You may have noticed that I upload a lot of pictures to the gallery.  There's a simple reason for this: I hate being lied to.

An optimist would tell you that "photo coming soon" sounds better than "no one has been arsed to upload a photo and aren't bloody well likely to, either," but optimism has always been a four letter word in my book (as it happens, my book had been tragically shipped to the printers before it could undergo a spel chek.) So when I visited Retromags for the first time a few years ago, all I saw was a database full of false promises, and it offended me at some sort of primal, instinctual level that can't be put into words.  Why even HAVE a database entry for issue 37 of Bleep Bloop Gaming Monthly if there wasn't at least a cover pic to look at, I wondered?  And, naturally, my subsequent thought was, "ah, feck it, here's the download section.  Let's leech this mother dry."

But once I'd literally taken all I could take from the download section, I realized I'd also had all I could take from that damnable database and its mocking, cacophonous cries of "photo coming soon!" screaming at me from nearly every page.  And I've been on a mission to silence them ever since.

It's an impossible mission.  I don't personally own every magazine in existence, and many many many mags have never had a cover scan appear elsewhere on the interwebs, let alone at a size large enough to bother with.  So I'll never be able fill all the holes.  But I'm doing my best.  I've got hundreds...thousands? of pics sitting in folders on my desktop waiting to be uploaded this very second.  Almost no one out there will notice or care. Some will wish I would stop (I still remember a complaint that was made once about all my gallery uploads cluttering up the activity feed so they couldn't see the "important" stuff.)

We're never going to have more magazine downloads than everybody else.  That'll be left to sites that scan more than us like Kiwi's site, or (especially) sites that don't care where they get their scans from and will allow anything to be uploaded, like archive.org.

But what I hope we can be, is the definitive online resource for decent quality cover pics of gaming mags as well as game-related comics and books.  And god help me if I ever run out of those things and get really serious about filling out or advertisement section as well.  In some regards we're already a definitive resource, while in others we've got a ways to go.  I'll never be finished; as I've said, that mission is an impossible one.  But if I can just get those damned grey boxes to be the exception and not the norm, I'll be able to rest easier, at least.  This message will self-destruct in five seconds.