I am a 90’s gamer, pretty avid, yet still very average. I didn’t spend all my allowance at the arcade. I spent most of my weekends at home playing Nintendo the original console with the likes of Super Mario Brothers, Dino Wars, etc. I would often stay up an extra hour, sometimes two or three hours playing these games. For their 2D graphics and 8-bit beats, they were still very mesmerizing to me. Dad would sometimes play with me, but honestly, I had about as much fun by myself. I had a Nintendo console before I even knew what a computer was. Sadly, I gave that console to some less fortunate kids in the neighborhood, but I didn’t feel too bad about that, it was close to Christmas. I finally got my first computer when I was 15, about 2002. I stayed on it often, night and day, gaming, looking up music, back in the day everything had a free site somewhere. I was running Windows XP like many people were at the time. I didn’t have a clue what Linux was. Most games got bloated and wouldn’t play on that machine. At the same time, I was getting viruses off of it every week. I am surprised it lasted as long as it did. I rebuilt it, but it kept aging and things kept getting more advanced and complex for it. Browsing became more of a chore for that system, but it did it right up until the last, never questioned me. As I transitioned to newer hardware, I became engulfed in Windows 7. This is where I learned more and more each day about how things worked. I wrote Batch files to tinker with system settings under the hood, I wrote little fake viruses to prank people, I even started college under the umbrella of Windows 7. I became fairly proficient in fixing my own issues and learning coding, I even played around with Linux a few times during those days, but it wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I chose to stick with Linux. I learned steadily everything I could, I didn’t gradually migrate over either, in a few days, I had most if not all of the essential commands that I absolutely needed under my belt, I jumped right in. Every computer in my house became a Linux system. About that time, Windows 8-10 came in with their new telemetry stuff.  I didn’t need them anymore, I had everything that I needed right at my fingertips. Obviously Ubuntu became a bit dated for me, so I moved to Arch, now I can’t even go back. Gaming nowadays is a bit sparse for me, but what games I do play tend to emulate older Mario’s Brothers type games mostly. I go to an arcade every now and then now. But most of the time, I have my head buried in code, an article about technology from ghacks and ars technica, to just testing out software and reviewing it in blogs.  I am still and will always be a 90’s kid at heart though. 8-bit will forever be my jam.