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