S1 PRIMER
The What
A note about a film should feel like the film. A brew log should read like the back of the bag. A game I finished should sit on a shelf the way it sat in the store. Somewhere in the small hours that stopped being a nice idea and became a rule, and the rule is what this whole volume is about.
There is no master stylesheet doing the work, no single file the cards all bow to. What they share is a shape. Every card in the file runs the same four beats. A rule decides which notes it claims, reading one line of frontmatter and nothing else. A template bakes the note’s facts into the card before anything moves. A script wakes after that and fills the rest, the parts no template could know in advance. And a separate one-shot writes the note in the first place, so I am typing a title, not a database row. Rule, template, script, maker. Learn the four and every later part is just one card bending them.
The family resemblance is not inheritance. It is discipline. Each card carries its own styling, its own template, its own logic, and leans only on the Bureau’s shared colors and fonts to keep them looking like kin. I built it that way on purpose. A card you can lift out whole, paste into another vault, and watch run is worth more to me than a tidy shared library that ties all ten together and lets none of them move. They drift, and that is the point. The day I want the recipes card to grow up differently from the movies card, nothing is in the way.
The Why
I didn’t build this because the vault needed it. I built it because a plain list of titles is a database, and I wanted a shelf. The classification tiers, the file numbers, the redaction bars came later, once it was clear the cards could carry a little theater without lying about the data underneath.
What follows is the apparatus, one card at a time. The rule that catches a movie. The script that samples a poster for its color and repaints the card to match. The template that reorganizes a recipe whether I wrote it tidy or not. Same four beats, ten different rooms, each one able to stand on its own. Start anywhere. They were all built in the same house, and any one of them can leave it.