8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

DispatCHes
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Summer Synth

    What does summer sound like?

    Oh sure, it seems obvious—ice cream trucks, and birds chirping in the trees, Vivaldi symphonies and sunshine bouncing off the asphalt—but I was sitting in the park recently and I had brought along my synth.

    Remember my synth? About a year and a half ago I bought an Arturia Microfreak digital synthesizer (not a sponsored mention, by the way) which at about the size of a laptop computer has twenty-five solid state keys and about thirty knobs & buttons for tweaking and tuning the sound envelope. It is not a keyboard or a piano, but rather a proper (albeit budget) synthesizer with powerful shaping tools, a matrix-based sound design engine, an LFO, arpeggiator, sequencer and—oh, the list goes on. It’s also pretty portable, so I can pop it in a backpack with a battery pack and some headphones and—yeah—go sit in the park and play music.

    I have about four hundred patches loaded into the memory banks, presets for interesting sound patterns and pads and leads and bass effects and even all variety of cosmic sound effects.

    I thought it would be easy to find a summery sound.

    Because I was, as mentioned, sitting there in the park with my synth and my headphones and making music for no one but myself and I wanted a summery vibe.

    Synths, and perhaps this was merely a factor of my synth and how I had it configured, seem very wintery: echoey and airy wisps of noise, hulking bass tones, crackling shivers, and creaking sine waves. I tuned through my options, scrolling the knob and seeking something with mood that matched the sun and the grass and the mosquitos flitting about in the same and I struggled. 

    A tinkling piano sound, a ringing lead that evoked a steel drum, or the croaking higher octaves of a patch named after a frog—I was close.

    Summer was all around, but I couldn’t put my finger on something that fit. What does summer sound like, after all? 

  • Young Restless

    I made the mistake of asking an AI chatbot for motivation the other day.

    When one leans into these sorts of modern tools for creative inspiration it is helpful to remember that they are the strangest sorts of things often juxtaposing unearned flattery with inhumanly blunt criticism. Grain of salt on standby.

    My curiosity was with a very human problem for which I knew the answer but I figured an all-knowing resource-consuming generative search tool might come up with something unique to say: why do I so often run out of steam on new projects?

    The joys of starting a new hobby, tackling a new challenge, or learning a new skill are often gloriously rewarding.

    And when we were young, damn, everything was new and interesting.

    I’m wheeling in on fifty this year and I find that the joy of newness is not only something I crave, but an energy and vibe that tanks likes a bad metaphor with the lifespan of an ice cream treat in the sunshine.

    The AI knew why just as well as I did: some mix of psychology and endorphins and reward stimuli in the primal parts of my woefully organic brain. 

    Fixing the issue is a bigger challenge than just asking a bot, though, and I think it might help to spend some time getting my own very human brain around the problem.

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

  • Polka Truths

    If I was asked to cobble together a top ten list of my deepest and strangest creative influences, leaders of thought and individuality, curiosity and cleverness, people who have evoked the best from my introspective heart, near the very top of that list would surely be “Weird Al” Yankovic.

    My first interaction with the parody artist was when I bought “Dare to be Stupid”[1] on cassette tape while in grade school, the first album I ever bought with my own money, and I wore that darn thing out listening to it and memorizing every song.

    My latest interaction with the musician was just last week when I bought tickets to his touring show, one for me and one for my daughter, which is coming to my city later this year. It’ll be the first time in my forty years as a fan that I’ll see him perform live.

    And that’s the thing, isn’t it. Forty-plus years (nearly fifty, to be more precise) of making music and entertaining a loyal fanbase is nothing to shirk at, but it also represents a span of time lacking scandal or public outrage, all while being something completely unorthodox in time, space, music, and commercially-bankable content.

    And it all really occurred to me as I was walking this morning, having loaded a few classics onto the playlist of my phone: If there was ever a model upon which to look with awe and reverence for what it means to be a truly creative soul, how can we not count Mr. Yankovic as a paragon?

    Dare to be stupid, indeed.

    That’s the real truth some of us are looking for.

  • 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.

  • Proper Bookish

    You’ll need to excuse my excitement yet again. I’m going on holiday for most of the front half of July so I’ve been writing these posts nearly three weeks in advance to get a leg up on the schedule and timing… and I’ve just this morning (in early July) looked at the word count on this project.

    It’s now well over fifty thousand. A proper book.

    Fifty thousand words was always the novel-length goal set out at the beginning of November when that infamous[1] novel writing challenge took place and we all rushed to pen fifty thousand words in thirty days.

    I now only point to it as a milestone.

    Oh, and as a reminder about my biggest and most core bit of quasi-advice on this project: the power of iteration and incrementalism.  Again, and again, and probably again I will point to these very words and just say: twenty minutes a day and a couple hundred words. It adds up.

    Heck, I don’t know if some random book publisher is out there trolling around looking for the next project, but hey… this needs some more organization and polish, but I’ve got the guts of something serious here. Don’t you agree?

    Okay, fine. I’ll back off the self-aggrandizing and get back on topic.

    Fifty thousand words of something is definitely not nothing—nor is it everything—but it is worth noting, particularly as a point about putting in the work. 

    I did. I am. I will. You can, too.