I try to keep housekeeping posts at a minimum here on Dirty Feed, but I feel the need to mark this one, as I’ve written a lot about it in the past. As of the 25th January, I’m no longer part of Ganymede & Titan. I know, I know, I don’t know why the media aren’t parked out on my doorstep either.
This has a few implications for Dirty Feed. Firstly and most immediately, I can suddenly spend rather more time working on silly articles for this place, which is a positive thing. More on that shortly.
Secondly, over the next few months, a few selected articles I wrote over on Ganymede & Titan might be republished here, slightly rewritten and improved. Don’t worry, there won’t be a deluge of reheated Dwarf nonsense – there would be no point moving the site’s bread-and-butter posts over to here. But some of the better stuff probably deserves a new home somewhere under my control. And I’d like the opportunity to improve a few of them too.
Thirdly, it would be complete madness for me to leave G&T, and then immediately start writing brand new Dwarf stuff over here. But once I’ve had a year or so’s break from that kind of thing, there are a few things about old Red Dwarf that I’d like to finish off here. In particular, my series of articles looking at the show’s sets has been abandoned halfway through; I’d like to bring that to some kind of conclusion. So for those of you who enjoy my Red Dwarf writing, it’s not disappearing entirely. It is going into hibernation for a bit, though.
Fourthly, I am definitely going to write something about Come Back Mrs Noah, purely to be annoying.
* * *
On the subject of being able to spend more time writing for this site, I do feel the need to inject a note of caution.1 Reading kottke.org the other day about Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism, the following caught my eye:
“So this post actually took me 45+ minutes to research & write (not counting this addendum). And this is just one little list that in the grand and cold economic scheme of things is going to make me exactly zero more dollars than the 5-minute post would have!”
Meanwhile, this struck me while reading a review of Star Trek Picard over on Jammer’s Reviews:
“The two of them conclude Dahj was somehow created by Maddox, and that she has a twin out there somewhere. (The details for how exactly they jump to this conclusion escape me, possibly a result of my lack of time to watch this more than once, or possibly because of convenient narrative shortcuts.)”
I can safely say that most of the pieces on Dirty Feed take rather longer to write than 45 minutes.2 And the idea of only watching something once before writing about it is nothing short of a joke. I’ve lost count of the hours and hours I spent rewatching Drop the Dead Donkey so I could write this piece about the pilot, for instance. It’s at times like this that I realise another reason why this site never seems to update as much as I want it to: the kind of writing I do here takes absolutely bloody ages.
Same goes for the next redesign of this place, which I’m going to attempt this year. I can’t just grab a theme off the shelf, tweak it, and call it done. Like the current design of the site, I just have to do it entirely from scratch. It takes, literally, months. But I can’t do it any other way. I’m just too much of an control freak arsehole.
Oh yeah, I was supposed to be leading to some kind of point. Put simply: don’t expect this place to suddenly overflow with AMAZING HOT CONTENT. The kind of stuff I write often takes time, and this place is still sometimes going to go weeks on end without a substantial update. Unless somebody wants to pay me to rewatch all of Are You Being Served?, that’s always going to be the case. Don’t get me wrong: there should still be more stuff published on here than in years past. But don’t expect something fantastic every week.
I now return you to your standard barren wasteland.
…I should probably get better at advertising myself, really.