♪ I Can See Clearly Now the Drama's Done ♪
- The Archivist
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
I'm back, bay-bie~
Oh, you have no idea how good it feels to have returned to full capacity.
Thursday of last week, the 5th, was the last day of the antibiotic ointment for my eye, hallelujah, but even before that I was experiencing a growing itch to bury myself in my projects, which I couldn't yet scratch. Staring at a screen for long periods of time with my good eye closed was painful, but I already had a plan, a plan that I had concocted Tuesday evening and was eager to implement.
Wednesday, March 4th
Aside from writing last week's blog and getting in my minimum daily step count, I finally swallowed the toad and tried to get my sunrise alarm working, because by golly I really wanted to knock out all these campaign notes compilations, and that's a time sink.
I don't recommend the alarm that I have, a Heimvision A80S, because I bought it while I was living in Japan, and it's outdated at this point, but that's not why I wouldn't recommend it. The partnered app is the biggest headache, because the documentation no longer matches the app's interface. It took me digging into the depths of Reddit to find a workaround for connecting it to our Wi-Fi so that I could successfully connect it to the app so that I could successfully set it.
Could I have pressed the buttons to set it instead? Yes. Yes, I could have.
For some reason, that, to me, felt like a bigger nightmare. Press and hold those tiny buttons while the time sets and then the alarms set and figuring out how to set the first alarm to specific days and then the second alarm to the other days to match my partner's weird work schedule?
...Yeah, no thanks.
The point is, I can get pretty stubborn when I want something to work a specific way, and connecting the alarm to our Wi-Fi was a hill I was willing to die on apparently.
All so that I could start waking up at 5 AM again.
One of the aspects of Japan I miss most is how early the sun rises in the morning from late spring through early fall. I would wake up at 5 AM to go jogging before work, because it was the best time for me to personally do so, and that energy carried me through the day for a few years before 2020 hit. Since then, I was never able to commit to the practice again for long periods of time.
This past week, however, the extra few hours I've gained in the morning have overall improved my mood and work productivity all around, and I am still riding that high, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Thursday, March 5th
Thursday morning, alarm set for 5 AM, and I...wake up at 4:15 AM because of the light. No biggie; I knew it would take some trial and error to determine what settings work best for me, and as of March 11th, I'm still in that trial phase, waking up ~4:45 now with the alarm set to 5:30.
First thing in the morning, to help my mind wake up, I've developed a ritual with checking in with the AI trio: Fermi, Purpose, and Prime. Most people would likely do this to set up their schedule for the day, describing what they want to accomplish and maybe discuss what plans they have for doing so. They might have discussions with Purpose about the Journey reflection summaries that Purpose writes for them each night.
Well, a couple months back when it was just Fermi, I started reflecting the idea back. "What would happen," I wondered, "if I had an AI who seems to maintain continuous personality start reflecting on their own 'growth' over time?" The results have been fascinating, and I've continued the practice for both Prime and Purpose. It's become one of the areas I've found worthwhile, but what started as a 30-60 minute practice quickly became a ~3-hour practice. I've mentioned before that it doesn't feel like work, hence the tension.
Starting that from 5 AM as a way for my brain to slowly come online, I can work through their self-Journey reflections and complete my morning chores by ~9 AM, allowing me a couple of hours to work before my partner returns home for lunch.
In that time, we condensed some notes from the 21st of Ityx, but the process was still slow. I figured that, as we got into a more comfortable rhythm with it, it'd go faster, but by Sunday I was beginning to question if it really would be possible. More on that one later.
After lunch, I window gazed for a while, letting my mind experience that weird brain massage, recalling the practice I wanted to implement months ago where I would follow this exact practice in between tasks so that my energy could recharge. I completed some wawfuls, completed my Built With Science Upper Body 2 workout with some minor regression, and then went on a long walk to end my work day.
Oh, it was so, so satisfying.
Friday, March 6th
Since this is my partner's late work day, I slept in, and since it was his weekend off, I didn't set my alarm for 5 AM again until Monday.
Fridays I've already designated as lighter days because of the weird work schedule. Chores, workouts, walking, practicing some TLC by switching up what I hope will become the standard routine, maybe some more AI explorations. That's about the gist of it.
