Hello friends! Blessed feast of Lazarus Saturday.
Welcome to the first of my weekly installments which I’m calling memory dumps. This will be a curated list of 5 things that grabbed my attention during the week, published every weekend. It could be a documentary I enjoyed, books I’m reading, bits of content from research I’m doing, quotes, hard to find resources and information, tech tools and hacks, and just general personal musings in journal form. It will be exclusively for paid subscribers and I am going to do my best to share somewhat valuable information that’s hopefully worth paying for instead of expecting subscribers to pay monthly just to read my schizo ramblings.
It will also be a more manageable way for me to put out content every week since it takes more time for me to write longer articles and do weekly podcast episodes. In case I hit writers block or can’t podcast as often, I can promise to stay consistent with these weekly memory dumps. The first issue is available to all, so you can see what you’ll be getting every week should you choose to take advantage of the subscription discount below which ends on April 16th by the way.
Now that I’ve gotten my obligatory Substack shilling out of the way, let’s dive into this week’s memory dump.
1. Learning how to learn better
Being away from the endless doom-scrolling of the Twitter timeline for the past 5 weeks has helped me to re-examine how to better cultivate my thought process. I was searching for a good note taking app to record my random thoughts and research notes instead of just tweeting them. So I found myself going down a productivity rabbit hole and tested out a number of different apps to enhance my personal, professional and content creation workflow.
What I discovered is a method of note taking and information collection called Zettelkasten, which is German for “slip box”. This personal knowledge management system was made famous by Niklas Luhmann who amassed a collection of over 90,000 index card notes that were catalogued by a numeric system. He used these note cards to back reference previous thoughts and develop them into writings that would help him publish more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles covering a variety of subjects.
The Zettelkasten method starts with "fleeting thoughts" or more commonly known as shower thoughts. The information gets jotted down in a note taking app and backlogged for future reference. It may develop into a larger idea, project, a book, a business, or it can be forever ignored. But it’s referenced with tags that link to other similar notes, creating a web of knowledge known as a “second brain”. It’s a personal knowledge management archive that backlogs information you find noteworthy, a digital commonplace book.
If a note is developed further it goes through the Zettelkasten method where it is distilled, edited and refined accordingly in the next directory which functions as "literature notes" since it will require some further research. Those literature notes then may develop further into permanent notes that are frequently used as a continual reference. The perfect app for this, in my opinion, is Obsidian. It uses markdown which is a simple plaintext language and processes the notes as markdown files which can be read and formatted easily on any device. Obsidian gives you ownership of your note files as it can be stored locally, or in my case, on my home server. Its the most future proof way to store notes since it doesn’t rely on a 3rd party cloud service.
Using the Zettelkasten method with Obsidian for backlinking and tagging notes creates a web of knowledge, linked together to create what’s called a “second brain”. Basically its the perfect personal knowledge management tool to help string together my schizo thoughts to organize them and better assist with my writing and content creation.
2. Books I’m reading
I have really been enjoying Human, Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War by James Poulos. Its an essential read for those struggling to navigate the catastrophe of the digital age conflicting with our humanity. I am working on an article about this which will go into more detail but its a very motivational text for such a blackpilling topic. Interestingly, the book was published on the Bitcoin blockchain and is only available for purchase with Bitcoin. I hope to see more authors use this method of publishing in the future as censorship of knowledge has already taken hold of bookstores and publishers themselves. Learn to leverage digital technology to instead of letting it enslave you.
Regarding note taking while reading, I found this older article in my research on marginalia, the lost art of annotating in books. Many readers have strong opinions on marking up their books, people like to keep them in pristine condition. While I understand this and held to this idea myself for a while, I not only find it beneficial for reading comprehension, but I like the idea of leaving my own personal mark on the books. It's engaging the author and having a dialogue on the pages themselves. Writing separately in a notebook or notepads is good but for me it makes what I'm reading more memorable as I directly interact with the words on the pages. It seems like it's a more recent idea that books should be treated as collectibles and kept in perfect condition. Some books I will never write in for that reason, like my 1 volume edition of Lord of the Rings, something like that was published to be a collectible. Other than that, nonfiction is getting written in.
