ROOPHLOCH 2022 round up

The fourth 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!

First of all, some good news: participation was up substantially

from 2021! Last year's round up post was a little on the gloomy

side, with me noting that participation had halved every single year

since the first ROOPHLOCH in 2019. Had this trend continued, we'd

have seen a meagre two posts this year and I'd probably have been

sorely tempted, once again, to call it quits. Instead, this year

we had a whopping ten (UPDATE: no, eleven!) posts, the

second-highest count since the beginning, with a good mix of first

timers and previous participants, some of whom helped keep the

flame alive last year as well, and some of whom were returning

after a hiatus. This makes me happy - it's good consolation for

the fact that, holy heck, I failed to post myself again this year,

although at least I genuinely tried[2].

Second of all, some bad news: one participant this year emailed

me (at solderpunk@posteo.net) toward the end of the month, as their

second effort to inform me of their post after accidentally sending

their first email to my old SDF email address (largely my bad

for never being diligent enough to set up any kind forwarding or

autoresponse or whatever). Well, I figured perhaps other people

with my old address in their address books may have made the same

mistake, so I tried to check my SDF email for additional posts,

and this was how I discovered that, literally years after the

last time I ever publically said anything negative about SDF

via any medium, my SDF account (a "lifetime" ARPA membership,

for the record) has been summarily deleted, and mail to my old

address now bounces. This must have happened only this month,

for an earlier ROOPHLOCH-related email to have not bounced. To be

honest, I fully expected this to happen years ago, so I had nothing

irreplaceable stored there anyway. The only surprise was that this

took so long. Anyway, the main reason I mention this negativity here

is to draw attention to the following important ROOPHLOCH fact:

if you emailed solderpunk@sdf.org to inform me of your ROOPHLOCH

2022 post, I'm afraid I didn't see your email and now I never,

ever will, so please resend it to the Posteo address above so I can

add you to the list and bump up the participant count!

Third and last of all, some neutral news: this year two (UPDATE: no,

three!) of the posts are available via Gemini only. Now, ROOPHLOCH

predates Gemini, which is why it's called ROOPHLOCH and not, uhh,

ROOPH/GLOCH? To my mind, "phlog" means, strictly and unambiguously,

Gopher log. I have noticed - and this strictly an observation, not a

complaint or criticism - that plenty of people use what I think

of as protocol-specific terminology a lot more loosely. Heck,

I have seen people talk about "Gemini websites", which I find a

purely self-contradictory term, but I acknowledge there's a lack

of good generic terminology in this space. Anyway, when the first

post-Gemini ROOPHLOCH date rolled around, I pondered whether or

not the definition ought to be expanded to explicitly include gemlogs

too. I don't think I ever discussed this openly, perhaps I should

have. At the time I was feeling some level of guilt toward

Gopherspace, which was and is very close to my heart. I imagined

that there must have been people out there who did not look

favourably upon the Gemini project, who construed it as a criticism

of Gopherspace, who thought that I was at best abandoning Gopher

after years of enthusiasm and at worst actively trying to replace it.

I should say that literally not a single person has ever said a

single thing to me along these lines, not even obliquely hinted at

it, these are just imaginary monsters lurking in my head, but

imaginary head monsters exert real influence on behaviour. I felt

genuinely bad and I decided to keep ROOPHLOCH as a special little

Gopher-only thing, as a kind of goodwill gesture, as a sign that I

acknowledged Gopherspace and Geminispace as separate and independent

spaces with individual worth. That's why the ROOPHLOCH

announcement and round up posts only ever appear in my phlog and not

in my gemlog, while almost everything else I write appears in both

places. Despite this, this year I received Gemini-only ROOPHLOCH

submissions for the first time ever, and with push having been brought

to shove I decided almost immediately that to tell these smolfriends

"Sorry, you can't join in our fun because you used the wrong kind of

simple, respectful, empowering technology" would be the pettiest

thing in the world and serve no good purpose. This really does seem

like a case for "the more the merrier". In the extremely unlikely

event that any ROOPHLOCH purists are upset by this, do please note

that this was the most popular ROOPHLOCH event in a years even if

you don't count the Gemini posts, which are outnumbered nearly three

to one.

Well, that's all I think there is to say. Thank you to everybody who

participated this year, for helping keep this fun little tradition

alive! It seems like every year when I write this post the real world

is even gloomier than the year before, and 2022 is certainly no

exception. It's hard, for me at least, to take the idea of trying to

fix the shortcomings of the modern internet very seriously when by any

reasonable account there are ever more much important problems out

there. So I like that ROOPHLOCH has no pretensions at all about fixing

problems or righting wrongs or building a better anything, it's just

clean, pure, fun, and it helps to knit a little part of the smolnet

community closer together. Surely we're all in need of a little more

community fun these days.

See you all in 2023!

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/roophloch/2022

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/story-of-a-roophlop.txt