ROOPHLOCH 2023 round up
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Well, October is here, September is gone, and with it another year's
ROOPHLOCH has come to a close. It was a great year! Thanks to
everybody who participated and helped keep the tradition alive.
As always, I have prepared a page of links[1] to all participating
posts I know of. If your post is missing, please let me know!
This was the first ROOPHLOCH year that Gemini posts were explicitly
allowed in addition to Gopher posts, and the first time that the
event was announced on Gemini. Funnily enough, participation ended
up being split perfectly evenly across the two protocols. I am
aware of eight Gopher posts (from six distinct users, two of them
first time ROOPHLOCHERs) and eight Gemini posts. That makes for 16
in total, which is not only more than the 11 we got last year, but
is also the most posts we've had since the inaugural event in 2019,
when we got...16 posts. So we have met our previous record but still
not exceeded it. In another little coincidence, we also had exactly
the same number of distinct users this year and in 2019, namely 14.
UPDATE: Stop the press! I had missed out on another last minute
Gopher post from sundog dokuja! That makes 17 posts from 15 users,
we have set a new record, and in the end we had more Gopher posts
than Gemini posts, true to our heritage. I am thrilled!
On a brief personal note I'm really happy to report that not only
did I finally manage to make a qualifying post myself this year for
the first time in a while (I was let down in 2022 by the inability
of modern telephones to accurately convey sine waves over very
short distances, what a time to be alive), and not only that but I
finally did something more interesting than just using my phone's
WiFi hotspot. I've definitely raised the bar for myself in future.
There's lots of cool stuff to see amongst this year's posts.
I am super impressed by the "solar powered tables" on a university
campus which facilitated azul's post, I have never seen anything
like that before. Spaceling used the Meshtastic LoRa platform,
which was also new to me. Jone wrote a Gopher CGI program to
facilitate making a post using a Gopher client, and then wrote that
Gopher client in BASIC! ~ew and the Free Thinker both mentioned
optical links in their posts as ideas/inspirations for future years.
Maybe 2024 will be the first year somebody makes a non-radio post?
I'm looking forward to finding out!
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/roophloch/2023
