Where the Weekend Assignments Are

Posted on January 4, 2008    Posted by John Scalzi      9 Comments

For those of you who used to read By The Way, you’ll know that every Thursday I wrote up a “Weekend Assignment,” to give folks something to do with their blogs over the weekend (Friday – Sunday, for AOL Journals, was typically the time period in which the members posted the least). I’m not doing the Weekend Assignments anymore, but I’ve bequeathed the activity to Karen Funk Blocher (aka Mavarin), and she’s doing them on her blog now. The first of her Weekend Assignments is up, and it’s asking what people are doing with their time in the wake of the WGA strike.

If you’ve been a fan of the Weekend Assignments, or if you just think it would be fun to participate, then head over to Karen’s and get the assignment. Then write it up on your own blog/journal, and then post a link to your entry in Karen’s comment thread, in which you’ll also be able to follow the link to the entries of other participants. Easy and fun. And then head back in a week for a new assignment.

I thought up nearly 200 of these Weekend Assignments over at By The Way, so I’m really pleased Karen is keeping the idea going. I encourage you to play, even if you’ve not done so before. I think she’s going to do a great job.

Also, while I’m busy pimping the new mistress of the Weekend Assignment, let me be one of the first to answer her assignment question: “Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns?”

My answer: It’s affecting me very little, actually, since I rarely watched prime time television to begin with. I got out of the habit of watching TV regularly when I was in high school, since we weren’t allowed to watch TV there as a general rule. In college I never got myself a TV, and then my first job out of college was as a movie critic, so my nights were spent watching the big screen, not the small one. These days, I’m more likely to be in front of a computer screen than a TV screen. If I do watch a TV series, I do it on DVD, rather than on TV.

So, basically, it’s had very little impact on my day-to-day life. The exceptions are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which I would watch when I remembered to turn on the TV at 11; I’ve missed them a little bit. But not so much that I’m going to watch them when they come back next week. I think I’ll wait until the strike gets resolved to do that.

The Weekend Assignment usually has a quick, related “extra credit” question, which this week is: “how are you spending the time instead?” Well, in my case, I’m trying to finish a book, and every moment not watching TV helps. So while I hope the writers prevail in the strike, they picked the right time, for me, to go on strike. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.

That’s my thought on this week’s Weekend Assignment; I hope you’ll go and play along too, over at Karen’s site.