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notesprawl

this was originally a bit of a joke, but i also knew when joking that i was going to want to revisit this (joke about outcomes you want), and sure enough, the concept has been growing on me over time. i found myself mentioning it in my latest wordvomit, which was reason enough for me […]

you can look it up

The idea for this post came up mid-conversation with @neuranne when I was telling her about how inspired I was by an audio essay @ronenv spoke for me about the history of TV. Ronen spoke for at least an hour telling a very compelling story about the history of media, some of the major players […]

copes

I’ve settled on /copes/ as the page that I’m going to use as the cornerstone or anchor post for a bunch of other posts in the 2copes category. Posts include… These aren’t all the posts, but I’m putting them here to look at them a certain way, to see if they spark some realization for […]

do less

this one is a bit counterintuitive: if you’re starting a youtube channel or a blog or something, i believe you shouldn’t put toooo much effort into your first post, because it’ll rarely do as “well” as you might hope. this isn’t even really about you or your work… it’s just sort of the nature of […]

rugpulls

placeholder post for future rugpull content A useful bit of vocabulary from the world of crypto is the idea of the ‘rugpull’. Which is just a condensed form of an older idiom, “to pull the rug from under someone”. Sooner or later, everyone gets rugpulled in life. You find out that your parents lied to […]

discourse cycles

placeholder post for future updates (2024dec28) currently revisiting this post while editing my blog and there’s a raging firestorm of discourse going on rn on twitter about H1B immigrants in the US. strikes me as something that’s going to cycle and loop back around repeatedly. Also recently there was news that Christopher Nolan’s next movie […]

again

Sometimes repetition is a sign that you’re returning to something important. Sometimes it’s a sign that you’re failing to learn something. Funnily, it can take some repetition to figure out the difference. But more importantly, it takes discernment. You have to stop and take stock of the situation, and ask, what’s really going on here? […]

sigh

I met an old friend for lunch a while ago. He observed that I was initially tense and weary, but that I then visibly relaxed over the course of the conversation. Particularly he noticed that I would do these big sighs. I thought about it again when hanging out with my 5-month-old son, who does […]

emotional knottedness

you’re unlikely to be less tired tomorrow if your tiredness is actually emotional knottedness, which requires dynamic action rather than rest sometimes what you need is “strength training” ;;; via (archives/junkyard-of-vague-intentions) “knottedness // It’s probably true that I might’ve benefited from a break, but I didn’t want to do that, either. Ideas about emotional knottedness […]

things are knowable

(2024dec24) surprise, I already had an uncategorized post titled “Knowable”! I want to use it to list out other posts that fit this category. ✱ (original thread) since i was kid i always wondered why things weren’t better. i’ve probably spent thousands of hours thinking and reading and talking about this. my current assessment is […]

make yourself comfortable

“When we truly feel comfortable, the desire to improve is natural— no antagonism required, no debt incurred.” (deleted source) you can make yourself a little more comfortable, as a treat. you can take lil actions to make your environment a little nicer for yourself. that feels good. it’s nice to feel good. it’s nice to […]

journalling

I am always recommending to people that they ought to journal. Keep a diary, write your memoirs, it doesn’t really precisely matter what the form is. Keep a vlog if that’s what you prefer. Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages works perfectly: 3 pages, in the morning, for your eyes only, about anything, done by hand. A […]

quotes

I’ve thought from time to time that people don’t do a great job of quoting things. I figure I might as well make my own list. Here we go. “it’s unfortunate that so many players don’t realize that watching their own recordings or posting recordings for feedback could have saved 1198 hours of frustration.” – […]

my creative process

“social mistake i used to make a lot was, always engaging with everyone the way I wanted to be engaged with, which was to be taken seriously in a very particular way. turns out a lot of people just* be saying shit**, without necessarily like, putting heavy significance*** about it” I initially typed the above […]

What does it mean to “process” an experience?

(original thread) What does it mean to process something? I see versions of this question all the time, and I seldom see anybody give a really satisfactory answer. I think I have a pretty good one. Generally speaking, the thing that needs to be processed after a peak experience, are one’s prior assumptions. Lemme explain… […]

why were you late?

Here’s a story that I often tell people, and it’s useful enough that it’s worth writing up to share with more people. I started my first real adult job in early 2013, working in marketing for a software company. I think both my ex-boss Dinesh and I would describe myself similarly: 22-year-old Visa was a […]

attention metrics

I usually bring up this thread/idea when talking with people about things like optimizing for views or follower counts. The thing I’m always trying to get people to see is that not all views or viewers are equal. (original thread) the flattening of attention metrics is something that seems to trip up even the most […]

the world is big

“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.” – Arthur Schopenhauer “Your personal experiences make up <0.0001% of what’s happened in the world but 80% of how you think the world works. When experiencing a fraction of what’s out there but using that to explain everything […]

deviants

(original 2018 thread) it’s funny to consider how much of the conversation around things like “what makes you unique, what makes you different” is dominated by people who aren’t really all that unique or different. I don’t mean this as a putdown or a jab, it’s just one of those optical illusions. people who are […]

greatness is deviance

“Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.” — Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) If […]

it’s just math

when I was at 50 or 500 followers if I said I was going to have 50,000, people wouldve said I’m arrogant. (I didn’t say exactly that, but I’ve had enough similar conversations to be sure.) it’s not arrogance it’s just simple math, managing psychology & solving for distribution ✱ Sometimes ppl who interpret me […]

people-shaped

This post is a quick sketch / copy-over of some tweets where I use the phrase “people-shaped”, which I think is something I want to revisit. A while ago (4 years ago, wow) I wrote a post after I had a conversation with a friend who was struggling with having a large writing project in […]

when “women are people” doesn’t work

(original thread, Mar2023) Sometimes guys say “idk how to talk to girls” and the ladies respond (understandably, but unhelpfully) “you know girls are people, right…?” – this is an eg of cultural confusion. Because what the guy is conveying is “my model of people is overtrained on male-male interactions” there are charitable and uncharitable ways […]

