hrefgopuram

[hrefgopuram]

/archives/ drafts overview 2024dec26

roundups

essay drafts – mar2024

drafts aug2022-may2023

what's the point of voltaic? – this is the parent of INT, FAN, FS – it's about aliveness, the quality without a name

incompleteness and digressions

tbc

[hrefgopuram]

twitter highlights 2024

chaos-surfing requirements

how to do what you love

making money doing what you love

how to be vulnerable online without getting pwned

replace dismissal with inquiry to flourish socially (400 RTs)

how to write good thank you notes (reply game thread, 160 RTs)

reply game as cure to all ills

how to get people to read your stuff

how to buy more happiness at a discounted rate

money and status as a proxy for what you want

tyranny of mass appeal

allocate your attention like a VIP / attention sovereignty

action-terminating assumptions

stuff i'm always surprised to have to point out – blogposts to write here

transcend simplistic notions of productivity

rugpulls and long games

my backstory (NYC housemates)

my formative influences

social media still undervalued

seinfeld/burr on meetings

the freedom to author one's own thoughts

nested threads index

boy mimicking dad sports loss

disrupting ooda loops

insanity of groups (388 RTs)

social reality less barren (300+ RTs)

errenously assuming people driven by $

projecting insecurities

parallels between imposter's syndrome and writer's block

power as perceived by social consensus

thinking through a parent/child conflict

loneliness (wretched)

suicide-by-cop hecklers (wretched)

trigger gaps (wretched)

underdogs crossing thresholds

the dip is disheartening (managing psychology)

safety rituals

social norms as safety rituals

heartbreak as a bottleneck (ambition)

self-flagellating ambitious guy refuses to learn from experience

goldilocks zones

no path to a normal future

questions that answer themselves if you invert or modify them

don't let bad actors make you one of them

the value of good configurations (info architecture)

blackout blinds (333 RTs)

comms is lossy

matrix view of twitter (comms is lossy, literacy)

deep twitter game

reality check

[hrefgopuram]

/archives/

luckmaxxing

universal cursed artifact

incorrect estimates

advanced stupid

cant or wont

artful incompleteness — all the channels

/blog/comms-is-lossy/ /blog/hyperthreading /blog/long-games

meta: https://www.visakanv.com/archives/2023/05/08/drafts-aug2022-may2023/

[hrefgopuram]

2021 /blog/start-here/

2023: Layers upon layers - the latest "start here" page is now "ref".

✱

Last updated: ~2021

Like many things in my life, my blog is a delightful mess. It's a sprawling junkyard of notes, links, essays, reflections and it has a life of its own. There have been times when I have attempted to start something new from scratch, but it invariably ends up accumulating junk and mess like the rest of my stuff. I am done resisting this fact, and I choose to embrace it.

Frequently Shared Posts:

The Library Ethos – this is a new post, but I wrote it to be the cornerstone post of my blog – something that I think captures my fundamental philosophy and approach to life, which informs all of my utterances and actions. If you want to get to know me, this is a good place to start.

Bookmarks that I often share with friends – a collection of links to posts that I revisit often.

Relationships are challenging + a lot of work – this is a "threadpost" – ie, a blogpost that's made up of twitter threads that I've written. My wife and I married at 22, and so we've had the unusual privilege of being married a lot longer than our peers (who are starting to get hitched around now). So we have some experience that we'd like to share.

How to build and maintain communities – I have always been passionate about good communities, and dismayed at how fleeting they tend to be. This is a collection of links, thoughts and ideas I've had about them.

Being Smart vs Being Kind – One of the most important changes in my life was about learning to become less of a belligerent asshole.

‘Smart Writing’ is about cultivating taste, suspending judgement and chasing your curiosity – funnily, the trick to smart writing is to worry less about being smart, and pursuing whatever you think is interesting.

Letter To A Young Songwriter – This applies to all creative work. Don't worry too much about making great work, or about having fun – just be prolific, and both will happen as a consequence.

An Analysis of Power And Social Dynamics In 'Mean Girls' – I wrote this in 2014 and it's somehow still one of the best things I've ever written.