You always hear about people buying used books and being fascinated by the annotations of the previous reader, spilling their thoughts and comments out into the book. Yes, that was common in the past. If I don't mark up my books I have a harder time comprehending what I've read. I want to leave my mark on the books I plan to pass down to my children. I want them to experience the fascination the used book buyer experiences when encountering the previous readers' annotations, knowing it was their father's thoughts. I want to be known as a book consumer, not just a book collector.
Here are a couple spicy books I got from a recent book haul. I will share more in future memory dumps.
Article on Marginalia, the Anti-Library, and Other Ways to Master the Lost Art of Reading.
Video on analytical reading 101 and how to get the most out of a book:
3. Useful resource I found
Zotero has been an incredibly useful piece of open source software that I’ve been using to have a digital reference of all the books I own. I wish I had used something like this in university, it really helps streamline research articles as you can use it to easily cite PDF’s, journals and books from your own personal bibliography. It also integrates with a good amount of writing and note taking platforms, I use an Obsidian plugin for citing book reports, quotes and footnotes since I do all my writing and note taking in Obsidian.
Similar to Obsidian, Zotero generates your book collection into a variety of different file types so that you can easily have ownership of your digital bibliography without worrying about a 3rd party knowing that you own publications that could get you [redacted] in today’s society.
4. Projects I’m working on
I realized it’s been a year since I’ve been running my home server. I started exploring self hosting solutions during Lent last year. I have always been interested in ways to increase my digital sovereignty and one powerful way to do that is by hosting your own data. I’ve spent countless hours configuring my home network and learning basic server admin techniques to spin up my own server to maximize convenience, accessibility and stability. Then I got ransomware attacked and lost nearly a terrabyte of media. Lesson learned, so I started over exactly 1 year later, this time not exposing my network to the internet and keeping everything local. So this week I spent some time setting up Nextcloud, a self hosted cloud service along with Raspberry Pi to host my own VPN so I can access my home network from anywhere without exposing it to the internet. It is running a software called Pi-hole which blocks malware, spam, ads, trackers, crypto miners, p*rn and other malicious links for all incoming traffic to any devices that connect to my local network.
5. Content I enjoyed
This was an incredible discussion between Fr. Josiah Trenham and Bishop Irenei of London on the topic of “internet Orthodoxy”, which I have discussed similar sentiments on episode 7 of my podcast with The Prudentialist.
”The very structure of the social media forms this acrimonious spirit, forcing you not to be content and at peace unless you say something, which is nourishing pride." -Fr. Josiah Trenham
Another must watch is the Trisagion Films documentary on the Life of St. Gabriel of Georgia, the Fool for Christ. They do an incredible job depicting the famous scene where St. Gabriel burned the portrait of Lenin during the national worker's day celebration (1965) in the central square of Tbilisi. He was beaten within an inch of his life for this and never regretted it. There are a bunch of amazing stories like this in the documentary, its an hour well spent.
Also I’m just going to leave this here and say as little about it as possible - it is an amazing critique of Zionism by Israel Shahak who was a holocaust survivor and intellectual. He uses references from the Talmud to demonstrate where certain attitudes towards Gentiles derive from. Even for those who are familiar with the subject will find some shocking truths in this book.
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Thanks to the anon who recommended it (I know you’re reading this).
As an extra bit of news, after Substack announced it is releasing its Twitter competitor called Notes, Elon Musk decided to censor Substack links on Twitter so they cannot be retweeted or liked. Substack links are also marked with a warning so users can’t click through to the site directly from Twitter. While Twitter is moving further away from my personal philosophy on content creation and monetization, Substack is moving even closer to it.
Anyway, that’s all for this week. Thank you for reading and I look forward to writing many more of these, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so you can hopefully benefit from these memory dumps in the future. Let me know in the comments your thoughts and questions in the comments, I love to hear from you all. For those who are comfy free subscription enjoyers, I will try my best to continue publishing free content as my schedule permits. Either way, thank you for your support and for my Orthodox friends, have a blessed Holy Week!
-Anthony
Researching business books, programming/IT/nerd stuff, and productivity was one of the big threads that eventually led me to Orthodoxy.
Asking "what actually works?" has always been a way of sorting through nonsense.
Thanks for sharing here!
That Obsidian app looks very useful. Definitely going to be trying it out.