So this past week has basically been two things: getting stonewalled by a video game and, out of pure procrastination, ending up weirdly invested in a robot cargo capsule. Not exactly a themed week, but here we are.
I picked up Diablo III the day it came out, May 15th, like a lot of people apparently did, because Blizzard's authentication servers spent the first 24 hours completely faceplanting. If you were anywhere near a gaming forum that week you already know about Error 37: the "servers are busy" message that became its own meme almost overnight. People were making t-shirt mockups of it within like two days. What still gets me, and I know I'm not the first person to say this, is that Diablo III requires a constant internet connection even when you're playing entirely by yourself. No offline mode. None. I've been playing this thing solo in the evenings after work and I still have to be logged into Battle.net the whole time, which means if their servers hiccup, so does my game, even though there is not one single other human involved in what I'm doing. That's not a technical limitation, that's a decision, and it's a decision that exists to stop piracy and protect the real-money auction house they're rolling out later this summer, not to make the game better for me. I got through the first two acts on Tuesday night and got booted twice. Twice! For a game I own, playing by myself, at 11pm on a Tuesday. Anyway. I'm still playing it because the game itself is genuinely fun once it lets you in, the itemization and the skill rune system are a real improvement over Diablo II, but the always-online thing is going to be the story people remember about this launch, not the gameplay.
The other thing eating my week has been NASA TV, which I never in a million years thought I'd say. SpaceX's Dragon capsule launched last Tuesday, the 22nd, and on Friday morning it did something no private company had ever done before: it got grabbed by the space station's robotic arm and berthed to the Harmony module. I had the livestream open in a background tab at work, muted, just glancing at it between emails, and when the capture actually happened I stopped what I was doing and just watched. There's something about watching a vehicle built by a company that also makes flamethrowers and put a cherry-red Roadster into orbit tests dock — sorry, berth, apparently there's a difference between docking and berthing and I learned that this week too — with an actual space station that got me more than I expected. The astronauts opened the hatch not long after and started unloading cargo, a few hundred pounds of supplies and some crew provisions. Dragon's still up there right now as I'm typing this, expected to head back down to a Pacific splashdown in the next day or so. I don't even really follow space stuff that closely, but there was something refreshing about a piece of technology working exactly the way it was supposed to, in public, with no login server involved.
I keep thinking about how those two things sat next to each other in my week. One's a video game that couldn't handle demand for a product people paid sixty bucks for, the other is a private rocket company doing something genuinely new with a spacecraft that cost who-knows-how-many millions, and the rocket company had the smoother week. Draw whatever conclusion you want from that, I'm not sure I have one that isn't a little too cute.
Small unrelated complaint before I close the laptop: the coffee shop down the street from my apartment changed their wifi password again without posting the new one anywhere obvious, and I had to ask the guy behind the counter twice because I misheard him the first time over the espresso machine. It's a good americano though, so I'll allow it.
Back to grinding Act III, assuming the servers let me in tonight.