It turns out second time is *not* the charm. Listen: I tried, okay? I really, really tried to make it work with my Hobonichi. And frankly, I'm proud of how far I got! Two months straight of writing is much further than I think I expected to get, at least in the back of my head. But as much I love the make and feel of it, and how much I loved using my beautiful tombow pen, which will remain my primary writing tool for probably the rest of my life: I am just not built for paper journals. I still believe in the benefits of physical writing, and continue to outline my posts or capture random ideas in a notebook when I'm at my desk. But for me the paper buck stops at journaling. And it's simply because my brain is broken. My hands cannot keep pace with the amount of journaling I need to do to stay sane and work on myself as a person. Just the thought of trying to write about how I'm feeling when I'm constantly feeling *so much, all the time* makes my wrist preemptively ache. I gave it the old college try, but it simply isn't in the cards. Instead, like all things, I've returned to Obsidian to get this done. My daily note used to just be a dataview table of notes I've created and updated on that given day. But now it's also where all my journaling goes throughout the day. I use a global shortcut that lets me append to the bottom of my daily note, so I can journal about something whenever I'm at my desk and feel or think a random thought or want to make a note, too, and then write out final thoughts on my phone before I go to bed. This journaling has the added benefit of letting me [link stuff together even more](https://help.obsidian.md/link-notes), which is still one of Obsidian's best features. And becomes I'm super extra, I'm using the [Tracker Plugin](https://github.com/pyrochlore/obsidian-tracker) to track my mood with a tag property that's embedded into each daily note. ![[Giving Up on the Hobonichi-1741546656494.png]] Could I just use a regular mood tracking app? Yes, but that would be normal! Which I'm not! That's the whole throughline of most of the things in this website, in case you didn't notice. So yeah, no Hobonichi next year, I think. For once technology's usefulness wins out for me, which isn't common. I actually used to journal a ton using [Day One](https://dayoneapp.com/), back when I was deep in the Mac ecosystem (it didn't have an Android app at the time - I'm old). But when I wanted to switch to Windows, getting my entries out from that app was such a pain in the ass that the idea of losing more of my journaling scared me off from doing journaling digitally at all. Thankfully Obsidian's ubiquitous nature in generating everything in Markdown makes it easy to access these daily notes should I ever need to move on or convert them. Maybe I'll even combine them all yearly and turn them into a physical book or something. Who knows! Anyways rest in peace Hobonichi. At least I become [[Earthbound|enough of an Earthbound fan]] to earn that Mr. Saturn cover though. :P