Comcast, as well as being the cable tv provider in the area, is the company that currently gives me my cable internet connection. I’d been happy with the service and channels I had from our plan (one step above basic: it had the Comedy Central, SciFi, and other things I watch frequently without all the premium channels I don’t watch). Soon Scifi will be moved to a digital-only channel. I have to go get a new digital box in order to watch it, so I make that my tech adventure today. It’s plugged in and set itself up, the equivalent of reporting back to the mothership or whatever the hell it does. I turn it on, and somewhere there is a Hindenberg full of baby Jesus clones, powered by liquified kittens and puppies, crashing into a radio tower in an explosion of sacriligious crying and mewing. Humanity has not only been lost, it was torn asunder by the sheer impact of horror and left a space in my psyche, leaving me a shell of a man tottering for the very vocabulary to describe the disgust with which I have been infused.
Let me share a few gripes about the “new and improved” user interface. In particular, let me complain to the designers who I know will never read this post: Go suck a filthy sock of syphilitic donkey jizz, you garbage-producing wastes of stem cells.
Part the first: My beloved program grid has been replaced. Instead of being able to scan what’s on and what will be on in the next hour and a half by a grid according to time and channel, I am forced to see one or the other. I can see what’s on in the current half hour, or I can see what on one channel for the next two hours. The previous guide made sense. It was logical and readable. The new “guide” is a smegging insult. To make matters worse, the new guide has the TV Guide logo plastered across it - the previous guide was the exact same fucking layout as the TV Guide magazine. No more! What the ungodly feck do you thing you’re trying to do?!
Part the second: messages. The cable box should pipe the signal into a form translated into audio and digital signals for my television. That’s it. I do not need email on my cable box telling me that you have baseball games or 450 channels of maraichi music. In fact, if you wanted to let me know of the programming, how about putting it on the damned program lineup?! Too bad nobody will bother to navigate the horrible thing now to see. There is a red light on the cable box telling me if there are messages or not, even if the box is off. Ding! it says, You’ve got spam! A baleful glaring eye, piercing into the soul. It will never go away until I submit and open the stupid fucking spam message.
Part the third: Previously, with the old box, when turning to a new channel it would provide a small text description of the show. It would tall you the time it came on, the time it will end, the title, and even the brief description of the plot if it had one in the program guide. Now when changing channels a huge yellow box containing one line of text - the name of the show - covers the bottom of the screen. This box contains this one line, the aforementioned TV GUide logo, and the subject of the next part.
Part the fourth: advertisements. Each and every screen on the box’s system has at least one outside (i.e., non-Comcast) advertisement. The main menu. The channel guide. The options. The fucking spam mailbox. All these worlds and more are given to the ads, and no monolith can save me for the black box itself is the one feeding these abominations unto my screen. These are the same types of ads that you would see on your less well-to do websites, whoring their space out to companies without the slightest concern or connection to subject. Of course I’d be interested in debt consolidation! Of course I want to buy a boquet of flowers! I don’t mind at all that this piece of monkey shit is hogging up screen space. Again: how much more am I paying to have the ‘privilage’ of having your sickening advertisements piped directly into my information source?
All I want is to watch television. How fucking hard is that?