Over the past few weeks I’ve binged the first season of two shows: Fallout, loosely based on the video game of the same name, and The Acolyte, the latest live action Star Wars series. The first season of Fallout, which aired on Amazon Prime, had an estimated budged of $150 million, while The Acolyte had a budget of roughly $180 million. Fallout currently has a 90% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes while The Acolyte has an abysmal 31% approval rating. What did Fallout do so right that The Acolyte failed out? A lot, actually.

In science fiction stories authors create fantastic worlds that can have any rules they dream up, but one of the most important things is that once those rules are established, they are consistent. It’s perfectly acceptable for an author to establishes a world where aliens can breathe underwater… but if one of those aliens later drowns it has to be explained to readers or viewers why. These types of stories have to stick to the rules they’ve created, otherwise the audience may feel confused, cheated, or frustrated when the rules change.

Fallout does a great job of this. Its post-apocalyptic setting is established early on. Groups of people known as “vault dwellers” avoided the effects of a nuclear war by living in underground bunkers, while the land above (the “wasteland”) has become a dangerous place full of fiends and ghouls who suffer from radiation (and worse). The season’s overarching plot involves a vault dweller named Lucy who must emerge from her vault and face adversity to rescue her kidnapped father. In the first episode we are introduced to two more major characters, Maximus (a squire serving in the militaristic Brotherhood) and “The Ghoul,” an undead gunslinger who crosses paths with both Lucy and Maximus and is after the same thing (which just so happens to be, quite literally, someone else’s head). Throughout the season the show uses flashbacks to flesh out the backstories of these characters. By the end of the season a lot of what viewers thought they knew was wrong, but everything fits together nicely.

The Acolyte tries to do many of these same things and, ironically, fails at most of them. The Acolyte tells the story of Force-sensitive identical twins, Osha and Mae, who were being raised by a coven of witches. A group of four Jedi arrive on the planet, stumble across the twins, and ultimately are involved in a deadly conflict with the witches. As a result of the conflict the witches are killed and the twins are separated, leaving each one to believe they were the sole survivor. One of the twins, Osha, leaves with the Jedi and attempts to become one herself only to fail. The other twin, Mae, spends the next fifteen years training under a Sith Lord with the intent of murdering the four Jedi who visited her planet as a child. So far, so good.

One of the biggest problems with The Acolyte is that it takes place in a world that has already been established. The rules of the Star Wars universe were firmly established back in 1977 although, god love ’em, they’ve been fiddling with them ever since. In the original trilogy it was established what Jedi could (and couldn’t) do through the means of the Force, but new Jedi powers keep appearing. In this series, the Sith Lord referred to as “The Stranger” is able to perform a “mind wipe,” in which he is able to make characters permanently forget about the existence of other characters, and even wipe decades of memories from their minds. That’s new! The Shadow also wears a helmet made of “cortosis,” a metal that shorts out lightsabers when they come in contact with it and repels the Force from penetrating it. Neat. But where was this metal in every other Star Wars film? Why doesn’t The Stranger wear an entire suit of armor made from the stuff? Or wrap his fortress in it? Why can’t the Force penetrate the helmet through the eye slits we’re shown?

Another thing both series have in common is the use of flashbacks. In Fallout, flashbacks are used to give backstories to the characters and explain to viewers how we got to where we are. In the main timeline we know there’s been a nuclear incent of some kind, but later, through flashbacks, we learn who was behind it. We learn each of the characters’ backstories, and ultimately, their motivations.

Again, The Acolyte does this completely wrong. The next to last episode of the season is a flashback to events that has already been explained and in many cases shown to views. One of the biggest complaints about 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story was that it retold events that viewers already knew about. In 1977’s Star Wars, Han Solo bragged about making the Kessel Run in “less than 12 parsecs.” In Solo… we watch Han make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. But, like, great — we already knew he could, because he already did. We also see him win the Millennium Falcon from Lando, a fact that was established in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. If you told viewers it happened, you don’t need to go back and show us it happened, too. The Acolyte revisits entire scenes for the sake of showing us that Jedi was hiding behind a tree the entire time. It feels a bit like Back to the Future Part II when one time-traveling Marty McFly goes back and revisits the first time-traveling Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, except in this case there’s very little to be gained from it.

