Shit I'm...

Considering...

I don't have a single tattoo on my body. I've always been pretty certain I'd never be satisfied with anything enough that I wouldn't obsess over it and regret it. But, dammit, Paw Tattoo is really making me rethink that.

Using

Obsidian Stuff, Part 2

A couple issues ago I talked about the general baseline theming and stuff that I feel is table stakes for making Obsidian something that feels joyful to use. Again, it's not a native app, but people are taking advantage of the underlying web technology and the hooks the developers built into the foundation to make it both beautiful, but also wildly extensive and powerful.

So as mentioned, I've gone pretty deep with an excessive amount of plugins and tweaks. But I think it would probably be best to demonstrate that stuff in course of talking about some workflows.

Daily Notes

First up is a daily notes setup. I think Roam Research (which essentially kicked off this whole craze as far as I can tell) always defaults to a daily notes page. The idea is essentially that, with a graph database instead of a traditional folder based hierarchy, you should't have to "organize" anything. Just capture stuff on your daily notes page and use links and tags and outlining hierarchy to get things into a logical structure and leave it at that. That inherently provides a time dimension since you'll always know when you wrote things down, along with whatever tagging and linking you do.

As an aside, I suppose "daily notes" is just... a diary. But, tech is no stranger to reinventing things that have always existed and calling it revolutionary.

Anyways, it turns out having a diary is pretty cool. One of my biggest problems with this type of stuff has always been where to put things. It seems like it should be simple, but it's just enough friction that I tend to just not write things down so I don't have to figure out where to organize it. And then I of course forget about it. With a daily note you just write shit down on it. You can have some structure to the page if you want, but when in doubt, just write stuff down on your daily notes page. It's pretty liberating.

Obsidian is a bit of an odd duck compared to the more "pure" graph based apps like Roam and Logseq, though, in that it really is just a folder filled with folders of markdown files. Technically Logseq is as well, but they abstract all that away in the product, whereas in Obsidian you can open up a file browser on the left just like any other normal app. The cool thing about this, though, is you can kind of get the best of both worlds.

I took the Building A Second Brain course a few weeks ago and I've mostly adopted the PARA folder system of just having Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive folders. Obsidian has files, and files need some sort of organization, and this is good enough that the Tiago dude is making millions of dollars recommending you should just use four folders. Again, it's just a way to not think about things and just do it, and it's also pretty liberating.

Ok, so daily notes provide a lot of the benefit of the graph approach with the time dimension while still having the crutch of folders and files under the hood. Luckily, Obsidian has a built in Daily Notes plugin that works really well. However, I've been using the Periodic Notes community plugin because it provides a more broad approach with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes. So far I only use daily and weekly, but I want to move toward using all of them at some point as I get better at this stuff.

Daily notes are of course the backbone, though. I have a keyboard command set up so hitting command-t always takes me to today's note, and creates it if it doesn't yet exist. By default, daily notes are just blank pages. This is fine for jotting stuff down, but for maximum nerditude you need to set up some templates.

Templates

Obsidian also comes with a stock templating plugin, but I'm using the Templater plugin for unlimited power. It essentially gives you a full templating language and the ability to harness as much javascript as you want to do some pretty interesting things, but even just the base functionality is great.

My daily notes template has accumulated a lot of stuff:

  • The weather in portland at the time I create it (using wttr.in)
  • My daily highlight (a concept from Make Time, basically the most important thing of the day)
  • Morning / evening routine checklists
  • The day's calendar events (retrieved with a shortcut that is launched with a button)
  • Daily log where all the random thoughts and interstitial journaling stuff lands
  • My Readwise highlights for the day using dataview (dataview probably warrants a whole post itself)
  • Tasks for the day (using the Obsidian Tasks plugin which is also pretty gnarly)

Here's a partial screenshot of the template:

That probably seems like a lot, and I guess it kinda is, but it's mostly automated, ambient info with areas dedicated to dropping random stuff (which I do with various methods depending on where I'm recording it... more on that in a future issue). And having things like my calendar events and tasks give me one place to see my day at a glance, as well as easily take notes on any of them as the day progresses, which is especially great for meeting notes. Also, all the :: items are actually data that you can query in other places, which comes into play with my weekly pages (which I'll cover in a future issue).

It's definitely taken a lot of trial and error to evolve to this point. In fact, looking at it for this write up distracted me and started me down a path of trying to only get the different task headers to appear if there were actually any tasks and I had to drag myself back to finish this. But I think that's what's kinda rad about Obsidian – it's infinitely moldable to your needs. I finally understand all the nerds who were obsessed with emacs and org-mode.

Anyways, whatever tool you use, having a daily diary is pretty cool. Maybe Doogie Howser was a genius.

Wearing

Now that it's kinda warming up a bit here in Portland, I've been wearing my denim jacket more instead of the parka. I got this 3sixteen overdyed type III jacket a few years ago and I really love it. It's an indigo denim jacket in the regular Levi's trucker jacket style, but dyed a deep black on top of it, which gives it a really soft texture and an interesting blue that pops through on the parts that fade. The sizing is super wacky, as my normal medium sizing required an XL in this. But it's really well made (in the USA 🇺🇸) and has really soft corduroy lined hand warmer pockets.

Listening to

Impel - Omnidirectional – back in like 1993 a bunch of my high school crew drove the 2 hours down to San Diego to see the best band in the world, Unbroken. It's an understatement to say Unbroken was a gigantic influence on all of us. Their music was incredible, yes, but they also had a sense of style and attitude that was different than any of the other hardcore and straight edge bands of the time. While everyone else was still wearing basketball jerseys and baggy shorts, the Unbroken dudes were super into Morrissey, rockabilly style, and gothy shit. As a result, all of us drove down in our button up shirts and pompadours to see them play.

