!Gef's 5 questions --- agk's diary 23 February 2024 @ 15:23 UTC --- written on x61, vf15 monitor, model m keyboard while first daughter washes dishes --- Gef wrote 5 questions, in the tradition of Christy O'Twisty. I'll give 'em a try. gopher://sdf.org/0/users/gef/questions/march 1. What's my favorite soup? Probably soup beans. Cook some bacon or fat meat in the skillet with butter or lard. Sautee you some onions in there and throw in whatever else you want. Dump in the pinto beans you already soaked and pressure cooked with a bay leaf and kombu seaweed if you have it. Dump in broth. Cook everything together, add salt and pepper, and serve it with hot cornbread that soaked up some of the bacon grease and a slice of raw onion. If somebody else is making it, I love a soup with a slow-cooked goat knuckle or knee in it. I've had a Pakistani soup like that and a Polish one and both stuck to my ribs some good. 2. In a few weeks there'll be no internet forever. What do I download? I'll make sure my gopher hole's backed up. I've got plenty of reference and entertainment books and so do the public and college libraries, and an ok handful of videotapes, records, and old mixtapes for when there's electricity. I might make sure I have a book about making sundials and an Atlas and Gazateer detailed map book for my state and some surrounding states. I imagine some supply chain disruption and grid outages, so if it wasn't too late, I'd probably get a Turkish charcoal samovar, a heavy rocket stove like the Ecozoom Versa, and give plans for a cinva-ram compressed earth block press to a local metal shop to get one made. I'd fill a couple buckets with seedmeal or tankage, agricultural lime, gypsum, dolomite lime, and rock phosphate or bonemeal, and try to get a bunch of seed potatoes. I'd stock up on ghee, lard, and olive oil. If I had money and they were still available , I might get a couple solar panels, a DC fridge, some DC fans, spare parts for our bikes and my motorcycle, and probably a cheap .22 rifle and a cheap shotgun with some boxes of ammo. Other- wise I'd scavenge, share, or trade for that stuff after the internet's gone. These are things I don't have now because they aren't useful to me. They'd just be clutter in the world I live in. The biggest thing I'd probably miss is trustworthy global news, I figure something would emerge to replace that within a year. SMS and email probably gets replaced by visits, radio, bulletin boards, mail, and notices in the paper. I'd miss the books at my fingertips through Anna's Archive, but I don't have a hard drive big enough to back it up locally, and I'm dim on the idea I'd have the electricity to read many e-books without stress, at least in the short term, if the internet's gone forever. 3. What's a memorable dream? I used to dream about playing hide and seek with the SWAT team in a warehouse or low-rise block of housing project apartments. As those real-world days get further behind me, those dreams get rarer. 4. What am I most excited about this spring? Bonfires at my AA sponsor's house. 5. What's the most interesting website I go to? I like Anna's Archive and worldcat for books. I like The Hearty Salon's West Asia Front threads for news from the axis of resistance to Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I like Moon of Alabama for geopolitical analysis. I like Web Oasis for links, particularly recipes when trying to cook something not in my books. --- UPDATE 27 Mar: After reading "Downlink, uplink" by Jesse (Jebug29 at sdf, 26 Mar), I rethought what I want to download if the internet is going away forever. Jesse wrote how losing internet after you are used to it is losing access to society. Yes a lot of my society is offline, and I'm confident in its robustness and resilience to shock as I wrote above. But what I need to back up is less about entertainment than about balm for the short- or long-term loneliness from losing one part of my access to society. So I'd like to back up a large chunk of gopher. I want the entire archives of gopherholes I most often read, so I can commune with the traces of personalities I've become used to: szczezuja, solderpunk, gef, freet, defanor, candide, christy, tomasino, AUTOMA, nm03, etc, and those I reread: spring, logout, typed-hole's textfile archive. It wouldn't take much space, especially confining download to text files only. It'd download quick and be easy to navigate by locally hosted gopher server or directory walking. Fliping through these albums, I'd find comfort in getting to know your ghosts or traces, marks left by your personalities in accounts of yourselves, when I feel lonely during the adjustment period and periodically far into future. If the hardware holds up or remains repairable and electricity can be found, I can even introduce my daughter to your traces long in the future. "These are some ways people were; some things they thought about, before internet ended."