(abandoned substack post)
I have been very helpful (1) to a lot of people in a lot of ways. But I can’t help you if you can’t (or won’t) fucking read. I get driven to despair sometimes watching people behave like absolute nitwits on Twitter. This is the stuff I don’t tweet about, because losing your shit on Twitter about Twitter is a spiraling path to hell. Generally, if you gotta bitch about people somewhere, it’s better to do it across platforms. This discourages low-effort responses, so you’ll have a higher quality of average response. (Even here I betray my instincts/values – why should you want a higher quality of response? What if you just want mindless, meaningless bullshit? That’s Fine Too I’m Sure but please do that bullshit far away from me. It’s doubly annoying how some people can’t be satisfied by playing their own game, but have to actively go out of their way to play interference in other people’s games.
Maybe I should pause and check myself about why exactly I care about being helpful to people. I am aware of the problem of being an insufferable do-gooder who goes around meddling in other people’s business. I don’t want to do that. I simply want to reach the people who are interested in what I have to say. There are people who want to be helped.
I want to talk about genres, frames, forms… why? people don’t know how to fucking read and I wish they did so I might as well fucking teach them.
All creativity begins with imitation. We learn language this way, by mimicking how we’re spoken to. Then there’s some experimentation, remixing.
What is a genre? What are conventions? They are generalizations. Forms. Finite-ish games?
The rigid conventions of Singapore? I wanted to educate my readers about the context that I’m from.
I grew up in Singapore in the 1990s. There’s a bunch of stuff about that that feels a little strange and dated to talk about in 2022. I wonder if I’ve already written about it before. I’ll attempt to write some things from memory. The tricky thing is all the subtle, implicit stuff that nobody really spells out for you explicitly. I’m grateful to comedians like Kumar and the folks who record them. Some of the famous things that spread outside the country: we banned chewing gum, we have caning. there’s a t-shirt that says we’re a Fine country, lots of fines.
cash credit card condo car country club
(Minor/irrelevant point?) a bunch of international media about Singapore is viewed through western eyes. I’d be more interested in hearing what our regional neighbors think of us.
There’s an old essay from Colin and Yen, titled Paved With Good Intentions. There are several films – Singapore Dreaming.
Colin is a lawyer who wrote a comic strip in The New Paper called Concrete Jungle.
I have the intrusive thought from time to time that people don’t know how to read. I don’t mean basic literacy, though some people do struggle with that. Past basic literacy you have simple logic, which people also struggle with. (A classic example: people hearing “black lives matter” and interpreting an unstated only or more in the phrase.)
Sometimes there are ways in which you can’t be expected to know how to read some particular text because of the missing context. The above tiktok is a fun example
I am not without problems when I write. I start with an idea and then there’s a sub-point in the idea that turns out to be much bigger than the idea. It’s messy and chaotic. I ought to embrace the mess. But what the fuck does embracing the mess look like