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14 Sep, 34 tweets, 14 min read
kinda feel like doing an AMA because I crossed 34k followers but I’m also sleepy and lazy and can’t be arsed to do the voice - you know the talkshow host sort of voice? anyway. I’m just some guy lounging in a bunk bed, feel free to ask me questions if u like
maybe, tho I don’t watch much anime these days and I have several others in my backlog (eizouken, evangelion). but maybe
to rebuild the Baghdad house of wisdom
I am! I’m physically tired from weird sleep cycles, a little emotionally exhausted from working on my book, but I’m happy where I am. Thanks for asking! I hope you’re ok too 🥰🙏🏾
it’s kinda nondescript- not particularly delicious but not entirely bland either. like, rice, chicken, gravy… fish… pasta… cant complain

these days there are civilian subcontractors who handle the food so we don’t have to get involved, which is probably for the best 😂
it’s tricky. I guess it depends on the context of the meeting. sometimes I see a good opportunity to present them with something (an idea, POV, etc) that I know will help them, and it does, and it’s amazing. But sometimes I can get too invested and it’s not good for either of us
zooming out and seeing the big picture, I think my “success rate” more than mitigates my “failure rate” — anybody who is helped is helped substantially, anybody who isn’t helped is hopefully at worst just annoyed for a bit. I do feel bad when I fail to handle this perfectly
seek excellent peers. work to earn the respect and admiration of people you respect and admire. learn to be kind and generous and encouraging. everything else you could need would be something your peers would help Goh with + nudge you towards visakanv.com/blog/seek-exce…
I’m pretty good at math, I think. I always enjoyed logic puzzles etc as a kid. I enjoy finding things out, and math is a great tool to help you find things out. I like to nerd out about how early mathematicians (and maybe modern ones too!) saw it as something profound, godly
that’s what I’m tryna do!
I don’t think children need to be raised in a way that is “cognitively beneficial”. Raise them with love, take them seriously, be honest with them, involve them in your life. If you enjoy using multiple languages around them, they will too. If you make it a burden they’ll hate it
do whatever makes their heart sing

be bold and courageous in doing what you love

introduce the best people you know to each other

be kind to each other

the more good people we have around here who have come alive, the greater this will compound and snowball
I don’t think it’ll ~change~ my trajectory

one selfish thing I wanna do is renovate my house so my wife and I can live in a nicer environment, that’s like $20k-ish

other than that I will be deploying all the assets I have towards commissioning and supporting creative work
my greatest achievement is my marriage, if we have kids it’ll be them too. and my friends, and all the people I’ve introduced to each other. my life is really simple in principle, all of the answers to all of these questions are the same. # of shining eyes
Friendly ambitious nerds, the topic of my first book! to reference a previous answer, people who have come alive, whose hearts are singing, eyes are shining. People who are curious and joyful, optimistic, imaginative, look out for each other and try to make better things happen
I do earnest videos and I reply earnestly to every comment as much as I can. I try to be encouraging and always seek whatever seems most compelling and interesting. Same general principle of all of my interactions with everyone everywhere, as much as I can manage
I would say it’s an idea that’s been with me from the very beginning, since I was a child in a library. It just took ~25 years for me to find a catchy phrase for it. I have always been the same guy😅. I used to blog about local politics, organise local concerts, all the same idea
“Calling” is an interesting word… i think it started out feeling like a bunch of minor disjoint observations, like hey how come we aren’t all talking about how cool X is? Took me a bunch of experience(s) and reflection on that exp to see how it’s all variations of the same
Twitter, YouTube, TikTok

it’s bananas to me that social media is real and that we can use it to put messages out into the world. It’s like Cerebro from the X-Men, for finding the others, worldwide. Our predecessors would’ve done anything for these tools
yea nothing is coming to mind lol. I just talk about whatever I feel like talking about. you could say I’ve optimised my entire life for this. The bottleneck is not “opportunity” to speak, so much as… reading and research that I haven’t done
I haven’t visited enough to feel confident in a choice! I guess I might pick the Meenakshi temple in Madurai, India. It’s just so *large*. There’s nothing like it in Singapore. It feels almost like an entire sacred city. The energy there is something else. It’s electric
I’ve never been! Erm,,, the beaches? And erm… the bogans? We all got our own bogans

