SQYD.studio

Hello anyone! It’s been one heck of a week- for a whole lot of reasons. As an alternative to despair, I’m going to try to blog about things in my life that I can control. Oh no! Now I’m wondering if I actually have any control over my life at all! Is free choice possible? Do we exist in a deterministic universe? Sometimes I feel like I don’t really have a choice about what I’m going to focus on- I’m a low willpower individual. Case in point: let’s talk about Obsidian.md today.

Obsidian is a note taking app. Or it’s a plain-text markdown visualization tool. Or it’s an accessible scaffold to interface with the files on your PC using JavaScript. Some people tell me it’s a productivity tool- but I have my doubts. Since I started playing with Obsidian last Friday (the 17th, not yesterday) I’ve gotten very little else accomplished. That’s not because I don’t think you could use Obsidian to become more productive, but because it’s such an unstructured, free, and extendable platform that you could spend a week- or more- tweaking and optimizing your setup without really accomplishing anything. I should know- I just did that.

Let’s back up a bit. What is Obsidian? You’ll get more answers out of their excellent help page than me, but really simply- it’s a plaintext editor that lets you create notes and link them to other notes. In some ways it reminds me of the “adventure of your own choosing” making software Twine – but Obsidian also lets you attach external documents, build out a file structure, and extend your experience with JavaScript (specifically Typescript I believe.)

It is that extensibility that sucked me down the rabbit hole this week. Obsidian has easy access to hundreds of community plugins that let you modify its features in all kinds of ways both magic and strange. I’ve installed a whole lot of them, mucked around with trying to get them to talk to each other, and tried hard to imagine another world where a single app can be the silver bullet that solves my productivity woes by the simple virtue of being really cool and fun to use (I don’t think this world exists but I’d like to keep dreaming about it, thank you very much).

Here are some of the Obsidain plugins that I’m going to keep installed. If you too want to sacrifice a week of your life on the altar of Obsidian (maybe it will also help you take notes I don’t know you- and yes it does feel a little like joining a cult) then consider this an amateur’s guide to some community plugins that I think are cool and I’m happy I installed.

Data View – is powerful. It can let you query your database with “SQL”-like commands, and build tables based on your notes. I haven’t played around with the full query language yet (learning proper SQL is an item on my 2025 todo list) but I did use it to build a couple of quick tables for my Dashboard- aggregate all my ttrpg notes and sort them by date- that sort of thing. I have a feeling that I’ll be spending a lot of time playing with Data View in the future- for better or worse.

Pomodoro Timer – Another new year’s resolution for me is to try, really try, to use the Pomodoro method to keep myself on track this year. I know it’s a system that works well for a lot of people with scattered minds. I even built myself a little todolist app (using the Blazor framework just so I could track my tasks and my Pomos together in one place. Shows what I know spending time making my own tools- this Pomodoro Timer integrates with your task lists, it automatically tracks your work and rest periods, and it associates them with items on your todo list.

Tasks – The Tasks add-on is great. It also give you an SQLish query view that lets you search your checklists. On top of that it has support for due dates, start dates, task priority, repeatable tasks, task dependencies, and more. Will it make me more productive? So far I’ve spent more time playing with configuration then I have working down my todos, but the future is bright and Tasks is a cool plugin.

Dice Roller – I love dice. Unpredictability is fun- and while I prefer physical dice sometimes a Random Number Generator is good too. This dice roller plugin is pretty powerful. It’s got support for all kinds of dice- from percentile to fudge, roll with advantage, make your dice explode, everything in between. It’s even got 3 dimensional dice that clatter across your screen (no sfx unfortunately) you can even template your dice formulas for future use in the Obsidian sidebar. In fact, it’s so cool that I’m getting distracted by it right now.

So that’s the blog this week. One part excuse as to why I have no game dev updates to share, one part soapbox to shout about this cool software that is “definitely” going to help me get more done, and one part willful refusal to gaze deep into the abyss that is the state of global geopolitics. Also it’s the fourth blog posted on time in a row- so that’s pretty great. Hooray!

Thank you for reading, if you did. If not thank you for skimming to the end- that’s cool too. I’ll be back next week with more- whatever the heck this blog is about, game development or some such I think.