Billy Mitchell Is Going to Trial

[Link | 2,713]

15 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Wait they remade Night Court?  Ugh... I only use antenna tv and streaming for a few years now.  You might be thinking of LAFF TV which is just comedy shows and movies at times.  Or perhaps it's on MeTV possibly?  They run old stuff going back decades.

No, it's a brand new show. John Larroquette is in it. It's on NBC so you actually could watch it over the air if you wanted to. 

[Khromak | 768]

2 hours ago, G-type said:

Billy is an incredibly skilled player. That's undeniable. He also has a large ego which is probably what compels him to pursue this seemingly losing legal cause. His villain persona is mostly an act (the comparisons to pro-wrestling seem apt). Most people who've met him at conventions speak about it being a very positive experience. He was very friendly and personable to me. with regards to his gaming bonafides, I've seen him break a million on DK on live twitch streams. Did he break the twin galaxies rules of not playing on the 100% original hardware? probably. I don't really care.

I'm sure he is a skilled player. I'm also sure he's nice to his friends, to people who admire him, and those who don't challenge him. I'm sure that he "hams it up" with this "persona" of being a villain or a heel.

The problem I have with him is that he's very clearly not just playing a character or pretending. When you get to the point of harassing people, suing people, and writing all kinds of nasty things about others, you're not pretending or playing anymore, you're actually causing harm.

I also agree with your final point, he broke the twin galaxies rules, and as a top-level player there's no chance he didn't realize it or it was any kind of accident. Then they took down his records because he broke the rules, and he got upset about this and decided to go on a decades-long tirade of lying, deceit, and lawsuits because people "defamed" him by telling the truth and using facts to prove he's a liar.

Sorry, don't have a single ounce of sympathy for the known and verified cheater who on multiple occasions has been caught red-handed breaking rules. You may say that they're harmless infractions or the rules are unnecessary, or whatever you want, but at the end of the day he's a cheater, a poor sport, and a vindictive and petty man with thin skin. He might have good hot sauce, IDK.

[G-type | 2,482]

28 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Wait they remade Night Court?

the three of them watching this show is silence is somehow harsher than the most scathing critic's review.

[JamesRobot | 5,802]

2 hours ago, Hammerfestus said:

What’s wrong with that guy‘s hair?  

 

You kidding me?  That's probably the most beautiful Kentucky waterfall I've ever seen. 

[Hammerfestus | 3,849]

44 minutes ago, JamesRobot said:

You kidding me?  That's probably the most beautiful Kentucky waterfall I've ever seen. 

It looks like he lured several Asian women into his basement to play “Donkey Kong” shaved all of their body hair and crafted it into a gigantic helmet for himself.  

[MrWunderful | 2,927]

If you “play the heel” for fame and exposure, don’t be surprised when people think you are a douche. 
 

He was so skilled he had to use a modified 8 way joystick instead of the factory 4-way. I don’t even really think he is that good TBH. Pretty sure I could post a higher score if I put my mind to it. 

[CodysGameRoom | 2,008]

17 minutes ago, MrWunderful said:

Pretty sure I could post a higher score if I put my mind to it. 

[Tanooki | 4,934]

3 hours ago, docile tapeworm said:

Lol ya they remade it I saw the commercials for it.
 

Ya I get Laff tv and metv and it is on one of those two I would guess. 
I love living without cable tv. Like you it’s the antenna and we have dsl internet.

metv gets regular play in our house. They have Saturday morning cartoons. Flintstones and jetsons.

I can't speak to your antenna but I got this wicked indoor one a Clearstream Eclipse with a 50+mi range and it shocked me.  All these years the cable companies with their out of date equipment gloating about GET HD NOW best picture...bulllsheeet.  As I was canceling out I compared some TV channels both on the faux 1080p vs antenna 1080p.

I was legitimately already annoyed with their rate hikes and snark about it, but I got furious.  Watching the news or like golf (which is great indicator for detail) was a dead give away.  It was close to that revelation of a 480p SDTV (Sony Wega I had) jumping to a 720p HDTV I upgraded to when it fried out in the 00s(Wii era.)  The antenna you could see every blade of grass, the dimples on a golf ball with like 2-3x the clarity.  I mean you could at least make them out on cable better than old school, but the sharp quality increase when it wasn't overly compressed to save a dime on there end was very obvious.

