{"id":14486,"date":"2024-10-17T09:49:55","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T09:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14486"},"modified":"2025-03-02T15:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T15:48:10","slug":"nothing-contextualizes-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/10\/17\/nothing-contextualizes-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"nothing contextualizes itself, and the context is always collapsing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The very first essay I published on this substack in 2022 was titled We were voyagers<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> and it was subtitled \u201cOn Nietzschean historical sense: the happiness to know oneself in a manner not entirely arbitrary and accidental, but grown out of a past\u201d. In 2024 I realize that if I were writing it from scratch today, there\u2019s a good chance I might\u2019ve titled it \u201cyou think you just fell out of a coconut tree?\u201d (Is this decreasing in relevance now that the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I imagine most of my readers \u2014 who typically who know me from Twitter, and as such are likely to be more Online than most people, would know that I\u2019d be referencing a viral meme<\/a> courtesy of US Vice-President Kamala Harris. But I\u2019m also thinking, surely not everyone<\/em> would get it? I\u2019m from Singapore, and I\u2019m not sure that the average Singaporean would get it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there’s an informal collective of Kamala supporters who call themselves the KHive, which doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense until you realize it\u2019s a reference to the Beyonce fandom which is called BHive, which is itself a pun on \u2018beehive\u2019. Many things in culture are like this. (Nobody xThere\u2019s a camp called Whorehole<\/a>, which seems like an odd thing to name a camp, until you find out that it\u2019s downstream of Vibehole which is downstream of Vibecamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I let my son watch a little Sesame Street from time to time. He\u2019s 1 year old and he hasn\u2019t started speaking yet. But I appreciate that it gives him a context in which to learn some letters and numbers. there are \u2018kids\u2019 pretending to go to school, roleplaying things like riding on a bus, and dealing with the little conflicts that come up<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n