posted: 2025-02-26
Spoilers for: Linda Cube Again Scenarios A, B, MAJOR SPOILERS for Scenario C, Zero Time Dilemma Puzzle Notes, and Animal Well codes. All spoilers are in the images so simply scroll past them if you don't want to worry. Fact is, I'm showing off notes about video games. Spoilers are kind of baked into the experience. Ah well.
How I Filled My First Media Journal
“Keep a notebook handy when you watch anything, and if … you have a thought that seems even remotely promising, write it down so you don’t forget it.” - Roger Ebert
I keep a couple journals, I think most people do too. I like them! They’re nice spaces that I can share my thoughts, feelings, and reactions without having to worry that randomnamebunchanumbers will try to strike up a bad faith argument with me. The written journals are truly private, and I love that. To the twitter user in the voice acting industry who uses twitter like a diary still today in 2025, please, girl, what are you even doing.
No, my journals do not have names, at least not until I cannot write in the “active volume” if the book. Even then, I have only named my true, personal, “tomes of knowledge” or whatever we want to call them 1. No, their names are not for you to know. They’re journals. They’re all Dotted Leuchtturm n1917s, most A5 sized, one A4 due to a typo on my end (though I actually kind of like the size? We’ll see what size I opt for next). They’re places where I write down my thoughts with a writing utensil, usually a Pilot G2-07 pen of either a black or blue ink (though sometimes other colors depending explicitly on how I feel that day). They are what I need them to be in that moment.
I have filled six “personal journals” to completion so far and am slowly but surely making my way through the seventh. I do not apply restrictions to what I put into my primary journals. I write about the weather. I write about how the weather made me feel. I write about what’s on my mind. I write about what happened that day. I write down notes from meetings. I doodle. This is the brain dumping location. I have kept a personal journal since January 24, 2020, and no, I did not start because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I started because I was depressed and needed an outlet to express myself (and a way to keep track of my weekly tasks besides storing them in my head, but that’s not something I do in these personal journals anymore.). I tried keeping journals when I was younger due to my unfortunate early-teenage obsession with Mirai Nikki 2, but they never lasted more than a few days.
I should perhaps clarify, I keep a couple journals. As previously acknowledged I have my primary “tomes”, yes, but I also have a few others. For one, I have my entire Obsidian Vault; I keep a collection of markdown text files synced with encryption across a decentralized network of various computer machines. This, naturally, is my collected, relatively evergreen, personal knowledge management system. This is where I work. This is the “back-end” of the idea filtering process. It’s light-weight, easy to travel with, and has actually saved my ass on more than one occasion. My obsidian vault is as much for my research notes and pre-writing scientific manuscripts as it is me developing little blog articles related to the games and media I play. If Obsidian were to up and vanish, I would still own my Markdown files, it would just be a little less pretty. I would still have files on my three computers and mobile device dedicated to my opinions and memories of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team, which themselves have been sourced from written little sentence fragments on collections of paper. Speaking of.
I filled my first “media journal” last week! While not a Leuchtturm, this one is one of a pack of three soft-cover, dot-grid Moleskin “cahier” I got for Christmas a while back. It’s a good notebook, though I really dislike the fact that the last few pages are perforated. I like having the confidence to know that it isn’t easy to simply tear out a page from my notebooks.
In any case, I filled this “cahier” with little scribbles and scrawls of nothing and everything. It is my thought-capture mechanism. It is my butterfly net. It is an EDC 3 item. It is something I pull outta my backpack every time I sit down to watch an episode of a TV, play a game, or otherwise am think about or experiencing a piece of art or media. I admit that this journal started more as a “video game documentation device” before one day I just decided “FUCK IT, this is just a media journal” (more on this later). Life’s been nicer when I’ve lifted some of these arbitrary rules for myself.
Today I’d like to take a moment and share just what the heck I scrawl in some in this, my first completed media journal, maybe talk a bit about the “why and how” of it all.
Featuring some lovely stickers from one Game&Burger freauring a few games found inside. Cheers also to exclamatia for aiding in the shipping!
I know that everyone’s going to have a different approach to “note taking”. I encourage you to experiment and not simply assume that my method of capturing thoughts and ideas will work for you. I straight up did not start keeping a dedicated media journal until I was at the tail end of Journal #6. Part of my reason to start was that, up until Summer 2022, I didn’t have any dedicated manipulatable spaces to synthesize the ideas that I was writing down in a notebook. I felt limited by the fact that the books were bound in some way, and that I couldn’t move things around if I felt like I wanted to start a different game. In my younger years I always wanted to start a new notebook for every new game I started and have that notebook be dedicated a single game. This desire didn’t work outside of a rare exception: my 2016 playthrough of Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, where \ I was also exploring London which also happened to be a few days after the Brexit vote. How am I able to recall all this? I wrote it all down. Duh.
