Distracted by More Obsidian

Since my partner is on vacation and we have a busy week ahead of us, I won't be going as in-depth with this post as I would like, which saddens me a hair because this week was a treasure trove of learning and accomplishments. While there's a slim chance I might blog next week, I'm skeptical that'll actually happen.

That said, I've been continuing my trend from last week and staying up waaaaay too late playing with Obsidian and reading/watching tutorials for Templater. As someone who knows only Markdown and a smidge of HTML, the syntax for Templater is an entirely new beast that I'm having some difficulty wrapping my mind around. The tutorials available have been invaluable, if not 100% helpful outside of what I myself am able to cobble together and glean from them as a relatively new user of Obsidian and the plugins such as Templater and Dataview.

The two combined will automate what I've needed help with the most: compiling what sessions characters, for example, make an appearance and providing a summary of that summary through the Bases I've set up.

The above table shows the Transcripts where Mure makes an appearance thanks to the links I've made between him and those files. The bottom coding is how I created that table, but I'll back up a bit and see if I can't lay out the steps I took to get to this point.

From the moment I imported everything into Obsidian, I knew I would want a Character Template for future NPCs we encounter. The same goes for Locations, Journal Entries , and more. Setting up a template for future characters was a relatively easy task, and at first I used Obsidian's core plugins for my initial template for certain properties such as Ancestry, Aliases, Gender, etc... It would be an easy enough endeavor to fill out the info for each new character file I created, but it didn't solve the issue of past characters buried deep within the transcript files. Sure, I could link the character to the transcript file, but I wanted to see on the character page what sessions they appeared in at any given moment.

That's when I began to dive into the more advanced plugin Templater. Through Nicole's tutorial, which is one of the ones listed on the site link I provided above, I learned how to automatically apply templates to files that are created within certain folders by using the "await"...function?--I'm still not solid on the terminology.

Basically, whenever I create a new file in the "Characters" folder, the template will automatically apply the Properties table that's provided so that I don't need to add all of those properties myself for each and every new character. I can even apply the template to pre-existing files with just a few commands, which simplifies my life significantly.

When she went more in-depth about the Dataview structure, however, my mind broke. Even now, I still don't fully understand the syntax, because I haven't looked too deeply into Dataview or its syntax. I had to follow her tutorial to a T and recreate her examples in my attempt to understand the inner workings of how the automation works. Initially, instead of the "summary" title, I used something like "Session Number," but I couldn't get the syntax to work correctly, so summary it is for now.

Still though, I can see the utility of this tool if I can manage to learn how the syntax works. The documentation provided for it assumes that the reader has prior coding experience, so it doesn't do the greatest job of simplifying concepts or providing multiple examples, and the other tutorials also make some assumptions about their viewership, but I'm slowly learning.

I'll probably forget all that I was just beginning to grasp, since I won't be practicing it much this next week, but maybe returning to it after will solidify my understanding.

Other Notable Accomplishments:

• Finished "translating" the lullaby to Aefala's "Common" language, which required more concentration and thought than I anticipated. Even then, the words sound like a mix of German, French, and occasionally Russian, which I find hilarious, but it doesn't matter too much for my purposes that they sound like a patchwork quilt.

  • Recorded it as well, which made me realize how much goes into sound production and getting artists and albums to sound good. I don't need it to sound professional, so I only did some bare bones work to lessen the inevitable saliva sounds that cropped up, but I see now how much there is to learn in that field and how little I know.

  • My partner and I plan to do the first half of the performance this upcoming Saturday. After having worked on Teyr'loch Delter Pach for so long, it hasn't really clicked for me that it's nearly done.

• 4-day workout split: strength down another .6%, and I anticipate it'll dip further, since I won't really be working out this week. I'm trying not to let the strength loss get to me, since I anticipated it, and I know it'll tick back up after this week, but it faintly eats at me.

Questions for Contemplation & Discussion:

• Nothing for this week.

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Mura

Dead to the world