Animated Films Deluxe
In the past, I kept a text document listing animated feature films: to keep track of which ones I had seen, which ones I wanted to see, etc. Frankly, that was the wrong way to do this.
A Better Way
Better, up-to-date version lives here:
- Animation gallery, using TheBrain 15's new Local API.
A better way is to use TheBrain, a highly flexible piece of software for keeping track of many different things, but in this case, for keeping track of feature films made by various studios. Here is a link to my publicly shared Animation brain where I have updated and expanded that old list, and more importantly, it's now much easier to keep up to date.
Pretty-Printing a Text Outline
Not only that, but I can make a wonderful gallery using TheBrain 15's new Local API.
For reference:
-
brain-gal, an open source project on GitHub that shows how to use templates and CSS to build a really nice gallery.
- Also ships with a very useful Node script,
local-brain-text-outline.jsthat can connect to TB15 locally and by specificying a local brain, it can fetch a giant outline of all your thoughts, types, tags, and URL attachments, starting from a given root thought, similar to the way TB14 and TB15 desktop have been able to output a text outline, but instead fully automated, on your live data, fast enough to be useful on demand. (Before I had to do this step manually with TheBrain desktop UI and it took way too many clicks to get the outline text file. Much easier with Local API support.)
- Also ships with a very useful Node script,
The scripts in brain-gal use another script outline2jsx.js to turn the outline into XML, and then another framework, Bray, converts this into a web page using carefully designed components. (However the right way to do this is probably to make a live web-app with React or Vite instead, and to skip the text outline entirely and just use the JSON responses from TheBrain Local API directly. My Bray-based code spits out a static outline, which is easier to host, but harder to update.)
Hopefully someone out there will find this useful or inspiring, to take on a data visualization adventure of their own.