iron FAN

One of my favorite blogposts by Venkatesh Rao was about the Iron Man movies. He describes how Tony Stark had two problems –

take note, notice

I take a lot of notes. I also have quite a lot of thoughts about note-taking. I could probably keep going. I also have a lot o

public intellectuals

This is a substack draft where I just thread all of the tweets that I’ve written with the word “public intellectual”. I

how to write good comments

✱ Alright bitches and motherfuckers so what constitutes a good comment? It’s 5am so I gotta go to bed but i’m leaving th

thinking in dominos

One of the best memes i’ve come up with is what my friends know as The Dominos Meme – an expression of earnest, ambitious

2000s

an interesting thing about 2004 was that both Mean Girls and The Incredibles had scenes where white women were frustrated/emba

internal conflicts?

movie/media reviews

I have a folder in my notes app called “reviews”, where I throw in notes that I’ve put together about stuff I’ve watch

reintroducing myself

Maybe delete, here are my guiding thoughts for myself as I introduce myself again: I can’t possibly expect to say everything

pave the desire paths

A desire path is a path that’s created by people using it, rather than by top-down design. The path is proof that people wan

220,000 tweets later / twitter overview

I started putting this together because it seemed like Twitter had a non-trivial chance of dying. If I’m being honest a part

comedic influences

Sometimes I just like to investigate things on Wikipedia. Today I’m curious about some details about immigrants. I start by

the problem of atomized thinking?

Not sure how i want to phrase it I want to talk about arrogance and humility and how people get that wrong lots of mistakes yo

sweet spots

I got distracted halfway when writing this because of a pradyu tweet about asian kids complaining. but then afterwards… nah

status notes

I’ve been wanting to write some stuff about social status for a long time, but I never quite had the right framing or contex

a man from each century

BCE Pythagoras Pericles Herodotus 0-999 Paul the Apostle Plutarch Marcus Aurelius Faxian (337 CE – c. 422 CE) travelling mon

scene sketches

One of my favorite things that I periodically do on Twitter is what I might call exploratory nerdposting – it’s when I sta

Advanced Stupid

be not not-yourself

Sometimes double-negatives can be very helpful. “be yourself” can be endlessly frustrating, but I believe that 

palm leaf manuscripts / tweet grammar

(2023jul15) Let’s dive right in. I trust that you already know what Twitter is, you know what tweets are, I don’t really w

writing used to be easier for me / logjam

Writing used to be easier for me. When I was a novice, when I was younger, when I perceived myself to be a nobody with nothing

incorrect estimates

I had this nice fantasy when I published my second book that I would then churn out a nice essay every week. If I had done tha

Scheherazade

my debt to scheherazade – this is kinda poetic but it’s more of a chapter/subheader than the actual title. this is mea

chasing the feeling with no name

A part of me is always chasing a particular feeling. Sometimes I call it “aesthetic resonance”, though that’s not the wh

Against Flanderization

As a creator, you might feel like it’s your job to give the audience what they want. In practice, this turns out to be a

a love letter to my process

ios/substack draft A love letter to my process  Feels a bit tacky to write so much about writing. But this is an internal fee

culture2, notes

One of the victory conditions in the Civilization video game series is “cultural victory”. A funny quote that happens is w