Tag: Television

Picard is Here

Plot a course for my living room TV, maximum warp.  Engage.

I was up pretty early today, hours before I needed to punch in to work.  The first episode of Picard is out, and we actually have access to it.  I had the time and the means to watch the whole episode but I couldn’t do it.  My step son and I were talking about it last night.  He’s not that much of a Star Trek TNG fan, but he was definitely interested in the new show.  I said we’d watch it together.  That means I either had to drag him out of bed at a shockingly early hour on a day where he has two brutal mid-term exams, or I have to wait until tonight when he comes home.

Oh the waiting is killing me!

Jen and I watched some clips of Sir Patrick on a talk show and… well… he’s really old now.  He’s 79.  I have to admit that when I first saw him play Jean Luc Picard back in 1987 I thought he was old.  Captain Kirk was my Star Trek reference, and here is this middle aged bald dude… he’s just too old!  Well, Sir Patrick was 46 years old when TNG debuted… and that’s two years younger than I am today.  Damn it.

Anyway, he was on this talk show and he looked every second of his 79 years.  It kind of scared me.  They are already talking about a second season.  Is he going to be able to keep doing it?  (this next sentence is definitely colored by the passing of Neil Peart) Is he going to be alive a year from now?  It gave me this totally irrational need… if we are going to lose Sir Patrick, I have to make sure I see every episode of this new show before he goes.  That makes ZERO sense, but what can you do, right?

Step One: The clock needs to hit 5:30 so I can punch out.
Step Two: Harry needs to get himself home!

Make it so!

Two Instances of Hypocrisy

I’m a hypocrite.  It’s official.  Pull up a chair and I’ll bore you to tears with two stories of hypocritical hypocrisy.

First: When CBS released it’s streaming service I said no.  No way.  Even as a lifelong Star Trek fanatic I couldn’t do it.  I waited until the first season of Discovery came to iTunes and I watched it there.  I did the same thing with season two.  In fact, I just watched season two, episode four while eating my dinner tonight.

But… Picard.  How can I possibly live in a world where there is a Star Trek TV series about Jean Luc Picard without actually seeing it the second it comes out?  I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.  I promised myself I wouldn’t watch the trailer because it would make me want to subscribe.  It didn’t work.  I subscribed and then watched the trailer.  Hypocrite.  Hypocrisy to the max.

Second: I posted something not long ago about how the number of visitors to this page had doubled when I started posting every day (1×2=2).  I said I didn’t really care if anyone visited the page at all because that’s not why I do this.  I do this to yell at the universe.  It’s not Facebook, I’m here with the expectation that no one is paying attention and I like it that way.

Then last week I read a post on reddit where a user in the blogging subreddit mentioned that their traffic increased by a factor of 10 after they started employing some simple SEO techniques.  They started tagging everything and using categories, things like that.  Blah, said I.  I bet if I did the same thing it wouldn’t change anything.  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been tagging the crap out of stuff and I started using categories again for the first time in ages.

Well… ummmm… traffic hasn’t increased by a factor of 10, but it sure has increased.  Ummm… woops.  Hello to all you new folks who have stumbled on my hypocritically hypocritical stupidity.  Thanks for stopping by.  Donald Trump is a fascist… anyone still left?  Okay.

I like interacting with people on Facebook.  I kinda like interacting with people on Twitter, but I usually don’t.  My twitter is about 1/4 bitching about that fascist, Trump, 3/4 links back to this page, and a few random Bruins and Red Sox posts for flavor.  Tumblr… hehe, just kidding.  This page isn’t for anything like that though.  This is a blathering idiot blathering.  If you’re cool with that, fine.  I’m thinking about looking into turning off comments because 99% of them are spam and the wordpress.com spam blocker catches them all.

Whatever.  Get off my lawn, you nasty kids!  The hypocrite is hypocriting, or something.

Addendum: Good at hypocrisy, bad at SEO.  After all that I forgot to add tags to this post.  You can’t see me laughing at my own dumb ass self, but trust that I am.  Also, I think I need to add a television category.  Should I go through the previous 11,555 post (that number is actually accurate) and search for references to television so that I can add them to the category?  No.  The answer to that is a solid, hard, definite no.

It’s Going to be a Long Night

The season premier of The Walking Dead starts in a touch over one hour.

We don’t have cable in the house anymore, so I will be downloading the episode from the iTunes season pass. Unfortunately the episode does not become available until around 3:00am tomorrow morning. Amazon video and the AMC iOS app are on the same schedule.

That means I am about one hour from turning my house into a spoiler free zone. I will do that by taking all of my connected devices off line until tomorrow morning. I hope to be able to sneak a viewing of the new episode before work tomorrow, but until that happens I can’t be anywhere near twitter or facebook or instagram or myspace or friendster or anything.

…and I just ran out of episodes of Rick and Morty on Hulu.

It’s going to be a long night, friends. A long ass kicker of a night.

Practice Time

Just getting ready to go to band practice. We’re going to be short a singer tonight (he’s in Chicago… I still think we should try rehearsing over skype) so the focus is on tightening up the rest of us.

The downside for me right now is that I am exhausted to the point of distraction. I took a shower today at about 11:30 and ever since I sat down to tie my shoes following that shower I have been on the verge of sleep. I went out to run some errands and that was okay, but as soon as I got home I just wanted to sleep. I expect that this will carry over to practice tonight and I will suck something fierce.

13 days to our next gig. I am going to do a lot of practicing at home. Probably going to be noodling on the guitar while watching TV with the kids after work and stuff. I will be ready when the time comes. Hell, I’m almost ready right now. Just not tonight… Urgh. Is it bed time?

