Okay, so a growing amount of my readers are already starting to guess at this, and writing in to ask me to verify it or not, so I guess I should go ahead and talk about it a little in public as well.... The truth is that, yes, partly why I've decided to cut back on this journal is because of all the reasons I mentioned in my last journal entry - that the arts center is starting to eat up a lot more of my free time, as is the growing amount of freelance work I'm doing, and definitely so will the projects coming up later this year that I haven't even started yet. But yes, in answer to some of your questions, part of it was inspired by a recent, um, incident in my life, concerning someone who reads this journal, an incident that turned out to be rather...er, upsetting I guess would be the best word. What they actually did was kind of offensive to me; and it kind of creeped me out to learn of the intensity of this person's obsession with me; and it was just one of those situations that was never legitimately dangerous or anything, but really just left me rather shaken by it all afterwards. (And no, I'm not going to go into detail; I don't want to encourage others to do what this person did.)

In fact, I've hinted at this a couple of times since moving my journal over to this main website of mine, about a year and a half ago; that the number of hate mails, badly obsessive readers and the like has been dramatically rising for me, the further we get into this so-called fabled "Web 2.0" and the more people start reading and writing blogs. And this is to be expected, I suppose; any time a new creative medium starts getting big, and especially the moment that people start earning real notoriety and money from it, it just starts bringing out both jealous people and legitimate crazies in dramatically larger numbers. I mean, this is just one of many things that contemporary bloggers now have to worry about, that none of us ever had to in 1997 when I first started this site, along with such other unbelievable things as whether your blog will get you fired from your day job, and whether you're going to get sued by a multinational corporation because of it. Any new technology, blogging included, ends up going through a series of phases, such as an anarchic first explosion (like what happened my first five years as a blogger), a time where the mainstream sorta co-opts it (like what's going on now), the moment of overload when suddenly a million people get frustrated and all quit at once (coming soon), a time when it's nerdy and underground again, and all sorts of cool things start happening again (coming in another five to ten years), etc.

Bloggers have had a relatively easy time at it so far, because it's been mostly rewards with very few risks - a chance to actually change a situation sometimes, definitely to gather an audience and have a public voice, but without the majority of reprisals that come with being a legitimate public figure, other than a few snotty remarks in their comments section or a few nasty emails. As a whole wave of bloggers, though, now start experiencing those reprisals - obsessed readers tracking down their home address, people stalking them, people finding out where they work and trying to sabotage their jobs - it's going to make a whole lot of bloggers really ask themselves if they want to be bloggers in the first place - if having that voice and public following is really worth that much shit to them, that many legitimately creepy experiences. As people continue getting fired and sued for their blogs, continue having to get restraining orders, I think you're going to start noticing a real shift in exactly how many people do them, and what exactly they say.

Now, let's make no mistake about all this; I'm the very first person to admit that most of this shit gets thrown on me because I'm a dick. I'm a dick, people, okay? I get that. I have very fiery opinions, that I'm not afraid to share in sometimes very insulting ways; I mean, jeez, I've been pissing off adults since I was 10 or 11 years old, based entirely on the drivel coming out of my mouth, and has gotten nothing but worse as I continually accumulate an ever-increasing vocabulary of shit and hate. I know that if I didn't go around pissing people off all the time, maybe so many people wouldn't be getting pissed off at me; and as long as I was simply a writer for a living, with no one to answer to and no one who could screw with my career, this was a perfectly fine option for me, and I would gently laugh at all the hate mail that came in and throw it away without a care in the world.

Now that I'm an arts administrator, though, my mission is suddenly the opposite - my livelihood depends on my ability to get along with people, to defuse the continual crises that arise when putting a room full of artists together. I'm the one who has to smooth things over, the one who sees issues from everyone's sides, and it just doesn't do for me to run around with a bunch of people hating my guts; it impedes my ability to be a good arts administrator, which is a problem. Not to mention, when people get pissed off at me now, they do have a chance to actually sabotage things with my career, and especially my arts center; in fact, something concerning CCLaP got affected by this recent incident, which is partly why it upset me so badly. I hate that that situation exists, but it now does; that's what happens when you're suddenly responsible for getting other people paid, of getting partnerships set up with mainstream organizations and popular commercial venues.

I know that this personal journal is never going to stop pissing people off; I mean, Jesus, I've probably made a dozen new enemies today just from what I've written so far. My only option, as I see it anyway, if I want to do something constructive towards taking the heat off my arts center, is to simply tone down my own public profile; that's another thing you can count on, of course, is that when you stop pissing people off on a daily basis, most will soon wander off to go find someone else to be pissed off by daily. I could answer all this newfound hate in my life with further hate, to call people out by name and hurl a heap of flaming manure their way. But that defeats the point of me being an arts administrator; my job now is to simply try to get as much of that stuff to disappear as possible. If that means having profoundly less of a presence on the web than I have before, then that's perfectly fine with me.