I didn't even bother riding out the cycle, called, demanded a pro-rated refund, and dropped that crap off within an hour at a local drop point.

 

Those old shows even on the antenna look shockingly good, better than like ever.  I kind of wish I had went to it years earlier.  Action channel, GRIT(westerns), MeTV, AntennaTV, Laff, and various others are just amazing what they run and being our age we're used to commercials anyway -- time to go pee, get a drink, put the dog out...it works.

[MrWunderful | 2,927]

43 minutes ago, CodysGameRoom said:

Nah, I have a job

 

I am ok living with the fact I know deep down I am better at video games than Billy Mitchell! And a better person with much nicer hair

[Estil | 1,265]

1 hour ago, MrWunderful said:

If you “play the heel” for fame and exposure, don’t be surprised when people think you are a douche. 

Well, if not a giant douche then a turd sandwich!  

 

 

[Estil | 1,265]

4 hours ago, G-type said:

I disagree... I think all court cases should be video game related. I would watch the tv show of that: Video Game Court.

Ooooh, is that anything like Math Court?  

And as Johnny Cochran would say, if the clock doesn't fit you must acquit!  

[Link | 2,713]

4 hours ago, Link said:

you ... could watch it 

 

4 hours ago, G-type said:

 

...
. , 
..

Never mind. 

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

@Tanooki I just have a cheapo from the dollar store but it picks up 15 or so channels. I have been debating getting one of the 20 footers, I see people have them in my area. Dude I’ll never go back to cable. What a rip off. You’re right the picture quality is fantastic through antenna and the content is plenty enough television programming in my opinion.

[Tanooki | 4,934]

@docile tapeworm Good enough, I just did research for like 6mo up to when I was terminating, went between the mohu leaf brand one, another I forget, and the one I got and it was some founded research that was worthwhile.  Sometimes you get lucky though, picked up this desktop resting curved plate that also has rabbit ears off it at a goodwill a few years back to put on the rear TV since it's little used and it picks up really well.

I think it just depends how many are in your general radius and how powerful their tower is, much like old radio where some AM can go like 50mi others can go 1500mi+ ...more power, more improvement.

 

This probably is obvious to someone here, but if it was missed, do use this site: https://www.antennaweb.org/

Pop  your zipcode in above, and you'll get station results for your immediate area and can be spread wider depending on your reach.  Antenna can get a good solid signal 50mi out, usually 70s are about it, when one says 100+ they're full of crap because they are line of sight and the world curves.  That link can give you your stations and then you can also find out what they're broadcasting too if you click the station since it doubles as a TV guide too.

[AirVillain | 490]

On 2/6/2023 at 6:51 PM, docile tapeworm said:

@Tanooki I just have a cheapo from the dollar store but it picks up 15 or so channels. I have been debating getting one of the 20 footers, I see people have them in my area. Dude I’ll never go back to cable. What a rip off. You’re right the picture quality is fantastic through antenna and the content is plenty enough television programming in my opinion.

Am I understanding from this post that you just put up an antennae to get TV channels???? Like it was 1984?

You just put up the antanna and it just GETS channels? One you bought from the DOLLAR STORE? I mean... we've got some radical dollar stores around here, but buying an antenna from one and actually receiving TV channels. That's impressive. 

This is radical. 

What if you want to record something....? VCR?

[RH | 4,906]

Lol, the turn of this conversation I'm just seeing is amusing.  OTA, Digital TV (at least in the US) has always been superior to satellite TV and, by proxy, cable.

The reason why is because high-quality, uncompressed video takes a lot of bandwidth.  I mean, this is 2023, so we can stream YouTube at 8k and the results are impressive, but keep in mind that most satellite technology is kind of old.  As in, 20-25 years old.  The big issue is throughput.  Each data satellite up in space can only stream so many Gigabytes per second.  Some, I guess, might even rate in the Megabytes/s range.  Although that may sound like more than enough, the main issue here is that all channels have to be spread across this throughput.  If a satellite company wants to add more channels, they have to "rob" the throughput from all of the other channels, which means they have to be compressed.

Now, you might ask "can't they just put more satellites up there"?  Well... yes and no.  For those of us that are older we might have remembered having those friends with the BIG 10' satellite dishes (or you might have had one too.)  These systems could move and point at various satellites.  What made the modern, "mini dish" era plausible is that stronger satellites (for the time in the 90s) could now broadcast many channels from one satellite dish.  Back in the 90s when we were all on standard definition, this was great!  Loads of content and satellite dishes were cheap because they were small and not mechanical.

However, about 15 years after the mini-dish revolution, HD content became mainstream and new HD content had too rely on old streaming technology and it couldn't catch up. Not even 1080p.  So to get HD content, satellite companies had to compress the content.  If you've had a Dish dish pointed in the same direction for the past 25 years, well, you've been getting TV from the same old satellite.  It can't output more data than what it was designed for.

Cable companies (at least they use too) would have 5-6 big satellite dishes pointing to major broadcasting satellites and then they'd distribute that content over... cables.  This means they too have the same problem as mini-dish companies and it wouldn't surprise me that too this day it's even worse because they are probably still using satellites that were launched into space 30-40 years ago!  Their throughput is likely less than those of Dish Network!  I'm sure... surely some clearing house (or whatever it's called) has launched another satellite or two for cable TV in the past couple of decades, but I wouldn't bank on many of them.  An operation like that is expensive and if not enough customers are complaining fast enough, why make the upgrade?

I know this is a looong post, but this is where OTA is always superior.  Since OTA digital signals are 100%, completely one-way communication, all a station has to do is upgrade a bit of hardware and they can send uncompressed footage over the air.  Now, all video is probably compressed at some point.  We all know that none of us save raw videos of any form because they would be MASSIVE, but lossless compression is a thing and TV Stations, especially local stations, can have cached content that they can broadcast and it will look super-crisp.  In fact, so long as you're close enough to a TV tower so that you're not dropping packets, some of these  signals might even be clearer than videos you might have saved to  your PC.  Theoretically, live camera data from the local news could be streamed to the broadcasting hardware, 100% uncompressed and then distributed from their digital radio amplifier.  1080p in such a case would look phenomenal!  If/when they upgrade to 4k or maybe even 8k, this could look exceptional!

OTA stuff obviously has it's limitations (I mean, it's not On Demand)but for there's still a lot of quality content out there, especially if you enjoy old reruns or movies and the local news.  I think there are OTA DVRs out there, but I've not looked into them.  I'd like one but the last I looked (maybe 10 years ago) there's no easy/accurate way to search for what's coming up and scheduling recordings.  Maybe from main channels like NBC, CBS or ABC, but some of the secondary channels seem to not have as accurate information you can tap into for your DVR.  But, that might have changed in 10 years.  I should probably look into it again.

[Tulpa | 3,509]

45 minutes ago, AirVillain said:

What if you want to record something....? VCR?

Don't be silly. You have to watch it when it's broadcast, or you lose it forever.

Like, if your parents want to watch something else and hog the TV so you miss that episode of MacGuyver, you stew in your room and contemplate putting them in a nursing home when they're older.

That's how we rolled back then.

Edited February 14, 2023 by Tulpa

[TDIRunner | 2,741]

36 minutes ago, AirVillain said:

Am I understanding from this post that you just put up an antennae to get TV channels???? Like it was 1984?

You just put up the antanna and it just GETS channels? One you bought from the DOLLAR STORE? I mean... we've got some radical dollar stores around here, but buying an antenna from one and actually receiving TV channels. That's impressive. 

This is radical. 

What if you want to record something....? VCR?

I've been using an antenna mounted in my attic since before either of my kids were born (over 9 years).  Neither of my kids even know what cable or satellite TV is.  Since I'm pretty close to St. Louis, the attic mounted antenna works just fine and I get between 40 and 50 channels crystal clear, and most in HD.  My in-laws have a property out in the middle of nowhere about 50 miles between two large metro areas.  The antenna we use there has to be mounted about 50 feet up in the air to get channels from both directions.  We don't get as many channels up there, but they still come through crystal clear.  

As far as the VCR thing goes, in order to work, the VCR would need a digital tuner built in, or some kind of converter.  Digital tuners in VCRs are pretty uncommon because VCRs were already on the way out before the big analog to digital conversion.  I have both a VCR and a DVD recorder that both have digital tuners, but to be honest, I've never even attempted to use either to record television.  About 95% of my television watching is through streaming services rather than the antenna channels.  

I haven't missed my cable TV services for even a second since dropping it.  I was getting charged about $80 a month for cable TV when I dropped it.  Again, that was around 9 years ago, so I have no idea how much they are charging now.  But I've saved a ton of money by getting rid of it.  

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

1 hour ago, AirVillain said:

What if you want to record something....? VCR?

I’ve recorded the bachelor (FOR MY WIFE OK!) this exact way.

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

@RH I read that entire post. Impressive.

[docile tapeworm | 4,198]

@TDIRunner ya I have a couple tuner I use on crts to get antenna tv.

Edited February 14, 2023 by docile tapeworm

[Link | 2,713]

I have an OTA DVR. Program information isn't a problem. The listings appearance isn't much more than a cable box from 20 years ago and it can be a bit slow. The operating system and remote control have some questionable design choices. But it does the job. 

This is the one I have: https://gpx.com/digital-tv-tuner-and-recorder-tvtr149b.html
BYO HDD. I first had an older model which was branded "Homeworx". Imagine my surprise at seeing the exact same software when I got this GPX unit.

I tried another one which had a much better user interface. It was very slow to do anything, and it turned itself off after being inactive for a few hours, so it was not useful for scheduled recording but the tuner was good.

These are $40-80 devices. The next step up is $200. I'd like to try a nicer model, but haven't yet found exactly what I want. I don't need a lot of features, I'm just picky. I want it to actually use broadcast signals rather than internet and have a sensible UI. I don't want to pay a subscription service. Multiple tuners (for recording 2-4 things at once) would be nice. And it should connect with coax. If there is one with a great tuner and software I would be willing to use HDMI and a TV with no built-in tuner of its own. But it has to be really good for me to give that up. 

[Tanooki | 4,934]

2 hours ago, AirVillain said:

Am I understanding from this post that you just put up an antennae to get TV channels???? Like it was 1984?

You just put up the antanna and it just GETS channels? One you bought from the DOLLAR STORE? I mean... we've got some radical dollar stores around here, but buying an antenna from one and actually receiving TV channels. That's impressive. 

This is radical. 

What if you want to record something....? VCR?

Dollar store?  Maybe, never looked.  I dropped I guess around $50 or something on mine through amazon, they seem to have gone UP in price since the stupid virus, guess they had a run on them with shut ins.

They're basically in principle like old analog era 'rabbit ears' you pop on top of a TV.  You put the antenna in a good position, turn the TV on, and it can find signals in the air and broadcast TV to your screen, free.  That's it.  Depending on your area you can have a few or 50+ channels easily to choose from.  Having an antenna rated at 50+ (or 50-70~) miles is the best you can get that isn't a lie since they work on line of sight basically.  A modern TV you can try and tune in, or run its built in memory program to surf the spectrum then it saves it for easy flipping, and as it's digital the package also gives you the show name, time, description much like cable and goes out for hours if not days.

I guess if you had a VCR or similar, just intercept the signal all the same, just wire it up between the antenna (it would use a coax cable likely) between that and the TV and just copy what you want.  Shouldn't be an issue if you try.  But as LINK said there are better options too like over the air DVR.

 

This is the antenna on my TV in here, and out in the main room, it's back down to $60.  Last I looked they were pushing thing around $100 a couple years ago taking advantage of the situation.  It's a powered or unpowered device, your choice, if you don't just screw it into the TV there's a little box with a light and a power source (cable usb+adapter included) and it can help strengthen the signal and pull in a better draw from more distant sources.

You can't really do better than this other than an outdoor model on or above your roof and it won't do a whole lot better depending on your area if you're close to the fringe of what can be picked up it's probably a waste.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HZD5MUM

[Tanooki | 4,934]

@RH Impressive and well written, good job.  But what you have there as you said is 10 years old basically.  I got into streaming and antenna TV just in 2019 and that's where my research largely ended as I took 6+ months going for the right setup to brave dumping the turds at direct tv.  The device I linked is fantastic and fairly discrete too.

As I said in that larger post, in the last few years (5-6 by my gathering) the over the air stuff now does stream out days of upcoming programming information on channel if they choose to supply it.  It has the came basic carry of info cable does with the time, rating, title, actors names, and a small description.

This is mirrored on that site I linked days ago too over at antennaweb, and that should be accessible by any DVR device to log what you want to watch later and have it saved which is huge, a great step for basically ad driven "free" tv.

[G-type | 2,482]

I'd be willing to cut the cord, but my wife isn't.