librarypunk - 054 - digital gardens.redux

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

We’re doing digital gardens again, this time with Deleuze. It’s rhizome time baby. Also we cover the Hoopla Slide and TikTok updates.    Readings Tensions Between Zettelkasten & the Productivity Scene https://writing.bobdoto.computer/tensions-between-zettelkasten-and-the-productivity-scene/ Misconceptions About the Relationship Between Permanent & Evergreen Notes https://writing.bobdoto.computer/misconceptions-about-the-relationship-between-permanent-and-evergreen-notes/  Zettelkasten Madness https://bobdoto.computer/Zettelkasten-Madness  How to choose the right note-taking app: https://nesslabs.com/how-to-choose-the-right-note-taking-app https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy) Explaining Deleuze with drum machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDVKrbM5MIQ&t=364s    Media mentioned:  Thread: https://twitter.com/eminencefont/status/1529174808914804736  https://lib-static.github.io/  https://wilde-at-heart.garden/ Justin’s public garden: https://smazzie.github.io/ObsidianSite/My_Obsidian_journey/  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat-file_database https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/ Nick Milo https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson   Software/systems mentioned: https://logseq.com/  https://www.notion.so/product https://obsidian.md/  https://evernote.com/ https://www.craft.do/ https://readwise.io/ https://ticktick.com/?language=en_US https://www.zotero.org/  OneNote https://airtable.com/  https://roamresearch.com/  https://www.orgroam.com/  https://joplinapp.org/  Apple Notes

Happy the Cowboy finally showed up in Dracula Daily a week. Lord have mercy, I'm about to bust. I haven't been doing the Dracula Daily thing, but I have seen so much about it on Tumblr. It's just like a never-ending stream of Dracula memes, which is just incredible to watch from the sidelines. I would actually love to do an episode eventually on Dracula, either about Dracula Daily or just the novel in general, because from an information standpoint, I think. find it fascinating because it's not just epistolary, it's like curated, compiled, like diaries and transcriptions and recordings and newspaper things and captain's logs and all this stuff. Like, it's not just, I'm Jonathan Harker and this is my diary. It's like all sorts

of shit. I'm seriously as an information professional. I'm fascinated by Dracula. Everyone should go read it. And the Coppola film, which does have its issues, is really good at portraying the like curated epistolary nature of it. So shout out to that movie and Dracula. I hope everyone's enjoying Quincy Morris, the best character ever because Dracula has a cowboy in it. Isn't the Coppola one with, that's the newer one, right? The Coppola one is from 1992. It has Gary Oldman as Dracula.

It has Keanu Reeves as Jonathan. Winona Ryder as Mina. Fucking Carrie Elvis is Arthur Holmwood. Fucking Anthony Hopkins is Van Halen. Hell saying Tom Waits is Renfield. It's awesome. And, oh, what's his name? Like Richard Grant or something?

He was in Withnail and I. He is Dr. Seward, mental asylum guy. I just saw the post today. Someone was like, Dracula should have his three weed smoking girlfriends fight. Lucy's three. Three weed smoking boyfriends, like Pokemon. It's so good. I'm just so happy seeing people who've never actually read Dracula because most adaptations actually are not very accurate to the book.

Like get to discover this incredibly bonkers-ass book. This is a Dracula pod now. This is a Dracula pod. The Goths are taking over. Are you doing a spooky noise, Justin? No, the Rumba didn't finish earlier. Hi, Roomba. Just send it back.

Okay. My God. Roomba intrusion. Rumba intrusion. Eight minutes later, let's get started. Yeah. I had to wait for the Rumba to finish emptying itself. Okay.

I'm Justin. I'm a Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm C. I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they then? I'm Jay. I'm a metadata librarian.

and my pronouns are he him. And what are we going to talk about today? No guest, by the way. Yeah, Jay. Yeah, we're going to stroke my ego a bit more here. And we're going to revisit Digital Gardens so that I can demonstrate the learning and public thing to talk about how wrong I got on a bunch of shit the first time around, because I've learned since then and I'm excited about it. Apparently, we're also Dracula posting. Yeah.

Yeah. And instead of Donna Haraway, I'm just going to like butcher DeLews. What's the segment? What's the segment? This wasn't at ALA. This was a Massachusetts Library Association. Yeah, yeah, because Callant was mass lib posting. It's a Massachusetts drop.

Big North Slot. Dropkick Murphy's shipping down to Boston, whatever it is. Anything like that? Anything from the departed? Those people are dumb-dums. There we go. Yeah. I may be Irish, but I'm not stupid.

Let's see. Calan had a thread about Hoopla doing a presentation where they were talking about how they make their process neutral, but weren't really answering any questions from the librarians or anyone else about what's going on in their collections, since they had all that Holocaust denial and anti-feminist stuff. Yeah, neutral is just a code word for we don't have to tell you, right? I also didn't see this thread, so. I saw briefly. It does not surprise me.

No. The mouth says one thing and the hands are doing something else. Oh, I love this little, like, is it two people facing each other? Is it a vase graphic they've got going on? Or is it, yeah, like a... Alligator. Flat fuck Fridays represent. My God.

But anyway, the slide says, as a partner to public libraries, we aim for neutrality. It's such a poorly designed slide. It's very yellow, too. I suppose he needs to be fired. They did use ALA's Bill of Rights to sort of like hide behind in neutrality

and be like, well, see, we didn't do anything wrong because we did the neutrality thing that you guys want, right? And so people were like,

yeah, this is also ALA's Yeah, yeah. There's this project called, like, LibStatic, and it's meant to, like, provide resources and models and tools and tutorials and whatnot for, like, static sites and stuff just sort of help librarians not rely on third-party, like, vendor software so much, especially for, like, digital exhibits or things like that. Yeah, I saw Matthew Murray retweet it, like, quote tweeted.

the post, the tweet about it. And I knew it had been a thing that was going to happen. So pretty cool that that's up now. I was looking through and it's got a lot of cool ideas for like digital humanities projects as well and like how to host those and like data visualization and stuff. But it's got other things in it. So that's a good thing. If you are not wanting to use like third party vendor software that you don't get to control and that will collect data about your patrons that like you don't even know about half the time and you want to stop using complicated shit.

Check this out. I think it's a good project to support endorsing it officially. This message is approved by me. And I do have one other segment. Steve's not mad about the Library Sexualism episode

Oh no I was to say what Steve do So he asked for us not to say That he was mad We are redacting Steve is not mad I am sorry I'm the one who said it

I'm apologizing You can cancel me So that was the was Steve Matt update I'll post I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm not

I'm not I'm not I'm not I'll post to like Apple notes fucking apology on Twitter But like Don't apologize. Yeah.

To like it influence our apology. We're here to talk about Digital Gardens. Roo, Roo, Rita. Lord have mercy, I'm about to bust. You are loving that drop, Justin. It's like the sixth time you've used it. Second time. Yeah, we used it last week too.

Okay. Yeah, well. It's continuity. It's like, you know, writing a theme into a story, Right, it just happens. This is my light motif. Yeah. Yeah.

You're being very Vognarian right now. So, Jay, let us know what's happened in Digital Gardenland while I sit here and listen where you can all see me. Wink. So, yeah, so I wanted to do a Redux episode because I recently, like, learned a bunch of new shit and realized I got a bunch of shit wrong. and I re-did mine completely. So it would be cool if people could check it out.

I think it's very new and improved. And that web ring that I mentioned last time that I couldn't remember the name of, the XXIIVV web ring. It's a web ring of personal wikis. And your site has to be able to function without too much JavaScript

and all that stuff to be added to it. You get reviewed to be put on it and it's a bunch of people who like post like cool art it's like you can do like your personal like portfolio of stuff and like it can't primarily be a blog it has to be other types of stuff and I got added to it like you have to like request to be put on it and mine got approved so that was fun very cool yeah so I'm on the fun cool the cool kids web ring now nice so that's fun and check it out I also moved away from using emacs and org mode for it and I feel like a fucking traitor because I've been like an

evangelist for so long, but I found a new shiny, but that like works for what I'm wanting to do a little better. Like I'm still using Emacs and whatnot for other things, but for this project specifically, I found.

