Forsooth, my countenence is of a nerdly predilection

In otherwords, I'm kind of a nerd.

Take for example my obsession with wanting a home theater setup (or my imminent Final Fantasy experiment) even with the crappy audio/video equipment I own--and lack of money for new, better equipment. I dream about (or actually, I read on the internet a lot about) a big theater with super comfy seats viewing a huge drop down screen with a digial projector image on it with 8 or more speakers in the room all placed with and blaring sound with THX-like precision.

Okay, that's a few years down the road.

In my current house we have a huge living room area where all of the a/v stuff is. We have the TV in a corner and then a semi-circle around it so we can fit about 7-10 people watching something, depending on how friendly people feel. The house I am moving into soon is much smaller and doesn't have a large open area like that. It has a small living room and two bedrooms and then a basement that is split in half. My roommate and I decided we would split the basement and I immediately decided that my half was the only place in the house that would fit my TV and speakers and everything else. But how to set it up?

It was long and narrow so obviously the TV would go at one end. The problem is that "rows" in home viewing situations don't work so well as the giant heads of people in the front row tend to get in the way of people in the back row. This is where my idea popped into my head. There were a bunch of cinder blocks around the house; I proposed that these blocks be used to prop up a second row of seating. I'd have stadium seating in my own house--there are a couple of theaters in town that don't have that!

This weekend I had moved the three section reclining couch over to the new place and last night I moved a loveseat with an ottoman over there. My soon-to-be roommate, Eric, and I arranged the furniture in a few different ways to try and get it all to work. We ended up with the loveseat/ottoman in the front row with the reclining couch, using only two sections instead of three because of width considerations, raised on blocks in the back row. We then proceeded to watch some of the Olympics with me sitting in front and him in the second row. It worked sweet. I can't wait to get the whole system hooked up and fully operational.