Continued from an earlier post: Creative Positive (Part Two)

I continue to remind myself that, as a creative, refraining from posting positive things into social spaces not only is a kind of self-censorship but it leaves gaps that are quickly filled by negative things.

I was more active online in the weeks leading up to the unity referendum that happened here in Alberta, Canada in October.  It was not necessarily about joining into the fray and shouting partisan slogans or reposting dubious information.  I did my share to “get out the vote” and sent numerous reminders to friends and offers of free babysitting (which no one took me up on) but mostly I just posted non-political stuff.

I kept sending links to my running website.

I took dozens of autumn photos and shared them everywhere.

I fired up the frequency of my back posting from this and the other writing project I’m doing about algorithms and technology topics.

I shared positive thoughts and whimsical aphorisms about all sorts of things that popped into my head.

And I just tried to fill the space: not necessarily to interfere with the conversation, but because that’s my role. My job, unpaid and often thankless, is to clutter up your social media feed with the mundane. It is to drop art into your apps, pack your photo scrolling with pics from nature, and remind you that real life is bigger than political bullshit, that it continues even when the mouths of politicians stop aren’t flapping and hucksters of every stripe aren’t trying to needle a bit more power.

Rare moments, but they exist. They need to exist. They need to continue to exist.

Despite the evidence to contrary, life is bigger than all that.

Art. Thought. Story. Music. Colour. Trails. Sunsets. All of it must keep going no matter what. When they stop, when we stop being creative positive, then the negative wins and what is there left worth fighting for.

We live in complex political times. As I write and publish this initially in late-2026 the political landscape of my home in Western Canada is undergoing a nationalistic push to secede from the Canadian confederation. We are in the midst of a referendum… and this post is not about that, but it is about something parallel: that being someone who makes stuff, writes stories, draws pictures, and posts introspective daily essays on navel-gazing topics can feel monumentally inadequate to the moment.

Look no further than social media. The click rate on my posts are trivial for my creative works compared to when I go online and start engaging politically. And it can feel like a kick to the chest to try to rationalize that the attention of the population is nearly entirely consumed by a tidal wave of political rhetoric and partisan conversation.

Particularly right now it feels like the last thing anyone wants is a short story by an amateur science fiction author.

…or some autumn photography.

…or screenshots from a video game I’m working on.

…or a sketch of a funky tree in the park.

…or—hell, the list could go on forever.

How do creative people stand up in the undertow of the ebbing and flowing tide and find a role in all this that is more than just another screaming voice.

But like I said, there is more to making the world a good place than overtly fighting evil.

A picture of a beautiful autumn scene, or a clip from the latest build of my indie game, or some simple sketch-work passed into someone’s social feed is not a distraction from something good, it is a diversion from the darkness. It is a reminder that among the so-called important conversation there still remains people holding a beacon light for humanity to navigate it’s way back to normality.  

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. 

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.

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 writing project 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 writing projects—yikes!—and write on two different topics.

Here, on “Dispatches 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-site conversation.  Or, whatever: what do I know, I’m not a machine here.

Check it out.

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?

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.

Branched · Part Two Continued in Creative Positive (Part Three)

Continued from an earlier post: Creative Positive (Part One)

I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

The darkness is insidious. It is sweet like raw sugar upon the tongue, lighting up our emotions with an ability to draw us in and feast upon our time and energy.

You may be reading these words—all of them, the project and every post and every image and all the adjacent works of public performative creativity that goes on around it—and pondering the purpose. 

I have a hundred reasons to write and create and sketch and make and build and do interesting things. But I have a very short list of reasons to share: it is, yes, about money and brand and fame, of course it is, it always is—but it is also about balance. It’s about holding my little patch of digital ground against the darkness. 

It is about creating human-made ideas and sharing them into the ocean of slop.

It is about being a net-positive in an electronic sea of rage.

It is about finding the good of the world and launching it back into the universe for something bigger than myself.

So long as I have hope that the world still needs something bigger and brighter than the dim shadows of this societal chasm we seem to be traversing I will get up each morning and try my best to find something positive to make …and share.

Branched · Part One Continued in Creative Positive (Part Two)

I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

It is not our jobs to join the rage.

It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.