Yesterday, I was trying to tell a story abotu watching King Kong with Kitty. We were watching it shortly after the election and she drank one and a half liters of wine in the process and got really upset, then wanted to watch Rent, which is hardly a cheering up movie. Rent was really hard on me because it isn't a good movie to watch when worrying about a friend's substance abuse problem. She had kept calling her boyfriend and telling him to buy her more wine, then when he got home, accused him of being ashamed of her because she was under the impression he had been going to invite people over, then didn't.

My point with this story was that, like many people with more money than audio expertise, her boyfriend has tiny Bose speakers. I'm sure they were quite expensive, but my RCA speakers from a cheap home-theater-in-a-box kit sound better, mainly because of poor bass rolloff on the Bose. When Kong roars, it should put the fear of God in you. That's how it sounded in the theater and that's how it sounds at my place, but it was rather unimpressive there.

I bought my current TV under less than ideal circumstances. Namely, my old TV died, wrecking my plans to wait another six months. My current TV, a Westinghouse TX-47F430S, has its good points. It was cheap for its size when I bought it and has a sharp image. Unfortunately, it also downmixes digital audio to two channels for some reason and, most upsetingly, has terrible black levels. Some games were unplayable until I messed with settings to essentially make them not dark like they were supposed to be. When I watch “Smallville”, Lana's hair is a solid, dark-grey mass. The lack of shadow detail means I miss out on a lot of Blu-rays high-definition advantages.

The quality of your equipment can effect your movie experience. This also applies to media and is why I've been big on Blu-ray. In the past few days, I have ordered forty-one movies and two TV seasons in addition to buying two movies in stores, nearly doubling the size of my Blu library. One of the movies was an accident, though, and I'll have to find a way to get rid of the copy of Rambo I bought when intending to buy the Rambo trilogy and didn't catch in time. Only seven of them, including Rambo, were over $10. I also got some, but not nearly as many, DVDs. This gives me a good number of now-redundant DVDs to dump. I would normally give them as gifts, but my parents no longer want DVDs and I don't think Kitty wants Die Another Day. I may start exchanging gifts with Grammarboy again as there are some I'm sure he wants.

One of the great things about being single is you can drop $2000 on a new computer and a bunch of movies in a week and no one complains. Granted, that is a lot, but I think I'll be basically buying movies once a year with only a couple sporadic purchases between. In fact, I think I'll aim to watch and review at least one movie a week. I have a home theater plan in mind for about $4000 which should be damn good, but I am quite clueless on speakers. I'll likely build this next summer unless I decide to wait for the 2009 projectors, which should be even better than the current ones.