Announcing ROOPHLOCH 2019

Today is the last day to submit your HAMMER-related content to

Tomasino's zine[1], Jeff! Are you already breaking out into cold

sweats of dread, wondering how you will get through September without

an internet stranger assigning you arbitrary deadlines to dictate how

you spend your free time?

Fear not, gopherverse citizens! I hereby declare August 2019 to be

the month of the first ever, possibly annual (if things go well),

Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge, aka ROOPHLOCH (which I'm

mentally pronouncing "Roo flock", but you do you).

In order to participate in ROOPHLOCH '19, you need to:

1. Make a phlog post,

2. From somewhere other than the place(s) you normally make phlog

posts when you aren't participating in ROOPHLOCH,

3. Whilst not inside a permanent human-made structure,

4. Without the direct use of permanent infrastructure for power or

communication.

5. Email me (solderpunk@sdf.org) informing me of the URL of your

ROOPHLOCH post, so I can publish a list of entries for everybody to

enjoy.

6. Complete all of the above by midnight, your local time, on

September 30th, 2019.

Basically, if you don't have a roof over your head and your phlogging

device is not plugged into a wall via any kind of cable, you're

winning! You can phlog about anything you like. Obviously your

fellow ROOPLOCHers are going to be curious about where you're

phlogging from and how, but it's up to you whether your post is a

detailed technical description of your remote gophering feat or

whether you put a small footnote at the bottom of a post about

anything else.

I am deliberately setting the bar very low for this. If you take your

laptop out into your backyard where your home WiFi still reaches and

you make a post, you've successfully completed ROOPHLOCH and nobody

can take that away from you! But obviously the true spirit of the

event is to push yourself to do a little bit more than that; discover

new places near to you (but not too near!), and experiment with new

devices or new technologies. Try to come up with creative,

interesting and unusual ways to comply with the above rules from

unexpected locations. I will not be assigning an official winner or

ranking entries by awesomness or anything like that, but rest assured

that if you you do something like use your amateur radio license to

transmit your phlog post back to a waiting upload script on your home

computer via packet radio from a solar-powered RaspberryPi on the top

of a mountain which you climbed yourself, the entire phlogosphere will

consider you the unofficial winner and you'll retain serious bragging

rights.

So, put your hiking boots on, pump up your bike tires, or buy a train

ticket! Put a laptop, tablet, vintage PDA, or SBC in your bag!

Charge up your cell phone, your walkie talkies or your HT! Maybe get

in touch with your local wireless community network[2]? Start

studying a map, or perhaps the minimodem(1) man page? Have fun, get

outdoors, learn something new and break your phlogging routine. You

can do it! Even you, Jeff.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20190719-zine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_community_network