State of the Blog

If you haven't noticed yet, we're headed to Portland in a few days! The 2nd through the 9th, to be specific. We have a few things planned, some of which have no relevance to the blog and some of which may not work out due to the vagaries of scheduling. However, at a minimum we'll work on a writeup of what the city's really like (the bits we see, the bits we hear about; we plan to do a lot of walking) and hopefully wander in the vicinity of some of the exterior shooting locations.

We know that we have, unfortunately, planned this right over the first half of the two-parter Grimm that's coming up. We had to guess at possible breaks when we bought tickets and made reservations, and sadly we were off by a week. While there are no guarantees, we'll do our best to have the first half up by the time we leave for home. Worst case scenario, we're flying back on the same long flight. We can play pass the keyboard with whoever's got the most battery life. Fear our plotting and cackling.

While we're gone, we'd like you to think about and research Gittip. Gittip is a format for recurring, regular donations to people doing work you want to see more of. It requires transparent accounting for those taking money from it, but allows opacity on the part of the donors. During airing season of a show we put, at minimum, eight hours of work a week into a show, discounting refining and revising approaches over the course of a week as we get more sneak peeks, etc. Every recaplysis post you see is the work of 6-10 hours apiece. Every essay you see is 1-3 hours. But we haven't been posting beyond staying current recently because we have too many other projects, all of which are more likely to yield something more than RSI in the medium-to-long term. If supporting the blog in a concrete way is something you'd be interested in, we would reprioritize to a degree.

Gittip is the format we settled on as the most transparent, most consistent way of doing a donations button. It is by its very nature easy to see who's taking how much out of the pot, and it allows us the luxury of not working up a spreadsheet showing how much our income from the blog is, which we might feel obligated to do in a format like PayPal or Patreon. This does not mean we are closing the blog, moving the blog (unless to a domain we own), changing the weekly recaps, installing a pay wall, looking for sponsorship, or changing anything about the way the blog currently functions. We still have no intention of putting ads on the blog, and if you ever start seeing them you should let us know. (AdBlock+ can be a blessing and a curse in this regard.) We have simply reached a point where we feel experienced enough that we're comfortable asking for donations, and are generally overcommitted enough that this would help us prioritize our many to-do lists. Please leave us your feedback in the comments - if you're happy with what we're doing as it stands, there's no need to change anything. If you want us to incorporate more essays, profiles, murder dot-plots, etc., then seriously consider Gittip.

PSA

Due to our being in the same geographical location, and my being a ghost during camp week, there will be no Person of Interest ep posted this week. There may or may not be one next week, depending on what else happens. We're very sorry - we've been looking forward to finishing s1 too - but given the import of these eps it's for the best that they happen when we're both well-rested and able to give them our focus.

Haven eps will continue every two weeks as normal until sometime in August (I am way too lazy to look at our calendar right now) when they'll go to every week so we can ramp up to the new season. Trust me, we're excited. I'm just too sleepy right now to muster anything beyond all your caffeine give to Zim.

We'll also have a proper, full-length state of the blog sometime after SDCC happens and we get a chance to watch chunks of the panels and spoilers and so on. You can help us out with that one by leaving YouTube links in comments, if you like! For any of the three shows we're doing.

Thanks for understanding, and we'll see you back here in August for more Person of Interest and Haven s1.

Schedule Update

Okay, folks, we have an airdate for the end of Haven s3, which means now we can plan our lives around the blog instead of vice versa. We are MUCH happier about this, let me tell you.

First off, don't forget that you only have 2 days to vote on our next show(s)! At the moment y'all apparently want us to skewer OUAT and watch Person of Interest, so we'll work that into our plans for the next couple months.

Second, here's what we know. Haven airs back-to-back eps on January 17th. This means that we will work both eps together, as we have been with only one currently-airing show to recaplysize, and ideally we will have Reunion up on Saturday the 18th and Thanks For The Memories up on Sunday the 19th. Grimm doesn't come back, according to all the sources we've seen, until Friday, March 8th.