I'm using LogSeek or LogSec, however you want to pronounce it. It's L-O-G-S-E-Q. And it's meant to be a like, on your computer, privacy first, free open source similar to Rome and that everything is like node

and block based but it emphasizes this sort of outliner graph network structure so if you're a person who is like using Rome but you don't want to pay $15 a month for it like check out log seat

I like it a lot yeah and I sort of changed my scope a bit and I'll kind of get into more why I did that when I go until like the what the fuck I got wrong section, but I'm sort of emphasizing the sort of like showing how my ideas are growing in the process of turning them into a zettocastin. So it's like main focus is actually an online zettelcastin, but the garden aspect is showing how the ideas kind of start and how I'm

maturing them to get to the point where they're like zettocastin ready. Instead of just being like random shit that I just like, oh, I know a thing, and I just learned a thing, and I'm going to put it up there. It's a little bit more curated and refined now. Yeah. So that's pretty fun. Random shit is just how my brain works, so I admire you being able to. Like, I know Justin mentioned this last time, but it finally sunk in more to me was like, if my notes that I put online don't make sense to anyone else but me, if they're like not useful. to anyone else, then why am I putting them online? Like, yes, they can be messy and they can be wrong and they can sort of be in their infancy, but why am I putting them online if it's just going to be pointless to another person if the point is to sort of share and make it public? And so if I just have like random shit and I barely said anything about it and it's not really even me having a thought about something, it's more like, this is this or whatever. Like I kind of, I kind of kind of had been doing. Yeah, no, I've moved away from that. So yeah, I feel like it's a lot

better now. I'm not embarrassed by it. I'm quite proud of it, actually. So I thought we could, you know, have me eat a little bit of humble pie and have me be wrong in public on the internet. Yeah, so that's publicly shame, Jay, for not being perfect. for what I was wrong on the internet, folks. A lot of people heard it. God forbid. I was wrong on the internet. But to be fair, most people are with regards to this.

So mainly what I was getting wrong. I was getting wrong with how you scope a digital garden and how you like curate it. I was being a little too loosey-goosey with it. But the main thing I think I got wrong and that I want to focus on is the central customs. aspect of it. And to be fair, I don't blame myself for being wrong on this because most information online about Zetalcastin is kind of garbage. To be honest, the way that I was describing it and the way that most people are using it is they are mainly just using it as a way to connect ideas and seeing how things are connected and kind of putting everything in one system and then

seeing how it's connected and making sure it's like atomic, right? Or it's like these are the notes that I'm taking while I'm reading something, a literature note. And that's not what it traditionally means. People are allowed to adapt it. But I read a book and I took a course and I'll talk about that course in a bit. But this helped me refine both like what is that'll cast in my head and then how like a digital garden fits into that from like an information.

organization and management standpoint. Like, a Zetalcastin is not whatever random shit you think about during the day or, like, learn about, or the notes you take while you're at work or, or anything. It is specifically, like, I'm having, like, a thought or an insight about a topic. And so I, like, write down that, like, specific atomic note thing. but it's not me putting a quote from something. It's not the notes I take while I'm reading a book. It is, okay, I've read the book, I've watched the movie, I've done whatever, now this is sort of what I want to say about it.

And a good way to get yourself on the habit of doing this is you title them as either a full sentence statement or a question. So it's like if I just read this or this quote, oh, here's sort of my thought about that. And so you can maybe quote the thing you're kind of bouncing off of and building on, but that's the point of it. So that then you can see how

the things that you, your thoughts that you're thinking about and talking about how they clump up over time. But the Zetocastin itself is not random shit that you're, I mean, it's not all shit, but like, it's not like your meeting notes aren't in your Zetalcastin. Now, if you are in a meeting and you take notes, you're like, oh, there's, I have a, I have a thought I just thunk, like, related to

this. That's like, take that and put it in the. Right, right. Like, like, like, an ins, like, the way that I've been framing them is, like, insights. And, like, so framing information in this way of like, what is stuff I've collected or captured and what is my own? And also, like, there is no original, right? And I will fucking get into that later. We're going to get into some deluge very poorly, baby. But that sort of, yeah, so there's a big confusion on that. There's a lot of other confusion that I'm not going to go into because I'll be pissy about it because I'm one of those people.

But that's sort of the way I've clarified it for myself. I just put a bunch in mind today based off of like a presentation I gave, some sort of like chunks out of that that I could like, you know, put into like little individual things as like an insight. And you can see how they're building off of each other and how they're connecting. They're pretty good. And how like the digital garden flows into that because they are not the same thing. They are not the same thing.

A digital garden is not just an online version of a Zetalcastin. It's like the way I'm using. it is like, okay, I have this kind of idea or this topic I want to talk about. I'm going to like make a really note that's maybe got some like thoughts or stuff in it or quotes that I might want to build on. And once it's

at the point where it makes sense to someone else, like, okay, I can put that online. And then as that grows, I might trim it. I might split it up. I might put more things in there, build more links. And then when it gets to a certain state of maturity, it's like, oh, I will make a zettel out of this bit and this bit and

this bit. I'll leave the like, kind of messy version and then I'll go and make my actual little refined versions and link back to that but like to show to not just put online the perfect well not perfect it can still change but like this like more polished zettel like instead of doing like blog posts I mean they're small but instead of just putting that online I'm showing how my thoughts are growing and how the way I'm capturing information is growing yes so are you are you, well, are you going from like digital garden thoughts to putting them in your Zetelcastin? Or is it like two-way?

Yeah. So like things can naturally flow back and forth. But I'm using the sort of like digital garden framework as a way to build up ideas that I will then like to get to the point where they can be put in a Zetal-Castin. And that's, I'm putting that all in the same place. but you'll see I title things differently and they look quite different once you look at them and like how they're scoped and whatnot. But yeah, I'm just using it as a way to like show my thinking process instead of just boom, here's this. That makes sense. Yeah.

So like I have my obsidian, which has sort of just like my notes about everything because I use that as my main note taking up. And then I also have the ones that push through Git. onto the public website. And those are usually like full pages, full ideas. So I could have my obsidian as sort of like my digital garden, but then my zettel would be the parts that I would feel comfortable pushing to be public ones. Is that the distinction you're drawing? Not quite because I'm actually putting the digital garden stuff online as well.

It's just that like a zetal, it's like, okay, so a good example that I was sort of working through recently. I just recently did a presentation on like archival silence. And I had been sort of had like some slap dash notes about archival silence where I like pulled out. But the definition was from the SAA website and maybe some of my thoughts about it. And that was like very, you know, and I put that online once it was like, okay, it's not just the definition, but I like maybe put a paragraph or two very small about like my thoughts about it. and eventually I would like add more things but then and like that's online and then I have a like a few notes that are related to archival silence now so like I'm basically like what I'm doing so what you're doing is like the parts where you're sort of like maybe building up to what you would put online I'm also putting that online but only once it's at a state where it makes sense to someone else who isn't me like I'm not just putting a quote online. I'm not just putting the definition online. I have to have had like some sort of original thought. So you're going from like source material to synthesized thought to like polished thought.

Yeah. And there's still very small chunks. Like I'm not putting essays. Yeah. Okay. But that's sort of like, it might be like looser like, oh, but what does this mean? And I have a problem with this to like, I have an idea about this as a way of structuring information. You know, not everyone is going to, like, go from Digital Garden to Zetalcasten as, like, a information flow. That's just what makes sense to me because I like both frameworks. And it helps me, like, yes, the Zetalcasten is like, oh, it's atomic. But I, with my ADHD brain, I have trouble breaking things down that small.

And so having the little messier growing notes helps me to, like, practice breaking things down and what not before I just have that policy. version because otherwise I would just stare and be like, I don't know where to start. But you said you weren't sort of like linking everything to everything. And there's some stuff in the notes about like non-hierarchical linking. Yes. I'm like looking at your page and it actually looks kind of like more hierarchical because it's got like parents. Yeah.

And we don't have to get too into like how you do a Zetocastin. So one of the things about the Zetalceston is, um, so Zetalcastin is um, so Zetel Castel Castellosan has said just means slitbox. And there was a technique that Nicholas Luman did that I learned about recently called the Fulcocetal. Not everyone does this, especially digitally, but what he would do, like, because he would just do index cards, right? And so you only put one idea on an index card. Like, each index card is one idea. But if he was like having a train of thought, because he numbered them, right? And it wasn't any like purposeful, like, do we decimal numbering. It was just like, okay, now I'm on thought five, now I'm on thought six, I'm on thought seven, right? Just as a way of like, okay. But if say he was at like, you know, note two, but he had like a, oh, I have something kind of like not just like that I can relate to it, but kind of continuing a train of thought to it, he would do like two A, A, one, two B.

