8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [12] Social & Community

Finding your tribe and building a community for collaboration, and to beat creative loneliness.

Chapter List

  • Social Disfunction

    You know my type. 

    When I go to a social function, I’m the weird guy with the camera.

    Oh, I represent. I dance at weddings. I play games at parties. I help with the dishes at the holiday dinners. I’m not just the guy with the camera, but—yeah. I’m usually the one taking photos.

    I call it a type because like every artistic pursuit there is always a cliché. There is always a tell. There is always a secret handshake that isn’t a handshake but maybe just a really nice camera that never leaves the hand and—shake: you recognize the other weird guys from a mile away.

    Weird camera guys find other weird camera guys at social functions. We talk. We compare equipment, stories, and frustrations. 

    Because… that’s community.

    That’s the thing you want but you never recognize it until you’re driving home later that evening thinking you should have connected with that other weird camera guy on instagram or something so you could maybe turn an awkward social function conversation into something creatively productive—a collaboration, or maybe just someone to talk to about that thing you love to do.

    I know my type. I’m the weird camera guy, and these hobbies are often lonely enough without pretending that we don’t see each other.

  • Cheerleader Types

    Not everyone is a creative production engine, and that’s okay.

    Building a community is an effort that requires not just surrounding yourself with other creative people, but finding good people who support you from the sidelines.

    This step is easy to overlook when it’s missing, and even easier to take for granted when it falls into place. 

    Having people in your life who want to read your writing, hang your art, and attend your concerts is never automatic. It’s precious and a reminder that someone is paying attention. It can be all that holds you together on those too-frequent days when it seems like obscurity and irrelevance is your only companion on a creative adventure. It can hold it all together when the path is unclear.

    Cheerleaders are, of course, not devoid of creativity or otherwise lacking in motivation. Heck no. But they might be people who appreciate your efforts in a field that they themselves do not excel. They are almost certainly people who understand the soul of creative effort and know that encouragement and support are the lifeblood and fuel of its continuity. 

    And most often, they come unasked. You can’t beg and plead for them to cheer and you cannot be anything but thankful that they stay for a day, a month or a lifetime. 

    But when you find them, notice them, and cheer right back.

  • 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. 

  • Meta Creativity

    I blame the processors for the rise of meta creativity.

    It is us, too. It is our penchant for gossip and rubber necking at disasters, but I would argue that it wasn’t until the algorithm turned it into a cottage industry and a lucrative product that meta creative content blossomed like an algal outbreak in mountain lake through our feeds.

    Let me interject here with a definition. When I use the term “meta creative” I am referring to a genre of published media that falls somewhere in the uncanny valley between genuine creative works such as film, music, art, and literature on one end and critique-slash-analysis on the other end. In the middle there is a new variety of lazy, reactionary performance that often involves belittling, mocking, panning or otherwise pointing and laughing at (sometimes literally) the work of other people (and this is the important part) with nothing of value to add besides the raw reaction.

    Honest critique and analysis plays a vital role in creativity, and any art school grad will tell you that learning how to gather and act on genuine feedback is vital to improvement. 

    On the other hand, the kind of sloppy green screen overlay of a mocking primal reaction to something, positive or negative, serves very little besides its own self promotion and amplification on the work of others.

    It is a spectrum, of course. There is no perfect critique and there is no absolutely pointless meta creative reaction, but the algorithm certainly seems to reward the lingering gaze of any and all of us who stare a little too long at the simplistic emotional takes of reaction clips. 

    We’ve lost something for that, and I write that as both a creative soul and as grumpy old guy who knew a more supportive creative era, now passed.

    This is cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

  • Reality Thirst

    As insurmountable as the social media algorithms often seem to me, occasionally I break through for a few moments and sense the craving beyond.

    I started taking a lot of black and white photographs lately. If you are reading this post where I published it, on my website, you may have noticed that each is accompanied by an often-unrelated black and white image. There is nothing particularly secret or hidden in the connection: I just like taking photos and was using the effort of writing here as a place to showcase some of my other (very human) work.

    As I was taking all these photos it occurred to me that I should be sharing them with others besides the handful of readers on this (very new and very obscure) writing project: so I started a fresh Instagram account, gave it a silly name, and started uploading monochrome pics, including many of the ones you can see at the top of these posts.

    Viral is the wrong word. 

    But there was certainly a gush of unprovoked interest in my photos.

    Raw. Simple. Often just fuzzy macros of textures from my yard and neighbourhood, these pics are not works of art. But neither are they slop. They are intentional snaps and observations collected from micro-adventures by yours truly. 

    And people flocked, are flocking, seem to be continuing to flock to follow and like and comment on those pictures. 

    It was a side effort that spun off from the main effort that has become orders of magnitude more public than the original. 

    People, it seems, are craving, yearning, thirsting for something real and interesting.

    This post was original posted on of poets & processors.