The Obsidian Galaxy

The past week has been defined by waves of creative re-organizing between attempts to improve my "SEO" past the dismal state it currently is in and improve the way my setting is organized to make it more useful for publishing and actively expanding again.

For added context, I have an obsidian vault which organizes the galaxy I have built out over the years. And in recent weeks, ive come to realize the old folder system just was too convoluted and hurt the discoverability of notes and connections to crippling degrees. So I took an axe to to the old way of doing things and went about two sets of activities this week.

Epoch 7903 SEO { scifi space+opera postbiology starfish+alien cyberpunk biopunk eldritch warp hyperspace megastructure game symbiont galactic mad+utopia space world agent automata sulfuric hydrocarbon system multimedia }

The SEO is a mix of terms taken from the word cloud and how I have come to more clearly define what it is I do and what this setting is. Epoch 7903 (formerly known as the Sprawlverse but I found out that word already describes Gibson's Nueromancer and for years hesitated to change names as I didn't have a better name until recently. Not to mention with how a new phase has been reached with the projects be it the Daedalus Game System, Cyborg game prototype, interactive story projects that have been on the backburner, an 'introductory story' I am calling Epoch 7903 or the Relay talks on my discord channel there is an added pressure to sell stuff so I can spend more time doing this instead of drowning in gig work. So the need to have a clearer branding and terms that rapidly get the ideas across has grown dramatically.

The genre in the simplest term is cyberpunk space opera with influences ranging from Charles Stross, Greg Bear and Ian M Banks to stuff like Star Control and Vangelis music tracks. The influences are very multimedia in nature as this project is very multimedia in nature. Additionally, quite a bit of the world building has game design considerations built into it which led to quite a bit of overthinking on how the galaxy is balanced. (Yes the energy to mass converting galactic civilization is balanced with the upstart civ that just cracked fusion.)

Mad Utopia also comes up a lot because I am influenced by the idea of civilizations where idealism takes over as the more basal needs we know are so met that the pursuit of higher ideals and the positive feedback loops these can cause become a significant cause of conflict in place of wars or fights over material scarcity.

However the SEO efforts got displaced by a shift of priority to more general organizing, especially with respect to my obsidian vault which has been very stagnant for months.

The cause of the stagnation I charted to the ineffective folder organization, which had gotten overly bespoke in nature and hard to navigate. Its arbitrary segregation of subject matters also proved blinding, there was multiple notes that covered redundant territory from how I simply forgot that file explaining it even existed. In short, it was a lot of stuff that should have been handled using the bulk metadata or the tagging system. And so I made a new vault which reflected a more streamlined framework. I even had to use a shell command script to pull out the files from all the redundant folders and consolidate them into a single folder as it would have taken over an hour just to get started on such a move otherwise.

The advantage of this is not clear at first glance, but the basic gist of this is that it makes other ideas ive had like 'catered knowledge' for different players in a game or being able to just pull information from the vault much quicker even if it is much more reliant on the tagging/metadata. A lot of linking and editing is underway on the vault, but the end goal of 'context' based vaults is back on the range of possibilities. Having a spoiler free online vault for common use or a portfolio vault with the best articles to showcase are just a couple examples of how the vault may get used.

Additionally, there was a lot of information I had stored in extensive JSON files for Project Daedalus game activities that I wanted to integrate back into the vaults. In order to do this, I had to make JSONtoMD conversions. I also may attempt MDtoJSON conversions so the information can get loaded anywhere I want it to be loaded, be it the character creator I posted earlier in the year on my itch.io or the Daedalus Game System bot that my server has. The aggregation of all these new .md files made from JSON fields and entries led to a reshaping of whole node graph produced by Obsidian's node graph module in general.

Here is the before and after on the Sprawlverse node graph and the Epoch 7903 node graph:

The most noticeable difference is that the imported items catalog and currency articles congealed into a strong 'atoll' region due to the nexus of currency articles interlinked with the item articles. All of these have crossing links between the currency types by design, which resulted in the strong clustering. Other differences also are present but they are less immediately obvious. How it'll evolve with further revisions, links and tagging is not currently clear. But it is clear that the shift to a streamlined vault already has netted significant results.

To see how Epoch 7903 evolves going forward, you may also contact me on discord (ID: zoppadoppa) or follow my bluesky account. Also, if you want to financially support these endeavors, I have a kofi which includes a brushpack for procreate and a funding goal for October.

And of course, be sure to subscribe to this newsletter to get these updates as soon as they are published: