8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

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  • Blog Lore, Part Three

    I’ve been on holiday, I’m jet-lagged, and yeah: I need a few days to recover, so…

    I was digging through my archives which are stuffed away on a cloud drive where only I can see them and I found this blog advice thing I wrote in 2008.

    Enjoy.

    The Seven Sins of Blogging

    Original Published Date : Friday, June 13, 2008

    I was thinking of writing an entry explaining two things: (1) my motivation for writing and posting as much as I do and (2) the apparent arrogance and self-importance that tends to come across in this blog. First, I write because I am as compelled to write as I am to breathe. And second, that WOULD be arrogance did sin number seven not apply. I am mindful of that, and my explanation — not directed at ANYONE at all but me, really — evolved into the following:

    Do you have a blog? Thinking of starting one? Seven years, multiple blogs, thousands of entries, and encyclopedic quantities of text later, I have the following advice… of how you can completely screw up.

    Those seven sins of blogging are:

    Lust
    It’s not what you think. And unless maybe you are writing a sex-advice column, literally detailing your lust is a very sketchy idea for any blog (as you never know when your mother-in-law is reading.) However, if we take a similar approach as Dante, defining lust as the “excessive love of others,” you may be lustful if you are peppering your readers with (a) too many links, (b) opinions that are not your own, or worse (c) more quotes than content, and thus you should not expect your sad little blog to amount to much of anything. Your own opinion may be completely wrong and suck, but at least it’s yours — so don’t lust after someone else’s ideas: it’s just uninspired and lame.

    Gluttony
    In blogging, gluttony is measured in units of your reader’s time. Your sad little blog commits gluttony if it eats too much of that irreplaceable resource: the pages may take too long to download, your spelling and grammar might suck thus consuming all of our time with abandon as readers try to decipher your thoughts. It may drone on—and on and on and on and on—about nothing of significance and thus consume our time merely looking for the point of your ramblings. Or it might simply be horridly designed and force the consumption of our time purging the pain of viewing it from ours eyes and brains with hot pokers. As attributed to Kurt Vonnegut: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted” — or you suck.

    Greed
    If your readers can’t find your content for the barrage of advertisements on your sad little blog, guess what: you’re a greedy ass. Do we think you have something valuable to say, or are you simple a shill for Google? Don’t tell us it generates revenue. Don’t tell us it pays your hosting fees. If you expect anyone to believe blogging is how you earn your grocery money—or that targeted ads are the only way you can afford to pay for something that costs less than a pint of beer—do you really expect readers to believe anything else you write? One or two ads: cool. More, get over yourself.

    Sloth
    Commitment. Do you have it? If you are going to write a blog, then do it: pull up to a keyboard and go. The alternative is finding the delete button. Many would argue: but blogs are media. And most of us recycle our old newspapers and delete anything older than a few weeks past from our PVRs. If your sad little blog is stagnating because the gap between entries is measured in months, you have committed sloth and you need to make a decision. Chances are if two months have gone by without an update (the unofficial statute of limitations on this particular time line) no one will even notice if “whatilikeaboutcheese.randomfreeblogs.ru” suddenly disappears from their feed.

    Wrath
    We get it. Blog spam sucks. Scrapers suck. Flamers suck. But if you are going to run a blog, dealing with any and all of these is like dealing with commuters on your drive to work; It’s just part of the traffic. In that particular analogy, wrath would be represented by driving to work in a Hummer: sure, being involved in a collision equals multiple fatalities and you get to drive away, but your gas mileage sucks, and every other commuter thinks you’re an arrogant ass. The same goes for your sad little blog. Wrath comes in the form of you implementing overly cumbersome or restrictive tools to fight and prevent spam, scrapping, or unwelcome comments. Sure, easy for you to manage on the back end, but grow a pair and don’t make your readers suffer for your fear and anger.

    Envy
    Green shades are so unbecoming on a blog. We all know that envy is defined as wanting something that someone else has and you currently do not. Envy is stealing. Envy is pilfering content. Envy is filling your blog with snippets of content from other sites prefixed by the words “Check this out!” Your sad little blog has committed the sin of envy if you are simply writing your blog to “keep up with the Joneses” as it were. Don’t blog to fill space and seek to mimic the apparent notoriety of someone else’s efforts, or your blog will truly suck. Blogging for the sake of blogging means you have absolutely nothing of consequence to say and thus you should not be allowed access to a keyboard. Blogging itself is not cool, but entertaining and informing people in a meaningful way via a blog might be.

    Pride
    “What! Only five hundred hits this year?” And four hundred and ninety of them are likely your own clicks. No one cares what you have to say. No one cares, even if what you are writing is wise and insightful. No one cares what you thought of that movie. No one cares that you ate pizza for dinner in April 1997. No one cares: really. So if you are writing your sad little blog for an audience, forget it. Humble yourself and write for only you because in five years when you are paging through your archives (if they both still exist and you even care enough to do so) we can almost guarantee it won’t be for the purposes of submitting them to so great historical archive. You earn hits. And even those you earn are hits for which you are undeserving.

