A card catalog for the practice of bringing it to the room.

Index across the three rooms Rachel runs: Eastern Cabin'ét, Journal Cabinet, Secret-Cabinet. Pacific's cabinet is a neighboring room — acknowledged across the wire on the other side of the country. Two designer-maker-etc's and their instances, making things with an "agentic process" that is efficient AND entertaining as hell, to keep the work going, collaborative, consistent.

This repo doesn't contain any cabinet but it houses the index of current experiments that involve chaaracter-based idea generation. Each indexed cabinet publishes a MANIFEST.md in its home repo listing personas and their use across projects. The meta-cabinet fetches those manifests live from GitHub, parses them, and renders a landing page, members page, and directory. The hope is that finding overlaps, redundancies, and happy duplicatives will yield EVEN MOAR IDEAS.

• / — landing: room cards, "who's in the room these days" per room, cross-references
• /members — bio cards with portrait photos, origin, bio blurb, room assignments
• /directory — filterable flat table sourced from the MANIFEST files

Open http://localhost:3133. Requires Node 18+.

Each indexed cabinet's MANIFEST.md is fetched from GitHub raw on page load, cached server-side for 5 minutes. The parser reads the structured tables and frontmatter; the frontend renders from /api/cabinets.

The members page (/members) is client-side only — member data lives in public/js/members-data.js and portrait photos load from Wikipedia's REST API where available.

The Journal and Secret manifests are new — see prs/ for the drafts to land in each repo.

Edit the ## In the room right now block in the relevant room's MANIFEST.md. The change appears on the landing page within 5 minutes (cache TTL) or immediately via the refresh link in the footer.

Member portraits load from Wikipedia's REST API for historical/real figures. Personas without open cc Wikidata photos show a styled monogram by default. To add a local image for any member:

1. Drop a file at public/images/<key>.jpg (e.g. public/images/lestat.jpg)
2. Add image_url: '/images/lestat.jpg' to that member's entry in public/js/members-data.js

The hydration logic checks image_url first, then Wikipedia, then falls back to monogram.

The "meta-cabinet" term predates this repo — it first appeared in the dossier-placard description, gesturing at the practice that ran across the rooms without being named. This repo makes it visible.