did some stream-of-consciousness writing, I had dreamt that an old twitter friend was back on twitter (alas, they are not)
satisfied that I had done a bit of a braindump, I decided to open the bird app, and I discover that I have a dozens of replies and DMs from when I was asleep, which I am probably not going to be reply to, hence this:
I have my coffee, shower, and in the shower I think, "ok, ok, let's try and be productive, we should check our email". (I don't check my email often.)
in my inbox, I'm reminded that, a week ago, I posted about my Patreon, and got 5 new patrons
So now I'm thinking, damn. I should probably post about my patreon more often. I should create a roam page for my thinking about this, and think about it more seriously
while thinking about my patreon, I realized that the tension at the heart of it is between my desire to avoid caring about money vs my understanding that more resources means I can help more people, particularly the disenfranchised kids I care about:
So now I realize, this is a very important talking point for me, inside my own head. I was one of those kids and I remember feeling extremely isolated, gaslighted, etc etc. I want to help those kids. I should make that clearer to me and others. So now we're in wordpress...
very tempted here to switch up to writing a whole separate thing about effective action for change, but I am making the Executive Decision to focus on finishing and publishing this post
got distracted by random nonsense, but came back to publish the post. now it's time to get dinner visakanv.com/blog/kids/
I still haven’t finished checking my email
just to tie this one up – I then ate pizza for dinner with my wife while we watched Money No Enough (1998), then I played Hades for like 4 hours and then showered and went to bed
all in all, pretty representative of a random day in my life
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I’m piecing together bits for an essay I’m probably titling “the Jack Neo moral universe”.
On the surface it may not be interesting to non-Singaporeans, but I think might become my best and most important essay since An Analysis Of Power In Mean Girls
I need to rewatch INS 1&2 and MNE2, but here’s a sketch of a thesis based on MNE1 and ABTM1+2
Jack Neo does a pretty good job of depicting the struggles of regular people - but the frustrating thing is that the central conflict of the stories do not address the core issues
In Money No Enough, the story goes something like this: we live in a materialistic society, money talks, it’s a rich man’s world, etc. Our 3 protagonists are friends with different-ish financial backgrounds and they all end up facing serious financial problems
There’s a scene in Money No Enough where A does something stupid while waiting for another B, and A then says, “I got in trouble because of you!”
It hit me extra hard in that moment that people have different understandings of what “because” means
It’s making me question large parts of my childhood tbh. How much of what felt like cruel or selfish acts were really... people being incompetent re: causality?
It gets dicey, bc malice *can* be disguised as incompetence... sometimes the distinction is irrelevant (JJ’s razor)
It would probably be accurate to say that for most of my life I’ve taken people a little too seriously when they often don’t really mean what they say. 🤔
one of the radicalizing things about making things to sell in the marketplace – including, say, uploading test footage of your guitar playing to youtube – is discovering that the world is much more diverse than you think
I'd say there's such a thing as "marketplace intelligence" or "marketplace sensitivity" and it's something I value highly in people. it's also very learnable
lots of people can go through their entire lives with a very minimal amount of experience in this sphere
there's a chaos surfing element to it
on a long enough timescale, you will encounter...
people who think more highly of you than you think of yourself
people who think more poorly of you than you think of yourself
Woke up to 25,000 followers; hello new friends! Ask me anything 🤓
there are a few things that compete for this- “seek excellent peers”, “being kind makes you smarter”, “you can’t bully people into being loving” - it’s all connected. It’s really about *unlearning* neediness and coercion, which is all around us
I spend so much energy being sensible on twitter that on Facebook I just,
this triggers a memory – when I was a teenager, my parents brought me to see some family friend who would go into a trance state and tell fortunes. they asked him about my schooling and he growled "butthi yengeyo poothu", which translates to sth like, "his mind roams unknown"
at the time it seemed kinda spooky and weird, but on retrospect, damn, he right, and what a badass thing to say