ZDMedia is a “pseudo-brand” I use to gather all of my tech projects under one umbrella. I don’t sell any products or services, so it’s not really a business so much as something akin to a personal signature on my creations. The name is derived from my first 2002 web design project, a Zelda fan site titled “Zora’s Domain”. In those early days, I collaborated on several other websites (Traverse Town Square, FrequencyX, Internet Hate Machine, Kajonk-A-Con, and ZeldaPower among many others). To create a blanket name for these collaborations and projects, “Zora’s Domain Media” was shortened to “ZDMedia” so it wasn’t limited exclusively to Zelda projects.
During 2020-2023, I expanded ZDMedia to include a group of friends. We worked together on a series of self-hosted applications, all brought together by my friend Ffej. During this time we worked hard together to put a ton of fun technology projects together. He brought in some friends, and as a group we split the costs to experiment with our own self-hosted automation ecosystem. Sadly, we lost Ffej at the end of 2023. He was the glue that held the group together, so once again, I’m back to the only one working on projects under the name. We had some great times together, and the main site that unifies all of my projects just like he unified us, is dedicated to his memory.
My current projects:
FrequencyX was an experiment with radio signal scanning and decoding, providing the public with easy access to scanner feeds that would otherwise be locked behind expensive hobbyist equipment. At this time, the site is on hiatus due to local public safety broadcasts being encrypted in 2023. I’ve always liked the name though, so hopefully it will be coming back eventually in a new form.
Retrosyde Archive is a YouTube project to archive old and obscure video. The majority of the content shared consists of old TV recordings of ads, station bumps and news to serve as an interesting look at the cultural atmosphere from the time the recordings were made.
DJ Bot Bops is my controversial music project. Using Suno AI, I’ve found a new form of artistic self-expression by writing my own lyrics to make my own music, despite a strong cultural backlash to doing so. Apparently if you create something through inspiration it’s yours, but if you use a computer algorithm to do exactly the same thing, it’s hotly debated whether you created anything at all. However, I do write my own lyrics for what I create, and most of what I make is satirical in nature. I’d like to say “funny”, but I guess that’s subjective. Really, I just like to create things that make other people happy, and there’s no happiness better than a good laugh. We all strive to put something out into the world to make it more than what it is, and for me that’s laughter. In trying to express myself, I guess that’s what I usually want to come through in the music I make (even if you think I suck because I use an AI tool to do it).