Introducing The Newest Member Of Our Family

“So what’d you do on Father’s Day, Ferrett?” you may ask.  And the answer was this:

Yes, if you’ll recall, Gini and I needed a new television because the old one – which was perfectly good – simply had aged out. We bought it in 2003, in the days before HDMI had been invented, so we couldn’t play the PlayStation 4 on it without getting headaches from the wavery converter box.
And if we’re gonna go big, we went big. The old television, known as the Monster Penis System because I couldn’t stop talking about its size, was 55″.
This is 70″.

We did ultimately decide to get the 4K Ultra HD, because despite all the charts showing us how we could not possibly see the difference between that and the regular HD at ten feet away, we totally could. The colors on this are more vibrant, the darks darker. And maybe that was a trick of the showroom, or maybe it’s because this television attempts to interpolate pixels to give a sort of “HD-and-a-half” effect, but damn, the quality is nice.
We spent most of the day setting it up, because the installation had all sorts of problems: a large television already in place, a complex setup we didn’t want to tear down and recreate, the fact that the old TV needed no stand and this television needs a stand with, as it turned out, a mount.
Fortunately, all my days at StarCityGames had trained me how to deal with rollouts. I approached it like a programmer, ensuring we could roll back if anything went wrong with minimal fuss: first, we build the stand to put it on. Then, we’d turn it on and use its NetFlix app to ensure that wireless connectivity worked and the picture was intact. Then we hooked it up to our sound system to ensure it was compatible…
And when it was done, we had this:

It is incredibly large. Unfeasibly large. We are, sadly, getting used to its extreme width, but for now we’ll occasionally walk into the room and be surprised how this monolithic wall of black is dominating our space.
There was no doubt as to our first movie, of course.

And the thing is, watching Star Wars on Blu-Ray, we noticed details we’d never seen before – mostly in the background. The world is so delightfully dinged and scuffed that we kept pointing at wear patches on the hatches, places where the paint had rubbed off, and by God, notice how Threepio has some stray wires sticking out of his back that have pulled free? (And man, Alec Guinness in hi-def? Hot.)
And Erin brought me beer, with perhaps the sweetest card I’ve ever gotten:

So we drank Radler and moved on to the bourbon and then whooped as we watched Star Wars and then I whipped her butt at Mortal Kombat and talked to Amy via FaceTime.
It was one of the nicest days I’ve had.