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
[email protected]) 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
[email protected] 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
