feeling kinda angry about the idea of successful nerds getting gatekept out of nerd communities upon becoming successful
my personal definition of a nerd: a nerd is someone who is driven by curiosity. the more of your behavior is driven/determined by curiosity, the bigger of a nerd you are
I think most nerds will broadly agree with me on this definition, but some nerds will include this additional component of "a nerd is someone who endures negative social consequences for being a nerd" – being bullied, ostracized, broke, romantically unsuccessful, etc etc
I do. I'm one of the best fucking community builders on the goddamn planet. I can make a community out of a box of scraps in a cave if I have to. I'm not angry for me. I'm angry for nerds who don't have the social skills to do what I do

and yea ok if I think about it a little more it turns out the the anger is really grief, because the injustice is perpetuated out of a sense of fear and scarcity mindedness, the cruelty is all so unnecessary, and it perpetuates cycles of victimhood, bullying, shame, suspicion
and ok zoom out a bit more and it's not just nerds, right, this is a pattern in all sorts of struggling communities that make their struggles a part of their identity, such that success becomes betrayal. I remember someone telling me about their story re: being formerly homeless
"you're too good for us, huh? you think you're better than us, huh?" – hurt, anxious, defensive people will say this preemptively, defensively, even at a person who's trying their best to be kind

it's just all so sad.
lets try to be happy for the successes of our friends, and of our children, and not interpret it as a provocation directed at us

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More from @visakanv

Mar 26
always a fan of my own glow up

from tense, shifty and twitchy to open-hearted and cheerful

i should really stitch together like a side-by-side video bc its even more obvious in motion ImageImage
repostin' a couple of comparisons bc it's truly remarkable imo. 1,
Read 4 tweets
Mar 26
I’ve been ruminating on a hypothetical holy grail of information architecture for years and years now and every 3-6 months or so I have some new epiphany that feels like it’ll change everything, and it kinda does but not as much as I originally hoped
I’ve talked about a few critical things before

- bricks/spreadsheets as the densest way to display information

- the importance of desire paths

- “magic phrases” – passwords, really, but that word has come to become associated with a very specific login, so need a diff word
For some period of time I was painfully fixated on trying to represent my entire twitter corpus, I even unintentionally sent a couple of earnest devs down that hellhole, none have returned lol sorry friends

I realize now that’s a mistakenly needy frame. You can’t eat the sun
Read 7 tweets
Mar 26
been thinking a lot lately about culture and scales of influence

there’s the immediate local culture, and then there’s the bigger wider context that the local context is embedded in. the bigger context, the “overculture”, is typically abstracted away and imperceptible, ignored Image
this is recursive – once you get out of the hyperlocal context of your family unit, your peer group, you find there’s a wider community with its own issues, it’s own baggage and backstory

this applies not just to space but to time- the present now is embedded in past & future Image
been thinking about this again because I’ve been vaguely troubled by my perception of the general absence of visible big-picture long-term thinker-planner-doers who aren’t institutions

I worry that people don’t see it, though it’s probably likelier that they’re just quiet
Read 8 tweets
Mar 26
there is a very radical, powerful state of mind, state of being, that people throughout history have recurringly tried to talk about, but it's v hard to get the point across because people who don't want to hear about it will look for problems with the imperfect utterance
its the feeling of being the author of your own fate/destiny, of being in charge, being truly self-sovereign, earning your own respect and admiration, feeling your own body and mind standing by to assist you, the captain of your soul
we can talk shit about this all day, argue about the details, blah blah, the comments section appended to this is tens of thousands of pages long full of procrastinators & avoiders looking for fine print technicalities &excuses to support their argument that they're not in charge
Read 10 tweets
Mar 25
alright it's @midjourney imagining time baby

1. a king on a throne in a psychedelic kingdom Image
@midjourney when you give it a prompt it gives you 4 choices that you can then double down on

here's 2. "a hindu god as a final boss in a video game"

it's incomplete, I gotta pick one to dream further... I like all of them but I think I'll go with... the second? Image
@midjourney enhanced... ImageImage
Read 42 tweets
Mar 25
having dinner with twitter mutuals 🥰 Image
potato sweats and late realisations ImageImage
hype for kaicamp
Read 5 tweets

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