Threads

Fragments extracted from longer works that stand on their own

6 tweets · March 2019 · 143 likes · 19 retweets · read on Twitter

I'd love to collect a list of excellent things that were originally just an unassuming part of a longer thing but that stand powerfully on their own.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@callumflack This is part of what I love so much about twitter: the ability to lift a sentence out of its original tweetstorm/conversation, while retaining context, in a way that isn't natural in any other medium. eg I retweeted just this yesterday: twitter.com/sam_havens/sta…

My favorite example is the "Litany of Gendlin", which was reified by folks on LessWrong some years ago. It totally reads like a litany when displayed like this with the line breaks, but it wasn't originally meant as such. It was just a paragraph in Gendlin's book Focusing!

Similar elevation from a book by @visakanv

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world ❤️

@visakanv See original for context; this tweet generalizes to pretty much all of human life. There's a related blog post called The Metagame is the Process of Discovering its Own Constraints, which seems to be gone, but maybe archived here? web.archive.org/web/2018122502…

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

Unsurprisingly, few players put much thought into precisely defining the game that they are playing. Most players “pick it up” organically as they go along, inheriting the unwritten rules and norms of their peers via imitation and (limited) experimentation.

Me pulling half a sentence out of one of @vgr's threads

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

> your abstractions are implied by the phenomenological boundaries you draw, not definitions the metaphysics is the message twitter.com/vgr/status/126…

> It is not an argument, except inasmuch as each man's life is an argument for who he is. ❤️‍🔥

🕯Bird of Pray🕯 @BirdOfPlay_ ·

I suppose I should talk about my experience as a bisexual man. What follows is a list of observations about my sexuality. It is not an argument, except inasmuch as each man's life is an argument for who he is. 🧵