Site business

Like you, I have a horror of excessive panhandling. At the same time, if there's no way to support the site, nobody will. Thus, Time to Kill Now is now taking subscriptions for a small (or a medium!) monthly fee. In exchange for your generous support, you get regular posts a week early, and get access to bonus content that will primarily appeal to those interested enough to pay for it.

If you'd like to support the site, please do become a subscriber and choose the tier that is most comfortable for you. Subscriptions are run through this site, with payments handled securely through Stripe and your information kept here rather than used on someone else's marketing list, but if you prefer to use your Patreon account, there is also a Time to Kill Now Patreon. As to the tier names, if you know you know.

Time to Kill Now is and shall remain a free-friendly site. You will not have to pay a dollar, not even a Canadian dollar, to get the good stuff. The goal of taking subscriptions is not just to make money and allow you to show your appreciation, but also to improve the free content that the site will continue to deliver as regularly as practical.

If you're old like me, you will remember when the cutting edge of hockey analysis and the finest writing was to be found, not on large corporate sites nor still less in newspapers, but on things called "blogs." Back when "67" was a Toronto Maple Leafs reference, people would start blogs that looked like hell, had no marketing to speak of besides word-of-mouth, were updated erratically as a rule, contained whatever the author found interesting, had no possibility whatsoever of making any money, and changed the way people thought about hockey: bringing serious statistical analysis to the game, at first, almost single-handed.

Those days are gone and shall never return. The "blog" has become a column on a corporate network at best; a Substack at worst. Young people are more likely to start a YouTube channel than a long-form writing enterprise, and the community of the comment section has become the community of the chat window. AI and social media motivate takes churned out at speed rather than 1,500 words about Stan Weir every third Wednesday.

That's not all bad: the gifted can now actually make money writing on the Internet (even I made some), and the really smart guys turned hobbies into thriving careers. Edmonton Oilers bloggers circa 2006 have more Stanley Cup rings than the post-Messier Edmonton Oilers, but as to bringing the style back, 2006 was twenty years ago. The old days had its excesses: I went along with some of them, and glad I am that they're lost in the mists of time. It had its limitations: we'd have killed for Hockey Reference or Natural Stat Trick. Concepts that were once almost in-jokes, "Fenwick" and counting scoring chances, are now commonplace. For tastes to change with the times is no unhealthy thing.