"The Truth About What They Know..."

I don't watch broadcast TV anymore, I just don't... Streaming is probably the only technology that I can say I was an early adopter of. I didn't get a cell phone until 2004, nor a smart phone until 2018, but streaming, I was like sign me up!

Well. the data miners are making me hate streaming... Thanks to all the tech in our pockets and on our wrists and listening to us in our homes and at work and reporting our every movement, nothing about you is a secret anymore.  Google, Meta, Amazon and all the rest, they know more about you than you could recite yourself. So, since I'm a cheapskate, I tend to watch advertising supported streaming channels for the most part and they know who we are in my household.  The commercials are so focused that I find it irritating to be so pigeonholed by the folks paying for my entertainment.

Almost every commercial features a gay couple, which at first was a happily exciting development, afterall, who doesn't want to be able to see themselves represented... But lately, it's become a nuissance. And now that big pharma has bought into targeting the gays, it's lot's of commercials for HIV treatments and now PREP... It's annoying to be reminded that their stereotype is that, "Yeah, you're black and gay so you either have HIV, or you want to live a "lifestyle" where you're free to engage in high-risk sexual encounters.  Well, husband and I don't fit either of those molds.

Here's one of a number of spots for the PREP drug Apretude:

Now the unfunny part of how much I hate this ad and others like it is that I can't hold a candle to the comments on it from the Christian-Nazi crazies who want to hold it up and say, "Ah Ha! See, we told you so!" Don't believe me, read 'em here.

Geez, thanks big pharma!

Okay, so now that I've had my gripe about this merde (pardon my French), it took Saturday Night Live to strike a blow for equality on this (albeit with a healthy dose of homophobia):

And so here I am regretting buying that Netflix Watch Instantly box (which is how the first Roku devices were marketed) back in the summer of 2009.

I still have that first Roku I bought... I last used it about 6 years ago, but then the old CRT television it was attached to died, so I put it away on a shelf... Maybe when I've died, someone will give it to the Early Television Museum in Hilliard, Ohio so people of another generation can wonder what the hell it is.