Age of State of the Blog

Those of you following me on Twitter may have noticed a recent downtick in activity, especially of the sort that talks about blogging at all. Some of you may have noticed the broken arm and the subsequent WOW I AM HIGH ON VICODIN tweets.

(We're not talking about how much of February I may not remember clearly.)

So! I know we promised to start posting eps around this point for Helix and Librarians, and Kitty is just about ready with her first two eps (I believe she's just got to pull screencaps), but I am... behind. Very, very behind. On the plus side, I have a plan of attack and expect to be able to post ONE ep around March 25th; on the minus side, I actually do have a bunch of stuff I'm trying to catch up with all at once. But I can type and think clearly now, which is a nice change from basically all of February, and I should hopefully be at a point where I can work down a few minutes of an ep most days, more on the weekends.


The story, for those who want it, is that I slipped on ice that'd gotten snowed on while I was in for my fiddle lesson the beginning of February, and while I managed not to land ON the fiddle case (and indeed it wasn't even out of tune), I broke my arm. In two places. And had THE WORST urgent care experience of my LIFE, up to and including failure to take X-rays of my wrist that would have told them about the bone chip. Because I am me and have epic skills, I did this just exactly enough to require Vicodin, a sling, and perpetual ice, and not enough that I needed a cast or surgery. I know. I was impressed too. I'm coming up on six weeks out from it, though, and I've been improving pretty damn rapidly. Those of you who've been around awhile know that this means I'm going to inevitably push, but I will try not to fall flat on my face when it comes to blogging. Or, you know. Fall on my wrist. Again.

The State of the Blog Awakens

As promised, the state of the blog post-Haven, post-holidays, and post-sleeping like we're teaching ourselves to hibernate.

What we're never doing again: That. We are never, ever working to weekly deadline again. It was fun while it lasted, but we're frankly not getting any younger, and we're rapidly becoming the sort of stodgy 30-somethings who want our weekends back for housework. And TV marathons. And sleep. Shut up. Besides, we want to try to bring you better quality analysis, including a lot of the technical aspects that we know we let drop in recent posts in an effort to ensure everything got out on time.

What we'll be replacing live +24-blogging with: Anna is going to start up with The Librarians s1 & s2; Kitty will tackle Helix which has a limited run of two seasons. We'll aim to alternate weeks starting the middle to end of March, after we build up some backlog, so that we have time to continue writing at a reasonably leisurely pace.

The other great thing about this is that we're going to post during any currently-running show's hiatus, which will allow us to evaluate each ep in light of the larger whole of each season. With the move toward a significantly more serialized form of storytelling on TV, this is honestly the best way to continue giving you recaplyses without second-guessing every single week's developments. Sometimes this is fun! A lot of the time it leads to disappointment.

As a result, we're also considering branching out some: we've had at least one request for Jessica Jones, which will have to wait for us to finish watching before we make a decision yea or nay. (Hopefully this week/end!) There's a couple other shows we might do, but frankly we think you'll have plenty to keep you busy reading from now until the next time our lineup changes.

Murderboarding In Portland: A Report

So. That happened.

If you're on Twitter and you've been paying attention at all to our feeds, or perhaps even if you've just been reading our informational posts, we just took a working vacation. For a certain value of 'just.' We've been back a bit, we've had time to recover. I jotted down the notes for this entry while we were on the plane back and I was half-stoned from cold meds and sleep deprivation, plus altitude weirdness and the general mental miasma of being on a day-long plane adventure. I've had time since to think about these notes and bash them into something resembling coherent form. It took some bashing.

A working vacation. For Murderboarding, in this particular instance, it was a vacation relating to our work on Grimm, up to Portland where they film. It started off, actually, as a complete lark. Oh, hey, wouldn't it be funny and kind of amazing if we were able to go to Portland someday? Oh, yeah, that'd be cool. Then the idea gets shelved, and we think no more on it.

The problem with thinking no more on it is that then it sits there and seethes. And bubbles. And seizes on the next opportunity, oh, hey, we're getting a decent sized tax refund. Hey, plane fares are down. Oh, hey, this hotel looks affordable. Before we knew it we were allocating funds and booking tickets to Portland, making hotel reservations, making plans. But so far, it was still just a vacation. I mean, we had every intention of going around to locations, we looked up where they were, but we weren't going to do anything beyond that. Right? Of course right.