  • Excuse You

    Look around, pay attention and you’ll start to notice it everywhere.

    I happened to notice it the other night while we were having a family night catching up on a couple reality shows. I made a note that I should write something about it.

    Victimhood.

    You don’t fall into that trap, do you? You don’t trip over the wires of opting to blame everyone else for failure. You don’t catch on the snare of looking for external factors every time something goes wrong.

    We were watching that show—you know the one—where pairs of contestants race around the world and do challenges.  One of the teams was lagging, severely, and it was never about them. They played the perpetual victim. Other teams were picking on them. The challenges were so hard. The world was against them. Oh, I’m sure it felt good to dump their successive losses at the feet of everything and everyone else, but wow: it’s a game, it’s supposed to be competitive and challenging and stacked against you at every turn.

    Maybe, sure, it was played up by the editors of the show, but I also recognize that as a personality type. I also know that there are a lot of people with big ideas and ambitious dreams who hit a few little obstacles—and oh, will there be obstacles on the path to creative endeavours—and out come the excuses and blaming everything and everyone else.

    The list is endless, but you’d recognize it the second you heard it: someone or something is preventing those people from the win, so they give up trying.

    But the game is always stacked. The world is always working against most of us. That’s just the universe. 

  • Inside Outside

    What is creativity anyhow? I’ve been writing this blog for over eight months now and I don’t think I’ve actually sat down and written a proper definition—but is that even possible?

    Is it a good thing to be creative? Is it natural or purposeful—or maybe just an unserious pursuit?

    It’s curious though: my social media feed has picked up on the idea that I’m interested in the topic and so routinely it is peppered with bursts of commentary on creative lifestyles, both positive and negative. 

    And with many questions, I think maybe the negative jabs shine a brighter light on understanding the notion.

    Your results may vary, but my received negativity seems to shine through that little screen and mock the very idea of a middle aged guy trying to do art, learn an instrument, or write a novel. The universe, it often seems, finds the notion of artistic expression little more than a privileged extravagance for those less serious among us. 

    Why am I not feeding the gaping maw of capitalistic pursuit? Why am I not spending time earning or investing or consuming? Why am I telling stories and taking photos?

    None of this is a thing I can answer in one post, but I do know that creativity is not an idle excuse to avoid something “real” or “productive” but rather—and for most every self-defined creative person I know—foundational to who they are. It is who we are. It is the shape of our soul and the way we meet the world each day.

    All the rest of it is the mask we wear.

    Under the category of Inside & Outside I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Blog Lore, Part Two

    I’ve been online for a very long time.

    In the early 2000s I opened up a notepad on my desktop computer and started typing what would become my first blog post. It seemed like an interesting alternative to writing a bunch of individual emails back home to all the people I’d just left behind to start a new job in a new city.

    Blogging was novel. It was trendy. It had not yet become this big commercial shell game of trying to lure visitors to your site by any means necessary for the purpose of generating advertising revenue.  It was still a genuine and personal act of creativity.

    I’ve been stuck in that mindset for a quarter of a century, doing what the folks who need to label everything might call “life blogging”…

    And I guess that’s the real trick to having a real blog: one needs to first have a life to blog about.

    For most of mine—and if I’m being particularly honest—having the blog has become the reason for having an interesting life. I pursue hobbies, travel to interesting places, tackle local adventure, and take on personal challenges to give myself something to write about.  None of it is performance or faux influencer-type obnoxious behaviour, but rather waking up in the morning and becoming an interesting person by interacting with the world in a meaningful and positive way.

    After a while having a life becomes a habit.

    …and writing about that life becomes a lifestyle.

    So? My first piece of advice for an aspiring blogger looking to put together an interesting personal collection of writing full of curious topics: get a life. A real life. An interesting life. A life worth writing about. This is the first step.

  • Influence Less

    Look, it’s a blurry line between being someone who wants to make stuff and share their creativity with the world on one side and being someone who wants to be the main character of the internet on the other.

    Blurry, but not invisible.

    I personally struggle with my own identity on the modern internet. I make stuff for the joy of making it. I write stories because I feel the very human need to be a storyteller. I draw and make music and build games because I am compelled to use the half of my brain that is steeped in creative urges to do those things. 

    The tepid pool of what becomes popular for all the wrong reasons, though, is a little sad.

    I see reels that are staged or commercial or generated or simply rage bait.

    I see posts that reek of corporate pandering or identity grooming or culture shifting.

    I see profiles that are bots or resume acts or cons or worse.

    It’s all fake.

    What is to be done about those?  Nothing, maybe, but looking away and being better than that, not stooping to that grade of duplicity, treating people everywhere—your audience and the people around you in real life—with the respect they deserve. Maybe that will help a little.

    It’s old fashioned, but here’s the real:

    Be genuine. If you are out there making stuff that is fake or even whiffs of influencer-grade performance, just… don’t. Be better than that.