This is a brief tutorial on creating a wiki-style article using Obsidian, a software for taking notes and compiling a personal knowledge base, like a self-hosted wiki. Installation instructions are included.
The use of this brand name and any mention of specific products or media within the example does not imply ownership of nor endorsement by the owners of any products or media, nor discrimination against similar products or media not mentioned.
I am merely a user of the free personal version of Obsidian for my own purposes.
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Wiki-style articles are extremely familiar to most readers, from the ubiquitous Wikipedia.org to the accumulated media knowledge aggregated on Fandom.com and similar sites. Creating knowledge base articles in such a style can greatly increase retention, even if you don’t intend to make your knowledge base publicly-editable like a true wiki.
The first step is, naturally, to install your software, either on your computer or website. In this case, you’ll want to visit the Obsidian [downloads page](https://obsidian.md/download). The correct version should be automatically detected, but installer files for other platforms are available, including:
Windows
Macintosh
Linux
iOS
Android
After selecting the correct file for download, visit your download location and double-click to run the installer.
Post-installation, you will be prompted to create or open a ‘vault’, Obsidian’s term for a collection of articles.
Choose a name and select where the Vault folder should be stored, then click Create. Once the Vault has opened, click the New Note button.
Give your new Note a title — this title will be used to link back to this Note later, so try to make it both short and descriptive of the note’s contents.
Now that you’ve created an article, there are two ways to proceed. You can either:
Click the New Note button again, or
Turn a word or phrase in the current Note into a link to a new Note.
Example 1: If you create a new Note, you can enclose the name of an existing Note in double square brackets [[like so]] to create a link back to that Note:
Example 2: To create a backlink instead, simply enclose the title of the prospective new Note in the same double square brackets [[like so]]:
This link will appear ‘greyed out’ until the Note is created, which can be done by simply clicking on the new link. The new Note will automatically have the chosen title.
Keep in mind that changing the title of a Note will also change the links in all other Notes that link back to it.
By continuing to use both article creation methods, you will soon find that you have created a knowledge base in which a reader can easily navigate between related pages and gain more information on your products or services.
Below is a GM monologue I gave to players in my Pathfinder 2nd Edition campaign. I have plans to expand this world, potentially with multiple groups of players, with different quests and storylines available to each and with consequences of each group’s actions visible to all groups (a West Marches style, for those familiar with the jargon).
Welcome, Adventurers.
Our setting is the cosmopolitan city of Cork, where mortals of all races and rumor has it sometimes even gods can be found. Beneath the city is the world-famous Dungeon carved out centuries ago by one of the strongest mages ever known, the great wizard Damodred. The Dungeon is not the only structure of its kind in the world, but it is certainly the largest. It has also never been fully explored, let alone conquered.
Every day, adventurers plunge into the depths to hunt monstrous, soulless husks, bringing back their findings for pay, and always looking for a clue to the vaunted Sanctum where the mage’s research — and his accumulated treasure hoard — is presumed to lie.
The Adventurer’s Guild, controlling access to the Dungeon, serves as the de facto government to ensure that some kind of law and order is enforced in Cork. At their direction, newly-arriving Adventurers to join together in Clans, both to serve collective interests and because ‘going solo-diving’ is a common local euphemism for suicide.
The four of you, as well, are Adventurers. You have risen through the beginner ranks of The Winning Hand Clan, and are about to be assigned a Hand, a team for future adventuring purposes. Assignments are random, according to tradition set down by the clan’s founder, but the four of you have met before.
Newcomers to the Clan work in rotating groups, training and drilling their chosen methods of combat, but are never permitted beyond the first subfloor of the Dungeon. As such, you have worked together in the past and know each other vaguely, by name and sight like distant coworkers, and you’ve gotten along fine.
It is now time for your River, a sample mission given to a potential Hand to see if you work well enough together to do so permanently. In this case, the Clan has found a small abandoned keep nearby was taken over by undead, and your mission is to clear it out and figure out why and how they did so. Succeed, and you will have proved yourselves a Winning Hand and be given permission to Dungeon-dive in earnest.