Now, I want to reiterate that this doesn't make my online activities necessarily get any less; once the CCLaP website is at its full swing this summer, for example, I'll likely be authoring 5 to 20 new blog entries a day there, along with maintaining the CCLaP wiki ("The CCLaP Guide to Being a Self-Sustaining Artist" - more below), maintaining CCLaP's "Cafe Network" social app at Ning.com, maintaining our Flickr account, YouTube account, Google Calendar account, MySpace account and more. But yeah, you're right, it's not the same, which is sort of my point; none of those things will be pissing off people left and right, hopefully inspiring those who are here merely to get pissed off over something to go elsewhere. It will hopefully mostly leave behind just all of you who actually like my writing and projects (who, I want to make clear, actually outnumber hateful people about 10 to 1), who are excited about CCLaP and want to be a part of it. I mean, fans of my projects won't go away, just because I'm shifting priorities, just like they seemingly didn't when I stopped writing about sex and drugs so much and started writing a lot more about tech and politics.

So it's a whole combination of things, really, that are leading me to slowly but dramatically change the nature of this journal; and I'm fine with that, because I accepted way back in 2004 that this was likely going to happen, when making the decision to open the arts center in the first place. This is what I was always talking about back then, when I was yakking in 2003 and '04 about how I was going through a "transition" phase, and didn't know what kind of person was going to come out the other side; this is him. The guy who simply wants to get rid of people who legitimately creep him out, simply run his arts center and have a success with it, be able to pay rent each month and have health insurance, attract a sane woman, and all the rest.

So anyway, that's all I have to say about that.

So, I keep mentioning this CCLaP wiki offhandedly, but never sitting down and explaining what exactly it's going to be; and now I just remembered it, so I'm going to.

You know what a wiki is, right? The most famous example is Wikipedia, that "collective sum of all human knowledge" that those nitpicking nutjobs are trying to build over there right now. It's basically nothing more than a website, but one where visitors actually have a chance to change pages' content, while visiting. This can be done in a completely open way, like Wikipedia, or you can demand that people become members first, like we'll be doing with ours.

I really wanted to do a wiki through this arts center, but had the damnedest time trying to come up with a good theme; what is a good subject for a group of artists and creative fans to collectively build a document concerning, anyway? Then I realized, it could be the same subject I was thinking of tackling a couple of years ago for Wikibooks - as complete a guide as possible for anyone wanting to be a self-publishing, self-touring or otherwise self-sustaining underground artist. And the really cool thing about this subject, I think, is that it's profoundly scalable, leading to a value-added visit no matter if there are a small group of participants or large. I'll explain...

How I'll set this wiki up at the start will be through a master outline, set up through a traditional hierarchy - with a major chapter being "Publishing," for example, then split into "Paper" and "Electronic," with the "Paper" sub-chapter containing sections like "Designing," "Printing," "Distributing," etc., and the electronic one perhaps broken into sections like "Designing," "Software Options," "Format Types," "Distributing," "Creative Commons," etc. So before the wiki even goes public, I'll have a total of maybe nine or ten major chapters - "Publishing," "Touring," "Organizing Live Events," "Legal Issues," "Archiving," on and on. And of course with some major sub-chapters already included in the table of contents as well.

So even if I can only convince a handful of people to want to be seriously involved at first, that's still enough to fill out nice little pages for each of the major chapters and sub-chapters - a good overview and list of external links, if nothing else. But then if the wiki catches on, and more people from all walks of life start visiting it, it has the potential to grow dramatically larger and deeper, and to have an almost infinite number of sub-sub-sub-chapters included. Let's say you're a lawyer, for example, also a CCLaP Member, who has heard me crow on and on about this at the main website, so you finally check it out. And you only have one relevant thing you could contribute, but it would be a good one - the most important things artists should look for when reading a contract. Instead of waiting around for us to think of the subject ourselves, then, via wiki you could actually go into the main table of contents and add the proper sub-chapter yourself, right into "Legal Issues" where it belongs. You could then spend an afternoon writing up a five- or six-paragraph essay on the subject, throw it up, and that'd be the total contribution in your life to the CCLaP wiki. And if we can get 1,000 people to do that, we'll have 1,000 pages of content, and I would be so happy I'd spoo in my pants.

So anyway, that is but one of a myriad of online projects and experiments coming your way this fall, courtesy of CCLaP; much like Google, one of the things I want to do is simply sponsor cool online stuff, simply because we can, and then offer it for free to the general public. If only five people get involved with each project, it will have still been worth it for me; and if 5,000 do, then I think it's safe to say it was definitely worth it.

Wow, I still have a lot to tell you about, but am sick of writing for today; so Lordy be, there will actually be another journal entry tomorrow. I know, will miracles never cease? Anyway, see you then.