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RE: Tomasino - moleskines

20180621b

In his

latest phlog post

, Tomasino writes of his use of moleskine notebooks. The distillation is that starting in the late 90s he took to using them and he developed a system. The system is to write. Just write. The rationale being that a defined purpose would cause him to not use the notebook.

I can relate to this. I bought my first moleskine around 2006 or so. I have a pretty big stationary fetish. I have devoted notebooks to a purpose and empty they stayed. The reason for this was the same one Tomasino notes: that you quickly gain the notion your writing is not worthy of the book.

I got over this by an act of will, just this year. It had a lot to do with my solo RPG project. The leather cover was $40 and the moleskine $10. I forced myself, at first to write, and stuck with it. I have filled one already, and am on a second. This very morning I purchased another leather cover and moleskine (I prefer the soft cover 3.5x5.5" notebook, dotted). This one I bought for notes on Asatru.

After experimenting over the years with all types of pens, I have recently started using a .5mm mechanical pencil and have a staedtler eraser that retracts into a blue plastic barrel. The lines are crisp and mistakes vanish.

I keep a couple journals - one for personal and one for work - in 2 vimwikis. I have vimwikies on two different Raspberry Pi's (RPoD and RPoA) and use fusefs to centralize them on RPoA. This is for ease of access to the webserver on RPoD.

The journal being in vimwiki led to mental segmentation and a sort of liberation that allowed me to actually set a topic per notebook. This was hard won, however, the the cost of dozens of mostly blank notebooks lying about, useless, unloved. I have tried to revisit, even cutting out pages, but after a notebook is dead you cannot breath life back into it.

I also want to chime in on the moleskine not being merely a hipster purchase. I love the form factor, the paper, the elastic. It is all very practical. I have tried spiral bound notebooks, leather handmade ones, all the permutations between, and the moleskine just fits better. So why the pricey leather covers? Well, maybe there is a tad bit of hipster in me... or maybe I just find them sexy. It is a joy to hold, to breath in the leather scent, and yet to have my favorite notebook lie within.

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