So much work
Lately, I have become increasingly disenchanted with my handwritten journals. This practice has been going for nearly thirty years, and I just can not do the hand moving across the page without taking a moment several times during the process to check my phone. This annoys me. Also, I can hardly wait to get to my workstation and start doing things in my Obsidian vault. It’s very silly, but the notes in the book, are all just, “well I should do this,” or “I wish this happened,” or something along those lines, but within the vault, I am editing notes and changing things, creating new ideas to play with, or refactoring my workflows, and once in a while I build a new tool to mess around with my ideas - rather than just wistfully writing about them.
Maybe I have outgrown the paper format. Its a thought that I will need to dwell on for a little while. I have made this sort of effort before in the past. The transition to digital monitoring of my brain activity. I tried out Evernote for a couple years when it first came out. In fact, this year I finally downloaded all the old documents from that account - I have yet to do anything with them but I have them, so there is that. My problem with that service was that it was not readily extensible so that I could change the way I work within it. Also it was sort of frankensteined onto the computer as its own sovereign entity. With Obsidian, and the way I am using Obsidian, it is its own file system.
Well, not its own file system. First of all Obsidian, pretty much only is useful for markdown documents. Which is far less restrictive than it sounds. Markdown is basically a very common text file, with some special usage of symbols to help format the document. Pretty cool if you ask me, but I am a huge nerd so what do I know!? What this means for me, is that I can interact with these documents whether or not I am using Obsidian (and I frequently am doing exactly that.) Plus with a heap of plugins installed into the platform, I can make the whole vault look and act the way I want.
As I have my entire vault on a version control system that is decentralized enough that I can commit my changes to a cloud repository, I am able to work on the same documents no matter which device I am sitting with. I am also able to roll back changes when I make bold move that really screws up my entire system. This happens more times than I really like to admit, but when I decide to write a python script which will alter every single document in the vault (~10K notes) in one pass and it turns out that I didn’t understand my code before I ran it, this saves me a heap of heartache and trouble.
For the past six months, I have been adding resources and creating this vault at an explosive rate. Hence the more than 10,000 notes which are in it (this translates to 3.17 GB of data.) Lately, I have begun to go through whole sections of the vault, weeding, pruning, and merging files. The absolute number of notes is not the issue I am dealing with currently, rather the consistency of the knowledge that is presented within it. As the vault is where I am writing new chapters, setting up scenes for the D&D game, and generally trying to get a grip on the world of Orbis, it has become clear that if I do not have an organized vault, I can not create these stories in a manner which has coherence.
I struggle for this coherence because nearly all the best stories which have influenced me have it. It does not matter that we do not live in a world where swords made of light can be used to block laser beams, or that these extremely large lizard type creatures fly and spit cones of fire at someone-the escapism into these speculative fictional worlds presented by the narrative allow imagination to run crazy. As long as the story maintains its own internal logic, obeys its own rules as to what is or is not plausible, then the experience of reading that story is, to me, one of the most exciting parts of living life.
Some folks will find that statement to be an indicator of exactly how boring I actually am as a person. I’m ok with that. It’s part of why I do not try to be a twitch streamer or YouTuber or even engage in an Instagram addiction. I am boring to watch. Mostly because all the exciting, to me, bits are happening beneath my skull, inside the cerebral cortex where these neurological signals are firing and leaping across chasms that have the fractal space of a quarter of the universe.
I don’t really know why I wrote this, nor why I felt the need to publish it but here it is.