I happened to quite enjoy the Base-12 puzzle.
So that was 2016, let’s talk about this new journal eight-ish years later: Media Journal #001, starting at the at the top of page 1. No frills, no little title pages, no dedications, we just jump right into the bulk. I write the title of the game I was playing, “Linda Cube Again”, the date, 2/11/24, and the time I started playing, 6:55PM. Maybe you knew this about me, maybe you didn’t, I’m a data guy. I like having data about myself, for myself. By recording the date and start/stop time of play, I can record valuable parameters including, but not limited to, the total play time I spend on a game, the total time I spent playing games during a given calendar period, and how frequently I chose to play a certain game in particular.
After this front matter, I keep track of my individual thoughts using bullet points in the way akin to an outline. If an idea is a new idea, it gets a new bullet. If it’s a development of an immediate idea, then it gets indented. I admit, this method isn’t the greatest for linking ideas on this page, but again, that’s what Obsidian is for. I will return to these notes and filter them into my digital garden, and the runoff is still there in case later I decide that “no, actually I think this little bullet point is relevant somehow.” Not every thought is relevant. Then again, what initially appears to sprout as a weed may mature into a beautiful flower. We must take care to tend to our garden with love and precision.
Linda Cube Again
The first half of this journal is dominated by my 2024 playthrough of Alfa Systems’ masterpiece “Linda Cube Again”. With some soft prior guidance, I was quite proactive in jotting down many a detail. Perhaps one could argue that I started taking serious notes during gaming because of Linda Cube Again (and they might be right). When the game suggested to me in Scenario C to “take notes” I already had at least seven full front-and-back pages dedicated to the fauna (and some flora) of Neo Kenya. Rather than describe them in nebulous yet excruciating detail, let me just show you all a sample spread.
An example of my dedicated madness.
I write in dense, compact structures that are, admittedly, pretty tough to crack open almost a year later. That’s the reality of these Linda Cube notes: they’re moments frozen in time. Understanding them requires context only I can have. My notes? They’re written for me maybe a day or two after I actually put pen to paper.
Early entries from Scenarios A and B are mostly subjective feelings, reactions, and minor notes about game mechanics. I wrote things like “What the hell, Elizabeth stayed young for 50 years? -> Using Beastian Blood” on the same page as “Sheep in Spurr Marina, beneath Green Manor. Frogs too. And Bears?”. The former is pure subjective and functionally useless if I were to be writing notes strictly about how to beat the game. The latter is entirely objective, anyone could have written this stretch of words. Of course, these notes were little bits of safe keeping. “If I have to come back looking for Sheeps, Frogs, and even maybe Bears, it would be good to note I found them here.” When I ask “Why does Dr. Emori look like that…”, I’m not expecting an answer. Rather, it’s a loose end to explore in the development history if I feel so inclined. I would not include this exact sentence in my Obsidian vault, but I might include a burb about the character designs as a whole, with a specific focus on how Dr. Emori’s design not only looks like a Adolf Hitler but how his design was changed from the PC-Engine release to the Playstation release in 1997. I’m leaving clues for myself. Other entries include repeatedly admonishing Fleas: “Fuck I hate fleas so fucking much.” My net does not discriminate between butterflies, moths, or those nasty little bloodsuckers.
The types of notes change when I reach Scenario C. It’s in scenario C, where I had to collect 100 (but let’s be real it was 120), where my notes become truly scientific. I am writing down exactly what I found and where I found it or what I did and where I did it. As a scientist in-training, the style of note taking I observe when I look in these notebooks draws a little too close of a resemblance to the notes I took in my actual research lab space. They’re objective. They’re concise. They’re clear. They’re mandates. Gone are the loitering ellipses. No, those dots have been put to WORK in the form of ever-increasing To-Do lists. Yes, you read that right, I’d leave myself To-Do lists for the next play session so that I didn’t forget my objectives. The tasks on these lists were written with a straightforward command-like sentence structure: “Revive Dogs”. “Throw Poop at Mammals?”.
It makes sense in context, I promise.
Maybe I just like Linda Cube Again as much as I do because it was my little obsession I let myself have as a treat. I got so into this shit in a way I don’t think I have since.
