8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Publish Owner

    Publish on your Own Site…

    …Syndicate Everywhere.

    Leave it to Cory Doctorow to drop mention[1] of a content phenomenon that has been haunting my efforts for over a decade. 

    Among the most insidious of things that social media does to creators (and that’s a long list) is fool people who write words and make—shudder—content to share online, is to quietly neglect to remind any of us that we lose ownership the second we click the post button on any those sites.

    No really.

    They’ll pretend like you can edit and curate and delete and archive, but if you post on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn or any of a thousand other smaller platforms, they will hand wave around your ownership and rights, but in reality you have few.

    I call these places corporate social media for a reason: you are handing over your content not to a community of users but to the corporation that owns the software, server, and algorithms. They can show people what you created if and when they choose, they can censor you, and (as I have witnessed in the outrage rant by many creators over the years who have suffered because of it) they can delete your entire account for vague reasons that they may or may not choose to explain.

    We’re not going to change that.

    But Doctorow has an acronym for an idea I’ve been screaming from my blogs for years: POSSE or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

    Or simply, as a creator, it is incumbent upon you to figure out how to make your own central place to keep the things you make—a website, basically—and then syndicate, promote, link, cast, or otherwise surface from there, if for no other reason than you should keep control of ownership of it with every ounce of your digital strength.

    This is a cross-post from of Poets & Processors.

  • Good Vibrations

    The little speaker that I bought for roving musical adventures has a quirky side benefit—or, at least, a curiosity that has yet to become annoying.

    Regular readers may recall that I picked up a little battery powered five watt pocket amp with a bluetooth speaker and a quarter inch input jack. Specifically, it is the Positive Grid Spark Go (not an endorsement, just a side note) meant to be plugged into an electric guitar but simultaneously useful for both an aspiring electric violinist and his semi-regular synth jam sessions in the park.

    Then too, I threaded the output from my MIDI controller keyboard from the weakling computer speakers directly into the amp, so that when I sat down at my desktop in my home office to practice  I could make use of the richer sounds from the new speaker.

    It’s not great for more natural piano sounds, but as I explore the extensive instrument library that came bundled with the MIDI controller I have been building a collection of favourites that are a few standard deviations from natural—hybrids and bells and strings intermingled with raindrops—and many of those have rich bass ranges.

    The Spark Go has an interesting feature for a little speaker. If you lay it down on its back it has a bass pad that acoustically enjoins the surface of whatever it touches—the table or desk, in my case—and adds an audible and physical dimension to said surface.

    All that is to say, that when I’ve been playing bass heavy instruments on my MIDI controller and the speaker is on the desk the whole thing rumbles with a tactile joy that brings the music to life from and then right back through my fingertips.

    Curious technologies lead to simple joys.

  • Summer Showing

    I was back at it in the park recently, sitting cross-legged on a blanket under a tree, far from the path and people, with my synth propped up on a portable camp table, still trying to find a summery sound.

    Thanks to a new addition to my gear collection I was no longer playing with headphones, but rather I had propped up my small speaker amp nearby, set it to a reasonable volume, and was filling the local air with a bit of my chaotic noodling.

    It was not intended to be a performance.

    The reality of being outdoors in a park making art, taking photos, or playing music is that it is public. Eyes will connect. Heads will turn.

    We travelled to Europe a few years ago and did a lot of plein air sketching in very public places and it’s a whole other thing, let me tell you, to sit near a few thousands of wandering tourists and do your craft.

    Back in my little park a man on bike with his dog stopped to look, eyes connected, head turned. He stood in the grass a respectful distance away as if he expected me to crack out a banger and was getting ready for the show. I tapped out the first few bars of a Bach Prelude I had been practicing earlier that week and which was still stuck in my fingertips.

    He lingered for another couple minutes then cycled away.

  • Late Ready

    Everyone starts somewhere, but some of us start later than others.

    There are a few hard realities of learning a new craft after a certain age. Heck, like almost anything there is a ticking clock for greatness. Me picking away at the piano at nearly fifty is almost certainly not going to open up a spot at The Juilliard School any more than my dabbling in urban sketching this late in life it going to give me the time and energy to pursue a scholarship at Emily Carr University.

    The reality is that after certain doors in life, close most of the world will almost certainly regard your pursuits of artistic and creative skill as little more than a retirement hobby.

    And maybe that’s fair.

    …but it also isn’t.

    Art, fiction, music, all of it is as much about translating life experience into something outside of our memories. Fine whiskeys are aged to make them better, so why not artists, too?

    I am on the fringes of an age category transition myself, looking at much of middle age as something I’ve been through and starting to think about not just age, but the general idea of starting on a creative path as a late entrant.

    I got into watercolour when I was older than my first instructor.

    I took up the violin at forty.

    I didn’t start seriously trying to play the piano until just a year ago.  

    And something tells me that my flailing sense of urgency about aging might be a wee bit overblown. 

    Under the category of Late & Ready I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Devaluing Uncommercial

    What happens when worth is no longer judged by standards except for sales?

    No really? Art for the sake of art is like science for the sake of science: Serendipity takes us to interesting places we never would have planned.

    But when the only goal is profit the road has often been well travelled by thousands before us. 

    I have a bachelors degree in science and while I never pursued academia nor research, I often throughout my career ran in the tracks of businesses, governments and charities that (in their own self interest, realized or not) would put pressure on the research industrial complex to create output with profitable outcomes.

    The counterbalance to commercial science, of course, is often referred to as pure science, research driven by raw curiosity and following the data down interesting paths, an effort that has arguably both squandered a lot of money but also led us to discoveries that have reshaped the modern world in immeasurable ways. And more importantly, many of those world reshaping discoveries were not profitable… until they were, and so in retrospect businesses clap their hands at the ingenuity of the people who fought back all those profit-motivational barriers to discover interesting things despite it all.

    Many of the same people who scoff at pure science will, too, flatly argue that the best art, the stuff hanging in museums, say, was created under patronage—the church, monarchies or otherwise rich benefactors—and so to claim anything artistic can be created lacking the same is a fool’s errand. 

    The modern equivalent of course is corporate contracts, government grants or—for the smaller among us—algorithmically-driven fame leading to online fan sales. And it’s hard to argue that the folks who go viral are often the ones filling a commercial demand be that for trendy teen lit, spectral watercolour prints, or studio-quality family portraits. All of it is wrapped in sales metrics, of course, and all of it is considered “good” because it sells—it makes a profit.

    So I’ll repeat: what happens when worth is no longer judged by standards except for sales? What happens to art for the sake of art?