And so you would have like clusters of like, okay, here I am linking notes together. but then also like this is a way of me doing a train of thought and each thing is still its own unique individual thing but that's also way of showing like another way of showing clusters right so it's showing a branching pattern similar to like if i were doing this an obsidian i would have like a page and it has a backlink to this page and that could have a like it's creating a chain. Yeah. I'm trying to think of how I would actually fork one node into two. I know it happens. I guess it would be two unrelated things would both link back to the same node. Yeah, but it's like, you know, it'd be like in an essay, paragraph to paragraph to paragraph, basically.

So that's how he would sort of do like, oh, I'm having like a train of thought about a thing that's like several ideas. So it's not just, oh, this thing I wrote about, like, apples being good. It's not just related to this thing about, like, bananas also being good. It's, like, apples are good, and they're good because of this. And then this, like, if we're looking at, like, our sort of non-hierarchical web, things can be kind of loosely connected, but they're not about the same idea. But it's like, oh, this thing over here about fruit can be right. related to, I don't know, like, plether because of, like, vegan leather and, like, pineapple

leather or something, right? Like, oh, I can link those two together, but if it's like a, I'm having a train of thought or something that's, like, building off of a specific idea. Again, it's not necessarily creating, like, a shelf hierarchy, but it's just a way of, like, creating its own little specific branch. And not everyone does this, especially in a digital space. it's less like you need to do it, but especially with the way I'm naming them, that's how Nicholas did it. And the way I'm linking them, it's just another way of like, if I look at a graph of everything, it's easier to see specific clusters. That's the only reason I'm doing that. For some reason, and this may be entirely off, but you describing this just made me think of, like,

flat file structures. I don't know how common of a thing that's known, but like, in like, like organizing like information like having a flat file like database is similar to having a relational database where the order that it's in doesn't necessarily have any bearing on where it like doesn't have any bearing on what the information is or how it connects to other things. Exactly. Okay. Yeah, like my, the way I'm numbering, that number doesn't mean anything except the order in which I wrote them. It is not like a dewey decimal. Everything about this specific topic is going to be a one.

It's just like, nope, that was the first one I wrote, and then that was the first branch off I did. And then this was the next topic I worked on, and that's two. And it's only purely for like, it is not a classification. But it's not a timestamp. It's a, when did I develop this thought next in this direction? And when did I branch out? So like you could do like note three, and then the next day go back and go, oh, I got to go to 1A because I had a different idea in a different direction. So you're preserving a chronological flow, but it's not chronological. You couldn't replace this and automate it with timestamps. Right.

Like it is not a time-based thing. Because a lot of like Obsidian does this, by the way, but also like the archive software that like the Zettelkaston website does. They do and Zettler as well. all of like their IDs will just be a timestamp, basically, or random string of numbers. And that's fine. That's just not how I want to do it. Yeah, because I was looking at my graph on Obsidian. And then I realized I could animate it based on when I put things in.

So they'll show like what I was working on. So it'll be like, oh, this professor and this professor and archaeology came up all at the same time. I must have been in a meeting with them and adding these things at the same time. Right, like the way that you want to organize, like, especially with like IDing or file naming, I guess it could be related to classification, but like is it helpful for you to see when you were talking about, like, oh, you were talking about these things all around this time, or, oh, I did things in this order, or whatever, like, what is going to help you see the associations between things? Yeah.

Like in a very visual way. This is, again, this is just making my brain think of databases because it's, It is. Yeah, it basically is. It's just mapping a idea database. So, like, you know, you've got your keys and then you link to foreign keys, which aren't necessarily like. I remember taking my sequel. Yeah, yeah.

That's bad at the key thing. You link to foreign keys, which then, you know, are important, our main keys and other tables. Okay. Okay. Something beeped. I didn't know that was going to come through. I was just a button. And I was just like, what is this button?

I was like, did I break something? Oh, no. Yeah, so this way I can say, Joe Biden. Yeah. But yeah, so, like, Sadie, I love this point you bring off about, like, it kind of being like a database,

but about ideas instead of, like, managing people or logins or telephone numbers or whatever. I'm trying to think about the examples we did in my sequel class I took in grad school. I don't know what to actually. actually applications it has. I'm assuming similar.

So I did this whole, like, redo and actually learned how to do things better because I invested a little bit in, like, learning better about personal knowledge management, and I'm not going to like, but I did this, I think I talked about

personal knowledge management last time. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And you've got the, some of this stuff linked, must be linked up here. But the BASB. Yeah, so I didn't link BASB, but I can because I really don't want to be doing a sales pitch for it. But there is this cohort-based course, and there's a book coming out in like a few weeks, by the way, called Building a Second Brain. And it's basically the sort of like methodology for personal knowledge management.

And like, how do we curate and like relate to information and knowledge? in a way that where that's like externalized so that we're not having to like remember it all the time or like hold it all in our heads. It's a way to like kind of like offload everything. And of course it's very much pitch to like content creators and entrepreneurs and stuff as a way to like, you know, how do you then create things? Like this will help you do your whatever and make your YouTube video. or do your whatever. And like, sure, I was actually very surprised at how me and some of the few people who I'm now friends with and some of the mentors we were called like the weekend weirdos, where there's a bunch

of like anti-capitalists, like queer weirdos, like talking about like, no, fuck that, your expression of like the information that you find personally meaningful, like can just be how you live your life. You can focus on, like, there's this focus on like when you see information. that you want to like capture sensually how does that resonate with you like how do you feel it in your body it doesn't have to be related to a fucking like project you're doing for work or your content TM you're going to just be like I find this aesthetically pleasing or this makes me feel tingly in my body or I mean yeah that too like lord have mercy I'm about to bust

I love Colty so much they they are like a poet and they were one of the mentors and was bringing up, like, eroticism and stuff. I was like, I fucking wanted to do a paper on this. Like, God damn it. But so I took this course, and one of the mentors who sessions I did not attend because his whole, like, thing was like, we're going to write a newsletter. And I was like, no. But then I actually looked him up, and he's like this anarchist punk.

His name's Bob Dotto. And he did like a Zettl Kasten 101 workshop one weekend. I was like, fuck yeah, I'm going to this. He knows some. German and has like studied the actual like Nicholas Luman Zedlcaste in and like scholarship about it so he like knows what he's talking about. And he does a lot of writing about like knowledge management. And I find this interesting from like a librarian and like information professional standpoint. And also in relation to digital gardens and like what kinds of notes and information

people are taking and sharing and whatnot. And not to say this isn't part of it, but it's not the focus of it. People were very much trying to turn this into task management and project management and not knowledge management. They were trying to recreate the Trello board. Yes, they were. Okay. I mean, like, Tiago Forte is like the person who's like developed this methodology. He's like, the current productivity guru, right? His system's kind of antithetical to Nick Milo's, who's like the obsidian linking your thinking guy. Nick Milo has like stirred some shit with Tiago actually. You know, he does frame it around like, what are your projects that you're doing? But your project could be like, I want to write a poem by this Friday. I want to read this many books by July. I want to go on a vacation with my family. You know, it doesn't have to be work projects. It can be personal things too. And so, like, doing projects was part of it, but more as a way to sort of like kind of maybe refine in shape what you're curating. and organizing it, but it's not about like,

and this is how you manage a project. It was more like, oh, here's relevant information, and that can go into a task so you can think about it later, and this can go into your project so that you can use it in your project. I noticed a lot of people, when they, like, put their notes online, they include things like their tasks and their to-dos and stuff. And I'm like, but why? And one of the things I put in the notes is like this sort of Bob Dodo wrote,

like I think about the tension between like Zetalcustin and kind of general knowledge management and like the productivity niche community because they're like trying to conflate the two. Yeah. I mean, I put stuff in to-dos because I use the daily note function, which I think is like very popular among obsidian users. I do it in log seek too, but I don't put the stuff online. Yeah. And so I have basically a to-do list.

that will roll over every day. Yep. So that's really helpful. So it's like, okay. And then also lets me know what days I was working on certain things or like what days I stopped working on something. That's why the daily notes are so useful to be honest. And like a lot of people who use these kind of tools will tell you do everything in the daily notes. If you can only go into a page if you actually have to.

