Paper is the real 'killer app'

MD were such a beautiful thing. I still wonder what would have been if Sony decided to drop it as an open storage medium. Considering it was released in 1992 ... could you imagine.

There's something I recently felt deep and weird about. The society is a double rotating system. We live, we want to solve problems, the solutions become a new ground replacing the past, not solving it.

When I look at old tech (big hifi tuner, vu meters, etc), I still deeply love it. The electro mechanical beauty is still there. Same for video games, or old software (I love win3.1 and 95 to bits, if I could patch the flawed core without changing the UX of that period I'd do it...). Without the commercial need to appeal money that fueled future versions like XP or Vista.

I saw things like the pico8 project, which gives a somehow modern hardware but with 8bit mindset: low res, 256 colors. People made damn beautiful games out of it. Really cool animations, gameplay, design. No need for a PS4 pro. My new pleasure is tweaking old platforms to give them "modern" day usage. Like retrofitting BT in a car radio. Or modding an old HP calc (longer battery, usb).

For past several years I have Command+W mapped to sublime text opening text file named wiki for any notes on computer. Mostly copy paste and ctrl+f.

For any TODO or small notes i fall back to half sized index cards 3"x2.5".

For brainstorm use yellow legal pads with pilot V5 and tear them off once done.

I think you are right but I am also not sure how to change that.

We have Behance, Dribble, Pinterest, Instragram etc. all streams of great work which is kind of a different approach.

But I think there is value to the tangibility and history of creating these folders and having them there.

It's just a what humans find valuable kind of thing.

I have dysgraphia, which is a disability which cognitively affects my ability to write, much like dyslexia affects one's ability to read. Writing is extremely taxing for me, to the point where I will be physically exhausted if I hand write a page of text. I've tried every technology I can think of in an attempt to accommodate my disability. I've been using a computer to take notes for 20 years. I've tried every voice recognition technology you can think of. I've tried every note-taking app I can get my hands on. I've owned more portable devices than I can remember.

In my experience, nothing beats a pen and paper.

I doubt there is anyone on the planet who would be happier to ditch paper than me. While the issues I have with writing are primarily cognitive, writing is far more taxing than typing for me. While writing, Typing avoids any of the cognitive issues I have with physically forming letters -- the computer takes care of that for me -- and spelling and grammar check generally prevents me from leaving words out or jumbling up my word order. However, using a computer FORCES you to write. On a piece of paper, I can draw a diagram (my drawing ability is unaffected) and label key parts. I can make a flow chart. I can draw arrows all over the place. I can literally do millions of things other than writing words on a piece of paper.

Doing these things on a computer is a nightmare. Even if an application has the ability to do any one of these things, it generally pales in comparison to the versatility of writing. Sure, you might be able to move things around on a computer, something that is far more difficult on paper, however I've found it's generally faster to re-draw a flow chart than it is to fix the formatting on a computer if you need to move more than a couple of items around.

Beyond that, your work area with a computer is extremely limited. I have to concentrate so hard when writing that I often forget what I was writing about. I've literally cut up papers I've written in to their individual sentences, spread them on the floor, and rearranged them so that they make sense. I can make a flow chart with thousands of elements, and place it in a place where I can see all of it at once, but also make it big enough to read all of it at once.

Paper isn't all great though. I can't stand writing on paper. It takes me forever. Plus organizing paper is a nightmare. Need to find all of the references you've made to a certain person in the past six months? Prepare to spend a few days combing through your stuff. Backing up paper is time consuming as well, and searching paper back-ups is a huge pain, especially if your handwriting sucks too much for OCR.

Wipebook, on their webpage, claim they are available in Staples: https://wipebook.com/pages/faqs