Trailer for a documentary on the D.I.Y/handmade scene, coming out next year:

More Info

My friend Erica, who lives in the retirement capital of the world, Florida, made a Live Journal post about how old people often get upset that no one’s listening to them and for that reason, people like us should teach them how to use the Internet and show them websites where they can express themselves and impart their knowledge. Plus, she figured, it would give them something to do.

In that post, she gave examples of old(er) people she knew of on the internet, including a 72-year-old lady who creates instructional videos on how to train birds and uploads them to YouTube and a woman named Jan Griffin, who…well…keep reading.

In searching for instructions on how to use an oddly-shaped pet grooming tool she’d bought, Erica found ExpoTV.com, a site in which people make and share videos of themselves reviewing all kinds of products. This is where she stumbled upon Jan Griffin, an American professor whose age it would be rude to guess so I’m going to forgo hazarding one.

Jan has uploaded almost 500 videos in the past year & a half, seemingly reviewing everything in her house, including such insanely mundane items as Kleenex (twice!!), Ladies’ Home Journal, two different lint rollers, a stuffed soccer ball for dogs (also reviewed by who I’m guessing is a daughter or granddaughter), a calculator (”it adds very easily, that’s 20 + 10, EQUALS, and then you see what the result is,”) and my personal favourite, bobby pins:

I can just picture her meatside, moving through the world looking at and buying things because they’d make a good review for the internets. She’s a living, breathing Saturday Night Live sketch, one that hasn’t happened yet, but one that probably should. Chris Crocker can’t have all the glory, there’s room in this arena of internet celebrity for the old bitches too. Internet, let’s make it so!

Over the last little while I’ve been contacted by some people who have noticed that I’ve more or less dropped off the face of the Earth during the last year or two and they were wondering why. Questions like these come out of nowhere for me because I don’t know to whom I’m replying, where they know me from, what they know of me and my life etc. so I never know how to answer even the simplest things like “so, what have you been up to?” I simply don’t know where to start. This is very frustrating.

The fact of the matter is, because of growing up and certain life events and the fact that I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I’m not sure who I am anymore and what I want. I don’t know if I want to have a site anymore and even if I do, I don’t know what to put on it or how much to share.

Furthermore, things have gotten a lot more complicated than they were a few years ago with this WordPress shit vs. making a website in Dreamweaver that was comprised of mostly tables and because of this, maintaining a site - what you’re reading right now - isn’t something I feel I can do myself. Of course I’m capable of it, if I wanted to learn, but I don’t want to and if I’m not doing it myself, then do I really want to do it at all? Currently Blake (my husband) and I are trying to find a happy medium. Really, as far as I can tell, WordPress is just a template system, so all we need to do is come up with a template that I can edit and update myself. We’re working on it. It’s probably going to take a while.

But then the other problem I’m trying to work out in my head, and have been for a while, is which content is for my site and which content is for Live Journal? And really, what IS the point of having both? Do I even really need both? Why not just point my domain to Live Journal? But the thing is, there are some things that don’t feel right in a Live Journal (or a personal blog, I guess), such as articles, product reviews or endorsements, 3rd party content (YouTube videos like the one above etc). Basically I have no idea what to write or where anymore and I’ve completely lost track of why so many people even follow what I write, create and do to begin with, so it’s hard for me to figure out how to keep everyone happy.

And speaking of keeping everyone happy, there’s another problem. Back when I started doing whatever it is I do, the Internet was still sort of an underground thing. Everyone and their mother (certainly not MY mother) wasn’t potentially reading every word I wrote and that allowed me a certain freedom to be as honest and open as I’m known for being and have sort of built a reputation on. Well, some people don’t like truth and honesty. Some people get upset when you write about them, even though it’s all truth and facts and honesty. Some people don’t like the whole world knowing what they did on a Sunday afternoon and some people feel as though I’m trying to hold up a mirror so they can see something they perceive as being there when I’m merely being honest, but with a writer’s eye. This makes it very difficult to write about one’s life and if I can’t do so honestly, then I can’t do it at all.