Let me tell you what we did.

We took a bunch of photos of outdoor and exterior locations, mostly for our edification. We walked the Pearl, and saw a bunch of the places where events mentioned in the show would have taken place. We had dinner at Raven and Rose, which turned out to be an executive dinner meeting at Raven and Rose where we worked out some expansion plans for Murderboarding, the problem of essays since our previous post went entirely unanswered, we did some networking, met some fans of the blog who live in Portland, asked for and received permission to visit the set and learned a great deal while we were there, did some info gathering, scheduled and attempted to schedule some meetings and interviews (filming interfered with some, others we managed to catch), and overall managed to make a lot of progress on the scheduling and direction of Murderboarding, not just in Grimm, but in the blog in general.

We also scheduled the vacation portion of the working vacation, because goddammit, there are two words in 'working vacation.' Only one of them involves labor, even if it is a labor of love. We had concert tickets and Cirque du Soleil tickets and set aside a day for wandering around parks, and another for wandering around Powell's. We didn't schedule me getting sick for a day and a half with the head cold from hell, but it happens. We scheduled a studio visit with a lovely couple of artists, and we did quite a bit of just wandering around, eating in restaurants, and visiting gardens.

We had our fun very much scheduled because we did have a solid idea of how long it would take to get to the concerts, what we would do when there, and how long it would take. We had our working parts very much not, because we didn't know how long a set visit would take (estimated: 1 hour. actual duration: 4 hours, cut off there only because of extenuating circumstances), how long it would take us to hike around an area of town (not that long, as it turns out, but only in so much as we had a list of places and a native guide to point them out), whether or not we would get any of the interviews we were trying for, etc. We had never done this before. We didn't know, beyond what common sense told us, what would and would not be permitted. Common sense dictated that we take no pictures of the set, that we stand out of the way while filming and keep quiet, that we stand out of the way when not filming and talk quietly amongst ourselves unless spoken to, and there was a surprising amount of that. We remain incredibly grateful to Norberto Barba for his gracious welcome and willingness to answer questions. Common sense also dictated that we not go up to the cast while they're working and bug them. That we not go into private buildings and poke around and take pictures. You know, normal person stuff. But when we asked for interviews, or for the set visit, we really didn't have any idea if this was a thing that there was protocol for, or that people would be willing to do, or if we'd be consistently turned down for any of half a dozen reasons. As it turned out, even the people who had scheduling conflicts were happy to talk to us! Not for the interview, but they weren't upset that we had asked.

In a lot of ways, Portland and Grimm was an ideal choice for our first Murderboarding working vacation, if we were going to do this at all. A lovely city with plenty to do even without the blog-related agenda, and we found ourselves missing it as we left. Now that we've done this, hopefully some of the scary has rubbed off the prospect of asking people to talk to us about what they do for a living, what they like about it and what they find challenging. And we have a better idea of what we can and can't do.

Let me be clear on the can and can't do part, too. The cast of Grimm knows who we are. They know about the blog, some of the writers know about the blog, and we introduced ourselves to Berto as bloggers, with our business cards and a link to the blog so he could see that we were serious and professional about our work. (Yes, despite the fact that we say 'fuck' a lot.) That gave them the reassurance and expectation that we would behave as professionals, not be disruptive, obey the schedule we were set in accordance with their filming and production needs, and leave quietly when asked. Which, of course, we did. We do what we do because we're huge fans of the show, but we also do it in the manner that we do because we believe sincerity and dignity are the hallmarks of professional fans, for lack of a better term. Sincerity in our fandom, our fan-style appreciation, dignity of a professional.

Other things that helped: basically, scheduling ourselves for six hour "working" days. A lot of our travel time included a lot of planning, sitting on streetcars and buses going "okay, if we can do this, then this and this get easier," and so on and so forth. We made a budget and, by and large, we stuck to it, helped out a lot by a lot of the things we wanted to do amounting to going to a place and walking around till our feet told us to stop. We kept our evenings free for relaxing, decompressing, eating well, and going "OH MY GOD CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT HAPPENED," because let's face it, we do do this because we are fans, and it really helps maintain a professional demeanor if you know you can go back to your hotel room and, in private where it won't freak anyone out, screech about what happened to your co-blogger. No matter how professional you are, in whatever profession you're in, you will have those moments of "OH MY GOD I SHOOK HIS HAND SHE TALKED TO ME OH MY GOD." I read an article recently where an actor described himself as being so star-struck by Robert Redford that he walked into a refrigerator. We managed not to walk into anything, I'm pretty sure we managed not to be incoherent, and it was largely because we could decompress later. This is also the reason for six hour days, because being "on" like that is exhausting. Fun! But exhausting.

