its been about 14 years that i really stopped watching tv. take this commentary from a prospective not of slandering those who do watch it but just confusion that people actually do watch it. i do own a tv but its not hooked up to the internet / zero streaming services or any type of cable or satellite tv but i did hook a hdmi cable and a nintendo switch that i can move between my switch and my media center. the benefit is i get to watch what i want when i want and its free. so when you are in my house there are no tvs on with loud volume blaring its just silence. i only use my phone for calls and text messages never even loaded the browser or installed mobile games it just sits on a shelf unused and silent. i remember back in the day comcast had a cable/internet bundle and my brother would be the only one watching tv all day such a useless human. i would overhear the dialog and the laugh tracks while being in a completely different room it was such a auditory hammering of the senses and the commercials were 50% louder then the tv show so you had to adjust the volume between the two. the commercials were endless, i picked up the remote many times and looked at the tv now playing menu and all the "content" was years old, 480p or later or at best 720p never 1080p random trash. we only had one tv and my brother is stupid fat at around 350 pounds like god dam fat lol so he "owned" the tv and remote. he loved to argue with everyone over anything so even being in the same room was like entrapment into a argument. so when he watched tv i just left the room and would read books, program and write scripts, or just work on the car. what ended up happening was even when he was not around i would not turn it on and it was so freeing not caring what others watched. if i wanted to watch a tv show that i liked i would just grab it off torrents its totally normal to think this way. if you paid for a service why was i subjected to commercials, why could i not select a tv season and play it without subscriptions, commercials in 1080p or 4k quality? that was the point of no return i was done and this was around 2005-2006. then netflix came out and i am totally aware of what netflix is and the other streaming sites i just don't care. i don't want to pay a subscription to license to view "content" that i cant keep and i am happy to say i have never even connected to netflix (the website) ever...
i found myself in a hotel room on a business trip looking at a black flat screen tv hung on a wall. i had copied a few tv shows from my 320 tb nas to a micro sd card but forgot to copy from the card into the laptops internal ssd. so i was copying from the micro sd card to my laptop around 200 gigs of data to the internal ssd drive and forgot how slow it is around 30 mbs - lol trash sd card reader fml. so waiting for the tv shows to copy over i turned on the tv and the volume was at 50% so i had to figure out how to use the remote and get it lowered then figure out how to change the channels. i saw commercials for products i have never heard about much less needed. watching tv for about 45 minutes just flipping threw channels and the viewing experience felt dead and sanitized then unexpectedly you would get another block of commercials. i would look over at the laptop seeing the copy dialog status almost praying for it to complete to end my suffering. it was not even an hour of watching tv after years and years and i turned it off.
having turned off the tv i sat at the edge of the bed for the remainder of the hour just thinking and reflecting in silence. what really stuck out in my mind was how surreal and alien watching tv was. it was not a superiority complex or narcissism that i came to this conclusion but the action of watching tv was painful. there was a deep sense of actual fear looking at the tv at the thought of something like this being on for hours. the file transfer had long completed a while ago but i was still lost in thought about the experience of watching tv and how numbing it was. i was grateful that i have the computer skills to not need to watch tv but i can download my own tv shows play any time anywhere no internet or subscriptions required in 4k. double clicking the mkv file of episode 1 of birdy the mighty decode and instantly loading in vlc gave me a smile.
one of my oldest tv memories i was trying to watch a documentary of amelia earhart. i guess they had to much time at the end and it felt like 1 minute of programming vrs 3 minutes of comercial over and over. i had to just shut it off.
all my other tv watching i would mute commercials. i finally reached barf maybe 30 years ago? no tv cept when visiting parents they might have it on.
the old tube tv supposedly gave of some kind of radio waves that made a mind relaxed and subjectable to suggestion. i remember as a child sitting in front of tv on saturday morning was like a trance
there is also other claimed things that tv is used for less then honest purposes. i wonder if some people have a natural aversion to tv because perhaps they some how detect their mind is under assult?
or they dont watch it just because it just sux
lol getting a headache just thinking bout tv
This post was edited by TiStuff on Jun 1 2025 06:02am