most shared

Here’s a list of my blogposts that have been most shared on Twitter. ✱ Here’s a list of my blogposts according to site traffic: ✱ Here’s a linkdump mainly for my own reference. Communities [Christine, Jubilee, amirbolous, gavinyua, auramarua, thatsnotoptimal, tjrwriting, aditipar, bardia, jamesoriel, jean-baptiste, snappercayt, lensofleo, metamitya, pesa_africa, rahul chabra, peter staal, jens thang, […]

advice for people in their 20s

Transcript: “I asked people a while ago what content I should make on YouTube and somebody said talk about your 20s. And sure, why not? I turned 30 in June this year (2020). 30 years old – an adult, a man, right? I have felt like an adult man for some time, but there is […]

safety rituals

the meta thing is, this sort of conversation itself will become a safety ritual if you don’t then take some action that changes the game. I think a good way to do this without bullshitting yourself is to take some new (small) action that you’ve not taken before (or recently) but also, you can live […]

focus on what you want to see more of

This tweet has basically become The Central @visakanv Tweet. focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of — Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) November 7, 2020 I don’t know if I particularly set out for it to be. But a lot of my journey has been like that. Incidental things become the […]

joke about outcomes you want

one of my riffs on Twitter that’s taken off and embedded in other people’s minds is the idea of “joke about outcomes you want”. (It’s worth noting somewhere that this is a subset of “focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of“). I have a lot of tweets about this, […]

psychofauna

@BenRatkaj said he wanted a psychofauna bestiary. Etienne Preamble to a Psychofauna Bestiary Khalil Durkheim on the Nature of Psychic Megafauna // Set of notes for future reference. Egragore? Oh, you mean psychic megafauna. our ancestors got picked off by megafauna, our peers get picked off by psychofauna [screeching digital pterodactyl swoops in and just […]

Advanced Stupid

I have a lot to say about this, have been sketching drafts of this over and over, never quite satisfied, so here is a dump of notes. to be updated Advanced Stupid is a phase I’ve found myself using to describe how intelligent people can be exceptionally destructive, to themselves and others. A regular stupid […]

so you’ve been main character’d

the hardest thing about dealing with being main character’d is managing your psychology, your emotional / physiological response to the feeling/perception of being attacked. I’d recommend writing down all of your thoughts and feelings in a notes app or something but do not post +1 to not replying, which is the most underappreciated thing. Replying […]

take baby steps

this is section 2.5 of introspect. “I always love it when people say ‘baby steps!’ to imply they’re being tentative, when actually baby steps are a great unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown.” – @OliveFSmith It can be useful to compare and contrast different domains in your life, particularly ones where you are successful […]

the Losev problem

Born in 1903, Oleg Vladimirovich Losev invented LEDs decades before everybody else (in the 1920s). “Unknown and uncelebrated, this should’ve been the beginning of the photonic telecommunications revolution.” But nobody cared. He was a lonely, broke self-taught nerd with no co-authors. He wrote to Einstein but didn’t get a reply. He died of starvation at […]

culture

Nov 2024: what is culture? There are lots of ways to approach talking about it, but I particularly want to focus on what I think can be meaningfully affected in a way that promotes human flourishing. Culture is… a collection of beliefs, assumptions, ideas, understandings. It’s a frame of reference that can be hard to […]

do whatever makes your heart sing

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman A very common question I get from my friends in all sorts of contexts is “What should I do? What should I write? What should […]

how to de-escalate tense situations

A thing i’ve gotten very good at that I just helped a friend in DMs with is de-escalating other people, eg someone DMs you a massive wall of text, how do you respond to that? I’ma try and share what I can without being too specific. If I get a huge wall of text, I […]

self-worth

this is one of those things where someone is trying to make you feel good with comforting noises, which is honestly sweet – but if you’re a thinking person and you investigate this a little closer, there are a lot of followup questions. What IS self-worth even? (original thread) If self-worth is worth that you […]

happiness

The following is a transcript of the above video, edited for readability. I think there’s a sort of mainstream understanding of how happiness is almost all-inclusive and elusive and just kind of ephemeral. Kind of vague, kind of general. There’s a lot of different ways to conceive of happiness. I would say that I don’t […]

Mint 100 Erasmuses

I’m shocked at how recently I learned about Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536), who according to Wikipedia is considered one of the greatest scholars of the northern Renaissance. He corresponded with literally hundreds of people in the 1500s. He was born out of wedlock in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Both of his parents died in a plague. He […]

write your memoirs

(2024nov update/comment: while doing some recategorizing, it struck me that this post fit in almost every single category I have on the blog. It really touches everything. It’s very central. It really helps to know the story of your life so that you can tinker with it. It’s a source of great power, in my […]

the solution to your imposter syndrome is not inside your head

The problem of imposter syndrome (under-estimating yourself) and Dunning-Krueger (over-estimating yourself) are both addressed by Talking To Other People so you can revise your self-estimates. I think people don’t talk to other people enough, and aren’t really listening properly. Listen to a dozen other people talk about their problems. really listen. it’ll cure your imposter […]

“Shouldn’t I want to make the world a better place?”

The following is a section I cut from an old draft of INTROSPECT. I’m inclined to say no. Not until you’re ready to handle such a heavy burden. As with weightlifting, carrying too much can hurt you. “Should” is one of those words that seems fairly innocuous, but can end up becoming a very invasive […]

civilization is potty training

Civilization is a kind of recursive, iterated potty training. See, the great thing about being an uncivilised barbarian is that you can shit wherever you like, whenever you like. This works out fine in the open wilderness, but it doesn’t work when you have lots of people in a small amount of space. Then shit […]

what’s it like to live your dream?

