Mary Lucia Thao Darst is a filmmaker, writer, and musician. She holds a DPhil in Music from Oxford University and an MA from Columbia University. She is a writer with the Austrian Economics Center, has held three fellowships with the Moving Picture Institute, and is a classically-trained violist and songwriter-composer.

Mary’s substack / digital humanities project: www.oxforddawn.com.

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PHYSICAL

• Wacom Intuos tablet. This is an old, and now discontinued, tablet that my Oxford college gave me for making the illustrations for my doctoral thesis. After I used it for that, I set it aside for several years. But then I started composing music again, and I realized that I could use the tablet and its pen to write music notation into my notation software in a more physically natural way than using a computer mouse. Because the tablet is discontinued, getting the drivers to work with my computer takes a bit of tweaking, but it’s all a learning experience.
• Richard Bassett’s book For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1619 – 1918. His book has been on my TBR for several years now. I’m finally getting around to it, after having read Bassett’s Last Days in Old Europe in the meantime.
• Audio Technica QuietPoint headphones. These headphones are old, and they’re in terrible shape cosmetically. They are in such bad shape that I’m not sharing a photo because I’m embarrassed by them. Because Audio Technica has discontinued the model, I can’t replace them. So I just keep repairing them. They’ve been a real workhorse set, surviving audition preparation, film sets, lots of travel, and even serving as adequate studio monitors.

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DIGITAL

• Obsidian note-taking application. During my doctorate, I used Evernote since most people at my institution used it. Then I moved to Notion. However, recently, I had a bad experience of vendor lock-in, so I began moving my notes to Obsidian because I like that the underlying files are plain markdown, and I like the ability to link notes to each other.
• Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking YouTube channel. Once I realized I had to move almost ten years of notes from one application to another, I knew I had to take the time to learn how to use Obsidian before starting the migration. Milo’s channel has been invaluable for this. I haven’t taken any of his courses, but given the quality of his YouTube content, I’m open to doing so.

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INVISIBLE

“Structure must be earned.”

Nick Milo quoted this in one of his videos. I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve been batting it around in my mind. I’m someone who tends toward making overly elaborate organizational structures, e.g. too many folders and sub-folders in my note-taking application, but then the structure is so over-engineered that I can’t find things when I need them. This quote has made me slow down and spend several days thinking of how I am using a note, document, music excerpt, etc. before filing it.

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09/16/26