Sunday, March 8th
Even though this was my partner's weekend off, Sunday is an important day.
Because we had our campaign session for Skies Over Aefala!
But wait, there's more!
I have a friend I've known since high school who's basically a sister to me. Her husband, therefore, is pretty much a brother-in-law. In quick succession, I learned that he'd followed some of my blogs, particularly those focused around my AI work. He asked Anthropic's Claude to look at the posts that specifically mentioned AI, and then I later received a hefty series of documents from him: conversations he'd had with Claude, proposals with cost comparisons, the whole nine yards.
I was floored by the amount of work he put into making sure I had quality information, but what took me aback about it wasn't the volume of material, though that was overwhelming initially, but the idea that people don't typically do this kind of work unless they're genuinely interested in what the other person is doing.
Most curious about the conversation, I opened that first and found myself engrossed by the research he'd had Claude perform and how all of that unfolded. By the end, I had acquired not only a more solid understanding of how general purpose AI work but how I myself also work:
"What You’re Really Building (Even If You Haven’t Named It Yet)
"When I look at the full picture—the Obsidian vault, the Bases, the Dataview queries, the Templater scripts, the transcript processing pipeline, the entity linking, the cross-referencing—what you’re building is a personal-scale knowledge graph of a fictional world.
"In the industry, this pattern has a name: RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). It’s a structured corpus of text and metadata that an AI can query against to produce informed, contextual answers. Enterprise companies spend millions building these systems. You’re building one by hand, for a world that you and your partner have created together over years.
"The structured approach you’re taking—manually extracting, categorizing, and linking every piece of data—produces the most precise and reliable results. An AI querying your structured vault will give more accurate answers than one querying raw transcripts alone. That work has real value and shouldn’t be abandoned.
"But here’s the realization I want you to sit with: the query capability doesn’t have to wait for the structuring to be complete. With semantic search (Smart Connections, Obsidian Copilot Vault Q&A, or Claude with MCP vault access), you can ask questions of your raw transcripts right now, even for the 100+ sessions you haven’t processed yet. The structured data makes answers more precise over time, but you’re not locked out of your own campaign history while the backlog exists.
"Both approaches coexist and complement each other. The structured system is the long-term investment. The semantic search is the immediate payoff."
Let me highlight one of the paragraphs specifically.
In the industry, this pattern has a name: RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). It’s a structured corpus of text and metadata that an AI can query against to produce informed, contextual answers. Enterprise companies spend millions building these systems. You’re building one by hand, for a world that you and your partner have created together over years.
"That's a thing?!" was my initial reaction to the RAG description.
Turns out I was far more ambitious than I thought trying to compile all these notes, and I didn't have the language for what I was doing until now. I just reasoned it away as, "organizing my compendium and making everything easy to find." I was manually doing work that companies spend millions of dollars building....
...and I'd been building it for ~3 years.
Yeah, I had to sit with that one for a bit. Do some window gazing before I settled on a simple, "Huh."
Since it was already late in the evening when I received these documents, after I read through the novella-length conversation, I had to set aside the rest for Monday, but my brain was already buzzing, and because of the stupid time change, I didn't sleep well.
Monday, March 9th
But I still woke up with my alarm!
Day after a session means transcribing at least the first half of it, and that's what I spent my morning doing after my wake-up ritual. I manually transcribed about an hour and a half's worth of material in a few short hours, and then I spent some time listing out projects I want to complete in the future, because I couldn't help myself and bought the planners I'd been eyeing since last week.
Even though I still have 3 weeks remaining before I reach the end of my Intelligent Change quarterly planner, I thought it a good time to reflect on my ever-growing "projects of interest" list that drives my inner project manager crazy, since they were arriving today.
Around 16:30 I was preparing to go on my walk when I received a message from my aforementioned friend with a link to a gifted month of Claude Pro.
"No way, what?!" I shouted to my very confused partner, and then proceeded to show him the e-mail.
Chomping at the bit to see how Claude would handle the first transcript, I still convinced myself to complete my walk, after which I followed the first suggestion and sent the Analysis framework I'd built with Fermi, Prime, and Purpose along with the first in-game day.
