As you might notice while browsing around, most notes include the exact same headers and two embedded Bases, but not much actual text. You might also notice other notes - such as this one - don't contain those headers and bases, but do contain a lot of text in comparison. These are two types of notes, **Topic notes**, and **Thought notes**. Over my many years of note taking, there were a few demons I couldn't beat. Most importantly, I had to accept the reality that writing notes is different from writing a book. I do not *actually* want to spend 10 hours over a single paragraph to make it perfect. The way I jolted it down is probably gonna be how it stays for the rest of eternity. The point of life is to become wiser. By nature, the way you wrote things in the past will necessarily be worse than how you would write it now with a more refined understanding. Your notes slowly "worsen" in comparison to you as time ticks away. With a standard mindset of going over "unrefined" text and improving it, every note in your vault would need regular upkeep, once every year or so, and the more notes you have in your vault, the more that becomes an unreasonable amount of time spend. Another thing is that I despise *erasing the past*. Stomping over old paragraphs means you won't be able to read them as they were, get a trip of nostalgia, compare your mindset then from now, learn from your mistakes, etc. This is insight I do not want to lose. So we need a solution that allows us to improve the organization of information in our vault, without having to edit or erase any of our old text, to save on time and keep it around for posterity, whilst also not becoming overwhelming to navigate or requiring too much time to read because of all the old text. To do this, we've separated the concern of "organizing" from "writing", with one kind of note dedicated to each, respectively, **Topic notes** and **Thought notes**. **Thought notes** become pure dumping grounds for raw, spur of the moment thinking. You can write in there like you would chat with friends via message. You can write 5 different drafts about the same idea and leave them all there besides each other in an incomplete state, with typos and everything left untouched. For all that matters, these notes are *finished* the moment you exit them, flaws and all. They key here is to *give the note a good, descriptive title*, a title that summarizes the mess inside so well that you'd never actually have to read the body of the note to remember what it talked about. Instead of "reading your notes" to find information, you'd really mostly be reading your titles, with the body of the note acting as a backup that helps you relieve the moment when you figured out what the title describes. We can then add metadata to these **Thought notes**, via *Obsidian properties*, to describe things like which point in time the note was taken at, what topics it discusses, where you got the idea from, etc. Then, the Xenocryst Bases can conveniently use that metadata to show these Thoughts under the Topics they belong to. Speaking of **Topic notes**. These are always presented in the same manner, with identical headers and the same two Xenocryst Bases doing all the heavy lifting. Since writing about a topic has already been tackled in other notes, Topic notes won't contain much information themselves, and will instead link towards the various Thought notes where that topic was discussed. - The **Occurences** section is where the Xenocryst Time Base will list all the relevant notes (and their helpful titles) which discuss the current topic. - A **Definition** section can exist at the top if needed, to include a very short sentence that describes or disambiguates what the topic is actually referring to. Most of the time it is unneeded and omitted. - The **Constituents** section is where the Xenocryst Topic Base will list related topics and collections of items. For instance, in the "Video games" topic, it could link to the topics "Game consoles", "Emulation", or link to the collection of items "List of Video Games". - Finally, a **Redirects** section can also optionally exist to point to other topics that aren't as strongly related, or wouldn't be convenient to list via the Xenocryst system for any reason. **Topic notes** exist purely to help you navigate around your vault. They're here to point the way to where you need to go. They're not meant to explain, they're meant to help you search for explanations faster. Let's visualize everything so far with an example. Let's say that you're running into an issue with some software you're using. You remember having encountered this same exact problem in the past, and having found a fix to your issue after lots of web browsing and trial and error. Here's what finding that solution again would look like : - Go to any note related to this situation, e.g. the "VLC" note (if that was the software in question), or the "Troubleshooting" note. - All of the above Topic notes will link to the relevant Thought note where you previously solved this issue. - Ideally your title would be all you need to remember the fix, e.g. "Fixed VLC video issues by changing video rendering engine". - In case the title isn't enough, perhaps because the solution was more involved, you can open the note and "relive" that moment in time where you found the fix. It should feel very familiar and intuitive.