Tag Archives: cable

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The limits of better living through chemistry. My doctors and I like to play a fun game. The goal of this game is to wait until I am just about feeling normal and then decide it’s time to add, take away, or otherwise screw around with one or more of the medications I’m taking. The whole thing seems purposely designed to leave me feeling vaguely disoriented, tired, out or sorts, and anxious as often as possible. As we are closing in on a year of this abject medical fuckery, I’d hoped we were a bit closer to reaching some kind of steady state with all this. So far, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

2. Eternal cold. I’m approximately 2/3’s the man I used to be. Apparently all of that represents lost insulation and I am, therefore, always uncomfortably cold. I’m forever wandering around the house putting on additional layers. I have extra fuzzy coats at the office. I have four layers of blankets on my bed. Every seat in the living room has at least one blanket… and I generally use multiple while watching TV in the evening. File this as yet another problem that I foolishly assumed would somehow be resolved by now. It’s very strange not having any idea what was the last time that I really felt warm. I didn’t realize it was something I was taking for granted.

3. Streaming television. The number of people who look at me like I have 16 heads when I tell them I still subscribe to old fashioned cable television is pretty astronomical. I get everything from stunned disbelief to pitches for satellite, antenna, and every streaming platform under the sun. The truth is, aside from cost, I’m basically satisfied with cable. There’s one “box” to deal with and every program it supplies is available with the push of one or two buttons. My user experience with streaming services has rarely been so seamless. Whether it’s updating passwords, constantly switching between apps hunting for the generic “something to watch,” or some episodes of a series being available on one service while other episodes are on another, or the sheer cost of building out an array of stream services to match the programming natively available through cable. Most of my television “watching” is in fact, listening to television in the background while I do other things. Cable excels at performing this function. It simply doesn’t require any thought at all as something is always on when you push the power button. Sure, I’ll keep rotating through the myriad of streaming options as I slowly consume their “prestige television” contenders, but I don’t see any world where I’m happy with seven or eight streamers attempting to replace or replicate the proper channel surfing experience. I’m sure streaming is a brave new world for others, but for the foreseeable future, I don’t see it being much more than an add on for me.

The broken promise of streaming entertainment…

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I read an article this morning that cited a survey reporting that American adults are now getting more of their screen time through streaming services and apps like TikTok than through traditional television. The comments section was filled by people talking about the glory of cord cutting. 

That’s fine. Good on them. My cable TV subscription is still the one stop shop for 85-90% of anything I want to watch. For all my hostility to Xfinity and Comcast before them, the presence of their “set top box” means I don’t have to constantly go hunting for something. The older I get the more willing I am to pay for that kind of convenience.

I get it. I’m a contrarian… but needing to jump between from Netflix, to Hulu, to Amazon, to Disney+, to Peacock, to HBO Go, in order to watch one show on each of them, in my opinion, tends to be a marvelous pain in the ass that inevitably means stopping to log in to one app or another when all I want to do is push a power button and go to the right channel. Layer on the joy of finding that half the seasons of a particular show are on App A while the rest are on Streaming Service B and forget about it. Whatever percentage of a dollar I’m saving for making my life more complicated just isn’t worth it.

Frankly, we’ve reached a point in this evolution where I’m more apt to cut streaming services rather than cable television. The promise of streaming was that I’d be able to select just the channels and content I wanted instead of buying the whole universe of programs that included bundles of things I couldn’t care less about. That future never materialized and instead streaming became ordering up bundles of bundles instead of one big one with everything included.

Increasingly, if there’s a series I want to watch and I can’t find it free through my cable service, I’ll just wait until I can buy the damned thing on iTunes or Amazon – one and done, commercial free, for a fixed price. I imagine my days of being subscribed to multiple streaming services is just about over. They’re quickly approaching the point of being more bother than they’re worth.

The fall season…

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There was an article this afternoon running on AP that blared the headline “TV cliffhanger: New season in jeopardy amid virus shutdown.” It turns out the fall season of network television is now officially in jeopardy. Which is definitely an issue if you are somehow involved in the entertainment industry.

Once upon a time, I’d have probably been in the ranks of the concerned. Fortunately, most of my favorite television is two decades old. If it does happen to be newer, it’s seasons and seasons deep into its run and there’s a better than average chance I either own copies of every episode or can fish them off the interwebs somewhere. Even if that weren’t the case, having fallen in love with Game of Thrones taught me that two years between seasons is a “perfectly reasonable” amount of time. 