Kitty just moved into her new house, and also participates in Yuletide every year. (I'm her first editor, so technically I participate too.) So between that and holidays, content's going to be pretty slim for the rest of the year. We'd like to get you the Women of Grimm and Haven posts, along with a couple other Grimm posts we've been working on for awhile now (namely, horror/fairy tale tropes and the Tristan and Iseult parallels), but we may or may not get them out before year's end. I plan to finish off the When You're At Home series before the 17th, thereby clearing my backlog of Grimm posts in time for the second half of the season. With the exception of the AudSarLu profile, we should also be able to get you the last of the Haven profiles as well - we're going to hold off on posting that until we get whatever data the finale gives us. Likewise, we should have an update to Howard's profile after the finale airs.

(By the way, if you have particular scenes you think I should focus on for the last two in that series, toss them at me in comments. I refuse to try and do ALL the scenes that take place at Monroe's or Nick and Juliette's, because I'd never finish the posts.)

Once Upon A Time skewering will happen in the weeks between now and Haven's s3 finale, at least in theory. It is, however, lowest on the priority queue, and may be preempted by actually having lives. (K: What's a lives?) (A: For you that's pronounced home renovations, precious.)

In the seven-ish weeks between Haven and Grimm, we'll work on dropping as many of the posts yet to be written as possible, though we may hold a couple in reserve for immediately before s4 of Haven premieres. We'll also watch our way through Person of Interest back-eps, unless something drastic changes with that poll between now and Friday. Assuming it doesn't, though, at this point we are not going to try and play merry buggers with catching up to where Person of Interest is as far as what's currently airing, so you'll have all the fun of watching us tear the show to shreds while you know what's coming next. Now is a good time to reiterate that we are totally okay with being spoilered, though given our workloads we're probably not going to seek them out, either. So the comments section on those posts will be completely open. In theory, we'll hammer out one PoI post a week until we finish s2... just in time for s3 to air, if our math serves us right. Hey, I never said we weren't gluttons for punishment. I'm also working on an actual calendar to help us be more organized, which should result in more regular content for you guys! Yay!

Questions, comments, concerns? Drop 'em off here.

Behind the Scenes at Murderboarding: Reader Poll

Dear readers, we're rapidly approaching that time of the year when neither of the shows we're currently analyzing is on. While we have no doubt that we're capable of coming up with odds and ends of Grimm and Haven posts to fill that time, we thought now would be as good a time as any to ask you what you'd like to see us do next. We have, through careful selection and weeding out (read: watching a bunch of pilots recommended by friends and family and snarking about the ones we didn't like on Twitter), selected a number of shows that we feel capable of doing for you!

Over to your right you will see two polls, which close at midnight PST on December 21!

 The first poll is for shows that we would analyze all of, regardless of hiatus or cancellation status. For shows that are currently airing, we might watch to catch up and begin analysis with the most recent episode, or we might start at the beginning and work through; it depends on our workload both on the blog and off of it, how many eps we have to catch up on, and what you guys have to say about it.

The second poll is a bit trickier and requires some preface. We both used to watch Once Upon a Time. We really liked it, even! And then, by a series of plot twists that weren't, wooden acting, and atrocious scripts, we fell out of love and into loathing with the show. Kitty's a few eps more up to date than A is, but neither of us finished out season 1, nor did we pick up with season 2. If we do this show, we will skewer it. We'll also, of course, call attention to the things we do like - because there were at least things in some of the eps we liked, or we wouldn't have kept watching. There's a certain kind of fun to be had from picking apart TV shows you don't enjoy and explaining in minute detail why they don't work, but if that's not something our readers would enjoy as well, we're not going to put the time into working up the posts. So, do you want to see us skewer no more than three eps of OUaT? And if you have suggestions on which eps, either in specific or in general type, please leave them in comments.