THEE ALCHEMICAL TIP JAR

or; on the microeconomics of global alchemy

After a certain amount of deliberation, I’ve decided to go ahead and provide an avenue for taking donations. I haven’t quite figured out how to get the code to work in wordpress for paypal buttons but if you go  HERE you can find it easily enough.

Initially I was very hesitant to open myself up to thoughts of mercantilism. Ultimately I realised that just because much of that world is poisoned by greed and exploitation, it doesn’t have to be the case for me.

let me be clear: I don’t need your money. I am not doing some sort of duplicitous strategy to blackmail you with my rate of output into subsidising my creativity.

No. I have done this and will continue to do this in the fullest possible way regardless of if I ever make a penny off of it. It’s bigger than money for me. If I have to dig ditches for the rest of my life then I will. It will not affect this project in the slightest way.

What I want to do is perhaps illustrate the positive potential of the numbers game. My ideal situation here is that eventually I have a large enough audience that I can make a low level income from a small number of my audience donating trivial amounts of money.

This is eminently feasible, even from the current perspective. If I were making ( for example ) an average of one dime off each one of my downloads so far I could pay all of my hosting for two years. At the current rate of growth, within a year that ten cents for every download would be paying my rent. Most people are happy paying 25 cents for a download of a ringtone or a song or somesuch or even more.

I’m very gratified with the growth of my admittedly niche audience here. I’m rather demanding and hardass in my wishes for excellence in this field so I’m very sympathetic to anyone who happens to stick it out with me. as of this writing ( June 2007 ) I’ve had about 23 000 downloads of my talks here, and every day each one of my recordings gets downloaded again between 2 and 5 times. That’s at least doubled from last month and that was up from from the month before that. Not bad for 4 and a half months or so.

My needs are very modest. I essentially live in a monastic house. I don’t believe in material accumulation for it’s own sake. I have two jobs that I work casually. A small bit of support on your part makes a big difference potentially in my way of living.

But again I don’t need it. I do just fine already. But more energy equals more freedom to move and explore. I have many plans and much patience. I have been playing this long game for almost 15 years now. I firmly believe that sooner or later opportunities will arise to do everything I imagine doing, so if all you folks do is keep watching, listening and sharing your enthusiasm, I’ll be blinged-out anyway in no time.

What you can do, is help later to become a little bit sooner. So for that, and for your continued kind attention you have my thanks.