Everything I Wanted // Billie Eilish

Fragile Staghorn Coral, Acropora, Northwest Island, The Great Barrier Reef, Allan Power 1969

Yellow-Faced Anemone Fish, The Great Barrier Reef, Allan Power 1969

My top 10 posts of 2020

So! Inspired by @three–rings (thank you for the website!) here are my most popular posts on tumblr this year.

This post about Suibian which is topping the podium with a large margin, probably because it’s like, the second post in this blog, period. I adore Suibian, so I’m happy with it.

The MDZS translation masterlist, which makes sense because it’s a reference post regularly updated? (as always, if you are aware of a translation I missed, tell me, I’ll add it)

My Lan Zhan feels in the novel in Dafan Mountain. I’m also fine with that one, because I love Lan Zhan very much.

Me going full salt mode about racism in the Westernized danmei fandom. For a post where I basically deleted everything I had written in my first draft, it got a long life.

My Guardian epub post. I never know how many people actually download the epubs/pdf I make, so seeing this post circulating makes me think it’s actually somewhat useful?

This Lan Sizhui feels.

Another work post, this one about my MTL-translation of 2HA. I created a side-blog @wanning-of-the-night-sky to talk about 2HA and my work on it.

This post, also about my 2HA translation/MTL cleaning, specifically about the big update I made in August (but there has been other big updates since, so this one feels a little outdated? but the links are to the current version of the translation, so I guess it’s fine?)

This post, announcing that I would start editing the MTL version of 2HA to make it understandable in English (everyone who had tried the “raw” MTL know that it really wasn’t understandable before). I mostly find it funny now because I really thought I would “just” clean-up names, locations, etc. and it would be fine! And then I would stop! it would be maybe a month of work, top! And now, of course, it has been longer than that, I’ve spend so many hours on this project, I’ve re-translated fully a number of passages, made a ton of translation choices, etc. I don’t regret it but this post in particular feels very “oh sweet summer child” XD

This old post about the homophobia in MDZS world, and how a number of critics I saw about the sex scenes were not really about the sex scenes. I still stand by it, but I’ve been sucked several times since in the fandom debate about homophobia/fetishizing/consent, and this post is very limited in its point of view. But I guess a number of these posts (like, this one about the narrative importance of the noncon kiss on Phoenix Moutain) originated as reblogs of a previous post, so wouldn’t appear in a Top 10 of original posts. A number of my metas are actually answers to other posts, and they probably circulated more than these?

I’m frankly surprised that 2HA is occupying three posts of the top ten, because I moved 2ha content to a side-blog really quickly. I guess a number of people really wanted to read the story now, instead of waiting for the absolutely excellent fantranslation. I can’t say I’m displeased, because I did spend thousand of hours on this project, but also, that’s not really what I would have thought to be the centre of my Tumblr presence. So this was a fun exercise!

I guess the lesson is that you don’t really care about my metas, you just want to read stories, which… valid, I guess.

Social distancing be like

Regal Angel Fish, Pygoplites diacanthus, The Great Barrier Reef, Allan Power 1969

panic! at the disco - say amen (saturday night) lockscreens

Here it is, the sexiest thing I could think of dressing up as for Halloween.

Darwin’s finches, Biological Science: the web of life, Australian Academy of Science 1967