Tag: writing

Obsidian

Obsidian is my most used app on my laptops, iPad, phone, etc. and has been that way for the last few years between consulting, teaching, and working on my PhD (though you don’t need to do any of those things to appreciate Obsidian…). 

It’s a deceptively simple app that I adore for many reasons. I’ve been writing papers and doing research since my college days in the late 90’s and I wish I had access to a good deal of that work these days. Unfortunately, wonky file formats (like Word over the years) or tech (looking at you, ZIP Drive) has relegated much of that to the aether before I realized the error of my ways and decided to start writing and jotting down electronic notes in more open formats (text files). 

I run my consulting business off of Obsidian. All of my research and work on my PhD starts and is refined in Obsidian. Even my daily journaling has moved there (back to 2021 when I started using the platform).

I highly suggest you check out Obsidian whatever you do or write in this life… good podcast and interview here:

Obsidian’s CEO on why productivity tools need community more than AI | The Verge:

In Obsidian, files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use. You’ll hear Steph say that he doesn’t even know how many users Obsidian has or how sticky the software is, which is more or less unheard of among startups I cover.

Take Care of Your Tiny Notebooks

I like to think every time I open up Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations that I’m peering into something I shouldn’t be privy to… as I would always tell my students, he didn’t write those words for me, but only for himself. Yet, here we are. 

I gave away little composition notebooks to my students that we called “Tiny Notebooks.” I’d like to think some of them still are tempted to use them!

Take Care of Your Little Notebook | Charles Simic | The New York Review of Books:

I very much hope these notebooks I see in stationery stores, card shops, and bookstores are serving similar purposes. Just think, if you preserve them, your grandchildren will be able to read your jewels of wisdom fifty years from now, which may prove exceedingly difficult, should you decide to confine them solely to a smart phone you purchased yesterday.

Was Writing Developed by Poets, Priests, our Accountants?

Fun read:

As a writer of nonfiction, I can’t help but love writing’s roots in enumerating concrete objects and reality itself. The textual analyst part of me loves how Mesopotamian tokens were wrapped in clay envelopes after being impressed on the soft exterior – perhaps clay-wrapped tokens of meaning give rise to the notion that text is both a surface and an interior, and that that’s what leads us to talk so relentlessly (in English and other languages) about what is ‘in’ a given text. The poet in me wants to repurpose the heavy thumb of authority’s use of writing on behalf of the powerless. The linguist in me recognises the cognitive significance of the layers of writing’s invention, none of which the brain was evolved to do specifically but with which we have co-evolved. And as a partisan of text, I know its deep history won’t ever be erased.

— Read on aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting