We're still waiting on some of the news items to be confirmed outside of leaks, but it looks like Hetalia is going to be returning in 2021! (Both the manga serialization and the anime).

I'm so ridiculously hyped. I've been wanting to run laps around my apartment but I still have stuff everywhere from cleaning, so I've just been sitting and vibrating all morning. I also know I have some projects to wrap up before this return happens (mostly related to the Kitawiki). I also feel out of practice with staying on top of news and announcements because this hasn't been a regular occurrence since early 2016. At least now Himaruya has a twitter account.

Anyway, I now definitely need to finish those Hetalia fics I'd already planned on finishing this year. It's been too long.

So this is going up a couple of days later than I originally intended for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is that I've spent most of Friday and Saturday sleeping, and whatever time I've been awake I've spent watching the Great British Bake Off (and Coco for the first time on Saturday!) The other is that, while I had drafts of two of these done, I ended up scrapping the last thing I was working on and hammering it out today in the span of about an hour, and then finally proofed all of them last night.

So, yeah, using NaNo to finish old projects really worked for wrapping up the last of Fictober. In the end, I wrote 11 fics across 13 fills, and I'm rather proud of myself for both the sheer volume of that, and for stepping outside my comfort zone in a big way in terms of writing format and the types of stories I've written (even crossing into 'Dead Dove: Do Not Eat' territory a couple of times 0_o).

So without further ado, here are my final three fills:

Title: Feels Like Torture
Fandom: Supernatural
Challenge: Kinktober, Day 16: Frottage
Rating: Mature
Word Count: 1095
Characters/Pairings: Belphegor/Dean Winchester
Notes/Warnings: The same warnings that come with the Belphegor character as he's depicted in canon apply here as well. Also contains spoilers for Season 15, Episode 1, and could be considered canon compliant if you squint.
Summary: Belphegor starts making passes at Dean, which is the last thing he wants to deal with while trying to avert an apocalypse.

Read @ AO3

( Read more... )

Title: Get Lucky, Part 2
Fandom: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Challenge: spooktoberchallenge, Day 27: Lock
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 4122
Characters/Pairings: Korea/America, Korea/Taiwan, France, Hong Kong, Vietnam
Notes/Warnings: Continuation of the previous fill here.
Summary: Black cats bring bad luck, or so the superstition goes. But Yong Soo is pretty good at making his own bad luck.

Read @ AO3

( Read more... )

Title: Lighting the Jack-o'-lantern
Fandom: Supernatural
Challenge: spooktoberchallenge, Day 3: Trick or Treating / Kinktober, Day 8: Hate-fucking/Angry Sex
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 1644
Characters/Pairings: Belphegor/Dean Winchester, Castiel, Jack Kline (sort of)
Notes/Warnings: Despite the title, there is no fire in this fic. It's there for the pun and nothing more. The same warnings that come with the Belphegor character as he's depicted in canon apply here as well. Also contains vague spoilers for Season 15, Episode 3. Additionally, this fic heavily references the fact that Belphegor is possessing Jack's body and contains several pseudo-incestuous allusions and as a result. Also, some violence. (This warning is probably too long for how mild this fic actually is.)
Summary: On Halloween, Belphegor decides to have some fun with Dean while they're alone in the bunker.

Read @ AO3

( Read more... )

So this post was delayed A LOT, mostly because these two fills specifically got away from me (and ended up being over 4x as long as I originally intended them to be. Whoops. I decided that this week through next I'll just been posting (multiple) late fills until I'm basically taught up for the tail end of the month.

As with before, these are un-beta'd for now since I just want to get them up for now. I'm going to try to keep future fills to a more reasonable length so hopefully I won't run into this problem again.

Title: Get Lucky
Fandom: Hetalia
Challenge:spooktoberchallenge, Day 2: Cat
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 2177
Characters/Pairings: Korea/Taiwan, Korea/America, Hong Kong
Notes/Warnings: College AU, Human Names. (Taiwan is Xiao Mei and Hong Kong is Leon). This fill will also likely have a follow-up in a later fill.
Summary: Black cats bring bad luck, or so the superstition goes. But Yong Soo is pretty good at making his own bad luck.

( Read more... )

Title: Inside My Body
Fandom: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
Challenge: Kinktober, Day 2: Begging
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 3237
Characters/Pairings: Ron Grady/Jesse Walsh, Freddy Krueger
Notes/Warnings: Vague allusions to horror/gross-out imagery from the film. Internalized Homophobia. The first part of the story is a semi-direct adaption of the actual film scene, and includes word-for-word dialog.
Summary: In which the subtext becomes text, and things go very differently when Jesse visits Grady after his failed hook-up with Lisa.

( Read more... )

So the month is coming to an end and I've already fallen short of my goal to watch one season of Classic Doctor Who per month, but I'm okay with shifting that goal post to finishing 70's Classic Who in 2019 (which still averages 11 seasons for this year). It might actually be a decent cut off point since I know off-hand that the Fourth Doctor's final season is pretty heavily tied to the rest of 80's Classic Who.

