8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Polka Truths

    If I was asked to cobble together a top ten list of my deepest and strangest creative influences, leaders of thought and individuality, curiosity and cleverness, people who have evoked the best from my introspective heart, near the very top of that list would surely be “Weird Al” Yankovic.

    My first interaction with the parody artist was when I bought “Dare to be Stupid”[1] on cassette tape while in grade school, the first album I ever bought with my own money, and I wore that darn thing out listening to it and memorizing every song.

    My latest interaction with the musician was just last week when I bought tickets to his touring show, one for me and one for my daughter, which is coming to my city later this year. It’ll be the first time in my forty years as a fan that I’ll see him perform live.

    And that’s the thing, isn’t it. Forty-plus years (nearly fifty, to be more precise) of making music and entertaining a loyal fanbase is nothing to shirk at, but it also represents a span of time lacking scandal or public outrage, all while being something completely unorthodox in time, space, music, and commercially-bankable content.

    And it all really occurred to me as I was walking this morning, having loaded a few classics onto the playlist of my phone: If there was ever a model upon which to look with awe and reverence for what it means to be a truly creative soul, how can we not count Mr. Yankovic as a paragon?

    Dare to be stupid, indeed.

    That’s the real truth some of us are looking for.

  • Those Walls

    Let me walk you through the door I found in the wall that had been blocking my path.

    I spent the early part of 2025 building the foundations of a computer game. Code. Art. Story. All the bits strung together into a few megabytes of raw materials that I can compile into a simulation-slash-cozy gamer’s curiosity.

    But yeah. I hit a wall. 

    See, building a game is the work of a hundred different skillsets mingling together into just the right blend. A proper game studio would have specialists who focus on each niche skill. A proper game studio would have project managers who coordinate the timing. A proper game studio would have deadlines nudging their team forward.

    I had me.

    I am not a specialist.

    I am managing my own project.

    My deadlines are ethereal.

    So a wall, even a metaphorical one, spells trouble.

    The details of said wall are not important.  What is important is that walls can be impenetrable and project-ending failure points.  They often are.  And sometimes, often I would argue, creatives run into a wall that they don’t even realize was a wall at all.

    We can then do one of two things. We can give up—and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s the right answer. If the wall is insurmountable, spending the rest of our lives looking for a way over or through it may be a terrible idea.

    On the other hand we can look for a gap, a door, a foothold to climb over, or the place where the wall has crumbled from the efforts of someone who went before and…

    Well. That’s what I did with my game development work.

    Thus I march on, scanning the horizon for the next obstacle for surely there are many more ahead.

  • Proper Bookish

    You’ll need to excuse my excitement yet again. I’m going on holiday for most of the front half of July so I’ve been writing these posts nearly three weeks in advance to get a leg up on the schedule and timing… and I’ve just this morning (in early July) looked at the word count on this project.

    It’s now well over fifty thousand. A proper book.

    Fifty thousand words was always the novel-length goal set out at the beginning of November when that infamous[1] novel writing challenge took place and we all rushed to pen fifty thousand words in thirty days.

    I now only point to it as a milestone.

    Oh, and as a reminder about my biggest and most core bit of quasi-advice on this project: the power of iteration and incrementalism.  Again, and again, and probably again I will point to these very words and just say: twenty minutes a day and a couple hundred words. It adds up.

    Heck, I don’t know if some random book publisher is out there trolling around looking for the next project, but hey… this needs some more organization and polish, but I’ve got the guts of something serious here. Don’t you agree?

    Okay, fine. I’ll back off the self-aggrandizing and get back on topic.

    Fifty thousand words of something is definitely not nothing—nor is it everything—but it is worth noting, particularly as a point about putting in the work. 

    I did. I am. I will. You can, too. 

  • Professional Games 

    In early 2025 I founded a game studio.

    Sounds impressive, no? In a way it is like any other clever idea: you give an idea a name and send it off in a direction and it becomes important and meaningful. It becomes work.

    Why did I found a game studio?

    Because I write code.  My profession for two decades has involved technology and systems and building things on computers. The gaming industry may seem lighthearted and playful, but at the end of the day games are just more code (and art and music and databases and stories) built inside of a computer.

    I spent the next five months working on the soul and systems of a simulation-meets-cozy style game and pushing it through various iterations of functionality until I was actually able to load it onto one of those handheld gaming PCs and sit on the couch playing my buggy (but functional) game.

    It’s now mid-2026 as I write this and the game development has been stalled for about a year. I’ve poked at it. Prodded it. Added tiny nudges to the system. But stalled, really.

    I bring it up here because it comes to mind when I think of the idea I’m trying to get across in this chapter of the blog: creativity isn’t just a whim. It can be work and a product and an invention that may someday wind up in a store being sold to people who would pay for it.

    And on days that I’m being particularly honest I think I would tell you that the game development didn’t stall for lack of time or motivation or direction. It probably stalled because the profession that morphed in a newfound passion quietly transformed back into a profession when I wasn’t looking. And it took me a few months to get my head around that idea.

  • Past Present

    Over and over I stumble across advice for creativity.  Heck, it’s the basis of this blog, isn’t it? Here’s what has worked for me, for others, for everyone else in the past, present and certainly will do in the future, too.

    Right?

    And the smart money, the guy who wants this site to be successful and to captivate you and to hold your attention would tell you that there are answers buried inside if you read deeply enough.

    The honest guy would tell you that creativity is just like any other job. You get out what you put in, and the effort pays off when you do the work.

    The fuzzy spaces between, though, are filled with an endless doubting void that slurps up every bit of advice, superstition, ritual, inspiration, and randomness distilled from the universe as possible.

    I’m just the guy sitting here telling you to embrace that uncertainty.

    Look at the advice.

    But also find your own way.

    Do the work.

    But embrace the chaos.

    Dig into ideas that shift your mind, body, and soul to new perspectives.

    But ride the efforts of a billion people who have gone this way before you.

    Under the category of Past & Present, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.