Issue 6

Shit I'm...

Reading

More or Less – his and hers apartment, side by side – interesting article about a couple splitting their living space into two different areas to accommodate their wildly different aesthetic preferences.

The wife, a former curator for the Cooper Hewitt museum of design, is a collector and her area is pretty extra. Reminds me of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, just filled with stuff.

The husband's side, on the other hand, is a faithful rendition of an austere Japanese tea house and sleeping area. It couldn't be more different than the other half of the house.

Kinda weird, right? There's a lot of expectations around how things should be, the default thinking of "we need to agree on everything, have the same tastes, compromise or give in on this type of stuff or something is wrong."

What this approach presupposes is – what if you didn't?

There's another similar movement called Living Apart Together where married couples live in separate places. Again, seems weird, right? But, after Jen and I were separated, there was a period of time where this was essentially our situation. We decided that we wanted to work things out and stay together, but logistics and a general desire for transition meant we kept living where we were, moving between places on a schedule. It was naturally a pain in the ass moving between homes every few days, especially for the kiddos, but I dunno... there was kinda something nice about having our "own" spaces.

So, we found and bought a house we both love that has enough room for us to have our own spaces. The vast majority of the house is shared, of course, and we worked with a designer to help us figure out an approach to decorating and furnishing those areas that we both agreed on. It went a lot more smoothly than we expected. Much like a therapist being a neutral third party, the designer made it way easier to figure out what we both liked rather than fixating on the things we didn't.

And we also have our own spots that we can kinda do whatever we want with. Jen claimed a corner room for doing crafts and sewing. We call it the Rainbow Room since, well, it's covered in rainbows, has a rainbow rug, a pink chair, and a pink accent wall.

Meanwhile, the attic, while unfinished, is pretty big and cool. Tons of potential. At some point we'd love to finish it, maybe put a south facing window in the roof, etc. In the meantime, though, Jen's converted half of it to be a cozy, bohemian/witchy zone with tons of blankets and pouffes and trinkets and candles. It's pretty sweet. Felix loves hanging out with her up there.

And since I work from home permanently now, what used to be the maid quarters or whatever in the basement is now my office/lair. It's pretty well separate from the rest of the house and has a bathroom, entry room, and main room, both of which have windows looking out onto the backyard. And, for some reason, the main room was equipped with some speakers on the wall and ceiling. It's kind of a perfect office for me. I can keep it set up how I want, blast music on the built in speakers, use the bathroom, chill on the couch in the entry room, whatever. It's just my own space. I love it.

Now, I know this is a super privileged situation. We bought a big ass house with lots of room, and I recognize that we're super fortunate. Similarly, the original article is about 2 people living in a 4000sf loft apartment in Manhattan. I can't even imagine what it's worth.

I'm sure this type of approach would likely be pretty hard in a small place, especially with kids etc. Like one of those sitcoms where the kids split the room with tape:

Sisters Sharing Bedroom Divided With Tape Stock-Foto - Getty Images

Also, I suppose "man caves" and "sewing rooms" and all that aren't all that uncommon. This is just the first time I've ever really lived somewhere that can reasonably sustain both.

I dunno. I guess it's just one of those things that I never really thought about, but is probably a lot more common than I ever considered. And, maybe, it's just one of many important tools that can help sustain a relationship through creativity and acknowledgment/respect of differences.

Using

All right, things are gonna get nerdy.

So, the main reason I started doing this newsletter is because I took a class on building a "second brain" which is basically "take a bunch of notes instead of keeping all that shit in your head and stay up all night thinking about it." If you know, you know.

Lots of folks have been getting into this stuff lately. This type of shit is catnip for nerds. Arguing over the best tools and processes for taking notes and gathering knowledge rather than actually getting work done or writing? Just like old painters sniffing each others brushes to critique their choice of materials, we just can't help it.

The building a second brain course is intended to get you to actually produce something, though. The main dude still just uses Evernote. At the end of the day it's just organizing text, the point is to make something out of it.

This newsletter is the result of that. And I'm super glad I was pointed in this direction instead of just obsessing over the tools and methods and only paying attention to how other people are taking notes instead of what they're making.

Anyways, now I'm going to write about tools and methods and hacks. Alex requested it, blame him.

