8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [28] Fail & Flail

Embracing failure, imperfection, and the happy accidents of trying something new.

Chapter List

  • First Thrust

    Apparently attributable to a conversation published in a book[1] so out-of-print I couldn’t even locate one at a local library, Picasso is to have said that “In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.”

    His point, I think, may have had something to do with character, imperfection and what another famous painter, Bob Ross, probably would have called a “happy accident.”

    Trying to polish, correct, or refine something that emerged as beautiful from that first thrust of the pen, the initial strokes upon a keyboard or an inspired glimmer of photographic insight is, one might claim, fighting against the artistic instinct.  The rawness of the first try carries a beauty that, I might be so bold as to say that Picasso seemed to suggest, is difficult to replicate through copying the effort or nudging it with a more conscious hand.

    I find it captivating, this idea that imperfection has a beauty that transcends a glossy finish. We seem to worship the idea of factory fresh and mint-in-box and too often find ourselves chasing art that fits some commercial vibe or mechanized standardization.  

    Instead, leaning into a first try—not a try devoid of talent or skill, nor a try devoid of an experienced hand—but an attempt that is a first thrust at a new project, art without a reference draft to glance towards, that is where the richness of creativity might be truly bound.

  • Excuse You

    Look around, pay attention and you’ll start to notice it everywhere.

    I happened to notice it the other night while we were having a family night catching up on a couple reality shows. I made a note that I should write something about it.

    Victimhood.

    You don’t fall into that trap, do you? You don’t trip over the wires of opting to blame everyone else for failure. You don’t catch on the snare of looking for external factors every time something goes wrong.

    We were watching that show—you know the one—where pairs of contestants race around the world and do challenges.  One of the teams was lagging, severely, and it was never about them. They played the perpetual victim. Other teams were picking on them. The challenges were so hard. The world was against them. Oh, I’m sure it felt good to dump their successive losses at the feet of everything and everyone else, but wow: it’s a game, it’s supposed to be competitive and challenging and stacked against you at every turn.

    Maybe, sure, it was played up by the editors of the show, but I also recognize that as a personality type. I also know that there are a lot of people with big ideas and ambitious dreams who hit a few little obstacles—and oh, will there be obstacles on the path to creative endeavours—and out come the excuses and blaming everything and everyone else.

    The list is endless, but you’d recognize it the second you heard it: someone or something is preventing those people from the win, so they give up trying.

    But the game is always stacked. The world is always working against most of us. That’s just the universe. 

  • Those Walls

    Let me walk you through the door I found in the wall that had been blocking my path.

    I spent the early part of 2025 building the foundations of a computer game. Code. Art. Story. All the bits strung together into a few megabytes of raw materials that I can compile into a simulation-slash-cozy gamer’s curiosity.

    But yeah. I hit a wall. 

    See, building a game is the work of a hundred different skillsets mingling together into just the right blend. A proper game studio would have specialists who focus on each niche skill. A proper game studio would have project managers who coordinate the timing. A proper game studio would have deadlines nudging their team forward.

    I had me.

    I am not a specialist.

    I am managing my own project.

    My deadlines are ethereal.

    So a wall, even a metaphorical one, spells trouble.

    The details of said wall are not important.  What is important is that walls can be impenetrable and project-ending failure points.  They often are.  And sometimes, often I would argue, creatives run into a wall that they don’t even realize was a wall at all.

    We can then do one of two things. We can give up—and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s the right answer. If the wall is insurmountable, spending the rest of our lives looking for a way over or through it may be a terrible idea.

    On the other hand we can look for a gap, a door, a foothold to climb over, or the place where the wall has crumbled from the efforts of someone who went before and…

    Well. That’s what I did with my game development work.

    Thus I march on, scanning the horizon for the next obstacle for surely there are many more ahead.

  • Advice Less

    You may have found this blog project and be thinking that I’ve made a terrible mistake.

    There’s not really much advice here, you might be thinking.

    You’re not wrong, but you’re not right.

    This was never intended to be a manual about being a creative person. No. Not at all. It was meant to be a collection of thoughts on the accidental nature of creativity. I have no solid advice. I have no lists of skills to check off on your way towards success.  I have no morals or lessons or cautionary tales with polished insights at the end.

    This is a fumbling, imperfect exercise in abstraction. It is an daily exercise in being lost on a path that is as much about the journey as it is about a destination. Imperfection is the goal.

    You want a lesson?

    Fail more. Because it means you tried something and maybe learned.

    Embrace different. Because it might be the only way to stand out in a crowd.

    Close your eyes and ignore all the other advice. Because copying is what machines do and the humanity of creativity is something that might not be teachable so much as felt, gleaned, experienced, caught, or whatever.

    You’re not wrong. There isn’t much advice here, just a few notes from the last guy to wander this path and never really find his way out.

  • Pinch Poster

    This is not the post I had intended to drop here today.

    I’ve been keeping about a week and a half ahead of my schedule these days, writing posts, getting them queued up on the back end of the blog, giving myself both breathing room and time to go back over and revise stuff I’ve written before it goes live.

    And about two weeks ago I started a whole new series. It was going to be about a bunch of big projects I was going to tackle, and write big multi-part articles about.

    I wrote an introduction post that was supposed to go out instead of this post.

    It fumbled and flopped before it even launched. I was struggling getting the actual project done in the middle of writing all about how great it was going. [Slowly pulls back curtain and…]

    In this case, I realized that committing to the time to do the project itself was just out of the realm of reasonability as summer arrives and things get busier around our house. 

    I accept failure as a natural part of working on big ideas. Not everything is going to take and sometimes—like this past week—you’re going to find that you’ve bit off a bit more than you can chew on. Take the L and move on.