Blog Post

Here's a blog post we forgot to put up because we got too distracted with something else.

These are our notes we took before. We originally planned on writing something about them but it ended up being too sprawling to really make anything specific out of, so we left it this way.

"How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think" by Lion Kimbro in 2003 and a visual summary by Sacha Chua in 2013

Quotes
Notes
- Considering the last time this was updated, there are probably many more options for using this kind of method on a computer. In an interview he seemed very excited about the possible future uses of wikis.
- The general idea does sound like something that might be possible in TiddlyMap, maybe paired with Refnotes or Stroll, but we haven't used those plugins before. A table of contents where non-linear notes are sorted by subject and each note can be under multiple subjects has worked for us so we haven't had a need for another navigation method.
- Glyphs and other symbols could be replaced with emoji, acronyms (less space restrictions on a computer than on paper), or just spreading everything out enough to have room for all words to be written fully.
- Lion says that the digital equivalent of this system would be generating speeds and maps to print but I think we’re already past that point in computer advancements, this is being compared to fully-digital systems now
  - A complete replacement for Lion’s record system would probably include mobile speeds that are added to a map that is sorted on a computer
  - The map and what it links to would then be accessible back through a mobile device
- Need more information on “mental paralysis”
  - Lion says that this note-taking system takes so much time that you have to stop thinking to get down everything that you just thought prior to starting to write, then that a digital version of this might be fast enough to reduce or eliminate that paralysis
  - Speed vs ease of use in graphical interfaces
- Notes on the future system that aligns with now current times:
  - “Magic paper” touch screens, scanning text to transcribe it (mentioned by Lion, it’s called Optical Character Recognition), smart keyboards and abbreviations
  - Many people just type quickly and are okay with their typing speed
    - Stenography like Plover
  - Multi-categorization: categorization by tagging, available in most flexible wiki-building systems now
    - Searchable tree structures? If you filter to things included in top-level table of contents this is technically possible in TiddlyWiki but more often you’re searching the entire wiki
  - There is no indicator of “sloppiness” (how quickly something was written as a visual indicator of how much work needs to be done on it) but there are replacements and possible replacements
    - Modern tech either tries to look simple (one readable font) or look good (multiple, nice fonts, often web fonts)
    - Tagging as “stub”, “incomplete”, “to-do”, etc.
    - Inserting notes in a different place (via shortcut to a quick list vs inputting things directly to a section)
      - We do this in our TiddlyWiki via Projectify's inbox vs projects
      - Timer that literally categorizes quick notes based on how quickly they were written
    - Categorizing notes by how many information fields they have filled out
      - Lion’s system: checked off for being done with, hint/context, type of thought, the thought itself (content)
  - Maps are typically limited to software made for maps (see Obsidian)
    - TiddlyMaps has multiple maps but not infinite zooming to reach all map levels through one map
      - There this but it’s incomplete
      - There may end up still being a Grand Subject Map of Contents (GSMOC) and smaller Subject Maps of Contents (SMOC) but the GSMOC could be one map instead of a grander GSMOC that maps itself (due to not fitting on one paper, while webpages can scroll)
    - Trilium Notes supports a built-in note map but it's used less often because it favors a hierarchy/tree system
  - Indexes are not mentioned in the predictions of future note-taking systems
    - Probably replaced by full text searching
    - TiddlyWiki Full Text Search
  - Icon programmability
    - OCR customization as a future thing
    - TiddlyWiki allows icons for tags but that's not quite the same
  - File types
    - Wikis are now hypertext and put on the internet or stored on a computer in a note-taking program’s own filetype (HTML and related languages are still the standard for their export, though)
    - Lion mentions TXT, XML, YAML (like XML for Python), SQL
      - TiddlyWiki uses HTML and its own markdown, Trilium uses SQL, Obsidian uses markdown
    - In the modern world, a perfect note-taking system would need to be able to record in multiple file types
      - TiddlyWiki and Trilium can save various file types directly, Obsidian doesn't save anything directly because it uses the computer's file system
    - People spend so much time on computers nowadays that all computer filetypes are important to be able to store in some way
      - Someone might want to save a video or podcast they found important as a reference, making this accessible could require embedding of a file type that isn’t meant for text displaying
      - See calibre’s filetype switching and conversion: a single entry can have multiple filetypes of it that are considered the same file for all purposes of sorting besides possibly searching by filetype
- Getting started
  - Lion’s advice: make a pan-subject speed list, identify common categories that show up in the speed list (half-subjects), map them, make a subject to sort stuff from the biggest half-subject into, and start shuffling stuff into it
  - There are many guides for starting a personal wiki now, although they tend to be based on certain programs.
    - People often make personal wikis or similar systems using the Zettelkasten method.