On a related note, my wife and I started binge watching The Man in the High Castle last night. After practice we expect to have enough time to watch two more episodes before we have to give up and go to bed…

We have three episodes left.

Nooooooooo!!!!!

The Talk

Last night we had The Talk.  It wasn’t easy.  It was kinda scary.  It was time though.  It needed to happen.

We talked about whether or not it would be more cost effective to get rid of cable television than to keep it.  We already use Netflix extensively, and we (too) often take advantage of iTunes for various TV shows season passes.  HBO has a subscription service now, and Hulu looks like it would do a decent job giving us new, first run series’.  The main point against giving up cable is sports.  The NHL and MLB both offer video subscription services, but are local broadcasts blacked out?  If they are they are more or less useless.  Would I be okay with going 100% radio for my Bruins and Red Sox needs?  I have to admit that I don’t watch nearly as many games as I used to, but at the same time while this conversation was taking place last night the Bruins game was on the tube.  Ummm…

We have a contract with FiOS right now and it doesn’t end for another six months.  When that time comes, will we finally ditch cable TV?  It could very well happen.

Family Feud

Sitting in my parents’ living room.

My mother was watching The Family Feud*.

I needed to get up to go to the kitchen for something, but I waited to see what the last of the top five answers on the board was.

Then I realized I was actually watching The Family Feud and decided it was time to claw my eyes out.

*I misspelled feud three times while writing this post.

Mondays Suck

Today was the third Monday I’ve worked since getting promoted (already?) and losing my second telecommuting day. It’s the first one that hurt though, for two reasons.

Jen and I over slept this morning. Not much, just a little. Hell, it wasn’t even enough to make me late for work. I left at the usual time, but I had to skip packing my lunch. The kids were at their fathers this weekend. Had I been able to work form home today I actually would have been able to stay in bed for two more hours. That hurt. That hurt in a big way.

The second way not telecommuting hurt is sillier. Season four of The Walking Dead is winding down. On a tele-Monday I would have watched last night’s episode before work. Even with driving in today, I still tried to watch before work. I said I left home at the normal time, but today is St Patrick’s Day as well as the Boston-only holiday, Evacuation Day. Traditionally it is an easy drive day. I downloaded last night’s episode onto my phone in the hopes I’d get to work fast enough to watch it in the parking lot.

The file is 43 minutes long. I parked in the lot at 8:20. Ssssssso close. I started watching, but after 17-18 minutes I stopped and went inside. It was cold, the screen is small, the show was dark (literally as well as figuratively) and hard to see. I watched the rest when I got home. I’m glad I waited for a bigger view.

Oh. My. God. That was the most difficult story since Sofia came out do the barn. Mind blowingly awesome. Brutal and terrible and heart destroyingly painful, but awesome. Television does not get any better,

So now I sit here, in between periods of the Bruins vs Wild game. Wishing I’d gotten an extra chunk of sleep and wishing I’d watched some great tv in one sitting. I miss my second telecommuting day. Indeed I do.

An Idiot Abroad

Jen and I were feeling like today should be the kind of day where we just lazily sit on the couch and watch the boob toob. Neither of us has any interest in the super bowl so we just popped over to Netflix to see what was what.

We stumbled upon the show An Idiot Abroad. We thought we’d give it a shot. What the hell, if it sucked then we put something else on. 44 minutes later we had both laughed our butts off and we’ve since plowed through two more episodes. Damn that is a funny show.

Archer

Have you seen the show Archer on FX?

The fifth season started tonight. No spoilers here, but they used the premier to essentially re-write the entire premise of the show. The episode was really funny. We’ll have to see how the rest of the season goes and how the huge changes work out, but hats off to the show’s creators. Can you image it? People in the TV business actually made changes to something. Not just small changes. This wasn’t a case of the baby on Full House is too old to be cute so let’s make one of the characters have twins. This is basically a re-write of the whole show. Same characters, but entirely unrelated story lines. I didn’t think anyone in Hollywood had the balls to try that. Frankly, I’m stunned. I hope it works out and they don’t get canned because the ratings drop a fraction of a point.

Good luck in the Danger Zone.

Blame TBS

I would like to publicly state that anything I do wrong today (and probably tomorrow too) will be blamed on the Turner Broadcasting System.

Last night my home town baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, played a game that started at 8:30pm. Assuming that the average game runs about three hours, in order for me to go to sleep at a decent enough time to get myself at least seven hours of sleep, I would have to stop watching approximately half way through the game.

During the regular season, most East coast teams start their games at either 7:00 or 7:30pm. Both teams in last nights game, and by extension the overwhelming majority of their fans, are on the East coast. Why then was the start time for the game set at 8:30? It’s disgusting enough that the games start so late that no school age child could ever dream of watching the entire game, but no adult who wishes to be productive at work the next day could stay up for the whole thing either.

I’m not even complaining about the four hours the game actually lasted. That isn’t TBS’ fault (although those commercial breaks between innings sure seemed longer than regular season breaks, didn’t they? I should watch with a stop watch next time to see how long they actually are), but it’s also irrelevant. Anyone on the East coast who works a 9-5 job would still be sleep deprived if the game had been three hours long.

It’s all about money though. If they run two games in one day without overlapping them, then they can sell 18 innings worth of ad space instead of having to split 9 innings of ad space between two Turner networks. The actual people who would like to watch the entire game are not even considered in the advertising equation.

I stayed up for the entire game last night. The final out was made at about 12:30am this morning and I can honestly say that as soon as the game ended I was in bed with the lights off, and I was dead asleep before the Red Sox left the field. My alarm clock then went off at 5:00am. TBS could care less.