Presenting smallnet documentary at brcon2025
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║1 ...........Posted: 2025-08-05........... 1║
║2* .......Tags: gopher art smallnet ....... *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
(TXT) [1]: They have a "conference in gopherspace" guide: gopher://bitreich.org:70/0/con/2021/brcondoc.en.txt
(TXT) [2]: brcon2025 general archive: gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2025
(TXT) [3]: brcon2025 post-talk announcement: gopher://bitreich.org:70/0/usr/20h/phlog/2025-08-02T18-35-01-802997.md
(HTM) [4]: The MADE: https://themade.org
(TXT) [5]: the official brcon2025 archive: gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2025
s[6]: .ogg recording of my talk: /assets/posts/brcon2025/2025-08-02-someodd-gopher-documentary.ogg
(BIN) [7]: slides (.zip of .md files): /assets/posts/brcon2025/gopher-documentary.zip
s[8]: transcription of the .ogg recording: /assets/posts/brcon2025/2025-08-02-someodd-gopher-documentary.ogg
(TXT) [9]: 20h's presentation on Gopher Game Programming: gopher://bitreich.org:70/0/con/2025/rec/gopher-game-programming.md