Wes now has a YouTube account! He’s going to use it mostly for Minecraft videos but says he’s going to do some bloggy type ones too.

Thanks, Jax.
(And thanks to Belinda for introducing me to this guy a few weeks ago. I’m definitely a fan.)

Who plays Draw Something on the iPad? I’ve had my iPad for a while, I had it when I was in the hospital, but Charlie just got me a stylus for it and I’ve been playing Draw Something today with my friends Mark and Serendipity. I don’t know what my username is because I signed up through Facebook but I think if you add me by e-mail address (Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com) it should work. I’ll play with pretty much anyone so hit me up!

Charlie also sent me the COOLEST DAMN THING EVER! Check THIS out!

It’s a Flip HD camcorder with my character Octavia from The Fiction Project on it! How cool is that? He got it printed at CafePress apparently and he also sent the tripod with it which I didn’t even know existed before and now I can make drawing and painting process videos! I’m so excited!

Along with the Flip, the tripod and some Tara McPherson prints for Madison, he also sent me my Brown Bee Girl stamps from Zazzle for The 4 x 6 Exchange! The 4 of us are using the stamps, as well as my mom and some of her friends. Lots of exposure there! Too bad I’m not doing girls anymore…

Speaking of not doing girls anymore, I spent yesterday working on my first of two 30 x 30 inch wood panels and I had Blake take some pics while I worked just for posterity’s sake. Here they are:

My poor herniated tummy. :o(

As you can tell by the pictures, I’m painting another uterus, my hair is growing back in and my body is very lumpy. My hair kept getting in my paint so I threw on that hairband as a temporary solution. I don’t normally wear hairbands. (Although maybe I should! I just have the one though.) My hair is still really thin but it’s growing back nicely. I really really want to bleach it out and dye it pink but the new hair is so fine that I’m afraid to damage it. Plus, it’s been interesting to see what my natural hair colour is. (The pics make it looks darker than it really is. It’s an ash blonde.) The new hair is about 5 or 6 inches long.

Well, I didn’t really have a whole lot to say today so I’ll wrap this up…I hope you’re enjoying your Monday afternoon! I think I’m off to scarf down a bagel and then get back to painting this beast. I’ll probably write more tomorrow. <3

One day I looked at myself and thought: Sh*t, this is it. This is what I look like. No amount of self-hatred is going to change my appearance. I am who I am. I am stuck with this, and I have to love it, or else I am going to die early from my own suffering and idea that I got shortchanged in the looks department.

- Margaret Cho, You Are Not Ugly, So Don’t Make Those ‘Am I Ugly?’ Videos

This was shared by pretty much everyone on my Facebook friends list today and yesterday and when I finally got around to watching it, all I could think of was “Fuck yeah, Rick Mercer, fuck YEAH.”

My friend Jay Holben linked this in Facebook this afternoon and I just got around to watching it now. Pretty interesting stuff. It’s a year old, so you might have seen it and I’m sure the stats have changed, but still interesting I think. Anyway, the text moves faster than I could read, so I suggest pausing when necessary and also possibly viewing the video in a larger size than I’ve embedded here. Here’s the YouTube link to the video.

So, is social media a fad? Even before watching this video I would have said “absolutely not”. The world’s changing and I feel really privileged to be alive at this point in history when the world’s changing changing changing and doing it faster than a lot of people can even keep up. I mean, how many people reading this can even figure out their Facebook’s privacy settings? (Take a look at Time magazine this week, that’s the cover story.)

I dunno, I just like this stuff a lot so I thought I’d share the video. I’m too tired to make a real post about it, so excuse me for not being my normal verbose self tonight…

Edit: Here’s this year’s version of the same video with updated stats, it was released this month.

I woke up today at 1:30pm and I was amazed when my eyes adjusted enough for me to look at the clock. I got up at 8am on Sunday, for some ungodly reason, and last night I ended up staying awake until around 3:30am because someone on a forum I go to started a thread about this A&E show called Hoarders, which I’d never heard of and it sounded interesting so I (stupidly) decided to start watching episodes on Ninja Video.

Also last night, I wrote one of my articles for Buttercup, called “So This Is Xmas“, all about why I hate this particular holiday and it left me emotionally ravaged. I know I’ve told the story as to why I hate Xmas on my site before and last night I promised myself that this would be the last time I open that wound ever again because afterward, I was a complete mess. (Mom, if you’re reading this, you probably wanna skip that article. You know what it’s about and I really mean it when I say it’s the last time it’s going to be brought up.) It’s strange how something that happened so long ago can leave me a a crumpled mess on the floor wanting to throw up more than half a lifetime later.

Anyway, that’s what I did last night.

There are a couple of arty things that have been topics of discussion lately and I figure now’s as good a time as any to talk about them. The first is that some friends of mine have asked me if I’ll ever start making videos on YouTube, specifically art tutorial videos and vlogs and the answer to that is quite simply “no”. There are millions of art tutorials already on YouTube, I suck at video editing software and have no intentions of improvement in that area and I just don’t want to. Vlogs? Why? I already have a blog and write quite well, thank you, so I don’t see the point of sitting in front of a camera essentially talking to myself and saying everything I’m saying here only a hell of a lot less eloquently. No thank you. One person said that there’s no difference between recording a vlog and doing a streaming show at Camwhores and I guess that person has never been to Camwhores before or seen any of my shows. Yes, there is similarity in the fact that you’re in front of a camera, but that’s where the similarity ends. At Camwhores, there are people watching you and talking to you, it’s live and to me, that’s a lot less awkward than sitting in my office talking to myself about the weather.  Plus, there’s no editing to be done and only a select audience is going to be viewing it after it’s been recorded and put in the archives. So it’s completely different and no, I won’t be making art tutorials or vlogs for YouTube in the new year. I may do little videos of my finished paintings so people can see how they sparkle (which we’ve found impossible to photograph), but that’s about the extent of it.

The other thing I’ve been asked recently is if I’ll do a tutorial on how I do backgrounds and the answer to that one is “sure”. If people want to know how, as it appears they do, then the next time I make a painting (which should be in the new year, unless I become inspired before then) I’ll take photos of the process and whip up a tutorial on all that goes into the background. It’s actually extremely easy, as long as you’ve got the right products and I think the end result is pretty cool. So that’s something I plan on working on in the new year.

Since I have nothing to read right now, I dug out these back issues I ordered last year of a magazine called Artful Blogging. Yes, even I was amazed that such a publication existed. Basically, last year someone suggested that I write a piece about my blog for the magazine so I ordered the back issues to see what it was all about and then someone else told me to “let them come to you”, so I kind of put the idea out of my mind. Then last week when I was looking for something on one of my bookshelves that I haven’t read yet, I found them and started reading. Long story short, I don’t think I want to be in this magazine and the suggestion of me being in it is actually kind of laughable because I so wouldn’t fit in. This magazine is not for people who say “fuck” a lot, it’s for people who inspire and make friends through their blogs and network and all kinds of other flowery “uplifting” bullshit. And while yes, I’ve done all of the above with my blog (or more to the point, my Live Journal) and I’ve had mine longer than any of the people in at least the first two issues of the magazine, I’ve done so with a hell of a lot more edge than the women profiled (and they’re all women) and this magazine doesn’t appear to be the place for that. I’m going to read all of the issues I have, even though every article is practically the same, and then I’m going to forget it exists again because it’s, well, boring. Hopefully I get some new books for Xmas.

And with that, I think I’m off to my Sims Bunker since I have to write a review for the expansion next week and I still haven’t been to Egypt.