I hope this meets all criteria.
HELLS YEAH!
Speaking of girlnerds:
Kotaku:
"Activison's Ex is Now Playboy's Miss November (And She Prefers Rock Band!)"It’s easy to empathize, because we’ve all been there, or close. You have your 9 to 5 job, it’s a good gig, the work’s interesting. Then an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity comes along and you have to sneak out to chase it.
Grace Kim, as Activision’s PR lead for
Guitar Hero, was in that spot a year ago in October 2007.
“I was giving so many excuses,”
Grace said, “I even went to CVS and bought crutches, and pretended I had a fractured ankle. At this point, Activision was getting annoyed. They were really heavily promoting
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, and
Guitar Hero for the DS. My boss was getting really upset.”
Finally, on the fifth straight day away from the office, she couldn’t think up any more alibis. So she quit, but she couldn’t tell Activision why.
She was in front of a camera, taking off all of her clothes for
Playboy, becoming Miss November, 2008.
“It was difficult for me to come home from the shoot and then write a bunch of press releases for
Guitar Hero,” she said. “I couldn’t tell them I was going to be in
Playboy. At that point, I didn’t want anybody to know at the time. I hadn’t told anybody, not my parents or my friends or anyone.”
Before you think, “Oh, what a burden,” consider that becoming a Playmate is a yearlong process, from test Polaroid to final publication, fraught with acceptance, rejection, uncertainty — and nondisclosure — in between. The waiting is the world’s worst job interview, for either gender. Before you imagine, “What a problem, having the opposite sex want me,” think of what it would mean, to reveal yourself as a potential Playboy centerfold in the context of an everyday professional workplace.
Especially — look to your left, look to your right — among a bunch of gamers.
“I love the gaming industry, I really do,”
Grace said. ”It’s so cool, and everyone is so passionate, and you get to test out the prototypes but, then, the guys, if they find out a co-worker’s gonna be in
Playboy ... you know, they’re gonna act a little bit weird.”
So
Grace, 29, is mindful today of what she left for what she achieved. As Miss November [2008], her pictorial is the fusion of both — a game-themed centerfold in the men’s magazine whose women have set the standard for desirability for more than 60 years.
“It just, coincidentally ... it happened — at the same time,”
Grace said, “and I did feel a little bit guilty. Out of 100 applicants [for the Activision job] there were so many who were better for the job than I was, with years and years of gaming experience, and I was really lucky to get the job.”
But to hear the full retelling, her short time with Activision sounds much like a quick and torrid affair, one she loves and regrets, ended by a choice only the heart could make and suffer.
In more ways than obvious.
“I was,” said Miss November, “secretly playing a lot of
Rock Band.”
In fact, the guitar
Grace posed with in her
Playboy pictorial — by now on newsstands and
Playboy.com (NSFW), is her own Fender Stratocaster made by Harmonix exclusively for the original
Rock Band. She bought it more than a year ago and brought it to her shoot. And on her data sheet, she lists her six favorite video games.
Rock Band is there.
Guitar Hero is not.
‘When you’re working for something you like, it can somewhat kill your passion for it,” Grace said. “Especially when you’re doing PR. When I was doing PR for Activision and
Guitar Hero, it kind of stunted my playing, because I was working on it all day."...
She owns four consoles, a Playstation 3, Playstation 2, Xbox 360 and Xbox. But — and Sony fanboys, go get a glass of ice cold water for this next paragraph — she only plays on the PS3.
“Really, the PS3 or the 360? It’s like comparing a Lamborghini to a Pinto,”
Grace said. She started playing on the PS3 when a now-ex boyfriend loaned one to her, and bought her own when Sony cut the price to $399...