Below is an excerpt from a novel I drafted in 2024; this is the inciting incident in which the POV character, Morgan, discovers their content-creator roommate Roy is a mage, and that the ordinary-seeming world around them is a mundane masquerade concealing an urban fantasy.
The month after was when everything changed.
I wasn’t sure when it started, but I first noticed when I came home on a Friday night after a trip to the gym, and found the apartment was hotter than Summer in Florida. Seeing as I had just stepped in from Summer in Florida, I felt the comparison was appropriate, and I almost staggered as I opened the front door and the heat rolled over me.
My first thought was that the apartment was on fire, but I didn’t smell any smoke, and everything looked normal. The sweat I’d built up from lifting weights, which had started to dry in the cool hallway, immediately started pouring down my face and neck again.
Closing the door so Yuki wouldn’t run out — although I didn’t see her in the living room — I checked the thermostat and found it was switched off. Crossing to Roy’s door, I banged on it frustratedly. “Hey, what’s wrong with the A/C?”
Apparently the door hadn’t been shut properly, because it swung open under my fist, revealing Roy slouching in his chair. He was still wearing a nice shirt, although the sleeves were cuffed up, and sweat was beading on his forehead. He looked up when the door opened, alarmed. “Morgan, I–”
“Roy, what the hell?” I interrupted, no longer looking at him.
As soon as the door had opened, my attention was drawn to the brazier sitting in the middle of his floor, surrounded by a painted circle and containing a large oval-shaped rock.
I was torn between demanding to know why he’d lit a fire in his bedroom, and why he was just staring at it instead of putting it out, when the incongruity struck me. Roy wasn’t a lunatic, and he wasn’t this careless. There were a few scorches on the sheetrock he’d laid down under the brazier, but the blaze was… contained? It was like the circle was actually preventing anything outside it from catching fire, despite the heat pouring off it being enough to make the air shimmer.
“What– How…?”
“Crapbaskets,” Roy sighed, wiping his face with a towel, but the sound jolted me out of the rut my brain had been stuck in since the door opened.
“Oh, you say that too?” He looked at me incredulously, but I was leaning down to inspect the fire. “Is that… an egg?”
“Dragon egg,” he agreed. “I think, anyway. They’re pretty unmistakeable.” He glanced at the doorway and grimaced. “Of course I forgot to put up the recording sign. Sorry about the heat. I was hoping to be done by the time you got home, but the damn thing won’t hatch. I’m not very good at fire; I’ve had to rejigger the circle twice already.”
“Is this–” What was I going to say? Real? Valuable? Necessary? “–going to take much longer?”
He gave me an unreadable look. “It shouldn’t. That egg is from an ignispirous species; they nest near volcanoes and breathe on their clutch, so the concentrated heat from the current circle should be enough.”
He kept staring, and I shrugged. “You’re hatching a dragon egg, that’s rad as hell. Where did you get it? Are there dragons in Florida? There must not be, you said they nest near volcanoes. Unless they migrate? Do dragons migrate?”
Roy started laughing. “There are a few smallish venispirous species around the everglades, mostly amphibious. And one aciduspirous drake in the Gulf; not a true dragon, but a cousin species. They can’t fly, but they can leap out of the water and glide like flying fish.”
“I take it ‘spirious’ means ‘breather’? Or ‘breathing’? Are these official terms or just yours?”
“Something like that. They have taxonomic species names, but I don’t know them all. I think I remembered the Latin construction of ‘fire-breather’ and ‘venom-breather’ correctly. Are you really okay with… everything?”
“I’ll freak out later,” I waved him off, and he laughed.
Before he could press, there was a crack from the egg. Hurriedly wiping his face, Roy waved me out of shot and hit a button on a remote, causing the camera light to blink on.
