I keep telling people that if creating and running llor.nu could pay my bills, I’d focus entirely on that. As it is, I’ve been focusing entirely on that, and all other things have been suffering. I’m actually losing weight because my activity level has been low (I have about 3% body fat, so any time I exercise my skinny little muscles they double in weight – an easy feat).

It’s just so compelling to me to try to tame a tiny little economy into a predictable and balanced one. I’m terrible at math, and especially this kind of math, so mostly I just poke at it and wait for changes, but the variables are so great, I’ll never get it right. I’ve put in things that help balance the untamable but it’s still unpredictable and always will be.

One thing that’s hard to describe is the sense of joy I get when I can see someone playing it from the “admin” point of view. I see the data show up in the database, I can see their account balance shift, see their payment logs. I don’t want to call it pride, though some of that is there. It just feels great to see someone enjoy something that I’ve made because I thought it would be cool – not because I thought others would think it’s cool. And to see them come back day after day is sublime.

And I’m also getting that feeling of “I did this for the love of it” rather than the feeling I get when I pursue projects purely out of financial interests or because I think it’ll help raise some kind of imaginary Internet status. It has no social significance, it doesn’t change the Internet, it doesn’t enable people to make money. At the end of the day, it matters little, but I suspect it’ll get more exposure than any project I’ve done to date, and that’s exciting to me not for the status or money it might bring, but because it’ll mean I did what I loved and it worked.