So this week, I finally went ahead and did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: I cut my cable. I like television — I’m not overly obsessed with it (and a lot of really popular shows, like the American version of The Office and any reality shows, never click with me), but I enjoy making dinner and sitting down occasionally to watch quality programming like Mad Men, 30 Rock, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. I’m a big Mythbusters fan, and I had Futurama on the DVR, as well as Nip/Tuck, Lost (of course), and 24 when they were both still on. My family almost always had cable at home when I was a kid, and I appreciate a good night of television.

I’ve actually gone without before, too — when I first moved to Chicago, my roommate and I didn’t have any extra money, and he didn’t want any extra distractions (from going out and getting a job), so we willfully stuck with just broadcast television for a while. Five channels, three of them in foreign languages. But ever since I got my nice big HDTV a few years ago, I’ve had cable — I figured it would be a waste to watch anything less than HD with a TV like the one I have. I did used to have Netflix as well, but canceled it a few months before I left for Los Angeles last year — at the time, my Instant Queue never seemed to appear with great video quality, and I never found the time to watch any of the DVDs they sent.

So as of last week, I was paying Time Warner a not-insignificant amount of money for their crappy little DVR box (I might still have cable if I owned a Tivo, now that I think about it) and their television service. A couple of weeks ago, I found that something was wrong with my cable box — it was overheating and freezing up, and it required a restart occasionally, and missed a few shows I’d set to record. I called the company, they sent a dude out, and as I figured he’d do, he soon recommended that I just take a new box. Fine by me. But there was a problem:

Him: So I’ll just put a new box in here, if that’s ok with you.

Me: Sounds good. There wasn’t really anything on there that I needed to watch anyway. Although — wait, does this mean my recordings are gone?

Him: Yeah, those don’t transfer.

Me: But I mean the scheduling. All of the scheduling I did?

Him: Yeah, that’s all gone.

That gave me pause. The OS on that DVR box is one of the worst ever designed, and I found that I dreaded the thought of having to go back into that guide, find and/or search for all of the quirky shows that I liked, and re-enter them all into the system. I eventually agreed to it, but it shook me that I was so tied into Time Warner’s crappy system. I wanted the box to bring my shows to me, but I didn’t want to have to depend on telling that stupid box what to do. If that’s how little I actually cared about watching those shows, I thought, then why was I paying the bill in the first place?

And so, last Friday, I decided to make the cut. I called up Time Warner, canceled my cable service, and today returned the cable box. I don’t have live television coming to my house any more. That’s a solid $50 off my monthly bill.

What I do have is Netflix — I jumped on the website and re-subscribed last night. I only went with the $9/month one disc plan — it’s the cheapest that allows Instant Watch, and honestly, I don’t need any more discs lying around my house. Fortunately, my Internet connection is much better here than it was in Chicago, and last night I was watching Pushing Daisies and Archer in full, bright HD — hopefully that will all stay up. I also found that two things will probably make me like my Netflix subscription more than I did before: their catalog and recommendation system is much better than it was a year and a half or so ago when I last tried it (I love the “combination” recommendations they do), and being without a movie subscription service for a while has left me with a whole slew of new-ish titles that I’ve missed. There’s plenty to watch, both movies and TV shows.

Also, Netflix on iPhone is worth a mention as well — I tried it out last night, and it worked very impressively. I am looking forward to the next time I’m in a plane with wifi.

I also may go ahead and subscribe to Hulu Plus — I’m not 100% convinced yet, both because it has ads, and because I probably don’t need it, but I like the idea of using that for current shows that I miss. I’ll wait and see on that one just how many current shows I want to watch before taking the plunge. If it’s only a few, I will probably just use the free version (I was already doing that occasionally, when that stupid DVR missed out on something).

And if all else fails, there’s always Bittorrent. I don’t really like having to go into often very shady places on the ‘net, find torrents, and run downloads on each single episode of TV that I want, but I’m thinking that for some shows, I’ll just have to. I already get spoilers on Twitter since I moved to the West Coast (seriously, New Yorkers, do you have to tweet about what’s happening on Mad Men just seconds after you see it?), and I don’t think I can really settle for being seasons behind on my favorite shows just because there’s no legal way to do it besides cable.

