A Note on This Edition
How a sprawling working document became something you can sit and read.
Dominos began as a Google Doc, a living document that Visakan Veerasamy kept adding to, revising, and revisiting in public over several years. It is one of his most referenced pieces of thinking. In its native form it is also a thicket: footnotes inline as parentheticals, to-do markers, half-finished scaffolding, dozens of reader comments threaded through the margins, and bold lines standing in for headings that were never made.
This edition is an attempt to let that thinking breathe. The goal was to present the same words as a clean, navigable reading experience, close to an ebook, and to build the reading machinery around them so the ideas are easy to move through.
The approach. Visakan's existing writing is preserved as written. It was not rewritten or paraphrased. Most of the work below is structure, presentation, and reading furniture built around his words. Where this edition genuinely adds material, such as a survey of historical scenes or fuller descriptions of his example friendships, that material is editorial and is noted as such in its own section, so it is never confused with his prose.
Why
A great working document and a great reading experience pull in opposite directions. The document is optimized for the author thinking out loud. It is append-only, addressed to himself, full of "tbc" and "add stories later." The reader wants a beginning, a spine, and a way to keep their place. The point of this edition is to keep the first thing fully intact while giving the second thing room to exist: a table of contents, real headings, footnotes you can tap, comments moved to the margin, and the long supplementary material gathered into an appendix instead of trailing off the end.
How it was made
It is built by a small, purpose-made tool that takes the Google Doc, exported as HTML, and runs it through a documented pipeline of transforms, then writes out a single self-contained page. The same tool can do this for any document. The moves specific to Dominos live alongside the document rather than inside the tool.
Two principles keep it honest. First, every transform is mechanical and reviewable. It moves, wraps, labels, or re-cases existing markup, and it does not generate prose. Second, the build is deterministic, so the same source always produces the same page, and any change in the result traces back to a change in the input. The whole edition is one self-contained file, which makes it easy to keep, share, and archive.
The reading experience
Everything in this group is machinery built around the text. None of it changes what the text says.
Generated from the headings, in three forms: a sticky bar at the top that always shows the section you are in and opens the full contents on tap, a contents rail alongside the text on wide screens, and a collapsible contents on narrow ones.
A panel to change the typeface (Iowan Old Style, ET Book, Fraunces, or Atkinson Hyperlegible), the text size across five steps, the theme (light, dark, or paper), and the column width (narrow, default, or wide). Your choices are remembered between visits.
A progress indicator tracks how far through the piece you are, in the top bar and along the side.
More than forty asides, to-dos, and sidenotes were moved out of the running text into numbered markers. Tapping one opens it in place, as a small popover on desktop and a bottom sheet on mobile, so the main line of thought stays clean.
Forty-plus reader comments were lifted out of the prose into an "In the margins" section, each attributed and anchored to its place in the text. Resolved ones are collapsed.
Dense question-and-answer blocks and the crowdsourced replies under the open questions fold away and open on demand, so the page reads at one level and expands where you want detail.
Tweets are rendered as live embedded cards, and article links as titled reference cards, each given a natural label in place of a raw URL.
Hovering any heading reveals a control to copy a direct link straight to that section.
An opening drop cap, ornamental dividers that rotate between major sections, a poem set as verse, and images placed inline with captions.
Structure and flow
Bold lines that were acting as headings were promoted to real headings at the right level. Vague labels were reworded into the question they imply, for example "Minimum viable scene" became "What is a minimum viable scene?"
The loose discussion sections, Talking points, Things to consider, and Worries and concerns, were gathered under one heading, "Talking points and open questions." Things to consider and Worries and concerns were merged into a single "Considerations and concerns."
The long supplementary material, relevant reading, heroes, quotes, the 2023 reboot note, competitive advantages, and the Zompist note, was pulled out of the body to the very end as an Appendix, so the main argument reaches its call to action cleanly.
Several passages were moved to where they read best: the survey of scenes was lifted to lead the third domino, house parties were given their own heading among the methods for building a scene, the Losev passage was raised into its own section, and the four reader-sourced open questions were gathered in order under "Open questions."
Expanded and compiled
This group is the editorial contribution to the content itself, built from Visakan's own research and examples rather than invented. It is supplementary, and is the part that goes beyond pure presentation.
A survey of historical scenes, compiled from Visakan's ongoing research notes, presented as a structured list to ground the abstract idea of a scene in concrete cases. It is openly partial, and points to his working list for the latest version.
Visakan's bare list of pairs (Lennon and McCartney, Jobs and Wozniak, Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Vlogbrothers) was expanded into described examples, so a reader who does not already know the references can see why each one seeded a scene.
Scattered examples of the home gatherings that bootstrapped scenes were gathered into a dedicated section among the methods for building one.
At the surface
Run-on paragraphs were split where a double line break already implied a break, a few visibly unfinished sentences were joined to their neighbours, and filler interjections were removed. The wording itself is untouched.
Lowercase "i" was raised to "I", along with a handful of other letter-case fixes.
Dash and quotation styling were regularized to match the author's habits.
Authoring scaffolding only: "tbc", separator rules, "add stories" placeholders, date-stamp labels, "[repeated]" markers, and empty phantom headings.
Left for the author
Anything that would have required a judgement about meaning, an ambiguous reference or a genuinely unfinished thought, was left exactly as written and, where useful, flagged rather than quietly fixed.
What changed vs the original Google Doc
Visakan’s words are untouched. Everything here is structure, relocation, formatting, or letter-case.
- Comments 100 reader comments lifted out of the prose into “In the margins”, attributed & anchored (resolved ones collapsed).
- Footnotes 42 asides, to-dos and sidenotes moved into tap-to-open footnotes.
- Copy-edits 30 merges & clean-ups — joined run-on paragraphs, cut filler (“Urgh…”), reworded vague labels into real questions (“Minimum viable scene” → “What is a minimum viable scene?”).
- Headings 40 headings, incl. bold pseudo-headings promoted to real H2/H3, with a generated table of contents.
- Collapsibles 4 crowdsourced Q&A sections folded into expandable blocks.
- Decks & callouts 0 eyebrow subtitle(s) and 3 thesis callout(s) set off from the prose.
- Lists 5 run(s) of loose lines stitched into bullets/numbers (Lennon-McCartney …; @-handle recommendation lists).
- References 33 tweet links rendered as compact tweet cards and 40 article links as metadata cards, each with a natural label.
- Verse 1 poem set as verse (Emily Dickinson).
- Images 4 images rendered inline (with captions).
- Casing & run-ons lowercase “i”→“I” and 36 other case fixes; double-line-break run-ons split into real paragraphs.
- Removed 13 scaffolding block(s) (“tbc”, “~~~”, “Add stories”, the date-stamp labels); [repeated] markers and empty phantom headings stripped.
- Typography spaced en-dashes → em-dashes.
- Proper names that were lowercased or randomly capitalised in the draft (e.g. tyler → Tyler, scott → Scott, “Effective” → effective) are normalised; his stylised lowercase coinages (do100things, scenius, @handles) are left exactly as written.
- Misspellings spotted but left untouched (wording is yours to fix): “Sinclar Lewis” (Sinclair), “Camile Paglia” (Camille), “Huygenes” (Huygens).
- Bracketed [[wiki-links]] from his Roam (e.g. [[scenes]], [[cultural institutions]]) are kept verbatim as breadcrumbs.
The original
Nothing here replaces the source. The living document continues to grow in Visakan's hands.
Open the original Google Doc →
Colophon
Visakan Veerasamy.
Emmanuel Awosika.
A custom document-reader pipeline.
Fraunces and Iowan Old Style.