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Smell the roses
August 20th, 2017
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First, a confession. Yeah, I totally waited for midnight to roll around so
this post would show up as being written on Sunday and not a second
Saturday phlog. I wrote too much the other day and I'm a sensitive
snowflake or something.

On Mastodon tonight I was having a conversation about gopher with @maiki
and @salixlucida. Maiki triggered a memory with this paragraph:

	It is nostalgic, but I recall a time when I would hit a "homepage" or
	gopher site (or even Hotline server!) and I would just read every
	single thing on it. I really loved that.

He (shit, I didn't look at your profile @maiki and I'm assuming pronouns)
reminded me of my earliest days online when I would dial into Snakes Lair
BBS or one of a few other hot spots and dive deep into every nook and
cranny in the forums and newsgroups. I read EVERYTHING and it was huge in
forming me into who I am. I can't say it was the information I read in any
particular case, though I'm sure that had some impacts here and there.
Moreso it was the culture of eager consumption of information.

This stuff was mine. It was my secret place. My friends--most of them
anyway--didn't traffic online. I could disappear into rabbit holes my
parents wouldn't understand even if they saw it first hand. Everything
that happened on these systems, with these people, was sacred to me in
a way that I didnt/couldn't fathom at the time.

Now I would use symbolic terms from Mircea Eliade or Rudolf Otto and
describe my connectivity in spiritual terms. I was, after-all, a Jesuit
and have followed a very long religious path. The terms make sense to me,
they resonate. It's part of my way of understanding, of uniting my own
internal diaclectic of prakriti and purusha, if you will.

So yes, I agree with Maiki. I miss those times. I am already getting
a sense of them again here, barely two weeks in to my phlogging. If you're
on my people-list on my index page, I've either read everything you've
written on gopher or I'm close to it. I hope you'll do the same.
.