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forced to Bittorrent
Thursday, June 9 2011
I never got sick this past winter, not even so much as runny nose. It might be my first winter (at least on the East Coast) that I can say that about, though it's also possible I didn't get sick last winter either. Gretchen would credit this to my vegan diet, but I suspect it has more to do with the maturity of my immune system coupled with the infrequency with which I interact with other people. The other day, though, I began developing a mild sore throat, and by today I was experiencing discomfort when swallowing food. I looked at my throat in a mirror and my uvula and surrounding tissue had developed visibly inflamed blood vessels within them. I always make the mistake of looking up such symptoms in Google, and today as I was doing this I gradually felt myself becoming dizzy and nauseated. I was forced to lie down on the laboratory floor, where I soon broke out in a body-wide sweat.
Gretchen had a poetry reading way out in the northwestern Catskills (half-way to the Fingerlakes), and that left me alone in the house with my beer and trashy television. Intrigued by the developing narrative arc of this season of The Bachelorette, I'd tried to watch the past two episodes online at ABC.com, but this proved impossible. Usually when one watches archived video on a television network's website, the advertisements are brief and relatively non-intrusive, in keeping with the expectations and short attention spans of web users (whose media behaviors are very different from those of, say, the working stiffs who grab a beer and plop down on a sofa at the end of a day of mucking blood off the floor of a slaughterhouse). Not so with ABC.com. As near as I can tell, they subject the web viewer to the same punishing advertisement regime one experiences when watching live teevee. Worse still, there's no effective way to rewind or fast forward without immediately being subjected to 76 minutes of advertising. Well, I've have the web and DVR technology for far too long to put up with that shit. You can't stuff my tolerance for such annoyance back into the bottle of the early 1990s. It's like they're begging people to use Bittorrent. Hell, the torture might be great enough to get more people from my greying generation to start using it. It didn't take more than a couple hours to download the first and second episode of this season's The Bachelorette to my computer, where I could watch them (in HD) at my leisure, easily skipping past the filler and monotonous banter to focus on the juicy nuggets (such as the eviction of Tim the Drunk).
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