Welcome back to reedmaniac.com! It has been gone for years! It went off exploring the world and trying to find itself. Naturally, that did not work out and only resulted in a few odd quirks in personality and a nasty infection in a place we refuse to talk about publicly.

No, no, that's all a lie. After my little three and a half month sabbatical, I needed to present myself to the world in a slightly more professional capacity. While I found job hunting to have been a tedious, laborious, and ultimately unfulfilling way to spend my time, I understand that presentation is important. So, pulled out the old code editor and whipped up a site using Bootstrap and Laravel. The Laravel part is a bit overkill as I am only using it for the Contact Form, but honestly I cannot remember the last time I built just a Contact Form. Novelty and all.

And the blog is back too! Hellooooo! ShapelessChaos.com was a fine domain but after my little journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, I was updating on average once a month. It was always so serious too. Something about my multiple year pause in blogging and the rise of Twitter and Facebook had sucked a great deal of the spontaneity and fun out of blogging itself. Given my disdain of Facebook's Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions, I felt I really needed to start owning my content again.

Also, I went on web.archive.org and started reading my old entries from back when reedmaniac.com was on ExpressionEngine and before that pMachine Pro and even before that on Blogger. Hard to believe I have lived through four blogging platforms. Cannot wait to tell the grandkids. "Ack, ye wee buggers, ye do not know how we suffered! Templates edited in the browser! Updating software by uploading via FTP!" I had a great deal more fun blogging back then. Random links with snide comments. Blog entries that had internal monologues buried throughout. Just wacky shit. I miss that blogger. He was so much more fun.

We're going to try and get back to that. Going to be hard. Been buried in this terrible, awful, downright distasteful overly processed Paul who was always trying to be well thought out. That is not who I am. That is likely not who you are either. Why are we pretending? Why can we not admit the truth to each other? After all these years, isn't it time?! I love Nutty Bars and I love being the Paul who is willing to bellow that from the rooftops!

Welcome back.