Happy New Year!

Sure, 2016 was a steaming pile of disappointment in many ways, but for me personally, it was actually pretty amazing. It was because things were so great that the site didn't get much love this past year...

The best thing that happened to me in 2016 was finally visiting Japan. I've been hugely interested in the language and history of that country for nearly twenty years, but I never had the means of traveling there until this year. To say I was excited would be a gross understatement. Though the trip was in October, I began planning the itinerary in March. I was wholly focused on the trip and spent very little of my free time on anything unrelated to it.

As such, other interests like digital archaeology (and by extension, this site) got very little attention. There was only one original article published for the entire year on this site. That's quite a drop from the previous year, when I was averaging a couple posts a month.

Though it was a major factor, my enthusiasm for the Japan trip wasn't the only reason there was such a drop in activity here. If you compare old posts to some of my recent ones, you'll see that the depth of my articles has increased substantially. I've gone from short posts with a few screenshots and a trivial explanation to essay-length analyses of disassembled code and hardware. This sort of in-depth research is more interesting, I feel, and is lots of fun for me personally. But that research and, in particular, the accompanying article writing take time to complete. Unless I can somehow turn this hobby into a full-time job, posts are going to remain infrequent.

There's still plenty of content in the pipeline, though. I started taking apart fan favorites Donpachi and Dodonpachi way back in May, and have found a bunch of interesting things. The article for Donpachi will be published first and is nearly complete. It should be posted up in late January. Also, I've disassembled Lucky & Wild and found some juicy bits of disabled code, so expect to see that sometime early next year. There's also lots of other little things that I need to research further and eventually write about. I tend to post my findings as they happen on Twitter, so be sure to follow me there for faster updates. The website is also due for (another) facelift, as I want to optimize some things, make some changes to the colors and design and update the backend CMS. The site is far from dead!

Here's to 2017 and another year of disassemblies, data preservation and digitial archaeology!