“And there you have it, first crack after…” He checked his phone. “Eighty-six minutes of concentrated flame. Over two hours total, but that’s including the initial circle that wasn’t hot enough. Apparently even after doubling my first estimate, I was still underestimating how hot dragonbreath is, so take that as today’s first lesson: dragon fire can melt steel beams. And stone. And bone. So if you see it aimed at you, maybe dodge.”
To me, it always felt very similar to keeping a diary, which I’ve also never been good at. Part of the issue there is timekeeping, because I’m very bad at forming new habits and trying to remind myself to write about an average day tends to end with me dismissing the reminder because my day usually isn’t very interesting. I wake up, I eat food, I work, I do my hobbies (write), I play around on the computer, I chat with people online, I go to bed. Nothing in there really bears recording or demands self-analysis. I’m just one person among 8-some billion; I’m not special.
And then on top of that, a blog is a diary that is deliberately open to the public. So now my self-analysis is open to being nitpicked and criticized by random people. And of course this shouldn’t necessarily stop me — what do I care about the opinions of internet anons, after all? — but this then begs the question1, why should random people care about my opinions on things?
I am aware that this is, in fact, not the traditional definition of ‘begging the question’, which is an informal logical fallacy involving circular reasoning (‘if A then B’, where A only leads to B if we assume B is true in the first place). The fallacy is informal because each individual step can be logically valid while still failing to be rhetorically persuasive. However, in recent parlance ‘begging the question’ has come to be a simple synonym of ‘raising the question’. And while this is incorrect according to the traditional logical definition of petītiō principiī, by the nature of linguistic descriptivism — that is, if we are less concerned with official rules of correctness and pay attention to how language is actually used —this new definition is equally ‘correct’ because it is commonly understood. ↩︎
I can certainly talk your ear off if you get me going, as the length of this post likely illustrates — at graduation, my high school cohort presented me with the Three Cents Award “for always giving more than just two”, somehow expecting that not to sting — but growing up with what I now know was undiagnosed ADHD made very sensitive to being perceived as annoying, so I learned over the years to keep my opinion to myself unless prompted for it. After a while, ‘unless prompted’ evolved into ‘even when prompted’, and I wound up with a habit of simply never expressing myself outside of a known, safe circle.
As you can imagine, this runs somewhat counter to the nature of being a writer, where I have to express my opinion constantly (whether through narration, character dialogue, or even just my choice of subject in technical documentation) and alsohave to put my opinion out there, into the public eye to be read, evaluated, and analyzed. Looking back over the things I’ve written, I can see my opinions, my biases, my interests, my values, my fears, my politics, all shining through — sometimes subtly, sometimes very much not.
And this is unavoidable. There really isn’t any other option. Even though my habit is to write for myself rather than writing ‘for an audience’ — even when it comes to pieces I never planned to publish or which I explicitly plan never to publish — the nature of the medium dictates that when you write, you are writing to be read, even if it’s only by your future self.
It also, unfortunately, seems to conflict with some of those values at first glance. For instance, I happen to believe that everyone should make up their own mind on matters of religion and spirituality, without having someone else’s beliefs rammed down their throats, or being made to feel guilty for what they do or don’t happen to believe. (Can you tell I grew up Catholic?) Is it then wrong to write about my own atheism? To pen a story where the Church is the antagonist? Where the evangelical are framed as, at best, misguided? Where the ‘deity’ is revealed to be a fraud?
The answer is no, of course; it’s not wrong to express my opinion, because expressing an opinion is not the same as indoctrination. Blogging is not equivalent to public square preaching, and even discussing the subject with someone who asks is anything but counter to those beliefs. It is, in fact, the correct expression of them, because prompting someone to reconsider their held notions, to question alternatives, and to perhaps come to a new conclusion, is the very nature of ‘letting people make up their own minds’.
Besides, there is no way to avoid this order of causes and effects, aside from not writing — and if you ask almost any artist, they will tell you in more or fewer words that not doing art is simply not an option. If I must write, then I have no choice but to express myself, and to do so publicly. If I must write, then my politics must be laid bare, because as far as I’m concerned, all art is inherently political.
What does this have to do with moving to the Netherlands?