Obsidian

I already wrote about using Obsidian a few issues back. It's my weapon of choice in the linked notes arms race. It's extremely flexible and has a huge amount of community folks making plugins. It's pretty great. I'm also keenly interested in Logseq, which is a block-based outliner based on markdown files, but I need to just settle on something. So, Obsidian it is.

The blessing and curse of Obsidian is that there's an infinite amount of customization and tweaking you can do. This is great for dialing in your specific workflows etc, but it's also a very deep, tempting rabbit hole.

I'd like to show you around my rabbit hole.

This will probably go for many many issues. Warm up that unsubscribe finger.

First things first: Themes and tweaks

Ok, first off, if you're going to use Obsidian, you have to get a decent theme. The default is ... fine, but it's meant to be cross platform and inoffensive. If you're going to bother using an app that's essentially a website and not actually native, you might as well take full advantage of that fact and tweak it to ridiculous levels.

I've been a designer for a long time, and I love trying to make the computing environment I use all day every day pleasing. As the kids say, I want to make it Aesthetic™. So, if you want to roll in Aesthetic™ style, you need the Minimal theme. There are lots of other nice themes, but, to me, Minimal is the gold standard, especially if you're on a mac. It's clean, well thought out, has nice typography, and tons of options to tweak the small stuff if that's how you roll.

And if you want the full extent of the Minimal goodness, you're going to need to install a couple plugins to go along with it.

So, yeah... plugins.

Plugins

This is where shit with Obsidian goes off the rails. The Obsidian community is pretty huge and active and everything is built with html/js/css. As a result, there's a ton of cool plugins available. Even a numbskull like me could make some if I remembered how to write code.

I will admit, I have a plugin problem. The number of plugins I have installed is so high I won't even type it here out of embarrassment. You don't need to follow my bad example. Much of this series will likely focus on the plugins I use and the general workflows I've cobbled together.

For now, keeping with the theme of, well, themes, here's a list of a few visually focused plugins I like:

Minimal Theme Settings – what it says. Adds a whole bunch of cool options for the Minimal theme, including color schemes, typography, nicer icons, turning some stuff on and off, etc.
Style Settings – this one provides a way for themes and other plugins to make it easy to add options for visual styling. It can get pretty in depth, but it's nice to have available.
Hider – gives you more options to turn interface elements on and off. I turn off the entire title bar to get into a frameless mode, the vault name, and scrollbars, etc.
Icon Folder – let's you add nice, monochrome icons to the folders in the file browser sidebar. Lots of folks use emoji, but they're too garish for me. I mostly use the remix icons, and I really like the extra scannability and personality they give.

I have settled on the Things color scheme in dark mode because dark mode is objectively best.

Here's a screenshot of my setup as I'm authoring this post. Inception shit.

Ok, that's probably enough. I'll get into more stuff next issue.

Wearing

Iron Heart Ultra Heavy Flannel Shirt

Iron Heart Returns With Their Ultra Heavy Flannel Shirts

All right, so I live in Portland. Yes, flannels, plaid, beanies, lumbersexuals, etc. Get it out of your system now.

All done?

Ok, cool. With that out of the way, these things kick serious ass. I got one on a big sale a couple years ago, and I love it so much. It's THICC. It has cowboy snaps instead of fiddly buttons for easy on/off. And the inside is brushed to make it super soft. And did I mention it's thicc as hell?

Even on sale it was still stupid expensive, but I'll have this thing for the rest of my life. Highly recommended.

Listening to

8-bit Metallica – say what you want about Metallica, but The Big 3 albums will always rule. These are pretty much perfect translations to 8-bit chiptune style. The only inaccuracy is that Lars's drums are in perfect time.

Emberthrone video – I've been playing music with a couple dudes recently and Monte, the bass player, also sings for a Real Metal Band called Emberthrone. They just dropped the first song and it crushes.

Seeing

No shows this last week, but I'm gonna see Bongzilla, Zeke, and Lord Dying next week. I'm stoked to see Lord Dying again. Their last album continues to be one of my faves, and they're local Portland boyz.

Drawing

Here's another drawing I did few weeks back. I need to get back on the wagon and get some new ones done.

Laughing at

Learning about

The Cube Rule of Food Identification

The Cube Rule of Food for identifying dishes based on starch locations

Something to think about...

Watching

Baker Street – great sax riff, or greatest sax riff?

Dennis Chambers plays a tool song after hearing it once without drums – this is absolutely mind blowing. What a master.

Heely King – you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

— Toby