#obsidian

i understand that it comes from anime tropes and is basically fully removed from reality, but maids are very much a real profession. my family have been maids, i've functionally been a tme person's live in maid.

my grandmother was brought to the u.s. because she was a live in maid and nanny for a wealthy american family, one of my aunts was an undocumented maid for years in the 2000s, being a maid is, in reality, a very racialized position. it's a precarious kind of employment that is absolutely fraught with abuses of power, exploitation, and sexual harassment.

my frustration with other writing applications is that i will write my scenes out of order and it's hard to move things around and rearrange them on a regular document.

but with obsidian there's this canvas feature where you can just write all your scenes and plot moments on these little cards that you can freely rearrange. you can color code them and connect them too.

here's the canvas i've created for my current multi-chapter fic: (if you zoom in you can see all the text in each card this what it looks like zoomed out)

as you can see, i color code them based off chapters and will group them next to a document card with the working title of the chapter. anything not color-coded are scenes that don't have a proper place quite yet or it's just world building references. this app can also be good for note-taking and collecting research!

best of all, it's FREE!!! the only downside is that if you want your stuff to sync across devices, you do have to pay for that. i constantly hop between my laptop and desktop so i pay for the syncing. but if you write on only one device it's completely free! EDIT: some reblogs have mentioned that you can apparently link your own personal cloud storage (dropbox, gdrive, icloud, etc.) to obsidian for free! that way you can access your obsidian vaults across multiple devices without the extra fee. i don't mind supporting the devs but just something to look into if costs is a concern.

Rad-Dragon

Using this post as a template for my alters, with some "alter"-ations of course ^^ I've been pretty pleased with how things look so far for the profiles that are most complete!

Here's some examples of other fields in the template too!! I really like how detailed it is, it's nice to have a place to store all this info.

Worth noting : Obsidian is offline and keeps all the info on your device (though there are ways to sync your info across devices). This has pros and cons! For me personally I loved using octocon to share info with my partner, but having it all private takes a lot of stress out of keeping trauma and trigger details in profiles (which I'd like to! It helps us to keep the info we know written down!).

Here's a front log and chat feature we got from this post!! Sorry for the crude language erm. That's just how those two talk.

The front log is really nice to us and easy to edit times and such!! Plus it links to the alter's profile. We haven't used the chat too much yet but it looks nice :] you get to choose what color your name shows up as!

Another thing we like about obsidian is that we have a place to keep all of our flags and stamps and blinkies and dividers and ough!! Everything!! And storing images in obsidian makes it really easy to then use them in alter profiles :]

Last but not least we also use obsidian to track other mental health things. We have a lot of trouble remembering things like when we've last eaten or showered because. Disability. But. Using that same table from the front tracker we now have an easy way to track these things!!

I'm really happy about obsidian being so customizable :] I'll miss octocon for sure (having been using it since the app was up and running), but having a solid offline place to store this info until I have an online place for sharing info is relieving.