Hello World

There is a great push nowadays to be productive in life. At one point, I was also guilty of optimising away every spurious activity or lazy endeavour with ruthless precision. Modern society has no love for dawdlers, laggards or galumphers. Life has to be traversed in big, straight strides, in a perpetual state of hurry.

Starting a website in 2026 feels absurd. By all accounts I’m setting myself up for ‘failure’. Who could possibly be interested in my ideas, my rambling, my figments of imagination? At first glance this seems like a rhetorical question, but the internet is a big place. Somewhere out there are armchair nerds, philosophers, programmers, and other odd souls who might value the content on here. Human intuition is famously poor at grasping scale, after all; Some studies have shown that even something as basic as number can be understood very differently across cultures [1]. Surely, then, the internet is large enough to contain a few kindred spirits.

I won’t promise that every article will be created artisanally in a clean room without access to any form of artificial intelligence. I will use tools, including AI, when they help me think, check, polish, or argue with myself. But the judgement, taste, and responsibility are mine. Nothing appears here unless I am willing to put my name under it.

What’s in a name?

This raises the question: what will I write about? The name of the site, Dusty Memory Card, already reveals that I will not be writing about apple pie recipes. Nor will I strive towards min-maxing my readership by going all-in on SEO and researching the exact optimal article size for viewer retention.

The name is partly literal: my first console was a PlayStation, and the memory card was where your little worlds lived when the machine was switched off. Progress, places, characters, unfinished business — all stored on an inconspicous little magical plastic husk. As a boy I would imagine the characters in my games living on while I wasn’t looking. How they continued to live their lives while I was spending my days in school. That feels like the right metaphor for this site: a place for saved games, saved thoughts, and the strange persistence of old technology in memory.

The title of this first post is “Hello World”, a common trope among programmers to signify the first program they write in a new system or language. Every time I try something new in life I make it a point of writing a hello world to signal the beginning. While technical discussions will certainly have their place on this site, most of the content will actually be about the human side: the experience of technology through my inevitably distorted lens.

Lofty goals

My goal is to create a cosy spot on the internet for long-form writing, for people whose attention spans have not yet been sandblasted down to that of a goldfish. I want to carve out a little piece of digital real estate, my own domain to rule over, with a firm but righteous hand. I am not looking for likes, clicks, or affirmation. I will not tailor the content to appeal to the masses, but if it does, I won’t be contrarian merely for the sake of it.

There is no loud rebel in me, but I am a firm believer that if I want to change the world for the better, I had better start with myself. Writing the content that I would like to see on the internet, even if it is drowned out by an ocean of clickbait, feels worthwhile. A small act of protest against the enshittification of the internet.

So what can you, as a reader, expect from this site? Topics you can certainly anticipate are retro games and hardware. I have a particular fondness for anything janky from the 90s and early 2000s. I must confess that after watching too many LGR videos I have acquired a taste for woodgrain, so occasionally I might dip into the 80s or even the 70s.

My own twist

But this will not be just another retro gaming site. While I love some of the content that is already out there, it often feels like a vast ocean with the depth of a puddle. There is no lack of coverage for old games in particular, and these niche audiences are already served adequately. My goal is to add a more in-depth, technical, and philosophical perspective.

That also means I will sometimes use references. Not every piece needs to drag a bibliography behind it, but when an argument benefits from research, history, technical documentation, or a well-placed citation, I will use one. The internet has enough people confidently spewing opinions into the void. I would like this site to be opinionated, certainly, but not weightless.

The tone will also be deliberately positive. Not uncritical, not naive, and certainly not allergic to pointing out flaws, but positive in the sense that I want to look for what is interesting, admirable, strange, ambitious, or endearing. Even bad games are rarely just bad. They are made by people: artists, programmers, designers, producers, testers, writers, stubborn veterans, and that exhausted junior who had to make the menu work at two in the morning. Even blatantly commercial games had people behind it who spent time and effort trying to make something worthwhile. That deserves at least a little respect.

Deep reflection

As a graphics researcher and ex-game developer, I believe I have some interesting material to bring to the discussion. I also believe that my particular road through life has left me uniquely positioned to reflect deeply on certain topics, in a way that is more serious and less superficial than most content focused purely on entertainment value.

Most of all, I want this site to feel like a place. A cosy room or a warm house where you are welcome to return at any time. A place of respite from the hastiness of everyday life. An establishment where you can curl up under a blanket and reminisce about technology over hot cocoa in winter, or lie in a hammock at a wonderful barbecue with friends on a hot summer’s night, just as the dew is settling and the conversation is getting more interesting.

That is the place I am trying to build. Welcome to Dusty Memory Card. Hello world!

Further Reading

[1] Dehaene, S., Izard, V., Spelke, E., & Pica, P. (2008). “Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures.” Science, 320(5880), 1217–1220.