The More You Know September 2013 – Pre-Party Party

Dear Traumateers,

Sweeney: What’s this? A TMYK post? MADNESS. Right, so, for those of you who are new around here, this is a thing we used to do but randomly stopped doing for no reason other than time/laziness a few months ago.

Lorraine: I’m gonna go ahead and defend us and say it was more a time issue. No one who reads this site can accuse us of being lazy. I mean, we are sometimes, but you guys wouldn’t know it.

Sweeney: That’s totally true. I was doing the whole self-deprecating thing, but now that you mention it, yeah, we put an insane amount of time into this blog. Which, obvs we choose to do to ourselves, but it also means that we often bite off more than we can chew, trying to dedicate more time to this project even though I’m not sure either of us really can dedicate any additional time to this blog. BUT OMG WE KEEP TRYING BECAUSE WE WANT TO SO BADLY.

Lor: So, right, the point of these posts (for those of you just joining us) is to recap our recap site. We tell you all the things we did the month before (in case you  missed it!), tell you about any plans we have for the future (LOL. PLANS.), and point out any changes we’ve made around the site.

Also, we sometimes like to tell you guys what we’ve been up to in our offline lives. That usually amounts to, “BUSY. NO TIME. GOTTA GO.” but this post has the added bonus of getting us SQUEEing over the fact that Sweeney, Sara and I will be seeing each other in Dallas TOMORROW. Snark Ladies in the same room! DESTINY’S CHILD DANCE PRE-PARTY.

 

Sweeney: HELL YES PRE-PARTY TIME!

destinyschild

 

Last Month:

We started season six of Buffy just as September started, and were greeted by the most disturbing special effect on Buffy ever, which is to say that Buffy didn’t stay dead at all. B has a hard time adjusting to being alive again, mostly because she was in FREAKIN’ HEAVEN, and her friends pulled her out. If that isn’t bad enough, she also came back to money problems. Buffy tries to get a grown up job and it leads to some heavy drinking. Dawn’s first kiss leads directly to her first slay, AND THEN THE BEST MOST FANTASTIC MUSICAL EPISODE EVER. Willow thinks she can fix her failing relationship and Buffy’s sads with a spell that erases everyone’s memories. As if that weren’t enough magic, Willow manages to de-rat Amy and Spike and Buffy have sex in a scene that got everyone all riled up (for different reasons.)

This all coincided with the start of season three of Angel, in which Angel was hunted by a broken hearted vampire and Darla is pregnant. Cordy’s visions take a turn for the disgusting and it’s all Kal Penn’s fault. Angel has to free a crazy dude from fire jail to save Cordy. Gunn has to choose between his old bros and his new Fang Gang, and while he does, Caritas goes down in the cross fire. An old man jumps into Angel’s body and takes it out for a spin. Fred’s family tracks her down for a little round of misdirection that just ends with feels and Fred love. The crazy dude Angel released from jail turns the men he touches into raging misogynists. Darla finally shows up in LA with that news that Angel is going to be a daddy, to a human boy no less. Holtz is back and ready to make trouble for Angel, all while Darla goes into labor. She has the baby via self-staking. That’s not even a joke.

On Pretty Little Liars, the girls found new and incredibly unstealthy ways to see each other, all while Jason got The Toby Edit. We learn that Ian is actually dead, but it seemed he committed suicide and confessed to Ali’s murder. The girls actually have to attend Ian’s funeral, and Melissa thinks Spencer was pretending to be Ian via text messages. Rosewood High hosts a fashion show, but it of course turns awful when A intervenes. Aria’s parents host a dinner and unwittingly invite all her pedo-suitors and Toby finds a buried field hockey stick on the Hasting’s property. A has been injecting HGH into Emily’s lotion and it lands her in the hospital. While there, the girls steal some files that confirm the field hockey stick could’ve been the weapon used to knock Alison out, though she died buried alive.

The last time we wrote a The More You Know post, we promised a new series, and sure, it’s like a little late, but! Here it is! We premiered Firefly on the site, met all of the lovely characters including Captain Mmm, Mmmm, MMM Mal.

Speaking of premieres, we also debuted a new series, Snark Tube, in which we discuss different short videos, trailers, and web series, all starting with Local Ambition, a made for YouTube series… that happens to feature Sweeney’s sister.

