I’m changing the title of my substack from “voltaic verses ⚡️” to “frame studies 🖼️”.

Should I explain?

My first two major works have been Friendly Ambitious Nerd (2020) and Introspect (2022). Both of these are ebooks, but more broadly they’re also ‘vectors’, or ‘expeditions’. They’re ways of seeing. They have corresponding twitter accounts, @FANswitchboard and @IntrospectVV, which I mostly use to retweet other people’s tweets about related ideas and topics. I consider these to be works in progress, and I do want to continue adding to them, building on them, updating them.

But I also want to get started on a third major work that isn’t simply more FAN (VV1) or INT (VV2). And after years of ruminating and questioning and hypothesizing and so on, I’ve come around to calling my third major work (VV3) ‘Frame Studies’. I think I might be loosely inspired by how John Mayer named his 4th album ‘Battle Studies’.

(For convenience in the rest of this post, I will be using VV1, VV2 and VV3 as placeholders or pointers to the corresponding works, following the emergent convention of using the initials of an artist and a number. For example, Lady Gaga’s Chromatica is #LG6, Joanne was #LG5, and so on.)

I do not currently intend VV3 / Frame Studies to be an ebook like VV1 and VV2. Rather, I want it to be a collection of essays. In a sense, VV1 was really a collection of Twitter threads and blogposts packaged as an ebook, rather than a proper ‘book’. VV2 was my first ‘proper book’ that was really designed and written to be read ‘as a book’, and even then I don’t think I did a fantastic job of it. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to ‘how to write a good book’, by which I mean not just having good ideas and good chapters, but a good coherence within the book. I recently listened to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds for the first time, and that’s a great example of a fantastic album, where all of the songs add up to something greater than the sum of its part.

I don’t know if this will be the ‘final’ title. I don’t know if I believe in final titles. I think the names for things evolve over time. The organization known as the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) subsequently renamed itself The Wifi Alliance, which was clearly a good move.

A good sign though: when I created a Twitter account for my marketing blog back in 2014, I got the username VVframing. I’m not linking it here right now because that account is currently dated, inactive, a lot of the links are broken, etc. Let’s do a quick bullet list of things that I referenced in that account:

• Red Bull’s marketing and positioning, which I spent a lot of time nerding out about. They framed themselves not as a competitor to Coke, but as a drink in a whole different category.
• The marketing and messaging of beauty products, a thread of observations from following my wife around a Sephora
• Lady Gaga’s career, which I think is worth studying, and may still write an essay about

I previously had the idea of writing a book titled “Optics”, which I think I can repurpose into Frame Studies.

I’m not sure I’m going to publish this post either, but the point is to think through what I’m doing.

I want to write about movies and culture. I want to write about Alice in Wonderland, Back to the Future, Avengers Endgame, maybe Black Panther

I want to write about the WWE somewhat, I’m not sure how many posts, but there’s a lot to dig into there, and there’s an audience that already appreciates it

I definitely want to write about videogames, I want to write about stories and worldbuilding

I want to write about MTV…

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“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” (1943)

it’s funny how sometimes you go out looking for something, and then you eventually find it right at the start of things. The first post I wrote on this Substack, which I’m still really proud of, was titled We Were Voyagersand it hints at what I wanted the rest of this to be like.

a bunch of my essays have been about my creative process. But I don’t want this to be a substack about my creative process. those posts are really just scaffolding as i figure myself out, figure out this medium

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some stuff i want to explore and talk about

samuel johnson, harold bloom, literary criticism

shakespeare, dante, goethe, tolstoy, shaw

republic of letters

pamphlets

CDs, cassettes, vinyls, music business, albums, spotify. tv, broadcasting, mcluhan, tv shows.

tattoos, typography, design, new york city, london, history of great cities, scenius, brian eno

movies: alice in wonderland, kung fu panda trilogy, the matrix,

I want to do a post about each century probably from the 1400s onwards. i’m not a historian i’m just a curious guy looking to situate myself in history. marco polo

trans sharan camel caravans, spice trade

early internet? backstories of public intellectuals, solving for distribution

wretchedness

cursed artifacts / magic mirrors

how i met your mother

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I’ve spent most of the last two years… thinking about my writing. Well- it’s complicated, depending on how you want to carve things up. You could also say I’ve spent basically all my life thinking about my writing. Properly out a full timeline of my writing would take at least an hour of time, which I don’t currently have. (Also, I vaguely feel like I might have done it before, maybe in a blogpost or in tweets or something.) Sometimes thoughts pay off many, many years down the line. There’s stuff I was thinking about as a teenager that has turned out to be really valuable to me as an adult.

Part of how I do my thinking is by writing– I have tens of thousands of words of drafts, loose notes and other detritus– but I also do a lot of it kinda sitting around staring into space, or holding a bunch of thoughts in my mind while wandering around looking at other things.

Anyway all of this is really preamble for some vision quest shit

i’m really just getting around to talking about my substack, my goals and vision for this substack

for a while i was saying “all the channels at once” as a tagline and I think it’s a good idea still but it’s more of an aesthetic thing than a real mission or strategic

i’m coming around to a clearer sense of what the ‘expedition’ should be… about media, pope pius quote… want to write stuff that helps people get media-sense, that’s the technical stuff. FRAME STUDIES

but the deeper thing is more about vibes, a way of seeing, a way of navigating, engaging… so i wont just be doing lectures. i will be nerding out. i will be demonstrating how to love media, how to love the world, how to have a great time, all of that stuff is incredibly important

PLAYING WITH FRAMES

but also i want to have specific questions to answer. the wretchedness thing .the smartphone thing. maybe those are too big and i need to find smaller angles. i want to ask questions. can people change? that’s a big question. i want to do book reviews. focusing, KWML. why did i take so long to get around to doing KWML and inner game reviews? that’s a qeustion to be investigated as well. ok bye

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ALL THE CHANNELS

a thing that I didn’t really think of as valuable until people from halfway across the world started pointing it out, is that I’m v chill about, is my ability to be ok with many different beliefs and value systems simultaneously. I think being Southeast Asian helps tremendously with this

the tagline for my substack is “all the channels at once” and I feel like i must’ve been in a heightened state of inspiration when i wrote it because i have a hard time explaining why, to me, it’s so fucken good. the long explanation involves telling you every single thing about my entire history and childhood and so on. neither of us has time for that. figuring out a good shorter explanation is tricky, and so far every attempt I’ve made has been tedious, boring, frustrating. probably because i’ve been trying too hard to write a Proper Essay. so again i am coming to the wordvomits to do an unhinged rant about it and maybe from the janky mess of earnestness i’ll be able to salvage something useful that I can repurpose. or maybe the janky explanation will be the best one. we’ll see. 

so like. channels. tv channels. i used to be channel surfer. and then i was a web surfer. we don’t seem to say “surf” very much anymore when it comes to the web. and we don’t seem to say “web” very much either. both of which I think are micro-tragic, because there was something compelling and evocative about those phrases, at least for me. why are tv channels called channels?

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Interstitials

Reading McLuhan — hot media, media, Center, margin

The city of history 

what do I want voltaic to achieve 

how do I want people to feel

Optimistic, inspired, challenged

Internet history

Wider world history

Culture sense

Men of letters

media studies? Understanding media book review

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cities are built out of crossroads

they’re also built atop of ruins? why? not all ruins… but there’s something here

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There are many different things I want to do with my Substack, and I want to do all of them almost simultaneously. This is difficult. I am trying to do a difficult thing. I am imposing difficulty on myself. there has to be a smarter way to do it. i’m trying to do an artist’s 10 albums simultaneously. but you can only write/record one album at a time.

tbc