At this point I must be one of Hey’s easiest customers. At 24 months and 0 emails sent it’s the definition of easy money.
When I first set up this account the intention was to use it as a tool in a long intended creative endeavour in the World of Warcraft content creator space. The ‘ffsmonty’ references one of my WoW character names (or rather the outbursts caused by what are known in the space as ‘pro gamer moves’).
Since then though, life got a bit wobbly - for IRL reasons I took a step back from Mythic Raiding, and more generally WoW and other MMORPG’s. I’ve moved house, changed partners, pursued a few new skills as a result. 31 years closer to the grave and finally I have a driving license (and far more interestingly as far as I’m concerned a motorcycle license). For a myriad of reasons I’d never bothered to pick one up, but new living conditions outside of the city necessitated it.
There’s also been a return to some long forgotten hobbies: I’ve achieved the basic A license as a skydiver! I’d originally started chasing this 14 years ago. But again for reasons it fell by the wayside. It’s nice to finally have that under my belt, and it opens up a plethora of opportunities in the long term.
More importantly there’s been a major refocus on some lifestyle goals that have long been missing from my life. Travel. My feet itch so bad. I’ve taken the year to setup a lifetime goal of undertaking a ‘gap year’ experience. This is so overdue - originally planned for a pre university endeavour, it got continuously bumped. First to after college, then to mid university, and then to after university, and then to… later. Later is never, and I’ve pushed it right to the wire in terms of visa requirements and age limits.
So at the end of February I’m flying to Australia.
It’s taken a lot of brain power to even get this all lined up, partly because I’ve had my attention split between everything above and the practical limitations of day to day life. Even as I type this, the house from the previous relationship still isn’t sold, and mortgage payments need to be made. Employment wise, I’ve wound down work as a software engineer to focus on the people around me before I go away. Obviously this combination of factors hasn’t been stress free.
It’s been a year of slowly slowly - everything at once.
Which brings us back to Hey.com. 100 dollars a year in exchange for an unused service is an outrageous expense for the unemployed. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime: all have been deactivated in pursuit of reducing expenses. However, with Hey.com my fingers linger over the account settings. This email blog feature tempts me… more than I ever thought it would. The intent was always to set up my own site as part of the WoW content work, but the reality of my new world is that I haven’t got the time or headspace to over engineer what amounts to a simple blog.
I’d probably really enjoy setting up a static site blog in a dockerised build that deploys to a self managed Kubernetes platform off the back of a CI platform and version control with auto updating ssl certificates and bla bla bla bla. But starting that journey bites ass. Even after 7+ years working in web development getting that stuff up and running locally consistently and accessible from multiple platforms is an absolutely terrible experience. Just last week I was fighting errors between a local Kubernetes install, the underlying Docker engine, storage drivers, devcontainers. That’s before even getting to a production cluster on some cloud provider, and deploying from a CI service. And realistically: even billing for those services is going to piss me right off.
So a blog from email? While travelling around? With limited internet… very tempting indeed. 100 quid a year for managed hosting? And email? And it’s nice email… that’s suddenly a lot more appealing. Especially if it turns out I am do imagery, and perhaps even get some ad revenue off the back of it. (I suspect this last point may become a deal breaker down the line).
But enough for now, let’s see how this flows: here’s to a soon to be sold house, 2+ years of travel, skydiving, and a return to a swagger that’s been lost somewhere along the way.
