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.