So who is The Free Thinker? Well he's me, and you can thank me
already for jumping in and stopping myself there before I started
talking in the third person. Perhaps you'll also thank me for
posting here on Gopher, if like me you hate the sight of the modern
web. Or if you're of the mindset not to thank people for doing the
obvious for people of my cyber-beliefs, then you might think again
after I tell you that I'm in my mid-twenties and so should be out
Facebooking around with the rest of my generation rather than
communicating with you folk clinging on to the past.
Actually I don't have much care for the norms of my generation. I
like technology, it's facinating in design as much as in execution,
and any technology that works for its purpose is valid to consider
using at any time. In practice much of the technology that I cling
to is about the same age as I am. The PC that I'm typing this on is
about the same age as me. My car is five years older (a nice one in
its day though), and my TV probably a few years younger (last man
alive who still watches a CRT each night talking!). I'm not sure
how old my fridge is, but "from the 70s" wouldn't surprise me.
There are various philosophies behind my choices as a "consumer"
which might be aired here sooner or later, but to a large extent it
boils down to the old line "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" (the
car is broke quite often though...).
For public text on the internet, Gopher still works. I actually
think the web does too, if you design sites in plain HTML4 and
don't bother trying to please the idiots of the world with useless
eye candy. But my websites are directly linked with my real
identity, which is directly linked with my excuse for an online
business, and I'd worry that expressing all of my wild ideas there
could cause some unwelcome echos back into my real life. Of course
to protect my identity I'll still have to censor myself a little
bit, but hardly as much as I do when talking with people who don't
want to hear what I really want to say (usually due to extreme
disinterest).
So I want a separate place to post text to, and as long as it's
just text, and not likely to contain many links (properly
researched stuff would probably go on my website, which you'll
probably never find, oh the pains of being a member of the general
public), it might as well be in Gopher. Plus there seem to be ample
providers of free hosting at the moment, which should make an
anonymous account pretty easy to create.
Now the information about who I am seems to be leaking into this
ramble really rather slowly, so time to cover a few key points
before I run further into time that is reserved for more important
tasks on a Saturday (I just realised that I still haven't put the
washing on, for one thing). You've probably skipped over much of
the above, so I'll draw your eyes back in with some tasty dot
points:
*I'm a male living in the middle of nowhere, which I define as
somewhere in rural Australia.
*I've got far too many interests and hobbies, most of them not
pursued to the extent that I'd like to pursue them. Key ones
mentioned here are likely to be electronics, computers,
photography, and modern history. Others will likely leak out if I
stick with you at this keyboard regularly enough. Philosphy is
likely to play a part to, but I wouldn't call that a interest/hobby,
more an irremovable part of my daily thinking that is usually kept
very much to myself.
*I'm pretty broke and spend much of my time trying find a way of
making money while still keeping at arms length from society and
other people in general. The fact that you have to deal with people
and society in order for them to give you the money is a catch-22
that I'm eternally troubled by.
*I'm not here as a convert away from Facebook, Twitter, or whatever
variations there are of "typestuffhereandwewillshowyouads.com". I
never saw a strong attraction to them in the first place. It's
called "social media" and frankly I'm not all that social. This may
turn out to be the most personal thing I put publicly on the
internet, but it's not likely to turn into some self-obsessed log of
my daily activities.
I guess one other thing that I should clear up is the slight
ambiguity in the meaning of "free" in the names "Free Thoughts" and
"The Free Thinker". Is it free as in, as those open-source
drunkards keep putting it, "free beer"? Or is it free from the
boundaries of convention, society, tradition, normality,
sensibility, conceptuality, sanity, etc.? Really it's probably a
bit of both, but the name originally came from the idea of a gift
to you. I'd like to pursue most of the thoughts that I express here
for some material gain, and if I could then I'd want to do it alone
and not tell anyone about them until I had something to show for
it. With some less ambitious thoughts/ideas I still hold onto this
goal, but many were clearly doomed never to be fulfilled from the
moment they were commited to paper. If I'm never going to use them,
they might as well be fed into the (frustratingly ineffective)
global network of human minds called the internet, so that they
might just gives ome of those minds the inspiration to pursue what
I can not.
That said, I'm also bound to babble on about things that aren't of
much help/inspiration to anyone. But that's where the tag line
comes in, because with free thoughts, "you get what you pay for".
-The Free Thinker