It just seems like on all levels of life, I’m stuck. I have no refuge. I used to “write it out” when I was feeling badly or trying to process something and that outlet’s mostly been taken away by people who don’t understand me or what I do. I absolutely resent them for it and I’ve racked my brain searching for happy mediums and work-arounds, but I keep coming up short.

Truthfully, though, I’m a little bit sick of writing about my life for an audience anyway. For friends I’ve met through this technological journey who are also writing about their own lives, say, via Live Journal? Sure. But thousands of strangers? I dunno anymore. Especially not when I’ve been increasingly bombarded with anonymous folks over the years who trigger my paranoia and contribute to my shaky mental health and waning self-esteem.

I had to disable anonymous commenting in Live Journal recently due to troll activity and comments have been disabled here (along with “pings”?) for a long time because I don’t know how to control the posting of spam. I don’t know how to make this two-way communication between the many of you and the one and only me work anymore.

While parts of me are still the same, and the core of me is still the same, the last few years have been pretty rough on me and I’ve done a lot of changing and growing as a result. Unfortunately some of you, it seems, wanted me to stay the same, so to those of you who fall into that category: I’m sorry I let you down and I’m sad to see you go. (Except that’s a lie because if you honestly expected me to stay a scantily clad 20-something year old on a webcam forever, you’re probably an asshole and good riddance.) For the rest of you, I hope you’ll stick around long enough for me to figure out whatever the fuck it is I’m doing because I have a feeling that whatever it is and once I get all of this shit figure out, it’s going to be interesting.
Things can only get better.

So while comments are disabled and will remain so for a while, feel free to e-mail me at Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com or snail mail me at the address below. Give me suggestions, tell me how you found me, tell me why you’ve stuck around, tell me what you’d like to see more of (you lose points for saying “tits” *eyerolls*) or what you think I should stay away from. I’d really like to know what all of you strangers are getting out of this whole thing, it’s always been a mystery to me and finally having some perspective from the other side of the screen would probably help immensely in sorting out the mess that is my so-called internet life.

Sunny of the Great White North

PO Box 3042

Elmvale, ON

L0L 1P0

CANADA

Edit (08/12/08): Not to discourage the e-mails (they’ve been great so far!) comments have been re-enabled, so feel free to register and be heard! :o)

I’ve been talking to Jay Holben, the director who’s doing the documentary, Camgirls, and a person I consider a pretty decent, creative, guy and thinking about where the cam world is going. I’ve been more watching and reading than performing in recent years, but I’m still a part of the community and while no one’s asked me about “the book” recently - except Jay Holben - who wasn’t being a douche about it.

The book I’m talking about is Digital Burlesque: When the Girl Next Door Goes Global, which is/was the working title for the book I am/was/will always be sort of working on, I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Basically all I do is cram myself with tidbits of info and hope like hell one day it’ll all come into place, if only as a memoir when I’m 80.

But lately I’ve been thinking sooner than that, but no time soon. The documentary sounds interesting though, from what I’ve heard about it from both Jay and my “sources”. ;D

It’s true, I’ve been cut pretty much completely out of it, but I’d been hoping like hell about that since before we even started because I’m shy about cameras, I much prefer the other side of the lens, outside of my webcam and even then I prefer stills because I’m less goofy looking/acting. So thank god for the cutting room! I do happen to know approximately what footage had been left in and where it’s going, but it’s still in post and I signed a contract and stuff, so I’ll just say it all sounds so very interesting. I love the camworld.

It occured to me the other day that when Jennifer Ringley was on Leno or Letterman or whatever the hell I posted, I bet half the audience didn’t even have the internet. Like half the people in the studio audience OR half the people in the viewing audience, I don’t know, but I bet there were a lot of people who really didn’t understand what she was doing and what it all meant. But everyone I know, at least from back then, did. And it’s stuff like that I’m trying to convey in the book, or at least I’d like to, but I have trouble when it comes how to present it. And in what order. And how long it should be. Plus the cam world keeps changing. The focus has been on YouTube for a while but there’s been a lot of undercurrents that the mainstream media, the “world at large” hasn’t caught onto because for a while there, it appeared as though video killed the camgirl. It didn’t, but that’s a whole other chapter.

