ROOPHLOCH 2024 round up
-----------------------

So long, September!  The window for participation in ROOPHLOCH 2024
closed a few days ago.  Sorry that this round up post is coming
after a short delay.  Unfortunately I was travelling for work on
the 1st and 2nd of October, so this is the soonest I could get
it out.  Thanks, as always, to everybody who participated, which,
as we'll soon see, was an awful lot of you!  As in previous years
I've prepared a page of links[1] to all participating posts I know
of.  If your post is missing, or you notice a broken link, please let
me know!

At the start of September I was a little afraid that the
fact that my phlog was temporarily not being picked up by the
Bongusta! gopherspace aggregator might mean that participation
this year might be lower than usual, or that maybe there would be
a strong imbalance between the number of Gopher and Gemini posts.
Well, I needn't have worried!  The sixth incarnation of ROOPHLOCH
was absolutely positively the most successful year yet, and all
records have been broken!

Quite a few posts are available on both eligible protocols.
In recognition of ROOPHLOCH's Gopher-only origins, and in the hopes
of making up for any shortfall in Gopher participation due to the
aforementioned Bongusta! problem, I have listed those posts, and
counted them in the statistics to follow, as if they were Gopher
only.  Finding the corresponding gemini:// URLs for those posts, if
you want them, is left as a straightforward exercise to the reader.

A total of 13 qualifying posts were made on Gopher, by 13 distinct
users, and a total of 20 posts were made on Gemini, by 18 distinct
users.  That makes for 33 posts in total from 31 distinct users!
Considering that we had a total of 17 posts from 15 users last year,
this is really impressive!  We basically doubled participation in a
single year.  There's a good healthy mix of Gopher and Gemini, old
hats and first time ROOPHLOCHers (even somebody who only started
their gemlog a week before participating!), pubnix members and
self-hosters, all of which makes me really happy to see.

UPDATE 2024-10-09: I received late notice of one extra post by
ROOPHLOCH regular xiled, which puts us at 34 posts from 32 users in
total, which means we exactly doubled posts and more than doubled
users, woohoo!

We still haven't seen our first non-RF-based post, but there were
multiple LoRa posts this year and multiple amateur radio post
as well.  We also had posts come in from some interesting portable
devices, some new (like the Freewrite Alpha), some old (like a
PSP or a Palm TX), and some being used other than intended (like a
Kobo Clara e-Reader).  I don't want to write too much here about the
different means by which people posted, though.  Not that this isn't
a big part of the ROOPHLOCH event, because it is and always has been.
But based on a few emails and participating posts this year I have
come to regret a little that there has been so little emphasis
placed on the places that people post from and the means by which
they get there, at least relative to the "techier" side of things.
The "RO" in ROOPHLOCH stands for "Remote Outdoor", after all, and
posts with well-written descriptions or even photographs of outdoor
places outside of the author's typical daily routes are in the spirit
of the event even if they're posted with boring old mobile data,
and I don't want those posts to be marginalised.  I also want to
encourage other people who have perhaps not bothered participating
in previous years because they did not have the skills or equipment
to make posts in interesting ways and thought perhaps nobody would
care to read their post because of it - you can more than make
up for that by going to interesting places in interesting ways
(cycling, kayaking, climbing?) and writing about that.  This year
we had a post from a beach, a graveyard and, goodness me, even
from the vicinity of the now absent Nakagin Capsule Tower Building.
One of the posts I particularly enjoyed reading was "only" written
from the author's back porch late at night, but described the sights
and sounds wonderfully.

Let me close with another big and heartfelt thank you to everybody
who participated in ROOPHLOCH this year!  I am already looking
forward to next year's challenge.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/roophloch/2024/