That headline is misleading. You thought I was talking about my wee baby boy, not what I'm actually gonna talk about.

Frequent readers of this blog (heh) will know that, for the last several years, I've run a couple of fairly successful reddit-adjacent websites: one RedditBooru and AnimeBracket. But, very soon, that chapter will finally be closed.

RedditBooru I shut down last year due to rising costs in storage. Turns out my $200+/mo Amazon bill was not transfer, but the price of storing oodles of terabytes of anime related images of varying levels of couth. I hadn't been active in the community for quite a while, so the plan to drop it was really just finishing something I'd already started. I wouldn't say it was easy, after all, that consumed quite a lot of time and was something I was proud of. But, the rising costs and trying to stay ahead of an aging tech stack that really needed to be rewritten was too much. A phase out plan went into place, the main site was shuttered, and I moved a bunch of data around so images could continue to be served much much cheaper. That's where it stands today. Technically, I had a sunset date for the image serving too, but forgot about it and just kind of let it go. I'll turn that faucet off some day... In retrospect, I was way ahead of the curve in shutting that down, because the recent reddit API changes would've forced me to do it anyways. At least I could've blamed u/spez for that one...

That leads to baby #2: AnimeBracket. Of these two sites, this one was the most technically sound. There are bugs that need to be addressed, but it largely hums along by itself with little intervention. The folks over at r/anime have been using it with large audiences for years with only occasional investigation on my part (timely investigations, but occasional). The biggest issue is the UI and admin tools: they're not user friendly, so I've spent a bunch of time correcting data for folks' brackets, which is all manual database queries. Not fun. The issues/suggestions list just keeps growing, and I can't find the time or energy to actually delve into it. And now with a wee baby, there's less of both and... honestly, I'm kind of ready to just be done with it. So, hopefully, I'll wind up handing it off to somebody in the r/anime community so they can keep having their brackets without any time on my part. Also, that's a bunch more money per month in server costs that would just disappear.

Hard to believe that it's been over ten years with these two things, but it's been a good run. There's a lot to be proud of for sure, and part of me misses their peak when I loved working on them and working with the community. But, that time is gone and it's time to move onto new things.

Like an actual baby.

And maybe an electronics YouTube channel?