8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: old ideas new ideas

Chapter List

  • Anything New

    I never really learned to play the piano.

    That is, sure, I could jab the keys and grind out a mean Chopsticks as well as the next ten year old, and sure, we had a little keyboard propped up in our living room when I was growing up, and sure, I could poke a key or two at a time to feel out a song. But I never took lessons, never practiced scales, never learned chords, and never did anything besides fumble at the ivories.

    I have been trying to remedy that in 2026, and my days are incomplete if I haven’t sat down at the keys for at least half an hour each day.

    I recommend learning something new. Anything, really.

    Acquiring new skills can sometimes unlock a powerful ability that you never knew you were missing until you found it. A new perspective, a new way of looking at old problems, or a new bit of insight into the otherwise mundane.

    And you never really know what that will be until you try to acquire those skills.

    When I took up running I started to see the world from the perspective of footpaths and interconnected trails.

    When I learned watercolour paints I suddenly saw colours in a different way.

    Now when I get my head around the piano and chords I listen to music differently, hear the shapes of things when I watch movies, and get a bigger sense of sounds that dance around genres of music.

    Your experience will vary.  But you will experience.

  • Thawed Inspiration

    Spring is nigh. And I don’t know what the world looks like where you live, but where I spend my days winter is a bleak, snowy realm that hides the world under a chill blanket whence we await spring and the warmth and the inevitable thaw that comes, too.

    With thaw comes melt, plentiful puddles, and the revelation of all the things that had been covered in snow for months and months reappearing again. Often they are a caked and cruddy, sometimes little more than trash, but occasionally reminding us that there is work to be done in bringing summer to its full glory.

    People far smarter than I have been seeing metaphors in the seasons for long before I arrived and will do so long after I leave, but I will reiterate the point: spring, literal or figurative, is a time of renewal. The world, the mind, the heart, the soul— they all melt eventually and buried under the frozen realm is often surprises of once forgotten things.

    The Blankwraith may be a demon that freezes our creative selves, but even his power is subject to the thaw of inspiration. Even he tires, and ideas emerge from under the snow waiting to be brushed off and dealt with.