Oh I do enjoy Australian slang. I hardly understand it but I appreciate it. Y’all gave the world “selfie” didn’t you? What an A+ contribution. Just takin’ a selfie at the barbie this arvo
I think of technology as an extension of ourselves, starting with stone tools all the way up to computers and software. So it’s like asking, will humanity be humanity’s saving grace or our downfall? The answer is yes. We are our own brightest light & deepest dark. Our tech is us
probably my smartphone? it’s 611am and I’m in some obscure military camp in the middle of nowhere but thanks to this magic rectangle I get to interface with all my friends around the world, instantly, and query basically all of human knowledge. A guitar too is infinite fun. Books
lately I’ve been fascinated and obsessed with the labyrinth, as a concept, as a metaphor, experience. Lots of questions about what does it mean to go deeper, what are layers, what is a center, linearity, recursion, etc
My personal style is to keep things as simple as possible. Ask, what are you trying to do? Why? It helps to have a hypothesis. Alright now attempt the thing. Observe how the process strains and/or fails. Look for the bottleneck. What’s missing? Address it. Celebrate progress
it’s hard to pick, I want to say “all of them”. maybe The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, for being so bleak. Or maybe Satan Burger, by Carlton Mellick III, for opening my eyes to the absurd. Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, which is a short shot to the gut. Flowers for Algernon,
the currency and building block of relationships & connections is attention, so we gotta pay attention to our attention 🤪 and discern what constrains it. typically fear in some way. so we gotta face our fears and address them, so we can be more present for ourselves & each other
not very 😅 but it’s alright
Visakan! All my friends call me Visa
try to keep it simple and light. let curiosity guide you. ask questions and try to answer them. if it’s not working out, try to rest
I couldn’t think of one at first but then I saw this in my screenshots and it slays me every time
(🔒) 1. My Twitter intersects quite nicely with my work, so whatever I’m doing on Twitter tends to feed into my work, which is a win-win

2. my *deepest* work tends to happen in manic phases, so when I feel like working I really throw myself into it with great intensity
which is to say rather than think “I should keep myself from getting distracted” (I have never won this fight), I subject myself to an intense cascading interrogation about my work: what’s this for? what’s this about? where is it going? and I get so deep into it I forget all else

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More from @visakanv

visa is doing military stuff 🪖 Profile picture
14 Sep
the problem with guillotining people – even if you put aside that pesky ethical question of murder – is that you’re subsequently left with a bunch of people who have taken a lot of pleasure in using guillotines. The monster may have been beheaded, but the monster in you remains
there are two kinds of people who are flippant about violence: idiots, and the malevolent. and the malevolent seize power every time. once you summon this demon you cannot unsummon it
if you speak lightly about advocating for this it’s likely because you’ve never come face to face with a murderer who delights in it

and if you get too good at memeing the murders into existence, you will find that their next delight is you
Read 5 tweets
visa is doing military stuff 🪖 Profile picture
14 Sep
people often expect someone who understands something to be able to explain it, but the understanding of something sometimes eludes explanation

this is an issue with the bandwidth of communication, and consciousness, but it does not necessarily imply a lack of understanding
of course, this is not of much consolation to the person who understands a thing, but is unable to communicate their understanding to others, and is consequently assumed not to understand the thing

but you CAN *demonstrate* your understanding. (Assuming you do understand it.)
but demonstrations can take a long time, and they can be ignored by people who don’t know what they’re looking at, so there are layers and layers to this

what I wanted to talk about though actually is how it feels to understand something you can’t quite yet convey in words
Read 15 tweets
visa is doing military stuff 🪖 Profile picture
13 Sep
some stuff i’m hoping to do after my current book ships:

- start commissioning essays & content about scenes
- cybergaruda substack, about southeast asia (@GRIFTGURU)
- research review of past 30-40 years of current affairs
- essay about smartphones
- read Jung
- play guitar
- start turning some of my old nerdy threads into youtube video essays
- 100 tiktoks
- flesh out and publicly share drafts for next few ebooks (optics, constructive adhd, unlearning coercion, high voltage living, after gifted…)
- my own research project on historical scenes
- tidy up my archives somewhat, do an essay spelunking thru the archaeology of all my junk
- organize irl meetups
- essay about memory palace notetaking and information architecture
- get a gaming pc and start streaming on twitch
- finish @1000wordvomits
- restart my 🇸🇬 blog
Read 7 tweets
visa is doing military stuff 🪖 Profile picture
12 Sep
this is kind of a vague post but generally speaking if you think i have done anything wrong or made any mistakes, i would love to hear about it so i can do something about it. my DMs have always been open
sometimes people talk about me like i’m some abstract depersonalized entity rather than some guy you can just talk to
like if you think i’m arrogant or full of myself or whatever i would actually be really happy to have a conversation about it! if you’ve thought your position through i’d love to hear it and there’s a good chance you’d adjust my position as well
Read 5 tweets
visa is doing military stuff 🪖 Profile picture
12 Sep
i also think a big part of why “kids learn faster than adults” is that kids are *expected* to be learning all the time, and adults (who might not even know each other!) will actually *coordinate* to create supportive learning environments and experiences for kids
One way adults can approximate the child’s experience is to be an immigrant, broadly speaking, or “the new guy” in some context – if you can signal clearly that you’re clueless and earnestly trying to learn, people similarly tend to chip in to help
another way to do it is to create a small cluster or scene where a group of people all agree that they all want to learn, and so challenge and support each other’s learning as much as possible. these environments produce massive increases in learning beyond what is “normal”
Read 5 tweets
visa is doing military stuff 🪖 Profile picture
12 Sep
utilitarians ngmi
📈
well that got dark fast
Read 4 tweets

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