Interview of Lion Kimbro by Giles Turnbull in 2004

Quotes
- “Remember, I was running medical records for a while- it makes you think differently about information, when someone's going to die if you can't find their chart.”
  - Need for information: not everyone needs or wants to keep track of so much in their life, but it is very important for other people
  - Necessary for: people who work on many things at once and need to be able to come back to some other things later, people who are depended on to keep information, people who have memory issues, system members who can’t share memories between themselves
- “I knew it would be a physical monster- I mean: really big, physically. Bulky. I knew that already, because I've done a LOT of notebook systems before. One of them covered my walls with notes. One of them consisted of an enormous text file. One of them consisted of hoards of spiral bound notebooks; there's just hoards of ways to do it.”
- “What I didn't antipicate [sic] was the freezing effect.”
  - Unique to this notebook system
  - “While I was in the thick of it, I tended to avoid movies, since they made me think so much. It was sort of like getting psychologically bombed.”
  - The freezing effect limits the ability to keep track of things that the notebook may have been started to keep track of
- “The power of wiki is the ability to distill the wisdom of common people. It starts with a simple dialog between two people. Then the voices of more people are added. As the issue is explored, it starts to be collected and organized. It is a very messy process, but it yields real gems.”
Notes
- Lion didn’t seem to expect personal wikis at all, only wikis as a public version of the notebook system that makes a database of the best thoughts
  - Community Wiki, which Lion is a part of, does mention personal wikis
  - “It won’t be the same as in the days of WikiWikiWeb, of course: wikis will become more personal. Note the whole DigitalGarden, SecondBrain? and [[Memex?]] discussion circulating around the nets. People are starting to realize they need something wiki-like. Perhaps, a vast network of loosely connected wikis is what we really need.”
- A wiki/notebook is built up over time but allows for finding many connections
  - This is what Obsidian is based on
- Lion discourages using this notetaking system for very long periods of time because of the immobilizing effect
  - This goes against the idea of using it for memory problems
  - Systems like Zettelkasten are for ongoing use
  - It's still important to have "downtime" periods for entertainment, relaxation, etc.
- Wikis are more permanent than messaging/posting systems
- Lion says the notebook shouldn’t hold anything “low quality” or “raw data” which fits some parts of personal wikis but not all of them
  - Low quality: links to quick doodles and thoughts off-wiki, such as on social media
  - Raw data: project information for public (how soon it will be done) or private (tracking progress)

Everyone Needs Their Own Thinking Space

Notes
- Level of privacy: private, online/shared
- Most memexes and wikis don’t provide this: it’s either public or private
- Having a public-by-default wiki with encrypted pages/tiddlers like with this plugin
- Having a self-hosted wiki with private pages
  - Like Trilium's encryption system
- Splitting memex into multiple parts, may cut off interlinking ability as a tradeoff for more privacy

"The Verge at work: backing up your brain" by Thomas Houston in 2012 (Evernote as a memex)

There is choosiness in what goes into the system and what doesn’t
Evernote is used more for highlights and notes while reading than it is for offline project notes
Complicated or heavy systems may need workarounds for mobile compatibility or slower devices
Folders are less interlinkable than tags

"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush in 1945 (coining of “memex”)

Quotes
- “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
- “Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.”
- “When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome.”
- “The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.”
Notes
- This essay is a prediction of the future of technology in general, to demonstrate how much technology could be improved by advancements in information-recording
- The memex is introduced in section 6, the name of it is arbitrary but it still fits with “meme” as relating to natural spread of thoughts and information
- Main ideas of the memex
  - Navigating information by association, not alphabetical/chronological order which takes time to find things in because it depends on how many things are already in there
  - The memex should be fast no matter how many items are in it
  - It should be able to hold pre-made content such as books its user has read
    - Previous note in reaction to Lion Kimbro about file types
  - Frequently used paths have shortcut codes
  - Multiple things can be opened at once
  - Notes can be taken naturally and easily
  - Selecting an item will bring up related items as well
  - Paths can be made within the memex as it is used for a specific purpose i.e. previously taken notes are consulted to gain knowledge on a topic
  - The path can be brought up later to see the thought process
- There is not only saved history of note creation but saved history of note access
  - Note access is manual but simple: there’s a shortcut button to save the current path
  - Potentially possible with TiddlyMap but the shortcut isn’t set up already, and having a map for every path taken may be tedious
  - Possibly: start a tiddler for each topic, link all tiddlers accessed to it on the map, have the Topics Researched tiddlers in a line and let the paths intersect as topics include similar research?
  - This would require making a tiddler for notes on all sources, like a wiki

