The 5,000th Post Post

If my blog-editing interface is correct, and I assume that it’s better at math than I am, then this is my 5,000th Tuned In post since I started blogging in fall 2005. I’m not generally big on milestones, but I’m given a running count every time I post, and last week I noticed I was closing in on the 5K mark. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, if my 5,000th post was my review of Game of Thrones‘ big-event “Blackwater” episode?

But I didn’t get around to writing the one additional post that would have made that possible, and if I stuck to my original plan, my 5,000th post would be about History channel’s draggy Hatfields and McCoys miniseries. And I just couldn’t do that. So–figuring that a guy is entitled to one or two blog posts about blogging every 5,000 or so–I thought I’d thank you all instead for sticking with me.

Tuned In has changed in content and form as TIME, technology and I have changed. When it launched, it was not meant to be a permanent blog, just a temporary one where I would review the new fall premieres in 2005. But I liked having the outlet; often writing for a magazine with limited print space can be like being a farmer who’s paid not to grow corn. I kept updating the blog, first irregularly, then daily, then many-times-a-daily. For a print writer with a loner streak, a blog is a great, if time-consuming, thing, like having a tiny magazine within a magazine with a staff of one and (something like) total control.

By a couple of years ago, I was posting four, five or more times a day. Over the past year, I’ve switched up, doing fewer but longer posts, because of a combination of factors. Folding Tuned In into the larger TIME Entertainment site took off some of the pressure to update constantly; using Twitter became kind of a micro-blog for me, allowing me to tweet quick hits immediately rather than craft entire posts; and the general glut of TV recaps online made me seriously rethink whether the world needed that many more weekly reviews of anything.

The thing that’s made the blog worth writing, of course, is being read, and especially, coming back to see how you all have kept the conversation going in the comments. (I am assuming, if you’ve read 400 words into a blog post about writing this blog, you are at least a semi-regular reader.) Tuned In commenters—and this is what other TV bloggers tell me, not just me sucking up—are some of the smartest, most well-spoken and widely interested and, maybe most important, most civil commenters in TV-blogdom.

This is no small thing, considering that the secret to a happy life nowadays is completely avoiding the comments sections of many blogs. The other day, in a Girls comments thread at The AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff took the time to lay a heartfelt and epic smackdown on a commenter who critiqued the show because Lena Dunham is not attractive enough. (Or rather, not funny enough to justify being so unattractive on TV. Tomato, tomahto.) I’m glad he did, because even unpaid commenters deserve to be called on their B.S.; not to do so is patronizing. But I’m also glad that I rarely ever have to do anything like that here–partly because this site doesn’t have the deluge of thousands of comments that The AV Club does, but mostly because you make it unnecessary.

Thanks. And now that I’ve got this out of my system, I’ll try to spare you the verbiage for my 10,000th post.