Gopher as a rural retreat

I'm not proud to admit that, as gopherspace has continued to expand,

I've become a little bit insular. I keep a fairly close eye on what's

happening in circumlunar space, of course, and my own personal

moku-pona feed keeps me up to date with the people I've been following

for years. But aside from that, if it doesn't show up on Bongusta I'm

quite liable to miss it. Since the SDF exodus of a year or so back,

I've not really checked out any of the new phlogs that have appeared

there.

Fortunately not everybody is as slack as I am, and Tomasino's

wonderful phlog roll[1] has given me the opportunity to slowly get a

bit more up to date. I'm especially happy to have discovered SDFer

mmeta4's "Our Global Predicament" phlog[2], which is right up my

alley. Shane at ascendingcreations.com[3] has a lot of really

interesting stuff online as well, including a response to my robot

bathroom rant[4] which I've only just found. Thanks, shane!

But in keeping with my apparently iron-clad inability to use Gopher

to do anything other than talk about Gopher, this post is mostly being

written to share with anybody else who missed it a really nice thought

that I found at another SDF phlog, this one by fallingknife[5].

Prompted by a friends' question of Why are you wasting time on

something that is 30 years old [Gopher], when you could be doing

something meaningful?", fallingknife draws the analogy that Gopher is

like a "rural respite from the world wide web"[6]. I think there's

something in that idea. There's a cathartic quality to gopherspace

and the phlogosphere in particular which is at least partially due to

both the simpler, slower mode of operation in which we participate in

it and its feeling of remoteness and disconectedness from the rest of

the internet. The of a rural retreat seems to capture this value

pretty nicely.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/moku-pona/

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/mmeta4/Phlog

[3] gopher://ascendingcreations.com:70/1/shane/

[4] gopher://ascendingcreations.com:70/0/shane/XnvCJFDBcrMr2opMlyIvZKkfrOfOWW0j.txt

[5] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/fallingknife

[6] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/fallingknife/phlog/20190810-thoughts-and-quotes-on-change.txt