Finally, we have the characters themselves. While characters in a story should not be one-dimensional, they should have clearly established traits and morals and stick to them; and, if they don’t, those decisions should be justified. Fallout’s Lucy is a vault dweller who’s been raised on the Golden Rule. When forced to shoot, she’ll shoot, but she complains about being kidnapped and tortured by saying “that’s not nice!” The Ghoul, on the other hand, is on a mission. He’s unwavering from it and merciless, almost like The Terminator. When we find out why, it all makes sense. Maximus is a military grunt who dreams of earning a coveted position as a squire so that someday he might earn an even more coveted position as a knight. He was rescued by a knight as a child and wants to become one — end of story. That doesn’t meant that the character has to be simple, but it means his motivations are. Maximus’s story arc is about become a knight. Period.

In The Acolyte we have four Jedi who have been covering up an event and lying to the Jedi Council about it for 15 years. It was a death that, at best was a Jedi defending himself and maaaybe swinging his saber a fraction of a second too early, and at worse was an accident. I mean, this is Star Wars. Luke destroyed the Death Star which, according to the book, had nearly two million people on board. Two million! Obi-Wan killed a guy in a cantina and cut off another guy’s arm. Where was that mind wipe stuff then? Star Wars was a rough universe that often put characters in kill-or-be-killed situations. Worse than all of that, the show makes the Jedi look like a bunch of bumbling doofs. They can’t solve a murder, half of them are getting murdered by an angsty teen, another Jedi — who had nothing to do with the original witch attack, he just happened to be there — feels so guilty about the whole affair that he’s talked into killing himself rather easily. It just goes on and on. These aren’t the rantings of an old man saying “the Jedi aren’t acting the way I want them to” — these are the rantings of an old man saying, “the Jedi aren’t acting like they do in every other movie.” Somebody, Force mind wipe me!

Throughout its first season, Fallout told a complete story. We got a beginning, a middle, and an end of a story arc with lots of little stories throughout the season. At the end of the season, our characters are off on their next adventure. If the next season comes to fruition I’ll watch it and if it doesn’t, I feel satisfied with how the story ended. In the same amount of episodes, The Acolyte left viewers with more questions than answers. By the end of the season, one of the good guys has turned bad, one of the bad guys has amnesia, the ultimate bad guy has escaped, we learn there’s an even badder bad guy, and the events of this episode are covered up just like the previous events were, for reasons unknown. Bah.

Amazon has announced that Fallout has been renewed for a second season. I look forward to watching it. There has been no word as to whether there will be a second season of The Acolyte or not. These new Star Wars shows are being created for people younger than me BY people younger than me, and if they do end up making another season of that show, I’ll try and let them enjoy it while I go watch something else.

They say death comes in threes, which means this past weekend we either got one extra, or there are two more to come. This past weekend we lost four great celebrities.

Shannon Doherty passed away at the age of 53 on July 13 from breast cancer. Doherty rose to fame as Brenda on the hit show 90210, and found a second home as Prue on the television series Charmed. For Gen Xers, Doherty will be remembered either as Rene, Brody’s girlfriend from Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, or as Heather Duke, one of the many Heathers from the 1988 film, Heathers.

Shelley Duvall passed away at the age of 75 from complications of diabetes. Duvall first broke through with her performance in 1977’s Annie Hall, but it was her rolls in The Shining and Popeye, both released in 1980, that made her a superstar. Duvall’s Fairy Tale Theater was a big hit as well. Duvall was instantly recognizable and will be missed.