That said, there is one goal I absolutely MUST fulfill in March, and that is finishing the back-up of as much as I can of Kitayume, the website of Hidekaz Himaruya (creator of Hetalia) before geocities shuts down. Content will inevitably be lost and I know I'll probably spend the first two weeks of April deeply depressed about this, but I've already backed up a LOT and I need to get off my ass and do what's left while I still have the chance. I honestly wish I had been able to channel my depression from January into this project because I probably would have been "done" by now.

The announcement for Gen 8 of Pokémon happened yesterday and I have mixed feelings about it. Part of this is because I have a huge Alola/Gen 7 bias and I still haven't finished playing those games (goal for this summer?), but I honestly was not impressed with the starter designs. I loved the Gen 7 designs right off the bat but these feel so blah, which is basically how I felt about the Gen 6 starters tbh. I'll probably go with Scorbunny since his design is easily the best, unless the evolution designs really sway me in a different direction. That said, the setting and the design of the actual game so far looks FANTASTIC and successfully convinced me to drop money on a Switch. That probably won't happen until late Spring at the earliest though, since I STILL need to get off my ass and buy a new computer and I don't want to make two big purchases that close together. (It would be kinda nice to have a Switch with me when I go to Anime Expo though.)

Lately I haven't done much aside from going to bed ridiculously early and binge-watching Fresh Off the Boat. I've been trying to rewatch Arrested Development since what we all know is gonna be the final season is releasing in a couple of weeks but I've had a really hard time getting back into it. To be honest, it feels much more dated now than it did the first time I watched it back in 2014. I also need to get back into more Star Wars stuff but to be honest, aside from Resistance which is having it's season finale in March, I'm probably gonna put that off until April at least because I'm just so busy with other media right now.

I'm also gonna try to be better about posting here and responding to other people's entries, but I know everyone else is kind of hitting that same roadblock so at least we're all in this together.

So when it comes to holding onto data I've had some very bad luck. My phone died due to water damage and I didn't have anything backed up on the cloud, and while I sent it in for data recovery they couldn't pull anything off of it. My only real option now is to pay $700 minimum to a company out in California that specializes in hardcore data recovery. :S

Of course, the ones affecting more than just me are the ones that haven't (for the most part) happened yet. Tumblr will remove all adult content on 12/17, and Geocities Japan will shut down completely at the end of March 2019.

I'm not gonna go into Tumblr too much as its been all everyone's been talking about, but I have strated making second mirrors for stuff like the Chibisan Date manga in thechibisan_date community here (using imgur).

The shutdown of Geocities Japan, however, is much more serious and (imo) tragic, as there are sites on there dating back to the early 00's that have been forgotten and will be lost with no one to archive them. When the OG Geocities shut down it was sudden, so I'm at least glad that they gave us a few months of warning (it was originally announced on October 1st). Why does this affect me personally? The website of Hidekaz Himaruya, the creator of Hetalia, is on geocities and has been around in some form since 2003. In fact, this site was a lot of people's first concern as キタユメ。 ("Kitayume.", the name of the website) was trending on twitter when the announcement happened.

Years ago, my friendsjammerlea andsammich created a website called Hetarchive, which mirrored all the translated comics from the Hetalia livejournal in a way that was easier to read (and didn't run the risk of the image host deleting the translations). Because we had that infrastructure already set up (and having just launched Kitayumeverse for Himaruya's other non-Hetalia works in September), we've been using it to mirror and host as much of the original, untranslated material as possible while running everything through archival sites. Himaruya himself has said he will mirror stuff on his new wordpress blog as well, but he's been... slow.

We've already accomplished mirroring a lot with only a few months left to go. While archiving is tedious and (very) time consuming, I feel like it's something I'm good at and, to some small degree, enjoy. It's also nice that there's something tangible I can do about it. I just wish, you know, the original content wasn't being taken down. Every time this happens it feels like history is being lost, and we just scramble to collect what we can before the rest disappears. ;_;

So most of the blog content from livejournal has officially been moved over here, and it's got me thinking about how much content and research myself and others have saved from being permanently lost over the years. Being a part of lonelygirl15 fandom for a number of years helped me practice digging up obscure information from web pages that weren't necessarily still there. For Hetalia specificially, megalodon.jp and the Internet Archive were where we were able to dig up a lot of really neat, obscure stuff.

( A-Hunting We Will Go... )

Watch Status Roundup:
Star Wars Rebels - All Caught Up!
Digimon Tamers - 12/51
Cardcaptor Sakura - 10/75
The X-Files - 74/210

I was going to do a write-up of my complicated relationship with the lonelygirl15 franchise yesterday when the week's new video was posted, but it never was. So I'm probably going to sit and wait on those thoughts until I'm riding the high of new content.

That's really my goal for this blog: Longer, in-depth entries about specific topics. A lot of it will probably be media, but I might do some kind of entry on Election Day in order to help cleanse my soul of that whole horrific event. I'd probably still do entries like this but not as frequently as I do them now. To me honest a lot of the "miscellaneous thoughts" that would make up these types of entries is better suited to tweets. Now that I think about it I probably should've written something for Spirit Day yesterday but oh well.

Maybe I'll go over my internet usage history now, since it seems like as good a time as any.

( Read more... )

Watch Status Roundup:
Ashita no Nadja - 32/50
Star Wars: The Clone Wars - 28/125
The X-Files - 62/210