I noticed that early this month John MacFarlane wrote a retrospective on Twenty Years of Pandoc. I’ve used this incredible tool almost every day at least since 2011, when I set out to write a syllabus and a website for one of my first courses from a common template. It warms the heart of this procrastinator to learn that it began as a “product of procrastination” that just kept snowballing. Now it can bring endless avoidance-through-fiddling to all kinds of writing and document-producing. In fact it seems likely to me that pandoc really gave TeX a new lease of life, spreading it far beyond its well-entrenched home ground of the mathematical sciences to everywhere PDFs are needed—and in my case allowing me to indulge my nostalgia-toned techie/type-y compulsions while writing, teaching, and pursuing all kinds of other distractions. At this point it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of TeX, and that’s largely thanks to the streamlining and flexibility made possible by pandoc’s TeX-generating capacities. So bravo John MacFarlane, and bravo pandoc. May you thrive for many decades more, keeping the flame of useful abstraction and playful rigor alight in dark times.