Stardate: 20181125_0102
Location: Home Office
Input Device: Dell 7202
Audio: Enigma - Le roi est mort, Vive le roi!
Visual: Messy desk, 4 screens with content.
Energy: 40%
Mental: 50%
Emotional: tired, but alert.
Greetings, phlogosphere! I was inspired by all of the recent
activity in gopher and in the phlogosphere and decided to set
up a gopherspace of my own.
What brought me here was, like some of you, was a
dissatisfaction of the current state of things on the
Internet. There's a lot of things that I dislike, i.e., over
commercialization, too much static, privacy concerns, feeling
more disconnected even though jacked in, etc. It has
(d)evolved into something that I enjoy doing less and less.
Plus, the feeling that I was left with after each session was
like that of eating too much junk food; mass consumption with
no nutritional value. So I cut down on using it except for
work or quick informational searches.
What I did gain was more time in the analog. More time with
family and friends. More time building things in my garage.
More time practicing my guitar. More time reading books.
More time writing. More time exploring. It was all good.
Earlier this year, memories of previous cyberspace
experiences were triggered by the booklet that came with the
Complete Schwa Kit by Bill Barker. I had rediscovered this
on my bookshelf and this branched off into all kinds of
memories and searches of the FringeWare Review, Mondo 2000,
the analog version of bOING bOING, Harold Rheingold, The
WELL, BBS's, and finally, with the creation of my account on SDF.
Accessing SDF kinda feels like how it was back in the day
with BBS's. That was my introduction to getting online. C=
64, "Total Telecommunications" 300 baud modem (upgraded later
to 1200 baud, C=1670), Eagleterm, and Railnet BBS(?!) The
first BBS I dialed up and created an account was for a
railroad enthusiasts community, which I had no interest in
and was probably listed in Eagleterm's phone book, which I
copied from my friend on 5.25" floppy. No worries there since
I was able to get phone numbers for other local BBS's...but I
digress.
So yeah, SDF...I'm happy to see that this brand of cyberspace
is still in existence...as well as active and evolving, and
keeps supporting stuff like gopher protocol, irc, UNIX shell
accounts for users, homegrown tools (bboard, commode, etc.)
dialup (!?) I was never fond of the recent popular usage of
what people call the "Internet" and probably haven't been
since the advent of Web 2.0, social media, etc. I look
forward to meeting and interacting with you all in this
"virtual community," as well as in other facets and
extensions of the cyberspace of now.
