Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of nintendocore bands, stuff like Dinotrax.

Dinotrax don’t play together anymore—done and gone, just like everything else eventually—but I really loved them. Guys, if you don’t know the album Rearranging Patterns, go listen to it, seriously. Before that turns to dust too.

This musical intro is just to say that, while Grifis brought summer early back in February, I’m dragging its carcass all the way to the end of October. Summer is a good season, and this one was special for me.

We have to admit it: Grifis and I haven’t put much time into Retrogek, even though we finally had some real data in our hands to grind through. We left it behind because we had to sweat blood over another project we’re running alongside this one. I mentioned it to you before: besides trying to keep retrogames from dying out completely, we also have an app aimed at social help that we care about just as much as Retrogek.

And it’s just the two of us. And none of this pays the bills, not at all. You work for the glory and for the crows.

But we’re still right here, guys, nailed to our spots, and we’re not quitting. The plan stays the same, with one addition: we are trying to figure out if and how to let people play old titles directly on the site or on their phones.

The thing is, we want it all to be 100% legal, without ending up hanging from some tree, so we want to try two paths:

• Track down the original authors and ask for permission (I know, it’ll be rough—half of them are probably dead or unreachable).
• Dive into the world of amateur ROMs. We like this second road because it’s about republishing completely free games, made in dark bedrooms by people who still love and breathe the retrogaming world.

We’ll see how to pull it off.

Before any of that, though, we need Google to notice we’re alive. It’s not indexing anything for us, fuck, NOTHING. We’re ghosts in the desert. We’re losing our minds over optimization and trying to put out genuine, structured, valuable information. But Christ, this time around it ain’t easy at all.

It’s obvious the indexing algorithms have changed, just as it’s obvious that all the computing power and the few souls left inside Big G have been diverted to feed the AI beast, leaving us the crumbs. If there’s any Android developer or webmaster reading these lines—and there definitely will be, seeing as we have billions of readers out there in the void—they know damn well what kind of curse I’m talking about.

Anyway, time passes, consumes everything, and we are still here.

Later, folks.

DarkNoiSe