Fifteen Years of GemuBaka!

Friday, May 19 has come and gone, meaning GemuBaka is now 15 years old. It’s actually an incredible feat and something that means a lot to me, but I’m sitting here with no real update or special feature to recognize the occasion.

In my personal life, the past six months have not been overly kind to me, and this largely revolves around my workplace. The company I work for was purchased by a corporation at the very end of October, and that has presented a lot of challenges. Of course, the higher-ups started out by putting on a mask and claiming nothing about our jobs would change, but that would barely last three months before changes were absolutely made.

Over the last three months my coverage area has effectively doubled, while simultaneously reducing the staff. This has led to a number of logistical issues, and I’m virtually on a day-to-day basis of knowing when I need to work first shift, or a pseudo-second shift. My sleep schedule has been affected, my diet has been affected and my time spent doing things I enjoy has been affected.

Then, to compound issues for GemuBaka and its companion social media sites, my computer is clearly starting to approach the end of its useful life in being used for media creation. It surfs the web, streams media and plays a lot of games just fine, but as programs and operating systems update over time, these items that ran flawlessly years ago are taxing my computer more and more.

I would attribute a lot of these issues to my computer using integrated graphics instead having a dedicated graphics card. I’m starting to have difficulties in running games released over the past two years, and my CPU is starting to have to really carry the load of processing my media. Recent OBS updates have only created more issues for me, as streaming on my original settings now pushes my CPU into the 40-50% territory and making my tower’s fan put in a lot of work.

I could get a very similar computer tower with double the RAM and a later generation multi-core processor for only $200-$300, but I know that won’t solve the problem at the end of the day. I’m going to have to suck it up and spend between $800-$1,200 to get something that will keep me going.

Speaking of fans – on top this, I was starting to experiment with early streams before work and putting in time on Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line on Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, I just finished packing my Nintendo Switch up into a box because it needs serviced by Nintendo.

Over the past few days, my Nintendo Switch – a 1000-model launch version – started getting very noisy. I read that, over time, the fans inside the Switch need replaced once routine cleaning with canned air no longer keeps the system happy. The system started running warmer on top of being noisy, so I contacted Nintendo (with the rep being very helpful) and set up a service repair.

I’ll be glad to have what is essentially a Nintendo-authorized refurbishment of my Nintendo Switch, but this means I’ll be without the system for the next two to three weeks. I still have about 25% of Theatrhythm to clear and Splatoon 3 is about to enter its new season!

It’s honestly not my intent to use the 15th anniversary GemuBaka post to complain, but I’m hoping to find a little catharticism in putting things from my mind into text. That said, I do have plans moving forward, so this text also serves as a bit of roadmap in things I would like to accomplish at some point this year.

First of all: I did actually have a big project lined up for the 15th anniversary. This was in creating a small, published book of GemuBaka stories that would provide a physical record of my favorite features on the site.

I have mentioned several times that I have never been a big fan of social media, and I suppose even this very website isn’t 100% safe from someone flipping a switch and wiping the web content away whenever a company is no longer making the money it wants. If at least some of my works were “immortalized” in print, I would feel a little bit better about their lasting legacy.

The thing is, right when the company I work for announced its big shakeups in February, I had this book roughly 50% complete. The idea I had in my head was to directly copy over some of the content from GemuBaka, but also revise/update some of the features as well as introducing a handful of brand-new features that would be exclusive to the book (at least for a set amount of time). This would have created a publication of approximately 80-100 pages that would be roughly one-third classic content, one-third updated content and one-third new, original content.

I suppose the silver lining is that I haven’t completely given up on this project. I very much want to self-publish this book, and I admit that is based on selfishness, as I don’t expect much of anybody to actually purchase my book. In wishful thinking, maybe digital copies of it could find a few curiosity buys at a couple of bucks.

In achieving this vision, though, I can’t bring myself to rush this out the door and have a half-hearted publication that exists just because it was the easy way to do it. I need to take some time to sit down and complete my list of stories to add to the publication, but I also need some time and resources to talk to a couple of artists to help create a cover and a few other bits of art. I’m hoping to put something together that isn’t a full-on wall of text, so I thought it would be neat to sprinkle in a bunch of personal photos and small drawings based on the games being discussed.

Streaming is another item I need to fully figure out. The largest drawback to my work schedule flipping back and forth is that I am tired all of the time. When I have to work until late in the evening and then I have to be up very early to see the kids out the door for school, I am flat-out not getting the sleep I need. Previously, I would stay up late and sacrifice sleep to stream, but at least at that point, I had a dedicated schedule that allowed me to get a little bit of sleep in between taking the kids to school and work.

To help keep my channel active, I started doing a few morning streams here and there. I admit I have sort of borrowed the approach of the great retro streamer MRRKnight. He has a main channel where he does first-time playthroughs of retro games, but then he has a very casual side channel MRRRuns that he uses to focus on speedruning with less presentation elements such as not featuring a camera.

While I have not made a separate channel, I tried the approach with the morning streams of not having a camera active and playing a little more casually. This is where Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line came in, and it was nice to chill out and play a current game on which I spent money. My backlog has been fierce as of late, and my go-to joke to describe my current backlog is “anything I’ve ever bought for PlayStation 4.” I am painfully overdue to get back on the Yakuza series.

