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Islands in the streaming

The people who own the house we’re staying in have a complicated setup for their TV, with at least five different remote controls, and so it took us almost a week to figure out how to turn the TV on and watch anything. (It only took me three days to figure out how to turn the TV on and stare at a blank screen.)

They also have a Samsung TV, which has that annoying feature of playing an earsplitting fanfare every time you turn it on or off. "Wake up everyone! It’s 11pm and somebody just turned the TV off!"

On the positive side, they have an amazing surround sound system, with window rattling bass from behind the sofa, but on the negative we seem to be able to adjust only the volume of everything apart from the subwoofer. Which means you can make the dialogue as quiet as you want, but the whole house will still shake to the rumbles of ‘atmospheric’ sound effects. Strangely, the kids are still asleep.

They have Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Max, which covers almost the entire gamut of streaming services. Buying those individually is somewhere between $15 and $30 each per month, so that’s maybe $60 per month of stuff that you have only 168 hours in the week to watch. It’s dangerous because there’s little overlap between services, and if our children got obsessed with one program, we’d never be able to stop using that service… Which reminds me, as we’re not using it, we should probably cease our Netflix subscription until September.

Anyway, today we watched the latest Disney animation, Luca, which I fell asleep halfway through (I’d drunk some plum cider, so blame it on that) and after the girls went to bed, Loki, the latest Marvel TV spinoff series, which is fun but not compulsive viewing. Perhaps there’s something else starting with an L we can watch tomorrow.

Except tomorrow is another day that the girls will be deprived of TV, as we give them their birthday party in the park. Which means I have to boil some eggs for the egg and spoon race, something I’ve become insanely obsessed with in the last week. What madness is this?

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