Then there was also this pesky USC 2257 law (that was recently struck down), that I was trying to follow but personally, I find US politics really fucking boring. I find Canadian politics really fucking boring. (Unless either affects me, of course.) While I saw the effects of this law and saw how it was detrimental to both legitimate businesses (Camwhores for example) and our rights and freedoms should that kind of insanity spread north of the border, I paid attention, printed everything out and stuck it in my box of “book stuff”, which is slowly becoming two boxes, badly in need of proper sorting and filing. I’ll go through that crap later, I was too busy watching YouTube and trying to keep track of this iJustine thing. And the current state of the girls I’ve mostly been watching since I decided to write a book.

Anyway, I’m gonna shut up now. I just felt like addressing the world today, so hello! I hope you are having a good Thanksgiving to all my neighbours to the south and enjoy your festivities!

…I thought you might too.

How To Keep An Art Journal #1:

How To Keep An Art Journal #2:

How To Keep An Art Journal #2B:

How To Keep An Art Journal #3:

She has more videos like these on her YouTube channel and you can buy her creations on her website. :)

Dunno a damn thing about the band and these two videos are all I’ve seen/heard, but I thought they were awesome.

Atlas by Battles:

Now here’s Atlas bt Battles live:

Both just blew me away. Jesse says the album is just as impressive, so I put it on my wishlist since I have noooooo money to spend on music right now. Jesse said he’d burn me a copy, but then again, he always says that…he’s just a busy guy.

If anyone’s interested in putting it on their own wishlist, it’s called Mirrored.

Jennifer Ringley on Letterman:

Who the hell is Jennifer Ringley?

Well hello there internets, I’m glad you’re here because I have quite a bit to write about this evening.

First things first, I added a new page to this site under the “People In My World” category, god I’m so productive, I know. I don’t know how I do it either. But seriously, it can get confusing when I start writing about people so I’m trying to write a blurb or two on each person in my world for those moments when you just don’t know who the fuck I’m talking about. It’s taken me, oh, six months to do Jesse & Jen’s paragraphs, but I’m happy with them, so up they went.

In other news, Jen showed up at my house with a box tonight and inside that box was a baby rat. (Yes, another one.) We’ve decided to name her Twinkle (Twink for short) and she’s pretty damn cute. This video is of when we were introducing Twink to Zilla in the bath tub, as suggested by some friends of mine.

So far the introductions are going well, except Zilla dragged Twink from one end of the cage to the other by the scruff of the neck a few times. Twink didn’t seem to be hurt or distressed while this was happening so we just let it happen for a bit before putting them in separate cages for the night. I was thinking that since Twink is a baby, maybe Zilla was thinking of it as her baby; either that or maybe it’s just an establishing dominance thing. Despite having many rats as pets I don’t know all that much about rat behaviour, now that I think about it. I’ve only ever had single rats except for Kurt & Courtney, which I got in grade 9. The unfortunate thing was that in the case of my rats, instead of mating, Courtney really did kill Kurt. He wouldn’t leave her alone and one morning I found him inside their little house, missing a good chunk out of his throat. Ever since then, I only ever had single rats. Lovely story, huh?

I think Zilla & Twink are going to end up getting along fine, they’re already grooming each other, which I’m assuming is a good sign, so on some level they’re already getting along. Still, seperate cages at night for the first little while, I think, just to be on the safe side.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was how awesome my friend Sini is. No matter how low I feel, Sini can always make me feel better with just how awesome she is. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at her YouTube account. :D

Too lazy? Click here for just one of her gems:

There just aren’t any words and that’s why I adore her. :D

Well, it’s time for bed. Happy Tuesday!

Alanis Morisette covers “My Humps”:

The first 7 minutes of Little Darlings, it’s one of my favourite movies in the whole wide world, but as far as I know, it’s not available on DVD yet.

I wonder if there’s a torrent….