Gopher as a rural retreat
-------------------------

I'm not proud to admit that, as gopherspace has continued to expand,
I've become a little bit insular.  I keep a fairly close eye on what's
happening in circumlunar space, of course, and my own personal
moku-pona feed keeps me up to date with the people I've been following
for years.  But aside from that, if it doesn't show up on Bongusta I'm
quite liable to miss it.  Since the SDF exodus of a year or so back,
I've not really checked out any of the new phlogs that have appeared
there.

Fortunately not everybody is as slack as I am, and Tomasino's
wonderful phlog roll[1] has given me the opportunity to slowly get a
bit more up to date.  I'm especially happy to have discovered SDFer
mmeta4's "Our Global Predicament" phlog[2], which is right up my
alley.  Shane at ascendingcreations.com[3] has a lot of really
interesting stuff online as well, including a response to my robot
bathroom rant[4] which I've only just found.  Thanks, shane!

But in keeping with my apparently iron-clad inability to use Gopher
to do anything other than talk about Gopher, this post is mostly being
written to share with anybody else who missed it a really nice thought
that I found at another SDF phlog, this one by fallingknife[5].

Prompted by a friends' question of Why are you wasting time on
something that is 30 years old [Gopher], when you could be doing
something meaningful?", fallingknife draws the analogy that Gopher is
like a "rural respite from the world wide web"[6].  I think there's
something in that idea.  There's a cathartic quality to gopherspace
and the phlogosphere in particular which is at least partially due to
both the simpler, slower mode of operation in which we participate in
it and its feeling of remoteness and disconectedness from the rest of
the internet.  The of a rural retreat seems to capture this value
pretty nicely.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/moku-pona/
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/mmeta4/Phlog
[3] gopher://ascendingcreations.com:70/1/shane/
[4] gopher://ascendingcreations.com:70/0/shane/XnvCJFDBcrMr2opMlyIvZKkfrOfOWW0j.txt
[5] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/fallingknife
[6] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/fallingknife/phlog/20190810-thoughts-and-quotes-on-change.txt