8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Jubilant July

Chapter List

  • Explain Yourself

    Anyone who is not a sociopath is probably, eventually going to discover the need to explain themselves to someone.  This isn’t a weakness. It’s a social legacy reality.

    We all make stuff. 

    Maybe you’re not an artist or a writer or a musician, as I write about those things here, but you might prepare food, manage money, build roads, fight for justice, heal the sick—or any of countless other jobs—and each of those things the pursuit against the entropy of the universe. It is making order out of the slide into chaos.

    And if you are doing any of this making, eventually, probably, likely someone will ask you why you have made the things you have made.

    Why? Why did you spend your time on this planet, in this life, doing this thing and making what you made? Why this?

    It would be easy to mistake this for a requisite justification of our lives, rather than for what I think it is: the realization by all of us on the side asking the question: that what makes us humans is looking into the heart of someone else’s passions and seeking to understand.

    So. If someone asks you don’t flinch and feel interrogated. Explain yourself. Share your soul. Spread your love of that thing you do.

  • Memory Waned

    If I ever need a better reminder that age plays nasty tricks on us all (oh, and that I should keep a notebook or my notes app with me at all times) is sitting here for five minutes trying to trigger the second half of a lost memory.

    I remember that last night I had a great idea for an article, but this morning sitting here to write said article I can’t remember a thing about it.

    Is that getting older, or just bad idea management overall?

    I think we all probably encounter empty places where we thought we left our creative car keys the night before, and maybe such as it was in my youth I’m just more frustrated by this thinking organ in my skull that I feel like I should have more control over as I approach fifty.

    Online analysts will tell you that technology has allowed us to offload our memories to external devices and this has made the tools in our brains dull and fragile. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with leaning into a notebook to keep track of fleeting ideas when you don’t have time or inclination to open the laptop and immediately start working on them.

  • Hard Numbers

    Here’s the thing about a job that meany people overlook: everything ultimately needs to lead back to some kind of measurable, fungible value. Ah capitalism, you nasty freak.

    I managed a team of web developers for half a decade and as manager I had a lot of tasks—but not the least of these (and in fact arguably one of the most consistent and time consuming of these) was tracking metrics. 

    I had to put numbers to productivity. I had to match quantifiable costs against measured returns, make graphs of employee time spent per tasks, public page interactions, project cost recovery models, marketing investment return projections. Everything had to to be tracked, measured, plotted, and understood.

    Now that I’ve been create something of my own, for the sake of art, it has been too easy to fall into this same trap: measuring word counts, tracking web stats and search engine placements, allocating resources to audience building and working to balance effort with return based on numbers, even if some of those numbers are only tracked in my head.

    When your profession and passion collide, what is there to do?

    How do you stand arms length from the quantifiable measures of your art, words, and music as demanded by the professional side of the craft—often inseparable and important—and yet still find the mental space to think of it as a qualitative act measured in vibes and feels and beauty? 

  • Story Mistelling

    Beloved vlogbrother, Hank Green, has made or otherwise alluded to the point in a few videos[1] over the last couple years that sometimes the story is more interesting that the truth.

    Compounding this as an actual issue is that some people value the story—or the value of the story as a political tool, say—more than they value the truth.

    In other words: some people lie and invent stories to serve their own ends. Uh, no kidding, huh?

    I have written about storytelling on this site a disproportionate amount. I am planning on typing the word “storytelling” at least a few hundred more times before I stop posting here.

    So, it makes me wonder: have we reached a pivotal point in history where the art of telling stories is intertwined too dramatically and damningly to think of it anything other than as the dark side of the equation: is storytelling a tool for manipulation, lies, and propaganda?

    Well, yeah. Obviously.

    Though I don’t think Green’s point was meant to be taken as a call to abandon the ship of human tales and interesting fiction.  Instead, it was a call to vigilance.

    After all, I could theoretically bop someone on a head with the hammer and thus use it for dark deeds. I could also fix my fence with the same tool. The former use case does not mean we need to ban hammers. It means that we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of people who bring hammers into places where hammers are not meant to be.

    In the same way we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of fiction and stories implanted into places where they are not meant to be: politics, science, medicine, and more.

    Keep telling stories, of course. 

  • Pitch Brand

    I’m pretty sure I once missed out on an interesting job opportunity because my head froze up when the interviewer asked me if I could make his social media profile go viral.

    What does that even mean?

    I mean… I get it. He wanted a million followers. He wanted to be an influential. Fame. Adoration. Social capital. He wanted to be known and heard with a notification tab that needed to be silenced lest it wake the neighbourhood.

    To me, the shy auteur and guy who values meaningful connection and measured interaction with real people, I found myself floundered by the question that came out of nowhere in the middle of a seemingly average job interview.

    They keep telling us we live in the digital era, but I often think they’ve got it wrong. We live in the influencer era: social media as invaded every aspect of every layer of our lives and we have all become no less than personal brands who spend the day crafting illusions of our lives to share into those spaces. Even choosing to not participate becomes a meaningful action, one that defines a person and commodifies their social footprint.

    Personally… I loathe it.

    But it is inescapable and pervasive—and the reality of our times.

    What’s a creative soul to do but figure out how to not get swept up in the digital river and washed away by the social networks.

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