I’m not sure these roundups are working for me… but anyway.
Watching
After several rounds of “can someone recommend a c-drama like Nirvana in Fire and not being able to scratch the itch and mostly being disappointed that nothing else is as good, I decided to just… rewatch Nirvana in Fire.
Gotta say it makes a huge difference those first few eps to know who everyone is and what is going on instead of playing catchup. Also, after 6 months of chinese lessons, it’s nice when I sporadically actually understand on my own, instead of just reading subtitles.
Also, I finished xxxHOLiC 2 (original volumes), completing my reading challenge for the year (I read much fewer books a year since I got into danmei, they’re just so long…)
Reading
Starting Peerless Book 4…
Coding
I redid my Touya/Yuki shrine in Eleventy in 2020, and when I tried to edit recently I realized that what I was using for sass no longer works. So I’m in the process of restructuring the build scripts, and cleaning things up while I’m at it, now that I understand Eleventy better.
Fanfic archives
The recent thing about Germany getting Google to censor AO3, coupled with 2 months of Mastodon, has made me realize that laudable though AO3 is, total centralization of fanfiction is perhaps not a great idea, and that in particular I need to figure out how to automate downloading my bookmarks (on my to do list for months now) and also to start posting my own fanfic in my own sites in addition to AO3. And I realized that even though it’s popular to malign the experience of fanfiction archives for specific fandoms, ships, or even personal archives… I rather liked the experience? Even with a new fandom, AO3 is a known quantity, it’s never really brought me that little thrill of discovery that finding a new archive used to.
This.
I still think the AO3 is a great project, but I also think it’s a product of its time and its time was “centralization” and “content silos.” Both of those things I think are getting less and less defensible, and even the notion of “but we have to archive All The Things for History” I’m starting to question (losing art and history sucks but, also, I think it’s natural and the current “the internet never forgets” era is… actually not that good, psychologically, for people?).
Also as someone who cut my fandom teeth working on a (large!) pre-AO3 multifandom archive… I have a huge soft spot for that era in fandom. For all its jank and problems with usability, it was creative and collaborative in a way I don’t really get from the post-AO3 era…
I did see this comment before and forgot to reply. No excuse.
Anyway, yes. AO3 does a lot of thing, but honestly there’s things about it that I would definitely do differently. I was on CLAMPesque, back in the day, it was a CLAMP fanfic board, and I miss that sort of experience, because it was very much geared towards people having conversations. I also miss that era of fandom, it just isn’t the same anymore.