Status Update (05/01/2021)

Some words on this publication and Servant 2.04 review link

Dear Readers,

You might’ve noticed that there hasn’t been much new content here during the month of April, despite my voicing the intention to get faster and actually make 5-6 new articles. Well, I’ve been writing some things and am hoping to publish them within the coming days. But unfortunately, April simply hasn’t been a good month in terms of productivity.

What’s been really taking up my time is my personal life. Among other things, I’m currently in the process of a move, so that has entailed apartment hunting, furniture hunting, lots of research and paperwork. There’s also Taxes. Though the deadline for completing them was moved to the middle of May, I really wanted to complete those forms in advance, so they wouldn’t bother me later. Lately, I also have been feeling a little under the weather… quite literally. With the weather being pretty fickle during this unbelievably cold Spring, I have found it rather difficult to type up anything on certain days. It’s like I feel the constant desire to sleep, despite having had a full night’s rest previously.

My writing process can be an issue sometimes as well.

I generally produce my best work when I focus on one thing at a time. And that thing, to be considered finished, has to be in really good shape. I want to write shorter and simpler posts but that can clash with my desire to write posts that feel substantial… at least according to my own standards.  

I am really proud of my Itunes article, but that took some research and drafting to get right. Even then, I made some mistakes in the email version that I sent out that I only found later, like the lack of recommended links, not to mention a sucky URL name that resulted from the Substack editor glitching and reverting some of my changes. I decided not to change the URL, since that would cause issues elsewhere, but I corrected those other mistakes in the online version of the article.

So, what’s going on with Textual Variations in May then?

Well, given that April has been a little light on new content, I’m going to delay the third issue of VARIATIONS until the first week of June. Until then, I plan to have posted some more original essays and articles here, including a substantial piece on why movies change and what that means in a cultural and historical sense. I am also simultaneously writing for MEDIUM, and since I’ve decided to do less cross-posting between the two platforms, that has resulted in its own set of challenges, such as what to release here on Substack and what to make exclusive there. 

Recently, I have published a new review of “2:00,” the 14th episode of the Tony Basgallop/M. Night Shyamalan series, Servant. This was a review that I had hoped to write back in February, but I had to put it on the backburner in order to catch up with some of the other episodes and review them shortly after they came out. It’s a legitimately great episode that has some very interesting cultural references and the only one Shyamalan directed in the course of the second season. 

At the moment, I think I’m going to keep it and my other episodic reviews Medium-exclusive but I will keep posting free links here on T.V. to make sure those without a Medium subscription don’t get paywalled.

Now that I’ve finally reviewed 2.04, I have about 3 episodes left. So, if all goes well, my S2 coverage will be complete by the end of May. In fact, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to make a regularly updated Free Medium Link archive post here on T.V., so that free links are easily accessible to all my Medium-exclusive content.

So, that’s it for now. I wish you all a good weekend!

Best,

Mikhail Skoptsov