Mikhail's Long-Delayed, More Fun Digest #14
I’m changing up the format a little for January 2024
This is the fourteenth and much-delayed issue of what is typically an ongoing monthly-ish series that I like to call Mikhail’s Textual Variations Digest, aka MTVD, for short.
For various reasons, my regular publication schedule became disrupted back in January, and I neglected to make a digest post in Feb-March, so I’m now playing catchup. I’ve also decided to make this digest a bit more fun by offering a few new insights here and there.
If you’re a new subscriber, please check some of these out to get a better sense of what this newsletter offers or catch up on previously unread or missed posts. If you are a more casual subscriber, you can change your settings to receive just the digest section in your email.
January 9
A short piece on the changing Substack interface and how it messed up my graded episodic images for my reviews of shows like Servant. I worked really hard on these, making sure they’d fit the square box and everything, only for the platform to literally cut off the corners.
January 11
My first guest post on the excellent Lord of the Rings newsletter . This is a long piece, where I theorize the covert backstory of Sauron implied on the Amazon Prime original series, The Rings of Power, and speculate about his future.
I am very proud of this piece. It took a considerable amount of research and I think is among my finest tentpole articles. Also, I sincerely believe that I will have been proven right on many counts when Season 2 of the series finally airs.
January 16
A summary of my thoughts on Baz Luhrmann’s extended miniseries recut of Australia, which is available on Hulu. I’m happy to say I called it when it comes to predicting the ending.
I don’t agree with every change Luhrmann made, such as when it comes to the color palette, but I do think this was overall an improvement on the theatrical cut and am sad that US critics again largely rejected the film.
January 19
In response to Substack messing up my graded images’ formatting, I decided to make my own custom navigation page to the episodic reviews of the excellent Terminator TV series. (It’s one of my favorite shows and I hope to review S2 at some point.)
I was heavily inspired by the original interface and format of the Classic AVClub, which made it super easy to find reviews of specific episodes and attached grades to images. Hopefully, this will come back now that the outlet was bought by Paste Media.
BTW, if you like episodic reviews, be sure to check out Episodic Medium.
January 30
Here, I lament having to end my 17-week streak of uninterrupted posts and request some fellow authors for guest spots to help me prevent really long gaps in the schedule. This didn’t quite work for February, but it definitely helped in March, as we’ll see later on.
Also, I never got a badge or anything from Substack congratulating me on my uninterrupted run. Really, I was hoping for one, especially since a fellow author I see keeps sharing his badges on Notes. Total envy here. Like, what does it take to get a badge like that?
And how do some people do it for 52 weeks in a row? I have no idea.