But most of the time work on your daily notes because seeing the dates like can actually be really helpful information. This sounds very similar to something, to bullet journaling kind of methodology where you have the list and then you recreate it every day with the things from the previous list so you can kind of see. But it's automated. But yeah. Yeah, which I hate bullet journaling because it's manual, right? I tried to keep a bullet journal for a while and I just couldn't maintain it. A little bit of a digression. I actually don't do my task management in LogSeek.

I use Tic for that. That is my main project task management software now. It's kind of similar to things. But any to-dos I have, like, I only use logseek for my more like intellectually creative shit that I need to do, the sort of network-link thought in. And my only to-does are I have a fleeting note. Here's a to-do and I have a template so that I see all the little fleeting notes that I have. Oh, I should turn this into an actual thing.

That's like what my to-dos are in this. is like build this out. But I don't use it for task or project management. And I actually use Evernote for a lot of shit now. I did not expect to like Evernote. But I use it for like a file cabinet kind of for like things that I capture that aren't necessarily mine or if I need a scaffold out a project with not necessarily tasks, but maybe outlining or gathering support for it.

That sounds exactly like how I use one note at work. Yeah. Because this is my last week at my current job. I've been writing up a lot of documentation that was just like projects that I've been doing over a long time and all of that and just digging through my one note. And I'm like, holy shit, I have way more in here than I ever thought I would. Right. But yeah. So I'll skip over the divergence and convergence unless we have time later.

But like that kind of leads us into. And I think this could be interesting both from like a digital garden perspective and thinking about how we create and organize and relate to information. and the sort of like, I think we have like a tools obsession right now, even in libraries, like, oh, here's the new shiny. And instead of focusing- It'll solve all your problems. Yes, there's going to be one thing. You're going to get Alma Primo, Rialto, Leganto, whatever. Oh, you're going to get the whole suite, right? You're going to be able to do everything in it. Instead of thinking, like, what is my need and what is the tool that best suits that need, even if, like, I think this is like the modular. structure versus the like mono structure. It's like I might have a bunch of different tools because I want them to meet a specific need.

And in the sort of like digital guarding knowledge management scene, Tiago and also the Ness Labs people have sort of made this really helpful distinction, including what tools kind of align with them for like the note taking style. and no person is going to be just one, because sometimes you will have different needs for different things. Like I would say I'm definitely two of these. I don't think I'm the third. But they are, are you an architect? are you a gardener? Or are you a librarian? And I found this very interesting.

I was like, oh, ho. Let's see how they butcher this. Because they also use archive for like, this is where you put things when you're done with them. And they're like, that's not what archive means. And so I named my archive attic instead. And I have an angry post about it. And my digital garden is that like this erases labor.

And that's not what it means. Not from like a pissy pedantic point of view. But like this is erasing. the labor and the purpose of archiving. Anyway, so an architect note-taking style is like enjoying planning, designing processes

and frameworks, and like a note-taking tool that allows you to structure ideas. And so like, Notion is a real big architect tool. If you haven't used Notion, I hate it.

A lot of people love it. But like basically you can make databases in it as like tables and like each of the cells can be its own page. And so people will make these really complicated like dashboards and workflows. And actually you can put them online. So it can actually be quite good for like company collaboration work. That's what I see a lot of people doing with it. If if you like spreadsheets and you like relational databases and you like building them and you like emojis, Notion might be. for you. I hate it. But that's just me. I hate it. I'm not an architect, apparently. Then there's the gardener, and that's about, like, exploring and connecting thoughts together. And so a note-taking tool that allows you to grow your ideas. And so this is your log seek. This is your Rome research. I would argue obsidian could be all three of these. And I feel like that's maybe why a lot of people like it, but it tends to be associated most with the gardener just because of, like, the

backlinking. And then there's the librarian. And that's about like collecting, curating, cataloging, like building up a like resource catalog of something where you might want to retrieve idea. So like I like to call my Evernote, my file cabinet. I capture everything through like the Evernote web clipper and stuff or like things I want for reference. So Evernote is like the librarian tool. And so I use. I use, like logseek for my gardening side, literally for my digital garden, and then like Evernote for like, okay, I'm going to clip this article so I can look at it later. I am going to like outline a project in here. And I find this interesting as an information professional. I don't want to just get into like personal knowledge management. But like must a digital garden always come from a gardening mindset? How does like personal wiki and like library and file cabinet

mindset? Is that part of a digital garden? Are those ideas that can be built on? What about like an architect kind of structuring relations between notes where it's not so like loosey-goosey, but it's still a way to see how things are connecting and growing? And then like, because I'm so interested, like, this is all framed at a personal level, but I'm always trying to think of like, what does this look like when you explode it on like a macro level? Like, how can we as people who like do knowledge, management as a profession at a larger level. Like, okay, if these are kind of overgeneralized ways that individuals might be interacting with information, how do we look at that and how does that influence the way that we then

create systems for people to relate to information or teach them how to relate to information? I know we talked a little bit about this last time, but specifically like knowing a little it more about these like three styles, I guess. And not just from like a digital gardening standpoint, but again, just as a librarian, can we explode those? Is that even possible to kind of take this individualistic kind of tailored thing and explode it? Yes, Sadie. Yeah, I see what you, I see what you mean. And that just brings me back to the idea of tools. And I feel like there are a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs or, you know, startups and stuff that are are trying to build specific tools for this, but then enable to keep to, you know, satisfy venture capital and, you know, capitalism

and all that shit. They keep adding things to it. They keep adding more and more features. So, yeah, that question of how do you scope it up? I feel like the wrong people are tackling it. Like, we don't need programmers and project managers and entrepreneurs to tackle it. it should be something more along the lines for knowledge professionals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or like I, I, so I'm in like the log seek discord and I saw someone ask like, oh, are you ever going to put

away for people to do like databases like notion in this? And I almost screamed. I was like, no, don't do that to it. That's not the point of this. Stop trying to make something that can be everything because then it, that's one reason I don't like obsidian, to be honest, is because it can be everything and then therefore I actually have a hard time using it. That's just me. I know other people really like it. It seems to just link back to this obsession with productivity. Yes. Because if you have one tool that does everything, then you don't have to be distracted figuring out other things. You can just, you know, because bullet journal is kind of the same thing where it's like a knowledge capturing idea.

that also, you know, you can do daily notes or bigger ideas or lists and stuff. And yeah, like, you can do everything in your bullet journal, then you don't have to worry about, you know, how productive you are. I hate the, I hate the concept of productivity as like a measure of your life worth. It's... Right. And I think as librarians, I think this is actually something we should be paying attention to or like library workers or like people who work with knowledge and not at this level. We should be thinking about in that like people are conflating the types of information they relate to and create and like to productivity and like turning their lives into systems and okay how can I perfectly tag and organize and whatever like every single thing that I interact with in this like perfect system all in this one

tool if that's the way that people are interacting with information like when is that going to spill over into librarianship and library work and information work and how we are then designing our systems and how we think people are going to want access information. When are we going to start when is productivity going to spill over into library types of knowledge management? Well, it already has. I mean, that's like what discovery layers are. Yes, I hate them. I know I worked on it. I was kind of thinking, though, like, if you had, if you did want to, like, scale this to library services, like, you know, could you visualize the catalog in a different way? Or could you have, like, a private account that helps you build out information as you're searching for it and saving it?

