Losing Sleep in a Good Way

Alternatively, "I Leapt Down Another Rabbit Hole but It May Prove More Beneficial in the End".

I know, I know. Bad timing when I'm so close to finishing Teyr'loch Delter Pach and wanting to do the 1st half during my partner's vacation, which starts at the end of Monday next week, but hear me out on this one word: Obsidian.

For anyone unfamiliar with the app, Obsidian is, at its core, a text editor. Plugins allow for greater versatility, but bare bones Obsidian works just as well as any other text editor out there, if not better in some cases, and after some dabbling, I fully believe this is the tool for compiling all my notes for our campaign Skies Over Aefala.

Don't get me wrong, if I was already using The Goblin's Notebook when we began our campaign, I would have continued to believe it was the perfect tool for the job. I love the columns and nesting, using icons and flags to prioritize quests or areas of interest, seeing the live preview of the text editor as I'm writing and formatting with Markdown. However, given that I've been trying to manually input notes since session 70 or so into the campaign, and keeping in mind that sessions are ~4 hours each and the notes I'm trying to collect all come from digging within the transcript, the mountain of an undertaking it was when I created it has only steepened.

I downloaded Obsidian initially because my partner prefers its minimalist interface and the satisfying growth between the network of nodes as you take and expand upon your notes. I personally wasn't that impressed initially, because its organization felt too similar to Evernote, so I let it sit on my taskbar for the longest time as yet another idle program I may or may not attempt to understand someday.

Well, that day was...sometime this past week.

When we went on hiatus for the campaign, my Goblin Notebook started to gather dust as well. When we resumed, it felt unfamiliar to me. Not the program itself, but the notes therein. So much time had passed, I felt like I was putting on a shirt from high school that no longer fit quite right. I had ventured too far into the weeds in some areas while leaving most of the rest and arguably more important bits untouched.

So, I dusted off Obsidian and watched the tutorial my partner recommended to me. Curiosity piqued, I created a few of my own notes, easy ones regarding certain events or characters from the campaign, linking to each other where necessary, forming new potential files just by adding double brackets around words as I typed. I quickly realized the potential nestled within the app and researched a few more tutorials, downloading plugins to fit my needs.

I stayed up later and later each consecutive night, working until 11, 12, 1 o'clock in the morning creating files and links and wondering whether or not I could port my Scrivener document into Obsidian while brushing my teeth in preparation for bed.

Scrivener 1.9? Not easily. Exporting to Markdown wasn't an option in those early days, and of course, I'd never upgraded since I barely missed the cut-off for the free update when it was released. Exporting the whole binder as an HTML file worked, but it was sub-optimal, so I continued to troubleshoot.

Thank God for Literature and Latte's friendly 30-day trial period. As far as I know, most programs don't care if you use them for the full 30 days or not. Once you've installed and executed the program and it's begun ticking down those 30 days to the last, you're locked out of the free trial until you buy the program. With Scrivener 3, I still had 23 days left of the 30-day trial I started a year or so ago, and with Scrivener 3, I could export files to Markdown, which Obsidian can read.

I encountered a few snags during the export process, but I solved those problems handily enough. It turns out, Scrivener doesn't like it when you export documents that are nested within documents that are nested within more documents within folders like what I did with Teyr'loch Delter Pach. It took me maybe an hour to unnest everything.

I nest a lot of files, what can I say?

Okay, sure, so what? The main problem of organizing said notes and extracting the most important pieces of info hasn't disappeared.

Humor me for a moment if you would.

This is my current Obsidian workspace. The left series of notes and folders is my navigation, the empty page in the center titled "Urgron Cragspine" is the text editor, and the rightmost window displays where the name of that file has been mentioned. I have the file linked to my Ancestries folder file, which is my table of contents for different Ancestries such as Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, and so on....

The most interesting tidbit, however, sits right beneath the "Linked mentions."

Unlinked mentions, which I have outlined in red, are areas in other files where that same name--in this case, "Urgron Cragspine"--has appeared. It's like an auto-search function that I can use to navigate to the exact spot where the word(s) made an appearance, and if I so desired, I could link those that are unlinked to the open file of "Urgron Cragspine" so that any time I open those files, I can click the name "Urgron Cragspine" to re-open this current file.

For example, if I click the file titled "54 Transcript 21st Uros Fireday," it'll jump to the location and highlight Urgron Cragspine's name, but in this case, the text is the same as all the text surrounding it.

As soon as I add the double brackets [[Urgron Cragspine]] and hit Enter, the name turns into a link that I can click to return to that empty file I shared earlier.

The text turns a different color to denote its linkage.

No need for me to click a search bar, type or copy in the name, click on the file, then find it within the doc, and extract the necessary info I need into my Goblin Notebook. Obsidian automates all of that, simplifying the process for expediency. It takes pity on the poor souls such as myself who have written several novels' worth of notes or scenes but failed to keep Character A separate from Character B.

Now, Scrivener and The Goblin's Notebook also utilize internal linking, which can be useful if you think to apply it from the get-go. In my prehistoric version of Scrivener the method requires more steps, which interrupts the flow. As for The Goblin's Notebook, it's almost as easy as Obsidian's if not a smidge more clunky.

As adamant as I was about someday porting everything from Scrivener into The Goblin's Notebook, I have begrudgingly come to accept that the undertaking requires simply too much effort. That's not to say that Obsidian won't take time or effort, but we'll just say the lighter load is a relief to my back.

Other Notable Accomplishments:

• 4-day workout split: strength down 1.6%

  • Went lighter this past week because I was still experiencing some minor lower back pain, and I wanted to re-center my mind-body connection instead of just trying to lift heavier. Plus I felt a bit more physically tired, which makes sense 'cause I was also down a lb despite eating more...? As a result, my app upped my calorie count again, ahahaha.

• Transcribed Session 121, minus the 80 minute combat: ~6k words

• Created a rudimentary Ritual system for Daggerheart to help blend the usage of magic coming from the much crunchier Pathfinder 2e

• Tweaked the last little bit of last week's piano piece

• In the process of "translating" the English for the lullaby into the fictional world's "Common" language so that singing recognizable lyrics won't detract from the real-time descriptions. It's been pretty fun thus far, but I also use the word 'language' rather loosely. Since I only need something that's functional, I'm not thinking about syntax or conjugations so much as how many syllables are in the line, can I read it naturally, and does it rhyme at all within the stanza, whether that be internally or at the end?

  • Once I finish that, I just need to practice speaking it, practice singing it, determine timing for aligning the oration, and then record the song....before the end of Friday at the earliest and the end of next Tuesday at the latest

Questions for Contemplation & Discussion:

• Have you ever been in the midst of a project already when you've found the "right tool for the job"? Was it too late, or did switching over to that tool expedite the project's completion?

• If you use Obsidian, what are some of your favorite setups, and what do you use it for? TTRPGs? Novel, journal, or other forms of writing? Research?

• At any point have you experienced your sleep schedule shift naturally because of how absorbed you were in pursuing your interests? I notice that I'm becoming more and more of a night owl the longer I work on these notes.

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Qiri