my super surprise when I got a call asking for an onsite interview.
I was still in awe. And honestly, I panicked a little. I started trying to talk myself out of the job, kept saying to my husband I didn’t even know if I would take it offered. In fact, I barely told anyone I applied. Most people had no idea. And I didn’t want to have to talk about the interview if it didn’t go well. I was so scared I wasn’t going to get the job I started acting like I didn’t even want it.
And then the onsite came. I flew out the day before, and barely slept. I don’t know if it was because it’s the first night I’d been away from my husband since before moving in with him or because I had an onsite with one of my fav AAA studios. Either way, I was super tired.
Then I arrived at the studio. It was so hard not to be a fan boy. I mean, flash back to last Halloween. I’m a huge fan. I got to see their awards and posters and that awesome statue. I was in the studio that made Bioshock.
In the end, I think I ended up being so tired once I got there and stopped trying to act like a fan boy that there really wasn’t a way for me to stay nervous in my interviews. I was just too tired. I was so barely awake, that I didn’t have a filter between my brain and mouth anymore. In part of my interview, I think I was chastising them for their lack of accessibility features. (Flash back to some of my first AbleGamer Reviews for Bioshock 1 and 2.) But to be honest, that whole day was such a blur I can barely remember. Probably not the normal thing that happens when they are looking for Senior QA.
After I finally left Boston (on a flight that was delayed by like 4 hours) I really had no idea what was going to happen. I wasn’t really sure how I had done, but I felt that everyone at least liked me. But getting liked isn’t enough to get a job.
So, I just waited. Then, just over a week later, I got the offer. Then 2 days after that, I officially took it.
So here I am. I’m finishing up my project here at Firebrand (we’re literally approaching our last milestone) then moving up the coast with the hubby and starting a Irrational on September 6th.
This will be a great adventure.
So, this past Halloween I decided to make a little sister costume. And although I posted how to make this super quick costume, I never talked about how to make the most awesome piece of it – the Adam Syringe. After a couple emails and comments though, I thought it would be useful to have a how to on this… so here we go!
Now, you have quite a few things to gather together, so let’s start with a list of what you need, and were you’re going to get these items. The list is below, and then I have a picture showing what I’m talking about below so you get an idea what these parts end up being.
First you’re going to need to gather up everything you’re going to need for this project:
So, let’s break down all of those items become this:
Well, like this:
So let’s get started.
Now, a large portion of the needle gun is already done for you because of the gas pump. So let’s go on from there.
Gas pump body:
The Needle Tip
It should now look like this:
The Baby Bottle
It should now look like this, the larger image has the 2nd grey nipple circled so it’s easy to understand why you pushed the first one through the second one….
Attaching the bottle to the gas pump
This is where it can get a little tricky. Take the lid off of your bottle. Look at your gas pump top. For us, the gas pump top had a pattern in it.
Your lid has to be very securely fashioned to your pump because it has to 1) support the weight of your bottle 2) allow the bottle to be screwed and unscrewed. So we did the following.


Now- a word of warning.
If you have a better idea than epoxy, or know how to weld… do that. Because we learned something very important.
Gatorade eats through water proof epoxy if it’s given enough time to do so. It took like 12 hours.
If you don’t have an alternative solution, you can do what we did after we realized what was happening. We took a plastic sandwich bad and epoxied that to the lid to create a water tight seal to keep the Gatorade and epoxy apart. We also don’t leave it sitting around with Gatorade in it.
Final Steps
Hope this was helpful!
Hey guys,
So this past Halloween I went as a Little Sister from Bioshock while my fiance went as a splicer. I was a little crunched for time, so instead of going for an accurate Little Sister costume, I decided to just take the most recognizable elements of a little sister and put those together for my own version.
The 3 things I really wanted to make sure I had were-
1) A needle gun (Due to the overwhelming amount of people asking me how to make this a how to on this has now been listed here!)
2) Dirty Dress
3) Pony tail with ribbon
4) Yellow Eyes
For my dress, I actually bought an Alice in Wonderland costume. In retrospect, there were better Alice in Wonderland costumes I could have bought to alter- but then I wouldn’t of had this hilarious moment so I’m glad I went with the cheap one.
So how did I go from Alice to Little Sister?
The Dress:
After buying the dress, I preceded to rip off all of the ribbons. I then went through the “dirtyfcation” process where I used tea, coffee, and old make up to stain my dress. If you want to know more about how to do that, it’s the same thing I did for my Silent Hill Nurse costume. That made my dress look like this:
After that, I sewed 4 buttons onto the front of the dress and ripped the bottom of the skirt up and called it done.
Needle Gun
The needle gun was the most important part of my costume. I had no idea how to go about it. Luckily my fiance did. So I agreed to make his splicer costume if he made my needle gun. I’m not completely sure of the construction, but I do know the most important element was buying an antique gas pump handle via eBay.
So,
gas pump handle + pipe cap + dowel rod + glass jar + bottle nipple + spray paint + Gatorade = needle gun.
If you have questions about this, feel free to email me and I can get you the more specific info.
Make Up/Eyes:
So for this my make up was simple- use a foundation that is slightly too light, and cover my eyes in dark grey/black/purple eye shadow. The real finishing touch on this was my UV light yellow contacts. They were scary as hell.
So that was really all this costume was. I wore black flats, and pulled my hair in a pony tail. I also carried around a big daddy doll I had and that was it. Every one knew what I was supposed to be and while out at a local bar, several people asked for me and my fiance to pose for pictures with them. With more time I would have made my dress more purple by dying it and likely get a brown wig, but I still think it was great and this was fun to wear.
And yes, that gun was very sharp.