Personal rating 8/10

This was interesting! I enjoy the Alien franchise and its various entries as a whole—though I admit I've so far been limited to the live action movies/series and haven't explored the print entries—and this was no exception.

Alien: Earth is set between Alien: Covenant and Alien though I don't think you need any knowledge of the other franchise entries to understand what's going on here. It does raise interesting questions about the spread of Xenomorphs throughout the universe post-Covenant.

( Spoilers for the franchise as a whole and for the series itself. )

Random stuff:

• I love Eyeleen, the alien eyeball octopus thing! She's amazing, she's iconic, and I predict she will take over the world if we get a S02.
• They really like superimposing shots in this series. It was used a bit too much for my liking; it went from "Oh, cool," to "Was this really necessary?" pretty quick.
• In the first episode, there's a scene where the text on the computer screen is apparently bright enough to be projecte legibly on Morrow's face. I can buy that, but it drove up the wall that they didn't mirror the text.
• Kirsh slandering sleeved blankets, how dare he. (I love him, but how dare he.)
• Alien: Earth decided to contribute to the franchise by adding to the worldbuilding and Alien Romulus contributed by adding content that followed closely in the footsteps of the original movie. I think both approaches are valid; what's more important is whether the cast and crew are able to pull off whatever they have planned.

Things You Can Make ChatGPT Write for You

Every warm human word
You could ever have said

I'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.

This was also discussed over at 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.