One must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing – existence can be bleak, but it's also funny. This is a pretty decent representation of my personal approach to managing the widely-perceived crisis of existence.

The instructions I wish I was given (As a newbie startup marketer) – this is a 'reflecting on my career' post that I often share with young people starting out in their own careers.

When arguing, seek to understand the other person's context. This is the long game.

Taste is the beating heart of all creative value. I talk about this in (5), but it bears repeating because taste is truly one of the most precious resources on the planet. We need more of it, and we're bad at cultivating it.

Why this blog exists

Love. I've loved the Internet since I was a little boy, the same way people love libraries and bookstores. It gives me a sense of possibility. I've always wanted to have a "Room Of My Own" on the web, and this is it. I've had websites and blogs ever since I was a kid.

Peopling. Derek Sivers has this great quote about how every breakthrough comes from someone you know, so you get out there and know people. Having a blog allows people to find me, via Google or other means.

Storage. I use this blog as a repository, as a thinking tool, as a working space. It's a work in progress, it's messy, it doesn't make a lot of sense a lot of the time. I will try to tidy it up from time to time, but overall I think it's going to always be messy because it's a representation of my mind – which can be a messy place. (2023 update: I'm moving most "storage" type posts over to /archives/)

More later.

What else?

I am most active and prolific on Twitter at @visakanv. People often ask me about the header image in my Twitter bio, which you can check out here.

Check out my my ebooks FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD and INTROSPECT!

I have a Substack! visakanv.substack.com

I'd love it if you subscribed to my youtube channel: youtube.com/visakanv

[hrefgopuram]

afterimages

2024jan21 — I wish I could tell you everything. Some parts of me truly yearns to. Some of those parts are playfully eager. Other parts are desperately anguished. It feels like wanting to fall in love. Wouldn’t it be delightful, to share our deepest understandings? And, gosh, isn’t it devastating, how alienated we are when we don’t? So I feel a compulsion to try. But we don’t have enough time. We don’t have enough space. I don’t even consciously know all of the things that I know. How am I to share what I don’t know? So I have to get creative. And I’m not yet as creative as I’d like to be. I may never be as creative as I’d like to be. So I have to proceed with what I have, with who I am, and somehow trust and accept that it will have to be enough. I’ve been haunted before by visions before of a intricate, beautiful universe that’s self-explanatory in its resplendence. But all I have now are the afterimages.

✱

2024oct14 — I wrote the above paragraph months ago, and abandoned it in despair. But now I'm back here again, and it occurs to me that maybe I could do something interesting here. Maybe I could write a different paragraph every few months, in collaboration with myself. What's striking to me in this moment is that I'm in an emotionally different place than I was then. My wife is reading to our ~1 year old son, who was napping on me for a couple of hours earlier. I'm hungry. It rained heavily this morning. I open the window and look out at my neighborhood. Heavy rain washes away a layer of dust and grime that accumulates imperceptibly. The world outside looks fresh and clean. A cool wind blows. I find myself glancing at my desk, which is somewhat messy, but not the worst it's been, and not bad enough to require intervention. I glance at my tabs. I glance at my drafts...

[hrefgopuram]

substack overview

In late 2012 I started a writing project I called 1000 word vomits, with the intent of writing one million words in 1,000 sets of 1,000 words. The idea is that they would be mostly unedited, mostly rambling streams-of-consciousness, and yet be at least somewhat mindful of taste and sense. As of June 2023, I’ve written 825/1000 wordvomits. I’ve learned a lot a long the way, become a much better writer, and one of the things I’ve learned as a result is the importance of doing reviews. The word “review” is unfortunately a bit cluttered conceptually. The etymology of the word means simply “to view again”, but it’s come to additionally mean “with a critical lens”, such that we expect book reviews and movie reviews to tell us “whether it’s any good”. Which isn’t necessarily bad, unless it’s all there is.

Still, words are worth messing around with, and I’d prefer to use the word “overview” – in part because I’d like to avoid the judgemental connotations of “review”, and in part because I’m enamoured with the concept of “the overview effect”.

