!Gef's 5 questions
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agk's diary
23 February 2024 @ 15:23 UTC
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written on x61, vf15 monitor, model m keyboard
while first daughter washes dishes
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Gef wrote 5 questions, in the tradition of Christy
O'Twisty. I'll give 'em a try.
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/gef/questions/march
1. What's my favorite soup?
Probably soup beans. Cook some bacon or fat
meat in the skillet with butter or lard. Sautee
you some onions in there and throw in whatever
else you want. Dump in the pinto beans you
already soaked and pressure cooked with a bay
leaf and kombu seaweed if you have it. Dump in
broth. Cook everything together, add salt and
pepper, and serve it with hot cornbread that
soaked up some of the bacon grease and a slice
of raw onion.
If somebody else is making it, I love a soup
with a slow-cooked goat knuckle or knee in it.
I've had a Pakistani soup like that and a
Polish one and both stuck to my ribs some good.
2. In a few weeks there'll be no internet forever.
What do I download?
I'll make sure my gopher hole's backed up. I've
got plenty of reference and entertainment books
and so do the public and college libraries, and
an ok handful of videotapes, records, and old
mixtapes for when there's electricity.
I might make sure I have a book about making
sundials and an Atlas and Gazateer detailed map
book for my state and some surrounding states.
I imagine some supply chain disruption and grid
outages, so if it wasn't too late, I'd probably
get a Turkish charcoal samovar, a heavy rocket
stove like the Ecozoom Versa, and give plans
for a cinva-ram compressed earth block press to
a local metal shop to get one made.
I'd fill a couple buckets with seedmeal or
tankage, agricultural lime, gypsum, dolomite
lime, and rock phosphate or bonemeal, and try
to get a bunch of seed potatoes. I'd stock up
on ghee, lard, and olive oil.
If I had money and they were still available ,
I might get a couple solar panels, a DC fridge,
some DC fans, spare parts for our bikes and my
motorcycle, and probably a cheap .22 rifle and
a cheap shotgun with some boxes of ammo. Other-
wise I'd scavenge, share, or trade for that
stuff after the internet's gone.
These are things I don't have now because they
aren't useful to me. They'd just be clutter in
the world I live in.
The biggest thing I'd probably miss is
trustworthy global news, I figure something
would emerge to replace that within a year. SMS
and email probably gets replaced by visits,
radio, bulletin boards, mail, and notices in
the paper.
I'd miss the books at my fingertips through
Anna's Archive, but I don't have a hard drive
big enough to back it up locally, and I'm dim
on the idea I'd have the electricity to read
many e-books without stress, at least in the
short term, if the internet's gone forever.
3. What's a memorable dream?
I used to dream about playing hide and seek
with the SWAT team in a warehouse or low-rise
block of housing project apartments. As those
real-world days get further behind me, those
dreams get rarer.
4. What am I most excited about this spring?
Bonfires at my AA sponsor's house.
5. What's the most interesting website I go to?
I like Anna's Archive and worldcat for books. I
like The Hearty Salon's West Asia Front threads
for news from the axis of resistance to Israeli
genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I like
Moon of Alabama for geopolitical analysis. I
like Web Oasis for links, particularly recipes
when trying to cook something not in my books.
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UPDATE 27 Mar: After reading "Downlink, uplink" by
Jesse (Jebug29 at sdf, 26 Mar), I rethought what I
want to download if the internet is going away
forever. Jesse wrote how losing internet after you
are used to it is losing access to society.
Yes a lot of my society is offline, and I'm
confident in its robustness and resilience to
shock as I wrote above. But what I need to back up
is less about entertainment than about balm for
the short- or long-term loneliness from losing one
part of my access to society.
So I'd like to back up a large chunk of gopher. I
want the entire archives of gopherholes I most
often read, so I can commune with the traces of
personalities I've become used to: szczezuja,
solderpunk, gef, freet, defanor, candide, christy,
tomasino, AUTOMA, nm03, etc, and those I reread:
spring, logout, typed-hole's textfile archive.
It wouldn't take much space, especially confining
download to text files only. It'd download quick
and be easy to navigate by locally hosted gopher
server or directory walking.
Fliping through these albums, I'd find comfort in
getting to know your ghosts or traces, marks left
by your personalities in accounts of yourselves,
when I feel lonely during the adjustment period
and periodically far into future.
If the hardware holds up or remains repairable and
electricity can be found, I can even introduce my
daughter to your traces long in the future. "These
are some ways people were; some things they
thought about, before internet ended."