Lacking Information

Other systems for saving things
- Evernote
- Google Keep
- Microsoft OneNote
- Tomboy
- Vimwiki and org-mode
- etc. (many wiki options, too)
- See Personal Wiki page on Wikipedia, Wikipedia list of wiki software, and this software list for Zettelkasten

References
"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush in 1945 (coining of “memex”)
CommunityWiki Front Page
CommunityWiki PersonalWiki page
"How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think" by Lion Kimbro in 2003
Interview of Lion Kimbro by Giles Turnbull in 2004
"The Verge at work: backing up your brain" by Thomas Houston in 2012 (Evernote as a memex)
Visual summary of "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think" by Sacha Chua in 2013

Further Reading
Building a Second Brain course
Reddit post about BASB and Roam in 2019
"Wiring Your Tech to Fight ADHD: Your Second Brain" by Jordan McMagon in 2017 (response to “Backing Up Your Brain”)
"How To Build a Second Brain for Distributed Teams"

Thoughts

Having a more consistent place to write down thoughts to transfer somewhere else would be useful.
We haven't been into Sonic in a long time, but Surge and Kit look cool.
We've been using our system TiddlyWiki more like an actual wiki to describe terms as we use them. There are a lot of terms we've created or defined independently of usage by others, so having written definitions is very useful for future reference.
Coding is something we like in theory, but we rarely actually do it. We prefer coding as a creative tool over viewing it as something with definite answers, but it's difficult to see it that way because of how often we see it represented otherwise.
- That doesn't include HTML and CSS. We don't typically call those coding languages, but whether or not they're included in the category is really just contextual.
One of the issues we have with social media is that it's difficult for us to share a single feed when we have very different tastes. The time it takes for someone to hear about us scrolling past something they may like is often more than the time it takes for us to move on to something they like much less.
Something else we haven't been able to get into is browser drawing or screen drawing in general. The things we've tried so far either don't work the way we want screen drawing software to work or the drawing functionality itself just doesn't feel natural to us. If we decide it's something we really want we might go digging again.
Win32 C++ is terrible.
We previously wanted to learn some kind of shorthand but it'd probably be too time-consuming. We started listing acronyms, abbreviations and symbols we use in our wiki to make a "shorthand-lite" similar to personal shorthand.
- We've poked around a few OCR programs but it probably won't be usable on shorthand for a while.
Putting our project wiki's table of contents in the sidebar and then hiding the sidebar when we're not doing anything specific seems to increase how likely we are to work on our current projects.

Things

Every Fucking Bootstrap Website Ever
snail legs has a nice website and some cool art
Adventures With Anxiety interactive story and the accompanying essay with tips about dealing with anxiety.
"Innovation Under Socialism"
This public domain collection of vectorized vintage art
"Hot Allostatic Load" is about how trans people, especially transfems, are treated as "disposable" in many feminist and queer spaces.
- We already read this previously, but we thought it was worth revisiting.
- "Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.
  When the bounty system calls for the ears of evil people, well, most people have a fucking ear."
- "Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales."
- "[Mobbing] has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death."
- "The diversity-centric system expects more jobs to fix the problem, ignoring how long we’ve been damaged and made unfit for their jobs. They encourage the Strong Woman stereotype because it means taking the damage onto ourselves. We need more than jobs; we need social reintegration."
- In a similar vein, there's also what happened to Isabel Fall.
- This quote in particular reminded us of the other article's description of mobbing as a method of harm that concentrates an attack on someone while diluting the blame of the individuals in the group: "[W]hat this story really symbolizes is the fact that as we’ve grown more adept at using the internet, we’ve also grown more adept at destroying people’s lives, but from a distance, in an abstracted way. Sometimes, the path to your personal hell is paved with other people’s best intentions."
Life Between Advertisements
Code Poetry
This Are.na channel for personal website creation
"Paving the way for micro-transactions" is by the creator of Subeta
Secrets of the Dark write.as blog about the dark web
This article is about a kea (parrot) missing his upper beak who was found using pebbles to preen himself.
The Last Human (in a Crowded Galaxy) is a webcomic about a young human trying to find her identity after being adopted by a spider-like alien
"Please Stop Closing Forums and Moving People to Discord"
"Be Careful About What You Dislike"
- "This I assume is human behavior. Admitting that you might be wrong is hard enough, but it's even harder when you had validation that you were right in the past. In particular that an argument against something might no longer be valid because that something has changed in the meantime is hard."
Terminal color scheme generator
Sortingh.at is an interactive website that gives you a list of links to get started with the kind of game you want to make.
Eugenics Archives is a Canadian site about the history of eugenics.
"True Crime is Rotting Our Brains", with the subheading "I would sooner get stabbed again than have someone make a podcast about me"