An Almost Anonymous Blog

Pulling from the Stack(Edit)

A brief explainer to start: StackEdit is a browser-based markdown/HTML, cloud-based editor. As far as I can tell it does not have any mobile apps.

Recently I've gotten really tired of SimpleNote's captchcas every time I login to the desktop app. I love the app - as the name indicates, it is definitely simple. You can write plain text, or you can write in Markdown. I love using it for drafting blog posts for Bear (and my week notes) because I can copy/paste the code directly into the text editors. Yeah, you can save things as a draft in Bear, but if I want to make changes from my phone it's a lot easier to do so in SimpleNote. PLUS I can copy/paste super easily from SimpleNote to Bear from my phone, if I so choose. But, captchcas. They're not incredibly bad but they are still pretty bad, and annoying that I have to complete it every time I login.1

So I've been looking for alternatives. I'm disappointed in some of the more popular ones because they automatically convert markdown you type to the intended formatting, which defeats the point of what I want the application to do. Some of them allow for exporting to .md but I find this clunky. So far StackEdit is the most reliable solution (don't get me wrong, I will go back to SimpleNote in a heartbeat if they drop the ridiculous captchcas).

I used to use StackEdit a lot - 4 years ago, it seems. I found a bunch of pieces of writing in there, some of which I converted to blog posts or Medium articles. It also looks like in November 2020 I started a project of writing something every day - sort of like NaNoWriMo, but made up of a combination of things for myself and maybe other blog posts. Unfortunately it appears I stopped at November 22nd.

Most of the entries I have aren't "fit for publication" as you might say, and some of them are not available through StackEdit (I wrote them in notebooks, or else they're on a blog post and I just wrote "see blog post"). But I found some things I thought I'd highlight. First among those is my list of ideas; there are some neat things there I never explored. Here's some of the things I didn't get around to:

The "Proxies" article interests me quite a bit actually. It looks like something I'd like to try:

Write a series of flash essays on a variety of subjects that relies exclusively on your memory, then write a catalogue of corrections that fact-checks your claims.

Maybe keep your eyes open in this space for that in the future. The others are rather generic - just some prompts to get the creative juices going. Do I really need "2000+ writing prompts"? The "Real Magic" prompt sounds interesting as well:

Write a story inspired by magical realism in which a fantastical element or creature is introduced that does not represent any theme or conflict.

Here are some of the things pulled from the 22 or so entries I wrote. Let's start with a couple of pieces on memory:

I acknowledge that my memory is not great. I try to work on that (and I supplement by writing things down). But where it annoys me the most is when I can’t remember little things. Names, places, that kind of thing - they pop into my head and then pop back out. They go to the tip of my tongue and more often than not I can’t remember who or what it is I’m thinking about.

This one was about an author / name of a couple of books I was trying to figure out. I eventually did based on contextual clues; I later did something similar when trying to figure out the name of a Coldplay song I heard and wanted to listen to again.

I also quoted an article titled "Problems of retrieval". It's all about memory issues many people with Epilepsy suffer from, but I don't have a URL to go with it! I indicated I wrote about it in a notebook, but I don't have that handy. Will have to track it down (and I have so many notebooks that it could be in). I did a quick search and it appears to be this article about Types of Memory Problems.

Last Tuesday, the mail was dropped off, and it included a letter from the Ministry of Transportation. This was something I’ve been waiting for since early October - when I finally reached 6 months seizure-free. I haven’t been able to drive since November 9th 2019 ...

An excerpt from a "one year later" piece I wrote about my life a year after my first seizure. I believe I published this on Medium. I'm coming up on 5 years in November; I'm working on an essay about epilepsy so I will be writing it with the context of living with the diagnosis for 5 years.

I don’t feel like I can function today.

From November 20th. There's more to it, but the short version is that it appears I was feeling the effects of isolation because of COVID. We were given the work from home directive in March 2020, so most if not all of my human interaction other than with my wife would have been virtual.

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  1. I'd tolerate it if it prompted me to complete the captchca every once in a while, but not every time.↩

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