Richard Simmons, famous workout guru, passed away at the age of 76. In the 1980s, Simmons had seemingly the entire country “sweatin’ to the oldies,” but he was more than just a workout legend — her was a personality. Simmons’ appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, among other talk shows, made him a star. Simmons was known for his generosity and his empathy, often cold calling people to support them in their weight loss journey. In later years Simmons became a recluse, leading to speculation about his health and living situation (check out the excellent podcast Missing Rickard Simmons). Over the past year Simmons squabbled with comedian Pauly Shore, who was been pitching a biopic based on Simmons’ life which will surely now get greenlit.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the world’s most famous sex therapist, passed away at the age of 96. Westheimer lived an interesting life. At the age of 10 she was sent from Germany to Switzerland to attend school. Her Jewish parents remained in Germany, and were both killed in concentration camps. At the age of 17 Westheimer joined the military and served as a sniper, only to be discharged at the age of 20 after being injured by an exploding shell while defending Israel in the Palestine War. All of this happened 30 years before Westheimer began her call in radio talk show, Sexually Speaking, in 1980. That show led to multiple television shows and becoming a part of pop culture. Westheimer went on to author 45 books, with another waiting to be published at the time of her death.

Each of these four people contributed to pop culture in their own unique way and will be missed.

In the middle of Boatfest — a gathering in West Virginia that has everything to do with retrocomputing and nothing at all to do with boats — I heard some commotion coming from the rear of the room. When I arrived there I found John “BoatOfCar” Shawler and Amigo Aaron, hosts of the popular Amigos Podcast, playing football. They were playing on an original Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console released back in 1972. The game is so primitive that it requires a third person to serve as the referee, and the field itself is depicted by an overlay that has to be stuck to the front of the television. If that sounds remotely entertaining to interesting to you… welcome to Boatfest.

For the third year in a row, I made the 1,000 mile drive from Oklahoma City to Hurricane, West Virginia. This trip marked the first major voyage of Big Rob’s Van, which did surprisingly well. Sure, a few parts fell off along the way, the radio doesn’t work reliably and we had to stop at a Home Depot in Kentucky to buy a 2×4 to perform an on-the-road repair to the bed, but it did get us to West Virginia and back, so we’ll call that a success. On our first night on the road we stopped for the night at Big Springs National Park, where I slept in the van and Susan camped in a tent. On the following day once we arrived in West Virginia, Susan headed off to a cabin for the weekend while I remained in Hurricane for the event, spending my days at the event and my nights inside the van (in a friend’s driveway, not down by the river).

Boatfest is a throwback to the computer club meetings of the 1980s. There are scheduled events, but the majority of the show is all about looking at the things people brought. The computers you will see at Boatfest range from old machines that you might remember seeing (or maybe even owned) back in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, all the way to obscure machines that only the nerdiest of the nerds have heard of. Sitting on the table next to me was a nearly pristine 386/16 computer running Windows 3.1 that everyone recognized. Two tables away was an Apple 1 motherboard kit sitting next to a PiDP-11, a miniature version of the PDP-11 minicomputer released in 1970. A couple of tables past that, a couple of young teens were battling one another in in a car game on the Dreamcast. One of the best things about Boatfest is that nobody brings the same things to share two years in a row, which means the show is completely different every single year.

Another great thing about Boatfest is that new people are always discovering it. Among this year’s new attendees were Marshall and Lee, locals who found out about the show. Marshall bought a Altair kit and was showing some simple games it could play with its LED lights and how to load software into it. On the other side of the table, Lee had three vintage portable computers including a TRS-80 Model IV portable that I hadn’t seen in many years and another “luggable” system running Lode Runner. Trust me, you have not played Lode Runner until you have played it using keyboard controls while staring at a tiny amber monitor. Heaven!

Petzel may have one-uppoed his Amiga Toaster demonstration from last year by showing off his NABU system from the 1980s. I’ll probably get this wrong, but the NABU was a computer from the 1980s that connected to your home cable connection and was able to download software that way. The updated system Petzel was demoing had a Raspberry Pi simulating the original back end, allowing new software and games to be downloaded and played. It was yet another example of a computer system I had never heard of, and yet somehow there were three of them in the room.

