New Year updates; new project (of course)

Hullo, all!

I’m hoping you’re having an okay New Year’s so far! Things have been a bit… hectic here, over in writing|dog world, with CES and also with me trying to get my passport renewed and just generally being a catastrophe :p So. New stories have been written, but I’m still in the process of getting them marked up and uploaded. With luck, now that I’m no longer stuck in the US and can go home, I should be able to get some of that done tomorrow and be back on track.

That said, I’ve also gotten a first prototype working of a project I’ve wanted to do for… a long time now, which is putting together a worldbible / story reference that was canonical (so that I can refer to things) but also not necessarily spoilerful (in case you are looking to catch up but do not want to be spoiled). So. An early prototype of this is here:

https://www.writing.dog/index.php/writing-overview/reference-material/star-patrol-encyclopedia

and should work for all y’all.

This is focused on the Star Patrol setting, because somebody asked me for a dramatis personae and I didn’t have one readily available. It’s a fully-interlinked encyclopedia that contains information on people, places, technology, terms, cultures, and so on. For information that follows the series pilot, the article content is versioned by episode, with content deltas accessible by switching the relevant episodes “on” or “off.”

So, for example, if you’d like to start reading the 4th season of the Dark Horse material, you can turn spoilers on through the last episode of the third season, and then start reading. Or you can just turn all spoilers on, and do as you like :p Most of the information is from published text; some is from my background notes. All of it is canonical, and I will use this as a reference going forward.

Right now, there are about 130 articles, totaling 16,000 words. You will no doubt notice significant content gaps, as well as a very bare-bones UX (in particular, I haven’t written the code that links the story UIDs to their titles, so everything is listed as (for example) “s1e5” rather than its actual name). It's also not searchable yet, and some quality-of-life improvements like listing characters alphabetically by surname isn't implemented.

I’ve decided to post this now, because 130 articles is around the point where writing new articles stopped creating exponentially more articles that I then needed to write. As it stands I am aware of about 120 articles that are missing, including ones on major characters, and many of the existing articles are pretty incomplete. But I would like you to know where I am at and what I am doing.

As always, if you want access to the code or would like to use it for yourself, feel free to do so. I will caution in this particular case that the code is very very bad and should be optimized at some point, but it's important for me (as it is with the Fourth Wall project) that I be able to spend more time creating content than in the code boilerplate that produces it*. So I would like to focus on expanding the encyclopedia before making the project code a key focus.

But if you disagree, please let me know!

Wagful regards!

* The encyclopedia is a set of Scrivener sections, which I can cut and paste into a Python script that handles the rich text and converts it into a JSON object suitable for parsing and manipulation. So to add or update a new entry, the total non-writing time is like... 5 seconds. Which is working for me so far.