I think the best way, actually, would it would be, like, an extension for, like, Zotero and just be like, this goes here. and then I annotate here and then I do this because I was like a big user of Zotera for a long time. But now I use Obsidian, but I don't use all of the functions. I use it, like I have a concepts folder. So basically whenever I'm talking about someone, I'll just be like, oh, I'm working on this with

and then the person's name. Right. And that way I can go to that person's name and see every single thing I worked on them with because it automatically backlinks. Right. Yeah. Zotero has added a bunch of good shit lately, by the way. Also, apparently, people are willing to pay me money to have me coach them on using Zotero in their knowledge management workflows. That's a thing. If you want that, email me, I guess. I would love that. That'd be fun. Apparently, I'm good at it. Who knew? Yeah, like, I think that's a really good point you make, Justin, about, like, maybe not redesigning so that everyone has to interact with it in the same way, but allowing more pathways, ways, whatever, for people to sort of customize the way.

way that they're using it. One way that I was sort of thinking, and this can maybe go into Deleuze a little bit, I did want to be a theory asshole, but with Deleuze instead of Donna Hareway this time. And then I was thinking about like, so with the Zadal Costum and with the Digital Garden and with any of these backlinking systems, or like the Wiki link systems, right? Is that like, you know, a lot of people say like, oh, this allows me to put information, like, I don't have to worry about where I put something is normally what people say. Like, with Evernote, you have to put it in a folder. And like, you can put the folders in stacks,

but it can only be in one folder at one time, right? Which, that constraint can be helpful. It forces you to make a decision sometimes. And sometimes that's what you need. I like constraints sometimes. But that is the nice thing about these sort of obsidian, logsy, chrome, whatever, craft is like the new hotness as well, that they allow you to link between things and not necessarily force a hierarchy on you. Obsidian does allow you to use folders. I do know that. But technically, the note still isn't in more than one place at one time. It's being linked in a bunch of places and it's just in a non-hierarchical structure. There's still only one copy of it technically. You can like embed and reference, but it's not like you have a bunch of duplicates all over the place.

What you're doing is it's just you have a looser structure for collocating. That was the word that in the notes, it was like, it starts with a C, and it means to put things together and I don't remember what it is. But the whole purpose of like subject cataloging and classification is not just like, where do I put this on the shelf, but okay, here is everything about this subject, and it collocates things together, right? And things can have more than one subject. The only reason that like we classify things the way that we do is because normally

they can only go on one place on the shelf. But without, you know, without a physical restriction, you know, we can still classify and we can still assign subjects. But if we remove the need, the thought that this then goes on this shelf, if we're just thinking, you know, this is in one place, but it can be endlessly linked in a non-hierical way to other things. That might actually be possible. Granted, not in a physical space. This would be. This would be only digital. I don't have the mental capacity to think how that would work in a physical space. But yeah, we're not enforcing digital scarcity, but we're just being a little looser with the idea of what assigning subject headings can do. The thing with the Zetelkastin is, like,

the index card was only in one place physically. This was a physical system. The index card was in one place, but he would like link it to a few things, not to everything, but more like creating access points between things. And so it wasn't him putting the slip in more than one place. It was just creating this network of here are similar things. And he would even like make tags sometimes and like maybe have like an index file. And so he would like assign subjects sometimes if that was a needed extra access point. Hi, Arthur. Yeah, you can get on my leg. buddy, it's safe and stable. You're not going to fall, but he doesn't

like squishy things. So I was thinking about this, unless either of you want to say something real quick, because it's DeLu's time, baby. I sort of like had that revelation because I was like

looking more into Ted Nelson because he's a Chad, and I love him. And someone in the cohort, the course that I took, knows him. and his friends with him. I was like, ah! Please tell him he's the best. The baseball

player? Yes, exactly. And another one of his, like, cool words he came up with called intertwingularity. And it's, to quote Wikipedia, it's a term coin to express the complexity of interrelations and human knowledge. All caps.

Everything is deeply intertwingled. In an important sense, there are no, quote, subjects. at all. There is only all knowledge since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly. So he is sort of like an anti-Higalian, anti-German philosophy kind of guy saying, because German philosophy is very much like, here are subjects. The state is a subject. The working class is a subject, but this is all mythology.

Right. We use it as a useful way of thinking about the world because, like, point to the working class. You can't. Like, point to it on a map. Point me to society, right? But we treat these things as subjects. So what he's saying is that is a fiction and we're just ignoring it. Right.

He's saying that, like, everything is part of everything else. It's very similar to, like, the idea of, like, intertext. It's very postmodern in sort of acknowledging that, like, like, Like, there is nothing original, right? Everything is related to everything else. And when I was reading this Wikipedia page, it, like, brought up in, like, and so-and-so compares this to the idea of rhizomes by Gilles de Luz and Felix Gattari. And I was like, oh, I know those names because my best friend, Stan's DeLuze. And all of the, like, Marxists love DeLuze and Gattari because they are very anti-capitalist.

what's a rhizome and then I read the Wikipedia page on rhizomes and I was like so a rhizome is like a root system so it's like how mushrooms grow or how potatoes grow right where there's not like a root that like the other word that they use is arborescent it's not like a tree where it's like a seed and it makes a trunk and then the branches go out but it's all connected down to this one point. A rhizome is like, you know, the mushroom system is throughout the dirt and is like the largest living organism in the entire world because of just how connected everything is. Right. Like there's no like one point that it returns to as like a type of root system.

And immediately I was like, oh, nature, organic, digital garden, it's all coming together. baby. Oh, yeah, it's all coming together. Yes, Adie. That's really funny because to me, I'm just instantly thinking, like, networking, like internet working. Yes. Like the internet, yeah, and how, you know, like a lot of these terms are common in, you know, that kind of thing. Like, you talk about trunk ports and, you know, the way that you can get like loops and how you prevent those loops from happening. So, you know, you don't get like, you don't DDoS like a whole. Basically. Donna Harroway has entered the chat once again. Yeah. So, you know, and it's just funny because I'm sure that the internet has what you would call like trunks in a way just because that's also a capitalist thing because there are only so many companies who control so many fiber, you know, the high volume fiber lines. Shark comrades, eat it in the ocean. We're root for you.

So like what would the internet look like if it was, you know, Rosamatic, if that's, oh, word. Rhizomatic. Rizomatic. Yeah. Or like what would our library catalogs look like if they were rhizomatic and not like genealogical? I would say the homosaurus maybe a little bit because when I was first creating terms for

I was very doing traditional Library of Congress, genealogy, taxonomy. And they're like, no, no, no. We don't necessarily have to have the strict parent, sibling, child relationship. Things can be related without having the same parent. And that completely changed how I viewed that vocabulary. So shout out to homosaurus. But the way that, you know, just as like definitions, that that's arborescent and rhizomatic,

in a philosophical sense, what they're Deleuze and Gattari are referring to is like representational thinking for knowledge. So the way that the YouTube video explaining Deleuze with drum machines does this is, so in like platonic, philosophy. There's like the ideal self-ideal state form of something. Like everything is trying to be the perfect version of itself. And so a drum machine is meant to imitate a drum set. And like people will use it if they don't have a drum set. Right. It's trying to be caught. It's trying to imitate.

It's a representation of this perfect thing. But it's never going to get there. But then you have this punk band suicide who were like, no, I'm not going to use it to try to sound like a drum. I'm going to use it as its own thing. So instead of using it to represent something else, it's just going to be its own thing. And then that's how like punk music happens because they used it to create a beat that was faster than any human drummer could possibly do. And like the way that Brian Eno talks about how like the flaws in a medium are what makes it good, right? Like the things that, like, we view as problems about vinyl or CDs or whatever

are actually the things that make that thing valuable and unique, where it's not trying to be perfect or something else, where it's just what it is. Instead of, like, a note in my garden, trying to always point back towards this, like, origin where everything comes back to one point or, like, a note trying to represent something else, everything is sort of its own thing, and everything is connected. There's no central point where everything branches off. Things can have things that spread out from them, but there's like, if you take something out of the system,

it's not going to break the system. There's no one point of failure. There's no one point of beginning. You can kind of enter wherever you want. The other example the video uses is, if we're talking like Freudian perspective of a kid playing, playing with like a toy car set would try to be like edible complex

dicks whatever and like everything or like in our dreams or in a David Lynch film like what does this thing mean and a rhizomatic would just be like this thing just is its own thing and it might be connected to other things but it's not representing anything else

and so thinking about like information and the way that we organize information like are we being arborescent and saying that everything comes back to a central or point and the farther away it is from that central point, the less perfect it is, the more it's trying to represent the original thing, or is everything the sort of webbed system where everything is its own thing, but everything's also, like, connected to things? I'm probably

butchering that, but I feel like it's better than it would have done if I hadn't watched that really good video. That makes sense to me. Right? Yeah. The drum machine example made it click for me, honestly. Also, I'm a semiotics nerd. So I'm now like, oh, shit. Jeal de Luz is like shitting on signifiers and signified and shit. And yeah, this made me, like, think about when we're managing knowledge as like librarians, how does having like a rhizomatic, because I don't know if we could have a necessarily

rhizomatic system at a macro level, maybe as a way of organizing. But when we are like maybe assigning subjects or teaching people how to enter interact with information or, you know, we also do instruct people on how they manage their own information and not just relate to it. Or like you, Sadie, like, you construct like systems and work with systems that are like flows of information that support all of this other stuff. Like, if we can't make the systems themselves rhizomatic, how might that affect how we use those systems or teach people how to use those systems? Like how, what does rhizomatic subject cataloging look like? What does rhizomatic instruction look like? How does rhizomatic reference look like? I don't know.

