{"id":13513,"date":"2023-02-17T19:14:09","date_gmt":"2023-02-17T19:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=13513"},"modified":"2025-03-13T10:12:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T10:12:19","slug":"reintroducing-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2023\/02\/17\/reintroducing-myself\/","title":{"rendered":"reintroducing myself"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Maybe delete, here are my guiding thoughts for myself as I introduce myself again: I can\u2019t possibly expect to say everything about myself in a single post, but I want to be thinking about the audience that I want to be building.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My name is Visakan Veerasamy. I was born in Singapore in 1990, and I\u2019ve been here all my life. I\u2019m ethnically Tamil. I\u2019m left-handed. I\u2019m over 1.9m tall, or about 6\u20194. I loved books a lot as a child, and video games (Red Alert, Simcity 3000, Metal Slug).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got into music as a teenager \u2013 pop, rock, metal, blues. Avril Lavigne\u2019s Let Go was my first album, Disturbed\u2019s Believe was my second. I watched quite a lot of TV. Animes like Samurai X (aka Rurouni Kenshin), lots of MTV. Tamil movies with my family. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. I had a bit of a basketball phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I met my first girlfriend when we were 10. We started dating at 14, broke up when we were 17, got back together at 19, and married at 22. Dec 2022 was our 10th wedding anniversary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every Singaporean man has to do National Service, which is 2 years<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Singapore is an island-city-state in Southeast Asia with 5.6 million people. Singapore is small, dense, multiracial, multi-religious. Singapore has always been along a global shipping route from India to China. It\u2019s valuable real estate. We became independent in 1965, but before that we were a part of Malaysia, before that a British colony<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s funny for me is that being Singaporean is a very uncommon thing to be. Most people in the world do not live in island-city-states. Most people are not personally obliged to personally defend the sovereignty of their country. Most of the time, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I used to blog about local politics. I don\u2019t think I really particularly set out to, but I got kinda radicalized by the news one day. I thought they were being deceitful with statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

~~<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I go on podcasts, a common thing that hosts tend to point out is \u201cyou\u2019re a really unusual guy with an unusual point of view \/ way of being\u201d. It\u2019s always slightly funny to talk about, because if you\u2019re me then being me is the most normal thing imaginable. I am usually me. Still, it\u2019s an interesting question, and I appreciate being asked it because it has helped me clarify my own life experience in a way that maybe is more understandable to people who don\u2019t have the same experience. So, a quick list\/thread of defining… attributes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. I\u2019m Singaporean, born & raised. It\u2019s a tiny island-city-state. I don\u2019t know what it\u2019s like to be part of a big country like India or China or the US. I\u2019m used to thinking like a technocrat. I did 2 years of mandatory military service. \u201cLocal\u201d & \u201cfederal\u201d Govt are the same<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. I\u2019m ethnically Tamil. Within Singapore, this makes me a minority (about 9%). So I\u2019ve always known what it\u2019s like to be the weird guy with the weird skin color and the weird name and so on. I think Trevor Noah and Barack both share this experience. You have to charm your way<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. My dad ran his own business (industrial waste disposal, full stack \ud83d\ude02) This isn\u2019t very common in Singapore, I think. Business owners I think are psychologically more feral and independent. It also gives me a very irreverent attitude re: social classes and money<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. I was a book nerd as a child. Real book nerds know what\u2019s up. We have an irreverent attitude towards time and space and meaning (read history, physics, mythology, sci-fi, everything), we nerd out on the scale of centuries and have swole imaginations<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. I have friends across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. Some of my primary school classmates are wealthy blue-blooded Ivy League grads who might be future ministers and high-flyers. My army buddies include gravediggers, ex-convicts and other derelict motherfuckers<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. The local rock music scene was a big part of my life for many years. It taught me passion, vulnerability, emotional expression, showmanship, cameraderie. I learned to organise events, bring people together to make things happen<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. I met my wife when we were 10. We started dating at 14 and got married at 22. So I\u2019m 30 and I\u2019ve been a married homeowner for 7+ years, which is uncommon in our circles and I\u2019m guessing probably in yours too, with some exceptions. I get older friends asking for marriage advice<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. While I ~guess~ I\u2019m a sort of artsy humanities type (childhood aspirations: astronaut, inventor, game designer, lawyer, journalist), I spent 5.5 years doing marketing in a software company with a very strong engineering culture. Taught me to be precise, measured, systematic<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. When this book nerd encountered the internet, it was obviously the place for me to participate: make my own website, promote my band on MySpace, make friends, etc. I\u2019ve written over a million words over 20+ years of publishing online. I wrote elaborate game FAQs when I was 12<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That captures most of it I think! I realize midway that I actually have pre-existing threads about practically every single one of these things… maybe I\u2019ll piece that together in a blogpost or on my public roam or something if anybody\u2019s curious to get into the details<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, 10. ~2009-2013, I used to blog about local political issues, and got quite a bit of recognition for it. I experienced 1st-hand what it\u2019s like to be swept up in that sort of energy as a writer. I got disgusted with it and walked away from a high-traffic blog to introspect…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe delete, here are my guiding thoughts for myself as I introduce myself again: I can\u2019t possibly expect to say everything about myself in a single post, but I want to be thinking about the audience that I want to be building. My name is Visakan Veerasamy. I was born… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[727],"tags":[821],"class_list":["post-13513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drafts","tag-aboutme"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3vX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13514,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13513\/revisions\/13514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}