That’s right. I don’t have a TV! And yet I somehow manage to survive!
It’s not that I have anything against TV. I grew up watching TV, my parents have a TV, my dad gets pissed if I call during the Simpsons, and I have my favorite shows. But when I moved out of the house, I was broke and a TV didn’t seem like the best use of my money. So I didn’t buy one. Then I had a roommate for a year and she had a TV. At first I was pretty excited - ooh, shiny! But after a while the novelty sort of wore off and I would go for weeks without even turning the thing on. Now I’m living alone again and still, no TV. I can watch DVDs on my computer (I have eight seasons of TV shows on DVD, even) and I have a Netflix subscription, so any time I want to veg out, I can.
But you’d think I don’t breathe oxygen from peoples’ reactions. I swear to god, I have heard the most ludicrous shit, like “I would die without a TV.” No, you wouldn’t. You’d find something else to do. Today one of my coworkers told me he’d “stab himself with a butter knife” if he didn’t have a TV. Give me a freaking break, people! If you want to make yourself seem like a complete loser, please declare your total dependence on the TV. Now I think you’re extra cool!
I’m considering buying a TV just so I don’t have to deal with these incredibly stupid statements. Get a fucking grip, people.
You can come over and watch the game Sunday if you want.
And that’s about all I ever use mine for. Well, sports, news, and the occasional comedy. (Limited to the Simpsons now that Drew Carey reruns are no longer on.) People will talk about shows at work, turn to me and ask what I think, I’ll admit I have no clue what they’re talking about, and I’ll get one of those looks you’re so familar with. I think I could live without it if I had to; I’d just put baseball on the radio instead.
I do have a TV but I mostly watch movies on it. When I first met Ardred, he didn’t have tv reception, cable, a dvd player or a vcr (lightning strike). I was a life saver, as he also didn’t have any money.
TV isn’t all important, of course, but I would go quietly mad without my dvds. But, I see that you understand that.
Seriously, though. Sometimes, when people who don’t own a TV say that to someone else, it’s with a superior tone of voice. They make it sound like owning a TV is a cardinal sin. Maybe it’s not intentional, maybe it is. Not saying that you say it that way.
A lot of people like or even love TV and like all things that people are crazy about, some can’t understand why others don’t feel the same way.
I consider TV as a last resort to boredom. If the computer isn’t very intresting and I don’t feel like reading, I’ll go watch CSI or something. Sure I like TV, but I could live without. Of course, like others here I need my movies.
I feel the OP’s pain. I grew up in a conservative part of Ohio (Amish Country) where not having a TV wasn’t very unusual. We didn’t have one until I was 12 (although we weren’t Amish, my mother was deeply suspicious of pop culture). It took us another 4-5 years to get a VCR. We never did get cable; it was PBS and the local NBC affiliate or nothing every night.
Everyone at school thought my family was weird, except my teachers, who loved my excellent reading skills. Personally, I know I started doing a lot worse in school once we got a boob tube. TV shows are designed to keep you watching, at the expense of the rest of your life.
OK So on one hand you got your TV addicts.
On the other hand you have people with no TV who talk condescendingly about TV addicts.
You also got a lot of people who have a TV and watch it now and then.
Then you got your progressive scan high-def oversampled 16:9 format surround sound addicts watching every blade of grass on the freakin football field!! YES YES YES…where was I
I have a T.V. with cable, a VCR, and a DVD player. I don’t watch T.V.
I have the T.V. because, well, it’s a T.V., and you might as well have one. I have the VCR because my dad gave it to me, and it’s hooked up so that I can connect my game systems to it (my TV doesn’t have A/V hookups in the front). The DVD player was a present from my mom, who didn’t realize that I watch DVDs on my computer, and I’ve kept it around for lack of anything better to do with it. I have cable because my cable internet costs $10/month less with it than without. (I don’t know either.)
I don’t have anything against watching T.V., there just really isn’t that much on it that interests me. I used to like the History Channel and the Discovery Channel before they both started to suck. I used to like SciFi until the day I figured out that it had always sucked. I hate reality shows, so bye bye network programming. CNN sends me news updates via text message, and I know I can count on the SDMB to keep me current on all things political. I hate watching edited movies, especially with commercial interruptions, so there goes the primary reason to watch cable, and I ain’t paying for HBO. So, there you have it. I may start watching T.V. again at some point…you never know.
I’m not that fond of TV. My family likes TV. There are a few things I watch so I can contribute/stick my stupid opinions in over at Cafe Society and a whole bunch of others that I watch because my wife likes to have the TV on and me massaging her feet while she reads and I can’t read while the TV is on or while I’m massaging her feet. And I’m a sucker for documentaries–I sat through one about wrought iron grave markers in Swedish-American cemetaries in Iowa.
