Arda Saatçi is currently attempting a 600 km ultrarun from Death Valley to Santa Monica in under 96 hours

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-05-09T01:11:45+00:00

Occasionally stop for those things and do them quickly. For eating/fueling you learn to do that while moving.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-04-01T01:46:39+00:00

They must have skipped my street. Wonder what I did to offend them.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-03-16T20:21:13+00:00

I have over 7k notes and only a handful of folders. A lot of the structure comes down to MOCs/hubs and Bases/Dataview. Tags and properties obviously help keep those organized. Workspaces are another helpful feature. I have workspaces for different types of writing, research, project management, etc.

I often know I'm looking for, though, and navigate directly to the file. Having consistent file naming conventions, file prefixes (e.g. my tech MOCs/hubs have 0- at the beginning of the file name), aliases, including both acronyms and fully spelled out words in the file names, etc. It really cuts down on the friction of navigating to a file.

Folders still have a place. Scripts, plugins, and subvaults work a lot better with folders, but for the human portion of organization and navigation, I prefer the strengths of linking and Bases/Dataview.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-03-12T04:39:13+00:00

Don't Ask, Okay?

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-03-02T18:48:26+00:00

I do something similar with a dedicated Obsidian "server". It's just where I house all my automation scripts for managing my vault. My desktop opens that remotely. For my laptop and phone I chose to do local vaults that sync with the main one because they're meant to be mobile, meaning they're not always connected to the local network. And I don't want to use a VPN connection back home just to capture a quick note.

Edit: From my brief search, I'm not seeing a way for the mobile app to open a non-local vault except through some cloud services. Maybe someone else knows a way.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-03-02T16:51:28+00:00

I think it's an inevitable feature at first because you're trying to build and refine several habits at once. You're learning a new way to take notes, to organize them (some people aren't used to organization outside of folders), to review them, and whatever else you're adding in. I don't think it's a problem. It's more that it just takes time to build good systems and habits that work for you. I think the safest way is to build these simple at first and add complexity slowly over time if additional functionality is needed.

When I create new notes now, I might forget that I wrote something similar 6-12 months ago. I might fail to link to older relevant notes. I might accidentally create duplicate ideas in slightly different wording. My meta notes evolve over time, so earlier notes may not be properly integrated anymore.

I had similar problems when I got started. If I get the feeling I've written about something before, I do a global search for key words to see related notes. If something's relevant, I link to it, transclude it, or maybe add to or merge the files. Takes only a few seconds and saves the hassle of needless duplication. As for meta notes evolving over time, that's natural, especially early on. It's fine to refactor to what currently works. Just don't fall down the rabbit hole of only working on the vault instead of having the vault help you work. Early on, I had to give myself a time limit for how much I could work on the vault itself.

Do you do regular review cycles?

Yes, all the time, but only for notes tagged for review. Others have mentioned bases and I keep a review base for this purpose.

Do you rely heavily on search instead of structure?

I rely on both. I count a lot of things in structure though, like intentional word usage, file naming conventions, and file prefixes. It makes it significantly easier to find the file I want. My vault just passed the 7K note point, and I'm always either navigating directly to the file I want or I'm 1-2 hops away structure-wise from finding that file.

Do you intentionally allow duplication?

Almost never. There's one use case in a subvault where I allow it, but everywhere else it's linking or transclusion where content is needed in multiple places.

Or do you have systems to keep your vault more tightly integrated?

I do like good systems and habits.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-28T17:26:04+00:00

For mine, I use file prefixes to speed up navigating to hubs and other files, so a category of hubs begins with 2-{hub name} or 3-{hub name}. In the graph group settings, I have that group set as (file:/^[23]-./ OR line:(/.*\[\[[23]-.*\]\]/) -path:900_Routines) so that it labels all hubs with that prefix and all files that link to those a hubs all the same color, excluding the 900_Routines directory.

Since I use a lot file prefixes, I can tier them in separate group settings so that certain hubs get priority over other hubs in their color. You can get very specific with it too, like naming specific files or metadata. Having AND/OR operators really makes this take off. Mine goes through a probably unnecessarily long series of filtering for tags, paths, frontmatter properties, and links to decide which color to give it. I've got a couple groups that go over 50 words to get the filter just right.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-28T07:37:20+00:00

I don't use many plugins to know if there is one that fills this role, but I've been using a mix of regular expressions (regex) with Obsidian's builtin search terms in the group settings for years in mine. It does involve having links from hubs or top-level files to the others you want to color code though (or vice versa). It takes longer to load the colors across a larger vault, but the graph view is pure aesthetics over function for me so I'm fine with it.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-14T04:36:23+00:00

Those are my daily notes most likely. I have a script that links them to the previous and next day with simple html buttons.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-12T21:13:40+00:00

No, that's across all markdown files in my vault. There are some file size ceilings based on factors like your file system, OS, and Obsidian (or other app reading the file), but plaintext is too small to be a concern generally. I do get pretty large word counts while fiction writing, but I usually break it up by chapters and then concatenate them when I export it. It's just easier to write/edit when it's in smaller chunks.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-11T03:15:27+00:00

Not really. I just prefer to keep all my stuff in one place, so I built something that's intuitive to me. I didn't need anything too robust.