There are a few events that have become regular staples at Boatfest. Frank, Jason, and L. Curtis Boyle were holding court at the front of the room, doing repairs for RetroRewind. Anyone with broken gear is welcome to bring it to the show and the guys will do their best to repair it on the spot for free (minus the cost of parts of course). Several podcasts associated with the show including the Amigos, ARG Presents, and my own Sprite Castle took turns doing live shows. Finally on Saturday night was the auction. Anyone attending the show is invited to bring items from their personal collection and put them up for auction. Many people throw in an item or two and donate the proceeds towards either the show or the charity the show is associated with.

I didn’t have as much time or space to pack for the show as I had hoped and so for this year’s auction I only brought (and sold) some boxed DOS games from my personal collection. I really had no expectations when it came to pricing and was more interested in them finding new good homes than the amount they sold for; that being said, I made enough to cover a few tanks of gas in the van for the trip home. I am constantly surprised at the amounts some of the items in the auction seem to command. It seems like computers that mostly work but still need a few repairs sell for for than completely working systems! I have a few non-working Apple II computers and a few other items that I am already planning to bring to next year’s show.

Another Saturday night tradition that has developed is the bringing, sharing, and consumption of adult beverages. There were multiple spirits available to imbibe, including yet another jar of West Virginia moonshine that was smooth enough to be dangerous. At the far other end of classy, I found a bottle of Dill Pickle Flavored Vodka at the local liquor store, which I picked up and challenged people to drink. It was as tasty as you might imagine dill pickle flavored vodka to be.

Those who hadn’t already started their trips home gathered on Sunday for a picnic thrown by the Amigos crew. There were hamburgers, hot dogs, brats, and plenty of sides for everyone. As Susan (who had returned from the cabin and joined us for lunch) and I were sitting at a picnic table enjoying a hot dog, on the other side of the gazebo we could hear a loud conversation about the evils of Adobe’s licensing. Only at a Boatfest picnic!

I had a great time looking at and playing with all the old computers, but the highlight of the show for me is reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. Thanks to everyone who brought things to demonstrate at Boatfest or just stopped by the show to check things out. Every year on the drive home from Boatfest I begin brainstorming about new things to bring to next year’s show and I’ve already come up with a good one. It seemed to me everybody in attendance had a good time, and assuming there’s another show in 2025, I will definitely be there!

What do our Visio television, a set of DJI wireless microphones, and a GE washer/dryer combo have in common? Over the past couple of months, all of them have broken.

Back in the day I used to think that brand names were really important, and still do to a certain extent. When you spend a little more on name brand items, along with that name comes better quality. The JVC VCR I use to capture VHS tapes is fifteen years old and still working great. I can’t imagine a, you know, Daewoo unit lasting as long.

But the problem with appliances and devices today is that the companies selling them don’t make the components. I’ve always had good luck with Samsung televisions, but less than half of all Samsung televisions use Samsung displays. That’s not all that surprising. Apple makes 0% of the components that go into an iPhone.

So when you’re comparing brands and trying to decide between JVC and Daewoo, it’s likely that each of them have purchased third-party components (maybe even from the same supplier) to build devices. Now, part of what you’re paying for is quality control — we hope (or would at least like to think) that someone like JVC uses better parts and does more testing than an inexpensive brand. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. But recently, I’ve discovered that there’s something more important to me than the names on the box, and that is:

How easy is it to get repaired and/or get replaced if it breaks?

In all of the instances above, things went great. The $400/55″ Visio television Susan bought for the condo in DC and brought back home with her developed a problem with the display after only 13 months. Armed with only a model number and a prayer, I contacted their tech support and after a couple of hours of troubleshooting they told me to keep the TV and mailed me a check for the price of the television. My DJI wireless microphones stopped working and after contacting their company they cross-shipped me a new pair, no (a few) questions asked. Last week, our six-month-old GE washer/dryer combo unit stopped working. It’s under warranty and they’ll be fixing it next week free of charge, which is pretty generous considering the problem appears to be related to the handfuls of cat hair the repairman pulled out of the filter box…

My other “insurance card” comes from Amazon. I’ve ordered so many questionable items from Amazon, from a solar-rechargeable power band (fine print said it would take a week in the sun to recharge) to a large, off-brand power station (stopped working within the first month). As long as you’re willing to haul it up to Kohl’s or one of their other shipping partners, you can send almost anything back to Amazon within their return window.

