happy thursday you guys <33 guess what just happened recently ! >A<

i have lived at my grandparents' home for quite some time (had a 4/5 yr period where i moved out to live on my own, then came back lol). in that time, they've always had cable of some kind . i even remember 'Tivo' and the little logo of it being so cute ! they went from that to directTV to spectrum, probably some other ones i'm forgetting . i even used to have a DVR in my bedroom when i was growing up, recording all the cartoons and anime i wanted lol . my gma had dozens of dozens of DOZENS of recordings of naked and afraid, gunsmoke, family feud, NCIS, you name it, she would even record the news so she could fast forward thru the commercials and watch it on her own time !

my mom gave them the netflix password, my grandad has amazon prime video or whatever it's called, they got a firestick thingy, they even look at stuff on youtube sometimes . but when i walk past the living room and the TV is on, it's almost always on something that was recorded or live cable TV . i joked around that i was thankful they watched the news because that's how i would be in the know about current events almost immediately, usually through me just trying to have a normal convo with my family and overhearing something tragic .

decades of cable TV later, my grandad finally did the unthinkable ...he returned the cable TV box !! days before the super bowl at that !!! i couldn't believe it ! no more DVR, no more almost infinite amount of family feud to choose from on a casual day !! he switched the living room TV into roku TV !! augh, it's the same shit they show at my job on their TVs !!!

but yk what-i don't blame him for doing it ! because why is cable TV almost $260 a MONTH ???? that's what finally tipped him over to leaving entirely .

he held on for a long time-we used to have DVRs in all the rooms of the house except the sewing room and bathrooms-even the kitchen had a DVR lmao ..so he downgraded to only one, and that was fine for a while, but the prices just kept going up . i had no idea it had gotten to the level of someone's car insurance-$260 is around how much i have to pay for my studio every month, i can't imagine paying that much just for cable !

even all the memories i made through TV (i feel like if i wasn't such a TV kid i wouldn't have wanted to become an animator so bad lol), the constant of it all, thinking it would always be there like how i thought they'd always have a landline at their house (something else that got too expensive to keep !!), i don't think it's worth that much monthly . but i had stopped looking at TV as much a long time ago-it was my grandparents i was worried about .

to my surprise tho, they said it was ok ! my gma said this would give her more time to read and work on crossword puzzles . my grandad feels like he can get the same stuff on the fire stick that he did with cable and they can still watch the news even if they can’t record it to watch later lol

but yeah, end of an era honestly ! i'm going to miss it a little but i'll have the memories of it . i'm thankful i used one of my relax days earlier in the month to spend it with my gma watching a recorded episode of naked and afraid, it was nice ! ;v; i might try to pirate the old shows we would watch on cable just to get that feeling again if i ever miss it too much lmao . who even still has cable anymore ??? i can't say we have it now !

-Spiry