"Inspiration lists" in my new JDecimal system

[lmailhol (Luca)]

Hello,

First of all, thank you very much. I found out about JD a year ago, but hadn’t yet taken the time to really get started. The release of the “Life Admin” system helped me get rolling, as it’s so complete.

I haven’t yet implemented my work projects (I’m a bit of a freelancer). But first, I wanted to add my “knowledge base”, in which one will find my “inspirations”, to my current system.

Up until then, I’d only used Bear to manage, among other things: film lists, exhibition lists, artist lists… Often with a few notes, some images.

As I see it, the huge advantage of JDecimal lies in the fact that I can continue to use Bear as an index, while at the same time having a “physical” folder in my Finder in which I can store images, among other things.

Nevertheless, I wonder about the presentation of this index.

For example, if I take the idea of the movie list, I’ll have something like :

• 20-29 Knowledge base
  • 21 Inspiration
    • 21.11 Films I’ve seen
      • Collateral
        • stills-1.jpg
        • stills-2.jpg
      • Eraserhead
      • Full Metal Jacket
      • (…)

Ideally I’d like a note for each film. And not a single note for ID 21.11.
First, I thought of something like that.

As it is, it works, but when I click on category 21, Bear obviously shows me the IDs plus the films. Add to that artists, music, exhibitions or whatever by the dozen and it’s going to get pretty messy.

So I thought I’d create an ID for each film. But I think I’ll soon run out of IDs, and more importantly, I won’t have enough 10 categories. Actually, that seems to go against the whole idea of the system.

Maybe I can manage just fine with the way described above. But maybe I’m missing something, especially with this idea of extending the system.

I have the impression that the problem also comes from Bear’s tag system. But I like this program, I’d like to avoid migrating everything to Obsidian, for example, if I can.

I’m just wondering what you think!

Thank you so much for reading. I hope everything is clear.

[clappingcactus (John)]

In my note-taking system, my library all follows academic reference notation.

Hitchcock1956 can be The Man Who Knew Too Much
Hitchcock1956a can be The Wrong Man

All media, and indeed research articles, get a last name + year of release of media as their name.

This means that ten years later, if I’m taking a note about something I already took a note about in my system, I will still stumble on its old name/link.

This allows the naming of these objects to be near immutable over time, unlike any JD-ID-ification.

Finally, I don’t tag media/library objects. I link them within my notes [[Hitchcock1956]] ; this way I can find all my notes about the film, but also all the days I took notes about the film from the film’s own note.

I recently realized that JD-IDs are helpful for things that don’t naturally have an address. Mostly, thoughts, or groups of objects that are meaningful to me.

When I can pick up an item, and give it to another person (let’s say a recipe, or a film), I should aim to have the naming scheme for that object be as universal as possible.

Hope my thoughts on this spark something for you.

[lmailhol (Luca)]

Hey clappingcactus,

On the one hand, your thoughts seem interesting. But I have to admit that I’m having a hard time fully visualizing what it looks like in a software like Bear or even in a file system.

Anyway, I’m also looking for a clear note per film, which I can easily turn into a text file to save. And into which I can return a year, two years, ten years later to add things.
A long time ago, I kept a single org-mode file in which I listed everything. It was pretty handy as long as it wasn’t too big and didn’t have any images (and I never really got the hang of emacs, unfortunately…).

Nevertheless, unlike you, I’d tend to name this note by the title of the film, or something like Title, Director (year).

In any case, thank you very much for your reply !

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[EDIT] - A sort of solution

Well, as usual when you re-read the manual, you find the answers to your problems on your own. At least a start.

I found Bear’s “Hide Subtag Notes” option. Going back to my exemple on the original post, when I click on category 21, Bear only lists the various IDs. If I click on the ID, only the movies are displayed.

The only problem is that if I click on the area, I get nothing! But I can probably live with that…

(Anyway, still curious to learn more about your system, clappingcactus).

[clappingcactus (John)]

Sorry I didn’t explain it very well. If I applied my logic to your system here’s what files I’d end up with:

Filename - Theme of Content
21.11 - Movies I have Watched
21.12 - Music I Have Liked
21.13 - Museums I have Visited
Kubrick1987 - My main note for Full Metal Jacket the movie
Lynch1977 - My main note for Eraserhead the movie
Mann2004 - My main note for Collateral the movie

Example content of what’s inside a file:

21.11 - Movies I have Recently Watched

2025-03-03 - [[Lynch1977]] - This time it raised my curiosity ; what deformity am I protecting from the world? Is the world uglier on the inside than the outside? How do we choose what we protect?
2025-03-02 - [[Kubrick1987]] - I like how this movie was split in two
2025-03-01 - [[Mann2004]] - I love noir films
2025-02-28 - [[Lynch1977]] - I didn’t understand what Lynch was saying at all

Lynch1977 - Eraserhead

stored: Bookshelf #1 under “E”

Referenced:
[[21.11]] - 2025-03-03
[[21.11]] - 2025-02-28

My note taking app automatically turns [] into links and organizes them at the footer of the note being linked. All I have to do is write naturally. So my trick of using lastnameYEAR as the file name then allows me to write naturally in every moment, but have every fact searchable bi-directionally. It also allows me to “accidentally” years later write the same lastnameYEAR and realize I’ve already listened to album or read a particular short story.

[lmailhol (Luca)]

Ok, I understand the logic much better. It does make sense. In any case, I quite like the feeling of a more “organic” way of proceeding, as opposed to a fixed list.

(and I like the idea of trying to see Eraserhead again just a few days later, in your example )

I’m going to keep working on setting up my system. It’s not impossible that I’ll take some inspiration from all this.

Thanks for sharing!