8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Part 3 – Clicking In

The creative human fits into a bigger picture spanning the gamut of society, technology and tradition. The grit of creativity.

Chapter List

  • No Dice

    Among the first question I assume you have asked (or wanted to ask) of anyone attempting to write a daily blog (like this) is where do all the ideas come from?

    It’s no easy thing to think of something reasonably new and at least a little interesting to write about every day.  I will admit that, sure, I only post five days a week, Monday to Friday, but still: that is about twenty posts per month, and at least four thousand words spread across around five entries uploaded like clockwork each weekday.

    Brainstorming is key.

    I have written in the past about going for walks with a notepad, or sitting at the window in the cafe pondering the world while I wait for the sparks of imagination to ignite.  This month I tried something new: story dice[1].

    If you are a creative writer no doubt you’ve seen these, maybe even own these. Dice with pictograms on the side that are meant to help authors come up with fictional story plots.  But here’s the thing: I have found, strangely enough, that the little icons on each face of each die is abstract enough that rolling three or four fresh cubes gives just the right boost to my imagination, primed by the topics of this blog, to spark a few solid ‘X meets Y in the context of Z’ points into my digital brainstorming notebook.

    In fact, at least a dozen of the posts you’ll likely read in April spawned out of this random rolling of inspirational fate. So I suppose then that ideas, with the right tool and mindset, can come from pretty much anywhere.

  • Costume Party

    Does everyone need to brand themselves? 

    A personal brand goes well beyond a clever URL and a logo made up of your initials. 

    In an online world we are presented with this ideas of an avatar, a kind of costume that we don when we share our work, our thoughts, or our best selves in digital spaces.

    Since we are (obviously) unable to be online in the physical, tangible way that is the organic stuff of reality and a million years of social evolution, what we then present online is necessarily a construct. After all, we cannot know the subtleties of our own personalities like the ticks and quirks we give off when sitting across from a real person, so all of it is fabricated as some kind of manicured self image if we like that idea or not.

    Embracing this idea, leaning into it, is the notion of personal brand: shaping that avatar to fulfill a purpose, and perhaps to be more than—or at least a more refined and controlled version of—our real world selves.

    The notion this implies is that we are all somehow emotionally mature enough to construct these online characters in a way that presents us in a positive and beneficial way. 

    What this implies is skill and nuance. 

    What this notion misses is that not all masks well made.

    To brand oneself, one puts on a mask and becomes someone or something else, which can be useful and necessary, but can be a difficult illusion to maintain. 

    This doesn’t make it impossible or ill-advised, but rather perhaps something that is done with care and purpose and not just because it seems to be a fad.

  • Fail Bots

    The algorithm does not care if you succeed and in fact may want you to fail.

    Have you heard of the algorithm? We toss that term around like it has a deep history and long roots into our culture, and in some ways it might, but the algorithm itself is our newest creative barrier and one designed for the very purpose of siphoning the worth from everything you make.

    In their unchecked wisdom, the architects of our modern global communications platforms realized two things. First, they understood that the firehose of random creativity that emerged from millions of people posting to the internet was more enchanting when churned into curated maelstrom. Second, they learned there was money to be made from turning the creative efforts of those millions into a commodity labeled with the soulless term “content.” To engineer this transformation of art into corporate value they birthed complex mechanizations to sort and shuffle, scrape, churn, prune, and cultivate, all if it extracting the worth of human creativity into a storm of placid, flaccid… ugh… content.

    If you participate, that is if you make “content” then you will feed the algorithm and for a while you will feel as if you have achieved success. But rather than nurture the soul as art and creativity is meant to do, you will only enslave yourself to that mechanism.

    On the other hand, if you make things that do not fit neatly into the digital slots and grooves of the algorithm, that system will almost certainly work against you. It wants you to fail because you give it no literal value.

    But know this: you give the rest of us that value instead.

    The algorithm wants you to fail, so prove it wrong.

  • Eight Clicks

    No one has yet asked, but it’s about time I explained: what’s in a name? What’s in my name, to be exact. 

    I started writing creative fiction under the banner of “8 Clicks from Nowhere” a few years ago. Where it emerged from is not a piece of inspiration that derives meaning or clarity from much anything tangible nor from a deliberate plan. It just is.

    An 8 looks a bit like a B, the first letter of my first name.

    Clicks are webby.

    And if I claimed to be anywhere but the middle of a creative nowhere, I’d be exaggerating.

    Nowhere, you ask?

    I have friends who might eagerly disagree with that sentiment if they thought I was exclusively referring to this physical place. Our city, as much as it would hardly qualify for a shortlist of creative hotspots of the world, is neither a slouch for creative souls. 

    But yet I have often felt a pang of regret that while I live geographically in a place that is just okay for creative collaboration, I definitely live mentally, emotionally, spiritually in a place that is an oasis in a deadly dessert of creative isolation.

    I have long struggled to find a kindred spirit of the kind who might dig deep into the fertile soils of imagination where I tend.

    It is a lonely creative space.

    It has been nothing short of a lifelong state for which I have no clear remedy.

    It is, then, a state of creative existence I have embraced in my techie, webby name, finding myself as I do 8 clicks from nowhere in particular.

  • Opinionated Facts

    My opinion is not fact.

    Elsewhere, I do a lot of writing about critical thinking and evidence-based inquiry. That is to say, I am curious about curiosity and the mechanisms by which we learn, know, and believe things to be true.

    If they are actually true is an entirely different matter, of course.

    I was watching a video the other day, a review for an audio product of some sort, and after a lot of “shoulds” and other such recommendations by the host he looked right into the camera, his voice changed tone, and he solemnly added the caveat to his entire product rant saying “…but my opinion is not fact, it’s just my opinion. Do your own research.”

    What a great thought.

    This concept of opinion versus fact too often, in my opinion, goes unsaid.

    A lot of us making and creating and sharing find it easier to do so without the burden of evidence or absolutes. We write something and then hang it out there for evaluation, all the while never adding that asterisk of self-checking: adding, perhaps that this is just an opinion, my opinion, and I stand by it, but you should make your own judgements after all. 

    This is my opinion, everything I write here, all the advice and so-called insight. My ideas. My thoughts. My scribbles. My notions, and all of it based in my singular experience. It’s not fact, unsaid as I often leave it to be.

    Take it for what it is worth. Nothing more, nothing less.