SUDDEN DESU

disassemblies・digital archaeology・data preservation

State of the Site 2019

posted 2019-12-31 by Ryou

I hope your holidays were happy! Now let's talk about the upcoming year.

First of all, thank you for reading the site  and (presumably) being a fan. It's now been five years since the start of the site in its current form, and eight years since its original form as a tumblr (which is apparenly still hanging around!). Things have change quite a bit in that time, continually for the better, I feel. What started as a blog of randomness has carved out its own little niche in a sea of retro-gaming related websites.

For me personally, 2020 is looking to be a pretty busy year. New job opportunities have arisen, and I'm expecting a pretty big life change with the arrival of a baby at some point. This will almost certainly affect the amount of time and effort I can put into articles, but I'll do my best to keep the content coming as quick as I can.

The current site design is starting to look and feel a bit long in the tooth. There are a number of longstanding design issues I'd like to finally correct as as well as upgrades I'd like to make to things like the disassembly formatter. So you can expect a site redesign sometime in 2020. It may be subtle or it may be radically different. I'm basically going to start over from scratch and see where things go.

One thing I will likely add is one more Google ad, bringing the count to two per page. Of course, you're always free to use an ad blocker; I'll never restrict content or access based on ads. But that brings me to the next talking point: money.

This site and the work I do is not about getting rich. It's something I enjoy deeply, but the research and the articles take time. A few bucks helps justify the hours spent hacking out obscure dev tools inside 25+ year old arcade games. I gave Patreon a try earlier this year, but I wasn't a fan of its system. Our articles are infrequent, and I don't want to charge all subscribers for content they may not be interested in. I'd rather have a sort of 'tip jar' for the articles that people find personally useful or interesting. With that in mind, I've closed up the Patreon and have switched to Ko-fi instead, which better fits the donation model I'm aiming for.

In any case, here's to more game preservation, research and disassemblies in 2020! Happy New Year!

SUDDEN DESU Mk.5