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Digging a Hole

February 8th, 2021

A few minutes ago, I was coming to the close of an extremely mediocre weekend of accomplishing very little. I was just idly browsing an online forum, reading through some recent posts. Okay, fine, the forum was Reddit. Though, I was using a Reddit proxy that works through Gopher, and the Gopher client I was using happened to be NCSA Mosaic 2.7 compiled for GNU/Linux x86_64.

The post on that little-known online forum was talking about a piece of software that I won't mention by name. A piece of software that has infected many of our lives in the past 12 months. The author was expressing his anger at the developers for not bothering to make their software work properly on GNU/Linux. I laughed audibly with sympathy, because I have been wrestling with that exact same software for several months now.

In that moment, I realized two things:

  1. Wow! It isn't just me!
  2. I am reading a Reddit post through Gopher, an internet protocol that's been obsolete for 25 years, on a web browser that's been obsolete for most of that time, running on a modern operating system inside of a virtual machine under a different operating system. I need to get out of the house.

Perhaps the second thought should have come to me before I tried several websites on Mosaic, but hey, who's going outside at midnight anyway? This website works on it, by the way. Very well, in fact. Mosaic does a good job of handling HTML tags created long after it was killed, like <span>, a widely used tag on this website. However, it is amusing to see the contents of <style> tags displayed as text on the page. Switching to l.ultrabear.xyz fixed this problem, but not all websites have such an option.

Maybe my time spent inside is doing some good. Last night, I convinced someone who was about to go back to Windows from GNU/Linux to not go through with it by finding them a solution to an annoying graphical issue.

So, why am I telling you all this? I'll be honest, I don't know. It's my website, you're going to have to deal with it. If you don't like it, make your own website with your own crappy blog. Actually, even if you do enjoy reading this drivel for some reason, you should go make your own website anyway. Everyone should have their own website. Alternatively, you could make your own Gopherhole instead.

-- McKinley, having fun inside