Keep your expectations low and broad. Our mantra for this trip was "nothing is going to happen," and indeed for a lot of it, nothing did happen. We did not have ice cream parties with the cast, we did not run into anyone on the street, and nothing happened. Except a lot of things happened. Some of them we can't yet talk about. Some of them we've touched on but won't speak of in any more detail than we have here. Some of them even we don't yet know the entire scope of. We're rolling with the punches. We're pushing forward, with encouragement, and we're trying to keep our enthusiasm fired up by Portland from outpacing our ability to follow through. Another good reason to keep your expectations low; if you don't expect much, you won't necessarily attempt to do much, and find yourself running ragged by your own actions. We're trying to escape that fate, with moderate success. We still have three shows to blog, two of which have considerable backlogs, and we're tossing around ideas for touring the areas where those are filmed as well. Haven might be a stretch by now, but Sleepy Hollow is in not quite my own backyard but a couple backyards over. It's possible. A lot of things are possible, now. Maybe that's the best thing to come out of this trip to Portland, reminding ourselves why we do what we do, and how much joy we take in doing it.

And now, the fun part! We took maybe not as many pictures as people were expecting us to, but still a fair few! Now with snarky commentary. Some of them - most of them - you've probably seen on Twitter, but Twitter is notoriously ephemeral and now they're all in one place. As an extra bonus provided by one of our Portland friends, a time-lapse video of photographs of Portland, because we were so busy having fun we didn't take half as many general landscape and terrain photos as we should have.

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: Possible posting delay

Due to a death in Murderboarding's family, there may be a delay in getting the next two episodes up. We are both working on yesterday's episode right now, but I'll be handling next week's on my own while K is away attending to family business.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

State of the Blog

Okay, it's been a day or so since we got word on Haven, we're slightly saner or at least less stuck in a permanent state of squee, and we have a lot of shit to organize. Fortunately we're both awesome at that, so we present to you the results!

Haven: We currently intend to recaplysize the remaining back eps, which is to say s2, and have that up on the blog starting around June, as we did with s1 last year. When s5 comes back in the fall, we plan to have the usual weekly post up on Saturdays. Now with 200% more swearing! Standard warning for backlog posts applies: there will be spoilers, they will be for the entire run of the show so far.

Sleepy Hollow: While Grimm is on hiatus for the Olympics, we plan to start working on s1 of this show. We've been watching since the pilot, but at the time we were still working our way through Person of Interest mayitrestinpeace, and thus didn't have the ability to devote time to a new show. While we're regretting that now, we'd like to make it up to y'all by providing new analysis of the content over the long, painful wait for s2. As with all backlog posts, they will be in light of all the information acquired over the course of the season. I really cannot urge you highly enough, if you haven't already seen the full season, to wait to read our posts until that time. Coming from us, who seek out and devour spoilers like John Noble devours scenery… let me put it this way. We did not see the twists in the finale coming. The foreshadowing was there. We cannot turn analysis-brain off, and these twists impressed us. Which is why we're blogging this show.

Grimm: This season has been rocky. You may have noticed. We have hope that that'll shape up; the writers, actors, crew, everyone very clearly would rather be doing exciting metaplot than boring procedural stuff. (Note that procedurals don't have to be boring; see also Haven and Sleepy Hollow. Just that Grimm is, right now.) That said, we're in a position to finish out the season and reevaluate where we want to go with it. Right now we're working on the assumption that we'll continue, since numbers for renewal are looking good. Assuming both of these things happen, what we'll probably end up doing on weekends where Grimm airs simultaneous with Haven next fall is plan for Grimm posts to be published the Sunday after airing. This gives us a little more breathing room. A little.

A word of warning for those who might be new to the blog as we start Sleepy Hollow: we swear a lot and, for future reference, we speak on many adult subjects in recaplyses, as these are adult programs which often touch on a number of issues. Please keep this in mind, and read and share responsibly.

Behind the cut, a compilation of shows we're watching and why! Also quoteboards. Always quoteboards. 