But I feel like learning this term in like the micro and the personal knowledge management scale, like this has totally changed how I interact with how I create information and relate to it. I was totally having this big brain thing about metadata surrogates earlier today. It's not a novel concept, but then the way that I was like, oh, and this is flip, because capitalism, it has totally changed how I interact with how I organize and think of ideas. But that's on the personal. And so if I were to think about cataloging a movie or something in our current systems, how would this shape how I, like, assign subjects to it?

Or how would I teach someone how to use the catalog? Or how would I, like, configure the discovery layer that I configure? Not that arboroscent is bad. Gilles-Delouse and Felix Gauterese, they say arboroscent is bad. They say, we have too much representational thinking, and we should stop. They don't like it. They think we've had enough. But I'm one of these people that's like, no, these are tools, and they each have their place.

Streams have their place and gardens have their place. Great. So when does the arborescent suit us? When does the rhizomatic suit us on the macro information, knowledge management, organization, like profession? That's my spiel. I'm going to be thinking about that. Right? You could definitely, there are already databases that are like generalists that do this.

So if you ever use like Credo reference, it actually will create a web for you that you can sort of click around based on nodes. Yeah, Credo's fun. And you could make a catalog discovery layer do that too because you're just basically running around subject headings and making those connections. But the problem is they haven't been cataloged with this function in mind. Exactly. So like it might not work, but it might do some of the work.

And then it might be like a cleanup effort. But I was also thinking like, what would a library's wiki look like? Oh, yeah. So, like, if you had, instead of, like, lib guides, everything was built in wikis. I'm making a note about that. Fuck. Okay. Then you'd be like, oh, this is, instead of pages being about, like, deluse, it would be, like, philosophy.

And then, like, that would kind of be your philosophy, lib guide for subject research. But then it's like, okay, other sources, link, link, like external links. Internal links could go through. And then people could add and, like, students could add. You could do it by subjects, but then you could also be like, okay, and then this would be linked to mathematics courses or something. Like math 2021 would be its own page. And then that would be a course guide. And then that would link out to external databases.

So if you built your lib guides as one whole coherent wiki, that could be pretty interesting. That students could also edit. Yeah, exactly. And I feel like, and I feel this way also with like political action and labor organizing where if we maybe thinking of micro to biggest macro possible, that's not the way you want to scale up immediately. It's like, okay, I have personal, okay, what does, what would this look like in my library, right? In the communities of people who use my library, how can I make this look for them? How can I make our catalog or our, the way that I present information to people? How can I bring these sort of like digital garden ethos of let's show how ideas grow and link together as like an instruction tool or just as like a place for reference, a place for community collaboration?

And I feel like this would probably work that specifically would probably work really well in like smaller libraries. like maybe if your college, and I know I'm coming from an academic perspective, but like if there are like subject libraries, like I know the University of Illinois, which is huge, but they have a lot of like smaller subject libraries within their library system. Like they're like languages and literature's library is like the reading room, right? Or there's like the international like, you know, where like the Russian, like the whatever library and like the Arabic, the non-English language, but also. not German and stuff. That's its own thing. Not the giant like agricultural engineering library, but maybe smaller ones that would be easy to scale that up to you as like an instruction librarian or a reference librarian or a metadata librarian, like whatever or like library worker. Like Sadie, I would love to hear how this could maybe scale to like cis admin type of work in libraries.

I don't have any thoughts right off the bat. Report back. Yeah, I'll have to report back because, yeah, this, you know, with the job transition I'm going through and all of that, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, relationships between people and how, you know, that is what builds the bigger organizations. Like, I think Emily Drabinski kind of talked about that in our episode with her, you know, how it is, it is based on people. That's how you get the collective numbers and how that could affect,

like how we could turn that into something like from a sysadmin point of view. I'm not really, not really sure of, but I'm definitely going to be thinking about it because, yeah, like it's always more, to me at least, cis admin work is actually less about the technologies and more about the users. Yeah. So in a sense, you know, how would you apply this sort of thinking to your users and then adapt your technology to that as opposed to the other way around, which is how a lot of that kind of thing

goes? It's like, you know, you've got your active directory and that only does so many things and can only be structured in so many ways. So you basically have to force your users into a preexisting model. And you're already working with like relational databases for a lot of your stuff, right? Like it's already a framework you're working with. Yeah, and the thing with a lot of the databases are a lot of work. Yeah, they are.

That's probably why a lot of this kind of thing hasn't been done is simply because the library world doesn't have the, you know, just the labor for it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I will say I took a like database management course in grad school, which is basically like, let's learn my SQL. And it was the hardest course for me. and the one I got like the least use out of. I love sequel. I do like I because like the way that thing like once I was like oh this is kind of like a metadata schema.

But the way that like the keys and when do you pick a key like how do you link things with what do you pick is the key to link the things together? That part never clicked for me. And for most of my homework I'd have to like go to stack over for. flow and like see if someone had like answered something. Not to say like what I learned was useless because it's like, oh, I at least know how to like use my sequel. No, that's a good skill. I'm rusty on it.

But, you know, I would know how to use it. It's like the way that it was taught was more about here's how you build these relational structures, but not why. Yeah, no, you're hitting on exactly what I, yeah, where I was trying to go. is well and I just I have I always have so many thoughts about how like the technology world and the IT world actually parallels to I think to the library world in a lot of really interesting ways and I think that in a lot of ways it's really unexplored and maybe I'm just not you know following the right people on Twitter or reading the right articles or something but like you know I feel like they could be so harmonious it could be powerful I guess and And yeah, I just turn that over in my brain a lot when I start getting in the weeds. But yeah, this is cool shit, Jay. Thanks for sharing it.

Yeah, I'm excited. I learned about rhizomes. I'm sorry, delusians, if I butchered what rhizomes are. I did, you know, babies first deluse. We're learning in public. We're learning in public. I like that video. Help us learn in public.

Cool people who actually have read a thousand plateaus and understand it, recommended that video to me. So I trust their judgment. I think it was the Asid Horizon. I pretty sure it was like acid communist on Twitter who sent that to me. I'm pretty sure that's like one of the Asset Horizon guys. They do the crit drip at Z store where I got my fucking like Michelle Foucault shirt and my discipline and punished boxers.

So support them. They're cool. A discipline and punish Yowie Paddle. Oh God. Oh God. What would a live? very punk yowie battle look like. We would just have a bunny on it.

Yeah, you'd leave a bunny imprint. Yeah. Who would we hit with it? People you like? Do we really want to go there in public? Yes. We're learning in public, Sadie. I discovered this framework and yeah, while it is more about, like,

representational ideas and philosophy and knowledge in general, I thought it was like cool to think about how. this relates to how we actually structure our information systems and knowledge. I thought it was cool. Plus the whole like rhizome arborescent, like digital garden thing, I was like, baby match made in heaven. So all the, all the plant metaphors, Donna Hareway is so happy. Fuck yeah.

