Grifis continues his grueling work of data cataloging.

A silent inventory.

I have begun to run the first cross-references with the material we already have; for now, the math holds up, numbers do not lie, but there is still plenty of work left to do behind the scenes. A labor that consumes the eyes.

In this season, nostalgia knocks harder.

Summer has arrived for real now, scorching and inevitable, and it brought back to mind a news post Grifis wrote back in February. It was titled: Summer is approacching, featuring the cover of California Games, if I recall. In February, of all times. The strange thing is that very morning, when I opened my eyes, I had thought the exact same thing. It was an unseasonably warm and sunny morning, the scent of the first early flowers already in the air, premature and deceptive.

Now I will sit here and jinx myself.

Google, hello.

You are finally looking back at us. Come on in, pass by our site without worry. We have an uptime that would envy any enterprise infrastructure, a stability that seems carved in stone.

Jokes aside, the new VPS seems to hold and the performance is decent. A while ago I wrote that Grifis and I felt like two men intent on defending and fortifying a wooden shack in the midst of a world of storms and relentless assaults.

Out there, people, the internet has become the Wild West.

It feels like the late nineties, but on steroids, where the true players are massive entities with infinite resources. And yet, there is something wild and entertaining in this too. Trying to make the machine perform, with all the various services it distributes, keeping it standing and not getting plowed over by the first TikTok bot that comes down the road.

Night falls upon the network, cold and thick with drones seeking a crack in the wall.

We remain here, keepers of the fire, as long as the machine keeps turning.

And the dawn, when it comes, will find us still at our post.