Why the TV Junkie Award has to be earned!

Chess.com gives out this curious little thing called the TV Junkie award, for watching ChessTV twenty-four hours. At first glance, it sounds heroic. Watching TV, after all, is a perfectly legitimate activity. Nothing shameful there. But the moment you decide to engineer it, the universe tilts sideways. You are supporting a bigger industry and small commentators trying to make their living.

Some have tried the obvious disgusting shortcuts. They run there browser in some sort of container with Chromium.:

nohup bash -c 'for i in {1..25}; do sleep 3600; docker exec chromium xdotool key F5; echo "$(date): Refresh $i"; done' > /tmp/chesstv.log 2>&1 &

…and call themselves dedicated.

They are not. Don't fall for shortcuts. They are a log file that hits “refresh” automatically, like a ghost in a machine. For each hour 25 times to take care to earn this award. No snacks, no laughter, no cheering, no existential thrill of sitting in front of a glowing rectangle and actually watching. Just digital obedience. I really hope chess.com will do something about this. I am not sure if they can! But awards should be earned especially easy ones what you are doing anyways (watching TV). 

We do not live in a post-TV, post-streamer era. Streams abound. Grandmasters move, commentators talk, viewers cheer. If you want the award the right way, you sit. You watch. You support. You exist in the glow, for real, not through a container that simulates attention. The universe rewards the curious and the present, not the automated and the absent.