🏄‍♀️ State of the Eleanor 03

Wow, it’s been awhile since I had a chance to sit down at my computer and really think. I definitely haven’t gotten caught up on everything since giving birth, but if I don’t write this stuff down soon I’m probably going to forget. Plus, I figure I owe y’all an update about how I’m doing, how things went with the baby & birth, and what my plans are.

Last week I sent out my first newsletter edition in months, it’s micro reviews of fiction I read lately. I also wrote the edition that’ll go out next week, which is micro reviews of my recent nonfiction reading. During that process I ran into an issue with my newsletter hosting software not sending the article because I’d hit 10k subscribers (💚) and they wanted to charge more. I didn’t get an email warning me, and by the time I realized the article hadn’t gone out, it was like 3 days later because I’ve been busy with the aforementioned baby. Honestly, I couldn’t even get subscriptions to properly turn off using Ghost once I knew I was going to be taking a hiatus for pregnancy — it kept bugging out. Little frustrations like that add up, and with a day job and two kids, I’m not in a position to deal with these kinds of tech problems anymore.

So that's why the email version of this came from Substack instead of Ghost. If you're seeing this version, it's because you use RSS or check the website a lot.

Here's what you need to know.

I'm not going to be writing the Obsidian Roundup in its previous form, for two main reasons: (1) it’s going to be a long time before I can consistently devote my Fridays to such a regimented publication (2) most of its functions are either no longer necessary or done better elsewhere.

That said, I intend to keep writing about knowledge management, obscure history, and weird science. I will continue rounding up interesting and relevant articles and resources. I’m going to aim for a once-a-week cadence with this, and articles won’t necessarily be as timely because I’m going to schedule things more in advance to account for how different things are now as compared to a few years back when the Obsidian Roundup started. For one, LLMs and automations have made a lot of things I used to find joy in feel pretty rote.

After all: the Obsidian changelogs have gotten a lot easier to access. The Obsidian team now has a social media presence, and my own is limited by the fact that Twitter and Reddit both kind of suck now. On the happier side, there’s an amazing database of new plugins and updates. The Obsidian hub exists, and can be downloaded and searched. Most of the “game-changer” plugins have been conceived of and built. The major thought leaders are well established, other newsletters do a good job covering a lot of what I used to, and overall the ecosystem feels pretty mature.

So this is definitely not goodbye, this is hello:

Please check out the newly reconstituted Obsidian Iceberg, which does have an RSS feed, and feel free to share anything neat that you think I might have missed in the last few months, either as a comment, via email, or by hopping into the quiet little Discord server I use to chat with folks and mess around with Midjourney.