The decision to move abroad came in late 2024, around the time the the Heritage Foundation’s so-called Project 2025 was leaked. The Heritage Foundation, by the by, is a right-wing think tank founded and funded by openly and proudly racist, sexist, and homophobic Christian activists who explicitly favored voter suppression, abortion restriction, and religious intolerance.
While an open theocracy is not an explicit goal of the Foundation, Project 2025 nevertheless outlines a plan to:
pack courts and appoint civil servants who are idealogically aligned with the fundamentally Christian Foundation
further restrict abortion access after the overturning of previous Supreme Court rulings on Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, with the goal of making abortion effectively illegal
oppose the expansion (or existence) of rights protections for LGBTQ+ people, effectively making it legal to discriminate against people for being queer
remove diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs intended to protect against discrimination at any federally-funded company or university
tighten immigration policies to the extent of mass arrest, detention, and deportation while continuing to rely extensively on migrant labor for food production
massively cut public healthcare funding in the wake of a global pandemic that killed over 1 million Americans and almost 7 million worldwide
dismantle the Department of Education, effectively defunding low-income schools, implying that education is not a public good but should be reserved only for those who can afford it
defund environmental regulations for the benefit of fossil fuel companies who extensively fund the Foundation
overturn the Posse Comitatus Act to allow the federal government to freely deploy the US military domestically for law enforcement
Collectively, the end result of these policies would pretty quickly widen the already unacceptable rich/poor divide in the United States and consolidate power in the hands of the Foundation and their aforementioned ‘idealogically aligned’ allies — that is, those who hold similarly racist, sexist, and intolerant views as the Foundation — while suppressing any dissenting views with structurally discriminatory laws, kangaroo courts, and potentially military force.
While not explicitly fascistic or theocratic in a vacuum, I can’t help but describe the country created by the execution of that Project as fundamentally aggrandizing the party in power and directly contradicting the values of the democratic republic ‘with liberty and justice for all’ that I was taught about from pre-K up through university-level Civics classes.
This blatant and naked hypocrisy seems to be lost on the majority of voters, however, as November of 2024 resulted in the re-election of Donald Trump, who wasted no time beginning to implement Project 2025. I won’t spend the time relitigating all of those policy changes and their terrible knockon effects here — breadtube has my back in that regard — but suffice to say that almost as soon as the election results were announced, the idle joke about running away to Europe suddenly became a lot more attractive. After some discussion and a lot of research, my now-roommate and I decided that we would rather live somewhere else, and the Netherlands ended up topping the shortlist.
I’m not going to pretend that Europe in general, or the Netherlands in particular, don’t have their share of political problems. The Dutch Tweede Kamer (House of Representatives) has a right-wing majority at the moment, with the explicitly nationalist far-right party (at time of writing) holding an alarming near-25% of seats. However, as I won’t be eligible to vote in the Netherlands for at least several years, I’ll save my thoughts on the system of government here for another time.
All that said, in light of the 2024 US Election, I genuinely believe that my time in the US needed to come to an end, and I urge anyone reading this to reflect on whether the same is true for you.
I recognize that it’s difficult to pick up your life and move somewhere completely new — believe me, I know it better than most, because I’ve just done it — and that it’s tempting to fall back on platitudes like ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’. Yes, it is indeed human nature to want what you don’t currently have, but that isn’t what this move was about.
Another one I heard leading up to the move was ‘the grass is greener where you water it’, suggesting that getting involved in local politics and trying to improve the country myself could be the answer. The truth is, America’s future looks bleak to me. I don’t see the country turning toward a path that aligns with my values by peaceful means in my lifetime, and I have no interest in non-peaceful changes.
The grass may tend to be greener where you water it, but by the same token, the grass is MUCH greener where more than half the country isn’t actively voting the Grass Poisoning Party into power so they can enact the Fuck All Grass That Isn’t Mine policy.
I’ll be across the Atlantic, sipping coffee on my balcony in a diverse, international neighborhood with mixed zoning, bike paths, and public transit.
