The Painter Goblin

The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine

I wrote a new Twitter bot two weekends back: The Painter Goblin.

The Painter Goblin was inspired by a Zine I wrote in a different time, in 2015 for the Christchurch Zine festival, New Zealand.

The Zine itself was inspired by a story I had heard a few weeks earlier from someone who had seen this story on Reddit:

Every time I play the Sims, I start my family with a ‘painting goblin’.

I make him/her morbidly obese with green skin. I make sure to give him the following traits:

  • Likes to be alone
  • Lives art
  • Hates the outdoors

The first thing I do once I have enough money, is build a small room in the basement, send him down there, and then remove the stairs. I set him up in a tiny little area with only an easel, a toilet, a refrigerator, a bed, a shower, and a trash bin.

All he does all day is paint. That’s it. He paints and paints and paints.

Eventually his paintings become very good and worth a lot of money. Every few minutes I go downstairs and sell whatever painting he has finished and then I return to playing the game.

My family always ends up feeling blessed because of their fortune, and they never find out about the horrible secret living beneath their home.

Lets take a look in more detail below.

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Abstract representation of a Key Value store

Key :: Value Access Language (KVAL) for BoltDB and Golang

With some forced downtime as the effects of the Kaikōura earthquake are felt here on the North Island, with the shutdown of Archives New Zealand, what better way to spend it than creating a new grammar and parser for key-value databases? I have spent the last few weeks developing a specification for a Key-Value Access Language (KVAL) and implementing a binding for it for Golang’s BoltDB. I hope it will be of interest to folks, but let’s take a look at it in more detail below.

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A screenshot of my Twitter banner showing my newly created heritage avatars, created dynamically for Twitter and using binary numbers to represent the day of the month.

Dynamic avatars on Twitter

The visualization tells me that the first publication from my Twitter bot, created to dynamically update my avatars daily was 20 December 2012. My bot was a simple Python script that generated images in binary to represent the day of the month.

Visual representation of the binary number 0b10100 indicating the 20th of the Month -- in this instance 20 December 2012
20 December 2020 via https://github.com/exponential-decay/binary-numbers/blob/334d417ad2fef1ac37e082e7d78f42412d176de3/binary-numbers-original-images/binary-numbers-original-images-all/20-12-2012.png

Why?

Well, doesn’t it get a little boring looking at the same thing every day?

Lets look at the details below.

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Architecture of The-FR.org

Architecture of The-FR.org

Last week I blogged about the publication of a new linked data format registry based on the work I did previously at The National Archives, UK.

Where the work goes, we will have to see. Open sourcing it was an important goal of the short sprint. Partly because I hope it demonstrates an architecture that can be adopted for a similar registry, and it may also provide a code-base that can be adapted for similar, linked open data projects. This blog provides an overview of that architecture…

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