After seventeen years, I’ve finally decided to resurrect what was once my own personal space on the internet.
https://opcfg.kontek.net/zero_signal
To be honest, resurrecting it is not something I thought I’d ever do. That was before the days of “social media,” at least as we know it now. When I shut the original Zero Signal down, MySpace was only a couple of years old at the time, and was gaining traction fast. The days of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (etc) were still years in the future. I did jump on the MySpace train, as I got to reconnect with old friends that I hadn’t seen in years. That’s also why I joined Facebook when that started to take off, as I’m sure most everyone else did. It was fun, back then.
But over time, social media was taken over by corporations, seeing these sites as a vast, untapped source of revenue. Trolls started to run rampant. Bots stirred up trouble. Conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. Politics, despite pretty much always being a “GO TEAM!” kind of thing, became inflammatory to a degree that humanity has never seen in history. And, well, we all know what happened there.
The less-informed fell for this stuff, hook, line and sinker.
I started to withdraw from social media because of all this. Twitter first, as I never used it outside of posting book updates, and it was apparent just by scrolling through my feed that it was a virtual festering bowl of dog snot. Facebook came next, after the 2016 presidential election. I just couldn’t take the stupidity and fighting that erupted. Instagram became my choice of social media after that, as it was relatively free from the stupidity that plagued Twitter and Facebook. The cracks began to show there after a bit of time, too, so I started taking periodic breaks from it.
And, as I usually do, I began yearning for a simpler time. The “wild west” of the internet, as it were.
It didn’t happen overnight, of course. I did jump back into social media after a bit, thanks to some genuinely great people I’ve met. Even with them around, though, I’d mainly use these sites for announcements and direct messages. Then, late in 2021, I finally decided to reopen one of my old classic gaming pages, my most popular to date: West Mansion. While it was nice going back in, relearning web 1.0 HTML coding and all of that good stuff, it wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I have other interests, other things to talk about besides Splatterhouse all the time.
Then, a few days ago, I was scrolling through Facebook. Despite not posting there much, I still know plenty of people that do. One of them, NathanTZ, made a post that said, “I made a website. Fuck social media. It’s gone to shit.”
That lone post was enough to get the old gears turning in my head. For one thing, he’s right. Two, he went and did it. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, the time was right for Zero Signal’s return. And well, here we are.
Don’t expect me to post anything videogame-related on the site itself, aside from what little has already been mentioned, but I’ll still post about it here.
The OPCFG 