NOPEFENRIR'S PROFILE

Lots of old memories!

First of all, I'm very sorry to hear everything you said, QHeretic. I hope all is well now.

For my own experiences: I was a very small part of the GGZ community -- I had been playing with RM2k for a few years in high school and got into the general community, and stayed with it for the first part of my college career (I would guess I was active from around 2001 until 2005 or 2006?). I started out putting together sprite sheets of existing characters (like ripping from FF6), and then I did dip my toes into some original work/edits of default sprites (I actually had a semi-successful project where I organized a few folks to make Chrono Cross sprites -- I think it resulted in around a dozen sprite sheets getting made?).

I was a member of a few different sites, but then I joined the GGZ forums and eventually became a contributor on the site (again, very minimally). I think I had the same AIM experience as many members (messages from wishmoo pretty much any time I was online, but also lots of good conversations with the other members who were around my age -- I remember Android18a!).

Honestly, overall, if you stayed out of the more toxic side of the things, the GGZ forums themselves were GREAT! Lots of people with similar interests, and overall a good sense of humor. There were places for serious discussions, resource sharing, story building, but there were also places for out-and-out shitposting and just having fun. There were also sprite competitions pretty regularly with no real prizes, but it was a lot of fun to compete against the best in the community.

For a little while I did connect with some of the members of the site after I left via social media, but I've since deleted Facebook and Twitter, so I don't keep in touch with anyone now. I still think of that time a LOT as it was really where I learned how to be part of an Internet community.