Hi, reader. I'm watching Giant Bomb vids in between letting my PS4 cool down from a Wasteland 2 session and I decided to make a blog post.

At the beginning of this year, I got a job that moved me to western Oklahoma. (My first professional writing job! Years after dropping out of Humanities/Art History my junior year in college and becoming a writer from the ground-up over three years as a hobby). Outside of Oklahoma City, the state gets pretty wide open in terms of civilization and the people are more stereotypical of what you'd think "country" people are like. So games and entertainment are a little more important to me since there are arguably/comparatively less attractions around. Nonetheless I prefer spending a lot of free time playing games and such.

This time around I'm not paying for cable TV. So I'm missing out on the new Walking Dead season, all the great HBO content, etc. I just pay for internet and now rely on my phone and PS4 for most of my entertainment. Streaming services such as Netflix have grown in popularity and people are moving towards steaming their content rather than just sticking with a certain cable/TV provider.Then you have websites like Giant Bomb or the Trailer Park Boys with their Swear Net content and that allows people the option to pay a very small fee once a month for plenty of content directly from the creators.

Giant Bomb is my first foray into paying for entertaining content as a consumer that is trying other options than cable tv; mainly to save 40 or likely more bucks a month in that department. I like the idea of being able to pay a provider of content directly. Likewise, podcasting offers similar models. You can get Marc Maron and other "big name" shows bundled together -- from some service of which I can't recall the name -- for a cheap price. I definitely miss being able to see a show like the Walking Dead as it airs and I'll want to stay away from spoilers, but for five dollars, I've got dozens of hours of content that will be very fresh to me.

Five bucks would get me one day of a movie rental, which is fine, but comparatively, this five bucks for GB premium goes a long way for me. Streaming on consoles became popular with the Xbox 360 and PS3 with Netflix and even some TV. I'd love to be able to pay for just the networks, or even just the shows, I want and stream them that way. Though, I'm super weird about leaving my console on too long and I'm not the kind of person that will not want to watch several hours of anything through my console. Hence my weirdness now of killing time to let the console cool down to satisfy my irrational fear. Nonetheless, the point is that as a consumer I'm finding I like paying directly the content provider and that it is well worth the money.

I wasn't even a giant bomb fan up to a month ago. I'd just never visited the site or known the personalities. Somehow I got into watching the 'best of' GB videos and got hooked, recently watching all 60 or so of them. So now I have all the premium content to watch. No cable TV, just internet and services like this to keep me entertained. And there's plenty of it here for me to enjoy and it's certainly what interests me: gaming and comedy. It's not hard to throw five bucks down for it, and comparatively, the amount of content available for that money will give me plenty to enjoy and be an excellent alternative to cable tv.

So that's my story of joining Giant Bomb. Time for some more Wasteland 2.

--David