Eros: A Planet Waves Frontier Note - last week I attempted to post the full archive of 2005 birthday reports but instead posted our sales link. That was not really a Freudian slip. Here is the birthday report archive, which is indeed aat least partially a ploy to get to you consider subscribing, to see the 2006 reports as they come out each week: http://www.planetwaves.net/bdreports2005/ OUR NEW Eros area is very nearly ready to go. I have not mentioned it in this space. This new area is available to everyone who has upgraded to Gold Membership, or is a new subscriber with Gold Membership. It's a new dimension of Planet Waves that includes a variety of really fun features described below. Note, we're working with a specialist in electional astrology to select the startup time, which will be in the next week or so. We are currently under a rather tangled sky, and I don't have my objectivity to rely on (such as it ever was). Doing electional astrology -- that is, picking the right time to do something -- is always a challenge, but it's particularly challenging now. In any event, we are working along, and here's a new description of what we've got for you. Live community interaction. We now cross the imaginary line into interactive experience (Mercury in Cancer), including a live chat area called Le Chat that I'll host at least twice a month, and visit regularly. This gives us our first opportunity to interact in realtime, as well as a live community forum. I am truly and really and deeply looking forward to encountering the people I've been writing for all these years and I am sure that more than a few of you would like to meet one another. While it's called Le Chat, I want to keep the vibe anything but "chatroom" in the AOL sense of the word -- so every participant will serve as a moderator who will keep the discussion focused on the current astrology, personal growth, human experience, news items. Relevant, worth your time showing up. An oracle and horoscope research tool. Next is a horoscope database, which allows you to both research past interpretations from a database of 6,000 sign entries (updated ongoing), as well as use a divination oracle to get a response to a specific question or issue (in the form of a randomly selected horoscope entry from the past seven years). I've had some results from the oracle gave me a bug-eyed moment of looking at the screen. It's taken us 18 months to research and compile the horoscopes, as well as to program the database (which happened in two distinct programming steps, one to compile the interpretations and another to present them to you). Then we worked for some weeks on the presentation (a basic graphic user interface). Sound Waves: Audio. Sound Waves is our second ever experiment into Internet audio (the first, an audio section on aquasphere, was in 2004, so this is a first for recent history), which will have short clips of both astrology and other kinds of programming. Currently there are two bits I'm working on: on the spot interviews, and me riffing on the astrology of the moment. The Sound Waves area, in particular, is about getting our toes in the water of Internet radio. As we learn the craft and develop our audience, we'll move in the direction of podcasting. Your investment in the Gold Membership will help fund this effort. New photography. Our area called Eros that develops some of the themes I've introduced since beginning the Book of Blue photo project last year. (Like the god Eros himself, his name is used twice, once to describe the whole project, and once to describe the photography area, which will also have writing about the photos when my travel schedule settles down.) I don't know if what I'm doing with my pictures is actually unique -- it's a big world -- but I haven't seen anything like it. The theme of Book of Blue is: how do women see themselves? We're beginning with three galleries of models aged 22 to 46, and will be adding two per month for a while. Fairly soon the project will expand to men, as the right models present themselves. And why are we doing all of this? Pretty much because it's time. It started as an incentive for people to make an extra financial contribution to Planet Waves (called supporters and sustainers). And we've designed the Eros area to be a real win-win in this way: it's a lot of fun and economical for you, helpful to us and nourishing for everyone. Yet as I sit here and write this letter, it occurs to me that we've needed to move into these areas for a long time, and this became the opportunity. Yet the fundraising incentive is indeed meaningful. We are not big marketers at Planet Waves. As I've said many times, I would prefer to give everything away to everyone -- but Planet Waves does take resources to run. About 40 paid staff and volunteers work on the project -- amazing, but then, you would be surprised how many details have to be covered and how much time it takes to do so. For the past few years we've been obsessively adding services to Planet Waves without charging an extra fee. The weekly, that is Planet Waves Weekly, to which you too can subscribe, is easily three times the service it was when we began a few years ago, for about the same price (we started at $49.95 a year and we're now $54.95). During this time, we've added many new areas to the main Website: the amazing PlanetWaves.info newswire; two excellent news blogs, Political Waves and Psychsound; the monthly almanac; my front-page blog and the cover photo galleries; the daily cover photo itself; many articles by other writers; and lots more. There is also  the question-by-question Astrology Secrets Revealed archive, and that whole project itself -- the best astrology tutorial I've ever seen; search functions for the subscriber area and ASR; the world clock; and so on. There is so much, I am sure that most people have not tried most of it. Every year we come out with an ever-better annual edition (aquasphere, Bridge to the Core, Parallel Worlds) which is included for subscribers at no additional cost. That is a lot. Our marketing consultants tell us we're spoiling our readers and subscribers, teaching them to expect too much. Perhaps. If that is indeed that case, the choice to introduce a new community area at a reasonable upgrade fee is a healthy move for us, gives us some fun creative spaces to work, play and get to know one another in -- at the same time provide a source of information and nourishment. So now is your big chance to get involved, to experience Planet Waves a whole new way. There is an easy upgrade path for current subscribers ($49), and new subscribers can sign up for $99 including a full year subscription to Planet Waves Weekly. Both are available from this link. Current subscribers may choose the upgrade option; new subscribers may choose the Gold Membership option. Both are at this link: http://www.planetwavesweekly.com/sales/home.html Thanks for getting involved. I look forward to seeing you there.     e