Weekly chat reminder

[snycock]

Please join us for the weekly TS chat on Saturday, March 9th, at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC. That could be as early as 11 am if you’re on the west coast of North America, or 2 pm if you’re on the east coast, or 7 pm in the UK, or early Sunday morning in Australia or New Zealand.

 

We’re in the usual place: http://us25.chatzy.com/81935648447483. There’s nothing to download or install, just choose a name and a color and click on “join chat.”

 

Curious as to what chat is all about? Read Chat 101 below!

 

We’ve been meeting weekly (more or less) since 2006 to chat about all things Sentinel. We tried a couple of different days and times before settling on Saturdays at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). While it’s not ideal for every time zone – it’s very early in the morning in Australia, Japan, and China – it’s the best fit for most, including fans across the International Date Line.

 

We stay on Greenwich Mean Time/UTC all the time, which means that the time of chat shifts when Daylight Savings Time starts and again when it ends. If we tied it to any other specific time zone, fans in the opposite hemisphere would experience a two-hour shift in start time. It can make things a little confusing, especially when DST has started or ended in some places but not others, but a quick check of a time zone converter will set you straight – just remember that we are ALWAYS at 7 pm GMT, and you can find out when that is where you are.

 

We meet on Chatzy.com and the link is above. One of the nice things about Chatzy is that the chat remains even after we all leave. If you’d like to come and check things out outside of the regular chat day and time, feel free! But do beware – we get bots coming in and leaving links, usually to porn. I try to clean those up before chat starts, but if you are popping in at an irregular time, you may catch some of them.

 

We’re usually around for two to three hours, so feel free to drop in at any time and stay as long as you can. Chime in with the conversation or just lurk, anything goes. And we are always happy to revisit a conversation: if we said something interesting twenty minutes previously that you want to follow up on, say something!

 

Our schedule is as follows:

First Saturday of the month: we watch an episode together. Chatzy has a built-in video program that allows us to watch and chat at the same time. Currently we’re watching the episodes in order; we started with Switchman 63 months ago, and in May we’re going to be finishing up with The Sentinel by Blair Sandburg. In a total coincidence, that’s going to be the 25^th anniversary of when that episode aired on UPN, so we’ve got some special plans for that watch.

Second Saturday of the month: we trade off between reading a fic and discussing it one month, and doing concrit the next. For concrit we usually have a prompt, and folks who want to participate write a piece of no more than 1000 words. We upload them to a Google Drive folder and then give feedback during the chat.

Third and Fourth Saturdays of the month: we have various discussion topics. These can range from Jim’s backstory to favorite tropes to Shaman!Blair to what would have happened in a fifth season. They’re meant to start discussion, not limit it, so we don’t adhere to them rigidly, and in fact we often stray. Fic recs are always welcome!

Fifth Saturday of the month: on the rare occasions that we have a fifth Saturday we do Pimp Your Fandom, which is where people talk about what they have been reading or watching recently and why Sentinel fans would enjoy it.

 

So that’s the 411 on chat! Any questions, feel free to let me know. I hope we see you there!