Filling the Empty Hours

Hello, and welcome to Box Half Empty: the Television Blog by someone (me!) who doesn't have TV.

Let me explain.  Due to some really lousy career choices, I find myself unemployed from a field I hate.  So, in order to go "back to work", I would not only have to find a job in this not-exactly-blossoming recovery (unemployment rate in my city: 17%), but most likely return to a field that made me sick to my stomach even when I had a job.

Frankly, I'd rather just sit at home and watch TV.  One small problem, though; being unemployed makes you poor, and I can't afford the TV service any longer.  (My apartment complex only allows DirecTV, I would have to put several hundred dollars on deposit to get the service, I don't have several hundred dollars, and my "income" from Unemployment wouldn't allow me to budget for that, anyway.  It's either TV or rent, and it's hard to get TV service sleeping under a bridge, I'd assume.)  So, my plug has been pulled.

Thankfully, nowadays you can download pretty much anything on the internet, and so I can watch my favorite shows (and I have a wide range) on my computer.  This comes with certain pluses and minuses: on the positive side, I don't have to sit through any commercials, but, on the other hand, it's very easy to fall behind, because you need to make an affirmative effort to download a program (rather than just turn on the TV) and it takes a certain amount of time to do it.

On the positive side, since I'm downloading anyway, I can go back and explore shows I wasn't following or fell notably behind on.  (Of course, this means I have to dodge some major spoilers if f I do any TV-related reading online. Or even any reading; I've been hit with spoilers in the most absurd places.)  On the negative side, taking on more shows just means I've got more catching up to do.  It's as if Sisyphus decided he wanted to roll *more* rocks up that hill.

On the positive side, I can pause the show and get up any time I want, and screencaps are a breeze.  On the negative side, having to use my computer as a TV really inhibits my trying to do anything on the computer, much less trying to write about shows while watching them.

So, there are positives and negatives. I can either see the glass half-empty or half-full.  At the moment, I'll incline towards the negative, since there's clearly an absence (or several absences) in my experience (don't even get me started about all the sports I'm missing; most of those are just live-streamable, which doesn't work for this computer)…but I hope that this blog will become successful and my metaphorical box will become more full even as the hard drive full of downloaded shows (another kind of box) becomes more empty.

Oh, and I'm also going to set up a PayPal box so that all of you (at the moment entirely-hypothetical) readers can help support this site.  And, far more importantly, support ME.  Did I mention the part where I'm unemployed, flat broke, and in a heck of a financial squeeze?  Oh, yeah, I did.  It shouldn't take more than about $1000 per month to keep me going, but that does seem like a long, long, long ways away.

Well, perhaps you will all love "the Box", fill up that "box", and keep me from having to live in a box.   That's the plan, anyway.

So tune in next post for the first of a series of possibly-insightful, possibly-snarky, possibly-incoherent reviews and/or essays.  Until then…well, I suppose I'll need a catchphrase here, or something.  I'll work on it.  (Maybe.)

Seacrest, out!  (No, that's taken.  And dated. And lame.  Oh, well.)





"Ms. Calendar, I'm sure your Computer Science class is fascinating.  But I happen to believe that one can survive in modern society without becoming a slave to the, ummm, idiot box."

"That's TV.  TV is the Idiot Box.  This is the good box." 

—Rupert Giles and Jenny Calendar, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997).

And the eternal battle between good and idiot goes on…