Re: Gopher Resiliency (circumlunar.space), 11/20/2019
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I appreciated user tomasino's reply[1] to a post on gopher
resiliency that I made recently[2]. I wasn't sure if I ought
to put "rere" in my filename though; what's the gopherspace
best-practice there? I'm thinking a single "re" will suffice
in all cases...
First of all, the story about the NES magazines: The life
cycle of those, to me, was wonderfully complete. Had they
been thrown out or donated sooner, it wouldn't be as pretty
a tale. The fact that you kept them and and watched them
transform into their final useful state was beautiful.
Perhaps it's overly indulgent to view it that way, I don't
know. What is beauty anyway?
It's not the objects themselves that matter in this story,
it's your relationship with them; they were special to you,
and their end needed to balance with their meaning. Without
that balance, I'm certain there would be some lacking,
linger perhaps only as an insignificant regret- but a regret
nonetheless.
Cut to the scene of the pathological, compulsive hoarder. Is
something broken in there (yes, there is) that doesn't let
them have this complete lifecycle connection? Maybe we can
understand them better, those of us that have them in our
lives.
As for gopher content, I'm not sure where it falls here.
Sometimes I write, and I love what I wrote. Sometimes the
keypresses come from my soul. Other times, I just write
because I feel a need, because I'm bored, to avoid work, or
any other number of reasons.
Thank you, tomasino, for your kind words about my content
on your server. The story was a two-sided one, just a
dipping of toes into sci-fi, which I have shockingly narrow
experience in when juxtaposed with my other hobbies and
interests. My frustration with those comes from the fact
that I started only with a premise in mind. I felt like the
story didn't have any real meaning beyond that premise, and
I didn't know what to do with it. No outline, no goal. It
was fun, but I guess I felt like it wasn't what people who
enjoy sci-fi would want to read. Maybe I need to keep
writing it just because it's fun and for no other reason.
As for the resiliency bit, I think your post has driven me
to a resolution. As you said, "Our stuff is mostly text,
after all, and that doesn't take up much space." Therefore,
why worry too much about it? Like you, running across old
stuff on Gopher has never bothered me, it's really very
interesting. As long as the admins of the servers will keep
it up, I think I'll just leave it up. If they get tired of
it, things can move from there... and who knows when we
might pick up that old project and dust it off, for one last
hoorah in it's lifecycle?
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2019-11-14_gopherResiliency.txt
[2]
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/tomasino/phlog/20191115-re-gopher-resiliency
