NoViCoGE 2021
2021-11-23
===

 This article is written in reaction to Logout[1]'s NoViCoGE event. That is the 
'November Vintage Computer Gophering Event'. Per its suggestion I have 
estabilished this gopher space via my old i386 laptop. It has been a fairly 
eventful day, but now that my world has stopped coming to an end, I have 
decided to journal the challenge, which could very well be interpreted as an 
introduction to this particular triapul.cz gopher space.

 I am a relative newcomer to the gopher protocol, having spent the past two 
years tripping over various links, reading phlogs of folks I would have never 
met otherwise and discovering projects that not only intriqued me, but made me 
feel deep sympathy for the protocol. Soon after I become a gopher citizen 
myself, joining the followers of Slow Philosophy at rawtext.club. It seemed as 
if my decade long descent into a plain text fetishist reached its conclusion. 
Which of course birthed a new beginning with my personal dedication to not 
abandon gopher as an experiment, but to turn the experience into something 
special, in the very least for myself. But more on that some other time.

 Of the holes I began frequenting, Logout's Gopherspace quickly captured me 
simply for the fact that it was run by one of my countrymen. Having been 
enthralled by logout's mention of historical .cz gopher domains, something he 
grew to reflect in his melancholic discovery that his Gopherspace remained the 
last of the protocol on the Czech internet. I sought to remedy that issue by 
setting up triapul.cz. Not long before that however, I came upon desudoli.cz, a 
yet another project by a Czech author.

 Nevertheless, I struggled to pick the project off the ground. Finally the 
NoViCoGE challenge proved to be the final spark. Funnily it was through 
solene'%[2] that I discovered Logout's when I was reading her phlog. I 
undertook her Old Computer Challenge and wrote about it[3] a few months ago and 
have since provided some art for her OpenBSD webzine project [4]. The world 
seems smaller than ever. 

 The fan purs, as it does. The rest is still in the making, guided by the 
invisible hand of automatism.


[1] gopher://i-logout.cz:70/0/phlog\
/posts/2021-10-28_november_vintage_\
computer_gophering_event_2021.txt

[2] gopher://dataswamp.org/~solene

[3] gopher://triapul.cz/phlog/2021-07\
-09-the-case-of-eternal-computing.txt

[4] http://webzine.puffy.cafe