Twat to the Future

As much as I love having gadgets, toys and new technology, I hate buying them. No matter what you’re buying, a computer, TV or Optimus Prime, there’s hundreds of different options to take into consideration, a thousand online reviews letting you know about what’s important, and tens of gormlesstwonks stood around in Currys not knowing what you’re talking about.

And of course ten minutes after you buy it, it’s obsolete.

Got a standard definition telly? It’s not even worth keeping as a doorstop, even if it’s one of those enormously chunky ones that take up half your living room. The computer that you deliberated over for hours in 1996 and spent nearly a month’s salary on? Won’t even playFreecell. It’s got less power than a deck of cards.

I’ve always resisted buying things too soon, since they cost a fortune – remember when DVD players were hundreds of pounds? You can get them with a box of cornflakes now. Blu Ray (which is a rubbish name, by the way) will go the same way, as will whatever follows it, forcing you to upgrade your movie collection again by 2020.

This time though, I’ve jumped on the HD TV bandwagon quite early. Not as early as all those people who had it three years ago, but still, earlier than most people I know. WatchingHD television has turned me, sadly, into a Boring Twat.

These are Things I Do That I Wish I Didn’t:

1) Watch a program in HD and then switch to the equivalent Old Style Standard Definition channel to “ooh” and “aah” like a chimp at a firework display over the difference.

2) Watching channels just because I can see them in more detail. The first thing I watched was a documentary about starving children in Africa. My first thought: “whoa, you can really see the flies on his head.”

3) Pausing Sky+ when a particularly impressive shot comes on and boring the bloody arsehole off everyone else by showing them.

4) Say things like “you can really see the detail in his hair”. Like it matters. Like that’s what’s been holding me back all these years.

I fucking hate me.

For the entire time I’ve had a TV, the quality has never been a problem, I’ve never complained about it – apart from when ITV inexplicably broadcast sport in mosaic-vision. Now I can’t watch old TV without thinking that it could be so much better.

Looking at SkyHD now, it’s almost entirely something that can be reminisced about on “I Love the 2000s” with insincere talking heads in the future. They’d say something like…

“I remember when you only got 8 HD channels, and they were all over the place so you couldn’t just skip between them. And they were all labelled as “HD” too, because they had SD versions of the same channels. Remember SD? It was as bad as black and white, only with more colours.”

And they’d be twats too.

Don’t do it, don’t upgrade anything, don’t buy an iPhone, don’t go HD, and don’t get a jetpack. At least until everyone else has, yeah?