A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies... the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure! Just to piggy-back on cat's posts [0] [1] regarding gopher and new adherents to this august and elegant protocol, yes newcomers should absolutely take into account that gopher preceded HTML and has continued to be here all along. I myself never dabbled in it until very recently but have been enjoying the fresh air and the buried treasure. Saving gopher though, it just conjures up goofy images: "We're losing her! Give me the paddles!" "CLEAR!!" <<>> "Nothing!" "CLEAR!!" <<>> beep-beep beep-beep beep-beep... There is a non-zero possibility that gopher will be here after we have all shuffled off this mortal coil[2]. The rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated. It's a tough little protocol with a lot going for it. At one time folks knew to enter a new 'space' online quietly, lurk for a bit to get a feel for things, and RTFM (yeah, right) or at least pretend that they had RTFM and play along like they knew what was going on until they knew what was going on. (They knew this in part because the loud and unwary got LARTed within an inch of their lives and partly because people in general seemed to be more inclined to practice basic politeness. I suppose human nature had not yet caught up to the freedom from consequences inherent in most online communications.) Anyway. I think the lack of discoverability is a feature, not a bug. It enforces perseverence in order to participate and pushes folks to actually ask one another where to find things as spring once noted[3]. Many will, having not received their expected doses of dopamine, move on or else make asses of themselves trying to get enough attention to meet their needs. The latter will just be walling themselves off from the actual community while still using the protocol (is there a cask of Amontillado in there with you?) a self-correcting problem perhaps, a rarity in this day and age. Maybe a few will even kick the dopamine habit. The beauty of the protocol is that someone can produce a new gopher hole and no one ever has to visit it, not even once. No usenet death penalty required. In circumlunar space, no one can hear you plonk. In fact I have no idea whether anyone will read this[4]. And that's A-okay. I'm not ready to claim my civil right just yet. The gopher protocol makes me think of this quote from Chuck Close: Photography...it's the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody with a point-and-shoot camera can take a competent picture. But it's the hardest medium in which to have, to express, some kind of personal vision. Because there is no touch, there is no hand, there is no physicality. The fact that you CAN have something that's recognizable from 50 feet across the gallery as a Diane Arbus or an Irving Penn...the fact that you can have recognizable authorship means they really have done something. If someone can read your phlog post and come away with something meaningful from just a bit of bare text, if you can make a mark on the world without inline images or cascading stylesheets then you might just have something on the ball. Be well, sundogs. _______________ /\ \ / \ \ / \_________ \ / / /\ \ / / ___/ \ \ / / / \ \ \ / / /_____\___\ \ / / / \ / / /___________________\ \ / / \ / / \/__________________________/ [0] gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20190530.txt [1] gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20190531.txt [2] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180705-space-gopher-2000 [3] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7espring/phlog/2019-01-21__Solving_the_Search_Prob lem.txt [4] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7espring/phlog/2019-04-28__Easy_Mode.txt NO CARRIER