PDFs are Taking Over the Control
Hello everyone! I wasn’t able to write you last week because on Wednesday I was dealing with a stubborn headache which made impossible to concentrate on anything and on Thursday we had a good old 5.8 earthquake. At that point I’ve decided to skip the week because I was scared what could have happened if I tried on Friday.
(Update: As I tried to write this one, Substack caused Safari to crash twice, so I’ve finished this on Firefox.)
So, how are you all doing?
One problem I’m trying to solve about work right now is organizing my research materials, which includes a lot of PDFs, ebooks, online articles and other stuff. What I need is something I can read and annotate inside it and easily search when I needed something. Also put stuff inside easily. I’ve been using Evernote for that purpose for a while but it feels a bit cluttered sometimes and also experienced some weird bugs lately so I decided to check if there’s any good alternatives.
Tried Notion, OneNote, Keep It at first. Notion and OneNote looked like a great alternative but neither of them allowed me to annotate stuff I put inside and although Notion looked really good it had more stuff I didn’t need and less I asked for. Keep It looked like a good alternative but it caused many issues on my laptop and also its web clipper didn’t worked how I wanted no matter how many times I tried. Also using Zotero for academic purposes (great for footnotes and bibliography) but it doesn’t have anything else. And I sweared to never touch Mendeley because Elsevier.
Right now only real alternative which does what I wanted (and more) is devonthink but it’s a big investment for my freelancer budget right now. (If anyone from devonthink team somehow reads this: I’m open for sponsorship deals.) And because of that I’m stuck with Evernote again. If you have any recommendations hit me up. Because I really need to organize this digital chaos as soon as possible.
From the Blog
I was actually excited for a new video game release after a really long time. I used to play and talk about video games a lot, but for many reasons I stopped talking about it and played much less through the years. This year finally decided to get a Xbox One so maybe we could play some new games in our spare time. With that, I also started to understand better why my gaming and related media consumption minimized.
One thing is definitely the stuff happening since Gamergate and “true gamerz”. When you decide to see what people are talking about online about a game you’re enjoying, there’s a good chance you’re going to find yourself in a dumpster fire.
For example, the game I was excited was Destiny 2: Shadowkeep. Which is actually a DLC for the game I started this summer and adds a good enough cosmic horror story to the game, plus bunch of extra stuff. For me that’s all cool. New things to discover, new story to play etc. Much better than starting a new game and try to learn it from scratch. When I wanted to see what people are talking about it, it was an overload of arguments which made me feel like I’m probably playing something else. Like, my mind basically exploded because of how they criticize some technical changes and basically downvote to hell anyone who doesn’t agree with them. And based on my experience, this game’s community is one of the least toxic ones.
I know, for some people this is all normal. This is what happens when people got really into a hobby comes together. And it’s normal for me to feel weirded out by all of this, because I’m an “invisible gamer”. I learned this term recently from my brother, who writes for a video game mag in Turkey and does regular Twitch streams. But he knows there are people like me exists and that’s why he’s part of the small group of people who I can talk about games.
I’m talking about this mostly because when something I enjoyed was about to be released, I noticed that I was scared to talk about it online. There were many reasons for that, like how that “true gamers” created a stereotype which makes many people to distance themselves from video games, including me. But although I’m an invisible gamer, I still want to talk about video games and write about them. But all of the things I told you stops me from doing that.
I don’t know where I’m trying to go with this one. Maybe just a disclaimer in case I write something about video games. Which is really sad because no one should feel the need to explain themselves before talking about something they like. But this is where we are now.
Side Note: I haven’t played Untitled Goose Game yet but planning to play when I get some things in order. Because I love that type of indie games and I’ll probably waste a good time on it.
WADI Filter
Google making sure we use the internet they want.
Raphaël Vinot talks about how to diversify your conferences.
Amazon’s Alexa wants to sit on your face.
Four writers talking about internet and how it broke them. (h/t Jaymo)
And that’s where this week’s newsletter ends. Hopefully I’ll return sending it on Wednesdays next week. Now I have to go finish some other work and make sure I’m ready for tomorrow’s class.
Take care and see you all soon!
Who Writes This?
Ahmet A. Sabancı (that's me), writer, journalist and researcher. Writing about many things including technology, surveillance, censorship, philosophy, science fiction and futures and occasionally about politics and Turkey. There’s a good chance you found me through my blog or Twitter or maybe some nice people recommended this newsletter to you. You can find more about me here and small selection of my writings here.