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a list of some of my twitter threads

Visakan Veerasamy
October 1, 2017

🚨 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 The Spreading of Threading for some context on that. This is a work-in-progress post consolidating my often-revisited, often-shared twitter threads. Want to incentivize me to spend more time + energy on making this better? Support me on Patreon!

(PS: If you prefer audio, here’s a list of links to podcast episodes I’ve been on: visakanv.com/podcasts/)

Start Here

These are good threads to get a sense of my “operating system”, the beliefs and ideas near the core of my thinking, my ways of seeing.

  1. “exploring my curiosity” threads – these are some of my all-time favorite threads, where I just pick some object or idea or concept and then start exploring and learning and tweeting as I go. (I’d love it if you did these too! Tag me in one, and I’ll add it to this list.)
  2. “RT for more takes” – I recently revisited this thread and was surprised by how well it captures many of my top-of-mind ideas.
  3. FAQs about cultivating taste and building a body of work – I’m very proud of these, I think I somehow managed to distill a lot of important points into a rather small space.
  4. FAQs I get about my threads themselves – how I think about them, how I do them, etc – particularly check out the thread about threading as a solution to fragmentation
  5. video snippets that have moved me deeply over the years – it would not be inaccurate to say that some of these videos are part of the reason why I’m still alive. It’s a significant part of why I do what I do.
  6. movies thread – particularly the Mean Girls thread, which has relevance even to geopolitics
  7. tv thread – don’t miss the Margaery Tyrell appreciation thread
  8. games thread – I enjoyed analyzing the addictiveness of Firaxis games
  9. 10 big ideas that have changed my life
  10. thread of my best one-liners
  11. weird-offbrand thoughts
  12. “half-joking” thread
  13. self authorship – a recurring, bleak conversation I’ve had with many friends

marriage/relationships

I never set out to be someone who dispensed relationship advice, but I talk about my wife and our marriage sometimes, and those tweets tend to popular + people are always asking me questions about her/us. The following threads are my most popular re: relationships, and I reference them a lot, so I wrote a “master threadpost” using them as raw material.

  1. my wife predicts divorce really well
  2. your spouse will annoy you more than anybody else – even if they’re the least annoying person you know!
  3. the project management of a relationship
  4. the necessity of being considerate
  5. “spicing up your relationship” is about being vulnerable
  6. my wife is funny – (warning, you may fall in love with my wife.)

make friends – peopling and socializing

This list was initially further down the page, but I’m starting to realize that these might be some of the most valuable things that I’ve written. It’s amazing to me how often I encounter smart, thoughtful people who tell me that they’re lonely.

social media / interneting

My perspective on this is is intimately tied up with the above. I might write a book or something someday – maybe a series of blogposts – in the theme of “Making Friends In The Digital Age”. Social media to me is a wonderful thing, full of wonder and opportunity. But lots of people seem to struggle with navigating it. There are many layers to this.

dealing with assholes

It’s a surprisingly small group of people who ruin things for everyone else, but we’re generally bad at dealing with them. If we can get better at dealing with assholes, we can get better at sustaining good communities and common spaces where everyone else can flourish.

narcissism

Narcissism is a topic I find myself drawn to. I could joke that it’s because I’m a narcissist myself, though I sometimes also joke that I love myself too much to be a narcissist. I think narcissism is a convoluted but important concept. Actual narcissists ruin a lot of things for a lot of people, and the fear of being called a narcissist deters a lot of people from doing things that would be good for them and for others. So I think it’s important, if we want to build a better world, that we have some honest conversations about what we mean when we use the term narcissist, and we be clear about what behaviors are acceptable and what are not, and why.

Riffs

These are ideas that I return to over and over again, and find myself reusing in all sorts of contexts. You could probably kinda-sorta put together a VisaBot from these riffs.

Personal Development

These are threads about things I’ve learned about becoming a stronger and better version of myself.

Singapore

I’m a Singaporean. I was born here, raised here, did my mandatory military conscription here, got married here, bought a house here. Friends from abroad are often curious to hear more about Singapore from me.

  • an oral history – master thread that contains most of the others
  • Lee Kuan Yew quotes – non-Singaporeans are always asking me about LKY
  • SG funny – you can learn a lot about a place by studying the humor
  • my criticisms of SG – hate the way we treat our LGBTQ citizens, hate the way some of us are gleeful to wield the death penalty, hate that some of us have a “better than you” mentality towards our neighbours
  • my old work commute – I really wanted to do this and I’m glad I did
  • meatspace thread – just a bunch of pics I’ve taken now and then
  • visiting Parliament

Marketing & Positioning

I’m a marketer by profession. I never specifically set out to be one, but I’m good enough at it that it pays the bills. Want to hire me as a consultant? DM me, let’s chat!

marketing thread /  / doing SaaS marketing

Fashion & Aesthetics

I’ve always been curious about fashion and aesthetics intellectually, though it’s only been very recently that I’ve actually started applying it to my own life. This has been increasingly interesting and important to me as time has gone by. I’ve come to believe that men in particular are impoverished by simplistic, bland aesthetics.

book threads

Before the Internet I was a library nerd! I’ve always loved books, and I’d still like to write and publish books of my own.

frames

I think about a lot of things in terms of frames. How you frame something can change everything about it.

find out how you are fucked up and fix it

Practically everybody inherits all sorts of bullshit that they don’t even realize. Life seems to get a lot better when we acknowledge this and address it.

meatbag management

The body is the mind.

building and maintaining healthy communities

I am very passionate about building and maintaining good online communities. I have a blogpost with a set of links about it titled ‘How to build and maintain communities” that I share often with friends who are curious about this. I feel like I was raised first by books and libraries, and then the Internet. I’d like the Internet – or parts of it, at least – to continue to be a space where people can find kinship.

masculinity

These are threads that typically invite some of the most hostile and insulting responses that I get online. Which… is itself kind of revealing, if you think about it.

women & girls

I have always been interested in women and girls, which can be a surprisingly unusual thing for a man to say. I am interested in their inner lives, in their politics, their culture.

race, ethnicity, culture

As with many other things, I never set out to be someone who was interested in matters of race and ethnicity. But such matters have always been interested in me.

writing

I have always described myself as a writer. Even as a guy who does vlogs, I think of myself as a writer.

memoirs

I’m slowly working on a book called Naughty Boy, a collection of essays about my childhood growing up in Singapore from 1990 – 2020.

Fun – if you’re not having fun, what’s the point?

Crowdsourced

Sometimes I ask people things and I get great responses that are worth going through.

Personal history / old content

FB 2017 thread / twitter favs 2017

Unsorted

If you’ve gotten any value out of my threads and would like to get ringside seats to my creative journey, support me on Patreon!

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2021 update: the following is the previous iteration of this post… left as some sort of weird vestige at the bottom… idk

2019 update: this blogpost is now quite outdated. 

it is very possible to make a living hawking bullshit

I am a tall man

Against generalism (the way we are educated)

Unrealistic expectations and incorrect models of reality:

Low battery

A young boy’s idea of cool:

My life through video games:

Best things I’ve written, off the top of my head

The homophobia I inherited / the relationship between disgust and morality

Legacy issues in language

Documentary ideas

Tattoos

Indian men fashion

Fashion

Learning:

Racism in SG

variations in tone when writing on the web

writing advice: Don’t forget about the reader:

more writing advice:

mvp model of personal development

feature requests

Influencer marketing

Narcissism travel

my writing process

attempted summary of word vomits (stopped at 10)

on growing up

frustration

echo chambers

list of truths

games and meta-games

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