I am going to start a weekly update feature, posted most weeks on Friday or Saturday, that will include general topics of stuff that is going on. This week will mostly be talking about television, though they may not be as unified in the future.

New television arrives today! I’m pretty jazzed, though feeling sad and a little bit guilty that about the functional television in the basement. I mean, that TV is… fine. But I do a lot of my television interaction through a computer, and that’s increasingly difficult with that old machine attached to it, and on a CRT display.

We’re going to be getting DirecTV soon, and so it’s one of those “do it now or make things really complicated down the line” things.

So I’m getting a new TV for the living room and moving the one there downstairs. The Vizio I currently have was a great value, but has certain blind spots. One of which is that it has bad SD display from cable/satellite. Which, if we’re getting cable/satellite, kind of matters.

A frustrating thing is that new TVs don’t have VGA inputs, and VGA is what I use to attach the computer. The media PC does have a DisplayPort, which can convert into HDMI. So I got the applicable cable and was, alas, disappointed by the results. The video looks okay, but the Windows interface looks less than stellar. I am hoping that this is a Vizio problem, and that the new Samsung will look better. The Vizio has the VGA outlet, and so I can continue to use them for that TV.

Another alternative is that I got a bad cable. Cables matter a lot for such things. While I didn’t skimp, I also apparently did not get a 4K HDMI. Now, the TV and computer are 1080, but it’s possible that you might want to overshoot on something like this?

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Speaking of which, I discovered PBSKids.org, which is pretty great with kids’ videos. It also has some Lain favorites, like a Curious George cartoon and Cat in the Hat cartoon. I have mixed feelings about the latter as it has Cat and Fish as friends (or sort) and Cat and kids (and fish) going on adventures together just doesn’t seem right to me.

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I’m presently working my way through Arrow and Flash, though that’s been stalled somewhat. Enjoying it greatly, though the melodrama of Arrow is sometimes grating.

I’m audioreading Isaac Asimov, which I’m enjoying. Though Matt Yglesias recently kickstarted a conversation about the French Reign of Terror, which turned me on to a bunch of podcasts I want to listen to. I wish that had happened before I jumped back in to Asimov.

Last week I listened to the TV show Revenge, to its conclusion. It was a worthy enough conclusion on a silly show. SPOILER: I’m struck that I cannot remember a case where a protagonist that I didn’t entirely expect to get a happy ending got a happy ending that by any objective assessment she completely did not deserve.