The Zmodem.org Projects

Current projects

• zmodem.org - This site. Seems redundant to put a link to this site on this site, but... don't think about it too hard. Originally going to be a blog and some other stuff, but those duties got absorbed by wyrm.org.
• ymodem.org - Frequently-neglected Gopher site (if your browser supports Gopher links, then use this one). Gopher predates the WWW and is better in a lot of ways, and worse in probably as many ways. It has a phlog (which is a blog hosted over Gopher) that I updated quite a bit until I started focusing on wyrm.org. Has an RSS feed so you can be notified when I remember to update it. *Note* there's also an xmodem.org, but someone else is responsible for that. I have nothing to do with it.
• wyrm.org - Crappy domain name? Sure. It also has a homophone that's definitely not me, but it's a four-letter domain name that's a real word (even if the word is kind of obscure), so that's something, at least. It started as a project for me to keep track of my video game collection and then grew into whatever it is now. Kind of a blog, microblog, audioblog, howtos and general information along with tracking my game collection. It's a playground for me to mess around with whatever I think is interesting. This is currently where most of the action happens. Uses XML and XSLT because I have a thing for abandoned technology.
• rejectedscreens.net - Started out as a place where I would dump the screenshots I took for protipoftheday.com but didn't end up using. After a while the software I was using went dormant and I didn't feel like migrating it to something else. Kept the name because I really liked it, and eventually found out about an annual game playing event for charity. About once a year around Halloween I pretend to be a video game streamer to participate and help fundraise, and I repurposed the site so it would be easier to tell everyone how to find me on Game Day. I keep telling myself that I'll eventually stream more often than once a year, and maybe one day I'll believe me. If that ever happens, this is the place where the magic will happen. Also the streaming.

Dormant Projects

• techfixer.org - I registered this site so I could have a 'more professional' email address to put on job applications. Originally had a resume on it, but I'm Olde Schoole enough that I don't really like putting my real name on the Internet, so I ended up taking it down shortly after finishing it. Also, since I'm not actively looking for a job I didn't want to invite a lot of unsolicited job offers.
• crummysocks.com - The first domain I ever bought and the first blog I started. Updated sporadically for over ten years and migrated across way too many CMS's to count. I grew to be embarrassed by the name when I would give it out to people, and the site had accreted a giant mishmash of half-baked ideas and projects that didn't really go anywhere so I moved on. Officially mothballed what content I had floating around on my hard drive in 2005. Also contains a mirror of the crappy site I did when I bought my first HTML for Dummies book and used the 5MB my ISP's gave me to host a website.
• closeoutwarrior.com - A spinoff blog where I started out doing 'reviews' of video games that I picked out of the clearance bin for less than $10. I still like the idea, but it turned into way more work than I had time for (it takes a lot of time to play a game long enough to get a good impression to write a review, capture screen shots/video, and then write a review while also playing the games I actually wanted to play. Oh, and also working at a Real Job to finance the whole thing). I enlisted some help (I'd provide the games, they'd provide the review), but that didn't last long. Eventually I changed it into a 'game a day' blog where I reminisced about a different game a day for something like 500 days in a row. I mostly updated it every day while I was working in a call center in between calls (and sometimes during calls). And when that job ended, the blog ended shortly aftward. Retired in 2009.
• pushbuttonb.com - I envisioned this as a collaborative blog, but most of the collaborators I convinced to help me dropped out after a few weeks. It's almost as if their priorities were aligned such that regularly providing content in exchange for nothing other than a byline took a backseat to whatever they had going on in their own lives. But that's just a guess. Fun while it lasted. Retired in 2011.
• protipoftheday.com - I took a dumb meme and tried to expand it into a full-on website (which is always a great idea!) where I would write up a different 'pro tip' every day. I had fun with it for a while, but the concept a lot harder to keep going than I anticipated and it ended up losing steam in 2010 after 544 'pro tips'.
• 8bit.fun - I took advantage of the tsunami of new TLDs to restart a gaming blog after a long hiatus of not having a gaming blog. Partly so I could pretend to be a game blogger and weasel my way into trade shows, but also partly because game blogs are generally awful and I figured I could change that. After about a year of sporadic updates I gave up on it. Partly because I tried to use Drupal, which got a lot harder to use and update since the last time I used it, and partly because it was too hard to convince anyone to visit it. It also turned out that my heart wasn't really into that kind of blogging any more. Even though I still like video games and am still elbows-deep into the hobby, it turns out that video game blogging is boring. Retired in 2019.
• This Videogame Rocks! (Internet Archive link) - One of the attempts of doing a video game blog that was 'less serious'. Got some help from an actual graphics designer who did a fantastic job which I'm still super-grateful for. Started in 2015 and lasted about a year. Tried to reinvent it a couple of times, but my heart wasn't in it at the time. Kept the domain up for a while, but thought it was silly to keep paying for the domain to host a handful of paragraphs of text.
• pipe.land - A silly domain hack thing where I played a full-screen video of the map screen of World 7 from Super Mario Bros. 3. I kept it going for a few years, but .land domains are kind of expensive and I needed to pare down my portfolio a little bit. Judging by the amount of plays the embedded YouTube video got I don't think too many people are missing it. Except me. Active 2015 - 2018
• The Rest - There are a lot more domain names that I registered and either never put anything up on them or the project's life was so short that there wasn't much worth saving. I won't enumerate all those here because who has time for that?

Social Media

Social media has a lot of problems. I prefer to use things like IRC and email and bulletin boards, but I also recognize that I sometimes live in the real world and that means that for some of the people in my circles, social media is the only reliable way I have to contact them.

• Twitter - This is my oldest social media account. I mostly talk about video games, computers, and things that annoy me. As of December 2022, I don't really check it much. You're better off checking fediverse.monster.
• Backlog.tv just redirects to my Twitch channel. I decided to set up Owncast here. On days that I pretend to be a video game streamer, this is where the magic happens. Also the stream.
• Fediverse Monster - Twitter is a dumpster fire full of tire fires. I'd like to use something else, so I'm investigating the Fediverse. I don't have any delusions that The Fediverse will unseat Twitter and Facebook et al, but it's nice to have alternatives. Registrations are closed for now because I don't want to have to be responsible for anyone else's info.