Back to the importance of reviews or overviews – so one of the things that frustrated me with my wordvomits project is how much I repeated myself, kinda “senselessly”. My view on this is itself evolving – I was most recently struck by a quote from Marshall Mcluhan’s Understanding Media where he talked about how oral traditions tend to have very cyclical ‘texts’, where you could get the point pretty quickly, but the meta-point is to go around and around on the subject so that you really get into it from all angles

Even so, I feel like there are smart ways of doing this and not-so-smart ways of doing this, and I’d prefer to do it the smart way. And the smart way in my current view is to not leave things so much up to chance, but to re-visit, re-explore, re-discover. I was in a rush with my early word vomits to write as much as possible, and as a result I found myself… disoriented?

I might explain this more on second passthrough but for now why not let’s just do an overview of all the posts on this substack so far. It’s still small enough and young enough that it’s possible, so let’s do it while we can. (The sub-bullets are for my own future reference – things that I might want to write new essays about and link to.)

The essays:

1. 🔥 We were voyagers – this essay just leapt out of me in one big burst after I had published my second book Introspect. I might say it’s about Nietzschean historical sense, or about Lincoln and Pericles and their ability to contextualize, to situate their people in the world. And I think that’s a very strong clue for what the essence of Voltaic Verses is going to be about.

2. The Essays I Have Not Published – looking back from the current context I would now describe this as a pre-view, a mapping of possibilities from where I stood. Looking at it now, it’s a pretty good mapping! Almost everything I write about here, is something I still want to write about in some shape or form. What’s interesting, I think, is a sense that the tentative shapes I have used, are probably not the ones I will be using. If they were the right ones, I’d already have used them. (mindpalaces, reconceptualization work, get really unblocked, growing pains, crossing of thresholds)

3. I don’t wanna! – in this essay I honor my resistance. I don’t want to fight the guy inside me that doesn’t want to write. I want to understand him.

4. nothing is edgier than earnestness – this essay meanders, and it opens with the Ted Hughes voltage quote that subsequently birthed the name Voltaic Verses. I talk about Ray Bradbury, Calvin & Hobbes… (digressions, inner critic, grief, X-Men: First Class, ATLA, edgelords, artful incompleteness)

5. dancing with constraints, pt 1 (grammar of tweets / constraint of mediums, multiple entities hot-desking the same meatbag, few hours of mental clarity...)

6. Santa is real – this was a seasonal post for Christmas, but it’s also very much about a lot of the things I care about: ritual, ceremony, meaning, belief, truth, process, social reality. Santa is a great, well-understood entry-point for thinking about all manner of beliefs and narratives. I find myself thinking there has to be a similar post to be written about talismans, and maybe I ought to pick the Oscars or the World Cup as a corresponding event. (KWML, ritual initiations)

7. 🔥 Are you serious? – I think this is currently the piece of writing I might be proudest of. Justo, Dashrath, Hokusai. Takes time to discern who’s serious. Not talking about solemnity. Silliness is sacred. Optimize for survival. The divorce mystery. (Advanced Stupid, LinkedIn World...)

8. resonance over coherence – I think this was inspired in part by the talk that I gave in New York, which reminds me I still haven’t published a post about that. Getting unstuck. Possibility space. People-shaped. Oof/crackle-boom surprisingly true. (indescribable mental motions)

9. yeet thyself – Bradbury again. Crackle-boom. Project management is about enabling collaboration. Workaholism. Living gloriously. (funhouse mirror misunderstandings)

10. branching paths – talking about Robert Frost, nominative determinism, information architecture, forgetting aids remembering, desire paths, ant colonies (narrative logic,

11. Breakthrough! in the DMs – helped someone “figure out what they want”, why I wrote Introspect, my dislike of Ikigai, Beyonce-Apple MVP, Meryl Streep inscrutability, Dinesh, the dynamism problem (asking people about movies, cartoon model of reality...)

