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- ║1 ...........Posted: 2025-08-05........... 1║
- ║2* Tags: gopher art smallnet my_interviews *2║
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-
- If you haven't noticed, I am a member of Bitreich, which is one of the
- forerunners in not just preserving The Internet Gopher Protocol, but propelling
- it forward. The Gopher Protocol is a very simple barebones protocol from the
- early 90s which predated the web. Think of a different way of navigating
- information than a web browser, kinda.
-
- Bitreich hosts a yearly conference which is held both online and in person via
- their very neat conferencing ecosystem. They have a "conference in gopherspace"
- guide[1] where you can read more.
-
- I had the honor of speaking at brcon2025 last Saturday, August 2nd:
-
- * brcon2025 general archive[2]
- * brcon2025 post-talk announcement[3]
-
- I presented my in-progress documentary which covers the smallnet: from Gopher
- history, to smallnet present and future. Fun interviews with most of the
- original Gopher RFC people, like Mark P. McCahill, Bob Alberti, Paul Lindner. I
- also interviewed Cory Doctorow and Melon King (of MelonLand). I mentioned plans
- to interview the founder of Bitreich for this documentary and also that this
- documentary plans to bring awareness to a retro tech/video game museum which is
- important to me/I volunteer at: The MADE[4]. Interestingly, I noticed I wasn't
- the only one talking about museums.
-
- Here's my copy of the assets from the talk, although you can find the originals
- on the official brcon2025 archive[5]:
-
- * .ogg recording of my talk[6]
- * slides (.zip of .md files)[7]
- * transcription of the .ogg recording[8]
-
- If you explore the archives, you'll see there's actually a lot of really amazing
- work being done in gopherspace, with `.ogg` recordings and transcripts. On that
- note, one of my favorite things about Bitreich is its ecosystem. For example,
- all the presenters used a very unix-y streaming setup for audio and presenting
- using a tool they called `catpoint` (like PowerPoint, but text-based).
- Personally, I streamed to their server using `ffmpeg`--which was a lot of fun.
- Thankfully, for my expediency I used ChatGPT to help with exactly what command I
- needed to accomplish such with their Darkice server. All this lines up with a
- lot of my philosophy which was passed on to me from wonderful Unix boomers:
- don't reinvent the wheel, these old tools, like icecast, are tried and true.
- Keep it simple, not monolithic. Interoperable. Let people use the tools they
- want.
-
- Here are some highlights I've chosen from brcon2025:
-
- * 20h's presentation on Gopher Game Programming[9]
- * Hackathon, developing out features for `sacc`, which is definitely my favorite
- TUI gopher client.
-
- Hack the planet!
-
- -- someodd
-
- ## Footnotes
-
- [1]: They have a "conference in gopherspace" guide: gopher://bitreich.org:70/0/con/2021/brcondoc.en.txt
- [2]: brcon2025 general archive: gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2025
- [3]: brcon2025 post-talk announcement: gopher://bitreich.org:70/0/usr/20h/phlog/2025-08-02T18-35-01-802997.md
- [4]: The MADE: https://themade.org
- [5]: the official brcon2025 archive: gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2025