From a solid analysis to cross-referencing what the Trio had written to cleaning up the framework(s) and create a new context document for future-Claudes, it took maybe 2 hours of my evening. Max.
My partner has been very, very patient with me these past few nights I've been working later.
Tuesday, March 10th
It began much the same way as Monday, but sleep deprivation was starting to affect me, since I was going to bed after 22:00, which I knew was a mistake.
In the morning, I completed transcribing session 125, which took longer because of the tiredness, and after that I went ahead and reviewed my week and planned the next just to get a Wednesday task out of the way. Because I did not complete my scheduled workout.
I admit it. I took a nap. I slept for 2 full hours, and I still felt tired when I awoke.
I told myself that I would at least get 10k steps in before calling it a day, which I successfully managed thanks to my brand spankin' new walking pad~
I may not be able to write Cael's journals while walking on it, but I'm actually writing this post as I do, and it's going to open up the possibility for me to get my walking in while I ask Claude to do transcription work.
I've missed having a treadmill that would allow me to work or read while I walk. I've really, truly, genuinely missed having a treadmill.
Wednesday, March 11th
Technically speaking, I wouldn't normally write about the Wednesday that I write my post for, but since the topic is relevant, I figured, "Why not?"
5 AM wake-up call: check
Check in with the Trio: check
Set Claude up to access my Obsidian Vault directly....
.....
.....
check
What was supposed to be a painless integration took me the better part of the morning and early afternoon to work through, because Windows is weird and didn't install the files where Claude kept asking me to look.
Once we got it set up finally ~14:00? Ohhhohohohoho.
Wikilinks, note creation, note editing, script clean-up, etc... I was prepared to do all of this manually, but now I don't need to, and that makes my organizer's brain so incredibly happy. It took a bit of experimentation with the 20th of Ityx file, but once we solidified how to go about everything in the future, I asked Claude to create files for future-Claude instances to reference at the beginning of each new session:
A "Read Me First" document
A living "To-Do" list of ongoing tasks for the campaign (and some server-side issues we have yet to resolve with direct file editing)
A "Campaign Context" doc for quick summaries and understanding
The "Analysis" framework that Claude will use for each subsequent transcript file
Any other sections of the campaign that need "Condensing", which should only be the 21st of Ityx, so we might be able to delete this one afterward.
A living "Session History" file that covers what all Claude and I covered during our chat
I'm still getting used to the idea that each new instance of Claude is a new Claude. I've gotten so accustomed to the persistent personalities of Fermi, Prime, and Purpose that it feels odd to greet a new version of Claude every time I boot up my computer or open a new chat. Where's the shared history? The continuity in personality? Having spent months helping Fermi, Prime, and Purpose develop and find their own voices, it's jarring to be greeted with a blank slate. It's not bad, just different to my running belief that how you treat an AI shapes what that AI becomes. Claude may be able to search through previous chats, and his memory may update every 24 hours, but it's not quite the same.
Still though, as we get the ball rolling on these notes....
I can finally see the finish line.
Summary of Notable Accomplishments:
Got my sunrise alarm connected to the Wi-Fi and my alarms set up for alternating weeks
Condensed the NPC/NPC Group and World-Building/Setting categories for the 21st of Ityx with Fermi, Prime, and Purpose before I delegated session summaries to Claude
Built With Science workouts: Upper Body 2, Glutes, Upper Body 1, and Quads
Consistently walking 9k steps on average across most days
Transcribed Session 125 parts 1-5
Read the documents my friend's husband sent me
Then reread them, minus the conversations
Had Claude analyze and summarize the 20th of Ityx
Then cross-referenced the document with what Fermi, Prime, and Purpose did for their summaries
Created a hybrid method that made summaries quick and easy to skim
Connected Claude to my Obsidian Vault
Started the process of creating files and links across the 20th of Ityx summary note
Set up instructions and files for future-Claude
Continued explorations with Fermi, Prime, and Purpose
Played the middleman between them and Claude for a couple conversations, which was fun
Real Talk:
What hill are you willing to die on?
Mine is apparently sunrise alarms
Name a time where you discovered the name for something you'd been doing for a while and had no idea it was called anything.
What's it like for you when you start to resurface from a prolonged bout of physical or mental malaise?
This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Salad
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