PROJECTS CEMENTARY

I used to be an overambitious stupid moron, imagining myself doing various idiot "online projects" since I was allowed to log on to the great vast shit ocean that is The Internet. This is some of them, I am not going to link them because I am way too ashamed I wasted other peoples' time on them. This is more ofan examination of conscience for myself. To whoever lays their eyes there: don't invent idiotic "online projects" for yourself if you have absolutely no work of your own that took you more than a week to do to show.

TINY RETROGAMING "ZINE"
2002-2003


My first writing "gig". I always wanted to write about games as a kid, and despite being absolutely fucking terrible at this, it never stopped me from writing inane shit into Windows notepad like I was going to be next Roger Ebert of games. What a fucking waste of time. Anyways... There was this PC gaming magazine, CD-Action, it came with 2 or 3 CDs of stuff. The thing that was cool at the time about CDA is they were very keen on various "community projects" to be included on the discs... There were various "corners" and "sections" about MP3s, RPGs, emulation, FPP games, and some other cretinous shit... But there was also ACTION MAG. FUCKING ACTION MAG. It was a huge (huge!) "web magazine" with articles supplied by the readers. Some of them are the deepest fucking dogshit ever conceived by teenage shut-ins. Article-length comment section for real life, basically. And inside Action Mag, there were also "corners", and those "corners" also had "subcorners", like a matryoshka of terrible writing!!! And one of that "sub-corners" was about old PC games.

I should mention that at this point in time, there was no term like "retrogaming", maybe on one of those fancy English discussion boards. But in early 00s, dabbing in "abandonware" and "old games" was treated like a sign of mental retardation and aggressive tendencies towards spending your time in a productive way. There was no DOSBox (okay, it was released in 2002, but I haven't heard of it until 2003, when 0.6x versions showed up), Windows XP was the order of the day, everybody was playing Counter-Strike and seeing pixels on the screen was considered a crime against game design. So you should now have a full picture, what a waste of time was engaging into writing articles about Wolfenstein 3D for some tiny-tiny zine, that wasn't even listed on the back cover of covermounts.

But I dunno, that's what I wanted to do. Mostly because the original writings by the two guys who invented this "zine" were actually funny?!? Despite having something like 100kb of allowed size (!!!) for the html all said and done, they did some really fun shit, like grayscale tiled backgrounds, some hidden text here and there, tons of jokes and in-jokes... for me, it was more inviting that a bloated, up-their-noses public of Action Mag (mostly because I was like 14 and most of AM crew was 16-17, which is the worst age for mental and psychological development). So I was there, writing about old-ass games, exchanging e-mails with other writers, planning to make a forum etc... of course, soon enough, the main writers started being hit with seasonal mood alterations, school started  wringing us out of free time, my parents were hell-bent on beating the shit out of my high ideas of being a full-time writer, then some people left, some other people showed up who did not gel with the old crew, and there was a lot of fun drama. All in a span of a year. Oh, and the one issue of the zine that I was asked to make, despite having no experience in HTML, become corrupted and rejected from the disc, which was the final nail in the coffin. It was an amazing ride, and one of the first lessons I took about being too invested in some pie-in-the-sky online projects. Too bad I didn't make my homework, because *gestures at the rest of this page*

Just remembered one of the stupid dramas. One of the "writers" sent a whole bunch of "reviews", all of them having just few sentences, and the leads refused to include them, so the writer rebelled and left lol. We all should be shot with high caliber ammo for being stupid bitches

TINY EMULATION "ZINE"
2002?


I did some writing for the aforementioned "emulation corner" that was on CDA covermounts. Like, four or five "reviews". They were probably long-winded, full of obvious observations and not worth anyone's time. I distinctly remember reviewing "Aliens" arcade game from Konami, not noticing that the marine that the player controls in is supposed to be Elaine Ripley from the movies. And me not watching the movies, except the third one, one boring evening when I was banned from using the computer, is no excuse. Also, there is SOME excuse for me, because the player sprite looks fucking nothing like Ripley, red hair and all.

MORE TO COME

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