12. interestingness on demand – the ayylmao tension of being creative for a living, Christopher Alexander, the psychology of tryhards, smart writing, clever little shortcuts, misframed problems, internally conflicted, Jim Carrey Golden Globes quote, (demonstrate interestingness, specialization and trade, perfect imperfection...)

13. witching hour writer patterns – Chrstopher Alexander, existence stack, William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, Ted Nelson, old emotional meanings, cultural jank, technical debt, Orwell’s Politics, /my-creative-process/...

14. the tavern and the temple – Bradbury’s “you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you”, Chappelle’s “the guy onstage is the real me”, contemplation. Twitter is many places all at once. Sorkin’s greater fool. untangling knotted perception. wiggle room, patience, cracks.

15. when the vision isn’t manifesting — channelling divine inspiration is the easiest part of being an artist. all serious projects are projects of grief. I don’t have the luxury of going dark for 4 years without anything to show for it publicly. if I can’t write 20 perfect essays I can at least write 200 good sketches. The universe in a glass of water. Meryl Streep being inscrutable to herself. Dave Chappelle on letting the idea drive. Eilish’s “maybe trust me”.

16. stray clippings #01 —

17. maybe buy more waffle irons —the kkh waffles store bottlenecked by # of irons. the doors in junior college. asking statement customers for tshirt ideas.

18. are you having fun, son? — “to continue to have fun is to participate in a dynamic process, to adapt to the situation”

19. a stupid bravery — feel like i could write an essay in 2-3hrs. borges: artist working even when dreaming. mayer: stupid bravery. fran lebowitz: words are easy, books are not. good writers can struggle with professionalism. fantasy of a competent manager domming them. balancing assertiveness and sensitivity. matthew effect, wretchedness problem. wbw’s cooks vs chefs. jobs’ on risking failure. jeremy mann doc: don’t try to perfectly represent reality, but our experience of reality. wooten: if you can make it feel right, any note can work. christopher alexander: improve patterns by testing them against experience, by recognizing how we feel.

20. a matryoskha of possibilities —“Be slightly wary of the whole endeavor. Describe things. Look for interesting trapdoors. Make matryoshkas of meaning. Enjoy good digressions. Say how you feel, and keep going.”

21. facing reality pt1 —

22. if i’m honest with myself —

23. writing a facebook status in 2024 —

24. 7 mini-essays in a trenchcoat

25. ephemeral plaintext —

[hrefgopuram]

blog cleanup 30jun2023

Very grateful for my notes from the previous thing!

language → archives/language (orwell/russell thread)

deleted curiosities → /archives/curiosities/. (2016 post)

stuff i’ve written about writing →  /archives/writing

/archives/motivation

/archives/creativity

/archives/taste

/archives/baby-abandonment/

/archives/dystopia

/archives/ideas

/archives/identity – withers away

blog cleanup 29may2023

https://www.visakanv.com/archives/confess/

https://www.visakanv.com/archives/eddies/

https://www.visakanv.com/archives/xab/

vectors → moved to marketing/vector

old posts that need better people-shaping: /motivation/, /creativity/

/childhood/ should be updated

/education/ should be merged with childhood

/misfit/... maybe merge with childhood? 🤔 

/ages-17-to-29/ – ^ 

/mindfuck/ deserves some love at some point

/threads/ needs some love, or a rewrite

/jk/ – merge with joke outcomes want?

archives/fashion

https://www.visakanv.com/blog/information-superhighway/

nyc post should maybe go on the blog instead of the substack? what are you waiting for lmao. oh you want it to be perfect! silly goose.

close the loop on /blog/introspect/ 🔥🔥

merge /most-people/ and /most-people-2/

update /iterating-introspect/

[hrefgopuram]

bestof twitter threads

things you need to know in order to be a bad mf feral free agent – this should maybe be a substack post

advice for intermediate creatives stuck – frame stories, new angles

project management blurt thread

questions to nobody – this is in line with all the stuff about resentment

iphone moment / peopling 101 / product-fit / latest marketing thread – blurt this one fast enough and we can actually... summarize/rewrite the entire marketing blog maybe? 

