I love this! I'm exactly like the author except a little less organized.
Some of my insights just to add to this:
1) I started curating existing collections to delete/cut down size. So I have a tv shows folder and I made a _cut folder and moved every show that I wasn't sure if I liked or if it was something I wanted to keep. This left the main folder with only my _absolute favorite_ shows.
2) I use sqlite for movie/tv/music/game/bookmarks databases and i try to combine data from different sources so like I combine imdb and boxofficemojo data in one sqlite db so that I know how many theaters every movie opened in and the rest of the info like actors/director/etc.
3) I make websites with lists and/or "collections" of the movies/things I like the most, and my personal stuff like code. That way I have to select and curate all of the items so that they are organized and accessible. Making a website is like publishing so can't publish drafts or half-finished stuff. Making a website for something really helps finishing the organization and collating all the disparate info.
4) Scraping info for all new movies/games/tv shows into the sqlite db's. Website for searching/browsing based on genre/whatever, and having the info locally (no third party).
5) Only publishing working code without any cruft to github. Makes it so I know every single commit in the commit history works and there is no need to organize everything since it was already organized and "fixed" when commiting. Also is essentially ALL code that I care to keep (I have a lot more "work in progress" code locally but that doesn't matter, only the published finished code matters), and of course local clone of all the repos.
6) I have a text file with all my command line one liners, tweaks and tricks for linux and/or website things but this is the one area where I am less organized. I don't externalize all the things I "know" as much, but I want to. I use my own memory for most things like that but would be nice to have a knowledge graph of some kind - looking into Obsidian.
Thanks for sharing your approach, very interesting! You went way farther with the movie/TV/music/game/bookmarks management, that's super cool.
At some point I went batshit crazy with automation and actually automated scraping, downloading of episodes, tracking of what I saw and did not. But over time I just let it all go because I didn't have the buffer to maintain all that anymore.
I omitted various things because I got tired; the article was way too long already
Some of my insights just to add to this: 1) I started curating existing collections to delete/cut down size. So I have a tv shows folder and I made a _cut folder and moved every show that I wasn't sure if I liked or if it was something I wanted to keep. This left the main folder with only my _absolute favorite_ shows.
2) I use sqlite for movie/tv/music/game/bookmarks databases and i try to combine data from different sources so like I combine imdb and boxofficemojo data in one sqlite db so that I know how many theaters every movie opened in and the rest of the info like actors/director/etc.
3) I make websites with lists and/or "collections" of the movies/things I like the most, and my personal stuff like code. That way I have to select and curate all of the items so that they are organized and accessible. Making a website is like publishing so can't publish drafts or half-finished stuff. Making a website for something really helps finishing the organization and collating all the disparate info.
4) Scraping info for all new movies/games/tv shows into the sqlite db's. Website for searching/browsing based on genre/whatever, and having the info locally (no third party).
5) Only publishing working code without any cruft to github. Makes it so I know every single commit in the commit history works and there is no need to organize everything since it was already organized and "fixed" when commiting. Also is essentially ALL code that I care to keep (I have a lot more "work in progress" code locally but that doesn't matter, only the published finished code matters), and of course local clone of all the repos.
6) I have a text file with all my command line one liners, tweaks and tricks for linux and/or website things but this is the one area where I am less organized. I don't externalize all the things I "know" as much, but I want to. I use my own memory for most things like that but would be nice to have a knowledge graph of some kind - looking into Obsidian.
Anyway great post.