The trouble with Coronavirus crippling the television industry, isn’t necessarily that so many shows might end up delayed or lost forever. The real nightmare scenario for TV in the Great Plague era is that these delays in scripted television may loose a new and terrible age of unscripted “reality” television upon the land. I can’t imagine any way to make contemporary television more irrelevant to my life than to cram even more Housewives of Wherever or Kardashians in Quarantine onto the airwaves. 

Telework Wednesday, interrupted…

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It was a good day at Fortress Jeff. It was a scheduled Telework Wednesday. I’d made eggs and toast for breakfast. My laptop was sitting patiently booting up in the sun room in preparation for the day. All the critters had been fed and I thought they were all accounted for… except, of course, they weren’t.

Somewhere between slathering butter on my toast and setting the dirty dishes in the sink, Jorah snuck off and a ranging loop through the house. It’s become a common enough sight now that he’s a more or less trusted agent.

That’s the point where the morning started its trip off the rails.

Unbeknownst to me, Jorah made a stop in the sunroom and took the opportunity to bite my work laptop’s power cord almost directly in half… a situation I didn’t stumble upon until I walked into the room with my coffee and more or less prepared to started the day.

Dogs chew. It’s a natural fact. The issue here is that for the 7+ months he’s been here, Jorah was remarkable good at leaving everything alone that wasn’t one of his toys. He didn’t chew chair legs, or moulding, or shoes. He never showed so much as a moment’s interst in any of the exposed cables that are strung everywhere around the house. He ignored them completely, right up to the point today where he didn’t.

So instead of starting off Telework Wednesday with a nice easy read through the overnight email and a bit of mouth scalding coffee, I took off my fuzzy slippers, put on a semi-clean pair of jeans, and then made the round trip drive to the office to pick up a spare power cord that I had stashed in my desk.

So this week my day working from home started off with the same old drive to the office… only slightly later in the morning so I was able to enjoy even more traffic than usual. If you think I’m not going to find half a dozen castoff Dell power cables to create my own strategic reserve against future incidents of cable gnawing, well, it’s like you don’t know me at all.

Blackout…

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One of the walls of the room wherein I’m trapped for eight hours a day features three large televisions. At any given time at least one of them shows a feed from the major cable news outlets shouting the current headlines at us. You don’t realize how little “new” news happens in a day until you spend months with rehashes and repeats washing over you every 30 minutes. It’s possible there’s a lot of news breaking out there somewhere, but it’s an awfully small portion that anyone is going to spend time talking about (and trying to monetize through advertising).

One of the better side effects of this 40-hour a week exposure is that my brain seems to have developed a basic self-preservation strategy of tuning almost all of it out. When someone asks “hey did you hear that?” I can usually respond honestly with, “no.” The other side effect I’ve noticed is that this constant stream of news has left me bereft of the desire to watch or seek out any news for the rest of the day.

With the exception of a few minutes of local weather and finding out the daily body count in Baltimore when I get home from work, the rest of the night is almost completely news free. I should show more of an interest, but I find this newfound disinterest to be a remarkably freeing experience. Sure, I still care what goes on in the world, but I’m becoming a hell of a lot more selective about what I want to burn an increasingly limited amount of mental bandwidth learning about or engaging on.

Some news is good for entertainment value (when bad things happen to stupid people), other bits are good to know because it impacts finances (business news and federal budget stuff), and finally there’s the space allocated to any news or information involving animals. Past that, maybe I should care, but I just don’t. Whatever intellectual energy I have left once I get home is far more effectively spent focused on the next spy novel or great thick books about war.

I intend this self-imposed (partial) news blackout to continue indefinitely.

Recency bias…

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Game of Thrones is kind of known for it’s big set piece battle scenes. The Battle of the Blackwater. The Battle of the Wall. The Battle of the Bastards. All are real standouts for their own reasons. Last night, in what I’m pretty sure was the shortest episode of the entire series to date, our friends over at HBO gave us another battle – and in a lot of ways it’s the one that most fans have been waiting a long, long time for.

There are a thousands sites where you can go for a recap of the actual episode, but I’ll just say that Spoils of War ranks well into my top five episodes at the moment. That’s not so much because of the battle itself but because it has finally brought cast members back together who had been separated for so long. In past seasons you could cheer for the Dragon Queen in Essos without worrying about your favorite characters in Westeros. Now, though, long time favorites find themselves head to head – and given that the story springs from the mind of George R.R. Martin, any of them could be fair game for a painful death.

