My current recommended starting order for new visitors:
- The library ethos
- We were voyagers
- Are you serious?
- Most People
- it’s just math
- the world is big
- greatness is deviance
- pave the desire paths
- word magic
(2024dec23) Everything below this section is sort of a ‘big ball of mud’ of hyperlinks (h/t laputan.org), which… is something that I don’t want to get rid of all at once, because it is full of useful material. But if I wanted to make it more reader-friendly, it would take me an annoyingly long time to sift through, tease apart and reorganize everything artfully. So I’ma set it aside (push it down, really) and ‘start from scratch’ up here.
This blog has been through many seasons of care and neglect. Periodically I have phases where I feel inspired to tidy everything up, but I’ve never really been able to follow through on that all the way to completion. If you scroll down you’ll find some clues of that. But here’s where I’m currently at right now. I want this blog to be useful to me, first and foremost. I’m currently thinking of conceptualizing it as a set of ‘proto-books’ that are all overlapping and scattered together. A few weeks ago I switched up my categories to acknowledge this. They are, 1heartsong, 2copes, 3wordmagic, and 4dominoes. There’s also memoirs, reviews, and unsorted. There was also another category originally titled 1desirepaths, but there weren’t that many posts, and I’ve since switched to using /desire-paths/ as the anchor post, linking out to other posts in that cluster. /knowable/ is similar, and may also lose its category status. Actually you know what, yes, let’s kill it. I might kill the heartsong category next. Done. The relevant posts instead are now /heartsong/, /copes/ and /word-magic/.
I don’t know if these are the right names for the categories. But I do feel like, within these categories, I should be able to create more cohesive reader experiences– again, with the most important reader being myself. I know from experience working on my last two books (Friendly Ambitious Nerd and Introspect) that the act of putting together a book is actually quite a relief, because it creates a ‘home’ for information to live in, and be comfortable in. It can create spaces for new information to enter.
I think that’s the quality that I currently most want in my blog, and in my life, really. I’ve been in the ‘magic junkyard’ era for years now, maybe decades, where I just kept collecting more stuff. And I take pride in being a pretty good collector of stuff. Maybe too much pride. Because now there’s so much junk it’s hard to really… relax and enjoy the space. So that’s my 2025 goal for visakanv.com/blog/ – to create a relaxing, enjoyable home for all this information I’ve collected and remixed and authored. I think an obvious first step is to create an ‘anchor’ post for each of those categories or proto-books. I’ll update this page when I have them… done. Is there an obvious second step? It would be to… improve the reader experience of each of those anchor posts.
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Most shared: Communities, Solve for distribution, Letter to a young songwriter, Being smart vs Being kind, The library ethos, relationships, one must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing, how to ask for help, Most People, good reply game, unlearning coercion, pay it forward
Most visited: relationships, The library ethos, do 100 things, Communities, good reply game, Most People, my influences, make friends, solve problems, how to ask for help, my talking points, seek excellent peers, constructive ADHD, how to de-escalate tense situations, do whatever makes your heart sing, ‘Mean Girls’
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I’m planning to update Friendly Ambitious Nerd to a “Mark II” version. That’s going to be quite a heavy undertaking. In the meantime, one of the things I thought of doing was to assemble as many of the constituent blogposts in one place as possible. So here they are. Some links may be broken, I’ll fix them eventually…
Friendly Ambitious Nerd:
I had to publish the book and stew on it for several years before I really came to “see the statue in the marble”. FAN is a seed of an operating system for healthy deviance.
Friendship is shared understanding
- Helm of the Arse Gods, kids in shitty social graphs, being a misfit
- Make friends – practice good reply game, seek excellent peers, everybody loves to make a great introduction, persuasion, accumulating social capital, small talk
- How to be more optimistic
- How to ask for help
- Develop genuine confidence, imposter syndrome
- communities,
- assholes, never be gleeful about violence, when i block people, sinister connotations
- the apocalypse test
- parents, peers and other benevolent plagues, Most People
- pay it forward
- perspective (feels kinda weak)
FA: encourage your friends, how to DM your heroes, cold emails
Ambition – giving as much of a shit as possible
- Are you serious?
