Well, yeah, it’s been a while, sorry about that.
My last post was kind of a downer, and I made it sound like I would never make another entry again because I was so disgusted with video games, the internet, and myself. I didn’t mean for it to sound that way, but then a few days off became a few weeks, and that spiraled into months, and, well, you know how those things go.
I’m still here, doing my thing, but not writing about it a whole lot.
That’s not strictly true, I’ve gotten a bunch of articles started, but only half-completed, and then deleted. This little site turns 10 years old this year, and I started to think that maybe I’ve said all I wanted to say. But I don’t think that’s it. I just haven’t been inspired by much lately.
That’s a weird statement to make, really. Video games and computers/the Internet are bigger than they’ve ever been, which is great, but also, really boring. Maybe now that I’m getting a few years older and my tastes are getting more refined, I’m finding the monotonous grey slurry of so-called ‘entertainment’ less palatable than I used to. We are hot off the heels of one of the biggest gaming events of the year, and for the first time in a long time, I can truthfully say that there was so little announced at the show that I was genuinely interested in, that I’ve already forgotten most of it. The kitschy fun stuff that I still love to play is still out there, I just have to work harder to find it.
And then there’s the Internet.
It used to be reasonably useful, but it’s shifting to the blogs, Top X Lists, clickbaity ‘articles’, infographics, and social media. Clicking around and discovering things used to be exciting and fun, but now if it doesn’t show up in my newsreader or a Google search, it doesn’t exist (and anything I click on, I just read the one article, and never go back). I honestly can’t remember the last time I discovered a site by one method or another and then went back more than once. The Internet is absolutely enormous, and I visit the same dozen or so sites every single day. I’m in a rut, and I don’t like it down here.
I know exciting, interesting, and fun stuff is still out there on the Internet, but just like with video games, I just need to look harder to find it.
And that brings me to Gopher. Gopher is one of the many methods on the Internet to distribute information, and it competed with (and actually lost to) HTTP. You can read about gopher and why it’s still relevant. Installing a Gopher client onto my computer is exciting to me. I can visit sites that maybe don’t have as much eyecandy, or popularity, or a comments page. I can visit repositories of information put up because the people genuinely love the technology and the subject matter, and who aren’t necessarily worrying about driving traffic to their site by resorting to clickbait.
I also have installed a Gopher server at gopher://obsolete.cartridge.technology (also available via http://obsolete.cartridge.technology:70 to do… well, something with. I haven’t really decided what I’m going to put up there, and this site isn’t going away any time soon. But there are so many protocols and networks on the Internet that I just plain forget to use, that I need to actually take the time to check them out. For the first time in a really long time, I’m genuinely excited about exploring the Internet, and I’d say that’s a very good thing.