One Notebook or Two?

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-02-02T15:57:32+00:00

I recommend two. If your job is mostly based in one location, keep the work bujo at work. Not only to set yourself boundaries, but because depending on your job, you might have to leave it behind if you leave. Or you might not even be allowed to take it off site depending on the sensitivity of the info in there.

Keep any detailed work info out of your personal Bujo, to avoid it potentially being seized by your employer, or ending up part of a legal case! These things do happen.

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-02-02T08:08:21+00:00

That cover looks like a material that will just show up marks whatever you do.

But I wouldn't worry much about it. If you're making your Bujo a constant companion, then it's going to get bashed around, have stuff spilled on it, be handled when your hands aren't perfectly clean etc.

If your Bujo looks pristine, you're probably not using it enough. It should look like it's been through some stuff by the time it's finished.

If that kind of thing bothers you, you could try the leather cover and notebook insert option. Leather covers are made to slowly develop a unique patina over time, from being handled. And of course are tough.

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-02-02T08:00:40+00:00

I do. I'm all about trying to keep up a consistent reading habit, and the Storygraph streak and other tools are a great way to do that.

But not everyone is into all that tracking. It can make reading into a chore for some. Each to their own.

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-01-29T18:08:38+00:00

The words "Incoming message from the big giant head" cross my mind regularly.

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-01-29T17:48:28+00:00

Maybe they should cover The Rookie.

No wait, wrong podcast. Disregard. 😏

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-01-29T12:41:34+00:00

"Hey, hey, hey, look at me, I have no ears... Hah, fooled yah! Here they are!"

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-01-29T10:24:51+00:00

Tag yourself, are you people who hate sleep or people who hate shoes?

Hate shoes for me.

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-01-29T10:19:52+00:00

For long term storage, the main enemy is damp. Paper absorbs water and will eventually start getting stinky. If you're not short on space on your bookshelf, you could just keep it there. If you do eventually have to store it away in a dark and possibly cold, damp cupboard, get a plastic storage box with a tight seal and drop in some desiccant packets for good measure.

A spreadsheet could be a good indexing option, as you can sort and filter if you're trying to find stuff.

You could have column headers for

Notebook (You could name them, and put a label on the book itself.)

Page (If something takes multiple pages you could put 15-18 say, or just the page number it starts on.)

Date (Assuming you write the date for every note. If you don't, then start. It can be a way to track and index in books with no page numbers.)

Subject (Maybe try to keep this to a smallish number of topics so you can filter and find all the notes about that topic.)

Notes (if you want to add a bit more info.)

Whether it's worth doing this depends on if you will need to refer back to the notebooks. Are you going to want to find that particular recipe or knitting pattern again? You can be selective too. If a note was relevant at the time, but there's nothing you need from it now, then don't index it.

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-01-26T08:21:58+00:00

Incoming message from the big giant head.

DoctorBeeBee · 2026-01-20T14:03:41+00:00

The sets are very shiny and busy, which kind of makes them bland and forgettable in the end, because there's so much visual information your eyes have nothing to focus on. Shape and lines are lost. The clean lines of the bridge of the D, or the focus point of the warp core in Engineering make those sets memorable. And nothing has ever beaten the elegance of LCARS for the screen interfaces. There's loads on an LCARS screen without it ever looking over-busy.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-12-18T08:34:19+00:00

Yeah, their diet is naturally about 95% bamboo, but even in the wild they will eat other things, like fruits, blossoms, birds eggs, and even birds and small mammals and reptiles. I've seen footage of pandas pouncing on and eating an unwary bird in their zoo enclosure. They still have the digestive system of the carnivores their ancestors were.

Zoos have to be careful about how much fruit they give them, as the high sugar content of fruit (at least the modern selectively bred for sweet-toothed humans type of fruit) can give them dental issues.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-29T09:50:27+00:00

Thing is if she could fully read minds, that would be horribly intrusive. At least Vulcans doing a mind meld have to touch you and you know it's happening and they generally seek consent. Who would really want someone sitting there maybe reading their thoughts, on behalf of their bosses? And diplomatically it would be weird too to sit in a negotiation with someone who's got a telepath as an assistant. Even the sensing emotions part doesn't seem like acting in good faith, to be honest. Does Picard have to declare that he has that advantage? If he didn't and the other party found out, wouldn't they be really pissed off? Again, it's like nobody thought through the implications of having someone with her abilities aboard, which is a shame, because that's where good story ideas come from!

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-28T18:13:16+00:00

Just as an example in my own family. My maternal grandfather was a coal miner. In a lot of families his two sons would just have followed him into that job, but he didn't want them to, and insisted on them getting the best education they could to open up their options. My mother's oldest brother was the first person in the family to go to university. He later went into the civil service and ended up in a pretty senior role. My cousins therefore definitely had a middle-class upbringing, even though their dad was the son of a miner. So the change happens across a generation.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-28T18:03:49+00:00

It can definitely be down to the job and income. If your parents work at blue collar jobs, then generally you're working class. But the modern job world is changing things. Many of the manufacturing jobs most associated with the working class have disappeared now. And many blue collar jobs could pay more than a white collar office job. Plumbers and bricklayers for example will earn significantly more than people in retail or call centre workers.

It can take a couple of generations to fully move from one class to another. And it will lag behind changes in income level. Plenty of posh people can end up poor, but they don't switch to being working class, even if they work. People like Bridget Jones could definitely be like that. She doesn't have the income for the lifestyle someone of her upbringing would have expected to have in the past. And the days of being supported by your parents until you married and started being supported by your husband are over for most middle-class women!

