2026-02-24, 2147h, Gamifying Obsidian

So as I settle into Obsidian and prepare for the long slog of bringing in old content - and adding new content - I wondered if there were any good plugins for gamifying Obsidian. I actually got inspired because I saw, while importing 2023-11-14, Winter Orientation, that I wrote that using 4theWords, a gamifying online writng platform.

Well, a Web search turned up a few that seemed of interest, right away.

One was Keep the Rhythm, which tracks how many words you write a day, that week, and an average over last thirty days, presenting a heatmap of the month, something like Github contributor calendar. I've installed that, to see how much I care about that.

The other that I found was Writing Goals, which lets you set word-count goals per file, or directory, including daily goals. I like that idea, because then I can see whether I've babbled "enough" for a day by giving myself a daily goal of 1,000 words. Which... at 2000h, sets myself up for failure a bit today, unless I really get into a tear about something to babble about.

The third plugin I found was Gamified PKM. I'm... not sure what that one does... I've set it to initialize, and.... beside adding a lot of frontmatter to all of my files, I can't really tell what it's done. But, that's fine, for now.

The fourth plugin I found was performium which... I also can't tell what it does, off-the-bat.

The fifth plugin I found was obsidian-gamified-tasks which I can't use yet, as I haven't set up any tasks in Obsidian, yet.

And that's the last of the plugins I easily found, and Emrys just finished up the most recent print, so that would seem like a natural wrapping up point... except that the pesky writing goal I just set for my babbles is at 201... 206, of 1000, and that's just enough past 0, and just close enough to 1000, that I'm really enticed to try and keep babbling just so that I hit it. But, also, as I approach 250 words with this sentence, I recognize that's just a quarter of the way there, which is not really that close at all.

Still, if I were a quarter of the way to the grocery store or something, I don't know if I'd decide to turn around and go back home just for some trivial thing, like, that would feel "close enough" to the store to keep going toward the store. Though that's a rather silly example.

I should probably keep pressing on to try and get to 1000 words though, if only because the writing is good practice for staying focused, writing character after character, and making sure I'm doing things like sitting up straight.

No one would know, but when I write, I actually use a cajon, the wooden box drum, as my seat. This is great for letting me like, tap out rhythms when I think and am listening to music. It's also great for my posture, but it is not great for letting me like, relax and slouch. Which is ultimately good, but not really desired, when it's evening time and I'm really rather keen to go lay down and am only in this position because of some arbitrary pressure I made up for myself and honestly, could have seen coming with the intention of, "Oh, let's set up some metrics in my writing software!"

So anyway, I made some good amount of progress on moving files around in that software. I found some writing that qualifies as my Letters to the Web, but isn't anywhere on the Substack syndicated version of those, which is cool. I also haven't found any local copy of some of what's on the Substack, which is a testament to just how messy things have gotten on my computer.

Tomorrow, the goal is to keep chugging on with bringing in the content I can find from across my computer to this unified catalog. Some of that will probably involve pulling in content that I'll have to be careful to keep isolated from what gets published, like notes about how to help friends with various projects, but that stuff is also where I might find some cool annotated bibliographies or other little resources. And all of that is a good step toward being able to have just... a more honest and contemporary version of myself on my Website. One thing I noticed as I pulled in content is that while I like a lot of the sentiment involved in lots of it, and the writing style is decent in some, none of it really "fits" my current, or aspired, personality. So, I'm hoping with a tool that pressures me to get out more words, I can start to outweigh that kind of outdated version of myself with a more up-to-date version, that's more able to explain what I mean and think.

That's not just a vanity, either, or least it doesn't necessarily feel like one: being able to point to resources that can explain my views on things like COVID-19 or settler-colonialism outside the tension of direct communication will be really useful in helping bring myself to my neighbors and broader community. Plus, just, pragmatically, I need a little more space to be able to explain my perspective on things like 3d printing emergency whistles.

With that, I'm at just shy of 800 words, which means I should be able to fill up the remaining 200 with as much ease as I filled in the first 200, though scrolling back to check how I did that, I see it was by writing out a concrete list of things and I can't really do that so easily, unless I were to list things like the fruit our house got today: oranges and bananas.

Well, that was only two items - three words - and so I suppose I could say that we didn't get apples today, but then I suppose I may as well, as far as the reader knows, say we didn't get strawberries, or peaches. Apples are notable only because they are the third fruit we often get, and, I suppose, are a standard object used in arbitrary lists.

Anyway, I'm transitioning from a day of watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine to an evening of watching MASH - specifically the first episode of Season 2, because I feel like drifiting off to some of that early MASH levity.

I thought sharing that would bring me above 1000, but I was only at 980, so now I've got to say some more stuff to hit 1000 - which I've now, of course, done, but it would be awkward to stop right there so I'm going to end, I suppose, right here.