The fact is that most of us do pursue a lifestyle rather than following our passions. I did it without even realizing it. Of course, my lifestyle choice was stability for my family. But along the way that also included a big house, two cars, big screen TVs, game systems, and all the usual trappings of a modern, 21st century American lifestyle. And I sought out jobs that afforded me those comforts.

I’ve always said that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But that might be a lie I’ve told myself for the last twenty years. That’s a hard truth, isn’t it? That you’ve been lying to yourself for two decades.

I love writing. And I love comedy. I enjoy design and, to a lesser extent, programming. I crave learning new things. It’s that craving that’s let me park my career in idle for the whole of my 30s because my jobs have required me to constantly learn new things. I’ve reached a point though where that’s just not enough anymore.

What does that mean? I don’t know. Addiction to a lifestyle is like any other addiction. The first step is to admit that you have a problem. That’s all this is. Me admitting that I have a problem. I don’t know what comes next.

The topic was causes.

I was struck by how awkward of a public speaker Al Gore is, even now. His attempts to plug Current TV were clumsy enough to elicit a few groans from the crowd.

At the end, when Sean plugged Causes and prefaced it with “Now’s the portion of the session devoted to shameless plugs,” the VP redeemed himself with a joke. “Wait, there’s a portion devoted to shameless plugs?” (Try to imagine that in Al Gore’s voice.)

Note: those quotes are paraphrased. I was too busy trying to get the above photo to write down the exact quotes. I don’t know how photo journalists do it.

It sounds like Billy Corgan has accepted the changed landscape that the digital world and, perhaps more importantly, the fans have imposed on the music industry. He’s accepted it, but it sounds like he still doesn’t get it.

He said the solution to the problem (“problem” was not clearly defined, at least not in the Digital Savant article) was for the fans to support the music they like. Well, duh. But that’s not exactly the whole of it. He’s laying the music industry’s woes entirely at the feet of fans. Bullshit. Everybody had a hand in that pie. We already know how the music industry and, more specifically, the record labels / RIAA fucked things up. No need to rehash that. No, I want to point a finger at the artists themselves for a moment.

And not artists like Metallica who went after their own fans with cops and lawyers. Those douchebags are in the same bucket as the RIAA as far as I’m concerned. Though they did that with the same underlying motive that Billy Corgan alluded to in his SXSW conversation.

I’m pointing a finger at artists like Billy Corgan because what he’s upset about is not that he can’t make a damn good living as a musician, but that he has to work more to make less. And that’s kind of reasonable, unless we’re talking about millions of dollars, in which case, fuck you Billy Corgan. Or, put another way…

Oops, your sense of entitlement is showing.

Or, put a third way…

I think you just stepped on your dick.

Look. I’m sorry you can’t make MEGA millions anymore. I’m sorry that, as a performer, a good chunk of your income in the future will come from, well, performing. If you’re a smart performer, you’ll probably make another huge chunk of change from merchandise. But I get it. It’ll never replace the gold that used to rain down from the sky with each breath you took in the Before Time.

At the end of the day though, you’re going to be a lot happier if you get over that.

The site runs on WordPress and I built a Twentyeleven child theme. The Twentyeleven framework did most of the heavy lifting on the responsiveness.

I had some fun with the typography. All open source or free. I’m using Lobster for the logo text, League Gothic for the main navigation, Ostrich Bold for the sidebar section titles, Museo Slab for titles, and Museo Sans for body copy. The design has only two images: the logo and the picture of me in the bottom left corner. I’m sure That’ll probably change, but not much.

Since this was launched in very little time and with very little sleep and during the distractions of SXSW, it wasn’t fully browser tested. It’s probably horribly broken in a dozen different ways. If you see something broken, please leave me a comment letting me know about it, because that is the path to good karma and enlightenment.