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.

The State of the Blog Strikes Back

And we're back! We know, we know, it's been so long, we never call, we never write. But we do come bearing news! A surprising amount of news for having been quiet since Haven stopped airing. Let's launch into that first.

Haven

First of all, we are, in fact, halfway done with Season 2 of Haven, which we intend to put up as we put up Season not6. Because let's face it, we all know that's Season 6 in everything but name and paycheck. We were hoping, and we know we did say it would be up earlier, all we can say is that things got very busy and chaotic for a while, and then we spent a while recovering from that and adjusting to other life things. Season 2 will, tentatively, go up Friday night so you have something to read before we post Season 6 on Saturdays. Yes, we are still posting on Saturdays. Ten thousand words of blathering and analysis is still hard on our wrists. So that's our schedule for the forseeable future, assuming they don't mess about with the air dates again. Remember, Haven Season not6 premieres October 8!

DragonCon

Murderboarding will be at DragonCon! One of us will, at any rate, I will be on the Friday Arrow panel, the Sunday Haven panel, and the Sunday Flash panel for the American Sci-Fi/Fantasy Media Track. If that changes, I will be tweeting about it under our #Murderboarding hashtag, so keep an eye out for that over DragonCon weekend. I will also have business cards and in most cases be available shortly before and for a little while after the panels if you want to come up and say hi, ask questions, etc. I can say in advance that we are not looking to add TV shows or writers at this point,  but any other questions are fair game.

The Future

We have a couple of other shows in mind to blog, none of them as they air to again save on carpal tunnel surgery. Two of them will be Helix (both seasons) and the Librarians (the first season), post dates to follow as soon as I get back from DragonCon and we have some idea of our work schedule at that point. Helix and the Librarians are both rich shows and labors of love or at least hobby fascination for us, and we're looking forward to tackling them. We also have a couple other shows we're looking at, but there are also other factors involved in these shows that we have to resolve before we talk about blogging them. I know that sounds cagey, but thirty episodes of two shows plus Haven should be enough to look forward to, right?

If I can clean them up enough I may also post the Arrow and Flash notes for my panels. Being the overachiever that I am, they're only half the length of the average post here, and those of you who have read any of our recaplysis posts know how long that is.

That is all the data thus far, and we hope it is sufficient. If not, well, we invite you to sing with us the song of our people.*

* The song of our people is a warped mashup of the dreidl song and the Sherlock Holmes quote "Data data data, I cannot make bricks without clay. Because that's how we roll.

State of the Blog: Grimm Conclusions

You've probably noticed that over the last few weekends we've only been posting the Haven recaplyses. When we first started this blog we made first a tentative guideline, then (after some experimenting) a hard and fast rule that we would not hatewatch for the blog. And, honestly, we don't enjoy Grimm anymore. Many of the qualities we used to love about the characters are gone, new storylines keep forming as fast as old ones are dropped without consistency or conclusion, and you can go back and look at the recap for 4x03 which we flatly refused to deal with as it was blatantly fucking racist. That's become more typical of the show, and with all of those factors combined, it's not fun anymore. And if we're not having fun writing it, you're not going to have any fun reading it.

While there's always a slim possibility that'll change, we don't want to commit to anything: by the time the show finds its feet again (if it does), there's a significant chance it won't be a show we're interested in blogging anyway. We still adore the cast, and we'll be interested to see what else they do in the future - just not, sadly, on Grimm.

Archives and the show page will remain up and available for the foreseeable future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

PSA

Out of respect for the families in Newtown and SyFy's wishes we will not be posting any new content until Monday. We'll let you know if our recap schedule will be altered from next-day once Syfy releases further information.

Edit 12/15: If you need something to do this weekend that's not digging through our back archives, if you want to know how you can help, the HuffPo has collected a short list of places that could use your support.