The more time I put into getting this new site ready, the more possibilities I see for turning it into my central (and only) communications portal. But could this be more? Could this finally be an end to the demon of my “telescoping effort” conundrum?
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That’s what I call the hurdle that has perplexed me for years and held back the public release of almost a dozen projects.
As a self-accused “idea guy,” I am constantly coming up with weird (the word my children use for “interesting”) projects that explore the corners of my fascination with creative expression. But being an idea guy, my fascination is all about that initial puzzle. Can I make it work? Once I’ve unlocked the trick and solved the puzzle at the center of the maze, my fascination rapidly plummets. From there, the process of slogging from prototype to polished product begins to look more like a prison sentence than a hobby. I see a sort of “vertigo zoom” effect in my head as I imagine a future chained to the minutiae of a puzzle I’ve lost interest in. My energy peters out and I quickly fall prey to the siren call of the Next Big Idea®.
The next stage of that telescope comes when I try to look past the polishing phase and imagine life after a public release. The most likely scenario, of course, is dead silence, as the world proves its complete indifference to whatever thing I’ve created. So to attract any kind of attention, I have to become a ::shudders:: promoter. Banging metaphorical pots and pans up and down the streets of the Internet trying to attract attention above the din of other pot-and-pan wielding hucksters who are both more enthusiastic about it and more skilled. The very thought is enough to make a guy like me yearn for the sweet, numbing release of death.
And if I can somehow look past all that, there’s still the spectre of actually having built an audience. As in, a mass of people who’ve endorsed your dream with their attention, their enthusiasm, and maybe even their hard-earned money. They’ll want you to stick around, won’t they? Fix the bugs, release updates, or sequels? So to serve that, you’ll need to spend time on social media, and writing newsletters, posting to Patreon, going to conventions… I really enjoy spending time with people who’ve discovered my stuff, but there’s so much extra work to make that happen - so many places they gather - and on each one you need to build up a presence. And maintain it.
I know he’s only in my head, but I’ve never been able to shake the demon who tells me that success with any one project is just a pair of handcuffs that will trap me in service to social media oligarch after oligarch, forever and ever, until the end of my days.
But with this new site, I’m finally beginning to see a way to evict that demon (and how oligarchs) for good.
What if my audience wasn’t about any one specific project, or even any single medium? What if I could find people like me who are fascinated by an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of puzzles, genres, and mediums? And instead of building presence after presence on every new social media platform that springs out of the weeds, what if I just focused on building one - my website - and made it an information hub about all my projects? I could customize it so that it minimized the time I had to spend managing my presence, and maximized the time I spend doing new things, and engaging with the people who find it interesting.
We’ll that’s precisely the ambition for this new version of Creativity Hacker. A central hub where folks of my tribe gather. A place where we can talk about the projects, and about nothing at all. A forum that I can post to quickly and easily, when the mood strikes, but that doesn’t have any moving parts that can be sh-t on by hackers and cost me days or even weeks of time each year manning the walls in defence.
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?
Refactoring the shadowmaker has become a bigger headache than I had originally anticipated, but it’s for the long-term health of the system, so I’m sticking to my guns. This weekend added further drama when I finally stopped running away from frontmatter and embraced it for all my metadata. Sure, scattering #ch-command directives throughout the body of the notes was insane, but fixing it is going to mean more than just adding a few metadata fields. I may have to completely change the way I use Obsidian.
While trying to integrate the many episodes of CaveTV into the site, I realized that the ontology was getting cramped. It needs to be revised to better distinguish between internal projects, external brand identities, multiple deliverables within a brand, and distinct showrooms.
What follows is the scheme we devised for what the abstractions are, how they should be tagged in Obsidian, and how the files will be managed within Hugo.