Blogs on Creativity Hacker

Exploding the End of Fight Club

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:07:05 +0000

One of my favorite movies to discuss is Fight Club. Love it or hate it, if you’ve ever seen it, you probably have a theory about what it’s trying to say. And my favorite way to discover someone’s take is to ask them to explain a single line of dialogue. No matter what you think the movie is all about, your stance is almost always revealed by how you explain that one line.

But of all the explanations I’ve ever heard, I’ve never had anybody echo my own take. Which surprises me, because it’s the only one I can think of that explains all the facts.

Before we get into it though, I should warn you that there be spoilers ahead. Big ones. If you’ve already seen the movie and been down into that grubby basement, then come on in. But if you aren’t a member yet, then you can just piss off.

We don’t talk about Fight Club.

Adulting 101 - Three Simple Rules

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 22:16:43 +0000

As a parent to several adult children, one of my last official acts before sending each one out into the world has always been to give them a sort of “job description” for being an adult. With our last fledgling quickly approaching that milestone, this will be my last such talk, so I thought I’d take a moment to share my simple rubric.

Trump Saves NASA

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 05:05:43 +0000

The Whitehouse is jubilant today, hailing President Donald J. Trump as an unprecedented genius. After firing former NASA Chief Bert McMurdle and installing himself in the dual roles of lead administrator and chief scientist, the multi-talented Trump effected sweeping changes to the entire roster of programs under management by the agency. The first to reach completion, Project Artemis was concluded successfully today, and came in at an estimated total cost of only 12.5%, as compared to the budget originally approved by McMurdle.

Spinners of the Web

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:54:09 +0000

The internet is full of advice on how to spot AI-generated images, videos, articles, newscasts, etc. But IMO, that’s entirely the wrong conversation.

Forget “How do we spot them?” We need to be talking about how society is going to function when the answer is: You can’t.

A Better Word Than Pibling

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:02:12 +0000

Your grandmother and grandfather are your grandparents. Your son and daughter are your children. Your brother and sister are your siblings. But when it comes to uncles and aunts, English gives us no genderless term that includes both.

The closest we’ve got, is an ugly, hatchet-faced word, made by collapsing “parent’s sibling” into… (Wait for it…)

“Pibling.”

Quite frankly, “pibling” sucks. But I’ve got an idea…

Improving What3Words

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 19:28:02 +0000

What3Words is a cool service that takes clunky GPS coordinates like 52.1261450, -106.6589970 and turns them into phrases, like twisty.wedding.runs, that are much easier to both say and remember.

But I’ve got some ideas for how it could be even better.

The Very Slow Game Jam

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 17:54:40 +0000

When I was a teenager, my dad and I would play slow chess. His job involved regularly rotating shift work, which meant that we often went weeks at a time where our days didn’t really overlap. So, to stay connected, we kept a chess board in the kitchen. Every day, Dad would make a move on the board while eating after he got home, and I would make mine after school. It was a fun way to stay connected when our lives were otherwise out of sync.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we were also inventing what would become an important ritual between us.

Tilder Disease

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:53:22 +0000

One thing you won’t find on this site is any TL;DR summaries. That’s by choice. I can see their value when browsing a site (like Reddit) where the culture is all about short-beat conversations. In that world, hitting a longer entry mid-scroll feels like hitting a bridge abutment on the Autobahn. But do we really want all our discourse to be reducible to the textual equivalent of a sound bite?

The Ethics of Blogging

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 08 May 2025 05:51:21 +0000

Creating online communities is easy; but doing it ethically is not.

Over the last few decades, we’ve developed many hacks and tricks - a playbook, if you like - for tempting communities of like-minded humans to gather into online echo chambers, where they can be manipulated in demographically unified buckets. So before I go too far, I need to ask myself an important question: Is blogging inherently evil? Or is it possible to thread this needle without crossing over to the dark side?

The American Dream is a Funhouse Mirror

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 22:05:05 +0000

Over on TrustCafe, James Young was trying to make sense of the broken American system that is being twisted out of all recognizable shape by the current Republican regime. He asked simply, “How did my country get here?”

I replied with my own take on the question, and then realized that my answer fit perfectly into this new blog stream that I’ve been thinking about.

Shopping Online Is Greener

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:51:46 +0000

For years I’ve felt guilty about my use of online shopping. All those little packages coming from big Eastern cities, all the way across the continent, to be driven to my door by a harried little man in an overworked Honda. Surely that’s wasteful compared to me just going to the local bigbox outlet and buying it in person, right? Well, I recently had a thought that has me questioning that logic.

Soft-serve Sci-Fi

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:47:03 +0000

Over the course of my lifetime, science fiction has gone from a niche-market storyform aimed at geeks and propeller-heads to a cultural juggernaut consumed by the masses. So you would think that, as a one-time card-carrying member of the Junior Space Ranger’s Adventure Club, I would be delighted by the scifi-rich world I now find myself living in.

But I’m not.

Healing the Existential Malaise

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:35:07 +0000

In all the hubbub of getting the project section going, I’ve been ignoring the more bloggish portion of the site. But after putting together the Countdown To Launch, it became impossible to ignore it any longer. So this is my inaugural blog post, in which I’ll try to guess what the hell I intend to blog about.

Review of Typoman

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:26:47 +0000

The video gaming world became toxic to me 20 years ago when I started getting motion sick every time I played. Maybe the game engines changed or maybe it was something in my head, but an entertainment medium I had previously loved suddenly became off limits, just as my children were beginning to discover it. But today was different.

The Regatta Savant

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 06:57:28 +0000

25 years ago, my dad bought a 16’ sailboat for the family cottage and, with no previous experience, taught himself how to sail it. Almost certainly on the spectrum, he spent every sunny day tinkering with his rigging and studying sailing physics, just to eke out a bit more speed. He’d even go out on calm days to see if he could get it to move. So you can imagine how delighted he was when the cottagers on our lake decided to hold a regatta.