Tue, April 20, 2004

Whenever my father used to play Tetris on our old, vintage, antebellum-era Nintendo, my mom would remark that he focused too much on trying to make all the columns even out, and not enough on actually trying to eliminate blocks. He's an architect, and he likes to see things in a fairly orderly fashion. (Maybe this was why, maybe he had his own reasons.) Anyway, she'd constantly be hollering at him about it because the blocks would be piling up, and he'd be too busy trying to fill an imperfection in the horizontal surface to do anything about it. (Which was ironic in a way, because she was terrible at Nintendo and rarely ever played it, except for Joust, a ridiculous ostrich-riding Medieval-style jousting game that we got hooked on in the arcade room of the hospital during my few days' stay after my appendectomy. So, for her to give advice on Tetris is like Michael Jackson and Patsy Ramsey giving parenting tips.)

Anyway, I'm my father's son. (I know, I know. I have to stop dropping bombshells like this.) So, I like it when the columns on this site's homepage are roughly equal in length – or, if one has to be longer, it should be the left right one, since it's the "main" column. [Redesign! –Ed.] Which means that I was a little dismayed this morning when I realized that the "main" column was shrinking because all the posts were too old. I didn't have anything good to say – my brain is still buzzing with poker, poker, poker! – and I knew it wouldn't be long before the column evaporated entirely.

Enter: Arksie.

I finally had a chance to catch up on this week's Average Mulder column over at the Athletic Reporter:

If You Like Sports, You Need TiVo [Athletic Reporter]

Arksie has done a marvelous thing here, finding a way to shoehorn the glorification of TiVo into a sports context so he can put it on his site. Of particularly notable excellence is this passage, comparing DirecTV to other satellite options. "...the reason why TiVo (or any of the other, lesser digital satellite services you might subscribe to if you're a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, puppy-murdering Communist) is great in the first place..." Hear hear! Down with Echostar, and other off-brand DVRs. TiVo shall trounce you all!

His evaluation is spot-on: TiVo is absolutely essential. If you watch TV, you need TiVo. If you watch TiVo, you need DirecTV with TiVo. If you don't watch TV, more power to you, unless you're one of those "I don't own a TV" people for reasons other than not being able to afford a TV. If you choose not to own a TV because you think that says something about your level of intellectual discourse or your high standards of self-entertainment, I'll see you in hell. TV is what separates us from the animals (and people who lived before the 1950s, who – let's call a spade a spade – were pretty much indistinguishable from the animals). If you don't like much of what's on TV, great. Most of reality-obsessed network TV is pretty unwatchable. But there's still Alias and MST3K and Jon Stewart. If you flaunt your non-ownership of a television as a personality trait, you're a dope of the highest order. That's like saying, "Oh, no. I don't have a door. Doors are so hoi-polloi – I climb in and out through a window; window's are where it's really at." Anyway, get TiVo. A "Kill your television" bumper sticker is very cute as long as you still go home and watch Scooby-Doo reruns on Cartoon Network. An unironic "Kill your television" bumper sticker is pathetic, asinine, pseudo-intellectual snobbery. What are you, French?

(By the way, it's high time we started a charity for giving cheap TVs to people who can't afford them. I think we've reached a point in our civilization where we should be able to know someone's an asshole when they say, "I don't own a TV." Let's take the guesswork out of this.)

Okay, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, Arskie on TiVo. God bless him for singing the praises of TiVo. For a while, there was a lot of hubbub about how great TiVo was, and then everyone either had it or at least knew that it was amazing, so you stopped hearing about it. Why is that? Do poets stop poemming just because everyone knows sunsets are beautiful? No!

As far as the specifics, I should say that, while his trick for watching live sporting events commercial-free is a very important one, there's one step he could cut out.

So, what you can do, particularly if you're watching an unimportant mid-season baseball game or any college basketball game, is leave TiVo on whatever channel the game's on, go back and watch something you've recorded for a half-hour, go back to the game, back TiVo up a half-hour, and start watching the game commercial-free. If and when you catch up to live, just do it again.

That works, and works well, but what you really want to do is pause live TV before you dig into your Now Playing list and select something pre-recorded to watch for 30 minutes. Then, when you're done viewing that, you return to live TV and (as long as no more than 30 minutes have elapsed), live TV is still paused, right where you left it. No messy rewinding (or waiting!). And, if you're concerned about going more than 30 minutes, you can always TiVo the live event you're watching. If you're planning to delete it almost as soon as it ends anyway, the disk space hit is nominal to just TiVo it for that brief period, and – if it's an important game at all – this saves you from accidentally changing the channel, or if you have to drive your pregnant wife to the hospital 25 minutes into your paused time.

And he's got it wrong (slightly) on TiVo Suggestions (tm). ("It's no skin off your nose; you just delete it.") You don't have to delete those; TiVo will do it for you. If you want, you can give a "thumbs down" to those which displease you, to help educate TiVo to fetch fewer programs like that in the future. But TiVo Suggestions are the first things TiVo deletes to record new programs, so spending your time deleting them makes for a tidier Now Playing list, but it's entirely unnecessary from a disk space standpoint.

It's about time more people took time to extol TiVo's virtues. TiVo is amazing. TiVo will change your life – even if you don't watch much television. TiVo absolutely revolutionizes the way you watch TV, whether live or recorded, and in many ways changes the way you think about the world. The concept of time is entirely redefined in a post-TiVo world. (Seriously.) And it provides such freedom, also. TiVo is like Neo. TiVo is the One. TiVo will set you free. No more rushing home to catch Arrested Development. Tell TiVo you want it, and it will be ready for you. No more worrying, "Did I set the VCR?" If The West Wing is new, TiVo will get it; if not, it won't. You don't even have to check. Your life is, once again, yours. Plus, I find myself very accustomed to the 8-second "instant replay" feature. I'm always trying to use it on TVs at non-TiVo households, or on my car radio. TiVo gets into your brain and lives there. Arksie is damn right; what are you doing without it?

(I should mention, by the way, that he makes the life of a Photoshop guru sound a lot better than it really is.)

There. Right column, take note. I think we've established who the real boss is around here.