I Loves My TiVo

Written 13 August, 2009

I Loves My TiVo

I didn't see much television in the '90s (too busy), but I more than made up for it in the early years of this century. Thanks to Turner Classic Movies and Netflix, I saw all the films that had been on my dance card for many years-- wonderful old movies like Nights of Cabiria and Black Orpheus and Orphans of the Storm and Key Largo and newer ones I'd missed at the theater. I watched CDs of the TV shows I'd missed in the 90s and Australian and English mini-series and foreign films and documentaries of every type. I would be in front of the television for hours.

Then came Second Life.

Fortunately, one of my last significant acquisitions before coming the land of virtuality had been a TiVo-- a digital recorder. It was something I had long wanted and finally purchased-- and I got it set up just in time.

For, you see, my advent into Second Life ended my days of extended television watching.

I no longer sat in the living room evenings and weekends; instead I was upstairs skydiving and buying land and going dancing and struggling to learn the building tools of Second Life.

If not for the TiVo, I would have missed every one of "my shows." But with it, I was able to save them and time shift them, watching them in snatches as I prepared breakfast or while wasting a few minutes before leaving for work or when getting ready to go to bed. In this way I was able to empty the TiVo as fast as it filled up. I watched The Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica and E.R. and Crossing Jordan (until they were gone); nowadays I watch Lost and NCIS and Sons of Anarchy and Rescue Me and The Closer.

I have a television in my home office, but I've not turned it on since 2006; I find Second Life just too immersive. Instead, I watch television shows in world on my second monitor with Sweetie (who watches at the same time wherever her dangerous duties have taken her)-- and sometimes we screen movies in world, hugged up in our free cuddle chair at the House of 1000 Pleasures.

That's great, but you know what?

I loves my TiVo too!