8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [11] Science & Politics

The weight of representation and creating when your identity seems political.

Chapter List

  • 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. 

  • Science Politics

    I spent four of my years of post-secondary education studying for (and receiving) a bachelors degree in biological sciences. I studied molecular biology, genetics, and a bit of ecology, cellular biology, botany, and entomology blurred into that mix. 

    I got a job doing computer stuff and never really looked back.

    But you don’t spend four intensive years studying the methods and tools of science without it changing how you look at the world. And it definitely changed how I look at the world.

    Now I find myself right here… and in this moment: we exist in this highly charged political time, a time when truth and reality are constantly being questioned. 

    One half of my very soul and identity often seem political and running against the grain of the populist movements that shape our news each day.

    I figure I could choose to reject it, go against all that I know and understand, or I can do what I’ve always done and embrace it—use it as the backbone to what I make, how I engage with the other half of my soul and identity: the creative artistic writer guy.

    Here I am.  Take it or leave it.

    Science, rational evidence-based thought, and critical thinking are part of who I am, what I make and how I engage with both sides of my personality. 

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

  • Poets Processing

    Daily writing has a way of losing focus. I dive down metaphorical rabbit holes all the time, and yet I’d be the first to tell you that such things are not just okay, but a kind of magical side effect of creativity. A perk.

    As I collect topics and ideas to fill these pages I have gone down one particular hole multiple times and at times have risked turning this blog into something else entirely.

    The bad part of that is losing focus on something I care about—creative pursuits—and is not (strategically speaking) the direction in which I want to take this project.

    The good part of that diversion is I that I do in fact have the time, resources and inclination to pursue those topics in another place.

    All this is to say that as of this month I’m going to be (trying to)maintain two daily blogs—yikes!—and write on two different topics.

    Here, on “Eight Clicks from Nowhere” I will keep on track with my ramblings related to creative motivation, insights into building skills and habits to make stuff, and write about the interesting (at least to me) hobbies that clutter my life.

    Over on “on poets & processors” I am building a new site around the topic of the dehumanization of art and creativity by algorithmic competition: how AI is invading the creative spaces and simultaneously stealing work while probably, maybe, sort of creating interesting new opportunities… and what’s the deal?

    Advance warning: there may be some cross posting, but as they veer off down different paths I suspect it may turn into more of a cross-blog conversation.  Or, whatever: what do I know, I’m not a machine here.

    Check it out.

  • Linked Out

    There is a flavour of professional writing which I find myself trying to avoid veering into.

    If you’ve ever been on that professional networking social media platform you know exactly what I’m talking about, those articles that talk about leadership, career growth and always seem to find a new way to write an article called what I learned about insert-business-trope-here from insert-random-life-experience-there.

    On site, those articles get lots of likes and reshares, but off site many assume it is all a lot of performative mugging, a bit vapid, and almost certainly driven by a lot of generative AI.

    So when a guy like me sits down to write a daily article on creative motivation or skill development or artistic niche hunting, it would be real easy to drift into the lane where all those aforementioned articles persist.

    That’s not my goal.  Far from it, in fact. It’s the reason I don’t pepper this site with advertising. I want to be more than that. Better than that. And in fact if I were to suggest that what I’m doing here is writing articles with that similar flavour but also with a lot more homespun sincerity and (what I’m hoping is) experiential insight then you might be closer to understanding where I’m coming from with this writing project.

    Still, the problem remains: writing optimistic micro-essays about creative pursuits is a genuine niche and one that has drawn the ire and ridicule of many who see it, when poorly or hastily done, as an disingenuous to the spirits of voice and purpose and method.

    It becomes just more slop.

    But I think I can avoid that.

    After all, just because fast food commodified and ruined the hamburger, doesn’t mean you won’t find a delicious example of one somewhere else, right?

  • Hot Toast

    I have been finding myself tired a lot lately and (without getting into the gritty politics of it) I think it has a lot to do with the state of the world these days.

    It’s a problem of multiple levels: geopolitics are nutty, local troubles are swirling, and even my own personal day-to-day struggles with identity, aging, and finding a fit in society weigh on my mind.

    Every one of these things takes up space in my brain, running in the background always, day and night, like an app that you can’t uninstall from your phone, and eating up battery life.

    By mid-afternoon I’m toast.

    We can’t escape our worlds, and one of the biggest struggles that anyone who tries to create and make and share faces today (and has probably faced through all time and history) is that we live in a society that demands a certain share of our mental battery.

    It is inescapable.

    Politics. Society. Climate. Culture. War. Famine. Economics. Life and death.

    None of us get to park our creative selves into a bubble and create outside of reality, no matter how much we might convince ourselves of the opposite.

    I don’t claim to have a strategy to deal with it, to fight the feeling of burning toast in your soul, but I do think that accepting the reality of that fact might be a big first step.