Graph view of the memex as of June 21, 2025; roughly 11,400 notes in size
on li████ai
this memex is my notebook, my diary, my second brain… my life, honestly. it could probably be argued that organizing this memex is my main hobby, with consuming content to write about within the memex right behind it, and using the memex to create new content just behind that.
it started out as an evernote notebook, though as its size has grown beyond what evernote could reasonably handle,1 it has found different homes: within joplin, then org-roam, and currently inside obsidian.
i now can’t remember when it was first created, but its earliest surviving note was written on august 8, 2011. it currently holds over 11,000 notes as of 2025.
Update on August 04, 2025
its earliest note was actually created on march 11, 2011 and is a list of albums and artists to one day listen to. as it kept being updated for years afterward, it’s tough to say what was originally on it
the memex is named after its designated caretaker, who currently wishes to remain hidden.
guiding principles
it was born from a fear of forgetting, really, so items don’t really get deleted unless their contents can be merged into another. and so it builds and builds, its items at risk of being forgotten due to being unattached.
i rely on dataview to make this neverending accumulation still intelligible, with hundreds of notes dedicated to the task of compiling other notes into lists for easy accumulation and access.2 so, even though there are a lot of orphans orbiting around, they’re still silently being compiled into dataview indexes somewhere. everything can and should have a place, but the more places of reference one can attach to something, the more likely it is to return to memory.
if you want to read more about the decisions that went into in this notebook, you can find that within memex
missing links
there is bound to be a lot of missing links within the document you’re reading here. one reason is just because, in my process of selecting notes from the memex to display here, some notes are likely to have links to other content that i didn’t find especially interesting to share – good for completeness on my end, but a cognitive dead-end for the time being. i try to remove these when i notice them, but i’ll probably miss a few a lot.
the other main reason is because my way of (ab?)using obsidian and dataview requires the creation of some links for which it’d be pointless to actually make the note they reference. this can be seen most obviously with the links to specific dates: even if it’s entirely pointless to actually have a note for that specific date, just having the dead link is enough to both make dataview recognize what date it’s conveying (good for creating e.g. monthly summary pages) and allows other notes written on the same day to share an indirect link.
so if you come across a 404, don’t take it personally: there’s a good chance that it’s a dead link in the main memex too.
Footnotes
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the software became increasingly laggier, and it especially had difficulty handling individual notes with a large word count (10,000+ words). in time it became too much to bear… and it constantly nagging me to upgrade to premium didn’t help ↩
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because quartz doesn’t support dataview renders natively, any such tables would need to be manually rendered out into the note before publishing. this has already been done in some places, and i’d like to do more of it, but approaching that same level of density here is more of a long-term aspiration ↩