The very first essay I published on this substack in 2022 was titled We were voyagers, and it was subtitled “On Nietzschean historical sense: the happiness to know oneself in a manner not entirely arbitrary and accidental, but grown out of a past”. In 2024 I realize that if I were writing it from scratch today, there’s a good chance I might’ve titled it “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” (Is this decreasing in relevance now that the

I imagine most of my readers — who typically who know me from Twitter, and as such are likely to be more Online than most people, would know that I’d be referencing a viral meme courtesy of US Vice-President Kamala Harris. But I’m also thinking, surely not everyone would get it? I’m from Singapore, and I’m not sure that the average Singaporean would get it.

there’s an informal collective of Kamala supporters who call themselves the KHive, which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you realize it’s a reference to the Beyonce fandom which is called BHive, which is itself a pun on ‘beehive’. Many things in culture are like this. (Nobody xThere’s a camp called Whorehole, which seems like an odd thing to name a camp, until you find out that it’s downstream of Vibehole which is downstream of Vibecamp.

I let my son watch a little Sesame Street from time to time. He’s 1 year old and he hasn’t started speaking yet. But I appreciate that it gives him a context in which to learn some letters and numbers. there are ‘kids’ pretending to go to school, roleplaying things like riding on a bus, and dealing with the little conflicts that come up

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• an alternate name for this substack’s Frame Studies era could be Context Studies
• for most of history, most people never really had to think very much beyond their own immediate context, so it makes sense that we aren’t very good at it.
• the internet has been an age of great context collision and collapse. someone having a conversation with a friend on twitter can have their exchange quote-tweeted or screenshot and rebroadcast to everyone else. this makes some people flinch from social media entirely,
• I still keep thinking about a little snippet of an exchange when Taylor Swift was on the David Letterman show years ago and they were talking about her upcoming CD. What’s fascinating to me about that exchange is what, in that context, doesn’t need to be said. They talk about the CD with the assumption that everyone knows what a CD is,
• in some ways my problem as an author is that i get too hung up on my own very immediate context, all tangled in my immediate concerns, many of which I know will not be very relevant for very long
• a thing i sometimes feel silly about is how a single conversation that i’m not really enjoying can suck up so much attention from me. i’m talking about the latest one in abstractions because i’m deciding i’d prefer not to remember what it was when i look back on this post.
• “I’m about to come on the air”