It may just be the recency bias talking, but last night was the first episode of this shortened season that made the long wait for Season 7 really feel worth while… and now my heart is breaking that there are only three episodes left before the next long wait.

Picking easier…

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With of the ludicrous cost of cable television I’ve toyed off and on for about a year with cutting the cord and trying to cobble together a collection of streaming services that would get the job done. After some exhaustive research, the real problem became the fact that to get all of my non-negotiable programming I was going to end up needing essentially all the streaming services.

I’m grudgingly forced to admit that cost not withstanding, cable is just the most convenient way of getting what I want. Getting those 40 channels means I end up paying for 300. As much as I hate writing that monthly check, I’m resigned to the fact that I’m just going to go ahead and keep paying for the convenience of having it all piped in through the same service.

For the better part of a decade I’d been living with my old 40-inch 780p plasma screen in the living room. Its picture quality didn’t justifying the full HD experience and I’d always resisted handing over the extra $10 a month for HD channels. The 58-inch monstrosity now residing in my living room, though, made standard signals look like absolute rubbish. So I gave in and took a Saturday side trip to my “local” Comcast storefront.

I have to confess the swap out to HD boxes all around was quick and easy. The truth is, I’m tremendously impressed with the picture quality that’s getting sent over the wire. I’m impressed enough at least to keep paying the bill until a real industry disruptor comes along.

I set out last weekend to make my life cheaper and easier and was forced into a choice between the two. Under those circumstances I’m going to pick easier just about every time.

The nine o’clock hour…

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HBO has provided the valedictory hour for my weekends since a guy named Tony ran north Jersey and the Barksdale crew controlled the corners in west Baltimore. With tonight’s season ender for Game of Thrones I guess I’m back to casting around for something at the nine o’clock hour to punctuate the end of the weekend.

I should probably be a responsible adult and use that extra hour to get something closer to eight hours of sleep, but somehow I know that’s not going to happen. I haven’t really looked at what HBO is rolling our for the summer or fall seasons – and the Walking Dead are still to far away to contemplate.

Worst case scenario I find myself a good book to fill the extra time. As much as I like reading, allocating one hour a week to get lost in the flickering glow of a really good drama feels like something I’m actually going to miss.

Mmmmm… leftovers.

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The LeftoversI’ve been watching The Leftovers on HBO. For those not following along at home, it’s a series based on what would happen after 2% of the population, men, women, and children simply disappeared. There’s plenty of self-loathing, searching for inner peace, questioning authority, and general social stress, you know, a basic dystopian adventure.

Without giving away any key plot elements, it seems to me that all of the characters are slowly descending into their own personal version of madness. Maybe that’s why I take exception with the show’s premise, especially since the great disappearance included the evil as well as the righteous. It was an equal opportunity vanishing.

I tend to think that if I woke up tomorrow to find 2% of the population had disappeared, I’d largely shrug and think of it as a good first step. When the other 97.999% bugger off, then we’d be in business.

Comcast, once again, sucks…

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If there’s are recurring threads to this blog, one of them must certainly be my ever increasing disdain, annoyance, and hatred of Comcast. Last year, I argued, cajoled, and bullied my bill for internet and television down to a svelte $97.04. That bought me 80 channels, “performance” internet, and HBO – the one splurge that’s non-negotiable (at least until HBO figures out a way to let people subscribe to them as a service instead of as a cable add-on). When I opened my bill this morning and found the price jumped to $124.09, well, let’s just say that they’ve given me one more reason to be less than impressed with their service.

Sure, business costs increase. Got it. Understood. Yet somehow, I don’t think the cost of delivering television and internet here to scenic Rental Casa de Jeff increased 25% year-over-year. Cutting the cable seems like a more and more realistic option for me every time they dish out such asshattery. Of course I’d still be saddled with a business relationship with Comcast because they have a monopoly on high speed out here in the wilderness. They suck, but sadly are the least bad of a host of truly god awful alternatives.

We can land a goddamned man on the goddamned moon, but can’t seem to come up with a way to watch Game of Thrones and surf the interwebs for less than a C-note a month. Maybe when the Chinese take over they’ll figure this mess out for us.