If you take time out after some criticism to digest it, and plan to respond eventually – say so early on!

Else it can look like you decided to just ignore them.

#slipbox

An issue with org-roam and many other digital slipboxes: titles are mandatory.

Maybe this suits Jethro and the other developers, and it suited me when I first started. Coming from a world where all files we ever create must be given a title, it wouldn't have occurred to me as something I'd want to live without. Besides, the title was how I used to find those files in the first place. But I found advice by a zettelkasten blogger (maybe it was Alex Keyhayias or Andy Matuschak) to try the original pen-and-paper Luhmann system for at least a while.

With the Luhmann system, most notes lack titles.

Freedom from titles means:

• You avoid the mental work of titling things
• Notes really do stand and fall with their connections

I used to worry about whether to title notes as nouns or as active statements. Matuschak even has ideas about titles as a kind of API…

But suppose that all new notes just got a random number as title unless you deign to re-title it later. And suppose we modify all our commands such as org-roam-node-insert to use ripgrep for matches in body texts instead of a title search. In a way, we'd treat the bodies as titles to themselves (kind of Logseq-ish!). Any titles matter less since we'd not depend on them to find the right note.

That boils down to a couple of lessons we can learn right now, if we still use mandatory titles:

1. Don't sweat the titles – write the first title that comes to mind, and think of them as near-random slugs that only maybe incidentally say something about the content
2. Rely first of all on the presence of interlinks to find any note – so refer to topic notes when you're looking for a note you remember. Rely second on ripgrep or filesystem order (both date created and date modified have analogues in the pen-and-paper system), and last (or never) on org-roam-node-find.

Undesirables:

• Mosquitoes
• Flies
• Slugs
• Ticks

Hunters:

• Bats
• Dragonflies
• Toads & other reptiles
• Small birds

Arrange a pond for reptiles and dragonflies, but be mindful that ponds also breed mosquitoes, so build it in a way that favours dragonflies and eliminate other still water bodies in the area, such as open rainwater collectors.

Build bird houses and especially bat houses (endangered), but be mindful that they can prey on your dragonflies.

Selecting a plot of land

• If your plot of land includes a stream, that should attract many predators. Use it to build a pond too.
• To reduce flies, find land far from cattle farms.
• To reduce mosquitoes and bugs in general, find high ground far from lakes.
• If you own the forest next to it, improve its biodiversity.
  • undo the monoculture and randomly sow a diverse set of plants and fungi
  • make lots of houses for bats, birds, hedgehogs, squirrel, …
  • erect cairns (piles of stone)
  • make open sandy areas
  • set up a beehive that you leave alone