Obsidian Resources Masterpost
This is a masterpost of all the useful resources I’ve collected for using Obsidian. Hopefully some of them will also be useful to you, and I’ll try to keep this post updated whenever I find new and exciting stuff!
General Obsidian
Download and install Obsidian
Obsidian Help
Obsidian Glossary
Beginners Guide to Obsidian
How to get started with Obsidian: a guide for Autistics & ADHDers
Youtube
My personal playlist of Obsidian-related videos
Danny Talks Tech
Nicole van der Hoeven
FromSergio
Jonathan Pritchard Obsidian Tutorials
Josh Plunkett Obsidian for TTRPG Videos
Vault Showcases & Use Examples
The best way to get an idea of what you can do in Obsidian is to look at what other people have done. This is a collection of articles, videos, and Obsidian Publish Vaults showing various setups and processes so you can get inspired!
Writing a novel in Markdown - PD Workman
(2024) Obsidian For TTRPG - Template Vault | Campaign Manager
How I Plan and Write Fiction in Obsidian – Vanessa Glau
SlRvb - Obsidian Publish
Obsidian TTRPG Tutorials
SoRobby/ObsidianStarterVault: Organize your Universe
How I structure my Obsidian vault (Obsidian tour 2023) - Nicole va der Hoeven
Obsidian - 2024 Intro for TTRPG and Worldbuilders
Form, Function, & Fun! - My Obsidian Vault Tour [2024] - CyanVoxel
Markdown
Obsidian uses markdown to format text, so these are some resources to help you out with that.
Markdown Syntax - Obsidian Hub
Basic Syntax | Markdown Guide
Markdown Reference
Basic formatting syntax - Obsidian Help
CSS & Styling
You can just use Obsidian as-is, but it’s so much fun to customise it and waste all the time you should be doing work on making it look pretty. These resources cover various plugins and ways of prettifying your vault, as well as some CSS resources, since Obsidian uses CSS for styling.
How to Style Obsidian
Default Obsidian Theme Colors
CSS reference
CSS Tutorial
CSS-Tricks
CSS Gradient — Generator, Maker, and Background
MarkSheet: a free HTML and CSS tutorial
ITS Theme: Image Adjustment Snippets + ITS Theme - SlRvb's Documentation
Banners: add banners to your notes
colored tags: Colorizes tags in different colors.
MySnippets Plugin: adds a status bar menu allowing the user to quickly manage their snippets within the comfort of their workspace
style settings: A dynamic user interface for adjusting theme, plugin, and snippet CSS variables
Plugins
A highly opinionated collection of plugins—all of these are ones I either currently use or have used. Organised loosely from simple to complex. Links go to the github pages, which have install instructions, but the easiest way is to install them directly from the plugins manager inside Obsidian.
smart typography: Converts quotes to curly quotes, dashes to em dashes, and periods to ellipses
url into selection: Paste URLs into selected text
better word count: Counts the words of selected text in the editor.
short links: plugin to display short internal links.
editing toolbar
omnisearch: A search engine that "just works" for Obsidian. Supports OCR and PDF indexing.
outliner: Work with your lists like in Workflowy or RoamResearch
Advanced tables: Improved table navigation, formatting, and manipulation
longform: A plugin that helps you write and edit novels, screenplays, and other long projects.
periodic notes: Create/manage your daily, weekly, and monthly notes in Obsidian
workspaces plus: Quickly switch and manage Obsidian workspaces
hover editor: Transform the Page Preview hover into a working editor instance
advanced uri: Advanced modes for Obsidian URI
dataview: A high-performance data index and query language over Markdown files + Dataview
Commander | Add Commands to every part of Obsidian's user interface
QuickAdd for Obsidian + Getting Started | QuickAdd
check out my obsidian tag for more posts / got questions? want to say hi?
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I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.
You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.
But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.
So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".
But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).
Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.
Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.
"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.
So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?
The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).
In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.
And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)
This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.
The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).
This one is just confusing.
The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...
And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).
This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.
Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.
References
Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.
McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.
Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.
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