Friday thoughts 06
Once again I have a quiet Friday at work, even with one of my employees on vacation. There's just not much happening lately - a sign we're in summer. That's when things usually slow down, picking back up again for Back to School season and the Fall. Fall and Spring, those are the busy times.
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I bought flowers for my wife yesterday. I was having a "down day", for no discernible reason. My brain was paradoxically split: one side seemed to know that I was fine, everything was okay; the other side felt like crap. I'm not sure how this happened, or why. But I knew that I wasn't feeling quite right, mentally, so I decided to do something about it.
I did two things:
- Bought flowers for my wife, like I said. I thought maybe if I could make my wife happy in a small way, that might make me feel good. It worked to some extent!
- Chose to write in my journal, instead of firing up a video game. I hadn't written in 4 days (apart from blog posts) and it was helpful to get a few words out.
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I had a short email correspondence with Ava regarding her post, "my blog discovery spree". It may not be done yet, I only just replied to her reply. Despite knowing her post isn't necessarily about my blog (I said to her, we always think it's about ourselves), it did push me to write more personally the other day when I talked about epilepsy.
I like writing about processes and tech, but I observed that these are the "easy" posts, and writing more personal things are the "hard" posts. Oh, these thought posts are easy too. But I appreciated that little push.
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I'm currently reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (with help from Neil Strauss). So far this book is a LOT about being an artist, and how to "tune" yourself to be more receptive to creative ideas and the process. I don't know if this book is "for me" in the sense that I don't see myself as an "artist" in the literal sense, but there have been some nuggets I highlighted. When I'm done with the book I'm going to export those to a text file and see if I can write about the book and include some of the quotes.
Or maybe just share a post with the quotes, I dunno.
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I went on a short journey into "MOCs" yesterday, relating to Obsidian. On the Obsidian subreddit a user posted a link to an article he wrote: Stop Overthinking Obsidian: A Beginner’s Guide That Actually Works | by Andre Monthy. The article is posted on Medium, but it appears he made it publicly available - thank you!
The article leans into the MOC concept heavily in regard to setting up your vault. I had no idea what MOC meant - it's a Map of Content - so I went digging. So many people have so many ideas on how to implement these, and have some convoluted setups. Almost all of it is related to "back links" and that seems to be the core concept people use their vaults for.
It seems I'm the outlier. My vault is simple: it's a place to store lists, links, and synthesize my written daily notes into Week Notes. I don't need a glorified index, the search function does everything I need it to. I stopped looking into setting up a map of content shortly after I dug into it. I appreciated this voice of reason in the thread, though.
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I realized I am highly susceptible to beautiful tech design. Because of how and where I browse Reddit, the mobile app occasionally shows me the Digital Audio Player subreddit. Someone recently posted about the FiiO M21. It looks amazing and I bet it's a joy to use, to feel the tactile buttons. But. I have a smartphone. Two, actually; I have an old S9+ that I use as a media device connected to my stereo. And I have an iPod Touch that I add music to from my personal library in various rotations. And I have a walkman.
I don't need this device, and it's way too expensive for me to seriously consider it.
But man...it's beautiful. And I want it.
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