Parents were rummaging through my room for some stuff they stored away long ago which meant I had to move everything out despite tidying up since the last clear out. So, I decided to see what else I could clear out once again.

In the end I found a mix of other bits and pieces like ten year old school jotters as well as more magazines stowed away. This particular issue was a little bit more special though and I remember being quite surprised when I was flipping through it at the newsagents...

About seven years ago I decided to write to a computer magazine named "PC Answers" over here. I bought magazines at the time to learn various bits of tricks with computers but, I found their articles were a bit lacking and often repeated the same content so I wrote a letter to them (Yes letter, no emails).

It ended up being chosen as the Star Letter and I received a copy of the WordPerfect Suite which is packaged inside a box more than double the size of all the old games.

Reading back, I sounded pretty harsh. At least I was giving constructive criticism instead of what trolls would usually post on message boards like, "This sucks!"

Will be keeping this of course.

Probably spent well over £300 on all these computing and gaming magazines including the last bunch I threw out. Using the internet was expensive back then and I remember getting into some serious trouble for running up huge phone bills at the time. Magazines provided the know-how not taught in class.

These days, it's much more convenient with cheap broadband internet but that doesn't mean abandoning these or books completely. Devil Survivor was just reminding players how there's actually a lot of misinformation on the internet and it's true.

There were many times such as when articles on the popular Wikipedia was edited to benefit a certain party and ended up being exposed. With books, the content has to be approved first before publishing so you have some guarantee as to how genuine the text is. With magazines, it means one doesn't have to go trawling the web to look for content.

Whole bunch of old school jotters that date back to as far as my first year of high school. We were made to cover our jotters with whatever we could besides newspapers because the teachers were getting fed up of students replacing messed up jotters and graffiti being put on the covers. This way, they could just change the cover when it got too messed up. Thus you see why I used some travel brochures back then.

Forgotten all my high school French now. The other language offered was Italian but I never got a chance to pick which language.

My handwriting's changed quite a bit since then. Tinier and messier now!

And er, came across some stationary my aunt used to send my brothers and I. As you can see, I never ended up using them.

Also had a number of certificates I earned from taking part in various activities.

More gifts from aunts. Pretty cool models at the time costing HK$20 each.

Press out the pieces and assemble them together with the included mini stick of PVC glue. I assembled one of them but don't know where the model went. Think it broke!

And more giant boxed games I bought by saving up pocket money during the early years of high school. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do with these. They obviously take up quite a bit of space.

These were as close to "JRPGs" I could get with no console at home. Of course, these were made by Western developers.

Shogo had some cool looking mechas...

But most of the character art were very ugly.

Remember I spent a while trying to find the theme song. Didn't know Japanese at the time so I had no idea what she was singing. Just found the tune catchy!

Got this headset from the Easy internet cafe which I used to visit a lot with my friends to use the broadband connections there and download stuff. It was £1 per hour I think and people were given these headsets for free.

Unfortunately they're not USB headsets and the sound quality is poor.

• Power Handling Capacity: 100mW
• Impedance: 32 Ohms
• Sensitivity: 104 dB/mW
• Frequency Response: 20 - 20,000Hz

It's a very noisy headset. A lot of fuzzy background sounds can be heard. The sound isn't particularly great either when listening to music but it was free! Doesn't matter, now that I have a pair of Sony MDR-V300.

Well, got a bit more room to fill up with new junk now!