Last Call: The End of the Saloon and the Beginning of Pomp Culture

The Monday Afternoon Hangover has been canceled this week in order to bring you an important announcement.

All good things must come to an end at some point, right? On Friday, November 7, Thunder Matt's Saloon will officially close it's doors for good. On Tuesday, November 11, we will be launching our new blog, Pomp Culture. The writers will still be the same, as will much of the content. But our new digs and our new identity will allow us to shed the one thing that helped make us who we are, yet was handcuffing us at the same time.

We will no longer be labeled a "Cubs Blog".

In all honesty our claim to be a Cubs blog was tenuous at best. While we did cover the team, we also covered plenty of other absurdities as well. Shedding this label will finally give us the freedom to truly write about whatever we want. We're all very excited for what the future of this new blog will bring.

...and now to answer some questions.

This seems rather drastic. Was being a "Cubs Blog" really hampering you guys that much?
Our sketchy coverage made for us being a rather lousy blog when it came to actually covering the Cubs. There were times where we'd go so long without a Cubs-related post, that an article would be hurriedly written just to have something up. The result was our scant Cubs coverage being rather forced and half-assed. Paul Sullivan would not be pleased.

Also being deemed a Cubs blog meant that our traffic has been rather seasonal. Despite having new material posted year round, we have seen sharp decreases in readership during the baseball offseason. It'd be nice to have the same amount of people reading our stuff in December as there is in July.

Does this mean you're not covering the Cubs any more?
Not at all. The vast majority of us here are Cubs fans, so to think we would never talk about them is absurd. What you probably won't see any more are "The Gists" and any other quick and dirty throwaway posts about them.

So what can we expect in the final weeks of TMS?
We plan to go out in style. In the final days you can expect some of our old classic features to make one last hurrah before jumping to the new place. Realm of Red, War Criminal, Overrated/Underrated, appearances from Ronald McDonald, Tommy Buzanis, and more. We may even get some closure on the TMS Bat Project. Rest assured, the Saloon will go out with a bang, not a whimper. Thunder Matt would want it that way.