About

βマックス | CC-BY-NC-SA

Intro, the blog and the commons!

Originally posted [somewhere] on fedi. It went through several revisions over the years.

I go by many names, but the internet primarily knows me as Betamax or just Beta (I like Beta!), chances are you've met me through fedi or twitch (as for April 2025, I have permanently left mastodon and twitch - still keeping this blog and other projects on my itch.io page tho)! I've already made an introduction aimed at each of those media, but I think this is a good opportunity to revisit some points, review and expand on em.

I’m in my 30's, white, non-binary transmasculine individual (I also go by demilady, aka "demigirl", or demienby - depending on the platform), bisexual, neuroatypical (ADHD and recently discovered I'm BPD - yup... it was a shock for me too). I was born and raised in a city in the Brazilian Amazon Region, use They/He (Ile/Elx/Ele) as pronouns and I believe that social, ethno, cognitive and environmental justice can be achieved through collaborative efforts. Finally, I understand english, portuguese and spanish - kinda!

Locally in my country, I've been doing research in the field of Law, Environmental Sciences and interdisciplinary area since 2012. Formally, I've withdrawn from a master's degree due to Covid and its complications. However, I still do small gigs on stuff related to academia for a living and the whole body of my previously accomplished research is openly available in portuguese (ask and I'll send my ORCID or R-Gate links). I feel very proud and satisfied for the things I managed to build, meaning that everything has become, now, a historical record that will persist beyond my limited existence. I also write poetry, it's openly available in portuguese.

Some of my interests are videogames, retro games, music, culture, meme culture (mhm lol), communication and movies. I've been really into specific subjects like romhacking and speedrunning since the rise of Covid. I was never into social media, but all things changed for me, mainly because of that new reality the virus has showed to all of us. In 2020 I joined twitch because of my interest in paper mario glitch-hunting and speedrunning (I'd really watch tons of related stuff on youtube before joining). For some reason that I still cannot explain, I've found the super mario world kaizo community (a romhacking scene) in this opportunity, and I was embraced by them. Twitch also worked as an important tool for me to improve foreign languages skills.

I've been developing a physical game about kaizo since 2022, whenever I have the time, and studying to make my own videogames and romhacks. I'm primarily interested in easy-to-use and/or drag-and-drop tools like card creatr studio, vassal engine, lunar magic and coil snake, since most of those tools are not requiring any previous programming/coding knowledge or relate to my main project (which is conforming the abstract concept of a "metagame" in something tangible, but also radically accessible across many media). But, of course, I don’t aim to stop on it. I feel like some of fedi's mainstream social tools are the right place for me to get to understand some stuff before start building the things I want to build.

During most part of my life I haven't had access to technology, so I don't know a lot about it (overall) or F(L)OSS. I had more or less access to “this” or “that” stuff, which made me a hybrid user and shaped some habits. Nonetheless, everything I am I owe to piracy (from sci-hub til TPB), to the web and the ICTs that made it possible for me accessing such knowledge. I've never had the opportunity of attending to a private language school in my country, and I wouldn't have achieved anything in the public university if I hadn’t pirated books and articles.

I particularly do not subscribe to those purist FOSS advocates mindset. There's the hardware dimension and the whole thing is much more complicated when you live in some periphery of the world. If you cannot afford something considering production costs, the exchange rates, taxes, shipping fees and the cost of living in your own place (currency stuff overall), you're going to take the other non-ideal/unconventional tool you need to survive in a connected and defined by its own economy world. So it's really hard to expect people having tech literacy and/or "consumer-ethics" in these conditions, as it just stands for one kind of rationality (accumulation).

This is why talking about free and open (source) software and not talking about free and open hardware (design and distribution), production chains (supply chains), conflict minerals (conflict resources), infrastructure and imperialism (capitalism) does not work for us in southern cultures/peripheral regions of the world.

Anyway, I want to be able to learn things and make some tech transitions possible, so I could change my current/near/local reality. This blog exists as a friendly - and frankly - noob space that allows me to organize all my experiences around so many interests. Here I'll try to talk about personal and ordinary things, but also about things way bigger than me, how they are and how I would like em to be. Always trying to place myself as an active subject of these transformations and from whom they may or may not occur. I like this idea of being able to build stuff and build yourself in the process.

All content on this blog is hereby available under CC-BY-NC-SA attribution, except where third party rights are involved - I've to say this, right?