HEXdidnt

A little over 30 years ago, I used to spend a lot of my spare time designing pie-in-the-sky games for the ZX Spectrum. I cut my teeth in pixel art using pencil and coloured pens on purpose-made screen planners bought at ZX Microfairs in the 1980s. Back in those days, I dreamed of working in the UK's flourishing games industry but, when I got to job-hunting age, technology had moved on: 16-bit machines (both computers and consoles) were common, and 32-bit machines were on the horizon... Worse still, pixel art was being left behind in favour of 3D graphics - both pre-rendered and vector-based, textured animated objects in live 3D environments. Even so, I persisted with pixel art for a while... From the Spectrum, I moved onto the SAM Coupé, and then the Commodore Amiga. Eventually, I got a PC... but, by that point, I'd given up on pixel art, and any lingering dreams I may have had of getting into the games industry. My skills weren't that great, but they were also very much out of date.

Considering how long I've been on DeviantArt (my About page claims ten years, but I would have thought it was more given that I'm sure I was already a member before being made redundant back in December 2010, because I remember discussing DeviantArt with a colleague who was looking through CV's and found someone listing their DA account) it seems strange to me that it's never cropped up in my dreams... But I guess they tend to focus on people and situations rather than things that exist only on the internet. However, regardless of any reasons, I actually had a dream that was very specifically about DeviantArt a couple of nights back. What seemed to have happened was that The Powers That Be had instituted a new form of account, where multiple users could share a single account. Kind of like if a personal account functioned as a Group, I guess? It seemed to be a colossally bad idea and, in this dream, I felt the need to demonstrate why, against my girlfriend's advice. There was a