ROOPHLOCH 2021 round up

The third ever Remote Off-Grid Outdoor Phlogging Challenge has come to

a close. As per past years, I have compiled a list[1] of all the

qualifying entries I am aware of. If I have missed your ROOPHLOCH

post, please let me know via email!

This was the quietest ROOPHLOCH yet. In fact, the trend of annual

halvings of participants continued! There were 16 posts made in 2019,

8 in 2020, and only 4 in 2021. There's now nobody who has

participated in every single instance of the event (dokuja and jynx

could, previously, boast this). I, myself, cannot really say anything

about this as I once again failed to participate in my own challenge.

I am suitably shame-faced, let me assure you.

As October rolled around and I checked in on my now habitually and

powerfully neglected email account and found only four emails with

"ROOPHLOCH" in the subject it made me a little sad and, when I

considered this in the context of my own persistent lack of interest

in motivation in just about anything internet related for the past few

months (I'll write more about this, at some point. On the off chance

anybody has been worried, I am fine. I have spent most of my free

time and energy reading books printed on paper, listening to music on

CD tape, and building little medium wave receivers to play around with

when the sun goes down, and I've been largely content with this life),

I honestly thought that perhaps the time was right to throw in the

towel.

Then I went and actually read those emails, and then I read the

ROOPHLOCH posts themselves, and my spirit was lifted. Okay, we lost

participants, including our "regulars". But let's look on the

brighter side: everybody who participated this year was a first time

participant. People thanked me for putting the event on and told me

they were looking forward to next year. There's life in this thing

yet. Hell, after reading dear Shufei's inaugural post[2] there's more

life in me, with respect to computing and the internet, than there

has been in months.

So, we'll do this again, in 2022. Please look forward to it.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/roophloch/2021

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~shufei/phlog/20210910-Life-ROOPHLOCH-Howdy.txt