Other Games and Media
Linda Cube Again entries span roughly the first third of the pages in this journal, but they’re not the only ones. Scattershot entries from Person a 3 Reload, Balatro and Dragon Quest V are laced between Linda Cube Again entries. They’re small blocks that someone might initially overlook as more Linda Cube again fodder. Yet still, these entires were also quite useful for me long term. In particular, my notes on Dragon Quest V on the DS proved to be the most useful simply because I ended up playing the gamme over the course of months. Coming back to a JRPG after an extended break is never easy, luckily I had given myself some opportunities to play catch-up, so that when after three or so months of playing other JRPGs, I picked up “Hand of the Heavenly Bride” and was able to kick off right where I had left off with some extra added personal context. Maybe I should have led with this use case…….
Some of you may ponder, “hey, why don’t you just write things directly into your Obsidian instead of writing notes on paper and then transcribing them?” Animal Well. Animal Well is why 4. I do not have any kind of touch-screen based computer, nor do I really want one. I really enjoy the analog nature of “writing shit down”! It sure helps when you’re playing a game like animal well and you need to draw schematics that involve both numbered directions and little smiling hieroglyphs. Or, y’know, if I need to write down some binary numbers in base 10 it sure is easier to do that math by hand in the moment. No, I do NOT know the alt codes to produce ASCII Arrows, please stop asking me. If I knew my life would be a lot easier. But even those don’t have diagonal arrows, so really how useful would it have been to try and type the arrows in directly? If you’ve played past layer 1 of Animal Well, you will understand what I mean here. The page of paper is truly a pblank canvas for whatever I need it to be in that moment, and in the case of playing Animal Well, that page was getting some cool little codebreaker notes arranged in a circle. Can’t do that in Markdown (at least with my current vault implementations, but that’s neither here nor there.)
“Notebooks are better than electronic devices because they don’t run out of battery power and you won’t annoy anyone if you use them in the dark.” Yes, I did follow Mr. Ebert’s advice and started keeping track of reactions during movies too. Have you ever tried to write in a nice structure and form while in the dark? It’s not easy! My notes on Mad Max are half-awake scrawls about bogans in the bush. I can read these scrawlings because I’m the one who wrote them. I expect that I will continue to develop a type of shorthand personal to me as I continue to document bits and scenes from TV and movies that stick out to me. I am not a particularly fast writer, and an even less-fast typist.
In reality, the reason I started keeping track of more than just video games has to do with FLCL. Yeah that’s right, I was bored on July 13, 2024 and decided that I was not only going to watch FLCL all in one weekend (this did not happen), but that I would keep track of my response to it. Because after all, you can only experience FLCL for the first time once. “FUCK IT, this is just a media journal.” Another demonstration of my journals being what I need them to be in that moment. And really, isn’t that what FLCL is all about? You can’t define FLCL, you can only point to things as being FLCL. It’s a feeling, a “I know it when I see it”. Really, that’s the same methodology I have for anything that goes in this first media journal: “I know it when I see it”.
Hell I even used this media journal to deposit thoughts that I had while explicitly NOT watching shows. I was at a conference, stuck in a technical session where the only talk of interest happened to be squarely in the middle of the collection of five presentations. And y’know, I’m the type of dude who really doesn’t like to 1. sit in the back of the auditorium if I actually give a hoot about what’s being presented, 2. leave in the space between presentations when I’m sitting right in the front. I figure I can learn a thing or two…. .. . . . . . except I didn’t here. Rather, I had 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim on the brain. And hey, if I thought dump here and now it might even look like I’m half paying attention or something. So I dropped a little set of bullet points about how much I enjoy the 13 Sentinel’s Soundtrack.
I’ve even taken notes… on YouTube videos…
I need to emphasize one key point: I do not care about how my journals appear to outside parties. I must admit, with my proverbial tail between my legs 5, that I occasionally peruse /r/journaling. While I don’t intend to have this piece turn into a miserable commentary on the nature of posting journal spreads on the internet for imaginary social cred internet points, I want to make it clear: I do not give a shit about what anyone’s journal pages look like. If you’re an artist and want to show a “messy page” that happens to be some of the cleanest, curated arrangement of scraps and sentences I’ve ever seen, then go for it. My journals do not look like that. They never will look like that. My journals are spaces that serve a utilitarian function: they are paper for my thoughts. That means that the thought is all nice and tidy, then sure, maybe it’s a social media post. But then, how frequently are all of our thoughts so well-defined? I do not care about aesthetic perfection when it comes to my journals. They are beautiful messes, much like my own existence. And they’re not written for you; they’re written for me.
Why Though?