The show got moved from the original larger location for some reason, but luckily we found out the new location was Cafe Mesopotamia. The place was a tiny coffee shop type place in a random strip mall that had a little stage in the back. When we walked in there was already a band called Impel playing that we'd never heard of before.

San Diego always had a pretty magical music scene. Something about it generated tons of super unique bands during the 90s. Well, unique in terms of they all had a super weird "San Diego spazz" type of sound. The scene was ultra incestuous, with lots of people being in 3 or 4 bands at once, ending and stopping bands all the time. San Diego has always felt like a foreign country to me, a super isolated mixture of Mexico, marines, and man child beach bums. The kids who were the weirdos of that mix were the ones making super wacky punk music.

Anyways, the fact the Impel was opening for Unbroken gave them instant credibility. Also, it turned out that their bass player was June Cate, a pretty famous skater at the time. We only heard a few songs, and what we did hear was most definitely not Slayer influenced metal like Unbroken, so we didn't give it much thought.

I never really came across much of their stuff, and to be honest, I wasn't really ready to appreciate the more emoish type of stuff they were doing. I never really forgot about them after that show at Mesopotamia, though, they always had an air of mystery about them to me.

A couple weeks ago Steven Miller from Unbroken posted on Instagram that Indecision records had (re?)released an Impel album. He has always been a legend after being in Unbroken, and he went on be in lots of other bands as well, including a few that had folks who had been in Impel back in the day. So I checked it out.

Turns out it's pretty great. It's heavy and intense, but not "metal". Much more along the lines of Quicksand and emo type bands, with the vocalist veering between the Julia-style whininess and the Refused guy's screaming. The music is pretty complex and layered and I dig it. Pretty cool to finally get around to listening to them and realizing I saw another rad band back in the day.

Seeing

Lots of shows this week!

The Mixtape Tour

All right, so first up – New Kids on the Block, Rick Astley, En Vogue, Salt 'n Pepa. Yeah. A friend of Jen's had their birthday this weekend and set up a last minute squad to go to this show. Gen Xers and Elder Millennials were in full force.

You gotta understand, NKOTB was enemy number one to 12 year old Toby and his skateboarding buddies. My friend's sister was a huge New Kids fan, with the sleeping bag and everything, and we mercilessly talked shit. I know, young boys are crappy. But that's how it was with the New Kids. They were the worst.

Fast forward 33 years and I'm paying to go to the NKOTB Mix Tape Tour™.

Not gonna lie, it was pretty badass. A lifetime of going to bar and club shows always leaves me in awe of big ass stadium shows. And even the stadium shows I have gone to are still usually on the pretentious side of things and relatively stripped down and raw. This show was not like that.

To say this show was "extra" would be an understatement. I mean look at this:

It was packed as hell. Most everyone was dressed in 80s/90s gear. Jen had a bodysuit, iridescent fanny pack, and borrowed a bunch of Paisley's clothes to pull off a perfect 90s look. I went as the grunge boyfriend who loves his lady so much he's willing to see NKOTB.

Real talk, though... it was a lot of fun. The whole show was extremely self-aware. Everyone performing was at least in their 50s and weren't really pretending otherwise. Little Joey McIntire said something like "I've been singing this song for 35 years" which hit everyone pretty hard. I think Jonathan Knight was just happy to be there collecting a paycheck. Donnie was still doing the bad boy thing, shaking his ass and pulling up his shirt etc. Rick Astley is still a good singer, and he IRL rickrolled us not once, but twice. Salt 'n Pepa were still badass, and En Vogue still fuckin' rule.

🥵

Tori Amos

Two nights later we had tickets to see Tori Amos at the Schnitzer theatre. I love me some brooding women, and Tori is an undisputed queen of brood. I've seen her live twice now, and both times it was just her and a piano. Her piano playing is of course genius, and I am extremely down to just have her play some dissonant piano runs while singing... but I'm a rhythm guy at heart. Most of her albums have a band backing her, and I absolutely love when she goes huge with the full band.

So, I was super stoked when I saw she had a drum set and bass rig ready to roll.

While I celebrate her entire catalog, she's one of the artists where I'm the annoying "her old stuff is the best" guy. While I usually don't agree with that when it comes to stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate (Rising Tide is their best album, fight me), Tori's early stuff is just untouchable. Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, and even some of the mid to late 90s stuff like From the Choirgirl Hotel are just super dark, dissonant, and brooding. And even her covers/tribute albums like Strange Little Girls and Night of Hunters are super complex and dark. Her recent stuff is still super good, but it's just not quite as ... intense.

Naturally, though, her live shows are a mix of old and new. She wants to play her recent stuff, but the audience wants to hear the 30 year old shit. Luckily it's all pretty great. The highlight of the show was absolutely their rendition of Cornflake Girl. The new drummer touring with her is Ash Soan who I'd never heard of before, but he was incredible. They did Cornflake Girl with the Rosanna Shuffle and it was magical.

Here she is doing her signature Rick Wakeman move:

WHORES.

I'll be seeing whores tomorrow night. They've always been awesome live and I haven't seen them in a long time. Here they are crushing St. Vitus Bar back in 2017. It'll be in next week's issue!

Drawing

I finished up the drawing I mentioned in the last issue, but I'm going to wait a bit before posting it. In the meantime, here's another one I did a little while back!

Laughing at

Watching

Severance is much wilder than I anticipated. It's pretty great! We still have a few episodes to go, though, so I'll discuss more when we finish.

Also, speaking of Ash Soan, this episode of him playing the Zildjian youtube series is pretty great. The definition of RESTRAINT.

— Toby