Life and Times

spiegelman:

merlin:

Steely Dan - Making of “Peg”

I will never get sick of watching this. 

So, maybe just take a minute and revel in the pure bleaching juggernaut that is my suburban male whiteness. 

You’re welcome.

Ok, so this is of some small significance, and only fitting that it came at the unintentional prompting of Merlin Mann. Here’s what happened.

I was watching TV with the iPad on my lap, as I’m wont to do these days. Correction: I wasn’t really watching the television, it was just kind of on. It was a movie, The Door in the Floor, which was only on because it was on after the last movie I’d been watching, Sherlock Holmes, which I’ve seen a million times but it was the most palatable of things on at that moment and damnit I just wanted the TV on.

With the movie in the background, I’m thumbing through Tumblr on my iPad, and I find Merlin’s post. I have that “I’d like to watch that” impulse. And then a new connection is made in the circuitry of my brain. I have an Apple TV. This is a YouTube video. I can “throw” the video from my iPad to the TV. So I clicked the TV over to the Apple TV input, I pressed play, and then the little AirPlay button. And there, part of a Steely Dan documentary was on my television set.

This was a completely organic impulse. I wasn’t trying too hard to make an over-the-top box stream the Internet to my TV, as I’ve done a hundred times before, forcibly, awkwardly. But this set of circumstances —knowing the TV was on but really reading Tumblr, stumbling upon something that appealed to me, already having the Apple TV set up, knowing how it works— it just all came together as if this is how it’s supposed to be, and then I streamed an Internet video on my television like it ain’t no thing.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. It was like impulse buying. Instead of flipping channels, something on a parallel system competed for my attention, and I clicked a couple things and boom, Jeff Bridges disappears and Donald Fagen takes his place. All I know is that this is the first time I’ve done this honestly, authentically, naturally. 

If the Internet and television are going to converge, we need to know a lot more about user behavior, what with all these new devices and how people actually want them to interact. I had no idea I wanted them to work in this fashion.