I have always loved the idea of commonplace books, a writers sketch book, more or less. Digital versions in things like tickler files have tempted me down the path into many failed or abandoned organizational systems. I have tried to keep physical ones, digital ones, even have a magical one as part of a novel.

For a long time now I have been saving notes in a digital commonplace book. (I don’t know the oldest note I saved, Evernote has go far enough down the enshittification path that I cannot login from the website and check the dates of my notes.) And I have used various systems. Evernote, OneNote, back to Evernote, Bear, Notional Velocity, EMacs org-mode, back to Evernote, Notion, and finally Obsidian.

I think Obsidian is going to stick for a while, having all of my notes in plain text (with markdown) and on every machine, makes it portable and free of lock-in and hopefully enshittification. I have always liked the idea of my notes being independent of any tool or platform, but I need some infrastructure to save from mobile and web from non-personal machines.

I tend to collect links, images, quotes, whole articles, summaries of books, movies, just what ever I felt like I wanted to save and reference later. I have whole other paths that I use as well, Instapaper for read later, pinboard for links, Readwise to try to sew it all together (save highlights to notes) and this blog for public facing stuff.

But after re-reading this post from Cory Doctorow (from 2020, which I had in my to read pile for gods know how long) which was re-posted by Bruce Sterling which in turn was commented on my Warren Ellis really got me thinking about what I wanted to do with the gigs and gigs of notes I have.

So, I am going to experiment with the blog again with the goal of as I save links to my commonplace book archive that I will post them and comment on them in more or less real time. Or something like that.

-luke, North End House of Chaos, Breakfast Nook, 2024.02.26@07:32am est.