For the record, I have a bunch of friends now who are home-brewing beer. I have never once liked anything any of them have produced. I haven’t tried any of Forrest’s own offerings, but when he solo scripts and produces the comic above, it is less than encouraging. On balance, I don’t like most beers, be they professionally and/or industrially crafted anyway. So perhaps I’m a poor test bench for these things.
I’ll stick to the charcoal porter I can almost never find anymore…
Without segue of any kind, now that I’m a few episodes into Star Trek Discovery I have downgraded from cautious enthusiasm to bemused ambivalence. The show just isn’t that good, but it’s still good enough, so I went and tried to solidify my hold on this content in my living room for the weeks that it’s available.
A cable subscription is out of the question. Paying a hundred and fifty dollars a month for a fire hose blasting outright poisonous shit into my house to try and catch an individual drop here and there that doesn’t suck just isn’t a business model. It’s abuse. Also, hook up a wattage meter to your decoder box. These things spend ninety-five percent of their lives consuming enormous amounts of electricity and emitting heat while doing no real work. My last cable decoder was less power-efficient than my vacuum cleaner, and I was told repeatedly that turning it off when I wasn’t using it was a contract-cancelling offense. So I cancelled my contract.
CraveTV is my sole recourse here in the frozen north. Now, I am not generally on board with giving the Bell Corporation any money. Those assholes are constantly pushing the envelope for pressuring government to enshrine their anti-consumer business practices in law. But delivering content on an ad-free, subscription streaming service is actually behavior worth encouraging. They also offer a free month trial, and a special deal to promote the very show I’m looking for, so I sign up on the website.
Took them less than a day to fuck it up, as Sunday night rolls around and there’s no fresh Trek in sight. In their defense, that’s actually CBS’s stupid fault. They reserve the day-off release of the show for their CBS All-Access service. Which of fucking course isn’t for Canadians. But then after fuming for twenty-four hours the nationally discriminated game time comes and goes and it turns out CraveTV has no Playstation 4 client. It’s impossible to use the service on that device.
I went so far as to ring up their support line only to be told by a condescending young lady that my TV box of choice isn’t, and I quote, “industry standard.” She then tried twice to interrupt me as I listed off all the other services available on the console, including her former competitor Shomi and goddamn Netflix, which is single-handedly the industry standard.
Just like with HBO Now, I am throwing my money at these idiots to buy their fucking content. You figured they’d be happy to oblige.
Ja.