A bit about my blog

It has come to my attention that people disagree with some or all of my opinions. Which is nice

It appears that not everyone agrees with my ramblings. In fact, hardly anyone does. And I have no issues with this. For the avoidance of doubt, I write these pages as a form of self therapy: nothing here is meant as a source of truth, and should not be relied upon as such. And whilst there may be some factualities buried here, like a newspaper, those truths are surrounded by a lot of hyperbol, misinformation, half truths and opinion. The difference here is that I am not now - nor have I ever been - any kind of journalist, whereas those writers for those newspapers often claim to be. I am a creative writer, and the only thing that one might ascertain from reading one or more of my blog posts is whatever was in my head at the time of writing, expressed in English words typed out and wrapped in HTML tags for your entertainment purposes. Or not. You could be here equally to hate read and rage, though as someone who has had high blood pressure, I wouldn't recommend that.

In any case, even if you might disagree with me, my opinions, or my conclusions about any given subject matter, then that's healthy. That's called reading. If what I say upsets or offends you, my advice is not to read. But I take a lead from what is being read according to the statistics for each blog post here, and almost certainly some of my most read pages are regarding the Sinclair-branded ZX Spectrum Next, or the ZX Multisystem as it should now be more accurately called.

I guess here that I'm managing a skill that some parts of the Internet are all about: click bait. But in my defence, my views on the ZX Spectrum Next ZX Multisystem computer are honest to my experience of the platform and what I see that is happening to it. Other opinions are available. You may trust, however, that it's not just the ZX Spectrum Next ZX Multisystem in which my views differ from some of the mainstream of the wider "retro community". A caveat here is that I've not been active in said community since around 2012; and when I started to get interested again, as one might expect, everything had changed, and not necessarily for the better.

When I did return (and I'm not saying here that I'm actively and overtly involved like I used to be), I was happy to see that Retro Gamer magazine was still a thing; although it's not a magazine that I would read nor purchase on a regular basis. I think I've procured around 4 issues since 2019 or so. Whilst I could offer my services to it again (and it is just a case of dropping an email to the editor with a proposal of one or more futures, it's not a little more complicated than that), it would be fraudulent to do so. Why write for a publication that one does not read oneself? The last issue I saw didn't give me an impression that this magazine was for someone like me. That's my opinion anyway. It has it's audience, and I'm not one of them.

This is why I ended up joining the BreakSpace team: reading issue one of that was and is pure joy; it is a publication with heart by people who review ZX Spectrum games for all of the right reasons. Thankfully, I was let in to opine on the latest Speccy entertainment software from issue two, and at the time of writing, I've already written 18 reviews for issue three, with some more to do before the looming deadline.

It's great to be writing again and for a publication like BreakSpace, and it's good that I have this blog as an outlet. As already stated, the purpose here is, or has latterly become, to entertain. This blog is so old, I don't remember why I started it in the first place: the likely reason though is because I could. I'm surprised that people still read blogs: like printed magazines, I thought they'd be dead by now, but I do understand Vinny Mainolfi's point about printed matter: landfill sites now have too many waste electronic devices, including tablets, eBook readers and smart phones, so the printed press might not be as environmentally damaging as publishing electronically after all. Anyway, I have more games to review and a deadline to hit. So, I'll leave it there.