PSA: Triple Eps

We love you. We also love our wrists, which is why we have no idea when the Grimm eps for this week are going to be posted. For those of you who don't know, Haven's season (series? we really hope not, and don't forget that you can write SyFy to tell them to renew Haven, sample letters and assorted addresses here) finale is this weekend, which will undoubtedly result in at least another 15k worth of recapalypse. Grimm is airing two eps because they love us and want us to have content and also hate us and want our wrists to fall off. NBC will pay for bionic replacements, right?

Anyway, all of that is to say: our current plan is to get the usual two Saturday recapalypses out on time, but we make no promises about when the second Grimm post will be out, other than sometime before the Friday following. You can, as always, follow us on Twitter and listen to all our shrieks of Oh You Fucking Fuckers before the post goes out, if you want a timeline on how far we are.

Thanks for understanding, and we'll try to get you some extra content over the holidays so you can all escape your families.

PSA: Person of Interest posts ending

It is with regret that I have come to tell you that tomorrow's Person of Interest post - which will not be 2x18, but 2x19, as I'm not asking Kitty to blog a show about which we now have zero fucks to give - will be our last. We've been watching the current season while trying to clear the s2 backlog of eps so that we could catch up by February sweeps, at least in theory, and with the conclusion of the HR arc we find that we don't even have enough interest to watch, let alone to spend eight hours an ep blogging it. Life's too goddamn short to hateblog things, and Murderboarding has always been a labor of love, even when a show puts out a weak episode.

The creators have made it very clear that this is not intended to be a weak arc of episodes, however, but the direction they intended the show to go all along, and that they consider themselves innovative and exciting because of it. We firmly and disrespectfully disagree; we feel it's lazy, cheap writing and a complete cop-out (pardon the pun) of an ending, and we're pissed off that they felt they could do that and call it clever, innovative, shocking, and not suffer consequences. It's neither clever nor shocking. It's a sign of a want of creativity to not have anything further to be able to do with a character so they kill that character off so everyone else can grieve/go on a vengeance spree in their various ways. We did see the episode after that and with two minor exceptions, were neither surprised nor gave a damn about any of it. Characters which we previously loved did not stir us. About the only thing that pleased us was the ending, and not because this was a new and interesting place to take that character. In fact, it was so predictable it was almost inevitable. But we enjoyed it because we enjoyed the actor's performance.

In the end, I suppose it's only appropriate that we're ending our recaplyses of PoI with the episode that fridged the character that began this arc.

As this is not up for debate, and neither of us has the spare cycles for moderating comments this week, I'm turning comments on this post off.

In happier news, we're considering adding Sleepy Hollow to our rotation instead. If that happens, look for recapalypses (given the show, I think we can consider them all apocalyptic) to start up sometime in February after the season finale airs. We also intend to get back to the far more entertaining work of writing essays and profiles for Grimm and Haven; with a topic list currently standing around a double dozen, I don't think we're in danger of a lack of content anytime soon.

Return of Behind the Scenes at Murderboarding

We're coming up on the holiday season, which means assorted show hiatuses. We're also coming up on the end of s2 of Person of Interest, which means we should probably use our words and tell you upcoming plans in that regard!

These next two weeks are going to be a bit odd. Haven airs Friday 11/22, but Grimm's taking a week off to air on Black Friday. No, we don't know why either. Yes, we find it a bit odd. A is going to be in LA for Thanksgiving (not smacking network execs with dead fish or trying to shake down writers for answers, family vacation), which means the next ep of Grimm will be aaaall Kitty. Just in time for another childhood legend of hers! (K: Yaaaaay.) And after that we're back to the usual doubleheader for the last two weeks of Haven, as far as we know.

Haven: season 2 has not yet been done. We intend for that to start going out in May or June of 2014, after network shows finish airing for the season.
Grimm: we still haven't decided if or when we're going to go back through the rest of season 1 and fill out all the non-Renard bits. Mainly because we don't yet have a TARDIS to write in. It seems probable that this is a thing we'll do sometime, but we can't make you any promises as yet. What we can promise is that sometime during late winter/early spring we intend to take a fangirls' working vacation to Portland. Because we're nerds, because the last vacation A took involved six to ten hours of music every day and then a week of recovery, and because Kitty hasn't had a vacation in approximately ever. We don't promise anything other than Twitter silliness from this, but we definitely promise a lot of Twitter silliness.
Person of Interest: we're scheduled to post the s2 finale on New Year's Day. Yeah, I know, what's the holidays, again? But we're working ahead as much as we can, with the intent being to free up some time during December and January, maybe. What we'd really love is if the networks released more than a couple weeks of scheduling at a time, but right now it seems likely that we'll pick up s3 during the midseason hiatus and start working through that backlog. No promises on when we'll be caught up to doing this show in realtime, but we'll tentatively guess by the middle of the back half of the season, depending on hiatuses, sweeps, etc.