(nov 18, 2021 thread) there are a bunch of things i wish some earnest person would ask me about, tho if i talk about it now it would distract me from my book lol. but maybe a quick distraction as a treat (been working on it today!!). i wish someone would ask me about what […]

how to DM your heroes

How to DM your heroes when they follow you 1. specific proof-of-work: “I’ve been a fan of your work and writing since the livejournal days” 2. share something specific about yourself, their influence on you: “your work shaped the way I now do X” 3. ask easy-to-answer specific question. I would try to have a […]

encourage your friends to ship their ideas

(original thread) friendly subtweet: sometimes when someone has an idea to do something, the best thing you can do is not to suggest ways to expand and broaden the idea into something more complex than they can handle, but to cheerfully tell them to just fucken do the thing they said they wanted. (If I […]

ayy lmao

a lot of paradoxes might be best resolved with a sense of humor. (eg: dicking around can be productive, but if you’re anxious about *being* productive, that typically ruins the whole thing). the conflict creates a vortex that can be anxiety-inducing, until you see the joke. once you see the joke and you can laugh […]

status quo soldiers lose in the long run

Here’s a tiresome thing when some bad shit happens: when people unaffected by it actually spend their precious time and energy to voluntarily discourage anybody who speaks up about it– saying things are worse elsewhere, that you should be grateful, be quiet, or take heroic action. this is a highly predictable response from people who […]

things I learned from my ex-boss Dinesh

in the 5+ years I worked for my ex-boss Dinesh (@dineshraju), he constantly would ask me about my goals & desired outcomes. He would ask things like, He would ask these questions with a casual intensity – he really wanted to know the answers to these questions, with a persistent curiosity that I inherited. I’ve […]

2,000 copies of F.A.N sold!

2023 update: crossed 3,000 in June of this year! ✱ Today is October 16, 2021, and I just sold my 2000th copy of Friendly Ambitious Nerd! I made a video in March 2020 when I released it: rewatching it now, I came up with the idea Feb 2nd, made it available for preorder on 3rd […]

comms is lossy

It’s amazing that any of us are able to understand each other at all. Communication is lossy. (“Lossy” is a concept usually used to talk about data compression – images, audio, video. But I believe it’s useful when talking about all communication. We try to express complex thoughts and feelings, but we struggle to convey what […]

oblique approaches can achieve what directness cannot

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —Success in Circuit liesToo bright for our infirm DelightThe Truth’s superb surpriseAs Lightning to the Children easedWith explanation kindThe Truth must dazzle graduallyOr every man be blind — – Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) ✱ If you have a truly revolutionary idea you’d want to be careful to state […]

Aug29: AGI fire alarm drill day

In October 2017, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a post on intelligence.org titled There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence. It occurs to me that, while there might not be a fire alarm, we could certainly do fire drills. A fire drill is when people practice how they would behave in the event of a fire. […]

I use scapple to do my think-out-loud maps

I’ve somehow become an unintentional advocate/evangelist for Scapple, which is a mindmapping tool made by Literature & Latte, the same people who make Scrivener. I just use it casually to help me think out loud, and I often post screenshots of it when tweeting. People then often ask me “how did you make that?” Eventually […]

seek excellent peers

Whenever people ask things like “your best advice in 3-4 words” etc, I always go with “seek excellent peers”. Because when you surround yourself with good people, they have a positive effect on everything else in your life. Some people find this directive too vague. “How?” Well the first thing is to evaluate what you […]

Pericles

Pericles (495–429 BCE) was a prominent Athenian general and statesman. He died aged 66, of plague. I find him to be a fascinating historical figure – he’s arguably one of the most important individuals in influencing what some people call The Golden Age Of Athens. If we want to recreate a Golden Age in our […]

“i’m such a failure”

This is a collection of posts and videos about failure and mistakes. learning to be ok with mistakes: It’s the panicky flinch response to a mistake that really definitively cements a mistake as a mistake. otherwise it’s just interesting dissonance you can work with and around mistakes contain buried insight. My personal growth really began […]

narrow utilitarianism

just as it takes the lows to define the highs, and the dark to define the light, if you want to be properly utilitarian, you must from time to time be an absolutely useless fellow

memed into existence

This page is a collection of instances of the phrase “memed into existence”. I’m collecting them out of nerdy academic curiosity. Some of these examples are silly, others can be troubling. Be warned. ✱ “We memed alt-right into existence” – 2016 Richard Spencer interview, Vice (youtube.com) You Must Meme Your Dreams Into Existence (medium.com) Meme […]

thinking is easy, information architecture is hard

This has been a recurring thing for me. A lot of what I’m trying to do with my life is architect information in a way that is useful, pleasurable, lasting. There are lots of ways to rephrase this, reframe this. Coming up with the idea for a solution is relatively easy, implementing it is hard. […]

exhaustion funnels: why tired?

2024-03-17: I find myself wondering, maybe this post should be retitled “why are you tired?”, in comparison to “why were you late?“ The exhaustion funnel is a simple concept that I wish I encountered when I was much younger. It puts a name to a phenomenon that I repeatedly experienced throughout my teens and 20s. […]

👶 a theory of pissbabies

The following post is meant to be fun, silly and tongue-in-cheek rather than serious, and yet at the same time I’m hoping it might be somehow useful – much like Aaron James’ theory of assholes and Harry Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit. I want to clarify in advance that I’m not looking to create a slur. […]

feral free agents

I’m not a fan of the word “unemployed”. First of all, it’s come to imply that the default state is “employed”, meaning to be an employee, meaning to have an employer. I am not a fan of the conventional employer-employee relationship – I don’t think it’s good for me, even when I have a great […]

the death and life of great scenius

The Death And Life Of Great American Cities is a book by 1961 by Jane Jacobs. It’s criminally underrated. Scenius is a phrase coined by Brian Eno, first mentioned roughly around 1993 at a business conference in London, and then quoted again in his 1996 book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. I have a public […]

🎨 everything is a remix

Everything Is A Remix [37:30] is a video by Kirby Ferguson. It’s one of the most powerful videos I’ve ever watched in my life. It dramatically reduced my creative anxiety, because it made me realize that there’s hardly any point in trying to be original. Everything we do is a remix of what we know, […]

coordination does not require conspiracy

Coordination does not require conspiracy. I think it’s great that the word “conspire” literally means “to breath together”. I find it to be very evocative. Even if we’re conspiring to do something together over a video chat, we are still sort of “breathing in unison”, in a sense. We are having a conversation, we are […]

