August 2025 – Perpetualized

Me, Obsidian, and 144 notes later…I quit!

August 22, 2025August 23, 2025 LynnLeave a comment

I had forgotten how trying it can be to trial new software in an established system. Obsidian was the trial and the system is my note-taking and journaling processes. Those processes are the product of a lot of previous experimentation and habit.

You can see my Obsidian journey here:

Phone writing is more freeing than I imagined (In which I credit Obsidian with things that it doesn’t really deserve the credit for after all. I mean, autoclosing quotes aren’t really that big of a deal. :D)
Obsidian is great, but is it for me? (I should have listened to myself when I said, “I don’t love it for my notes in general”, before I made a bunch of more notes.)
Time to give up on Obsidian? (In which I was struggling to make a decision.)
Second (and third) thoughts on Obsidian (In which I say, “I kind of think I’m going to stick with Obsidian after all.” Oh, how wrong I was.)
Gemini’s ASCII Poop Story (In which Gemini presents my decision process as a poorly written story that still somehow makes me smile every time I read it.)

Obsidian wasn’t bad. It just isn’t for me. It keeps your notes in markdown files, which I love the idea of, but the execution of, not so much. Markdown files are full of formatting syntax (lots of * and _ and [ and the like) that can make a pure text file look messy.

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Gemini’s ASCII Poop Story

August 13, 2025August 14, 2025 LynnLeave a comment

The following is a story generated by AI. I changed not a word of it. It does include some phrases that I wrote in the conversation I was having with it before I requested the story, but for the most part, it’s a creative exercise of the AI, not me. :D

Enjoy, or not! But don’t say you weren’t warned.

Don’t complain to me if you hate it, or hate AI generated images and text, and don’t give me a talking to because you have an anti-AI bias. I don’t care. I will delete your comments.

(I have my own anti-AI bias that’s slowly given way to the fun I keep having with it. I don’t need your complaining, thanks very much.)

But if you want to talk about AI generated writing in a reasonable way that isn’t pooping on my internet home? Yes, please.

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Second (and third) thoughts on Obsidian

August 1, 2025 LynnLeave a comment

I was going to stop using Obsidian today.

But…

Yesterday I discovered how to use the text editing tool in Gboard. It seems to make selections in Obsidian much easier than using my finger. So that solved at least a bit of that problem.

And today, I solved my share to OneNote problem by activating the OneNote floatie. I tested it I’m making some notes, and while making those notes, I decided to use both apps because I still wasn’t feeling 100% ready to abandon Obsidian.

But I discovered while doing all this sharing and copy pasting articles, using the finger press instead of the Gboard clipboard (which is less likely to strip out formatting), that OneNote doesn’t keep links that are in the text, but Obsidian does. Which is quite handy.

And last night I discovered that embedding audio files in Obsidian places a playback tool right in the Obsidian note. OneNote does do something similar with the attachment in the note, but the player is nowhere near as attractive.

That seems like such a small thing but I was looking at that and thinking I really want to keep Obsidian just based on appearances. It’s not a good reason to choose one piece of software over another one. However, even though Obsidian is boring and gray and low contrast in light mode in some ways, at least I can get a white background behind my folder view?) (Custom CSS snippets.)

So here I am tonight seriously considering sticking with Obsidian despite what I consider to be significant drawbacks and only a few true advantages. Admittedly, a couple of those advantages really play right into the things that I like, but those drawbacks are significant.

But I don’t know, I kind of think I’m going to stick with Obsidian after all.