Damn, I really have missed writing fanfic
Dec. 8th, 2025 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tropicsbearI've finally finished this year's Saiyuki fic! Still has to go through a round or two of editing before I can post it, but I should have it up on the usual places before the end of the week.
The original plan was for the fic to be 100% lighthearted and/or funny. Some heavy backstory snuck in at the last minute, which shouldn't surprise me because it's happened multiple times before across different fandoms, and yet it did.
( Some thoughts about my writing style. )
All that to say, I almost took this year's Saiyuki fic in a completely different direction than I first wanted. But I decided to stick with the lighthearted vibe for this even if there is that one slightly heavier section. Personally, I think the slight deviation helps make everything else land better.
Linkage
Dec. 8th, 2025 12:51 pmtropicsbear⚠️ Discussions of complications related to childbirth, infant death, birth- and pregnancy-related medical issues
Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world
By 2024, it was becoming increasingly hard to deny how many babies were dying to FBS mothers. Deaths followed a pattern. First-time mothers – whose pregnancies are known to be higher-risk – attempting freebirths over many days, even a week, after wild pregnancies. Some women went to more than 44 weeks of pregnancy.
Most women who freebirth will have positive outcomes, and for healthy mothers the risks are low. But the radical version of freebirth Saldaya and Norris-Clark pioneered caused alarm even among freebirth advocates.
(no subject)
Dec. 6th, 2025 02:09 pmtropicsbearThis was also discussed over at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
anime_manga, but I wanted a link here for mirroring reasons as well.
Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason
There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from that: the Funimation-turned-Crunchyroll executives still do not have any respect for anime as a medium. In addition, they seem to be treating Crunchyroll and its ways of doing things as the ways of pirates – which isn’t entirely incorrect, as Crunchyroll’s use of Aegisub and ASS did originate from the ways of pirate fansubbers. But fansubbers deeply care about anime as medium (they wouldn’t be illegally subtitling it for free as a hobby otherwise), which in turn means that the ways fansubbers have developed to subtitle anime are in fact extremely efficient for the job – much better than basically any “industry standards” for subtitling, even.
Like the anime_manga OP says, I do remember a time when Crunchyroll was a piracy site. It's why I made an account over there in the first place 😂 (An account I promptly forgot about in favor of torrenting, only to log in again after so many years and be surprised to see that the site was now legit.)
If I were running Crunchyroll, I'd hire a bunch of fansubbers and have them use their preferred software to make high-quality subtitles then use that as my selling point versus other streaming platforms.
(no subject)
Dec. 5th, 2025 11:47 pmtropicsbear✒️ I know I've said multiple times that I want to delete my FF.net account ... but now I also want to start cross-posting stuff between AO3 and SqWA because of the fear that one of them might suddenly disappear one day. The urges directly oppose one another, but I think the main difference is that AO3 and SqWA give me control over my account—I can delete it if I want—while FF.net doesn't. I'm holding off for now because I'm not even done emptying my FF.net, but we'll see.
❓ Is the tiny AO3 username icon not working for anyone else? Or is it just me?
💄 I've cleaned out all my expired lipsticks (donated them to a funeral parlor) and now I don't have a nude lipstick anymore. I poked around the department store for a replacement and decided to try GRWM's lip booze sheer balm in the shade Whiskey and omg. It's so good! Not sticky, made my lips feel super hydrated, and it looks so nice! Now I want to nab the Weng-weng shade.
🐏 I decided it was time to switch up my journal layout again. There's some things I'm trying figure out with the spacing of list items, but other than that, I think it's the perfect layout for TadaAi. Creating the custom layout layer wasn't as difficult as I thought it'd be. Opens up a whole new avenue of layouts for use. (I've been avoiding the ones using custom layers because I was scared of the implementation 😆)
