Post a random truth (about yourself)

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I love to watch TV.

I used to watch tv a bit but not much any more.

Even when I did, it was more of something when I didn't have something else to do, not as something I went out of my way to do.

It's all videos for me now. Among other things I got sick of waiting for them to air the stuff that I wanted to see. And they charge for live television in the UK.

In here we have 4 quality free to air television stations, and I watch them when I'm feeling low. There's something about having limited options that's appealing when my energy is already spent.

No subscriptions to catch up on
No endless browsing through the plethora of low quality programming.

If I catch a new episode of one of my favourites, great!
Otherwise I'm happy just to have the distraction.

Do you at least have ad free viewing for the paid live tv?
I'd be pretty mad if I paid to watch tv and still had to deal with ads.

I don't know if paid live TV is ad-free or not. It may be so. People who pay for such stuff as Sky television would know more about it than I do.

It's illegal in the UK to watch any live television at all without a BBC license, whether or not it's broadcast by the BBC, carries ads, or is paid for. It's ridiculous of course, and people are getting pretty sick of it. The rumour is that once the BBC's charter runs out in a few years the current arrangement will end.

One of the alternative options they're considering is even more unjust to people who don't want live BBC - to force everybody to pay for the BBC via a tax levy whether or not they watch any television at all. Just what the poor need in these austere times of benefit cuts and spiralling prices for essentials. Another is to make the BBC into a subscription service where you physically can't watch it without buying a decryptor. That's fairer but it's doubtful whether the BBC could get enough revenue to survive that way. I expect droves of people would simply not buy into the BBC but would get their telly from the free commercial broadcasters such as ITV.

Of course things have moved on since I last looked at live television. They have a few compromises between live and 100% on-demand, like "catchup" TV and channels that broadcast the same content as a live channel only 1 hour or more later. And of course there are hard disc recorders, and such things as DailyMotion and YouTube which are free to watch (and any ads can be blocked if you know how). There are probably also gizmos that will try to skip ads on recorded programs.

I hate paying my TV licence I do
And you don't even get a choice to opt out

I kind of like the idea of BBC being a subscription service. That way only people who watch it pay for it. As for its viability I think natural selection applies "only the strongest survive" which I think BBC fairs pretty well considering some solid programming lately.

I always avoid watching shows or documentaries or even reading things to do with autism and I didn't used to know why

But I think it's because I don't wanna see myself

Like I don't wanna be reminded because I have to survive an every day minefield and the only way I can do that is to just not even accept it's going on

But I'm actually going to sit down right this minute and watch "inside our autistic minds" on BBC iPlayer

Well, you can just stop buying the license and then either ditch live TV or take a chance that you don't get caught watching it.


I like that idea too, but I keep hearing that they'll not survive if they go that way. Not quite sure why. I gather PBS in America isn't doing well these days. I think they're funded by voluntary donations and don't carry ads. It's good to have a service that doesn't have ads but I suppose the theory is that it can't survive in a free market.

I'm not ditching my telly it's part of the furniture

No need to as long as it's got a socket for a laptop.

I almost left WP in Early 2007 after starting a thread about having more posts than members at the time. Someone I trusted said something nasty.

Well I'm glad they didn't drive you away. I remember somebody being nasty to you about talking about The Kinks, and I thought that was tacky of them, but one or two of us spoke up a bit in your defense, so it probably wasn't that.

I was thinking of leaving a while back when one or two people were saying nasty things, but I didn't in the end. It's important not to cave in and let the nasty people win.

I kind of left a few years ago too, but I'd never really meant to. It was a bit quiet on WP at the time and I just got bored, and busy with "real" life and something had to be ignored for a while. A moderator told me they were glad I'd decided to come back and I was surprised because as far as I was concerned I hadn't really left. Of course the topic reply notifications stopped coming in so they didn't jog my memory. But I wasn't far away.

My middle name is Talbot and according to Google it literally translates to "Messenger of Destruction".

As an adult I still use a dummy, it's one of my sensory items I use to satisfy an oral fixation. It's not a baby dummy, it's one made for adults.