SPOOKY ROOPHLOCH

Well I just noticed that I've got a pretty creepy scene going on
here. I'm sitting outside on an almost silent night on a little
stool before an old wooden folding table with a laptop and lantern
upon it, the latter picking out the twisted remains of a dead tree
emerging amongst some thistles, while directly behind me there's a
red full moon poking up just above the horizon. Now while the text I
type becomes obscured by bugs attracted to the light of the laptop's
scren, a breeze blows through the grass rustling it like whispers in
the warm night.

But I'm not out here to dabble in the occult, this night at least,
science will give me all the power I need to reach you without
resort to waves of sound, radio, or everyday telepathy. As it was a
year ago, light will be my carrier, over a distance of twenty two
meters back to the verandah of my house, where awaits an
internet-connected laptop ready to beam my words into the
intersphere.

Last time I was cut short by some brief precipitation before I had
the chance to indulge in such obscure verse as I have adopted here.
For twenty nine days I have awaited the correct meteorological
alignment, and willingness to get of the couch after dinner, until
now with just one day before the window for the sacred practice of
ROOPHLOCH expires, I can finally join among those explorers at the
frontier of unsheltered Gophering.

Ah, the world does still exist, the sound of a vehicle just passing
a kilometer or two away alerts me to the lights of some late
traveller, which I watched run beside me and up the hill to the
house in front of me, seen only as a faint glow of light in the
black emptyness. Before long though everything's black again but for
the sliver of light from the window of my house reaching out towards
me.

Well I'll slip out of my mystical mumbo-jumbo mode now and [Gah,
moth down my shirt] conclude the story of my last two phlog posts.
That vintage mechanical keyboard buyer from Brazil eventually gave
in and contacted me via the email address on my website, and so I
finally sold it in spite of Ebay's accusing AI eye. Hopefully it
gets there OK after all that.

My rig for optical communication this year hasn't changed. I've had
too many projects going on to even think of trying to improve it
since last year. I tried it in daylight this morning but it's no
good - the ambient light swamps the signal entirely. Hopefully one
year I'll get around to really pushing the distance, but any further
in this direction and I have to walk back and forth around a tall
mesh fence to make the adjustments, and that would get pretty
tiresome, especially in tonight's darkness (the moon has now gone
behind some creepy thin strips of cloud).

Well I guess the other thing was just my musing for the night, on
the couch [oh, I hear a bat flying around overhead, maximum creep
factor has been reached!], before working myself up to setting all
this up. I guess I was thinking about baud rates really, always a
prominent matter with this optical communication stuff since it's a
balance between how long one waits while the message sends, vs how
many times one need to resend it at ever-decreasing baud settings
before it works correctly. Anyway it got me thinking how everyone
carries within their mind a whole personal view of the world, a
universe all of their own, equivalent to a massive set of data, and
yet we have only such pathetically slow means to exchange it. Words,
drawings, music, take hours to compose, then to consume, to get just
the faintest glimpse into someone else's world. Everyone has their
own little universe that they can never really get out and share in
any volume, just selected highlights and digests so brief that
anything unique is usually lost, blended into assumptions of one's
own world view. It takes the greatest skill for anyone to even begin
to break through that, and then only for those who care at all to
imagine those other worlds from all those other minds.

OK, that'll do, the more I type the longer I have to wait watching
it flicker through space at 600 baud. Goodbye from the the spooky
darkness soon to be punctured by the red beam of this text making
its first jump out towards you.

 - The Free Thinkeò

Photos:
gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/optical_comms/2026/