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Stardate: 20190104.21h56
Location: Guest Room
Input Device: Cyber Rig
Audio: Central heating
Visual: Cyber Rig and guest room periphery
Energy: 60%
Mental: 70%
Emotional: slowing down, settling.

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Melton mentioned in a phlog entry today [1] about keeping 
things lean in the gopherspace.  The text is very lean and I 
really appreciate that, especially when I am going over 
congested wifi or hotspot with a faint signal to the tower.  
With larger files, I usually make note of them and download 
them later.  I still have not found a good workflow for 
downloading stuff.  What usually ends up happening is I 
download to the server that I am attached to, especially when 
mobile or using a low powered machine (like right now) and 
download from the server when I am back at a regular 
workstation.  I don't really like doing things that way, 
especially with pictures, since I seem to lose the continuity 
of reading a post and viewing the picture after and then 
rereading the post.

Right now, I am using my cyber rig again, with Pi0w on 
battery and the face mounted display (FMD).  I am also using 
my "zero gravity" Target recliner and testing this out with a 
cheap compact Chinese mechanical clicky LED keyboard.  I like 
the breathing glow of the rainbow LEDs, especiallly since the 
face mounted display is not enclosed right now.  I am not 
wearing my Carhartt ambient light shield at the moment and my 
periphery is visible, so looking at the FMD is like looking 
at the ceiling with my head tilted back against the
head rest.  When I gaze downward, I see the room and the 
keyboard.  That's if I am in full recline, like now.  If I 
sit in seated position, my periphery is more of the keyboard 
and my legs.  Also, my head is tilted downward with gravity.

I am enjoying using the cyber rig for gopher and taking my 
notes.  Right now, I just have 2 screen sessions.  One for 
reading gopher and the other one for typing out my notes.  
For some reason, when I am doing this on a full 
desktop/laptop, the experience starts simple, but then 
becomes complicated and distracting.  First, a terminal in 
gopher, then a terminal for notes. Then a terminal for email.  
Then I need tunage and fire up an mp3 player/streamer.  Then 
something I read in gopher takes me to the web so I fire up a
browser.  Then the browser has me and I get distracted by 
something else, not related to the gopher session.  Then I 
end up on mastodon and it goes on ad infinitum.  Then I 
realize it's after 3AM and I have to get up for work in 3 
hours.  At that point, my notes are incomplete, I'm feeling
burntout with all of the web stimuli, and did not feel like I 
accomplished much of anything except consume a whole bag of 
multidistracting.

So going back to what Melton wrote, the noise on the web was 
mentioned and how people are looking for pure content.  I 
think I am one of those people.  I don't like having to keep 
filtering out all of the noise to get a decent signal.  I 
don't like how hard it is to find stuff on the web these 
days.  

Before, you would be able to find decent content when you did 
a search.   I would even find more content related to the 
thing I was searching and sometimes even whole communities of 
people interested in the things I was searching for.  And 
that was only on page 1 of my search results.  Now, I 
struggle with finding the same kinds of results.  

Even not too long ago, I would see some forum entries 
related to  my inquiries in the results.  Not so much these 
days.  If I need to do a deep dive, it takes so much longer 
with so many distracting things...or my patience has 
become shorter.  Yeah, the results hit the glass at super 
fast speeds, but the results are not what I inquired 
about...until I hit page 5 or later.  And the amount of 
resources to go through the noise, the cookies, the banner 
ads, the bad scripts, the hijacked browser pages, the 
unrelated, and get to page 5?  Forget it.

So I enjoy the gopher tunnels for the pure content.  Searches 
are still questionable for me since veronica-2 and other 
search tools are hit or miss, but at least the content that 
is there and still available is just about the content.  Same 
with logging in to SDF and enjoying com or bboard...or even 
listening to anonradio while chatting on com in the 
#anonradio channel about what is currently being 
broadcasted...a shared and interactive experience with the 
community in real-time.

So yeah, I find myself experiencing and enjoying the pure 
content more so lately at my speed and on my terms and taking 
the time to digest and ruminate, instead of being force-fed 
and rushed into consuming more. So toxic!  

Maybe I have been too over-exposed and developed an allergy 
to the World Wide Web of now, kinda like Cayce Pollard's 
allergy to fashion labels in Gibson's, _Pattern Recognition_.  
Maybe the pure content of the gopher tunnels are giving me an 
exit.  

ASCII and the shell does seem to have a Zen quality to it 
that seems to calm me down to be here in the now.  The 
traffic, billboards, road rage, and accidents on the 
Information Super Highway are too much for me right now.  I'm 
turning off at the next exit and gonna drive this dirt road
and enjoy the scenery with no destination planned. Maybe I'll 
pull off the road and hitch hike a ride to the closest 
outpost for a cosmic voyage.  Maybe I'll request for asylum 
in your colony.  Or maybe I'll jack in and share a consensual 
hallucination like before. Or check in at your gopher hole to 
see what you're up to.  Maybe I'll even pull your finger.

[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/melton/phlog/more-fun-with-images.md

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