Why am I celebrating the deposition of fleeting, moderately useless thought? Well it’s because I had enough of them to fill an entire little booklet. I am excited to share that I reacted to art in a tangible, demonstrable way. I write down these thoughts and feelings I have because they live on as proof that I was not only alive, but that I had feelings. Maybe I don’t think about it in the moment, but I know in my soul that memory is not a permanent fixture. My genetics leave me predisposed to a future of unending dry ice haze slowly rolling over the lip of a basin and onto the stage slowly but surely accumulating until I lose all sense of my surroundings and accidentally fall off the proscenium. And who the hell even KNOWS what the hell the future will look five days, five weeks, five months, five years, five decades from now. If I’m lucky enough to live that long, I’ll still have my initial honest reactions to playing some of my favorite games of all time.
Video accomplishes a similar feat, yes, but it’s not as readily accessible at any given time. Scrubbing video still remains a tedious process and in general there’s not a functional way to automatically transcribe my copious streams and video archives into single, readable text files. Yes, Language Learning Models get better by the day. I’m sure that in the not so distant future, I’ll be able to feed a video into a kind of LLM and video synthesis hybrid AI and it’ll spit back to me a transcript that’s neatly divided into things I say, and what someone else might say on the stream, for example. I don’t fear this, I think it’ll be especially important for accessibility in the digital age. But I digress, right now, using video as a journal is not practical. Furthermore, who really owns the video I might want to use to access for personal use one day? Yes, I do store all my video archives locally so that I can still own a copy, but even then those are just that, a copy. Maybe someone’s already out there, using my stream VODs to train a neural network for this transcription tool… or other reasons.
Another truth: I’m quite through with “non-chat room” social media (though even this is a precarious balance). Fact is, I do not own any thoughts that I post on these platforms, as they are shared with the owners of these platforms. But I own my paper. I own my thoughts. I am the only person who can think for myself. My media journals are a demonstration of human expression, feeling, and creation. This is something that no technofascist landlord can take from me. I have paper, I have a pen, and I have a brain. The only thing I pay for is the initial cost of buying my materials.
I am begging you now: please “exit” posting on social media. For the love of God, write your funny thoughts on paper, share them with your friends in your favorite chatrooms later. But “post” in places you can trust. I do not trust most social media platforms anymore, and I don’t expect that to change. I am strictly taking my thoughts into my own space, the way my parents and grandparents did before me. Even before this technofascist coup, we were all hearing about how “social media isn’t your private diary, you never know who might be reading.” Well now more than ever, you do not know who or what is reading the things you write. The human experience through words is being contorted into something horrifying by people who only see us as means of getting richer and exerting their control.
Well I reject that.
I am choosing to “exit” from the space that believes that social media is going to be the only way to interact with humans. I will still post on this website until neocities decides to join the decay of the internet. I will still maintain my shitty LinkedIn profile and I will still own my handles. But I will never post on any of the major social media sites ever again. Social media has been a blight on my existence for as long as I can remember and I’m not going to let it and it’s black-box algorithms owned by its bad-faith bags of filthy and moldy bugs hold me hostage. They will never be able to annex my brain.
I write in my journals.
I’m proud of myself for filling this little book with nothing but my raw “self”. These are my reactions to the games I play, the movies I watch, the music I listen to, the thoughts I have in response to human creation. You won’t get to see most of these in their raw form. Those losers certainly won’t be able to either. But what I do choose to share is on my terms and I love that. I love that this single collection of pages, my first filled media journal, has allowed me to kickstart so many of the articles and written work you can find on this website. It’s been very fun and I cannot wait to fill up Media Journal #002.
Here’s your call to action: go grab a piece of paper the next time you watch / play something, and if you have any kind of thought, just write it down. It takes time and it takes some effort, but so does any kind of gardening. Over time, you’ll start to notice some new stalks sprouting from the ground. And maybe, with enough tending to, you might one day have a lovely bouquet for yourself.
Thank you for your attention and care.
Let me write you a letter some day. I’d like to do that.
okay this is a lie, sorry. I actually call my obsidian vault “myaiba” because I’m a filthy kotaro ushikoshi fan and i figured that one day obsidian might be as helpful as having my very own ai-ball. but also know that i do not advise training an LLM on your obsidian vault unless you own the LLM itself. I do not own any of the LLMs I use, so that’s that.↩︎
a killing game anime adapted from the manga of the same name by Sakae Esuno where the competitors have diaries that can predict the future. it’s one of my foundational anime, but not the story I want to talk about today. maybe another time.↩︎
“every-day carry”↩︎
one of many reasons, but it’s a great highlighter↩︎
no this is not my soft launch of being a furry. i am not a furry.↩︎