All of this is with an eye toward making room for doing extras again, because we love doing essays and profiles for you guys and we miss it rather a lot. We have a list. It's 20+ potential topics long, spanning all three shows and sometimes involving two of them in a compare-contrast sort of way. I don't think we're going to run out of material anytime soon. So it's safe to say that at least part of our work over the holidays will be doing some of the essays and profiles and ensuring that the show pages are up to date! Just call us gluttons for punishment, it's as accurate as anything else.

And now the show you've all been waiting for... the quoteboard. This, folks, is why we don't livetweet.

Congratulations, It's A Novel

Kitty's not going to write this because she has issues about self-promotion on this blog. I, on the other hand, am fucking shameless when it comes to shilling out her work, and after the way we've both been working like dogs Hellhounds for the last several months, y'all deserve to know why we've been distracted and, among other things, really really glad for a show that allows us to build up any backlog whatsoever. (Which is gone now and we have to build it back up again, but that's a different story.)

The thing is, there's this novel. A braided anthology! Called Black Ice, or the mold, or fucking mold, or any number of other things you may have seen us call it on Twitter. I happen to think it's fucking awesome noir urban fantasy, with PIs, Hellhounds, Sidhe, wee fae, necromancers, and at least one kickass heroine who's none of the above.

But I'm biased, 'cause I edited the everloving crap out of this anthology. You can find Kitty's original fiction here, with the Black Ice universe stuff clearly marked, and try a couple flash fiction pieces before buying anything. Or you can go here and buy the dime novel (released as a teaser two weeks ago) and the anthology, out today!

Us? We're going to have a well-earned drink before we end up diving into this weekend's Haven.

Announcements

For those of you who don't follow us on Twitter, here's what Kitty and I have been up to off-blog for the past month or two. In case you were wondering where all the essays have gone and what on earth we keep babbling about!

First off, I started a weekly recording project which you can find here, in the interests of shoving knowledge and repertoire through my brain. 'cause there's a damn lot of Irish tunes out there, and fussing at one for a month isn't going to get me a style or a repertoire as fast as I'd like to think. Then I found out about the Swannanoa Gathering, which turns out to be right by Kitty and has a bunch of truly amazing fiddle teachers for their Celtic Week.

Not being one for half-measures, I launched an Indiegogo yesterday to help fund that. You can get music from me that other people won't at a couple different levels, you can help choose which tunes I learn right before Swannanoa, you can get a bunch of photos and a write-up of the whole shebang after the fact. Oh, and while I'm down there I plan to record some Haven filk.

Kitty, meanwhile, has been finishing up edits on her Black Ice anthology in preparation for publishing it this fall. While writing the next volume of the anthology, scheduling her writing and releases for the next five years, and submitting a handful of short stories to a variety of places, including Fireside Magazine and Luna Station Quarterly.

Because writing ALL THE STORIES is not just a way of life, it's a calling, she's also launched a weekly email-only serial, Gods & Monsters. That's starting today, and if you sign up on her mailing list before noon eastern, you can be there when it starts. (If you can't, never fear: new subscribers will have access to the backlog.) I know this story, along with all her other ones: you want to read this. It's genre, it's family, it's politics, it's all kinds of things that we love dissecting on the blog, now in fiction format. She's also got a tip jar available for it, in a pay-if-you-want model, because writers cannot live by words alone, though they may try and get glared at for it.

If you don't do anything else with this information, we'd love it if you spread the word. Every little bit helps.

Revenge of Behind the Scenes at Murderboarding

In the wake of one truly terrible and fucked-up week, we bring you clarity and statements of intent! Or, you know, something approximating a schedule. Grimm was preempted from airing on NBC last night, as you all know by now. In the (unlikely) event that it turns up on Hulu or iTunes, we'll have a recaplysis out prior to next weekend; otherwise it will be posted next Saturday after the ep as per usual.