Name brands have always been important to me, but being able to easily return things has become just as important, if not more.

It’s been a long time since I attended a pop culture-style convention (think “Comic-Con”), and I was super excited to hear GalaxyCon was coming to Oklahoma City Memorial Day weekend. Susan, I, and the kids all spent some time at GalaxyCon this weekend and boy was there a lot of things to see and do!

Like many conventions, GalaxyCon has many events around the country each year and the Oklahoma City event took place at the Oklahoma City Convention Center in the heart of Oklahoma City, just south of the Paycom center and connected to the Omni Hotel. Last year Susan and I attended the Oddities and Curiosities Expo in the same location, but that show only took up half the convention floor space. GalaxyCon not only filled the entire space but had panels up on the second floor!

We saw kids who were six and adults in their sixties dressed in costume. There were costume contests at the convention, but a lot of people just enjoy dressing up. We recognized some of the costumes like Napoleon Dynamite and Mr. T, but a lot of them seemed like videogame characters we didn’t recognize. We sure recognized this pint-sized bounty hunter who was outside the convention, getting his jet pack fitted before entering.

The inside of the convention center was a bit overwhelming at first until we got the “lay of the land” so to speak. Essentially, the convention was split into the celebrity autograph section, the vendor/booth section, and the special event section. The video game and arcade section were in another room, and all the speaking panels were in rooms upstairs. There was no shortage of things to see and do at the show!

Susan and I walked through the celebrity autograph/meet-and-greet area a few times. Autographs seemed to range between $40 and $80, depending on the celebrity with the biggest stars commanding the biggest prices. Above you can see the line of people waiting to meet George Takei (Sulu from Star Trek). I was embarrassed by how many of the celebrity names I did not recognize, but there were plenty of people lined up to meet many of them so I was in the minority. I’m not sure how many celebrities were present but I would estimate that it was somewhere around 50-60. For professional wrestling fans, there was an entire row featuring Jeff Hardy, Lex Luger, Jerry “The King” Lawler, Mick Foley, and a few others. Some of the bigger names we saw were Chris Parnell (Saturday Night Live) and Butch Patrick (Eddie Munster). One of the funniest things we heard was Joey Fatone being identified as “that guy from Impractical Jokers” instead of “that guys from N’SYNC.”

Also in the celebrity/guest area was my pal Guy Hutchinson, who was sitting next to Dana Snyder and Andy Sipes. We were able to chat with each of them for a few minutes there but there was always someone waiting behind us in line, so we tried not to take up too much of their time!

Next up was the vendor area. There were over a hundred different booths filled with artwork, toys, crafts, costume accessories, play weapons, and more.

One of the best booths at the show was my friend Drew Stone’s Jurassic Park display. Drew has painstakingly recreated not one but two Jeeps from the film. He also had multiple dinosaurs on display, and an area set aside with multiple classic Jurassic Park videogames for people to play. Every time we walked past Drew’s booth there was a line of adults waiting to have their pictures taken and children waiting to pet the dinosaurs!

There were multiple Star Wars booths, lots of comic and videogame-related booths, and so, so many Ghostbusters! If there’s something strange in your neighborhood I’m not sure who you could call because all the Ghostbusters were set up at this convention.

Next to this room was the videogame room. While Mason was there he participated in a Super Smash Brothers tournament. There were lots of arcade games available to play, and even more comic, videogame, Twitch, and YouTube personalities to meet.

Because we had weekend passes, we ended up going to the show multiple times over the weekend. That worked out great. There were a lot of things happening on Saturday, but that was also the busiest day. Friday and Sunday were better days for spending time talking to vendors and celebrities because it wasn’t quite so busy.

I guess attendance was good because GalaxyCon has already announced they will be returning to Oklahoma City in 2025. WE can’t wait to go back, and they even take volunteers to host panels so who knows what might happen next year…

Our trips involve equal parts planning and impulse. Case in point — last year when Susan first heard about the 2024 eclipse, she booked an AirBnB in Austin. Then, a month before the big event, our reservation was abruptly cancelled without notice. We received a refund along with a note that said “this reservation is no longer available” which, to me, sounds like they got a more lucrative offer. I’ve been told they’ll take a hit on their rating and that there may be other consequences for then, but none of that matters to us. With less than a month before the big event, we had to make new plans… fast.

