The Shelf

A ledger of the games, music, television and channels I grew up with, written down while I still remember them, and kept for my kids.

The point is not the files. Most of the media is already looked after by people better equipped than me — the Internet Archive, No-Intro, TOSEC, redump. What is not preserved anywhere, by anyone, is why any of it mattered to me. A database can tell my kids that Shenmue came out in 1999. Only I can tell them what it felt like that a game gave you a phone number and expected you to call it.

So this repo holds the annotations, and records where the media lives rather than holding the media itself.

Open the file for its kind under ledger/ and add an entry. Only title and year are really needed — see SCHEMA.md for every field.

- title: Shenmue
  year: 1999
  platform: Dreamcast
  what: >
    An open-world adventure set in 1986 Yokosuka.
  great: >
    Shops closed at night and you had to come back tomorrow.
  mine: >
    Played it on a borrowed console over one winter.
  status: preserved

Then:

npm install     # once
npm run build   # regenerates docs/index.html
open docs/index.html

An entry with nothing but a title and a mine is worth more than a complete record with no memory in it. Write the memory first; the release year can be looked up forever, and your memory cannot.

npm run pictures

Finds each new entry on Wikipedia and writes the match to ledger/pictures.yml: the page it came from, Wikipedia's one-line description of that page, and the picture's address. The site links to the picture rather than storing it — cover art is not ours to redistribute — so offline, or once a link rots, the entry simply shows its spine instead.

Check every new line before trusting it. Wikipedia is only used for the picture, but the search guesses wrong often enough to matter: the first run matched Dark to His Dark Materials and Strings to an American bluegrass player. Fix a line by setting page and picture (or picture: none) and keep pinned: true on it, so a re-run never touches it again.

npm run capture -- "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=..." a-short-name
npm run build

That writes ledger/tracks/a-short-name.yml, which an entry points at with tracks_file:. Re-run it now and then and commit the result even when nothing changed — a playlist loses entries quietly, and the diff on that file is the only way to find out which ones. The first capture of my own music playlist already showed YouTube counting 100 videos while serving 99.

A captured track list is thin on its own: YouTube gives you a title and an uploader, and the uploader is frequently a lyric-video channel rather than the band. So each collection has a companion file under ledger/notes/, keyed by video id, holding the corrected artist, the song, a genre, one or two lines of lyric, and your note on them. The entry page rolls that up into who is on it and what kinds of music are on it, which is what you actually want to see before a hundred rows of titles.

Full lyrics are deliberately not stored — they are not ours to redistribute, and each track links out for the rest. One line you chose plus a sentence on why is worth more here than the complete text, which is a search away forever.

npm run build renders the whole thing — markup, styles, script and data — into a single docs/index.html. No server, no fetch, no runtime dependencies. Open it from a disk in 2050 and it still works. That is deliberate, so please don't split it back into separate assets.

The YAML stays the source of truth: if Node ever stops running, ledger/ is still plain readable text.

• Write the mediocre things down too. An archive of only favourites preserves the survivors, not the era — and it reads as a complaint about the present rather than a record of the past.
• status is the only field that tells you to do something. preserved means note where it lives and move on. at-risk means capture it yourself, soon. gone means the entry is now the only thing left, so make it good. Omitting it defaults to at-risk, because assuming a thing is safe is how it gets lost.
• YouTube is the urgent category. Games have dedicated communities and will be fine without you. Channels vanish permanently and usually without notice. If you only do one capture pass, do that one — yt-dlp into cold storage.

ledger/          the archive, one YAML file per kind — the real artifact
src/             template, styles, script
scripts/build.mjs   ledger + src -> docs/index.html
docs/            built output; GitHub Pages serves this