I will miss sports and other live television — I have an MLB subscription (not that the Cubs have been worth watching this year lately), and I’m expecting to visit some bars to watch the Bears. I will also miss catching car chases here in LA; that was a guilty pleasure of mine, hearing about a car chase going down on Twitter and turning on the TV to see it unfold, trying to recognize just where in the city it was. I won’t be able to do that phone thing with friends, either, where you are both watching a movie on the same channel at the same time (although I’m interested to try out Netflix’s party viewing on Xbox — maybe we can have a Tipoaa viewing party at some point and give it a shot).

But otherwise, I think it’ll work fine, and at the very least, even if I don’t use any of it, I’m saving $50 a month (yes, I’m paying for Netflix, but I figured I’ll be saving that since I was also occasionally renting movies anyway). And I’m looking forward to learning if it works or not — streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have been threatening to take the throne of traditional cable companies like Time Warner, and I’ll be happy to be one of the early adopters figuring out if they can actually do it. I’m thinking of this as a DIY-style experiment — instead of overpaying for tons of shows I don’t watch, I’ll underpay and only choose the ones I want.

And lest you think I worry too much about my television supply, that I am simply some illiterate zombie that requires a FlashBox 9000 to entertain me and do my thinking for me day and night, I’ll also tell you that I’ve lately been reading and enjoying a dead tree copy of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Great book. Not all of my entertainment plugs straight into the wall.

PS: I’ve been asked what I think of Apple TV and iTunes for this kind of thing. If I didn’t own an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii, I would probably give the Apple TV some consideration. But with any one of those consoles (not to mention all three, which I probably wouldn’t have if I didn’t write about games for a living), I don’t think the Apple TV is worth it. And I’ve never purchased anything in iTunes — a subscription plan would probably change that, but I don’t like the idea of paying per episode or per movie any more, no matter how cheap.

I took a walk around Culver City earlier today, and posted some pictures I took with my brand new iPhone 4 to my Flickr account (which I haven’t done in a while). It was fun — I went and found a self-guided walking tour map on the city’s website, and then went down there (it’s about 10 minutes south of me here in LA), and hiked around the city, finding all of the little hidden art and reading all of the “Historic Landmark” plaques around town.

It occurred to me just as I was walking away from my car that what I was doing was probably really weird — what kind of crazy dude under 40 just goes on walking tours by himself? It’s like the kind of guy that always fills out the scorecard exactly right when he goes to baseball games (I don’t), or cans his own tomatoes even though he lives alone (I do — live alone, not can tomatoes). Going on an old walking tour by my lonesome probably wasn’t the coolest thing to do on my Labor Day Sunday afternoon.

But I shrugged it off — I enjoy exploring cities and finding all of the hidden spots that most people walk past. I especially enjoy following written directions to landmarks — it’s like a scavenger hunt. There’s a picture of a Laurel and Hardy mural in the Flickr set I posted — that wall was listed in the guide as one confusing line, and it took me about 30 minutes of hiking around a certain block to find it. I checked every darn wall in that square block, and the last one I looked at, hidden in the back of an alley behind an art gallery had that picture on it. Culver City, I learned, is on the land of an old ranch named La Ballona, and earned its name as the “Heart of Screenland” after the movie industry built studios and theaters all over the place. The Laurel and Hardy films (along with tons of classic old movies) were filmed in that same five square blocks, and this picture, sitting in a back alley between a stairwell and a parking garage, commemorates their history.

I enjoyed finding that on my own, combing a set of streets and buildings to soak in exactly what they’ve been up to the last hundred years or so. These pictures don’t show everything I found (I stopped by the first church in Culver City, St. Augustine, so named because it was started by a priest from my own Santa Monica, and St. Augustine was apparently St. Monica’s son), but I think they give a nice taste of what turned out to be a fine afternoon.