Friends-locked (even from me)

Earlier today I published a whole post about why I refuse to assimilate my fifteen planners into one big app. Roughly four hours later, I finished merging twenty-two years of journals into a single surface. But hear me out: most of it was already written, and I’m only wiring content in, not building an aggregator of all things.

The mistake with the planners was trying to bolt five unrelated jobs into one dashboard until the whole building got condemned because I didn’t feel like looking at my to-do list. This is the opposite. The app still only does one job. It has no opinions about my calendar, my habits, or my Jira queue. I just finally connected the one empty journal app I already had to the twenty-two years of entries that were supposed to be inside it.

Every piece of this was already sitting on my drive in a different folder, completely unaware of the others. Over in one directory was livejournal-clone, a project from last fall’s bootleg-every-app phase that had a working editor, a mood picker, a Spotify button, and zero entries. Over in another directory were 2,622 actual entries from 2004 to 2026, stranded across fifteen places because I kept switching tools: old LiveJournal XML dumps, dead sideblogs, Notion exports, Obsidian vaults, and Day Crumbs. Sitting next to those was a Johnny-Decimal timeline mapping every year of my life to an era.

An empty journal app is a sad weekend demo, and twenty-two years of exports sitting in zip files is a backup you never open because you can’t search across it. None of it needed to be invented from scratch. Somebody just had to plug the cords into the wall.

So today livejournal-clone became friends-locked, and all fifteen notebooks moved into the UI that was built for them a year ago.

Once the pipes were connected, everything started speaking the same language. Every entry in the pile now knows what Johnny-Decimal era it belongs to, who was in the room when it happened, which recurring problems keep showing up across decades, and what was playing in the background. Old LiveJournal posts keep their original [current mood] and [current music] lines at the bottom, paired with an X-Ray panel on the right that reads the actual tone on the page. Teenage me loved marking an entry cheerful right before three paragraphs of pure existential dread.

Because all fifteen sources feed into the same index now, the whole thing filters and updates as one surface. Clicking “On This Day,” a person’s name, an era, or a recurring thread slices across 2004, 2017, and last week at the same time. When I write a new entry tonight, it grabs whatever is playing on Spotify, tags its own life stage on the fly, and drops straight into the same stream and filters as everything else.

The historical entries are locked read-only in the UI so I can’t accidentally clobber a file from 2005, and the tagline in the header is the real reason I wanted the whole archive in one place: finally, memories I can’t inadvertently rewrite by revisiting them. Human brains are terrible storage media. Every time you pull a memory up in your head to think about it, your brain quietly edits the file before putting it back on the shelf. Having all 2,622 entries sitting in one searchable room means I can revisit twenty-two years of my own life and get the version that actually happened, not the fifth photocopy my head made of it later.

The fifteen planners are still separate, and the journal still only does one thing. It just has all twenty-two years of its mail forwarded to the same address now.