Wallace was a masterful writer of short fiction, and I think IJ is best read as a (very) long series of short pieces with much that interrelates them.
Past a certain point on my first successful read through, maybe ~300 pgs in, I started realizing that, with very few exceptions, the more abstruse, boring, or frustrating the vignette, the more powerfully it ended; and at that point, I couldn’t put it down. So, in my opinion, skipping around would not make it more fulfilling, and would certainly not make it make more sense (and I do think it would be easy to understate how much they do compose together into a functioning plot for the novel). I could only advocate cultivating an appreciation of the individual vignettes themselves as more-or-less complete short stories.
I’ve been using CC as my GTD-buddy. All the usual plaintext files in a git repo, all the usual processes and workflows and constraints; but I’ve written two skills that have taken the activation energy out of what used to be the hard parts for me: /process-inbox and /weekly-review. Process-inbox interviews me item by item, making suggestions which I accept or amend, and it does the bookkeeping. I tell it when I want to do something and what calendar I want it on and it makes the calendar event. Weekly-review walks through an overview of everything done that week, all my open tasks and projects, makes sure everything has a scheduled next action. Sometimes I make a note, cancel something, reschedule something, whatever.
This is nothing I couldn’t do on my own, and in fact, it’s a lot slower than just manually editing files myself. But: this way it’s actually getting done :)
There’s too much hyperbole on this subject, so I won’t add to it; but it has solved a lot of very-long-running problems of mine.
There's a community and play-style called OSR or "old school renaissance," that recreates versions of the earliest editions of D&D, and encourage a style of play that's heavily oriented around few rules and the DM making quick decisions/rulings on the spot, rather than lots of rules and lots of time spent mining the rulebooks. In fact, the expression is "rulings over rules." This might appeal to you.
I’m using Jekyll for includes and so I can use Ruby to render pages from yaml data. I’m sure Pandoc can do this too one way or another but it’s dead simple out of the box in Jekyll.
Upvoted because it’s a thoughtful question, but honestly I think it’s just that this book and many others like it are addressed primarily to people who are going to use tools like SuperCollider or CSound or raw dsp to create their own entirely original technology stacks for creative work, and an understanding of the physics/math of sound is pretty key to that kind of work, regardless of the musicality of their later creative production.
Might just be a question of taste or personal predisposition. I’m only in Obsidian for the canvas, and I spend almost all my time in it. It’s extremely helpful for me to be able to put all of my buckets up in front of me at once, resize them, rearrange them, color-code them.
I already commented about Expect elsewhere in this thread, so I should probably pipe down, but thought it might be worth it here as well because Expect has been handling these kinds of exceptions and control transfers/flows with the full power of a robust programming language for decades. You might have a look at it for ideas and inspiration.
I see the point and I wouldn't want to belabor the metaphor, but I really feel like guitar is actually extremely difficult to even get started with. Between the awkward stretching of the fingers, how difficult/painful it is to hold down strings hard enough (and close enough to the fret) to get a clean, clear note, and how hard it is to hold those strings down in such a way that your fingers don't brush against other strings, I'd say guitar is crazy hard to start. I'm saying this as someone who has been playing and enjoying guitar for decades. Beginners have a rough time of it for awhile.
Lot of good, standard-issue advice in your replies already, so I think all I'll add is: (1) Everybody's mind is a little different, so you're likely to need to experiment with many things for a long time before you start converging on stable insights into what your specific needs are, and they're likely to be somewhat context-dependent, so they're likely to evolve over time; so above all else, be patient and go easy on yourself and focus on your long-term progress rather than your short-term frustrations; (2) ...I forgot (not joking)
Thanks very much, this sub-thread has been illuminating for me, and has the compelling quality of being obvious-in-retrospect. I now wonder what my MPC is doing, exactly, when I make an action at what appears to be a zero point. Thanks.
If I had the capacity to take on this kind of modeling project right now, I'd probably lean toward Prolog or something like an OWL/Protégé ontology. Then it could just metastasize to the limits of my time and neurochemistry.
Libraries’ resources are not infinite, therefore most of them are explicitly optimized for circulation, not preservation. If they’re allocating valuable shelf space and staff time on something no one is using, they’re misallocating resources. You know what makes librarians’ hearts warm up? For people to use their spaces, collections, and services.
You're in for a treat. The quote, in case you haven't looked it up yet, is "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." The canonical work is The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Thanks. My search found that also, but it didn't appear to have the features I need, at least not at the time. If LaTeX becomes vexing enough, I'll consider the custom workflow you're describing. Thanks for the tips.
https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34486596