BluAwesome

I held out as long as I could, which is to say not very long at all... Yesterday I merry christmased myself with a Blu-ray player and the unbelievably spectacular Planet Earth box set.

This was a tough call for me, actually; for one thing, there was the whole "who's going to win?" question between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. HD-DVD is being more aggressively promoted, the players being priced down presumably below their profit point. And again, Sony's track record on these matters isn't great; Betamax was the better format, but it still lost. One of the reasons was apparently that Sony refused to allow adult content on Beta; there was a report that they were going down that road again with Blu-ray, but Sony has responded that there is no such restriction. Blu-ray is the better format, again, but the reason that it is currently (depending on who you believe) winning is because the best way to get a Blu-ray player is at the creamy nougat center of a Playstation 3. Which brings me to my toughest question.

Do I buy a stand-alone player, or a PS3? Sony has put a dizzying array of PS3's out there, some of which play PS2 games, some of which have wireless, some of which have bigger hard drives... all of which have Blu-ray players. And then there's the question of, do I ever plan to finish my house? This was what finally made the choice for me, as I have played about 40 hours of Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword in the last week of vacation. So yesterday I went to Best Buy (I know, I know...) and picked on up. I paid about $10 or $15 more for the box set than I had to for the "eager sweaty palms" factor (more if you count the $10 I had to spend to park downtown for 3 hours), but then I went home and set it up, and: well.

My purchase was totally justified when two of my cats started hunting birds of paradise.