FAN in a thread?

social media obsession thread of threads

arrogance (jan 6 2021!) 

egragores 2022

it’s just math

What seems to be missing from my essays is feverish, frenetic energy. I gotta write like I’m running out of battery. There’s no urgency in my essays, it feels like. No heart. I need to burst. Blow up. Bradbury’s landmine

[hrefgopuram]

notes cleanup

battery low

boy who wouldn’t behave

2017 – I know I want to be a writer. “I need to start writing works rather than just verbalizing my thoughts” – what does that mean? “start sketching out characters, settings, contexts, plots. none of these needs to make sense. this is where we dive in, like Ark in Terranigma... wordvomits transforms here, at 640″

13may2017– obama... i was thrilled to witness obama become potus, seemed like an era of optimism. bush seemed stupid, clinton seemed... idk. obama seemed classy, compassionate, like we were on the cusp of something great. I suppose I wrote this after trump became potus and I wanted to... grieve my naive optimism?

I have ~40 notes about my memoirs, and about Naughty Boy... all of that could be merged into a single doc maybe, or a single project basically. It could be a book of poetry. meaning doesn’t need to be excruciatingly detailed.

gotta re-read all of alt_visa.

2018 note where i’m fragmented emotionally + declaring junkyard bankruptcy

[hrefgopuram]

onetab notes cleanup

I have so many notes they blot out the sun in my mind. I need sun, so I have to cleanup my notes. Maybe there is another way. But I expect tangible relief from sorting 300+ onetab notes. 151pm.

Going through FB friends for old stories, feelings. Set aside time to reply to twitter DMs.

Post drafts on archives

james baldwin on love and masks → frame stories?

yashkaf girardian scapegoating of bean dad and peach mom

nerdpost about camels and caravans and incense trade routes. berbers, garamantes.

eigen qt of cobratate self-disclosure thread

took break for lunch, did some threads. 518pm.

focus thread, 552pm.

distracted again. 643pm.

tengri, mongol sky god.

supportive context bottleneck. supportive learning environment. do not wait act. added birthday compliments to bookmarks. 

marketing questions ama, added to blog

walk through walls. beauty and the beast dynamic. good vs great ideas. brian eno. chemistry of disagreeability. greatness deviance, greatnesss team effort. 

crossover episode. culture sexy. 

self-consulting thread about introspect

response to “oh you want an echo chamber”

the only thing that guarantees pain is not moving enough

i tell all my friends to write their memoirs, once they can articulate their story they can inspect it, edit it

people who are bad at generating their own meaning get much more troubled by disruptions and turbulence in external meaning structures

intimate failure mastery...

finished at 848pm!

[hrefgopuram]

hyperthreading?

this image has been on my mind for a long time now. it captures something about my experience wrangling notes and files. why would anybody care about that enough to represent it? well the notes are not just stray items like dust or leaves. they represent something. something important. they represent intentions. they represent feelings. my feelings are all over the place, and that itself generates more feelings. feelings of distress and feelings of hope.

[hrefgopuram]

Introspect

Introspect related notes, etc. Ebook available here: gum.co/introspect

What is Introspect? Most simplistically it’s a self-help book, written by an author who read a bunch of self-help books growing up but never quite finding any of them “hitting the spot”. It does remix ideas from existing authors – there’s some Nietzsche, some Alan Watts, some Emerson, some Joseph Campbell, some Carl Jung, all that good stuff, phrased in practical, contemporary language.

Some links I want to update/process:

Problems are solvable, Narcissism, Ayy lmao, Exhaustion funnels, Ask questions, Make lists, Help, put the gun down, Forgive your inner criminal (2015), How do you know yourself (2012) – baby steps, Assholes (a whole category) – consider in relation to tyranny, Trust, Projects, Remove the nail

[hrefgopuram]

Friendly Ambitious Nerd

I want this post to be a cornerstone/portal for all FAN-related content, so I can reference this to get to everything else. Ebook available here: gum.co/FANbook

What is FAN? It’s a kind of Operating System, you might say it’s a philosophy or even a proto-religion of sorts but I’m not really a fan of either of those phrases, they have a way of pigeonholing. It’s an articulation of a way of being. But I don’t necessarily want to “install” my way of being into other people, that’s kinda creepy. I just want to share what I’ve developed within myself that’s worked for me, with the hope of being useful to other people on their journeys of self-articulation. Most simply, you could say it’s a book about becoming a kinder, bolder and more curious version of yourself.

