20250223-internet_archive.txt

I'm bored, so I decided I'd go through gopherspace... Man, Ben Collver
is the fucking man. I had found his gopherhole a while ago. I
bookmarked a subdirectory to get text directions from GMaps. But after
perusing some of his(?) text glog entries and going down a link rabbit
hole, I went back and could hardly believe my eyes: a gopher front-end
for the Internet Archive [0].

I guess technologically it's "no big deal." I mean I guess mirroring
or translating HTTP to Gopher isn't super impressive, but I have to
admit that Gopher just does things, like downloading files, better.

And I'm so pumped. I don't use it a ton, mostly just the Wayback
Machine, but this alternate route is just plain great to me. I can see
some shows that never made a VHS/DVD release. I can download some of
my old books. I know they've been in trouble with some accusations of
piracy, not entirely unfounded, but I still think on the whole the
Internet Archive is a good thing.

[0] gopher://tilde.pink/1/%7ebencollver/ia/