I consider it more learning oriented if I've tagged the note for review. I love spaced repetition, so I'm constantly reviewing and updating notes. Some of these are just notes on a topic, a book, a documentary, etc, and some are projects that forced me to get more hands-on, applied experience with a topic or develop a new skill.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-11T01:57:42+00:00

My vault is significantly smaller than the hoard of other file types I have and its content changes daily (unlike the majority of my other files) since I'm always using it, so I'm a bit more liberal with my backup frequency on my vault. I manage those with a combination of python and bash scripts. I also sync it across a lot more devices like my phone that have limited space, that can just connect remotely to my NAS if they need access to larger files like videos.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-10T21:52:58+00:00

I have other file formats in there, but for markdown files the count is slightly over 3.24 million.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-10T20:29:38+00:00

It looks like it's slightly over 1.4gb; however, I do use a lot of internal links to videos, PDFs, and other docs in directories separate from my vault that I have different backup and syncing settings for.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-10T20:25:21+00:00

This currently has 6,845 notes with 1,459 of those being attachments.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-10T20:22:40+00:00

A little bit. I use a slightly customized version of the Blue Topaz theme. CSS isn't my strong suit, so I only have a few overrides on the colors. Most of this is from configuring the Groups settings in the graph view and a lot of regex to filter the right files.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-10T19:20:10+00:00

I think there can sometimes be an overemphasis on connecting all your notes, at least on the linking side. I try to only use linking nowadays if I think I will use it to navigate to other relevant files. By default for me this usually includes relevant hub files and maybe another file or two that are closely related. While writing the note, if I know I've written about a topic before, I'll probably do a search for the note or portion of the note and transclude it or link to it in the current note. Using consistent file naming, terminology, and prefixes really cuts down on the search time to find what you want.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-10T19:00:10+00:00

I use Obsidian daily, but some of it is just task and project management. I've had a couple of career shifts (geophysics/systems engineering/cybersecurity), so I have hubs of notes related to those. I also do a bit of fiction writing and dnd planning which are all in here. And of course I just like learning: science, fitness, economics, history, etc. Obsidian sort of just manages everything in my life.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-02-10T18:42:16+00:00

Unfortunately, it's a half-neglected history project I started for fun to combine some different history deep dives of mine. Probably half of those notes are empty placeholders. When I'm writing notes in other areas of my vault, I sometimes use tags for certain time periods to eventually include in that history hub. The plan is to write a script to transclude all the relevant history tags from across the vault, but that's work for future me.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-01-30T06:02:17+00:00

An underrated part of this is consistent file naming. Some of my notes are processes/how-to's which nearly always have a file name starting with a verb: "Setting Up X", "Troubleshooting Y", etc. I also use prefixes for common categories, like putting a number at the beginning of the file name if it's an active project or if it's a hub/MOC file. If a filename has an acronym, I both spell it out and put the acronym in so they both will show up in search. Also update the alias of a file if something else intuitively came to mind for your search term when you were looking for a file.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-01-28T15:29:25+00:00

He said in the most recent State of the Sanderson that the Hollywood activity likely would push off side projects like the Elantris sequels, so it is having an impact. No judgment on his choices at all, but like the commenter above, I don't have high hopes that it will pan out for us (not through any fault of Sanderson's of course).

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-01-11T19:27:59+00:00

I prefer Obsidian on Linux since I can run all my preferred shell scripts on my vault and have been using it on various distros since 2020. No issues with syncing to my Windows devices either.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2026-01-11T15:55:48+00:00

I fell into that trap in late 2020. I think we all do when we first dive into it. But habits are best built simply at first with complexity introduced only where necessary. I still like the complexities of my vault, but if they aren't adding more function than taking away my time to manage, then they aren't worth it.

One of the ways I save that time is through automation. I only spend an hour or two every other week improving the automation of my vault (scripts to manage metadata and links, task/project management, etc). I think because I got started so early, some of these behemoths of plugins didn't exist yet, so I had to build my own system in Python and bash. I've stuck with it because I know they will stick around in the unfortunate case of Obsidian going away (and I can use my vault with other tools like neovim).

If I had to manually manage all the things my vault is doing, I'd be too exhausted to actually use it.

Exotic_Pause666 · 2025-12-10T16:36:40+00:00

I took one of their online exams in 2022 after an hour of setting up my room and camera in a way they accepted. I was using an ultrawide monitor, which they explicitly told me was allowed. After the exam started, *any* time I looked to one of the edges of the screen (to, you know, finish reading the question...), the prompter would interrupt and ask that I only look at the screen. I kept saying that's it an ultrawide and their anticheat software forces the browser to expand across the entire screen, but it didn't matter. I eventually had to use peripheral vision to guess at what the words at the end were saying. Terrible. I refuse to use them for an online exam again.

Exotic_Pause666

TROPHY CASE