On 16.02.2022 at 00:45, andrew scribbled:
On 2022-02-15, Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be> wrote:
That was Dan C.
I don't know whether he's still around, though; I killfiled him ages
ago, and I haven't seen anyone replying to any posts of his either —
not even in the Slackware group.
Oddly enough I 'met' him the other day at #slackbuilds on liberachat
where he goes as Dan_C. I had a brief exchange with him about the old
days, he has not done Usenet for some time now.
Mind you every year my own individual.net subscription comes up I
weigh up whether the current state of Usenet justifies €10...
Well, for what it's worth, I'm using news.eternal-september.org, which
is completely free of charge, albeit that it does not support binaries,
if you're into that sort of thing — personally, I'm not.
It does require registration with a valid email address, though, but
you're not obligated to use said email address as the visible address in
your newsreader. It's only for the registration and activation of your
account.
E-S does on occasion have outages, but for most part it works very well.
As for my own presence on Usenet, well, I'm not sure why I'm still here
either. I've been a regular here for well over 20 years now, and maybe
that's why I'm holding on, even though people come and people go, and
the times have certainly changed.
Back when I first started participating in Usenet discussions regarding GNU/Linux, pretty much everyone was an enthusiast, and most of the
experienced users come from a background in proprietary UNIX. One
didn't have to be proficient in using a command line, but nobody was
allergic to it either, and we would often recommend solutions that were command-line-based to the newbies.
Nowadays however, people don't even seem able to navigate a few menus
anymore, and everyone appears to be in a Microsoft Windows mindset.
That, or they are US-political right-wing bigots — I count Dan C as one
of those, and that's only one of the many reasons why he's in my
killfile.
Anywho, I've also got my hands full with the Manjaro forum, where I am
a moderator, as well as — at this point in time still — also the forum's leader in terms of the number of accepted solutions to reported
problems. (If it sounds like I'm bragging, I'm not — sooner or later
someone else is going to overtake me anyway — but I'm also not going to
lie and claim that I'm not a little bit proud of it either. :))
And then next to that, I've also got a whole other forum to tend to.
It's not a computer-related forum, but there I am the sole administrator
— albeit not the owner of the place, but the owner himself doesn't
have any time left anymore for running the place, which is why he hired
me — with two moderators to help me out.
But we're all volunteers and we all do that in our own free time. Just
as is the case for my presence on Usenet. And I'm not getting any
younger or healthier. As the matter of fact, right now I'm sitting
here with a fever and a headache due to trapped nerves both in my lower
back and in my neck. And the day has only just begun.
Maybe one day I'll throw in the towel on account of my presence on
Usenet. But not today, and not for a while still, barring a sudden and unexpected termination of my mortal existence — hey, shit does happen,
and it hasn't even been a year ago that I lost my baby sister.
The only two things you can take for granted about life is that you're
going to die eventually, and that one way or another, bad shit will
happen to you. Everything else is a variable.
<shrug>
--
With respect,
= Aragorn =
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
