It started with a tweet.

My association with this website, I mean.

There I was at the Replay convention in Blackpool in November, rapidly running out of battery on my mobile (hereafter usually referred to as the PurpleBerry) when I read a tweet tagged with the appropriate hashtag ‘Writers, please get in touch. We need you to blog.’

Upon approaching the retroGT stall I realised that Gary and I had met before – and in fact kept running into each other at retro conventions and collectors’ festivals.

Due to my new job and a number of other outside influences, it has taken me until now to sign up and get blogging. But here I am now. And, as is traditional, I’ll start off by telling you a bit about myself.

My involvement with all things retrotech is entirely the fault of my husband. (He gets blamed for a lot of circumstances in my life but this one really was his fault.) Within a few weeks of meeting, he took me to Collectormania at Milton Keynes and later, to Braamt in the Netherlands for Outline 2004 demoparty. Sure, having been a fan of electronic music since I first heard it in the 70s, I had a feeling for the music which went along with the games already. I have many fond memories of hours spent playing Mini Munchman, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and similar when I was in my early teens. But I didn’t know until I met my husband that there was a dedicated band of people who still met to play these games, designed and coded demos for the various platforms and generally enjoyed hanging out in darkened village halls at weekends, getting rather drunk and having a whale of a time whilst messing around with all this old tech. Neither did I know that there was a whole scene around that scene, consisting of buying, trading, swapping, restoring and displaying old kit as well as supplying suitably retro accessories to gamers.

Several parties and many more conventions later, I have gained myself a niche as the tweetqueen, keeping non-attendees up on goings on in 140 characters via my laptop or the PurpleBerry. I have been writing up my experiences and will post them here. I used to post them on Suite101.com but, after a re-evaluation of content earlier in the year, these articles are looking for a new home. May as well share them with like-minded types, I figured, so they’ll be rolling out to a computer near you soon. My husband and I, together with assorted friends, have a number of other con and party visits planned for the upcoming months, including Collectormania at Milton Keynes, maybe the London Film and Comic-Con, Sundown demoscene party in Budleigh Salterton in September (the cheesy chips at their local chippie are to die for!), most likely something involving our friends at the Retro Computer Museum in Leicestershire at Easter and with a bit of luck another visit to Replay later in the year.

I am particularly looking forward to Sundown, as I thoroughly enjoyed it when we went in 2010. It is truly a digital arts event these days, with coding taking place on both retro and modern machinery – and yours truly taking over the Twitter feed, of course.

I’m hoping to bring you coverage of developments relating to several computer museums in the Midlands and East of England area as well as reports from collectors’ conventions, retro exhibitions, parties and other gatherings of that ilk.

As far as my own gaming urges go, according to my colleague Jon, I am a ‘casual gamer’. I’m a Fishdom and Tetris gal, which are rated as casual games. But seeing as I’m on Level 330-something of Fishdom on the PC, I beg to differ about the ‘casualness’ of my gaming. I also have a Tetris game on my website as well as retro versions from previous machines. I tend towards match-3 games, other favourites being Bejeweled and Heroes of Hellas. I also play Solitaire/Klondike in all forms and enjoy the odd occasional hidden object game. I am a Vicious Yellow Bastard by definition and if I could just find what I did with my Mini Munchman I would reboot it and lose a few hours in happy bleeping bliss.

But in the meantime, I have more mundane things to do, such as getting on with work.

(At this, your blogger wanders off humming the Munchman music and going ‘blip’ at intervals thereafter.)