Focus on what you want to see more of!

FRIEND:

Make Friends, Good Reply Game, Lennon/McCartney scenes... people are lonely, disconnected, feel unheard, unseen, want to be attended to.

Good Reply Game is a way of thinking about how to make friends, how to be a useful member of a community, how to get more out of your interactions with people, both online and offline, it’s a way of being that overlaps with being charming and charismatic, without necessarily changing anything about yourself. People will just enjoy talking with you more, because you do good replies. The main thing about good reply game is thoughtfulness and attentiveness. Anytime anybody does or says something, there’s an implicit proposal in what they’re saying, and it’s up to others to read the proposal as accurately as they can. Victor Wooten: “My job is not to just play with him, my job is to make him sound better.”

AMBITION:

Do 100 Thing, stolen valor, prestige traps

Do 100 Thing is an approach to becoming more prolific, doing more stuff, creating more in the world, expressing yourself… it’s a way of practicing ambition even if you don’t particularly feel ambitious. It’s a way of navigating the world. Now, this is meant to be a light and loose framework for exploration. The point isn’t to browbeat yourself into forcefully doing things that you don’t want to do. Really the thing is to experiment until you find a configuration that you enjoy.

NERD:

Ask Questions seems somewhat trivial compared to the other two… but I mean it in a strong sense. Navigate by questions. At any given point in time, have dozens of questions… Richard Feynman said it better: “"You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"

✱ 

shitposting/nerdposting/sermonposting triangle – sensemaking is multiplayer, knowledge is power,

✱ 

thread/essays that should exist: a table of one’s own,

[hrefgopuram]

Notebooks

Verdana, Shaka, Romulus, Yukihiro, Mithrandir, Warhol, Bowie, Victoria, Parameswara, Erasmus, Franklin, Archie, Medusa, Pericles, Thane, Nyx, Barnum, Sagan, Pavlov, Proust

[hrefgopuram]

@visakanv body of work, 2023

The Library Ethos  – foundational essay, 2021

We Were Voyagers – substack post, 2022

Are you serious? – substack post, 2023

ebooks: Friendly Ambitious Nerd, Introspect

gdocs: centralnode, Constructive ADHD, Uninstalling Copes, Less Unstrategic, Index, Inquire, Intercourse, magicbeans

youtube.com/visakanv: cultivate taste, theory of happiness, dialogue with fear, articulate your vector

roam: welcome page, talking points, people

older essays: An analysis of power in Mean Girls, one must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing, letter to a young songwriter

blogposts people share: seek excellent peers, how to deescalate tense situations, do 100 thing, how to build and maintain communities, how to ask for help, solve for distribution, solve problems, take notes, relationships, most people, imposter syndrome, dinesh, bookmarks, breathwork, prestige, rebuilding trust, reply game, pay it forward, beating yourself up is egotistic, twitter strategy guide, safe spaces, religion, make friends, how to get my attention, smart writing

best tweets & threads: ayylmao, dominos, focus, talking points, resource constraints, hardcore social game

stuff I’d like to write about: status quo soldiers,

memoirs? gainful employment (2013), bus ride through space and time (2015)

[hrefgopuram]

hello, world.

In HTML (hypertext markup language), HREF is short for “hypertext reference”. It’s an attribute used in anchor tags, so a link to visakanv.com would look like <a href=“http://visakanv.com”>link text here</a>. HREFs function as magic portals across texts, teleporting us from one place to another.

A gopuram is an ornate tower at the entrance of south indian hindu temples. Gopurams function as gateways, demarcating the threshold of sacred space, and also as monuments: guiding attention, inspiring awe, embodying memory.