Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The Third Week Without Internet!

I’m reaching the end of my second week without internet, and it is fast becoming unbearable.  Not only am I reduced to my emergency porn stash, left over from the days before Tubes, but I’m also forced to only play Steam games that don’t require a dedicated internet connection and have been played previously.  Meaning no new games, even singleplayer games, while I’m waiting for my internet to get set up.

Oh, also I have to leave my apartment to email my students, receive work from them or update the course website I made for them, so that’s great.

It’s been less an exploration of simpler times and more a series of exercises in frustration.  I’m also sick, so staying housebound and working from my apartment would be a perfect way to make my recovery productive, but unfortunately every time I want to get anything done on the internet I have to make a 30 minute commute on the New York subway (basically one giant disease factory) or run to a coffee shop in my new neighborhood (which, during the day, has a clientele consisting entirely of web designers and hipsters posing as web designers).

Gaming has been a total wash, with only a handful of games accessible offline (though the superlative Torchlight 2 and FTL have been two of them, and after two weeks of heavy play they’re still holding up nicely) and my Star Wars chores have gone entirely untended: I’ve missed out on two weeks worth of Black Hole commendations, a fucking crime in my mind, one that’ll delay my acquiring that fancy looking helmet I’ve been eying that much longer.  But what’s really shocked me is how dependent I’ve been on the internet for background noise to keep me from going insane.

Usually I’m consuming media on a regular basis.  Even though I don’t have a TV a combination of Netflix, The Daily Show and podcasts (all hail the glorious Earwolf website) make living alone a relatively noisy and informative experience.  But here, without the internet, I find that I am once again being asked to entertain myself.  What a crock of shit.

Luckily, back in the days before Netflix, I bought a collection of items called “Dee-vee-dees,” and these items play movies.  These DVDs are not subject to the cruel ministrations of connection speed, nor do they sometimes stop playing and require me to “refresh my browser” or “press a play button briefly” to get them to restart.  Sure, they do require occasional changing, which is a bother, but you do what ya gotta if you wanna watch all of Battlestar Gallactica during a seventy two hour period where you stop grading papers so that you can sit and wonder where your life went so very wrong that you should have to live with so much as a single packet coming or going from your home.

I’ve been revisiting the things I’d watch before Netflix gave me such profound variety, and I’ve gotta say, I used to have good taste.  Which brings me to a strange thought: the bevy of available shows on Netflix makes me watch absolute shit.  Thanks in large part to the fact that everything’s on there and, what the fuck, I’m paying for it, I’m now acclimated to watching truly terrible shows.

I just sat through The Wire and, despite some superlative work on the part of a few actors the writing in that show, the thing it received awards for, is pretty fucking bad, especially in later seasons.  There are golden moments, like the first season’s “Fuck” scene.  But one of my favorite scenes involves a character entering the grocery store to buy red ribbon in order to construct a serial killer case based on three unconnected murders over a number of years which, naturally, works out perfectly for the majority of the series, immediately after another character from an unrelated story thread walks out of the same grocery store and they pass each other without acknowledging the other’s existence as if to scream at the viewer THIS IS A REAL PLACE KAY? I watched a documentary about Maynard James Keenan growing wine which, in the end, turned into a documentary about documentary filmmaking.  Maybe.  Jury’s still out on what the fuck that was.  I watched the British IT Crowd which…alright, that was pretty good.  But my point is that I sift through recommended or acclaimed dross and I sift through it almost entirely because of Netflix’s bountiful supply.

So in a sense, this time without internet has been a boon.  Not because I’m getting more work done, far from it.  I’m still very adept at wasting time.  But because I am now profoundly aware of how little I care about what I watch on Netflix.  I can’t wait to get it back so I can watch some appallingly stupid stuff that people tell me is great.  I wonder if they have Entourage on it?

Oh, and I’ve also been reading more.