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Moody Dwarves and Gophers ------------------------- I have a strong empathy for a particular behaviour exhibited by the dwarves in Tarn and Zach Adams' masterpiece, Dwarf Fortress: "Periodically, individual dwarves are struck with an idea for a legendary artifact and enter a *strange mood*. Dwarves which enter a strange mood will stop whatever they are doing and pursue the construction of this artifact to the exclusion of all else. They will not stop to eat, drink, sleep, or even run away from dangerous creatures. If they do not manage to begin construction of the artifact within a handful of months, they will go insane and die soon afterward." -- The Dwarf Fortress Wiki [1] To me this is a very obvious metaphor for way hackers of all stripes get sucked into projects and cannot face the light of day until the project is in some way ... complete? Perhaps not, but at least until the "sated" feeling arrives. It's also very much how I've felt about my recent gopher-related projects. Despite its simplicity, Elpher [2] in particular has been _all consuming_, and if you asked me why I wouldn't be able to tell you. I'm left, at the end of the madness, with an artifact and a dazed feeling of having accomplished... something. As always, the joy is in the learning and the making. Which brings me to what excites me about gopher: I've read quite a few interesting posts on phlogs discussing what various people consider to be its most important aspects. Seeing as I've only been here for a few weeks I won't presume to have an opinion on this. All I will say is that I'm hugely enjoying the extent to which the gopher/pubnix universe seems to be constructed more-or-less entirely by those who participate in it. There seems to be little distinction between users and builders. The extent to which this is enabled by simple-by-design protocols is, for me, an important part of their allure. The whole situation reminds me of the way the BBS scene used to be back in the early 90s, where much of the infrastructure was run by enthusiastic users, with almost no commercial involvement. Even worldwide networks like FidoNet and its derivatives (KatNet is the one I remember) were organized and run primarily by hobbyists. It also reminds me of the way I initially felt when I first experienced the big "I" Internet through a PPP connection: by having an IP address I was suddenly just as much a part of the global network as anyone else. I could run a website, host an IRC server, whatever. This is precisely the feeling that has largely vanished over the last decade. Internet services are increasingly centralized. Almost nobody has a fixed IP address (because we're still in love with IPv4), setting up a usable personal mail server is basically impossible (because spam, and all of the hoops one has to jump through to not be regarded as a source of it and therefore blacklisted). Even the well-intentioned privacy-focused legal obligations, not to mention not-so-well-intentioned copyright-focused legal obligations, that are being applied to operators of internet services are, in my opinion, helping separate internet participants into those who consume and those who produce. So for me as an outsider, this is the single greatest thing about gopher - the extent to which the simplicity of the protocol enables a community of pure participation, where distinctions between producers and consumers are impossible. A community built out of magical artifacts for and by moody dwarves. -- [1]: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Strange_mood [2]: gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/scripts/browse-git.scm|elpher.git