🗽iconography

I think about iconography a lot, I have multiple twitter threads about them. I’ll eventually expand this into a blogpost and probably subsequently do a youtube video about them too. The core thing that makes me obsessed about iconography is the idea that you can reverse-engineer successful icons, and create icons in the public domain. […]

don’t be gullible

Seen two separate things recently on the TL about how substack is a scam and how NFTs are a scam and my personal read is that the real problem is that people are gullible. If you solve for your own gullibility you don’t have to worry about being scammed. As a creator if you build […]

aesthetics

A loose set of notes about aesthetics. What are aesthetics? Why don’t you just say beautiful, or pretty? Why use this… pretentious word? I hear you. If there were a simpler word that worked, I would go with that. But I haven’t encountered one yet. And I mean something quite specific when I talk about […]

vision

1 ✱ We seem to be having a sort of crisis of vision, where hardly anybody seems to have interesting ideas about where we’re headed. Let’s fix that! ~~~ ✱ 2 Great things in the world happen when great people are introduced to each other and try to impress and outdo each other ~~~ ✱ […]

small talk

1jul2024: I have more to say about small talk. people who say they don’t like it, seem to misunderstand it… ✱ “What are you supposed to say if someone asks what’s new with you?” (original thread) This might seem odd but it totally works: say “let me check”, then open up your phone browser and […]

todo lists as narrative devices

every one of us is living in some kind of story. who are you? what is your name? where do you live? are you a student? what do you like to do for fun? oh you like football? what’s your favorite team? why? do you want to go to university? why? what would you like […]

📱smartphones changed everything

The following is a set of notes for an essay I want to write. ✱ A common feature in fantasy fiction is powerful magical objects. A crystal ball, a magic mirror, the Palantir in Lord of the Rings. These objects allow their users to see the unseen, to extend their sight and minds beyond the […]

systems thinking

To me, “systems thinking” is just “thinking”. If one’s thinking does not naturally lead them to identifying, observing, questioning and challenging systems, it’s likely because they’ve been conditioned to think within boxes that other people have defined for them. You cannot really teach systems thinking in school, because children aren’t really allowed to seriously interrogate […]

problems are solvable: define, solicit, integrate

✱ (2020feb29 thread) I don’t usually think of myself as a very clear-headed person… until people come to me with their problems 😂 I notice that people consistently overcomplicate their problems, quite dramatically. Problems become much easier to solve when you reduce them to their core elements. Some general principles: if you’re not addressing these, […]

🧵hyperthreading

Do you have a single document that links to every single thing that’s important to you on the web? Why not? (2024nov: revisiting this, I realize I don’t currently have a particularly strong candidate. Once upon a time it used to be my bookmarks post, but that now feels clunky and dated. It’s tempting to […]

jinky, janky, junky

I think it’s cute how three different words – jinky, janky and junky – all have this venn diagram overlap that I like my work to be in the middle of. I might write an ebook someday titled “jinky janky junkyard” or something to that effect. I’ll start with this blogpost, and grow it from […]

hostage

WIP / buncha notes There’s a 2018 video game called Detroit: Become Human. It has its pros and cons, I’m not sure I would particularly recommend it to everyone. But I will definitely say that it has a really strong opening. The game is about a future with lifelike androids in it, and as the […]

dealing with losers

(2020nov5 thread) I’m not a fan of divvying people up arbitrarily into winners and losers – one should never be gleeful about this – but I do have a subconscious subroutine that does it for me, and it’s very useful mental machinery, even accounting for some small % of error rate (5-10%?) I am being […]

influences

Sometimes people wanna know who my influences are. It’s tough to assemble a perfect or exhaustive list, but here’s an attempt that I’ll update from time to time. When I was really young, I read Charlie Brown’s ‘Cyclopedia. I think it influenced some of my aesthetic sensibilities. More broadly, I read everything I could get […]

talking points

This is a slightly edited repost of a twitter thread I once did at 520am in the morning to try and recap all of the things I talk about a lot, off the top of my head. Do it 100 times. Write 100 songs, cook 100 omelettes, talk to 100 people. It never seems like […]

fumbling the bag

There’s an exchange on Tinder(?) that I once saw on Twitter that I think about a lot. Read this really slowly and closely because there is a lot to learn here. First of all, he opens with “there is no way you swiped right on purpose” – this is already a bad move in my […]

“Wrong.”

This is more of my personal approach to things rather than some kind of claim about how the world works, or even how it should work. It’s how I like to do things. I’m always kind of surprised when I see someone telling someone else that they’re wrong on the Internet. Not because that it’s […]

shame

I’ve been thinking about shame lately. Here are some riffs, and maybe I’ll flesh this out into something more substantial later. (dec2023: this should also tie in with the status regulation and deviance posts) From time to time I encounter Singaporeans who describe me as shameless. It’s absolutely fascinating to me. I was still thinking […]

persuasion

— 1 — One of the most powerful skills you can learn is persuasion. Persuasion is how you convince people to join your team, give you what you want, and so on. You can do this in a way that’s not only non-threatening, non-coercive, but actually fun and compelling. It’s very strange to me that […]

pave the desire paths

(2024nov24) I’m in the process of once again trying to… organize my blog. It occurs to me that the desire paths post might be the best place to start trying something that I want to start trying. So… for starters, I’ll list out a bunch of other posts in this cluster: Why do I make […]

word magic

— 1 — I have always been very passionate about words. As I said in the library ethos, I grew up reading books and have strong feelings about them. Every word has a family, and a history. Lots of words are made up of other words, or parts of other words. Every word has more […]

dominoes

I reference and revisit and reuse this tweet a lot so I figured I might as well do a blogpost about it. It’s been surprising to me how popular it is with people. I could say that “it’s because it communicates a vision as a series of progressive steps”, which is technically true, but doesn’t […]

fuckability

fucking is labor, fuckability is capital many (most?) people wanna be fuckable more than they wanna fuck having good sex is a lot of work, you have to be attentive, you have to communicate, you have to respond to feedback ✱ this post exists mainly to be a catcher for the popular tweet: *taps mic* […]

constructive ADHD

this is a placeholder blogpost that will be updated with all my ADHD content I’m a fan of the phrase “constructive ADHD”, more so than say “productive ADHD”, because it makes me think of building things. lego. minecraft. cathedrals. skyscrapers. elaborate, byzantine, complex mindcities. learn to use the machine-gun mind effectively. I will be assembling […]

troubleshooting arrogance

When I was a teenager, the dominant criticism my closest friends had of me was that I was too arrogant, and they were right. I was too caustic, abrasive, eager to nitpick, quick to criticize, and I was way too certain of myself. I spent my entire 20s trying to correct for this. The social […]

books

Books I’ve written: The first book that I published is called FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD. The second book that I’m currently working on is called INTROSPECT. Introspect is about inner narrative troubleshooting. It’s about hitting Inspect Element on the story of your life. A skilled introspector achieves internal narrative clarity and resonance. Books I’ve spoken about:

👑 you are already the monarch of your life

— 1. talismans — A talisman is simply an object that is meaningful to you. Wedding rings are the most widely appreciated talismans. (One of the most haunting images from the Holocaust – which I won’t post here, but you can look it up – is a big pile of wedding rings taken from victims […]

🧠❌ you can’t think your way out of a courage deficit

(dec2023: title of this post is a catchy tweet, but do I want it to be a post? idk. maybe i’ll expand on it.) Reflecting on my own life experience, I think reducing one’s cowardice by half creates far more utility than tripling or quadrupling one’s analytical intelligence practically speaking, you only really need to […]

⏱ 4 hours

Realistically, I can only ever be *truly* productive for 4 hours a day. Most days, I’m lucky to even have 2 truly good, productive hours, where I’m really moving the needle. And I get by with the output of those 2 hours! I wish somebody told me this when I was like… 10 “The trick […]

play long games

This is an “aggregate” blogpost where I dump stuff from my tweets and notes. — What do I mean by long game? One way of thinking about it is to think backwards from the life you want to lead. — Change is possible. it will seem improbable until it becomes inevitable. persist. figure out what […]

Most People

I’ve been sharing this set of notes more and more as time goes by. I suppose you could say most people care too much about what most people think. I don’t expect to be able to change most people’s minds on this. But I’m interested in getting to know the people who really manage to […]

do 100 things

“Do 100 Thing” is a phrase I came up with when riffing around the idea of being prolific, making lots of stuff. It’s obviously not an original idea – Nietzsche suggested it, /r/thexeffect could be thought of as “do 49 thing”. I was also influenced by the parable of the pottery class. But for some […]

talent is not rare, talent is clueless and scared

(see also: greatness is deviance) When I was younger I thought that talent was rare, but as I get older I realize that the answer is so much weirder than that. talent is not ~super~ rare. but talent hides, talent often doesn’t want to be found, talent is scared, talent is clueless you could revise […]

🎸 let’s jam!

dec2023 update: I should talk about wooten, werner, mayer, the beatles, paramore, guns n roses… In my cornerstone post The Library Ethos, I mentioned in passing that there’s a sideplot about music and musicians. I feel like I’m on a roll here so let’s write that one too, hot off the press. While both my […]

📚 the library ethos

John Locke: “Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them… with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar […]

iterating Introspect

I came up with the idea for INTROSPECT sometime in 2018 or so, even before I thought of writing FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD (which I choose as my debut ebook). INTROSPECT has been through multiple drafts, iterations and rewrites. In retrospect (hah), I had to write some of the earlier versions of the book just to […]

after gifted

AFTER GIFTED is an ebook that I’m working on to help formerly gifted kids find success and happiness in life. Optimistically, I’ll probably only start working on it late 2021 and it’ll probably be released around 2022. 2023 Update: lol. lmao

kids in shitty social graphs

The following is a riff from a twitter thread I once wrote that I reference fairly often. I’m choosing to reproduce some of it here because I realize it’s a core part of my motivations. People who are really knowledgeable about the world are often publicly silent about the juiciest stuff, probably because the upside […]

🗣 hecklers

I’ve been thinking a lot about hecklers lately. There are a bunch of related-ish words, with varying connotations: haters – simple, succinct, memorable, but can have the unfortunate side-effect of implying that the criticism is unfounded or unwarranted. (Kanye once said “haters are fans too”, which I reference often in conversations.) critics – doesn’t adequately […]

narcissism

Usually, if you ask someone to imagine a narcissist, the first image that comes to mind is someone enjoying how they look. Someone who loves the sound of their own voice, someone who loves attention, being seen. That’s broadly accurate. But I want to also add that sometimes it can actually be more narcissistic to […]

magic junkyard

just doing the thing where I coin a phrase and then track how it spreads “We’ve been called everything from”the Superhuman of Notes” to a “Magic Junkyard for connecting your ideas.” – Roam’s AngelList page “there’s a reason people call it a magic junkyard.” – reddit comment Mentioned in A Taxonomy Of Notes, this Medium […]

👑 earn self-respect

(see also: self-loathing, self-worth) I think it’s important to earn one’s own self-respect. What does that mean? Well, you have to have a sense of what you respect in people, and then you have to conduct yourself in a way that you deem respectable. I respect people who are… Friendly. Sometimes friendliness is a “cope”, […]

☢️ the apocalypse test

A thing I do that brings me great clarity is to focus on individual people over everything else. I don’t care much about your career, nationality, ideology, gender, etc. All I really care about is whether I sense that there’s a nourishing humanity in you. I do get it wrong sometimes. Some people seem to […]

⚔️ optimize for survival

The big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. You can’t win if you lose – so learn to not lose. Most major failure conditions are avoidable with a little bit of foresight, planning, study and so on. Analyze failures and take conscientious steps to avoid them. From my […]

unlearning coercion

It took me a long time (maybe 10-15 years?) to properly realize that I was in an abusive relationship with myself, where my self-talk was contaminated with the language of coercion. Working on an ebook about this, UNLEARNING COERCION: https://gum.co/coercionbook “high agency” and “growth mindset” are roughly the same thing, and it’s also connected to […]

cold emails

If you get really good at cold emails, comms and positioning, you can run circles around people who rely on warm intros in smaller networks. But at an individual, tactical level, a cold email will very rarely ever live up to a warm introduction. You have to be 10x more interesting. You can plead with […]

🤝 how I rebuilt my trust in myself

A friend once said, regarding my Twitter, “I like how Visa says he’s going to do something, then immediately does it.” It’s actually an ADHD coping mechanism. If you ask my friends from my teenage days, they’ll tell you I was unreliable, full of shit, and that you couldn’t trust anything I said. This was […]