I used to have a TV. Watched it a fair amount. Then one day I sat down to catch, oh, I dunno what, maybe the weather, and my ancient, feeble TV expired. Well, actually it imploded – the picture, which at that stage of the TV’s existence would come on first as a shuddering horizontal line, gradually expanding into a full screen, got about halfway open, slammed back to a line, then went black. Tendrils of smoke began to rise from the back. I unplugged it and hauled it outside, heaving it into a convenient dumpster.
By some odd chance,this happened the day before the Great OJ Simpson White Bronco Chase. I can’t help wondering… did my TV know what was coming, and commit suicide? :dubious:
Oh, and after two weeks of panicked withdrawal (“I must get a TV!”) but no moolah, I forgot about it. Didn’t buy one until September 11, 2001, and unplugged it after a week or two.
Horses, reading, cats, message boards – who has time for the boob tube?
I just got a brand new TV. Thirty inches, widescreen, high-definition. Cost a little under one grand.
There’s a grand total of four TV shows a week that I try to make a point to catch. Three of them on the same network. And 75% of the time, I still forget to watch them.
But it was worth it, because of my movie collection. First thing I watched on my new TV was Julie Taymor’s Titus, and it was fuckin’ amazing. It was like watching it all over again. Over the next few months, I’m probably going to end up re-watching every movie I own, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty movies, and I’m planning on buying a shitload more in the next few months.
Plus, I own three game consoles. Video games are the greatest thing ever. Seriously. It’s one of the first truly original artforms in more than a century. Depending on how many similarities you see between stage and screen, you could argue that it’s the first truly new art form since Cervantes invented the novel. The TV was worth it just for GTA: San Andreas alone. And there’s that new Zelda game coming out that looks breathtaking.
Still, that’s not really anything you couldn’t do with a decent computer and a nice monitor. In the next few decades, the line between “television” and “personal computer” is probably going to disappear anyway. Just consider yourself ahead of the curve, Kyla. Next time someone gives you shit about this, roll your eyes and say, “A TV? That’s so 20th century.”
You can live without anything, except, you know, air and stuff.
People who don’t have/watch TV are cut off from a huge segment of popular culture. To me, it’s like saying, “Well, most books are crap, so I’m gonna stop reading.” There is excellent work being done in television right now, and refusing to look at it is foolish. There is an enormous gap between no TV and TV addiction.
Heh heh. Yup, I’m so with you on this one. During the whole “Waaaazuuuppppiiii” fad, I didn’t have a TV. One night I was at a friends watching Jay Leno, and he had the wazup guys on his show. His intro went something like this “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past several months, you know who these guys are”.
That attitude of “unless you’ve been paying SUCH close attention to TV that you are well versed in even the characters on COMMERCIALS you’ve been living under a rock” just floored me.
Excuse me? You mean biking, hiking, taking and/or teaching 5 dance classes a week, dating, going to movies, working 3 jobs etc" don’t count as “NOT living under a rock”??
Seems to me that suggesting that unless a person sees that much TV that they’re not living, that they’ve got it ass backward.
As a friend of mine used to say when someone would tell him he missed something on TV, he’d say “No, I didn’t miss it, I just didn’t see it”. Just ignore them or tell them you’re too busy actually LIVING life to be content being a couch potato.
I do watch tv, but only certain things. I read newspapers and the internet for news. I use the tv basically for certain cable channels. I avoid reality shows and I get to look confused when people mention them.
Simpsons. Saturday Night Live. Apprentice. Other than that, none of my shows are still running and the TV is just a screen to hook up to the VCR/DVD player. Wish they’d bring back The Mole, but we can’t have too many reality shows that don’t suck, now can we?
Well, I’m a hardcore gamer, tried and true, so having a TV just sort of goes along with that. I can live without TV, but I can’t live without games, and I like to be able to chat on AIM and play games at the same time (so no cute monitor hookups). What can I say, I’m a hedonist.
I also like keeping the TV on as background noise sometimes. I can’t stand absolute silence (even when I’m studying). Eventually, my relatively small collection of songs can get annoying, so TV is a nice escape.
Also, The Daily Show. We have two LCD widescreen TVs in the lobby downstairs, so I suppose I could watch TDS down there, but then I’d have to put on pants. And really, what’s the point of owning a TV if I have to wear pants?
Like I said in the OP, I can watch DVDs on my computer, and I have a Netflix subscription.
Mr. Blue Sky, project much? I am not condescending towards people who watch TV. I like TV fine! I just happen to not have one.
Heh. This is beginning to remind me of another problem I have - I’m a vegetarian and can say, with great sincerity, that I do not care what you’re eating (unless maybe it’s bananas, which are just nasty). And yet, I am constantly dealing with people who presuppose I am going to tell them what to eat and get on my freaking case about it.
But seriously… I “watch” only the Apprentice, new South Parks or new Stargates. Other than that the TV stays off unless I’m blowing up poor defenseless aliens, bad guys, enemies or such.
