The Perfect Format for Asides (an aside)

For a long time now, but especially since I started using this blog, I've been very concerned with the correct way to include tangents and asides in my text. I'm a chronic rambler, and being able to consign the particularly unrelated parts of what I'm writing to a purely optional area of the page is very important to continue pretending like I can maintain some kind of flow. It's your fault that you clicked on it and broke your train of thought, not mine! Originally it never occurred to me that there might be some native markdown for it, so I was using full html tags to link within the page1, because it's what I was used to. I only recently learned about the [^1] syntax for footnotes, and installed a plugin to make it even easier. Bliss, surely. But in truth, that's not what I want. Footnotes are great for three situations - complete non-sequiters, to recommend further reading, and when you're dealing with printed media. In a single long page, a footnote linked in paragraph one just…