There's a lot to talk about, and I'm a bit verbose to begin with, so I'll jump right in. User jandal has decided, or is at least considering, approaching the topic of depression again[1]. He noted that it sometimes feels like the majority are depressed, and that his previous attempt to broach the subject missed because of internal conflict and a desire to leave his own experience out of the discussion. Personally, I'm excited that jandal is considering opening the chapter back up, and I hope that others on gopher will contribute as well. In my opinion the best conversations will be ones that are largely self-focused, because depression is such an internal and personal experience. If you have experience with it, large or small, it's best to share what you're willing to share, rather than to abstract concepts. That doesn't come across as egotistical or self-centered; not to me at least. And speaking of sharing personal experiences and problems, I sincerely hope that xmanmonk is doing well, he hasn't posted in a while, and his last post was a little rough sounding[2]. User jynx shared a surprisingly uplifting email[3] that he sent within his company, on the subject of "Impostor Syndrome." It's a fascinating concept, and one that I admit I've felt the effects of from time to time. Briefly, it's the mistaken mental construct that leads us to believe that our own skills are over-valued by others, that we're not worthy of their praise, and that if others only knew the truth they would think less of us. Jynx noted that in our own sphere, we are in fact exceptional. What a great thought. On a side note, jynx also gave some good advice about gopher and robots.txt[4]. I don't know if the advice is sdf-specific, or gophernicus-specific, but I went ahead and followed it anyway. User cat posted about some of the depressing aspects of the holiday season, and the difficulty of work and life and balance[5]. At least, that's what I got out of the post. I never mind cat's "half-writing," it's far better than no writing at all. Life is too short to worry about making things perfect, especially on gopher. This is a place, I feel, for us to just do our thing and not worry too much about it. Keep writing cat, I think many people feel the same way about things much of the time. User mijk shared some cool info about cyber1[6], educational software from the 70's that has been setup to run on a virtual CDC. I can't wait to check it out. I wonder, however, if it could be made to run on the LCM's actual CDC! And finally, without any references, there have been some discussion on gopher about simplification of menu structures, testing on DOS and other original clients, justified text, etc. With the recent PHP problems over at SDF, I can see the value in my own content of just a simple menu structure with text (and other) files, as gopher was setup for originally. As for DOS, I'd be inclined to not worry about it, except that I originally found SDF a couple years ago (and subsequently grex and many other things) through Gopher, on an 8088 running DOS and an old gopher client. If the content that I had seen back then wasn't working right, I might not have pursued things. So, I can see actual value in making sure my content works for DOS clients. One last thing... user puldo, a friend over at tilde.town, has been gone for a while. His last post on the "feels" engine was about leaving home to live on the streets in Brazil. I'm hoping that he is making his way in the world. I should say, I'm praying for that. Sometimes I wonder, when I meet random people in the vast online world of public *nix, if they have anyone in their life that is praying for them. It pains me to think that there are people out there that either feel, or actually are, truly alone. No one should have to be. [1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jandal/phlog/i-think-i-need-to-talk-about-depression [2] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/xmanmonk/phlog/2017-nov-22-a.txt [3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jynx/dat/20171205b.post [4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jynx/dat/20171204b.post [5] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/cat/phlog/fs20171208.txt [6] gopher://grex.org:70/1/~mijk/outposts/ ("par" seems to have justified this text pretty well!)