Inauguration

Part 1

Here it is: my inaugural post. If you are reading this then it probably means you are looking back through the previous postings since as I write this not another soul is aware that I am planning on launching a blog. When I post this it will be to a site that no one knows exists and will have no immediate followers. Obviously, the fact that no one is reading what I have to say is not what I want to talk about so my purpose for these series of mini-posts is just to document the-what and the-why behind this entire endeavor.

If you are looking back through the archive then what I hope is not already apparent to you is that I have been known to produce walls of text and need a lot of characters and time to get anything across. I want this series to be quick to write, quick to read, and get right to the point.

Part 2: Who am I?

BacteriaMage will suffice for now. For those who wonder, it’s a play on “bacteriophage” which is a virus that attacks bacteria replacing the “phage” part with the similar sounding “mage” as a reference to fantasy games. The former was to emphasize how big a nerd I am whereas the latter emphasizes how big a nerd I am. Although, I’m clearly not as clever as I thought I was since I failed to realize its spelled bacteriophage and not bacteriaphage when I first created the account. Oh well.

I’m a proud member of the Oregon Trail Generation and a software engineer by trade. As such, it probably comes as no surprise that my topics of interest include retro and indie gaming, vintage software, reverse engineering, ROM hacking, and programming. I am also proponent of privacy and consumer rights but the former should not be taken to mean that I favor overconsumption.

This will actually be my first blog; ever. Despite the fact that I lived through the ’90s and the explosion of such, I never really actually blogged (and spent a long time not really understanding what that word actually meant). The closest that I came were various “homepages” strewn about on the likes of AOL, Tripod, and Geocities that I’m sure mostly no one saw and I don’t think counts. I think this speaks to my desire to not spew meaningless drivel about myself – or maybe it doesn’t.

Part 3: What’s this about?

The main purpose of this will be to disseminate information that is useful or just interesting. In the course of pursing my various hobbies and interests, I often find that I have produced something novel or more often just consolidated existing knowledge that others could also use. I feel like I’m doing a disservice keeping it to myself but I have had no means to broadcast the results of my work. I would add “until now” but that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?

I don’t plan to strictly limit myself to anyone area but my initial focus is going to have a specific locality to it and we’ll see where things go from there. I think future topics could come from anything I care to share that I think might be useful or interesting but will probably revolve broadly around video games and computing. Some might feel that they’re kind of technical too; I can only hope.

While I won’t promise to never share an opinion or a personal detail I can say that this blog is definitely not about me and it’s not a place for me to rant or rave.

Part 4: My NES Blog

I gave up on mainstream gaming some years back because of my staunch opposition to invasive and oppressive copy protection (basically anything that qualified as DRM) and to the free-to-play, micro-transaction, and downloadable-content phenomena that seeks just to extract as much money as possible from players often at the expense of game design. Instead, I decided to immerse myself in the idealized past before any of this entered our lexicon. From there, websites like GOG also introduced me to the concept and the whole new world of indie games. I have never looked back and I’m much happier for it.

I have my (no longer functioning) childhood NES and stacks of cartridges that had remained untouched in the twentyish intervening years since the advent of emulation. However, about a year-and-a-half ago I took notice of talk of the RetroUSB AVS before it launched and I was kind of delighted by the idea of it. I entered a preorder for one and ended up tacking on one of the “AVS Launch Series” games that was being sold alongside the console. This turned out to be my gateway drug into the modern world of NES homebrew and in the year or so since I’ve amassed a small collection.

I’ve been skulking about in the shadows of the NES homebrew community for over a year now following all the happenings mostly on Twitter and Kickstarter. I’ve been almost entirely a passive observer up to this point but I hope to launch into a more active participant coinciding with the launch of this blog. I want these pages to be the medium through which I can add what I have to contribute but true to my credo, no rigid focus is imposed and, should this endure, future postings could easily venture to other topics.