Many of us nerds and geeks know about cosplay, and some of us actually do cosplay. The mad popularity of this has conventions now dedicated solely to it. People set up photoshoots dedicated to a single show or game. Thousands of dollars a year are spent on making costumes look absolutely perfect. You even have companies like Anovos who have actual licensing rights to produce screen accurate costumes and sell them.  But while we all love seeing these incredible costumes on display and celebrate them, is there a darker side to cosplay? It can't be all happy and smiles, right?

From personal experience I have seen the darker side of cosplay. This fun hobby has turned many a friend into a ball of stress and sadness. The need to have every detail utterly perfect has a huge impact on the costume maker. There's also a stigma on making your own costume vs. buying your costume. Many would argue that it's not authentic enough or good enough if it's bought. I've seen actual friendships torn apart by cosplay. The stress people will put themselves under to ensure their costume is perfect has often times been a major issue between them. Look at Jessica and Holly, famous cosplayers who stopped cosplaying together for a while because one of them took it too far.

The whole point of cosplay is to have fun. Dressing up can be nerve wracking enough, since you are bringing that costume out into public where other people can judge you. Being up for judgement is hard, especially when it concerns something you love. There has been a movement in the Cosplay Community where cosplayers of all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders have said enough to being called out for their body type or costume design choices. I've talked about CosPositive before, but I don't know if i went into enough detail. Cosplay has kind of had this heavy elite feeling to it for a while, and people seem to be fighting back against it hard. 

The reason we all cosplay is because we love that character, and we're geeky nerds. The CosPositive movement has spoken out against the wrongful treatment of any cosplayer for any given reason. It's a powerful positive message that says "have fun or don't do it" and I utterly adore that. If someone is making you feel bad for your cosplay, don't give them the time of day. If you're a cosplayer and you're doing this for fun, keep doing this. There's a sad truth that most things that become popular can have a tinge of negativity to them, but we nerds aren't putting up with that. Nor should we. This is our thing, and we should stand together for this. Where your costume comes from is nobodies business but your own. Who you cosplay is up to you. Above all, we all need more positive affirmation in our lives. So, let's keep Cosplay fun!

Well, the big day has arrived at last ladies and gentlemen. After months of debate, and hard work we are happy to finally say goodbye to the Girls of Geek12 name and logo and instead unveil our new name, and our new logo and I would like to welcome each and every one of you to our brand new website...Nerds That Geek! With this new name comes a grand new direction for what we do and to celebrate our rebranding, I would like to take some time today to provide a little more insight as to what we plan on doing from here on out, and why we've said goodbye to our old name. 

In fact, let's start there. The fact of the matter is, one of the big reasons we needed to change our name was for brand recognition purposes. Many of you have asked myself and the crew over the years where the 12 in the name came from and well...let's answer that long standing question. The 12 in the old name came about from one thing...there is a second Girls of Geek website out there and the 12 was originally designed to "differentiate" us from them. Thankfully what they do versus what we do is night and day so we were able to peacefully coexist, but by making the choice to stick with the GOG12 brand, we chose to stick with confusing fans of both sites. 

Brand confusion is a poor choice for anyone, and well...truthfully we want to stand out. We want to be an instantly recognized brand and a new name certainly helps that as well. But more importantly, we wanted to step away from the GOG12 brand to get back to our roots. We set out in 2012 to be a celebration of everything geeky that we love and over the years we feel as though we began to stray from that all important goal. So we spent a lot of time searching for a name that  wasn't shared by anyone else on the web, but also represented everything we wanted to accomplish going forward.

Enter Nerds That Geek. Not only does it give us exactly what we want in being a name that is unique, but we also feel that it speaks to something special, community. We want anyone and everyone that comes to this site to feel welcome and know that they can enjoy quality blogs that are thoughtful and positive and engage you, our faithful readers. We want to challenge not only ourselves, but all of you. You'll find our work will look more and more at the unique aspects of our favorite fandoms, and we want to kick off discussions in print and on our podcast that feel more like the conversations we all share at the dinner table regarding our favorite movies and shows. If by chance we find something that doesn't quite agree with us as fans, that's okay. We'll deconstruct it in a positive manner as well, because keeping the fun in geeking out is our goal going forward.

Also, we cannot thank you enough for your continued and loyal support over the past few years. This has been...an incredible experience and the wonderful feedback we have received from so many of you regarding what we do here is what keeps all of us going and we are beyond excited to take all of you with us on the next phase of our adventure, and if you're new to the site, welcome, we hope you like what you see, and if you haven't had the chance to follow us on Twitter or Facebook yet, please give us a follow and a like to receive regular updates on everything we will be bringing you in the coming months. Either way, welcome to Nerds That Geek, and we look forward to continuing our geeky journey with all of you.

It's been a little while since I did one of these "Letters from the Editor" if you will and there's been good reason for that. We've been busy little bees over here at GOG12, working hard to fulfill our promises to you to update and change the site completely in 2016 and I thought it was high time to give all of you an update on where we are at when it comes to this grand rebranding of who we are and what we do. 

But before we get too deep into that, I need to thank all of you again. We promised to do things differently with our writing and how we cover events, specifically in doing our best to provide you with better quality over quantity and many of you responded to that instantly. We have seen, since our initial rebranding announcement, record breaking traffic for this site and that's because of all of you out there. I can speak for Scotty and Shae when I say that we are extremely humbled and shocked over the support we have received from all of you. You've made a crazy ride all the more crazier and the only way to properly express our gratitude, is to give you exactly what we promised. 

So...it pleases me to no end to announce that after much behind the scenes work on the digital side, Friday, May 13th will be the day we officially change our name and redesign this site. Our brand new logo is finally finished courtesy of the amazing work from Magpie Graphic Design out here in Colorado and we are super excited to unveil it, and say goodbye to the Girls of Geek12 moniker forever. Why alert everyone a week in advance? Well to not shock you if you follow us on Twitter or Facebook when our name changes come Friday morning, and we will continue to remind everyone that the change is on its way, not only to keep confusion out of the whole process, but because we are incredibly proud of this new design and where we are headed and this makes it a celebration as well. 

As for some of our other goals in 2016 that we mentioned earlier this year, know that we are still at work when it comes to the video content we promised you. Shae wants her new Vlog to be done just right and lots of logistical planning is going into the web series that we discussed as well. But while we hammer out the final details on those, The Geek Alert Podcast is back on the air and our first revamped episode premiered this past Sunday. We certainly hope you give it a listen and we promise to stay true to this new format where we discuss topics that we think are relevant to the geek community and we certainly hope it engages you, our faithful listeners, as well. 

Either way, this is it. The big day is finally drawing near and come next Friday I'll be sure to provide everyone with another one of these "conversational blogs" to outline a little more of what we want to accomplish under the new brand. Because it's simply not enough to throw up a new logo and change the web address and just call it good. A brand change means a completely new direction, an evolution that requires us to celebrate the things we love in fresh and exciting ways, and we cannot thank you enough to taking the time to support us on this journey and we look forward to entering the next phase of it with all of you. Until next time.