- articulating a vision, articulate your vectors, joke about outcomes you want, think in dominos, fumbling the bag
- optimize for survival, 4 kinds of luck, play long games
- ambition is not about prestige, the prestige trap
- tell it slant – on obliqueness
- you are already monarch of your life
- plans are worthless, planning is priceless. XAB method, soften the ground, mvp model of personal dev, projects require collaboration, project management, problems are solvable, mario castle problems
- elitism, the ratatouille rule
- don’t jump – the folly of the plunge (2016)
- shame – status regulation
- self-promotion, the world is unkind to the tacky
- struggle porn / hustle culture
- good vs great
- sitcom living
- status quo soldiers
AN: info architecture… infostructure?
Nerds are people whose behavior is driven by curiosity (asking questions, making lists)
- pursue your curiosities / taste is the beating heart of all creative value, everything is a remix, creativity is just connecting/remixing things
- take notes, constructive ADHD
- models, ‘systems thinking‘
- ‘jetpacks‘ should solve information overload
- narrow utilitarianism (failure mode), advanced stupid, learned catastrophizing, courage deficit
- the utility of art
- mindfucks – ideas that expanded my mind
- bottlenecks
- humility is honesty in the face of reality
FN: talking to people makes you a better writer
scenes: scenius, jane jacobs, talent is clueless and scared, erasmus, the losev problem, greatness is deviance
Introspect? Self-sense beating yourself up is egotistic (merge? moral failing fallacy), do you know what you want? (currently titled /introspect/, should change this) fault, boredom, adulthood, insecurity projection, identity, depression, earn self-respect, narcissism, better place, exhaustion funnels, unlearning coercion
Culture – I want to do more work here, this is what I want Voltaic Verses (visakanv.substack.com) to focus on
school, safe spaces, baby abandonment, smartphones, screentime, fame, fashion, civilization is potty training, real life is already dystopian, religion, mean girls, fuckability, pissbabies, Cultural appropriation, cultural cosplay
masculinity – merge menworld, cowardly men, mansplaining
How tos: picky eater, get my attention, so you’ve been Main Character’d, twitter rpg guide, advice for people in their 20s
memoirs/about me? busker, blinders, giftedness
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The following is a leftover remnant of one of the previous times I tried to sort my blog:
pedestalization, take deep breaths, talking for writers, Influences
Politics and the English Language (2016),
heat death, sisyphus, ayylmao,
Potentially promising but unfinished: hyperthreading, smartphones, jetpacks (information overload), information superhighway
Things that should be essays: projects require collaboration, status regulation, obliqueness, monarch life…
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(2023jan4) magicbeans: I’ve spent many years writing, blogging, note-taking, etc and over time I’ve found it necessary to come up with good, memorable phrases that I can use as reference points. “good phrases” or “memorable phrases” is a bit too generic, but magicbeans is quite a bit better. It’s not perfect – a truly great phrase would be one that nobody else uses. It’s a bit more complicated than this but I won’t get into that right now.
Advanced Stupid — do100things — desire paths / mindcity — joke about outcomes you want — status quo soldiers
to be updated
teasers, riffs, seedphrases: emotional knottedness – oblique – beware of psychofauna – poaster trajectory – switchboarding – ayylmao chaos surfing – focus on – Mario castle problems – royal touch / king energy / honor economy – make yourself comfortable – overpreemptive (thread) – uncommonly confident, humility… more…
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changelog?
2025jan15: just funny– I found a wordvomit from jan2013 (0033) where I talked about wanting to redo my blog, and how even then I had been wanting to do it for a very long time. Well, we’re doing it!
2025jan14: i’ve made so much progress in the past few days, particularly with the anchor posts of heartsong, desire paths, wordmagic, knowable, copes, dominoes. looking forward to improving the reader experience of each, and basically paving the desire paths. i no longer feel embarrassed by the state of things here, though there’s still a long way to go.
2023May02: Wow, I’m so glad that I did this. It’s going to save me so much time as I continue to piece things together.
2023Jan18: This blog has been weighing on me somewhat. In part, it feels like a historical record, and that’s… good? But it also feels clunky and tedious. The sitemap is too complicated. I think it’s time I did a fresh “research review” of the posts that I reference and revisit most.