________ ________ ________
2017-06-16 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
I suppose after days of tinkering with / _/ / /
the idea of setting up a phlog and getting \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
the layout looking good and whatever I / \/ \/ / \
should take the time to write an entry? / _/ /_ _/
/- / _/ /
So the what and why: I'd been doing \________/\________/\___/____/
personal blogs on and off for more or less
two decades as an outlet for whatever's on my mind, no real focus or schedule
or anything, just a personal journal. Once Twitter arrived on the scene I fell
out of the habit because in Twitter I found the same kind of outlet only much
more immediate. I didn't feel like I needed to be articulate or even make
sense on Twitter, I could just roll in, spray 140 characters and take off,
like some asshole yelling from his car as he cruises past.
In Twitter I also found a place where that stuff belongs and a community
doing similar things, I guess Twitter was to expelling the thought of the
moment what LiveJournal was to angsty teen poetry and slash fiction?
Over time and with liberal application of brand and celebrity Twitter got
fat and slow and stupid, the spam got thick, the users got more obnoxious and
louder and I lost interest then eventually jumped ship. That left me missing
an outlet. I tried to re-start a blog a few times but nothing took, I'd just
obsess over which platform to use and how to make it look then lose interest.
I hopped on and off a few social sites and more recently I've been flirting
with Mastodon a bit and it seems alright but it's just Twitter all over again,
people can joke about how terrible "the birdsite" is but most people's
behavior on Mastodon is no different to Twitter so, you know, don't throw
stones in glass houses.
It was on Mastodon that someone mentioned Gopher and I was like "I remember
that! I wonder what's new!" and started poking around the space on SDF. It
looked mostly like I remember it from last time I bothered to look; lots of
empty spaces, lots of test files but I'd never noticed the phlogs before and
that was really cool to me, like discovering a dusty old corner of a library.
Not necessarily secret, but behind a door you normally wouldn't think to open.
There's a lot that appeals to me about a Gopherspace phlog:
1. It gets me back to where I started, long wordy posts, formatted and
compiled by handand strips meof the engine/design/format obsession
that was derailing previous attempts to get back into keeping an
online journal.
2. Desocialization. It seems like almost everything in the surface web
these days comes with a weight of social baggage. A comments section,
an associated Twitter account or Facebook page, pingbacks, etc. A
phlog strips all that away, it's not much more than a collection of
textfiles.
3. Utilising the SDF; I've been a member for a while but mostly all I
did was log in every now and then, type "ls" and log off again.
There's a lot to the SDF and there's a lot they do that just isn't
done anywhere else. It really is a treasure that should be
appreciated and utilised more. I don't know shit about BSD or Gopher
or any of that (spent over an hour last night just trying to format a
fancy heading and failed), but trying to do as much as I can natively
rather than doing it all where I'm more comfortable and transferring
it across gives me a chance to learn to do more in BSD and on SDF.
4. The "door" mentioned above makes it fun. You put a blog post on the
web, Google finds it, people all over find it searching for whatever
thing you may have mentioned, it spreads outinfinitely. Gopher is a
walled garden, people don't accidentally end up in Gopher space,
people visit Gopher space to experience Gopher content from Gopher
users and I really like that idea. It feels nostalgic in a way, like
the BBS back in the old days. Also in that vein and following on from
point 3; by providing content, even personal content like a humble
journal, gives back and helps grow the SDF and it's Gopher space.
So that's how I start: My name is Cat and this is a phlog, a blog in Gopher
space, called FAX SEX.
