But change is hard and scary, even for a wild libertine such as myself. I was relieved to be gone from them, and I wish I'd done it sooner. So tl dr "were there good times you were wistful for?" For the most part, no. Bad enough being the curmudgeon of the group - you don't want to be OUT of the group, do you? Everyone was going along with it, and few shared my reservations. "So why did you do it?" Well, I needed to maintain my place on the site because I still depended on ad revenue back then. Doug wrote it, and I still have people assigning his opinions to me (boy do I not share them). Doug even crashed at my apartment for that, but I saw nothing for it. Oh, and I saw not one red penny from the Moulin Rouge! review (but Doug and Brent made $$). I was embarrassed then to be a part of them, and I still am. But let me state that I do not now, nor did I ever, blast with that. And I know there was some charm to the "amateur" aesthetic of the anniversary films, and that's what they wanted, I guess. The best time I had was in the 2011-2012 era when my NYC crew was fairly prolific and Chez Apocalypse was up and running - and, aside from a few people I met through CA, that had nothing to do with CA. And as evidenced by the wave of people speaking out, the Walkers did not consider us friends. But the shoots themselves? I was always miserable. I met people on those shoots I'm still good friends with, and I am grateful for that. You can't go without production insurance or stunt people (if they are needed), or people will get hurt (they did.) You need producers to secure permits and hours (they didn't). The thought was that this is just fun amateur hour! But you can't do that, especially on for-profit productions. The first time I felt genuinely disrespected was Kickassia (I outlined why in the Google doc ) - that was where I first realized that they were not interested in collaboration, even if it was with someone who knew more than they did about certain skills (in this case, film sets) All of the crossover sets were maddening to me (see again the anti-intellectual streak that still suffuses the company). Now, to the original question: were their good times? TBH, when not with my own crew, they were few and far between. Of course there was some resistance to this transition, but eventually they stopped caring about me staying in my lane. I didn't start learning to be okay with it until I started doing essay-style videos about not-nostalgia (" Smurfette Principle", the Kesha video). In short, I was always uncomfortable aping Doug's style and being "the girl", and I didn't want to be there, but I needed the money. TGWTG almost let me go several times - I can't fault them for that. So another reason I am very #cringe about everything I produced back then is because I was doing the BAREST possible minimum, and also being really unreliable scheduling-wise. I just did not have the energy or brainspace to care. So there are no words for how hard I phoned it in back then. And at MFA at the world's top film school (since usurped but it was rated #1 at the time!) takes super huge priority over internet videos, even if they paid okay. I say "huge mistake" because being young and dumb, I didn't realize that 7% interest rate on student loans was. Thing is, around this time, I made another huge mistake (haha joke ) when I got accepted to USC. In fairness to Michaud, he did eventually deliver on this for me (others, like MarzGurl, never saw any compensation for their early content). So with no other prospects, I submitted to the "Nostalgia Chick" contest in September of 2008, and won. It was a desperate time to be a recent college grad. I had just left NYC because I could no longer afford to live there and had moved back in with my parents. The context here is that it was 2008 - I had just gotten laid off from my job. And given my (relative) youth and the condition of the economy at the time, I really truly never thought when I entered it that it would last as long as it did. I was the only creator there whose sole raison d'etre was to exist as a distaff counterpart to someone else - I was hired to fulfill an idea someone else came up with. So this should be a surprise to no one, but I was always uncomfortable with my position there. So I'm I'll share my perspective, & then I'm done talking about CA, bc I want to move ON. Someone yesterday asked me on Twitter if there were any "good times" with Channel Awesome, since there's a general thread of lamenting what was lost with many other creators, & not with me.
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