leveling up our living room
Ealasaid and I had our first anniversary a couple of weeks ago. Our "paper" anniversary, I guess it's called - though I couldn't think of anything I especially wanted that was made out of paper. "Innumerable twenty-dollar bills", I guess... though I think U.S. currency is actually mostly cotton-based, so that was out.
So anyhow: in lieu of exchanging anniversary presents, we decided to communally upgrade our living room TV from "adequate" to "the largest television that we were physically capable of extracting from Costco". This is literally true - note the eight femtometers of clearance inside the vehicle. Mind you, not that we had the presence of mind to actually check that the TV would fit before we had it in the parking lot; it is only through sheer idiot chance that everything worked out so non-tragically.
The pics tell the story: old and busted; new hotness. Given the (lack of) size of our apartment, it is a terrifyingly large television - one should probably not be viewing a 50" TV from a distance of six feet. Then again, achieving the "optimal" viewing distance would likely involve burrowing through a wall into the neighbor's living room; the present setup is probably the more amenable of those two options.
(This is the portion of the post originally dedicated to the hours-long gnashing-of-teeth ordeal required to get the Rock Band lag calibration into some semblance of adequacy. But apparently, in contrast with every other HDTV I have ever had the misfortune of playing on, I got everything spot-on awesome within fifteen minutes or so. So never mind.)
So anyhow: in lieu of exchanging anniversary presents, we decided to communally upgrade our living room TV from "adequate" to "the largest television that we were physically capable of extracting from Costco". This is literally true - note the eight femtometers of clearance inside the vehicle. Mind you, not that we had the presence of mind to actually check that the TV would fit before we had it in the parking lot; it is only through sheer idiot chance that everything worked out so non-tragically.
The pics tell the story: old and busted; new hotness. Given the (lack of) size of our apartment, it is a terrifyingly large television - one should probably not be viewing a 50" TV from a distance of six feet. Then again, achieving the "optimal" viewing distance would likely involve burrowing through a wall into the neighbor's living room; the present setup is probably the more amenable of those two options.
(This is the portion of the post originally dedicated to the hours-long gnashing-of-teeth ordeal required to get the Rock Band lag calibration into some semblance of adequacy. But apparently, in contrast with every other HDTV I have ever had the misfortune of playing on, I got everything spot-on awesome within fifteen minutes or so. So never mind.)