At some point, we decided we weren’t watching enough TV, and thought we’d give you our thoughts on 2013 fall pilots as well. We hated Dads the most, and so far The Blacklist has gotten the highest marks.

Over on Fifty Shades Freed, Ana’s dad wakes up from a coma, but more importantly, Ana’s pregnant. Her pregnancy doesn’t actually make any sort of sense, but her doctor’s reaction is, “OH WELL.” Grey reacts violently to the news, and actually tells his wife that no one will hear her screams. We pause all of this when Jack Hyde turns up and kidnaps Mia, but it’s okay because Ana walks into a bank and withdraws five million dollars.

In other book news, Lorraine revived the hibernating Book Reports feature. She graded Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell an A-.

Plus, we offered up some-almost-bonus content, in which we tried really hard to care about movie casting news.

And finally, lots of us Traumateers got together to wish Lorraine a happy birthday in this video.

Lor: GRATITUDE SIDE BAR. I know I’m all over that post saying thank you a million times, but seriously, THANK YOU, especially to my lovely Sweeney who I will awkwardly hug SOON. It made me cry. True story.

Sweeney: I love your face and I’m just glad we could contribute some awesome to your birthday.

 

Coming Up

The last TMYK we did promised that a new series was coming up. That was three months ago and that new series only just appeared on Friday, so we’re a little bit anxious about making promises here. In fact, in the history of this “coming up” section, we’ve had a penchant for being really fucking vague, because we know ourselves. We know that we have lots of super cool ideas and a limited number of hours in the day. Keeping all of that in mind, I’ll say that what you can expect in October is (1) that we’ll continue to try really, really hard to post stuff on schedule. The schedule, just as an update is:

Monday: Buffy & Angel / Tuesday: Pretty Little Liars / Wednesday: Fifty Shades Freed / Thursday: Buffy & Angel / Friday: PLL & Firefly

We’re also going to attempt to keep up that SnarkTube thing on the weekends, though that is likely to turn into a pop-up series, in the event that something amazing happens, on the interwebz. We’ve also got one more Fall TV Roundup in our future. Tuesdays and Wednesdays will continue to be the days we drop in other “sometimes” features (like Book Reports and the occasional mythical Childhood Trauma post.)

(2) The other thing you can expect is a little Halloween related fun. There will forever be more Are You Afraid of the Dark to watch and we maaaaaybe have another big cool idea in the works, but you know us and our big cool projects in the works. Which is to say: you’ll probably see it eventually but who knows when eventually will happen.

 

Nuts & Bolts

A few months ago we established a protocol for receiving guest posts. As it turns out, this was a bad idea. This wasn’t a bad idea because of the quality of submissions. We’ve gotten some great stuff. The problem, as it turns out, is that we keep trying to do too many things. That’s basically the TMYK story — once a month (ish) we drop by and tell you the latest and greatest reason we overshot. We haven’t abandoned the idea of taking on guest posts in that fashion; we just aren’t ready to make that idea a priority project. Too many other things keep coming up. We’ll be emailing all of you who sent in submissions, but for now, we’ve taken down the submission page.

That also means we took down the page with this amazing gif on it, so here it is again because it makes me smile:

guest

The only other significant site change is on the far right side of the menu. That used to be “Sentiments” and we’ve restructured that a tiny bit into a “miscellaneous” category of sorts. It shouldn’t be too confusing, but since this is the place where we say, “Hey, we changed a thing!” this is me doing that.

 

Welcome, Questionable New Friends:

Lor:  This is the section we came up with just so we can share some of the crazy searches that lead to our website.

Sweeney: Also a solidarity thing! We often discuss the many questionable google searches we conduct for the sake of the blog; our search histories are surely a fearful thing to be hold. (Except, LOL, clear that shit.) It’s nice to know that there are other people out there searching for weird things and they’ve found us, usually so that we can either commiserate with them or educate them.

Lor:  This month’s lucky search is, “what would christian grey do with a cat.”

Huh. Good question, dear web searcher. I have a feeling it would be something like this:

Okay, maybe I we just went with this search so I could revive another favorite gif.

Sue me.

Sweeney: No regrets.

 


The Snark Squad

Nicole Sweeney

Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.