🙏🏾 how to ask for help

One of my new personal rules for myself is, if something annoys me, I’m going to funnel that into content that I can reference the next time I encounter it. Today I am annoyed by a very spammy, solipsistic request for help, that was effectively just “plz subscribe to my channel bc I need more […]

🗿 don’t pedestalize people

I use the term Pedestalization to describe the act of putting someone on a pedestal. Hero worship is pedestalization. Some people also pedestalize their friends or partners in a way that makes it impossible for them to see or acknowledge their flaws. Pedestalization is the inverse of demonization. Both acts are dehumanizing. If you intend […]

status and status regulation

2024oct15: there was a period of time where this seemed like one of the most important concepts I’d ever heard of, but I haven’t even really thought about it much recently. It feels like when I first learned about complex systems. I nerded out about it bigly, and then subsequently just internalized it into everything […]

elitism

It’s interesting how often the phrase “elitism” comes up when I solicit feedback from others. I’m aware that this will come across as defensive or denialist, but I have carefully considered it for quite a long time and I don’t really agree. We mean different things, maybe I went to school with some actual elitists, […]

❌ when and why I block people

(I’m thinking about this mainly in the context of Twitter, but there are some general principles here too.) I don’t like blocking people. I’m personally a big fan of public spaces and public commons. I like the idea of being accessible to people, and I feel like generally people should have the right of reply. […]

🍀 the 4 kinds of luck

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – apocryphal quote typically attributed to Seneca I’ve been thinking long and hard about luck for many years. I’ve done lots of experiments, big and small. I think I’m pretty decent at getting lucky. Some examples of me getting lucky: I’m sure I’m missing out lots of […]

🏛 the prestige trap

I’ve had several conversations with friends who’ve been incapacitated by the burdensome bullshit obligation to Have A Meaningful Life / Be Remembered / Do Important Work. It strikes me as socially inherited bloatware that causes tedious lag, which ironically prevents you from being awesome. When people say things like “just be yourself”, I think often […]

learned catastrophizing

I get young people in my DMs all the time. A common thing I notice about their despair is that they do a lot of generalizing (“I can’t seem to study for this test” → “I can’t do anything”). Lots of catastrophic thinking, things get very grandiose. I remember this feeling too. I think there […]

listen to kids

About once or twice a week I get some long DMs, usually from a younger person, who’s all stressed out and wound tight about how they’re going about their lives. It’s really heartening and kinda sad how appreciative they are when all I do is say a few kind, supportive things. My sense is… lots […]

depression

I’m keeping this post on standby because from time to time people ask me what to do if one is depressed, or thinks they are depressed. I am not a professional, I am just some guy. But sometimes people want to hear from some guy. So here’s what I got. I believe I’ve been depressed […]

take deep breaths

The following post is an ongoing-work-in-progress. The goal is for me to make sense of my learnings about breath and breathwork. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I am not even some kind of athlete or knowledgeable person. I’m just some guy trying to figure this stuff out. There’s a very high likelihood that I’m […]

project management

(2024dec12) A couple of friends have told me that they found the project management section of my book Introspect to be incredibly valuable. It might seem somewhat ironic that I haven’t put together a nice blogpost about project management, but in a sense it’s because I’m typically busy focusing on more important projects. Nevertheless, I […]

thinking

Hey, friends. So for today’s adlib, I’m gonna try and do 2 separate videos back to back or maybe I’ll just do one. And what I’m thinking is that I’ll do my first video about thinking and the second video about feeling so that by having them kind of separate and yet both on my […]

masculinity

I’m not sure when I first started really thinking about what it even means to be a man, what masculinity is. I think it’s something that begins in a very intangible, subtle way almost from birth – it’s in the culture around you, almost imperceptible because it’s so “normal”. Straight, cis-gendered men definitely notice it […]

friendly ambitious nerd

My first book, FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD, is now available for sale! gum.co/FANbook You may also be interested in reading about the marketing behind FAN. Here’s a post I wrote at 2,000 sales. As of November 2022 I’m starting to write FAN 2.0. I’m thinking I could maybe put together a list of all of the […]

➡️ pay it forward

When I was a broke teenager, my older friends often insisted on paying for drinks or meals. I used to feel a potent mix of gratitude and shame at this. I deeply appreciated the help, but I often also felt embarrassed, like I was a helpless “charity case”. A few years later, I got a […]

🔥 bestof 2010–2019

These are things that I’ve read or watched that stuck with me in the 2010s. 2010 Ugh Fields [lesswrong.com] Solitude and Leadership [theamericanscholar.org] 2011 The Information [newyorker.com] – this is my favorite essay of all time, so far. Sequelitis – Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X [youtube.com] Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant [github.com] We […]

💬 practice good reply game

There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing stupidly. Every “utterance” (status, tweet, […]

🗣 talking to people makes you a better writer

A friend asked me for some advice on a massive writing project that he’s had on the backburner for a while now. It sounded like something huge that could take years to finish. I suggested that he start with shorter essays. “But how do you scope them?” he asked. The answer – which seemed obvious […]

⚔️ twitter_rpg_strategy_guide.txt

twitter_rpg_strategy_guide.txt Twitter is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, primarily text-based with limited multimedia support. It combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read, view and contribute descriptions of objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world, as well as the […]

🍵 empty your cup and allow life to surprise you

2024apr29: I think this wants to be a more substantial post about attention. consider my recent conversation with dinesh about focus and epistemology… letting go of preexisting frames and assumptions, being genuinely open and curious 2017feb23 wordvomit (0647) 2019may-thread I never really understood the whole “empty your cup” and “unlearn what you have learned” thing […]

👩🏾‍🚀 representation matters

a recurring point I find myself making in private conversations is that I believe that representation might possibly be the #1 most powerful force for social change. it’s the tip of the spear. if you want to help a marginalized person or group, create media that centers them I’m revealing my own media bias & […]

😂 learn to laugh at yourself

One of my private beliefs that doesn’t translate very well is that true comedy is sacred. And not sacred as in solemn, but sacred as in profound. & even fart jokes can have a profundity to them if you get it right. But strangely few comedians seem to get it. Maybe I’m delusional? I think […]

