unconventional note-taking

[boreal cryptid]

thread about unconventional, strange, experimental note-taking software... or physical methods?

i wanted to share Sanctuary game/app, which uses the whole 3D environment for taking notes!!??

as a person who is Very Normal About Locations, i installed it as soon as i found it, LMAO. i won't say it's very useful method when i need to find/write something quickly, but i like sorting existing info here and there in different locations ^_^

about about safety of your note files:

Notes are saved in a human-readable .html file format, if Sanctuary would stop functioning in future you can still easily read them (just open those files with your browser).

it's built with Unity, but dev is already re-making it with Godot (waiting for it!).
there are similar (more general) threads, just in case: note-taking methods and systems and Notes App

[IndigoGolem]

That is interesting. If it's light and fast enough to launch quickly when you need it, it could be a very fun way to take notes.

We've tried imagining writing things in a book and then remembering the book, but it's hard to tell if we forget something recorded that way. Given that i cannot remember what the last thing we wrote was, it's probably not a very reliable method.

Most of the notes we take are just on a piece of paper we always carry. What makes them unusual is that they're not written in the Latin alphabet, they're written in a constructed script we invented for privacy.

[TheFrugalGamer]

Lately I've been playing the game Lucid Blocks and there is an in-game menu with a notebook that you are meant to use to record various recipes from the game and similar. I really like that it lets you pick up items and "stamp" them on the pages so that you can recreate the combinations more easily.

However, a lot of people like to use it to create really intricate pixel artwork. If you visit the community hub on steam, there are some very, very patient people who have created tiny little masterpieces there!

Most of the notes we take are just on a piece of paper we always carry. What makes them unusual is that they're not written in the Latin alphabet, they're written in a constructed script we invented for privacy.

I do this too! The script I use is part of a conlang with some lore behind it, so it wasn't strictly for privacy, but I do use it frequently for that purpose. I try to keep up with it regularly so that I can have it memorized instead of having to use my references often.

[DunsenChurner]

The only thing odd about my notetaking is I deliberately misspell wurds that have redundant letters to make it faster to write down story drafts or longer posts. Examples are like "enough" to "enuff" or "every" to "evry". Something like that. Writing in shorthand is something I considered but would be too much work learning. Who knows \o/ Otherwise, the rest of my process is fairly standard (using a notebook and writing with any pencil).

[akhenaton]

Haha the Sanctuary app reminds me that I used to make these “vocab rooms” in Minecraft when I was younger, where I might have something like a “Finnish room” and a “Latin room” and I’d decorate the walls with those wooden signs containing fresh vocabulary and its translations I just learnt, and I would trek to these locations whenever I wanted to review them.

I love the idea of notes existing in a spatial sense! I need to incorporate it back into my life.

Speaking of unconventional note-taking, I might have a story there as well. During years of bouncing between conventional note-taking tools like Evernote, Notion, Logseq (I think my usual rate is one app / year), despite my best efforts I always managed to find irreconcilable faults and unforgivable limitations within them. I finally had enough this year and wrote my own for personal use in Elixir. It’s called Catlet!

All I have to do is make a note with “#book {{La Peste}} #author {{Albert Camus}}” which would create “La Peste” and “Albert Camus” as “subjects”, and tag “La Peste” with the property “book” and make its “author” property be Albert Camus. I can easily query for books I recorded and view these entries in table view, gallery view, or plain note view. And each tag and subject “owns” their own custom css  , so the look of each of my notes is determined by the set of tags and subjects present in the note!! :D I love how

chaotic

and just *different* my notes look now

I feel like I finally found my happy place and hopefully this is where all my future notes will remain! Maybe they will finally cease being scattered and siloed across 10 different proprietary tools... here is a screenshot of the middle column (please disregard my actual notes) of Catlet.