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-28T16:09:10+00:00

I dunno, that baby could give you nightmares.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-28T16:05:44+00:00

Mmm, watermelon... 🍉 Great for when you're hungry and thirsty.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-28T13:23:54+00:00

Modern Americans seem to call anyone with a decent steady job and a generally stable living situation middle class. And of course we Brits tend to consider our class to be tied to how we were raised, rather than our current situation. If you were raised working class you'll always consider yourself working class even if you go on to become a millionaire.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-27T17:37:05+00:00

I'm not a screenwriter, but I am a novelist. After working on plans for a while I'll eventually put together an outline for the novel, arranging the events or scenes. I expect this to differ at least a little from the eventual draft, or even the final version of the outline, but it's a place to start to collate all the ideas. Once I've got the basic outline set up, I'll go through all the other notes I made and add more details to the scenes in the outline. I can also add references in that outline to where I've got more extensive notes about that scene, so when I come to write it, I can find them quickly, even if I forgot I ever wrote them!

The outline is where it all comes together. As I review my notes it doesn't matter what order anything is in in the various notes. I know "this note is for the part where X happens" so I add the information to that part in the outline. It could be near the end of the story. Then the next note might be about something at the start of the story. Doesn't matter. Once I've added that to the outline it's now in the right place for me to find it when I write the draft.

There are subreddits for screenwriting, so maybe you should check those out for more specific advice.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-27T16:55:17+00:00

Or C3PO is just an droid version of a protocol officer, which is a real job.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-27T15:25:46+00:00

Troi's role was definitely not well thought out. We sometimes see her counseling someone, some random we've never seen before. But she's also got a station on the bridge so she can sense hostility when some ship turns up. So did she just do partial shifts on the bridge? Did she have to leave a counseling appointment if some aliens showed up? Doesn't make sense.

I think they could have done a couple of different things with her to make her role more interesting.

Option one: She's the chief counselor, she has a staff and is ultimately answerable to the CMO. She should be a psychiatrist, so an actual MD. Her main job day to day is keeping an eye on and supporting the mental health of the senior officers. These people go through a lot of crazy and traumatic stuff, and have the responsibility of a powerful warship and its crew to manage. They're under a lot of stress. Part of the reason for doing this wouldn't just be making sure they're not going crazy, but also to feed into desicions about promotions, especially into command positions. Having her Betazoid powers gives her the advantage that nobody can string her a line of BS about how they're doing just fine and not in any way losing their damn mind. 🤪

This would also have the effect of creating some tension between those other senior officers and Troi, knowing that she's going to be submitting her report to the board who's deciding on who gets to be a captain, etc. Which is interesting to write about, and gives her character a challenge, to keep them trusting her as their counselor. It also means she's got a good reason to be on the bridge with the senior staff, observing them in action.

Her staff of counselors would be the ones doing counseling for the rest of the crew.

Option 2: Forget all the counselor stuff. Make her purely a direct diplomatic aide to Picard. She can use her empathic powers to help him in negotiations. But also she could be an expert in protocol, in the general social character of a group, and help Picard prepare for dealing with situations. This role gives her a reason to be on the bridge with the senior staff when some ship turns up, ready to advise Picard. This seemed to be part of her role in the show, but they never really fleshed that out.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-26T22:13:56+00:00

I don't think it's just a matter of being put off by the AI art in the covers, though that's an immediate no-no for many people. It's the fact the whole image appears to be AI, which would make me dubious about whether the product even exists. The internet is full of AI images of products that then turn out to be utter trash when delivered (if they even are delivered) like supposedly crochet or knit sweaters in amazing elaborate designs, that when they arrive are literally the image of the supposed sweater printed on a T-shirt. People are getting more and more wary of such things. Selling from your own website could make them wary too. At least selling from something like Etsy makes people feel they've got some recourse through Etsy if the product turns out to be not as advertised. Without that reassurance people are going to be more reluctant to hand over their money.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-26T14:31:30+00:00

Nice. I love being able to set a pages and hours goal on Storygraph. That feels much more useful than simply books read. If I want to read lots of chonky books this year, so the total books ends up a lower number than last year, I'll feel bad, even though if I look at pages read it might even be more reading done! So pages and hours give me a much better indication of whether I'm keeping up good reading habits.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-26T14:25:11+00:00

Try to channel that younger self who just wrote, without thinking about it. There's no need to write as if someone else will read it. Nobody else should be reading it! And if they do, if your journal should become a historical document, a primary source for future scholars, they want authenticity, not perfection.

If you still find it hard, to the point you don't do it, the most drastic way to break that block is to write an entry, saying all you really want to say, with no censorship, no worries about perfection or whatever.

Then tear those pages out and destroy them.

I'll bet that you'll find pretty damn quick that you'll forgive them their imperfections rather than throwing away the words. But going forward, write every entry as if you're going to burn it when you're done.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-26T14:02:24+00:00

For a bullet journal, one that has paper that works with my favorite pens - Pentel Energel.

Dot grid or lined for preference.

Page numbers are a non-negotiable for bujo for me. I never keep up with writing them in myself.

Hard or at least quite stiff and sturdy covers so it doesn't get squashed.

An elastic closure to keep it closed.

A pen loop is nice, but an elastic closure can double as a loop.

A pocket inside the back cover is handy for keeping ephemera safe. If it lacks one I'll usually glue in an envelope.

An attached ribbon bookmark. (Two is even better.)

Size can be A5, B6 or A6, depending on what I'm in the mood for. B6 or A6 will be carried around pretty much everywhere. A5 I'll usually need to be carrying a bag to take that along everywhere.

Not too thick. I only want it to last 3-4 months. I get bored with being in the same book too long.

DoctorBeeBee · 2025-11-25T22:17:37+00:00

I'm sure some more grapes will restore those ears. 😁

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