I KEPT LOSING TO STREAMING OPTIONS, SO I BUILT A TINY DICTATOR TO PICK MY TV FOR ME

Here is how a typical evening used to go. I’d finally sit down — dishes done, brain fried, maybe forty-five minutes before I turned into a pumpkin — and I’d pick up the remote with genuine optimism. Tonight I will watch something good. Then the menu loaded. You know the menu. The endless horizontal carousels. The trailer that starts autoplaying at full volume the instant your cursor hovers anywhere near it, so you flinch and accidentally scroll past the one thing you might’ve wanted. The little “Because you watched—” rows that have decided, based on one tired Tuesday, that you are now a person who exclusively enjoys British baking and serial killers. I’d scroll. I’d read three synopses. I’d open a thing, watch eight seconds, get scared off by the runtime, and back out. I’d open a different thing. Repeat. And then one of two things happened: I either gave up and rewatched an episode of something I’d already seen four times, or I search forever and nothing at all. Twenty minutes, gone.…