👋🏾 everyone loves to make a great introduction

I think the big secret of social life is that everybody loves to make a great introduction. If you can become someone that people love to introduce to to other people, you’re “in the green” socially. Everybody loves to introduce a great hire, romantic partner, friend, co-founder. Talking about this can seem narcissistic (narcissists ruin […]

🤡 the world is not kind to those who are tacky

Late night thought: “Don’t be tacky (unless you know why you’re doing it)” is a surprisingly powerful heuristic for me. Idk if anybody else will relate to it. It’s an aesthetic-grounded approach to peopling, related to “people are forgiving of most things if you’re classy” It’s kind of circular reasoning though. How do you even […]

🔟 @visakanv’s top 10 lifehacks

(Originally posted on Twitter) 10. Do 1,000 of something. Anything, it doesn’t matter what. Really. When was the last time you did 1,000 of something? You will be a different person at the end of it. It’s one of the simplest ways to become an interesting person – there’s something interesting at the end of […]

🌉 friends I met in SF

I was going through my photos and I wanted to keep track of all the people I met. Unfortunately sometimes I met someone and didn’t take a picture… I’m definitely going to be extra-meticulous about this in future trips.

📜 blogs that I like to read

In the old days, people used to have lists of links on their blogs to other blogs that they liked reading. Here’s mine. kalzumeus, by @patio11 ribbonfarm, by @vgr melting asphalt, by @KevinSimler morgan housel – 23 books that changed my life gwern.net ncase.me anna gat @webdevmason praxis, by @fortelabs devon zuegel knowing less, by […]

⏩ ages 17 to 29

Dear Visa-17, Visa-29 here. So I recently got on a Singapore Airlines plane (I know, finally!) and flew across the planet to San Francisco, California. It was, in my opinion, the best two weeks of my life. I have so much to say about it that I don’t know where to begin – until I […]

🇺🇸 San Francisco [2019]

Dear Visa-17, Visa-29 here. So I recently got on a Singapore Airlines plane (I know, finally!) and flew across the planet to San Francisco, California. It was, in my opinion, the best two weeks of my life. I have so much to say about it that I don’t know where to begin – until I […]

⚠️ how to get my attention

(There’s quite a bit of preamble in this post before I get to the answer – just scroll down past the hot dogs if you’re too busy for the backstory!) I have a happy problem. I have over 10,000 Twitter followers. I’d like to think that I’d like to meet every last one of them. […]

📱 screentime

I had a large amount of screentime as a child. And if I could go back in time and have a do-over, I would have liked even more screentime. If I had replaced my entire school life with screentime, I sincerely think I would be 10x to 100x more powerful. “So Visa what about when […]

👯‍♀️ make friends

I’ve kind of developed a name for myself as “the friendly guy”. My book is titled FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD. I like to go on the Internet and make friends. — 1 — You can spend years arguing with idiots, or you can spend years making friends. The idiots aren’t going to be there for you […]

🕸 VV’s memex – a map of directives to live well

I saw a picture of “Bay Area Memespace“, and for some reason I felt compelled to put together my own “@visakanv memespace”. It’s not exactly the same thing, but it’s basically a bunch of repeated motifs in my thinking and writing over the years. It might be accurate to call them directives. Anyway, when I […]

👫 relationships are challenging + a lot of work

Preamble: Hello everyone! This post has been getting shared a little bit, so I thought it might be worth taking some time to put together a bit of context? This blogpost is basically a “cleaned-up” or “unrolled” post of 5 of my Twitter threads. I put this together because I think it’s a useful thing […]

💃🏾 flirting is about signalling interest with plausible deniability

What I tell my nephews: flirting is basically this – give moderately strong signals of interest with plausible deniability (for you) and outs (for her), and then be attentive for returned signs of interest and riff off of that. If she plays with you, you can ask her out. It’s not actually that complex, any […]

#StrugglePorn – is it painting a false picture?

good conversation started here with Nat & Gary I’m not personally a fan of Gary’s overall brand, but I appreciate his willingness to engage and listen I think part of the mess is– there’s no generalizable advice that works for everyone; different people need different things I’ve personally experimented with several different attitudes and perspectives […]

📷 my life in pictures

This post exists to help me, at a glance, get a sense of my own life over the years. 1990 – 1996 1998 2001 2003 2004 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

🍱 I used to be a picky eater

I saw somebody make fun of picky eaters on Twitter, and I felt compelled to write about my own experiences. I was like this myself (picky eater) until I enlisted in the army and had no choice but to eat unfamiliar food or starve. Then I decided to teach myself how to food, and it […]

🗣 mansplaining is sometimes (but not always) innocuous

If I had to do a “the difference between men and women” type of standup set, I think I would focus on the phenomenon of mansplaining, which to me is significantly (but not completely!) an eg of big misunderstanding + language/communication breakdown The first thing to appreciate about mansplaining is that to some degree it’s […]

🍳 Breakfast AMAs

Every so often I have breakfast alone, and I ask Twitter to ask me questions. I enjoy it a lot – I find it to be a great way of getting out of my own head and getting a sense of what other people are thinking. Here are some of the questions people have been […]

👘 cultural cosplay: a broader framework for thinking about cultural appropriation

I’ve never quite been satisfied with the overuse of the phrase “cultural appropriation” in all sorts of contexts, or “cultural appreciation” as the (only?) alternative way of thinking about it – and I’ve been thinking that both fit within a larger framework of “cultural cosplay” I like the phrase “cultural cosplay” because it’s value-neutral. Cosplay […]

🤔 do you know what you want?

dec2024: I wrote this blogpost years before I wrote the book Introspect… vaguely feel like this post should become a summary of the book, or otherwise help to contextualize the book, slice-n-dice the book, make something good out of the book. Instinct is that I should make it people-shaped and catalogue conversations I’ve had that […]

💋 Narcissist PR works because we can’t shut up about it

WIP I tweeted a more cautious version of this blogpost in July, and it’s been on my mind so I wanted to take some time to think out loud about it. “Paris Hilton is a hustler. Kim Kardashian is a hustler. And you mother fuckers are the johns. Every time you complained about Paris or […]

