When it comes to consumer electronics, I was raised as an early adopter, albeit in a slipshit, scattershot way. I distinctly remember, as a child of five, having a Pong machine hooked up to the TV, disconnected only after my screeching tantrum that the white line dudes in tennis blocked, but the front dudes in hockey didn’t. Well, either that or after my three-year-old brother poured a glass of apple juice into the thing to hear it crackle, because early adoption in my house didn’t include sippy cups. As far as my parents were concerned, anything remotely resembling a nipple didn’t belong in the mouth of any boy over the age of eighteen months or under the age of I Do. Like I said, we were scattershot about these things.
When I was ten my dad came home with an Atari, and this was back when it was still called the Atari Video Computer System. Ostensibly it was because my brother and I had been helpful around the house while my mom was in a full leg cast after a skiing accident, but after watching my dad gleefully mowing down racks of space invaders, I think he would have said it was a reward for not being thalidomide flipper children if it meant getting the damn thing into the house.
We got our first VCR – a top-load Fisher VHS with a wired remote control – a full two years before the mass VCR adoption of 1985, although to get that one, my parents made me and my brother kick in a hundred bucks each from our college funds, which was real money back then; something like five hundred modern dollars, or eighteen modern Euros. After I saw WarGames and wouldn’t stop whining, our first computer – a TI994A with a tape drive and a 300 baud modem – followed suit, but only after I promised to learn to program and “don’t nuke Pomona”… although when my dad found out that it was a Democratic city, he let that last caveat slide.
But at the same time, certain consumer electronics were scorned in my house. We didn’t get a microwave oven until I was seventeen because my mom was convinced that they wouldn’t catch on, so she’d never be able to get it fixed if it broke. We didn’t have a remote control for the TV until I took the initiative to hook one up when I was nineteen because my father refused to pay the cable company for something he got for free when we first got cable (i.e., a press-button manual channel switcher on a ten-foot cord that was state of the art in 1979… and yes, we were the first on the block to get cable, too).
So while I had my first email address in 1985 and knew Basic programming back when the neighbors thought that ASCII was how my mom busted her leg, I still had to wait 45 minutes for frozen bagels to defrost in the oven, which gave me plenty of time to get up off my ungrateful ass and change the channel for my dad.
When I reached adulthood and started earning a living of my own, that spirit of early adoption stuck with me, only I swore that I wouldn’t be deterred by pesky fears of forced obsolescence or rebuying things I’ve already purchased. In that spirit, I came home on Friday night with a brand-spanking new Blu-Ray player and the newly remastered Godfather Trilogy.
“I thought you were afraid that hi-def discs wouldn’t catch on,” my girl sighed when I brought my bounty upstairs. “Besides, didn’t you say that you probably wouldn’t be able to see the difference between regular DVD and Blu-Ray without expensive laser eye surgery?”
“But… that was before the Godfather came out! Sonny Corelone, getting whacked in DTS surround sound! Fredo getting whacked in 1,080 lines of video resolution!”
“That’s an awful lot of ‘whacked’ to be hyping for a new video player,” my girl said, “If there’s porn in that bag…”
“Like hell; that’s what I have the computer for. Besides, you’d have to be a Goddamned fool to watch porn in this kind of crystal clarity. Porn is supposed to be a fantasy, and it’s hard to suspend your disbelief when you can see the girl’s implant scars, needle tracks and despair-filled eyes.”
“Fine,” she sighed, “But you are not moving around the home theater system and spending two hours cursing that you can’t find connectors and can’t reach outlets until tomorrow. Besides, if I have to spend nine hours that include Sofia Coppola trying to speak coherently, all while you drunkenly rant about how fucking perfect the picture is, I want to spend tonight playing Rock Band while I still have the chance.”
“You’ve got it,” I said eagerly, switching the TV and receiver inputs to the XBox 360 settings. “Trust me: once you see how this thing performs, you’ll never regret it. Besides, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, there is absolutely no risk in being an early adopter when it comes to consumer electronics. Nothing can go wrong.”
I pressed the power switch on the XBox… which beeped and have me the Red Ring of Death.
“Huh!” my girl said, “Would you look at that! Refresh my memory: doesn’t the Playstation 3 not have the same crippling hardware problems that the 360 has? And doesn’t it have a Blu-Ray player built into it? And didn’t it come out about five months after you bought the 360, but you didn’t want to wait for it, because the 360 ‘looked fucking awesome’?”
“…shut up.”
So do me a favor and buy a Blu-Ray player and a whole shitload of movies. Make it a viable format for movies. Because while I am accustomed to looking fucking retarded, looking that way while completely sober is a new and disturbing experience.
[tags]Blu-Ray, XBox 360, Red Ring of Death, dark humor, satire[/tags]
