Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Friday, June 4, 2010

once upon a time

once upon a time, i put my television in the closet, vowing only to take it out when my grades were better. for a long time, i only watched television when i was with other people, watching what they wanted - law and order with my mom, football with my dad, adult swim w/ p_____ and b__, etc. - and for a long time this was good.

i watched the rare movie - often with friends. i read a lot; i wrote a lot. i got a couple books out of this method.

of late, with technology being what it is, computers and playstation/xbox devices have kind of replaced television. right now, i can hop over to adult swim's website for all my venture brothers glory. i can open netflix and pour through an entire season of invader zim like falling asleep for a week.

and, i don't think i can go back to the way things were. when i thought about canceling netflix, i thought about why i got netflix in the first place: to build a reference of material that i can use to engage in design discussions at work, and to keep my company entertained with some sort of moving pictures with sound.

this is both kind of depressing to me, and kind of not depressing. on the one hand, i have a wide range of media possibilities to rip apart my already suspect attention span. on the other, an entire season of invader zim like falling asleep for a week and dreaming of invader zim.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

How have you been? We ditched our TV viewing about a month ago, along with our home phone. Life has been very quiet. One thing we discovered was Boxee. It let's us watch lots of shows from different sources, like the networks and Hulu. It's an aggregator and works very nicely!

We get to watch lots of old stuff like McGyver and Alfred Hitchcock, long with current stuff.

J m mcdermott said...

I'm hanging in there, and writing a lot, and waiting for word on things. How have you been!?

I tend to leave Netflix running when I'm doing homework, especially old stuff like Invader Zim. Nothing improves a heavy load of weighty seminar reading about death and mortality and alzheimers like GIR's quotable madness.

I really should have chosen more balanced seminar schedules this summer...