A few years ago

Before the field was completely consumed by AI hype (and before all of my free time and was consumed by the RPG mind virus), I was very into thinking about tools for thinking. Note-taking, note-making, linking your thinking, Zettelkasten, Memex, syntopical reading, malleable tools, and all that jazz. If you think all of this sounds dumb, you're not entirely wrong, and there's a good argument to be made that almost 100% of what these ideas were ever used for in practice was writing and thinking about themselves. Micro-influencers showing you their note-taking systems, filled only with notes on note taking systems, in an endless recursion (regress?) of ever more complex constructions supposedly putting your thinking and creativity on auto-pilot. And like capitalism, this whole industry managed to consume its criticisms and critics in a very efficient manner, leading to posts, articles, and videos about how you need to earn the structure and complexity of your system, and about the irony that all these Obsidian vaults people share are only ever filled with notes on how to take better notes.

I've seen the brightest minds of my generation destroyed by unmaintained Obsidian plugins central to their bespoke processes. (That's me in the middle btw.)

Still, I think that this phase in the development of note taking tools brought a few good, lasting ideas and tools into the mainstream. Notion, Obsidian, spaced repetition, interlinked notes that each contain a single idea. And digital gardens – a funny little term for a bunch of notes you return to again and again, "growing" them each time, like you would plants in a garden.

Not as many years ago

So when I started out learning about RPGs and how to run them, all of these things were very much at the front of my mind. This is when I developed my own little system for taking notes on all the videos and blog posts with tips for game masters that I watched and read. Over time, I mostly abandoned both the system and the notes I already made for various reasons.

Recently

Recently, I found myself wanting to get back to this process. But there's a chasm that forms between you and your past self, embodied in your notes, when you stop taking them for a significant chunk of time. You return to them and all you can see is how much you, your interests, and your thinking about these interests have changed. Since all that stuff in the middle is missing, and you never returned to your initial notes, "growing them", they have become curious artifacts of your past, but mostly worthless to you as tools today.

Now

That's why I decided to start from scratch. Of course I did. That's what you do when you're into note taking in the abstract, free from any constraints of them ever actually being used in any true capacity. The only appropriate reward for people who take notes is more notes. But this time I thought: why not put them online in the form of a digital garden?

So that's what I did! You can find that "garden" here: https://garden.dungeonmerl.in/

The rest of this post will be about how I tend to it.

My process, my system

Depending on the kind of person you are, the following will either seem completely obvious or entirely ridiculous. That's because it's both. But it kind of works for me, at least right now. And I have come to accept that things don't need to be original or everlasting (or sane) to be momentarily useful and worth writing about.

I describe the whole process of turning a blog post I read into a set of notes in my digital garden, which is built using Obsidian and the Obsidian Digital Garden plugin.

The end product here (or rather, an intermediary step) will be the promise of the title: a blown-up blog post, fully exploded into its constituent ideas, ready to be reassembled and -combined into new sets, like Lego bricks.

Discovery

Discovery is a solved problem when it comes to writing about RPGs. But this post is about the whole sausage, and just in case you're new around here, here is what you're going to do:

See? Solved.

Content found.

Ingress

Once you have found a blog post in the wild that has piqued your interest, you'll need to read it. Sorry, but there's no way around this part. I also strongly recommend making highlights of your favorite parts and ideas while doing so.

How I do this is mostly arbitrary. I could use the great (and free!) Obsidian Web Clipper. That would make sense, since I also use Obsidian. But that's not what I do.

Due to a few good reasons and many historical ones I use Readwise Reader to read everything I read online. I make comical amounts of highlights while doing so. And then I assign a myriad of tags to every article before moving it into Reader's archive.

Content ingested.

Source Notes

This is where we actually transition from the web into Obsidian.

Next, I import a reference note to the original article, including my highlights, into the Obsidian vault where my digital garden lives. I could do this automatically, using the Readwise plugin (or when using the Obsidian Web Clipper). But right now, I'm exporting each of these manually from Reader.

Here's an example of such a "source note" for Vivid Worlds Will Kill You by Traipse: https://garden.dungeonmerl.in/01-sources/vivid-worlds-will-kill-you/

The summary at the top is automatically created by Reader. I seldom use it, but it can be nice to have.

Below that are all the highlights I made. These are all by me. And I use them a lot.

Content sourced.

Literature Notes

Next, I create a "literature note" for the article. This note has the same title as the source note, but lives in a different folder. Here, I extract the ideas I want to take from the article. Ideally, I would write these in the source note. It would actually be nicer to fully co-locate ideas with the highlight I extracted them from. But sometimes I decide to add further highlights to the article during this process, and then I need to re-import the source note, which would overwrite all manual changes I have made to the note at this point. So two notes it is.

Here's an example of the literature note to the source note for Vivid Worlds Will Kill You from above: https://garden.dungeonmerl.in/02-literature-notes/vivid-worlds-will-kill-you/

For these, I go through all the highlights I made and think about what ideas are contained within each. I then write these out as small phrases, and put them in double brackets.

For those unfamiliar with Obsidian: This creates "empty notes" I can already link to in Obsidian's graph of linked notes, without them having a concrete representation in the form of a file in the filesystem. I can then create them later, and fill them out, and all notes that link to them will now point to this filled-out note.

