A few years ago I put this site together and had this dream that, when I have everything set up just right, I can just open up Emacs and type some stuff into a window and hit a button and everything would just work. It was a time when I imagined that I would spend a small fortune having a DigitalOcean Kubernetes setup because why not and everything would be just like I would if it was a setup for work.

What actually happened is that I did nothing with the site for a few years and then I had to spend hours yesterday remembering exactly how I had everything put together.

Admittedly, the setup actually worked fine for the most part and a lot of my confusion was due to me being too lazy to clean the previous Octopress-based setup from my blog repo (now this is running Hugo generated from org-mode). Barring that, now that I shook off those cobwebs, I can actually update this with a refreshing level of ease.

I often fear chatting with old friends, not because I fear them in any way, but the average person these days is completely incapable of carrying a conversation, and the situation of meeting someone you haven't seen for ages just so easily leads someone who is asked "So how have you been?" to respond with "I've been fine" and just walk away. So when you wonder what I have been doing for the past three years, let's just skip the question entirely and acknowledge that everyone has had a dreadful 2020 and 2021.

Let's all agree that everyone has been busy and wished that they could have been out living their best life and that the conversations as we all start meeting up again will be boring and tiring. No, I will not talk about your children that I don't care about - I still don't care about them now just like I didn't before because they still aren't mine - and I won't spend hours talking about the virus either because, quite frankly, I am sick of talking about it.

So let's be the sort of people that cool people want to talk with. No, not "cool" like getting trolleyed on a Saturday. I mean cool like people who read interesting literature or someone who picked up a new hobby. Tell me about that woodworking project or how you reimplemented an Apple II using a pipe cleaner and an orange peel.

Let's be cool.