So, I want to keep that going, while also dabbling in more speedrunning in that stream format. I’ve had a desire to really figure something out for speedrunning, because that is what the majority of marathons are based around, and I would really love to join in on these events that raise money for charity. The problem is, I goof around in a lot of fighting games or extremely short-run games, and marathons won’t take these because the set-up time is longer than most of the runs themselves. Plus, I have to admit, a lot of versus-CPU fighting game strategies aren’t exactly pretty – they tend to abuse one very strong move or strategy over and over and over across a number of fights.

It would be nice to dust off a few of my early “speedruns” such as Mega Man II (Rockman World 2/Game Boy) and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, and I have an idea for a “bad game” speedrun.

On top of that, I would again like to reach out to artists to see about getting a couple more versions of my “DJ” character so I can do a very simple “PNG-Tuber” setup. This would allow me to do these casual streams while still presenting an identity that viewers can gravitate to.

This would be another benefit to my brand of GemuBaka, as I’ve also had thoughts of treating the site as more of a “business.” I wouldn’t even qualify GemuBaka as a side hustle, but it is definitely a hobby. Still, having a web domain and hosting in this capacity isn’t free. If I could even have my web content scoop up the $150 or so needed each year to keep the site active as it is, I would be perfectly happy with just that.

But, moving forward, in something else I have brought up a time or two before – I have spent way too much time creating content for platforms such as Twitter over the years. If I had spent a fraction of that time building up GemuBaka, it might have more of a presence and readership, not to mention much more frequent content. Especially in the pre-pandemic years where I was seeing accelerated growth on my Twitter account, I let “numbers” – followers, likes, retweets – serve as an instant gratification instead of thinking more long-term and building a brand.

Growth for me on Twitter slowed to crawl post-pandemic, and for 2023, my stats are now practically dead in the water for a combination of reasons. I am actually steadily DOWN 20 followers since the start of the year when every other period of time saw growth. As a result, these events have accelerated my transition away from social media.

From this point forward, I’ll still post byproducts of what I am working on through my Twitter account, but it will largely turn into announcements of what I am working on here at GemuBaka. I’ve always wanted to be on a schedule where I post something to GemuBaka once a week, and not spending time on things that will struggle to get five likes on Twitter because I won’t pay for a checkmark is a great first step in accomplishing that.

For GemuBaka directly, one of the ideas I have kicked around is in starting a GemuBaka official kamige – a sort of “Hall of Fame” for the site that recognizes important games in my life. By this point, people have become familiar with the Japanese term “kusoge,” or crappy games, but it seems like internet users aren’t familiar with other such categories. “Kamige” is sort of like saying a “god-like/divine game,” and I’d like to induct select games into this status to highlight them.

I’m not sure how I will eventually accomplish this, but on another idea: while I don’t do the usual game reviews and news like I used to post on sites, I actually miss doing interviews. I would really like to see interviews pop back up onto the site, but I need to be realistic about the approach. I always want to support indie creators and arcades, so that will be a likely starting point, but I’ll see how this evolves over time.

Lastly, I’d like to do more archival features, so items like the “Combing Through the Pages” series will probably be seen more frequently. It was a while back, but I posted on Twitter about being able to buy a copy of the 3D0 Yu Yu Hakusho fighting game, and in posting one photo of the instruction booklet, someone had commented on the fact it showed a movelist. Sure enough, no movelist seems to exist on sites such as GameFAQs, so it might be of value to add information such as these fighting game moves.

If you somehow made it this far into this feature, I humbly thank you for taking the time to hear me out about this website. What I said when GemuBaka turned 14 years old still remains 100% true:

“When it comes to the history of GemuBaka, there really is a lot to unpack, and some of it involves a couple of lows that I don’t feel the need to bring up and revisit. However, it involves a number of highs. Back in 2008, I don’t think I ever believed I would toss aside video game news coverage and new game reviews and instead be creating full-fledged videos and archiving information about a couple of games that have been nearly lost to time.

“GemuBaka has served as something I’ve nurtured over the years, and, again, if you would have told 2008 D.J. that GemuBaka would eventually a have certified mascot, logo and theme song, he probably would have thought you were crazy … No, really, GemuBaka has a theme song – it plays in my channel trailers on YouTube and Twitch, and I’m pretty sure that maybe five people have ever heard it.”

Thanks to everyone who has ever visited or contributed to GemuBaka in any way. I spent so many years dreaming of becoming a writer for Tips & Tricks magazine. This is a bit of a far cry from that career path, but it still lets me live out that dream in a tiny way.

I do have one special item for people to enjoy for GemuBaka’s 15th anniversary: “GemuBaka Season 3: The Three-Year Hiatus!”

To explain, I took a break from live streaming in October of 2019, and then with everything happening through the COVID-19 pandemic, I didn’t return to live streaming on Twitch until the very end of July in 2022. To satisfy my creativity, I made a short film that served as a completely fictitious explanation of why I was gone from live streaming and playing video games for that period of time.

This only aired on the debut stream of season three for the Twitch channel, so this means approximately zero people ever saw it. Thanks for reading and watching!