Here are all the ideas I wrote down for Vivid Worlds Will Kill You, in the order they appear in the text:

These can sometimes be preliminary, fuzzy, imperfect, doubled, or even "wrong" in the sense that I misunderstood the intent of the author. The important part is that at this stage, I don't add any of my own thoughts. I simply "extract" ideas I think are already present in the original text. This act of curation and translation is already a form of editorializing of course, and that's important. And there's nothing preventing me from misunderstanding the author's intent. But each of the ideas I write down here can still be directly traced to the linked article and its author as their source in this way.

This is also where (most of) the "blowing up" the title implies happens. After this step, the original article lies before me, fully exploded into what I think are its constituent ideas that are the most relevant to me and my interests, at the time of writing.

Seeding

Next up, the gardening metaphors come into full swing, so get ready.

After creating all these links to placeholder notes, I create the actual notes behind them. I have a template and script that automatically creates them as "seed" notes, prepending the title with the 🌰 emoji (you know, to represent a seed...) and adding a bit of general frontmatter to the note.

Their status as a seed represents that while they exist, I haven't done anything to them to actually "plant them in the garden".

Planting

So immediately, I will go through all of them and do the bare minimum to fully bring them into the network of notes the rest of the vault forms.

That means two things:

1. Creating a list with links to other ideas that I think are related, and could be part of the text I will later write for this idea and note. Most of these will initially come from the same post. But over time, as the vault grows, and I come back to this list, there will be ideas from other posts as well. And even my own!

2. Creating a list of links to higher-level concepts, to group ideas under them that might not be otherwise directly related in the sense that they link to each other in their respective texts. This can be things like "Exploration", "Randomness", or "Dungeon Crawl".

Once I've done this, I transition the note's status from "seed" to "seedling", representing that it's now embedded into the soil, ready to sprout. This means replacing the 🌰 with the ðŸŒą emoji.

Potting

For most notes, planting is where I'll initially leave them to return to them whenever I feel like it. They are already part of the web of notes the vault forms, and I can link to and discover them from wherever I need to.

But they are still only stubs. So next up comes transferring these "seedling" to a pot. This represents adding actual text to them, describing the idea in my own words and linking to other notes inside the text where appropriate. The list of already linked ideas functions almost as prompts or even an outline while doing this.

Often, this will do nothing more than creating a coherent structure around these already linked notes, describing why I think they should be linked here. Sometimes, it will lead me to add new links to previously unlinked notes. And if I'm lucky, this will even induce me to form a new idea of my own.

Notes for which I have written such a text are represented by a ðŸŠī emoji in the title.

Growing

An idea can reach the previous potted state in minutes after me finishing a blog post. Up to and including that stage, everything can be achieved just by using ideas from the post itself, and each stage is very well-defined. It goes placeholder -> empty note -> linked note -> note with text based mostly on title.

Now comes the growing phase, at the end of which a note will be a "tree" in the garden. This is a bit more vibes-based, but should ideally take some time. It represents ideas that have accrued links to many other ones, ideally from many different blog posts, over time, or are simply "finished" the way they are.

None of the very few notes in my new garden have reached this level of maturity yet. But if they do, it will be represented by the ðŸŒģ emoji.

Combining

So... why do all this? Mostly because this advanced form of procrastination can be a source of its own sick kind of fun, of course. But what ideally will happen is the following:

  • You'll probably engage far deeper with the things you read.

    • This can be a blessing and a curse, of course. This whole process should be applied either only to posts you truly think are worth it, or, alternatively, done in a very quick and dirty manner to the ones you only find "okay" (e.g. extracting only a single quick idea from them, and linking it rather lazily)

  • You will automatically remember what you read better, since you engaged with it on a deeper level.

    • That's nice and all, but if memory was the (only) goal, you'd be better off just using a spaced repetition tool like Anki. (I still highly recommend using one for all kinds of things and reasons. Making memory a choice is life-changing, literally mind-altering stuff. But that's not what this is about.)

Me and my pin I'm always wearing all of the time.

  • If you publish your garden to the web, it's like constantly writing a lot of very small blog posts. So everything good you've heard about maintaining a blog also applies to your digital garden. Only smaller, but also more often (probably).

  • You will almost inevitably find connections between posts and ideas you wouldn't have made otherwise.

    • This is the big one. The thing all the note-taking gurus always talk about and make you chase. Following this process, and having all of these linked pieces of blog posts floating around in the same vault, will enable you to see connections where there weren't any before, and ideally turn into a form of automated creative thinking process.

      • I'm not saying that this is necessarily worth it, mind you. You might not even think that this is a good thing. You'll have to decide for yourself if this is something that would be of value to you, something you're completely neutral on, or maybe even something you abhor. Believe me when I say that I have held all of these opinions myself at one point or another.

Conclusion

This post has turned into a far stranger beast than I initially anticipated. You can hopefully tell from my tone throughout that I'm fully aware that this is all a pretty overengineered system that can easily read as laughable and quixotic, that, at the same time, isn't even that special, depending on the water you usually swim in.

But following this process can be a lot of fun if it fits your brain! The water is warm, so dip your toes.

P.S.

While writing this post, Noel published a post about how he uses similar tools and ideas for taking campaign notes in a post called Bottom-up organization for RPG notes. There's less overlap between these posts than you might think, but I still felt it warranted a shoutout.