2024-W28

I know what you're thinking, "What's the point? Why keep writing these?" I will tell you. It is a matter of personal accountability. Yes, I have been failing to do the bare minimum the past few weeks, but I prefer logging my failures to giving up completely. But enough about all of that. What have I been spending my free time on?

I have been transcribing and cataloging my old notebooks. These date as far back as 2011 and include everything from class notes from Belmont, journaling, poetry, novel attempts, research, ideas, card game scores, grocery lists, and so on. But why do this? Why transcribe all of this writing? For what purpose? I have a few reasons:

• Through the process of transcription, I am forced to self-reflect and interact with the multitudes of myself from the last decade and beyond
• Through the outcome of having all of this information digitally localized, I can create a system of creative stimulation by connecting themes and ideas from sources that would otherwise seem unrelated
• Through both the process and the outcome, I can bring the present and the past closer together, giving more complexity and emotional wealth to my creative output

I have completed three notebooks so far. I am transcribing them in an application called Obsidian, but don't worry, I will not bore you with "my Obsidian process" or how it's "the best writing app" like so many Obsidian users are prone to do. I will, however, give you a glimpse into the connectivity that is being created by this process of digitally localizing these notebooks. Here's a visual graph of my notes.

:(

You'll see a general note called "Notebooks" which branches off to the three notebooks I've transcribed so far (and a fourth notebook I haven't started yet). Those are the large nodes, and the smaller nodes surrounding them are the notes from those notebooks. That's pretty cool in terms of organization, but during the process of transcription, I am actively linking ideas together as I come across them. Here's a close-up view of one of these themes and its relations to other notes across two separate notebooks.

:(

[[Human creativity is a middle-out process]] is a note I took in a particular notebook, but during the transcription process, I noticed that idea popping up in other places like a note about [[Where do poems come from]] or even a note about [[Overeating, the Buddha playing jazz, and documentary recommendations]] which might have seemed unrelated based only on the title.

Am I doing what I said I wouldn't do? Am I just another Obsidian-boi talking about my "process"? Maybe so, but this is how I've been spending my time. This leads to what I am planning for next week, which is less in the realm of game development and more in line with web development. As I said last week (which was published today), I am very interested in this concept of the handmade web and digital gardens. I would like to work toward this in some form or fashion next week. That might just be more notebook transcription, but we will see.

Until then!