Hi all. I’m back from my holiday. Woo hoo! Everyone notice something, though? Yep, no news this morning.
Basically, for a number of COVIDy reasons and with a heavy heart, I’ve decided to both discontinue it and scale back TMINE itself as well – at least for now.
Let me explain why. I hope you’ll understand
Firstly, I’m really not getting any younger. I’ve tried using Inversion Technology from the future, but that didn’t work, so my arrow of time is still going forward. So I do need to look after my health, and with gyms closing and me now continuously working from home, I don’t commute past any gyms (or anything) any more.
Somehow I have to find time during the day to exercise and the only time I can think of, short of getting up at 5am every day and screwing up that whole work-life balance thing, is the time I usually spend doing the TMINE news.
Secondly, lockdown has actually made me busier than ever. I’m doing more and more work for longer and longer hours, which leaves less time to do TMINE. And that’s the stuff that pays the bill, whereas TMINE has always been a labour of love. I’m going to have to prioritise that.
Thirdly, cinemas are shutting again and the streaming services are running out of new movies, so there’s less for me to review. Ditto for the TV networks and TV itself.
And lastly, I have less time to watch TV and movies, since again, I’ve not got two hours of commute time every day any more. And as we found during the previous lockdown, it’s actually damn hard to focus on new things, rather than on comfort food viewing.
So what next?
All of which adds up to… something. At the very least, no potted news summary every day. Which is sad because I’ve been doing it for about a decade – in fact for so long, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t do it or even when I actually started doing it. But it is what it is.
As for everything else, I’m going to try to keep doing something. I might end up doing a semi-daily Covideodrome and turn TMINE into a film review blog, based on films that are already out there. I might turn ‘what have you been watching?’ into just that: what have you been watching.
I hope to continue the events coverage – assuming there are any events to cover – as well as What Time, TMINE? I might even simply post news to TMINE’s Facebook page as I get it, rather than trying to sum it up every morning. Then there’ll still be a TMINE news service.
It’s all a bit nebulous and up in the air. And who knows? I might end up with oodles of time and new things to review if the entire economy implodes. These are unprecedented times, so who can predict what’s going to happen or work out what the new normal is going to be?
But TMINE will continue in some form or other. I just hope it’s a journey that you’ll all want to go on with me – or that you’ll be back for more once we can get our COVID vaccinations with our daily Starbucks.