I'm surprised I didn't like catch any like deluz shit in staying with the trouble. But maybe I missed a footnote or something. I don't know. Was this a worthwhile episode? for you both. Okay. Yeah, I just haven't thought about, I've kind of just been doing my obsidian. So that way the next time I go back to like learn more about it and do it more deeply,

I'll have like experience doing it and go like, oh, this makes sense now. Because like trying to learn it all up front doesn't really work. Yeah, no, that's always really hard. I know when I did building a second brain, a thing that they did just like newly for this cohort was the week before. started. They did a tech week where they had like three mentors demonstrate sort of like three main tools. You didn't have to use one of those, but it was like, oh, if you have no idea or something, and like obviously we'll probably need more than one tool once you actually settle into your system. But to learn, you know, here are the notion sessions, here are the Rome sessions, and here are,

or like, and here's an obsidian session and here's an Evernote session for this tech week. So that once we actually start, you have a tool set up, and then just stick with that the whole time. You can always change it later, but at least learn on one tool. Yeah, I can do more backlinking and put it in more structure. But basically the way I'm doing it now is working more or less fine because I don't need to make real hierarchies, but I can just make folders, kind of. And that's just like, oh, conferences. And then it's just like a page for the conference.

So like I've got one page for like Open Texas. And it's like, okay, all the stuff for the committee meetings, all the notes and everything. It's also like replacing a lot of bookmarks and stuff. So I could just put the links in there instead of having like, I've got like 20 bookmarks for Open Texas. Because like we have last year's stuff and this year's stuff because I had to copy over a lot of stuff. So I didn't have everything bookmarked. It sounds like the way that you're using Obsidian is like how I use LogSeek and Evernote combined. Is that like I'm using Evernote as like the file cabinet and I have folders for it.

And then LogSeek is where I do kind of more my thinking. And then you're just, you're doing it in one tool. Whereas, like, I think one of the main differences and just how you write an obsidian and Logseek is that Logseek is doing the outliner type of writing where, like, there's like bullet points. And each of those is its own block node. So, like, in Obsidian, you can link to pages. And things like Roman Logseek, you can actually link in reference block. And so it's helping that atomicity for me. Right, right.

Yeah, linking to blocks. I think you can kind of do that in Obsidian. It's just not, I haven't done it. That's not its main function. Right. So I needed something that replaced my journal because what I was doing before was I had a a daily work journal. And then I had, which was like a new Google Doc every day.

And then I had two junk journals, personal one and a work one. And that was kind of more like my current system where it was just a long list of things that were like, oh, I'm going to need to get back to this later. So like, here's a project that's been on hold. So I'll just get back to it. And it's just like outlined in the Google Doc. Whereas now that instead of being an outline, that's like its own page. So it's like graduate assistant projects. And it's like, okay, I just click on that.

You know, like so in my daily note, I'll type 10 a.m. working on. And then I would double brackets. graduate assistant projects. And then I would just click on it and open up that page. Instead of having to go search for it, I would actually just insert it into my daily note and then open it from there to edit it. And then like when you go to that note, you can see all the days you worked on it. I do that exact same thing. I have fucked that up pretty badly by putting links in the to-does that roll over.

So there's stuff that's in there for like 30 or 40 days because I just never took it out of the to-do list. I, the way that I deal with like having more than one tool to do what you're doing with just one is there the organizational system you learn a building. A second brain is called para projects, areas, resources, archives, but I call it attic because I'm an asshole. And basically you do like I replicate that organizational structure in all of my systems. So I have like a project stack, an area stack, a resources stack, and an attic stack in my Evernote. And five folders go in those. I have pages that I use as tags in my logseek. So I'll tag something as a project or a resource or whatever. And like when a project's done, I remove the project tag and put attic there. Or in my task manager, I have projects and areas. I don't need resources in there. Yeah.

Tags is something I haven't really mastered an obsidian. So I have like the Daily Notes tag at the top, to actually tags. But I don't actually use the tag function at all because it's not really necessary for me to find things. Yeah, Logseek doesn't, so like, every note you can tag, and I do that where it's like, oh, I want this to also be related to this other thing. In Logseek, something can aesthetically look like a tag, but it's basically just doing a link to a page.

But what I do is often for those, like, the things that I would use as a tag versus like a double square bracket page, is that like I don't put anything on the page that I'm linking to. So like my projects page doesn't have anything in there, except it will show me these are all the pages that are tagged with projects. So it will look like a tag. Like I use a hashtag, but I'm not putting anything on that. You're kind of creating an index. Kind of, yeah.

Yeah, more automated. And so I'm done with the project. I just take the project tag off of it. And like each project I'll do like, this is my creative, generative, artwork project that I'm working on this week for like a sprint. I have a page called like the title of my project. That also doesn't have anything on it really, except maybe like a log of what I'm doing, but that in and of itself is a tag that I will then put on other things. That's how I'm kind of doing hierarchy and stuff in locks. People use namespaces and I find those annoying. That's kind of how I use

my concepts folder is like, this is the person, this is the project. And then I'll use those to sort of like act as interconnections. But usually I'll go to like a person's page. I'll click on it and there's usually no information in there about them. Unless it's like- Except all the things that are linked. Except all the things are linked. Or once in a while, I'll put like a long term like,

oh, they work on this project. That's good to know. So it's sort of like a CRM aspect to it because part of my job is also I build a CRM to track all of the OER work that we do. So we know which. faculty have been in which trainings and like what's what things they've done with us so have they worked on the press books have they applied to this grant have they completed this uh training and then like what college are they in what department are they in and like it obviously took a long time to get it

all set up but it's now like an extremely powerful database that we've built with like two people and like however much air table pro is per year and we've built like this amazing system Yeah. So anyway, that's sort of how I. But when you were talking about architects, that's what I was thinking of is like people who use air table. And you could build like little automations and shit. I would love to do that. Yeah, you sound like an architect, Justin.

Well, I like, I don't like doing any. I like not doing work that I don't have to. Like, I don't want to do any work I don't have to. So if I can automate something that is otherwise just going. like because especially if I might forget that step and be like, oh, this, this data needs to be on two spreadsheets at once. It's much better to have an automation doing that for me, but rather than like, it's not really saving me time, but it's like, okay, I don't have to think about that anymore. So like the cognitive load stays off of me. Yeah.

Whereas I'll just like be on my phone and be like, ooh. And then just like clip something with my Evernote and it goes in there. And if I'm like working on a project, I might or like, I. have a new area of responsibility in my life or something, I could do a keyword search of like, oh, what kind of things do I have related to music? And then I can like do a keyword search and see everything that I have where it's more about like, can I find a thing? And not like when I'm doing my knowledge management, that's not necessarily where I need the automation. For example, I just need to, I just need to trust my keyword searches basically. I think mine is,

more librarians because I am always like, how can I get back to this information? Because I don't want to lose it is the whole major thing. That's my fear. It's like any kind of workflow I invent is that is so I'm not forgetting something or forgetting how to access it. Because if it's if it's not accessed, then like I just wasted my time.

If I never go back and look at any of these notes. Whereas I am totally fine if I have like clip something because it resonates with me or I made a note because it resonates with me. If I never look at it, again, that's okay to me. I'm okay with the collector's fallacy. I'm okay with having this giant file cabinet. It's there if I ever need it. But the fact that I like let myself enjoy clipping a tweet because I found it funny and not for any purpose. And then if I never find it again, that's honestly okay with me. Although read wise is really fun because it will like

sort of you can clip things and then it's like kind of space repetition like with your Kindle highlights or you can send tweets to it and stuff. And I'm beta testing. It's like instip paper type reader. It's really cool. Yeah, I think I saw something like that. What I'm going to do in the notes is put all the software we've talked about as like a separate little chunk. Because I've been writing them down as we've been going. Yeah, if you're an architect, Try Notion. And the article that I link that's like how to, what your note taking style is in the apps, it also has links to open source versions of the apps that they recommend. I use Evernote and Logseek for note taking.

I use Tick-Tick for my task management, I guess also project management. And then I use readwise and I'm beta testing, their Instapaper type app reader. And that's sort of my like read it later kind of thing. Like readwise is about like highlights. Like you can sync your Kindle to it or you can like send tweets to it. And you like can revisit highlights every day. Like it will send random ones to you. It's kind of fun.

And then the reader does that, but you can actually, like, clip articles to it and then highlight things from there. So it's like, I can remove Insta Paper for my workflow now. I use Otero. I think that's the main tools that I use. Architects, I hear notions, the big one, but I feel like you can do it in Obsidian, too. If you're a gardener, look at Rome, look at obsidian, look at logseek, look at orgrome for Emacs, if you're an nerd like me. If you're a librarian, like Evernote. Joplin as well.

