An interesting post on urban renewal, real estate speculation, nostalgia and gentrification. This seems a pretty universal phenomenon: right now downtown Porto has a mix of successful (?) and not-successful renewal, in the form of new drinking establishments all over the place and costly overhyped low-quality apartments like those the article describes. The former are all too dependent on fashions and are risky business, while the latter can’t have a good future value — being located in buildings surrounded by abandoned fire hazards, in streets where the drunken hordes roam on weekends.

A huge part of my childhood now fits in a website. To think of all the anxious Fridays, waiting for my dad to arrive from work with a bootleg copy of some new game (back the 80s, at least in Portugal, there was no such thing as ‘piracy’, in fact there were quite a few ‘game copy shops’). To think of all the time spent anxiously waiting for that first load attempt, only to see the game crash after 15 minutes of loading. To think of all the constant fiddling with the tape recorder, trying to ‘tune’ it for that particular tape — in a couple of years I’d be fixing radios (or destroying them in a puff of noxious electrical smoke, more likely).

And now, this website has 28 years (up to 2010!) of Spectrum games accessible and always-loadable at the click of a button, and all I can say is that for all the nostalgia, Kick Off looked like shit.