theholtsite

Jill and I haven’t owned a TV for years now. I guess I’m kind of proud of not watching TV. Most of it stinks.

The news is a joke and consists of 30 second sound bites. Liberal or conservative? I don’t even know, I just know that watching it always seems biased – not that there’s enough time to even find out on a given story. It seems like things are so ratings-based that they have to use every second to pique our wandering interest. I am admittedly poorly informed as I don’t seek other, more dependable news sources online. But I know that better sources are out there.

Next we have TV shows. Most of it’s crap. When you do find the occasional show that’s worth watching, you have to watch one episode a week. Invariably (to keep your interest) these single episodes end with some kind of cliff hanger.

During the episode, you are interrupted every five minutes with annoying commercials trying (at high volume) to get you to buy things you don’t need. After not watching commercials for years, they bug the heck out of me when I see them. I simply can’t understand why people put up with them.

We also live in a small space. When you have a desk, couch, kitchen table, and music area in one room, things can get cramped even without a TV. And, being a minimalist, I sought a way to use my nice big computer screen rather than having two big screens in one room for different purposes.

Jill and I do watch a fair amount of movies and even the occasional TV show we like. We get the entire season for free from the local library (you can request just about anything and they’ll get it) or from a friend that bought the season. Then we’d just stick the DVD’s in the computer and watch on the “big” screen. With the advent of libraries that can get anything, Netflix, and iTunes, getting all your entertainment on the computer is quite possible.

With the library/friend method you have NO COMMERCIALS. How blessed. You can watch two episodes in a night if you want. It’s also free. The only downside is the stuff you’re watching isn’t current. This is only a problem if you’re the kind of person that watches TV all the time and wants to talk about the latest episode of x show every week.

Anyway, we used this method for years with a big computer screen, and it worked fine. But recently Jill got a new couch and wanted something so that we could watch movies without moving the couch every time. So we bought a projector. It hooks up to the computer and projects to the other side of the room from the couch. My friend Jeff let us borrow a nice screen that my brother-in-law Steve helped us mount to the wall. We still don’t have a TV, and we still feel like we’re in a private movie theater when we watch! It also takes up very little space.