Sometimes things happen for a reason, and as it turned out the area of Texas we had originally planned to visit was now predicting cloudy weather. Coincidentally I was contacted by an old acquaintance who was going to be visiting Arkansas the weekend of the eclipse, and a new plan was formed.

SUNDAY, APRIL 7

Susan and I left home on Sunday around 8 a.m. and around noon I met my friends Kevin and Earl at the Arkadia Retrocade, the retro arcade in Fayetteville, Arkansas owned by Shea Mathis. The Arkadia Retrocade is a happy place, a place that recharges my batteries by being bathed in the warm glow of arcade monitors. Arcades are not a place that recharges Susan’s batteries, but she was more than happy to drop me off and spend the day exploring Fayetteville on her own. Despite being around so many classic arcade games, the three of us spent most of our time sitting around a tabletop Warlords machine, chatting and catching up. Kevin and Earl left around 5 p.m. and Susan wasn’t scheduled to pick me up for another hour, which gave me plenty of time to enjoy the arcade and play some classic games. I didn’t take any pictures with my phone but I did stream some video to Facebook using my Meta glasses.

After the arcade closed, Susan found a local restaurant called Noodles. We were expecting more of a noodle-based restaurant but it was more of an Italian place, which was fine with us. The food was fantastic. I had chicken parmesan served on linguine with a cilantro and jalapeno lime cream sauce which was really good. Susan got the traditional spaghetti and meatballs, we got some bread served with vinegar and oil, and the cocktails made the meal absolutely perfect.

Fayetteville was just outside the path of totality, which meant hotel prices were still reasonable. We got a good night’s sleep and woke up rested and ready for an adventure.

MONDAY, APRIL 8

Our first stop of the morning was Doomsday Coffee, located in Fayetteville. The cafe’s name seemed to fit the theme of the weekend. The barista suggested we try the breakfast tacos, and we were so glad she did! They were so good, and the coffee was even better.

Doomsday was our last stop in Fayetteville. From there, we began driving toward… TOTALITY! (I can’t remember ever typing the word “totality” before this post.) We heard on the news that Russellville, Arkansas was having a large solar eclipse festival, but the closer we got the heavier the traffic became. On our way there, we stopped to top off our tank and found gas stations were beginning to run out of gas.

We ended up stopping at Ozark, Arkansas, a smaller town that was in the path of totality. Ozark was having their own festival, which turned out to be a lot of fun. We were able to park on Main Street for free, right next to the festival, and just a few feet away from a Daylight Donuts where we snagged a donut and a coffee. We also discovered that at 11 a.m., the donut shop would close and by taken over by a local group selling hamburgers and hotdogs for a fundraiser. We told them we would come back, and we did.

There were all kinds of vendors at the festival, selling all kinds of things. We bought Eclipse 2024 t-shirts, met the Sonic Slushie, had our pictures taken by a 360-degree rotating camera, and eventually made our way back across the street again for hotdogs and hamburgers.

After several hours of waiting, it was time for the big event. Around 1 p.m., the world started to look different. Things looked more yellow; it felt like there was a haze in the sky, or that our eyes were constantly out of focus. As the time of totality began to approach, more and more people began to stop what they were doing, put on their solar glasses, and claim their spots.

And then… Totality.

I heard a piece of advice on the radio this weekend: “watch your first eclipse, and photograph your second.” I thought pointing my iPhone toward the eclipse during its totality phase would capture at least s semblance of what we were seeing, but it wasn’t even close. In the sky we saw a black circle surrounded by a thin ring of fire. Every picture I took with my iPhone shows a blurry yellow circle with a tiny dot in the middle. A total eclipse is an amazing thing to see, and a difficult event to photograph without good equipment or better planning.

