Scratch Pad: Polyrhythms, Fonts, Obsidian
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Afternoon trio from grumbling tummy, squawking crows, and the distant rumbling of internal combustion vehicles
▰ Vehicular polyrhythm of a car alarm going off and then the owner causing it to emit additional bleeps during ongoing failed attempts to sort out which button sequence turns off the car alarm
▰ I love that “fun” is a font category on my computer’s OS. Somewhere there’s a typographer thinking: “My font’s friggin’ fun. Why the heck isn’t it on that list?!”
▰ I didn’t expect, when I started using Obsidian, that I’d use its native daily notes, since I’d already been compiling my own into monthly docs. But I’ve switched. This is about as big a change to my note-taking as I can recall in many years. And it’s great. One tip: I recommend adding the abbreviated day of the week (YYYY-MM-DD-ddd) to the file name so they’re more easily identifiable. It really does help me to understand some notes when I consider the day of the week they were written.
▰ And another Obsidian thing: tables. The recent(ish?) upgrade makes them so simple to use, and now I find myself using them all the time: for little to-do lists, to organize key points, to correlate related information. The ability to move rows and columns manually on a whim is fantastic.
▰ Not sure when I became a person who pre-orders books fairly frequently but I’m a person who now pre-orders books fairly frequently. Recently: the new Robin Sloan (Moonbound), the imminent China Miéville/Keanu Reeves (The Book of Elsewhere, related to the Brzrkr graphic novels, which I read earlier this year), and the later-this-year Neal Stephenson (Polostan). Which makes me realize: as much non-genre stuff as I read, I’m not “following” non-genre writers as way I once did. Dunno. Just sort of observing my own reading trends. Currently really digging Ed Parks’ Same Bed, Different Dreams and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Yes, she’s dead. I know.
▰ The YouTube video recommendation algorithm generally has my number (or numbers: synthesizers, guitar tutorials, non-comedic TV/movie previews, comics/scifi/literary author interviews, gadget news), except it persistently exhibits an impression that I’m interested in Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa
▰ Who ruled that YouTube videos need to be lit like they were filmed on a Virgin Airlines flight?
▰ How many videos are in your YouTube “watch later” playlist? I’ve got 2,070.
▰ Obsidian-heads: I’ve begun using the inter-file linking, which is quite remarkable (like how files names update within docs). However, I worry that if I use that, I’m locking myself into Obsidian (which runs contrary to its plain-text appeal). Are such links more “portable” than I think they are?
▰ Happiness is waking up to a photo in your email inbox of a sneak peek of a CD insert featuring liner notes you wrote
▰ Reading: apparently I haven’t registered here some of the books I’ve finished reading recently, not since June 8. I’ve read a lot, but just — well, not “just,” but relative to how much I’ve read it feels like just — finished three novels, or a novella and two novels. The novella: The Jade Setter of Janloon by Fonda Lee, set in the world of her excellent Jade trilogy. I hope she puts out one of these every year or so forever. Then Moonbound (more on which this coming week) by Robin Sloan, whose Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore I re-read in advance of this coming out. And then Max Barry’s Lexicon, which has a lot in common with R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (they’re both about language as a form of magic), which I read earlier in the year. Currently working my way through a bunch of books, of which I’m likely to finish Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams and Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World first. But we’ll see.
