*fittedwearer's note: This is the thing I was having delivered to my mommy's house last week during that train post, since you were curious, anonymous asker...you might want to have one delivered to your mommy's house as well.
It's no secret...the current economic downturn has drastically affected our descretionary spending patterns...in short, times is hard. Of course, there are those basic essentials like food, water, and shelter that will come out of one's pocket no matter what...but about 3 inches under that lie the comfort essentials. Comfort essentials are goods and services that while not actually life-threatening not to have, make our existence a bit more tolerable for us. (I'm sure you can guess a few of mine...if you can't, read a few more of my posts. If you can...you're still invited to read a few of my posts. Please? I'll be your friend...)
One of the most common comfort essentials is cable TV. Admittedly, it's awesome...but more and more expensive every day. They all like to argue back and forth through commercials how expensive the others are...but they all cost too damn much. Price gouging bastards like Comcast are charging as much as $200 a month for cable TV service with premium channels...but if you want to watch anything besides the news, Sesame Street, 14 church channels, soaps and a loud, flamboyant game shows ¡EN ESPAÑOL!, you don't have much choice but to make it rain on your cable provider. (Why the fuck is cable so expensive anyway? It's just a signal that floats through the air...you're lucky I don't talk to that one guy who stands on the train selling incense, body oils, bean pies, umbrellas and notary services and buy a black box to steal the shit, and you have the nerve to tax me hundreds of dollars for my honesty? Come on, man...) It's borderline extortion.
Everybody knows your average cable bill is an exorbitant price to pay for an almost pure profit service...but nobody questions why that is because they'll miss the next episode of "Boardwalk Empire". So...a TV watcher's choices are either half a mortgage payment sent off to Verizon or watching the salt and pepper screensaver, right? Wrong. I have broken free of the tyrannical hold of local monopoly Comcast and emerged with my viewing options intact. What wonderful device makes such a feat possible? umf'ers, I introduce to you the Roku.
Yes, it has a stupid name and I'm gonna personally refer to it as something else as soon as I'm finished writing this and come up with an adequately descriptive nickname, but this thing is, put succinctly, the shit. It connects to your TV and to your internet connection either through a ethernet cord or wirelessly, and does something magical...streams Netflix (DVD movies and series, in case you don't live in twentyten), Hulu (current seasons of popular TV shows), YouTube (that one website with all the movie previews, backyard injury experiments and salvia trip videos), and some deep catalogue of news, sports and international programs that I haven't gotten through enough shoot 'em up movies and episodes of SpongeBob to fully check out yet, all with a clear, smooth picture. What's on TV tonight? Pretty much whatever the fuck you want.
The downsides to it are the somewhat limited Netflix streaming selection ("somewhat" because while everything on Netflix might not be available to stream instantly, I'd say if you wanted to watch 5 things, 3 of them would be on there and 1.5 of them would be over on Hulu. You'll be aight.), the occasional rebuffering pause (which may just be due to my location...my modem never gets full reception. I think the crackheads are stealing my bandwidth), a rewind feature that's sort of awkward (it has to reload when you go back...it's probably because I have the $60 base model...or maybe because I'm black. Seriously, the $80 and $100 upgrades have that feature smoothed out a bit) and an inexplicable purple tag on both the unit and the remote that I think, like those mattress tags, cannot be removed under penalty of law. Still, the pros far outweigh the cons here...the Roku is worth it at double the price.
I don't want to say I love this thing, but only because I feel that's too forward and may make our relationship awkward. I don't want to push it away...I think we have something special. Trust me, at 60 bucks for the basic model and around 10 bucks a month for subscriptions to Hulu and Netflix, it's maximum entertainment for a minimum price. If you're a big TV watcher, it'll pay for itself in a month with what you would spend on cable. No longer will I have to choose between unlimited TV and my extracurricular activities...I can enjoy plenty of both at the same time. (It's better that way...now "Drunk with the Clicker" can come back...lol...) Brothers and sisters, we will cut the cable cords that constrict us...entertainment freedom is at hand! Getcha one at the Roku site...makes a great gift to anybody for any reason, or hell...yourself for no reason! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna finish pretending to work, go home, and spend the entire cold, snowy weekend higher than a giraffe's fedora in front of my TV for way less than most folk...it's the fiscally responsible thing to do. Happy weekend umf!
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