Yes, we're aware of the move to Tuesdays. Here's the thing: we do this for fun, and this particular form of fun takes up an entire weekend day every single time. We sit down first thing every Saturday morning, we take turns that range in length from an hour to two hours of typing time, and we analyze the shit out of the week's episode in between doing the housework we didn't get to all week because we are busy and overcommitted people. Obviously, we can't do that on a weekday. Our goal at this point with the last four eps of this season will be to have it out by Friday; whether that's Friday morning or evening is anybody's guess. Given the lack of notice on renewal, we have no idea what to say about season three of Grimm except that we will be very, very surprised if they don't renew, given its performance relative to all of NBC's other scripted dramas. When we know if this Tuesday move is permanent, or if they're going to move it to some other day of the week yet again, we'll be able to answer what our plans for Grimmblogging next fall are.

As a result of all this schedule fuckery, we're shoving the Haven s1 and 2 episodes off until June; we had initially planned to start them as soon as Grimm finished but we'll need the extra week or ten days of lead time. Especially because there is so damn much packed into the Haven episodes. Person of Interest will continue as normal.

Behind the jump, some more of us saying fuck a lot.

Son of Behind The Scenes at Murderboarding

Hello and welcome back! With Grimm starting up this weekend, we figured it was a good time to let you all know what our blogging status is at the moment. (Speaking of blogging status, we also have individual blogs now, at Kitty Ipsum and Mad Maud.) You may have noticed that our non-recaplysis posts have been trickling to a stop, which is intentional. There are a few posts that we'd like to get around at some point, but as is par for the course, life only settles down on one front at a time. If we're lucky. So Kitty's working on editing her antho for publication later this year, and I'm working on a sekrit fiddle project (which I will reveal this weekend!), and we do this for fun.

Thus, recaplysis posts will make up the bulk of our posting. Grimm takes precedence, and we still intend to get those out every Saturday from here through May-whatever when the finale airs. (Yes, by the way, we did see the interview that said the ring on Renard's left hand isn't a wedding ring. We also swore a whole lot. We're not scrambling to change the speculation right now; we'll wait to see if we get any actual damn data. Not that we're frothing at the mouth for murderboards. We would never.) Person of Interest is at the moment being shifted to a mid-week posting, both to give us some breathing room and to give you guys more space to read ALL the snark. (We're giving like that.) By current estimate, unless we marathon our way through a bunch of Person of Interest, we should be caught up with currently-airing eps sometime in s3. I'd apologize, but these are fun and I don't think either of us wants to miss a vital bit of data from early eps due to skipping a bunch. And last but not forgotten, Haven s1&2 recaplyses are running in the background at the moment; we'd like to start putting those out after Grimm finishes airing, with the goal of finishing them up in time for the s4 premiere.

Obviously, we are not planning to add a new show anytime soon. Just in case that wasn't clear. Now the part you've all been waiting for! Behind the jump, lots of us saying 'fuck.'

State of the Blog

Given the oddities of the current Haven schedule, and further given that your blogmistresses are under their standard ridiculous levels of stress at this time of year, we thought it would be a good idea to give you guys an idea of the next couple weeks!

Obviously we're working our way through the Once Upon A Time episodes, as people requested. I have to admit, though, that this was not fun for us. We don't enjoy hate-watching things; we especially don't enjoy doing so for a show that we did enjoy. (Insert requisite pun here.) So we're finishing it out this weekend, but you heard it here first: if a show becomes something we don't enjoy watching for analysis purposes, or never was something we would consider putting on the blog? We'll drop it or not do it in the first place. We won't go into details why we don't want to do it (unless it's a time constraints reason), because we try not to tell anyone what they should and shouldn't enjoy, even when we're picking things apart. But this started as a way for us to braindump things we enjoy doing, watching, and talking about, and this was a relatively inexpensive time/sanity cost to learn our lesson about writing on things we don't enjoy.

That said, the last of the Once eps (Stable Boy) should go up first thing this week, followed in short order by our very first guest post. Friday will see the AudSarLu profile for Haven, probably without any extra details from the last two eps of this season. We're aware that Haven is airing Thursday night, but we still have lives and things to do on Friday, and so you can expect 3x12 Reunion on Saturday and 3x13 Thanks For The Memories on Sunday.

