Wednesday, April 24, 2013 | By: Unknown

My Television Choices are Weirder Than My Music Taste...


                It’s an interesting yet almost clichéd question of all time: “How much television do you watch?” It’s the sort of question you expect from a doctor at a yearly check-up, right after asking about your dietary habits and right before the follow-up question about computer usage. And you, dear reader, are almost certainly not my doctor, so you don’t actually need this information unless you’re planning on randomly polling blogs of this subject to obtain statistical information (in which case I feel the need to remind you that this type of format probably isn’t the best for your search).
                So, back to television. I actually don’t watch all that much actual television aside from the local and global news programs each weeknight. I find that there’s a lot of just complete and utter nonsense on now, so my time is therefore better spent browsing the internet, where I have the ability to watch what I want at my own leisure without worrying about re-runs or time conflicts (except for those conflicts that exist between too much media viewing and too little To-Do-list-tackling). Up until a few months ago, I only watched the late-night anime that was shown on Cartoon Network, and even then it was a mere hour of time. Bleach was always played at 00:00, and then Naruto was immediately after that until 01:00. However, I somehow managed to miss one of the airings and never got back to watching it.
                Since I still have sixty some-odd words left and have come to the limits of my television watching as far as the actual television is concerned, I guess I’ll just write a bit more about alternative media viewing. I definitely watch a lot more television programs on the internet than on the actual TV. Among the series that I am enjoying/ have enjoyed are Hetalia, CSI: Miami, The Mentalist, Criminal Minds, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (a cartoon from the nineties), Yu-Gi-Oh!, Soul Eater, and various other videos (which are actually more like five-minute sketches or vlogs that people post to YouTube).  It’s sometimes hard to think about what I “should” be watching, what others my age are currently watching, because I know that I’m definitely a little odd considering some of my choices. I mean, half of what I watch/plan to watch is cartoon-based and the other half is all crime drama. The two are just so drastically different that I wonder about what kind of message I might be giving to others… Except then I decide that I really don’t care all that much about what other people think about, especially when it threatens to come between me and things that make me feel like I’m actually being myself. Embrace the awkward combination of children’s television programs from the nineties, anime, and crime dramas!
                There are a total of four televisions in our house, though only two are regularly used and one isn't even plugged in (that one is SUPER old; it has one of the spinny dial channel changer things instead of a button or remote, which is really, really cool!). Television is a common form of escape. I think of it in terms of this: In the late 1920s and 1930s, when movies were relatively new and cheap, people used the media form to escape the complete horrible-ness of the Great Depression. Now, our economy isn't so bad, but it's still pretty awful. Movies aren't cheap anymore, either, so we use cable television as our form of cheap, poor-man's entertainment. Of course, there are scads and scads of negatives with this topic, like increased laziness and reliance on technology to be our little entertainment puppets, but as with anything else, positives and negatives must be assessed in order to determine whether a subject is a positive or negative part of our society (I refuse to take a stance on this topic, mostly because I have no desire of making a hypocrite of myself).

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