It's not that I wasn't aware that gopher still exists -- I was -- but I *was* unaware it has active use outside my own

It's not that I wasn't aware that gopher still exists -- I was -- but I *was* unaware it has active use outside my own
little weird SDF bubble. Have discovered bitreich.org today and I feel like it's 1999 all over again.

Part of why I went down this rabbit^H^H^H^H^H^Hgopher hole to begin with is because I am sick to death of the
commercialized Internet -- this "walled garden" thing where Fedbook and Google and Amazon and Apple and Microsoft are in
charge of what you see, drive your interactions with other people behind the scenes, and have turned the Internet from a
wild west playground into a fucking shopping mall. I mean, it's a shopping mall with fascism on the rise, where people
like me (queer, jewish, trans) get continuously shoved out into the cold when we're not being brought up on charges of
being too weird to live, but a shopping mall nonetheless. I'm sick of it. We don't *own* anything any more -- nobody has
a web site, they have a fucking twitter account, and god help you if you want to connect with actual people instead of
bots or corporate brand accounts. I miss the old internet, where nobody knew you were a dog, and you could connect with
like-minded weirdos and you weren't using your legal name anywhere because it's the internet, why would you do that.

So anyway, this is all to say it's the year of our not-lord 2021 and I am indeed writing a phlog entry on fucking gopher
like the curmudgeonly anachronistic Gen X'er I am. Yep.