According to my drafts folder, the last time I tried to write something here was at least a year ago. Sorry about all that, I guess.

I've tried to learn my lesson to stop promising updates that won't come. (Or at least those that won't come with any particular timeline.) I let this site lapse into more disrepair than I'd like with a bad SSL certificate, an end-of-life'd CMS, and an unnecessarily solid VM from DigitalOcean, so I decided it was time to re-forge it.

This new version is a Hexo static side feeding off of a headless instance of Ghost CMS running locally. It's overkill, but I'm still fond of Ghost's admin and writing interface. Hexo was the least painful SSG to integrate and get rolling onto Github Pages. (I also still quite like Vue.js, but it was wildly unnecessary for getting a simple blog running. Maybe someday.)

I'm also fiddling with a fork of the Hexo Artemis theme, but it's probably not anything I'd ever want to support or extend. To be transparent, I was head over heels for NieR: Automata when it came out so I rather shamelessly cribbed ideas from their UI designer for styling.

Reviewing and tagging my posts for the Hexo migration wasn't as embarrassing or mortifying as I'd worried it would be. The relative lack of discomfort was a welcome surprise; maybe I'm just more comfortable since I turned 30, or perhaps my folks selling my childhood home has taken some of the sting out of looking at earlier versions of myself. However, there are two constants:

  1. I am verbose.
  2. Re-building this site is a recurring, all-consuming madness that periodically possesses me and encourages me to make very silly proclamations. Maybe this one will stick.

I changed jobs, then I changed jobs again. Hardly the first to say it, but the great game of musical chairs in the tech industry over the last few years has been a very strange thing. I continue to have opportunities to work with lovely people, and for that I'm very grateful.

I made mhm.social. It might be the best dumb idea I've had?

After SoundBlasterBlaster I might just be addicted to the rush of hearing my voice come out of the internet, but it's also been something I've found myself coming back to with some frequency. I continue to have complex feelings about Twitter (recent acquisition news only amplifying that), and this is the closest I've gotten to having my very own megaphone in a soundproof room. Shout it out, then carry on. I'd like to make more toy apps in this vein, but nothing's been begging for attention. (I have continued to mess around with voice clone libraries, so who knows.)

After a sometimes-painful wait due to COVID, Sarah and I finally got married. It was more or less perfect. Should you find yourself interested, and have the means of doing so, I'd recommend the experience.