8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [2026] The First Year

Chapter List

  • Bad Deals

    Yet another fist-shaking post from a popular YouTuber rolled across my feed recently. 

    This prolific poster of long form video essays was incensed at the draconian policies that resulted in her two hour long video being pulled from the site over a few seconds of copyright claim. I’m not going to out the specifics of this particular influencer (a) because she doesn’t need the publicity, but also (b) because she is just yet another example in a very long line of people who have made a bad deal for exposure and traded their content agency for the publicity and the fame that comes so much easier on those platforms.

    This isn’t an anti-copyright post, but (given the evidence she presented, at least) the claim was very likely a censorial or cash-grab type effort that resulted in exactly what the claimant was looking for: shutting down a popular video. 

    I’ve seen it so frequently now, and it joins a long list of “reasons these platforms own you” screeds I could write.

    All that aside—because I really do hate to be the I-told-you-so guy—but I will be using this as yet another example of why content sovereignty is important to creatives and the lack of power that popular influencer type posters have to deal with when they use corporate social media.  

    I’ll be the first one to tell you that overseeing a private website on a private space and relying 100% on my own elbow grease to build an audience and promote my work, well, it’s not easy. 

    And yes, I am beholden to the laws of the land for what I post—of course I am. 

    But I am also far less beholden to corporate and automated or algorithmic policies to that govern and manage and oversee what goes on a platform when I own said platform. 

    It’s hard to feel sorry for any influencer who has built their entire business on the back of another business and then has to deal with the consequences of (even if you look at it even in the most benign way) working inside of another digital ecosystem—or if you look at it more insidiously, making a deal with the devil for fame and popularity. 

    Once again, my best advice on this is to maintain as much agency and control over the things you make as you can. Or at the very least, when the system fails you, take it on the chin and stop complaining to the rest of us about the imbalance of the deal you’ve made for your popularity.

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

  • Book Guts

    One of the local cafes where I hang out for my morning writing sesh is solid at promoting artists from the neighbourhood. 

    I was ordering my tea and standing beside the cash register were a couple stacks of self-published books for sale, local poets mostly from what I could tell, who had hung out their work with a little sign and a price tag and basically said, hey, “I wrote this… and I live in your community.”

    Maybe that’s my next step, but I will say that it inspired me to do something similar: set up a book stand on my website and offer these words for sale.

    I know I’m going to come across like a bit of self-promotion here, but I think it’s more than that: I’ve been writing away in obscurity for literal decades while simultaneously fearing the big dangling blade of traditional publishing.

    The internet, for all as much as it has sunk into a kind of slop warehouse of inane content, is still filled with more great indie content than I will ever be able to consume in my life. It’s much harder to find in 2026, but it’s there. I’m certain of it.

    My effort at the cafe book drop then comes in the form of code: I whipped up some custom software to convert all these hundreds of posts into something that very much resembles an ebook—and then I dropped it into a page where people might see it there and buy a copy as they are passing through, as much as me saying, hey I wrote this… and I live in your internet community.

    I know it takes guts to put words into something quasi-permanent and then ask someone to pay you for them. I know, because I have spent a long time not having such guts.

    But maybe as I get older and give a few less fucks about the people distracted by fashion reels and shiny influencer slop, those guts are a bit easier to come by.

  • Charred Black

    Winter is coming. Literally.

    I just passed the two hundred post milestone on this writing project, and it has come a long way since I started with a big idea and a handful of introductory posts back in the deeps of last winter. And here we come again.

    Summer was a time of rejuvenation and new ideas, and I spent a lot of the time behind the scenes expanding out the scope of what I was trying to do here, adding features to the website, creating offline “book” versions of my content, and injecting a ton of metadata into the posts that interlink, expand, and clarify the things that I am sharing as nuggets of personal insight.

    It is my personal search for purpose. It feels that way sometimes.

    I came from a realm of professional burnout. I gave the legendary one hundred and ten percent to my various jobs for about twenty-five years, which by my math puts me about two hundred and fifty percent in the black.

    But that black isn’t an asset. It was char. And about a month or so after writing this I’ll be turning fifty—five-oh—and while that certainly isn’t my personal winter, it definitely feels a lot like autumn.

    I take comfort in knowing that I’ve been a bit of an autumn person my whole life, tho, so perhaps this work, this project, this writing, and whatever clarity has tumbled from the effort to over-philosophize and hyper-analyze my own creative soul has marked a seasonal transition.

    I can’t necessarily tell you how to find your own meaning, but wrapping your head around where you’ve been through introspection, writing and refocus has definitely started working some magic on me.

    Hunker down, the weather is about to shift.

  • Iteration Epics

    I love the idea of incrementalism. In fact, I have a confession. The original intent of this website, the whole first draft of the plan, was to write one hundred percent about the practice of incremental work, iteration, and working through challenges, gamification, and step-by-step efforts to a bigger goal.

    Instead, I simply made it a single chapter, and—you may have noticed—I talk about it with a bit of bias and abundance.

    Oddly enough as this explanation post (I’ve been writing one, in order, for each of my topics on every Monday for the last twenty-some weeks) came up in the queue, this project is simultaneously approaching it’s two hundredth post. In fact, this may very well be it.  And now well into my tenth month of writing an article for every weekday of this year so far, I’m approaching eighty thousand words of content on this site.

    Eighty thousand words is a book. Printed, you’d pick it up, hold it in your hand and think “Jeeze, this guy’s got something to get off his chest. This is a thick book.”

    I’ve made that. I’ve written it. I’ve posted it. I’ve refined it, tweaked it, supplemented it with citations and definitions. I’ve sent it out into the world for the better part of a year for anyone to read. And I’ve done it all a few hundred words at a time, each and every weekday, iteratively and in increments.

    If that doesn’t hammer home the point I’m trying to make I don’t know what else does. Either way, under the category of Iteration & Epics I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • For Granted

    How does one recognize one’s own biases?

    Look, society has you in a headlock, and that’s not always a bad thing. I know that I happen to live in a pretty great time and place. We have political quarrels, sure. And there is a shitload too much inequity in the world, but personally I’m wrapped up in so many layers of protective society that it is easy to take it for granted.

    But taking something for granted can have both positive and negative vibes.

    Bias comes in all forms, and this has never really been a political or a social studies project so my preference to examine it a little closer hones in on the art of it all.

    And maybe that’s the best place to start anyways: beginning with something low stakes, like how we think about art or music or photography, is a helluva lot easier on the soul than reevaluating our social, economic, and political biases, huh?

    This also isn’t an instruction manual. I’m not going to itemize how to squint your eyes at just the right angle to see a new perspective or pinch your brain down a route that let’s you outthink preconceptions. I’m merely going to suggest that bias is both insidious and abundant in most of our lives. You can probably start recognizing it if you care to look for it, and starting with low friction notions about, say, that hobby you love so much can probably make you better at recognizing and accepting bigger biases. 

    Society is a wonderful thing we built, but we’re still humans who have the power to ask questions about why we do things the way we do—and if art was meant to expand the mind of the audience, whose to say it can’t expand the mind of the artist, too?