2020-10-19, Barnabus Hawking Trinkets to the

In the fantasy world of Teraum, there is a character named Barnabus Trent, who for a while ran a shop in the town of Bellybrush. That town sold items gathered from all over Teraum… but most were from such distant lands that any context or meaning they had beyond “pretty trinket,” was lost.

A drawing (by Stirling Little) of the alligator that hung from the ceiling of Barnabus’ shop. Rumor had it he let it loose at night to stop burglars but wrestled it back up to the ceiling each morning. More than one farmboy signed up to sail to Gnalens after seeing the alligator.

But Barnabus didn’t really mind: getting them out there was enough that some people, with enough interest, might seek out the original context.

That’s about the attitude I have toward my website these days: it’s for people looking to collect “trinkets” of information. The medium, the Web, simply doesn’t really allow for the kind of context-building that might be necessary to make sure something has proper meaning. (That’s part of why I’m moving more and more into my email: as critical as I am of most aspects of modern computer use, direct conversations between people is pretty cool.)

Anyway. I have a lot of trinkets I’ve collected, but most of them aren’t really accessible: they exist scattered across private git repositories, flash drives, etc.

As discussed in a previous newsletter, I’m planning on separating my data from my procedures (though now I’m considering using JSON Schema, not XSD). I’ve begun that process, by starting to record things as Lua tables, and write schema.

For now the whole project is called Barnabus, after the curio-seller: pulling in all my little bits of data from around various computer stashes, and converting it to Lua.

Since it’s not too hard, I’m also writing some procedures to take the resultant data and turn it into a webpage, so that for the first time in a long time, a large portion of my past work will be available online.

You can view that code at Cyberearth Systems, a Gitea instance where I’ll be sharing my code moving forward. (Yay community hosting.)

I hope everyone had a decent weekend - mine was relatively busy, but just hauling boxes of food around for the community, which is hard to complain about. Next weekend, I’m going to try out a “Settler Saturday,” post, where I share all the “settler nonsense” I see through the week and provide my perspective on it. A lot more than just the Mi’kmaqi “Lobster Dispute” happened this past week, and I want to make sure I’m forwarding on knowledge of those events to y’all in a way that’s meaningful and timely, without cluttering your email overly much. (If you hear of any sort of “settler nonsense” you’d like to be included (and aren’t a colonist yourself) please feel free to share it with me!)