> I don't recall ever having a desire to be
> famous.

In junior high, I wanted to be an actor, presumably because of my then budding love for movies, but I don't think I ever particularly got duped into thinking this was a practical dream. I would, however, love to be a successful author.

It is unfortunate that the passions that drive me carry fame as a byproduct of success. Most of the occupations/hobbies I'm passionate about revolve around one thing: entertaining people. Fiction, humor, movies, games, drawing.... Coordinating the two RinkUnions is a new thing I've taken similarly enthusiastic interest in. Well, it's hard to be successful at entertaining people without incurring fame and the loss of privacy that comes with it.

Fortunately, my nature has at least steered me into areas that aren't so bad. My impractical movie-related dream job now is to direct, not to act, and what I'm truly content doing for real involves writing rather than performing. I like name recognition. When I create something people enjoy, I like people to know that I was responsible. And as much as it peeves me when people take time out of their day just to tell me I'm a sack of dung, I don't mind getting rational criticism for my work either.

The web was a medium that came around just in time for me. Never before did I have an audience for the things I did. A lot of my short stories have only been read by one or two other people, some not by anyone else at all. From 1985 onward, I was writing computer games in rapid succession, but nobody ever played them. The web gave me an audience, and I haven't looked back since. As a bonus, it works for so many different types of pursuits. I've incorporated nearly every beloved hobby I've ever had into RinkWorks in some form or other. Nearly every interest I've ever had I've tapped *somehow* and used here. It's great to be able to do that and to have a readership that is entertained by it. That's all I was shooting for, and that's what I got. I can't complain.

Everything comes with a price, of course, but in a way it's less than what it might have been, for the other advantage to the web is that I am faceless. My name is all over the place, but I'm still, in a way, anonymous. The average reader of RinkWorks reads something, is hopefully entertained, and may or may not notice and remember the name at all. But yet there is an easy way for people to contact me, a way that people make use of, and my privacy is not particularly violated. Usually it's a happy medium between fame and lack of privacy.

The price, though, is that the web gives everybody a voice, not just me. If people want to attack, belittle, mock, or disparage me, they can do so. They don't need to know anything about me to do so. They don't need to know what I look like, what accomplishments I've made in my life, what personal relationships I maintain with family and friends, or what faith I have in God. People can see 50 words of writing on RinkWorks that set them off, decide I am scum that can serve no greater purpose in life than as a target for people's angst and anger, and rip in as hard as they can. Fortunately, most such people can't put two words together without three spelling errors and only have a vocabulary that consists of profanity, exclamation marks, and the word "you," and I have a hard time taking the opinions of idiots seriously.

But once in a while somebody cuts deep, and I'm wounded and also sickened that people can take such glee in tearing down and kicking people they don't know and never did them any wrong. But even this price can be made a boon. Thanks to such senseless attacks, I've learned how to weather them, and frankly I'm more self-confident now than I ever was.

And, too, there are saving graces besides. Compensating for the rash of sadistic meanness is a positive side to RinkWorks I never expected, namely the community of friends we have here. Yes, I have my audience here. 120,000 hits a day is a big one. But more valuable are the handful of *friends* I've made here, some of them closer than any friendships I've ever had, many others at least as strong, and still more that I'd *like* to be stronger. Even just one friendship like that is worth all the senseless flames from strangers put together.