Field Notes to Markdown conversion. Still good.
I made the mistake of looking at Bluesky just now and saw something dumb that the idiot in chief posted to Truth Social. Now I'm riled up about it and need to blog about something—anything—to get my simple mind on another topic.
I've decided it feels gross trying to bullet journal with my phone into Drafts or Day One or a Markdown file. It just cannot be that I use the phone as often as that would require. It's a minefield of potential distraction, it reminds me of molasses, and it's one more way "They" would have their hooks into me. I feel sad every time I pick the thing up and open it. So I’m back to Field Notes, which always worked, after being inspired by the third or fourth re-read of Dave Gauer's epic My Notebook System post.
Last time I tried the Field Notes I avoided writing bullets because they reminded me of work. This time it's bullets all the way down because there’s less psychic weight to make the scribbles "worth" the room they take up on the paper, and also because I discovered that although digital bullets feel like work, I don't mind handwritten bullets.
But I want to have my cake and search it, too, so the text has to be digitized somehow. The process today is: Grab the notebook throughout the day to log whatever. At the end of the day, take non-fussy photos of the pages on the phone. Use Google Lens to convert them to text and paste them into a yyyy-mm-dd [3-character day of the week].md file in my Markdown notes directory (yep, right in there with all the other files The Archive looks at). And then the twist is, all the things that were bulleted on paper turn into individual lines with a space between them once they hit the file.
Maybe in a later post I can think out loud about what the compulsion is to log all this minutiae.