After that, we enter a seven week drought of no new Grimm episodes. During that time, we'll be updating the Haven show pages, clearing at least some of our backlog of Grimm and Haven supplemental posts (see the sidebar for more information, as usual), and starting work on Person of Interest! The goal here is to get one PoI ep out every week; we'd like to eventually do the s1 and s2 eps of Haven in full recaplysis glory but we're not sure on our schedule for those. Kitty has an urban fantasy anthology she's self-publishing, a house she's still renovating and unpacking, and a day job, and I have a freelance business to get off the ground and musical commitments to maintain.

Thanks to our regular readers for bearing with us while we juggle blog and lives!

ETA 1/14: Apparently this needs saying again: read our policies on the about page before you comment here. Please. I don't want to have to tack the comment policy, in link or shortened form, onto the end of every post, but I will if I have to.

Bride of Behind The Scenes at Murderboarding

As Kitty mentioned in her Haven recaplysis this week, we're Humperdinck levels of busy in the upcoming week. Which does not mean we won't be working on some posts for you guys, just that they're the kind of posts that require heavy lifting! Therefore, Murderboarding will be on hiatus from Monday, November 19 to Sunday, November 25. For those of you in the US, have a good Thanksgiving and we'll see you later. We'll see our international readers later too, but you'll have to come up with your own excuses for feast days. I have faith in you!

Just a reminder for the new folks: we try and keep the show pages in the top menubar updated as often as we get new data. Or as soon as we can parse out what the hell the new data means, yes, I'm still bitter about the Royals and Renard's little cell of conspirators this past episode.

Edit 11/20: We've got a recent influx of people from Facebook, and I thought I'd stop and let you guys know that Kitty and I do not, in fact, have Facebook. (And if we did we wouldn't want to attach it to this.) That said, you can follow us on Twitter under @mightybattlecat and @adsartha or add us to your RSS feeds if you want to know the second we post new content! We try, when not on hiatus, to post 3-5 times during the week in addition to the weekend post(s).

Even though Grimm's on hiatus, we'll still be churning out a sackful of posts between now and its return. Look for updates to the murdermap and our own personal murderboard, along with the Arthurian angle revisited (love potions and you, or how to make everything explode at once and not in the fun way), that stupid blood magic post that we were hoping to have a resolution to the potion on before posting, family ties (possibly followed by a study of Renard's ties, depending on how punchy we're feeling), and the women of Grimm. Plus the assorted homes we have yet to analyze in excruciating detail. Haven, of course, continues as scheduled and I'll see you all back here for the analysis of Burned first thing in December. We have a few other things up our sleeve for Haven, but we'll have to wait and see how long all this heavy lifting takes.

Without further ado, I give you more of us saying 'fuck' a lot, since I know that's what you're all here for.

Behind the Scenes at Murderboarding

Welcome to the first of a series of occasional behind-the-scenes posts! In these posts, you get to see some of what our flailing looks like instead of the nice, polished, not fannish or squeeful or ranty at all posts we put up for you the rest of the time.

(Whaaaat.)

We also get to tell you random things! Like, yes, we know there's been very little new content this week. That's because we've been working on putting together show pages for the top links bar. Because we love you and want you to have access to all the data at once. Also because we like being able to go back and check our own compendium of information when we're fussing at new episodes. The Grimm page is live now, as you can see; the Haven page should go up sometime in the next couple of weeks. A needs to finish her rewatch, and both of us need to run a quick immersion course in Stephen King before that happens. You can expect these pages to be updated whenever we get things to add to them!

Also in the works is a draft of that blood magic post for Grimm, which A plans to finish writing and put up after the Renard-Juliette plotline resolves to at least some degree; a study of Hank's house; and of course the La Llorona ep coming out this Friday. On the Haven side, Jeux sans frontières is slowly acquiring notes but probably won't be put together into a (massive, massive) post until after season 3 finishes airing; opening credit changes is 90% finished; and at some point we'll pull together all the information that indicates that Haven isn't even nearby to our universe. Note what we're not promising: this is A's birthday weekend, so Real Estate analysis may be delayed until Wednesday after airtime. Yes, that's Halloween. Yes, that's on purpose. Yes, we're giant dorks; you must all know this or you wouldn't be here.

You may, as usual, find a more complete list of forthcoming posts in the sidebar to your right. Please fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride.

Warning: We say 'fuck' a lot.