As the moon moved between us and the sun, all the dogs on leashes laid down in confusion. Birds that had been resting in trees suddenly began chirping before flying away. Everyone in Ozark, Arkansas stood still, staring at the sky.

And then, it was over. Light appeared faster than it had disappeared, it seemed. Susan and I wasted no time returning to our car and zipping back toward the interstate in hopes of beating the traffic rush. Traffic was indeed heavy for a few miles but before long it thinned out and it was smooth sailing for the rest of our trip back home.

They say we won’t have another total eclipse here in the United States for another 20 years, and who knows if we’ll ne able to see that one. I’m glad we were able to experience this at least once in our lives. It’s something I’ll never forget.

If you weren’t able to be in the path of totality, here’s a sped up version of the event I recorded with my GoPro. Watch it go from normal daylight to complete darkness and back in less than three minutes. Stay to the end and you’ll hear the festival attendees spontaneously applauding. Thank you, Sun and Moon, for your great performance.

Over the past fifteen years I’ve had a front row seat to the evolution of streaming digital content to televisions. While most modern televisions have the ability to stream both locally and externally hosted content, streaming video to a “dumb” TV fifteen years ago took a lot more effort. When I set cobbled together my first streaming network nearly twenty years ago, I crammed a dedicated computer into a small cubby inside my living room’s entertainment center and connected it to my television using a video card with an s-video cable. The living room PC was connected to my upstairs media server using a network cable that ran out the back of the entertainment center and literally up a flight of stairs, connecting the two machines.

Back in 2011 I purchased my Boxee box, the first add-on box I owned that allowed me to wirelessly stream content to my television. It’s kind of funny, reading my initial review of Boxee. (“I can now watch YouTube on my television!”) A year or two later I stumbled across Western Digital’s WD TV Live, which I found on sale while visiting Fry’s. I’ve seen them referred to by a few different names like WD TV and WD TV Live, but when I first saw them they were labeled WD Live, which is how I’ve always referred to them. The WD Live is a little box that uses your home’s WiFi network to stream local content (movies on your home computer) and other content like Netflix and YouTube over the internet. You can also play content off an attached USB stick. Again, these are all features built in to most modern flatscreen televisions, but being able to add these features to your television back in 2012 for $99 was pretty amazing.

If I wrote a blog post when I purchased my first WD Live box I can’t find it, but in 2014 I wrote an article about putting together my annual Christmas slideshow and doing it on the WD Live. One neat feature it has is that it can simultaneously play mp3s in random order from one directory while showing pictures in random order from another folder at the same time.

The Boxee device I bought died a low death. Boxee was bought by D-Link and phased out. Updates dried up, which is a death sentence for any cloud-dependent device. YouTube and other built-in streaming apps broke. Eventually, I replaced it with a second WD Live device. By the time I went to buy a third one, the WD Live had already been discontinued (WD stopped production of the device in 2016) so I bought a third one via eBay. I had one WD Live hooked up in the living room, a second one in the bedroom, and the third one in our upstairs den.

And again, like everything… time moves on. The WD Live does not support some of the newest (H.265) encodes, meaning it won’t play some newer content. It also suffers from an outdated interface. Today’s users expect a Neflix-like interface with lots of metadata and large screenshots. The WD Live works best by displaying filenames and nothing more.

Fast forward and today we have multiple DirecTV streaming boxes in our home, all of which do everything the WD Live boxes did. Our televisions also have Netflix and YouTube and all those streaming apps built in. What took a lot of technical knowledge to build 15 years ago now comes built in to every TV sold at Walmart. The WD Live has been rendered obsolete.

Well, almost.

Despite running Plex on my media server and trying everything I can come up with, there doesn’t appear to be any way to play random mp3s while displaying random photos at the same time. Such a seemingly simple thing should be easy to do, but there just doesn’t seem to be any way to do it.

I recently disconnected and boxed up two of my three WD Live boxes and relegated them out to the garage where they will most likely sit unused for the rest of my life. The third, however, I left hooked up in the living room. I may only use it one night a year on Christmas Eve to display my annual Christmas slideshow, but even if that’s all it does, it’ll be worth keeping around.