David Montgomery-Blake

UNLV – Computer Facilities Supervisor

Codex Worlds – Marketing & Publishing

Writing about me…

It shouldn’t be difficult to write about myself, but I often do find that the challenge feels insurmountable. And this is strange because I did theatre for so long, and one of the key points is selling yourself as an actor, which often means being able to talk candidly and lucidly about your strengths and weaknesses. But that doesn’t make it any easier. I’m out of practice, and I probably was not that great at it in the first place since I’m mostly an introvert who enjoyed performing and directing. But if you found your way here, you must want to know something, so I’ll give you a little flavor text on who I am, why I created Nostalgia Drop, and maybe a twist and turn along the way.

Writing my Obit

David Montgomery-Blake was born in Idaho Falls, ID to teenage parents. He was adopted by his grandparents and raised in Bliss, ID until they divorced. He moved to the comparative metropolis of Pocatello, ID in the early 1980s. It was here where he discovered his love for computers, which filled the void left by the death of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. More specifically, computer and console games filled the void in his young mind, as did trashy movies on cable he really should not have been watching. This would fuel his interests in information technology and special effects. After realizing he was horrible at makeup, FX were off the table, and IT was in.

He spent nearly 20 years working in IT at Idaho State University, first as a student in the computer labs and on the help desk, and then as a Computer Analyst. In 2007, he married the love of his life, and in 2011 was given an opportunity to work in the game industry and move to Las Vegas. They jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, the company closed down the majority of its operations and let most of the staff go. Luckily, he found a position at UNLV that was extremely similar to his long-term job at ISU, and has been happily working there ever since.

He still has a love of gaming, even if he is absolutely awful at them, and still loves horror, sex, and sleeze flicks. He also digs cozy mysteries and children’s shows, so his Netflix watch queue is a weird and wild place.

Getting Personal

Now that my obit is out of the way, I’ll get a little more personal in some of my likes, dislikes, and the ideas behind the site and social media channels for Nostalgia Drop. Oh, and more stock photos. I really love photography but I am a crap photographer myself. Colorblindness really messed up photography and special effects and lighting design as valid career choices. And I love the absolute bonkers creativity and weirdness that exude from stock photo sites. Since some are free (pexels, pixabay) or I have a subscription for (scop.io), I like to use them to spice up otherwise bland posts and pages.

It takes a significant amount of time and effort to do write-ups and such, and I had a massive hard drive failure which affected the site while I was transitioning it to a new host. So I lost about a year’s worth of content as well as a couple of years worth of screen captures and such I was working on as I started visualizing what I wanted Nostalgia Drop to be.

I’ve always loved geeky things, even if I wasn’t smart enough to be a “real” geek. So when I started putting this together, I wanted a mix of retro gaming, really bad trash cinema, and daily doses of nostalgic things from the past. The daily doses have been the easiest, though they also take a good chunk of time, especially when trying to edit content down to the Twitter character count or finding images that can work well on Instagram without looking like complete garbage when cropped to the limited aspect ratios available.

So that’s where I’m starting. I am re-creating the old content that I lost that makes sense, and am creating new content slowly.

Yes, I Do IT

I manage several student employees to take care of a host of classrooms, computer labs, and hybrid spaces at UNLV. While I specialize in Macs since that was the position I was hired for back in 2013, I also work in the Windows world since I have a number of Windows 10 computers I manage in my spaces as well. It seems starting as a student employee in the computer labs in 1992 when I graduated from High School and started college has led me down a path where I am perpetually in or around computer labs. It’s a good place to be, and UNLV is a great place to work. So no complaints there.

I am a JAMF and Papercut administrator.  JAMF helps manage our iOS and macOS fleet, and Papercut is our pay-for-print system. I also work with Broadcom Ghost and Faronics DeepFreeze, Anti-Virus, Insight, and Core Console. None of that is relevant here on Nostalgia Drop, but who knows if it will be relevant in a personal blog at some point. Regardless, I said I would write something about myself, and that is a key piece of what I do on the daily.

And yes, I badly Photoshopped Ultima VII onto that Mac because Ultima VII is a damn fine game, and one of the Ultimas that is still playable today. And by playable, I mean “not frustratingly old-school because we have trained ourselves on newer, better interferfaces over the years” and not “I couldn’t get it to work on new-fangled computers.”

I Have Some Trivia Chops, but Only in a Limited Scope

Right now it is just me working on the site, but hopefully I will be able to wrangle some others into it in the future to expand the expertise. See, I’m woefully ignorant of a ton of topics, especially anything sports related. Like most Americans, I’m also not that great at geography and cannot speak any languages other than English, and that probably not as well as I should be able to. I’ve been playing around with Duolingo with Spanish, but it mostly just quizzes me on words I already know. And I don’t know that many so I think it’s just trying to make me feel smarter than I am so I’ll hopefully convert to a paying member.

But I do have some things that I consistently work on aside from the other content and one-off’s. Doing things like capturing screenshots of movies and games can take forever, especially when processing them and picking through thousands of shots to find the perfect 10 to 20 you need.

Daily Drops of Nostalgia

Initially, I wanted to do a daily email, similar to how Product Hunt was started. However, it was started because Ryan knew a ton of movers and shakers and they were sharing stuff to an email list…which they expanded. I did not have a group of people I was sharing nostalgia with…and no money to pay for a managed email list. Constant Contact and the like can get expensive quickly! Excellent services, but too rich for my blood. So I started the free route of creating social media accounts and trying to grow slowly but surely. Well, at least slowly. But it’s been doing okay considering I’ve been dropping a nostalgia post every day for over a year now. If nothing else, it has helped me commit to writing and finding cool nostalgia stuff every day.

Check out the socials below. Yes, I know there are two Facebook links. One is the Nostalgia Drop Facebook Page and the other is the Nostalgia Drop Pub group which is an open group for anyone to share nostalgia.

Weekly Rewind or “So This Happened…”

Why use a strangely erotic picture of a threesome happening in the rain? Well, because sometimes the day after you’re involved in such an event, all you can think is… “well, that happened.” And that’s pretty much how I write the Weekly Rewinds. I try to include any cool things I find in the retro gaming or movie world. I post the daily drops that have gone out that week in a digest. And since I’m getting older, and many of the actors, musicians, and game developers who have influenced me are older than me, I often have a “weekly tears” obituary section. That section is the hardest to write.

Check out the latest ones below.

Sometimes NSFW

I do have a age-check content gate for anything I deem might be a little too extreme. It acts as a warning rather than a deterent, though, since any age gate is easily climbed. But I will hide nudity behind it, though it is still within the realm of what I consider nudity. Naked breasts and genitalia: age gate. Butt cleft or cleavage: no age gate. If there is extremely prolonged violence or triggering acts, I will probably put it behind the gate. So, if I added a video of the rape scene from Irreversible with a commentary track, it would be behind a gate. Don’t worry, though. It is just an age verification. You do not have to subscribe or give me your information. I will always take any bones you want to throw my way, but it’s not required to get to age-gated content.

I have a mouth on me and I often use profanity. Sometimes I try to filter it, like in videos where I will be posting to multiple platforms. But often, I just let myself fly so a good number of common and uncommon profanity may be present. I will not put profanity behind an age gate. I will have content warnings on anything that may be objectionable, though. If I’m talking about blaxploitation films where the title of the film drops the N  bomb, then it will have a content warning.