Hey, so guess what this week marks? That's right, it's the ninth anniversary of this website. Hard to fucking believe, ain't it? It certainly is for me; how could this goofy all-consuming hobby, that not once have I ever taken 100-percent seriously, be almost a decade old now? But yet it is; it was the break between Christmas and New Years in 1997, in fact, when I used the old Chicago Reader computers (back when I worked there) to upload the pages that would be the first version of this website (screenshot seen below), over at my sad little old Geocities page which in many ways is still very much missed.

I'm not going to go into a long explanation of those nine years this time; I'm saving that for next year and the tenth anniversary, where I'm planning on doing a big long retrospective of the site along with a whole gaggle of screenshots to illustrate it. Now that I'm at the end of the year, though, and reflecting on the previous twelve months I've been through, I'm realizing that it's been a year of particularly crazy ups and downs for me, even more than the typical crazy ups and downs I have just as a member of the arts community. This particularly came to light, in fact, when I sat down earlier today to write a "year in review" email for an overseas friend, who I was pretty sure doesn't read this site regularly anymore; for those who also don't follow along regularly anymore, or who might be new readers (or who might primarily know me through my Second Life blog as cartoon character Miller Copeland), here's a copy of that letter, pasted below:

Started the online version of my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CCLaP), this spring. Things went fine.

A friend in Chicago founded a new internet startup this summer, and asked me to come on full-time as COO, after saving the company from ruin while he was out of the country attending a funeral. This was going to immediately bring me (at the end of the summer, anyway) the $2,000 or so I needed to start up the live-events schedule at CCLaP; and if things went well and the startup got bought by Yahoo or whoever, I was set to become one of those fabled startup millionaires.

But alas, at the end of the summer I discovered that the owner had been lying to everyone about how much money was available; this led to a confrontation, which led to me quitting while still being owed over $3,000 in back pay (which I'm still owed to this day). This left me with no money to start up the live events at CCLaP, which means I had to cancel the program just a week before the first event was to be held; and this got me so angry and depressed that I just put the entire center altogether on hiatus for four months, until January 2007.

With suddenly a lot of time on my hands and no money or job, I decided on a whim to start up a new blog, a culture one about this odd videogame called Second Life, which I call "In The Grid." Done just to amuse myself, it has interestingly and unexpectedly become the fastest-growing creative project I've ever done: in just four months online now, I have almost 5,000 daily readers there; am accepting a growing amount of advertising; have been mentioned repeatedly by USA Today, and also by CNN, Reuters, BoingBoing and more; and even managed to snag an interview with the CEO of Second Life last month.

So, I'm going into 2007 basically expanding on that, and hoping to add a PHP events calendar for Second Life to my regular website; if I can convert those 5,000 daily readers into people who come back multiple times a day (to check an events calendar, for example), that shoots up total pageviews dramatically, which then gives me a chance to actually get signed with someone like Federated Media (who does all the ads for BoingBoing, Digg and more) and actually make a living with it. We'll see, anyway. In the meantime, I'm finally teaching myself Adobe Flash for the first time, specifically so that I can create a cool multimedia virtual photography gallery at the CCLaP website. Once next month rolls around, in fact, I'm finally getting CCLaP up and running again; this time, though, only as a place that releases free electronic media. Once a month I'm going to do a new show in the virtual gallery, where I'll also do Skype interviews with the artists that I will mix in with the Flash interface, so that it sounds like you're "walking" through the gallery with us and listening to what they have to say about each piece. I'll then combine this with free electronic books, in various forms (PDF, PDB, LIT, Sony Reader, etc) -- both catalogues of gallery shows and books of literature.

I'm going to do this for, whatever, nine months altogether, probably, just being my own curator and handpicking a series of artists around the world to feature; then combine it with a re-activation of the daily blog, to hopefully start building up traffic there, as well as "authority on the arts" in the eyes of the public. This August, then, I'm hoping to have saved up enough money for a two-week trip to California; first a week in SoCal, visiting my brother and sister-in-law in San Diego and several friends in LA, then a week in the Bay Area, visiting old writer friends and finally attending the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco (big geeky thing there once a year for those who most habitually play SL). After that, then, hopefully in September 2007, I'll finally be ready to start up the live events at CCLaP and have them actually be produced.

So anyway, for those who needed a catch-up with how this year's been for me, there it is; yeah, pretty nuts, more nuts than I wanted it to be, although I suppose that everything is turning out fine at the end, which tends to happen to me a lot. And as I partly mentioned, part of my time these days is being filled with a new geeky obsession, which is Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash); after a decade of watching my friends using it, and years of actually owning the authoring software, I'm finally teaching it to myself, via the excellent guide put out by Lynda.com. But I'm only on page 3 right now, so don't actually have anything to report; more thoughts coming at later dates, I'm geekily sure.

And then the other thing I'm starting to futz around with for the first time in machinima; or for those who don't speak Japanese gamer, the process of making videos within a full-time 3D graphical universe. I'm doing it through Second Life, unsurprisingly enough; there's a built-in videocamera in the interface on top of a still camera, meaning that you can shoot videos just as easily as take pictures. If you're reading this on a device with Flash Player, in fact (desktop, laptop, RSS reader or mobile device), you should be seeing a version above of the first machinima I did, which you can view right this moment. Anyway, I'm working on my second one as we speak, one that's going to be a lot more slick and (I think) interesting; as always, more news as I have it.

Okay, and I was also going to go over what I got for Christmas, including my first-ever iPod, but I've got too much stuff to still do today, and need to get going and actually doing them. So that'll be coming in the next update, arriving...er, God only know when. Sorry!