(2023jul15) Let’s dive right in. I trust that you already know what Twitter is, you know what tweets are, I don’t really want to do a 101 explainer of that stuff.

There are many different people playing many different games on Twitter, that’s a lot of the fun of it. One of the things Twitter has going for it is that, in Internet terms, it’s pretty old. It’s been around since before “social media” really became a concept. Lots of people be tweeting throwaway thoughts, whatever’s on their mind. Some people take it a little more seriously. I like to think I do both.

An important thing to note is that every tweet is framed and contextualized by the feed that it’s being received in. Which is something that the creator doesn’t really have a lot of control over.

In theory, we’re talking about bewilderingly infinite possibilities, since every person could have a completely different feed, by following a completely different set of other accounts. And, in a purely technical sense, sure, it’s very unlikely that multiple people follow the exact same 236 people. But people are quite predictable, and convergent. We cluster. We want to watch what our friends are watching, we want to talk about what our friends are talking about. And so we have things like “the main character of the day”, that “everyone is talking about”. At the time of writing, the most recent discernable main character event was Jonah Hill’s texts to his ex, and discourse around boundaries and abusive/controlling behavior. I don’t want to get into that, I just want to make a quick note to point out the convergent nature of a lot of Twitter. People see an opportunity to talk about what other people are talking about.

Could make a separate point here about the power and value of focusing on what you want to see more of. There is a strength to knowing what your talking points are, knowing what sort of discourse you want to participate in, how you want to contribute, who you want to hear from. “Tweet for the audience you want, not the audience you have,” was a bit of advice that I gave myself a few years ago, that I think has really paid off in a myriad of ways, and helped me stave off of the worst of the problem of Audience Capture. As with many things, it turns out Nietzsche got here first…

But, this isn’t really what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the grammar of tweets. what do I mean by that?? Well. I’ve tweeted a lot, right. Over 230,000 tweets over the years. A recurring joke amongst my friends is “there’s always a Visa tweet”, because I’ve covered so much ground thinking out loud about basically everything. So a question worth asking and answering is, why bother writing essays, if you’ve already tweeted about everything?1 And the answer is… while I might have tweeted about nearly everything, those tweets aren’t necessarily enough to capture everything I want to say. And here I could do some dramatic, “reach to the heavens”, “strive for the company of immortals” type brushstrokes – how can a finite being ever speak of the infinity of experience – well, we allude to it with poetry! – but that’s not what I want to talk about. Having framed a spectrum from “throwaway shitpost tweet lol” to “the celestial and infinite awesomeness of The Eternal Word of God”, I want to come back to earth and measure the distance from “earnest thread” to “earnest essay”. Yessss this is the thing I was looking for.

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2023feb17

I have a lot of internal conflicts, as one does. A part of me wants to go through all of my back material, meticulously catalogue it, look for new patterns that I hadn’t seen, weave it all together, finally put some good structure to it all, turn my slovenly mess into a beautiful gopuram of color and light. Another part of me wants to burn it all to the ground and scatter the ashes to the winds, and delight in the freedom of a truly blank page. (I deeply regret the last time I partially did this. Turns out that I love doing callbacks, and I grieve the loss of material that I so eagerly discarded.)

It re-occurs to me that one of the simplest ways that I could think about this challenge is to think about what I haven’t been able to do, and then throw myself into doing that. The main thing I’ve been doing creatively over the past ~5 years is tweet. I think I’ve done over 150,000 tweets in that time period. And the most distinctive thing about tweets is the character limit. You only get to do 280 characters per tweet.

I have a lot of strong feelings about the constraints of medium. I have a whole draft of a post about that, which I may end up just weaving into this particular essay. I love how my friend @artpi describes tweets as like sushi. A good twitter thread is like a great course of sushi. My other friend @shrinetothevine once brought me to a really fancy sushi place that I’d never have dared visited by myself. It was a euphoric experience for me, every single piece was a little slice of heaven. I digress. Tweets as sushi. Right. What is sushi? It’s a bit of sour rice and a bit of fish, or seafood. Each piece is bite-sized.

Tweets are like that. Each tweet is meant to be consumed “one pop at a time”. But a sushi isn’t exactly a meal. You could throw a bunch of sushi on a plate and call it a meal, and that works as a very specific kind of meal, but you can’t really make say, a 3 course dinner purely out of sushi. You also can’t… make a giant sushi. Idk if this analogy is working, I might delete it later. But the thing I actually want to say is, when I copy out a good twitter thread into a plaintext file, I’m immediately struck by how it doesn’t work. The pacing is too rigid. I’ll repeat myself two paragraphs down.

The downside of tweeting

I took a break from this essay for a while to be playful about sushi, and then I noticed myself scrolling through Twitter, reading a tweet… and then, almost unconsciously, I found myself writing up a clever oppositional tweet to one-up someone else in a subtle and skilful way. I know that I would get a bunch of likes for that tweet if I tweeted it. Maybe even some retweets and follows. You could think of that as a status win. And it’s fun. And I’m good at it. It’ll lead to me selling more ebooks. But I’m tired of it, even if I can do it in a fun and wholesome way such that it’s unlikely to upset anybody, ie “pure upside”. For me there is the downside of thinking oppositionally.

If I wrote the above paragraph as a twitter thread instead of in this essay, it would be read differently. There’s something about the “grammar” of tweets – I’m not talking about punctuation marks or word choices within the tweets, I’m talking about the tweets themselves. Every tweet has a certain punchiness to it. It occurred to me once that palm leaf manuscripts are like ancient twitter threads, and I think there’s a truth to it. There’s also additionally something about palm leaf manuscripts – think Bible verses – that have a punchiness to them.

It just occurred to me that palm leaf manuscripts are basically ancient twitter threads pic.twitter.com/VlhjuZ2sFO

— Visa ✈️ NYC (Feb22–Mar13) (@visakanv) March 23, 2018

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mindpalacing (2022)

Twitter mindpalacing?

I think I first remember reading about the idea of a mind palace I think in a book about study skills that my parents bought me. I believe it was called “I am gifted and so are you”, and it was described as a memory technique…

(link)

 I used to have worse memory and/but it got a lot better when I started to think of memory as something to piggyback onto emotion. So it’s like there’s an emotional trade network within the bodymind, and if you want to save a lot of information, the trick is to piggyback the data onto the emotional caravans in your bodymind’s trade network

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I believe that your body basically resists your mind’s attempt to browbeat it into expending precious cognitive effort/energy remembering things that it doesn’t see the point in remembering. So you have to work with it rather than against it, slipstream behind it

You have to persuade yourself. A wonderful benefit of this is, good persuasion is something that generalizes beyond the self. If you make your communications more r

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basically all of my Twitter threads rely on this, it’s like an emotion-word association game. Certain words develop certain emotional charges, and then when I want to remember something I bundle it with that word. “Junkyard” is currently coming to mind

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 feelings are the strongest memories (“people will forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel”, etc) so (1) is to get really in tune with one’s feelings, and (2) is to have feelings abt everything to be remembered

Poetry is memorable, 

Emotional caravans

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Desire paths