8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [04] Tools & Troubles

Finding your medium of focus through words, images, and pretty much everything in between

Chapter List

  • MIDI Controller Updated · v2

    I bought a dedicated MIDI controller. I capitulated to the lure, the artists yearning, the insatiable feeling deep down in one’s gut that nudges us all towards the black hole of equipment investment. 

    It was the itch.

    Look, the keyboard was not an expensive purchase. But neither is it a toy. It is merely a very basic and simple twenty-five key plug-and-play input device that has piano ivories (instead of numbers and letters.) MIDI controllers make no sound of their own, rather sending electronic signals to another device like my laptop and act as if I was typing musical notes. It’s a musical instrument-shaped interface for a computer, and a kind of soft synthesizer.

    Creativity is sometimes about logically unjustifiable exploration and investment.

    I am far from an expert on keyboard technology.

    If you had asked me a year ago what I knew about musical keyboards I would have told you there were, um, pianos …and electronic pianos …and—I am reluctantly admitting here that I hadn’t been paying much attention after that point. 

    Also, I quite enjoy synth music.

    Growing up we didn’t have a real piano or a fancy digital one and we definitely did not have a synth. We had a bog standard department store brand electronic keyboard with a couple dozen built in digital instruments. In our house now, my wife has (because it is hers from before we were married) a pretty nice digital piano in her office, and then a little over a decade ago we acquired a small upright piano, too, which sits in our kitchen and serves little other purpose than to remind the family of a decade of The Kid doing her piano lessons. In other words, the concept of a bed of black and white keys that makes sounds? That was pretty clear in my head. But I’m no expert.

    What I was, rather, was curious.

    For myself, those pianos were never quite what I wanted… what I was craving, musically speaking. I would noodle and try to learn the basics, of course, but it the tools I had access to never scratched the itch that I was feeling in my musical soul.

    Curiosity untethered to practicalities can lead to expensive places. It is the aforementioned equipment black hole. I have seen countless videos online where the recording studio is a room overflowing with more tools and toys than I could hope to accumulate if I were to work at it for the rest of my life as a full time job. These people are not wrong in chasing new investments in their hobby, of course. It is curiosity that brought most of them there. It is that itch to find the next thing that is going to satisfy the creative urge.

    We all do it, too. Photographers buy lenses. Artists buy brushes. You should see my mother-in-law’s quilt fabric collection. 

    I recently came across the example of Trigger[1], Willie Nelson’s famous guitar. “There are instruments older than Trigger, but few guitars have logged as many playing hours in a lifetime, and Nelson plays hard.” That is to say, there are a lucky few who find their tool and cling to it without variation. I’m sure Mr. Nelson owns more curious equipment add-ons and eclectic musical do-dahs than most, but famously he is a one-instrument musician. But now the important question: Did he get there on the first try? Or did it take him experimentally buying and upgrading and testing and tossing?

    I first went down the synthesizer rabbit hole in early 2025. A proper synth is more than a piano keyboard that makes funny sounds. And it is arguably better than a MIDI controller plugged into the software on my laptop. Rather it is a dedicated instrument engineered to generate and manipulate sounds with electrical hardware, and for which a piano-style keyboard is merely a comfortable and familiar user interface. The one I bought one rainy day that spring was my first synth, and I’d be lying if I told you that I’ll settle for it as my last…well for any other reason than budget. I’d love to buy a selection of them and dabble and poke and play and experiment. I’d love to fall into that equipment black hole until I find my Trigger. 

    The new MIDI controller is another step around that circle. I own a small keyboard controller to interface with the synth software on my computers, and I am learning more about how it all works with each visit to this world of music and sound …and most importantly, a new personal exploration of audio creativity. I am searching for something that I won’t know until I find it. It is a search for the scratch for that itch.

  • Short Fiction

    I’ve always had a space in my heart for short fiction.

    Short story is a form that is often under appreciated, and I would chalk this up to a couple strange reasons.

    First, I think it’s a value proposition. I figure it probably costs about the same amount to publish, ship, and market a twenty page book—something that will take a customer a lunch-break to read—as it does a five hundred page novel. Thus, they cost the same at the store. We get around this by publishing anthologies, but I think the whole equation often breaks down for people standing in a bookstore: buying a bunch of small stories glued together in one paperback, or a whole novel—most people, I wager, pick the novel.

    Second, the mental investment. We do like strong characters and getting to know imaginary people through the course of a five hundred page-long story. Ideas are important, too, but my experience with short story is that it often leans more into exploring an idea than it does exploring a fleshed out character—that’s the realm of novels with the space to do that well. It’s not impossible in a short story, but I think you can only create so much personality out of ten thousand words. People like people, so I think we tend to gravitate towards novels about people over stories about ideas.

    Just my speculation.

    In the coming months I want to write more short fiction, I think, filling that gap in my heart with explorations of big ideas and crazy concepts. 

    I fully expect it to be under appreciated.

  • Blog Lore Branch · 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.

  • Blog Lore Branched · 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.

  • Blog Lore Branched · Part One

    There’s more than one way to do this thing.

    Look, I know you probably stumbled on this site because some search engine plopped you over here or you read the little clip about high performance blogging on a social media feed, but writing for the wrong reasons is not my jam.

    I’ve spent too many years trying to find a community of like-minded writers who use blogging as their medium.

    Who are those people?

    Are you looking to optimize your search engine ranking so that you can serve targeted ads and increase your revenue so that you can pursue positive cash flow via your website? Um. You’re probably in the wrong place.

    Are you curious about a form of writing that is a self-publishing platform for personal expression that is not controlled by some corporate social media algorithm, where we work towards building curated collections of niche content for the love of simply doing it?  Yeah, this is probably your stop.

    And I realize that ninety-eight percent of you just clicked away.

    I’ve been online for over a quarter of a century and it’s taken me almost that long to realize and embrace the notion that I’m nothing short of a techno-idealist. I hate that the thru line of this incredible communications tool we created as a species has become the pursuit of wealth at any cost, damn the truth, damn reality, damn the harm it is doing. I hate that.

    When I started writing online I had no delusions of making any money. It was a passion project. I wrote online for the sheer joy of expression and sharing ideas. Sure, I have put ads up on my site on occasion, but always in the hope of turning my sites into self-watering flowers, not content engines making me money.

    Is that privilege? Damn right it is. And so what? We use that excuse too much in this capital-focused society. Anyone who does something for a reason besides profit is sneered at for having the time or inclination of going against the money grub.

    Why do you blog?

    If you’ve made it this far maybe it is because you are doing it for some other reason than milking ad revenue from your words, and if that is the case I not only applaud you but suggest you mark this topic where I hope I’ll write a bit more about my experience in writing against the grain and share a bit of the lore of what makes blogging so much bigger than just farming for clickthroughs.