It's like a free open source version that's local markdown files. But I got Evernote-pilled Apple notes, honestly. Like anything where it's just kind of like a flat, you know, where you can like make folders and just like take notes and there's not really anything fancy. But you can like organize and find things later for librarians. Yeah, I think that clipping was kind of how I used Zotero when I was in school. That was why I filled up my Zotero and then like kind of stopped using it. because I was saving everything and I wasn't worried about not finding it again.

So it's like because it was a lot of like I was trying to learn a lot about racism in the United States at that point. So like I realized I had this huge blind spot. Yeah. I'd just gotten a hold on feminist theory and I'm like, wow, if I can see the world this way, there must be a similar thing for studying racism. So then I started getting into like critical theory, analytic Marxism, black Marxism. And so I was trying to learn how to critically look at the world through that angle. Because it's like putting on glasses that let you see the world a slightly different angle.

That's what good theory does. So I was trying to like gain another superpower. But then I would just like save everything. And I'll save like Wikipedia pages. Like what is like what was that religion concept? And I was like, oh, it's like a psychopath. So you were using it as a read it later app. Basically.

Although it was more like this is something I know I'm going to forget later because I'm always trying to remember what is. this word. And so it's like, what is the psychopomp? And it's like, oh, I'll just save the Wikipedia page because I'll put it under a folder for religion. And I'll be like, okay, I know it's a religious concept and I'll go find it there. Yeah, I use a tarot only for like things I might cite. Otherwise, it goes into a read-out later app, which I have synced to Evernote. Yeah. Now what I would do is I would put that, what I was doing is I was putting that in my personal junk journal was basically links to stuff. But now, I don't know. I don't really, the way my obsidian is set up, I don't really have the same capacity of personal stuff because I haven't

figured out how to get my personal stuff to roll over. So usually what I'll do, maybe what I'll do is I'll update my template. And by the way, all my, my, my obsidian setup is going to be in the notes too on the public facing page. So you can see how I learned to use obsidian. I wrote out the whole process. Yeah, I need to write out my actual process and like put my templates for, for log seek. I'm going to make a note to do that right now and put that in the notes or we can share it later. I kind of have that in my like obligatory. I took the building a second brain course, a little blog post that I did. I kind of have that, but I don't really show my like templating or what it actually looks like in practice on the back end.

So maybe I can make a little video myself doing something. That could be fun. Express that as. we would say in building a second brain. You capture, you organize, you distill, and you express. That's what you do. And then you do a little dance on TikTok. Yep. Yep, you do.

I don't do the TikTok. I am not a cool kid. I kind of hate it, but I did get on it the other day because someone I like is starting a TikTok, so I'm trying to support them. And then I just sit and have us some stuff like I always do. I was just like, hey, these are emo cows. Here you go. That sounds perfect.

I found this channel that is like in rural China and it's every single one of them is filmed like a Chinese movie and it's basically this woman. Like a wusha? This woman will walk in. Just like the stylistic choices and like the guy is like always chewing on a blade of grass or something or a bamboo radio grass. But this woman will always walk in and then she'll be holding some kind of like meat. So she'll be holding like a rooster or she'll be holding like a post of one of them on my Twitter because I couldn't figure out what the animal was. It's like a huge spine and ribs and it takes two people to carry. And she'll like walk in and the guy will look at her and then who like writes something on a scroll and hand it off to someone.

I think it's like the video title. None of this is no of this is subtitled in English. So I don't know what's going on. And then he'll like cook it. And like they use the same formula like tons of times again and again. Or it'll just be her. and the video always starts, zoomed in on her butt,

and then she'll be like, I'm going to lift these two logs, or I'm going to, I'm going to, like, go hunting for bamboo shoots. But like it always starts up. It's just her doing, like, butch stuff out in the...

Hell yeah. Those are the two types. This sounds like it was something made for the girls in the gays. Yeah. I'm sure there's a straight explanation for it, but it's like, it's the same with those TikTok brass band,

the Moss, M-OS. and it's like five women who all play brass instruments and dance and do their dances. I'm like, I'm sure there's a heterosexual. I just call them the scot of lesbians in my head. I'm like, yeah, it's the sky of lesbians. I just imagine they're all dating each other. The main person I liked on TikTok, his account is Minut, Minuteman, and his whole thing, he's an archaeologist.

Like he was like, well, at the time he was like in college is like an archaeology major. And he would do videos debunking, like, archaeological misinformation on TikTok, like, conspiracy theories and whatnot. Because often those lead to, like, right-wing bullshit. And then he would also just, like, make videos about interesting things. But his stuff kept getting flagged and taken down, so he just made a YouTube channel. There's a guy who does that on YouTube. And then I watched the first one, and I'm like... Does he have long hair?

I don't remember. He's like a younger guy. But then I remember being like... It might be him. I don't think one of his arguments to, like, debunk the thing. He was talking about, like, flat earthers and, like, medieval maps. And he was like, this map is clearly talking about the top of Australia. I'm like, no, it isn't.

No European would have been there at that point. Like, so he debunked it by creating, like, he's saying, like, by creating a theory that this map was about Australia. And I'm like, there's no fucking way. I don't think that's, I don't think that's, I don't think that's. Yeah, I was like, I don't know where you're getting your information. It looks like a little pirate with long hair. I don't know. You looked really young. So he's probably, I'm sure he'll delete them in a few years.

Yeah. He's cool. But he was like the reason I like TikTok and now he's on YouTube. Yeah. It's very funny watching millennials trying to get into TikTok. Because like it's my, because they make vines. They make it a thing. Yeah. Well, they make vines. They're actually funny, whereas people on TikTok are not funny. It's the thing. It's just people dancing and pointing at things. I was going to say when I first started getting on TikTok, I was so I could continue to follow Vine. people and then I just kind of stopped using it. It's bad. Yeah. It's not funny. The thing,

my dad likes it. Wife really does TikTok and like they'll be scrolling and be like, oh, I want to show you this, but then TikTok refreshes and like you can literally never find it again unless you caught the username of the person. Because the search is awful. The search is awful. And it's like when that happens on Tumblr, at least I can be like, okay, it was probably this person and then go back through their blog.

But there's no fucking way you can find that again on TikTok unless you like it. Plus the way that people tag things on TikTok often has nothing to do with the video. It's just so it gets on the page. Yeah, they just algorithm stuff. Yeah, they released a function that was like you can repost someone's stuff. I'm like, oh, cool, they got reblogs. And it's like, no, you have to introduce the video yourself. I'm like, no, I just want my friends to see this.

That's just doing a duet then, right? Yeah, it's basically like a duet. It's like, hey, guys, hold on to your assholes, come buckets. We're going to see this. And then like... The Avenue power bottoms. Yeah. I don't have that drop anymore, obviously.

Why? Because he got his ass in a boxing match. What? Yeah, he had, there's a YouTuber boxing. You're more online than I am, and that's saying something. I never claimed not to be. And so he fought the epic meal time guy and got destroyed. That sounds fun.

Neither of them are a problem at TV. God. The things that exist in this world. I mean, he's been online a long time. So, like, a lot of his early stuff was, like, racist and sexist. It's just, like, no one ever really confronted him about, like, racist, like, things he would do for a long time. I think they're, like, I think they're all still friends, though. Are they?

I think, like, they never really cut those people out because I think they still, like, are friends. So, yeah, they're, I mean, they're just libs. They're just like, oh, well, you know, we're trying to keep this, trying not to feed the backlash. Because someone will say something and like, that's kind of, it's kind of racist. And he'll be like, but he'll never like apologize or anything. But again, like if you're a famous YouTuber and you apologize, like, you're just going to lose your mind like Lindsay Ellis and just be like,

I got to leave. Because like, once you start responding to critics, it's just like, yeah, this is what all your whole life. That's the rest of your life. Yeah. And like the Nazis had been trying to get her for years. Yeah. I think the mistake was, was even engaging.

So I think what they're doing is smart. They're just like, this is a money train. If I do something racist, I can apologize to individual people. But it was funny watching him like, he's like, I've been training and boxing. And then like, he just did awful. Just because you train doesn't mean you're good. Yeah, but I was like, did you train with a boxer or did you train with someone? Did you train by a YouTube video?

Did you train with like a karate guy? I just went to an opera about boxing. Yeah, it was about Emil Griffith. Yeah. Okay. Good night.