🧐 It’s my fault and that’s a good thing

(notes for a future essay about self-blame, responsibility, the concept of fault) A long term tension in my life: I don't feel qualified to lead, but I don't see anybody really worth following, either. When, where and how did I inherit these annoyingly perfectionist standards and ideals? — Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) April 4, 2018 Beeware […]

🚥 a system can only be improved at its tightest bottleneck

I’ve been thinking a lot about Tiago Forte’s point about bottlenecks – that the only meaningful improvement you can make in any system is at its tightest bottleneck. Progress at the second tightest bottleneck is unhelpful – you either just add extra stress on the tighter bottleneck ahead, or create capacity that goes unused. A […]

📺 we turn our lives into mostly-predictable sitcoms

(The following is from a conversation with a friend, after an acquaintance told us about feeling suicidal) it’s interesting to me how people fall into “roles”. have you heard of / read Eric Bernes’ Games People Play? Basically it’s a sort of framework for interpreting social interactions. Any social group seems to quickly develop a bunch […]

😈 sinister connotations allow people to be assholes with plausible deniability

I like words. It’s a big part of why I’m a writer. I like everything about them. Here are some interesting things about words: (TLDR if you’re too busy to read this: words are complex, multi-faceted, mean different things to different people, have multiple layers of meaning, and have a lot more power behind them […]

a list of some of my twitter threads

🚨 UPDATE: My book FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD is out! Buy it now: gum.co/friendlynerdbook Hello! I’m @visakanv, my friends call me Visa. I’m a 30yo Singaporean “digital native” who grew up on the Internet, writing prolifically across many mediums. I’ve gotten a bit of a reputation for my Twitter threads – check out Aaron Lewis’s post […]

🚦 constraints

I’ve written a lot about constraints over the years, and this blogpost strikes me as the best “master switchboard” to use to link to everything else. The thing that gets linked and referenced most is this 2019 twitter thread. In 2022 I wrote a substack essay trying to contextualize this, which is Dancing With Constraints […]

a sitemap of my memoirs

I have always been a somewhat scatter-brained person, and I’ve also always felt this sort of compulsion to catalog everything. The hope, I think, is that indexing everything would somehow make my life better – that I would “learn my lessons” better. Anyway. Over the years, I’ve definitely written a bunch of things that are memoir-ish. I’ll index them […]

🙏🏾 an oral history of my relationship with religion

Thought I’d write about my thoughts about religion, and how my perspective on it has changed from my childhood to the present day. I was raised in a Hindu household. We didn’t eat any beef. We went to the temples on special occasions. My mum had an altar with a pantheon of gods, and she’d […]

👀 when arguing, strive to understand context

— 1. When arguing, seek to understand context — [Published 2016] Roughly between ages 13 and 23 I was thoroughly convinced that best thing an intelligent person could do is to get obsessively good at evaluating and crafting sound arguments. Rationality! Debate! Wisdom! I rearranged a lot of my life around that wishful ideal: that […]

an analysis of power and social dynamics in ‘Mean Girls’

Theory: The movie has such enduring power and is quoted so much because it sheds some incredible light on real sociological phenomena. It’s compelling because it’s believable. It feels real. It might seem like a show about teenage girls, but it’s as nail-bitingly exciting as Late Night Poker, because it demonstrates decision-making, with stakes. Let’s […]

🐉 Drogon vs Balerion size comparison

The fun thing about this post is I basically cobbled it together out of my own frustration at not having a simple, easy, straightforward answer. I found the answers in youtube videos, but I didn’t want to have to watch the whole video to find the answer. It doesn’t particularly fit with the rest of […]

🔬 a list of predictions, to test my understanding

Preamble Originally on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9325637  It’s always interesting to look at old predictions– there was that Newsweek article that predicted the Internet was never going to be a big deal [1] (amusing because now Newsweek is online-only), and there were all the negative comments on the launch of the iPhone. [2] Also I believe Drew Houston’s […]

🤯 ideas that expanded my mind

Disorganized notes. (Revisiting this again in 2023… I remember doing a twitter thread in maybe eigen’s replies… this could be a pretty great youtube video actually) The scale and scope of the universe Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot Neil Tyson’s Most Astounding Fact (we are in the universe, yes, and the universe is also in […]

Politics and the English language [2016]

The following is my attempt to update George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language [1946] for modern reading. I’ve tried to follow his own principles to make his words sharper and clearer where I can. This is meant as a supplement to the original essay, not a replacement. English is suffering, and we’re not doing […]

⛰ one must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing

Life, particularly in modern civilization, is an absurd circus. We’re all clowns living in boxes trying to amuse ourselves with elaborate games in the face of inevitable death and meaninglessness. What’s additionally absurd is that we go through a lot of trouble to avoid facing up to this fact. We avoid discussing it with children […]

beating yourself up is egotistic

I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities. — Ray Dalio, Principles When I was a kid, I was stuck in a very silly cycle. I’d get home from […]

💀 the heat death of the universe means legacy is ultimately futile

Pup Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe, (c) Drew Weing (I wrote this in 2013 in a a conversation with a friend, and decided to tidy it up a little and publish it for future reference. I also referenced this idea on Quora and HN, and in word vomits 0124, 0227, 0351 and 0540.) In […]

🔖 bookmarks that I often share with friends

Disclaimer – I find these reads interesting. I don’t necessarily agree with them.  2024 update: I’ve moved the last version of this bookmarks page to visakanv.com/archives/bookmarks because this was starting to feel cumbersome and I wanted to have a fresh start. I’ll now update this list every time I find myself sharing a link with […]

🤝 how to build and maintain communities

This blogpost started out as a bunch of notes and links, and I found myself sharing it with people over and over again so much. Here are a list of things that I recommend reading if you’re interested in communities. Read about the evaporative-cooling effect by Xianhang Zhang – “If anyone can join your community, […]

☕️ Is Ya Kun Kaya Toast “Authentic”?

Originally posted on Poached Mag. I was having kopi with some friends at Ya Kun Kaya Toast. A friendly auntie spoke to us in cheery Singlish as she cleared our table. Someone remarked later that Ya Kun feels really “authentic” — not just because of the familiar butter-roast of the arabica beans, but because of aunties like […]