Survived familial small talk via my usual methods: sit, pretend I'm not there, and nod occasionally. One would think, given that I've been doing this Sunday game for ten years now, that I'd be neutral to its banality but it never ceases to exhaust me more than anything else I do all week.

Speaking of: I have, for the first time in this site's existence, turned on the comment system. Part of my desire to have all of my communications be through this site and/or the newsletter. Comment away – though I have no idea how Squarespace handles comments; I might install Disqus at some point if SS is user-unfriendly. Banality allowed.

(I had considered setting up a Discord channel for discussions and stuff here, and I might – especially for NL subscribers – but I prefer, at this stage in whatever passes for my career/life to keep all comminiques/broadcasts on platforms that I own.)

Obsidian love continues: my own Zettlekasten variant emergent, even though I have zero interest in learning all the ins and outs of the system, preferring instead to form my own hybrid out of the viscera of several disparate ones (the note titling system, YYYYMMDDHHMM, is great, especially since I have Obsidian set up to send these to an Inbox folder for later processing; would be great if Obsidian allowed for haptic touch menu Zettlenote creation, but it’s a young program – plenty of time to grow). That said, I love how it – along with other voices/uses – has moved my conception of my "writing times" into "focused thinking/processingtimes": one project for a two-hour chunk twice a day (still haven't decided if it's best for me to work on one project per day or two – if one's on a deadline, the deadline ALWAYS takes precedence over a non-deadline system), chunks composed of thinking and processing, sometimes with actual words put to page, other times not. Still in a state of flux but the state of flux is moving in the right direction.

One Obsidian caveat: I'm not sure that I would recommend you use Obsidian without your own systems in place which it can augment nor would I recommend it if you're not predisposed towards more visual, tangentially connected thinking best represented in mindmap form. For me, it's been a revelation – a means towards frictionless creation; for others, it might gum up the works.

Another heatdome day awaits.