So it's negative degrees outside right now, actual negative, not "feels like." I looked at the thermometer on the back porch around 7am and just laughed a little and went back to bed for twenty more minutes. Everyone's calling it the "polar vortex" this week like it's a new invention, like cold air from the Arctic occasionally sliding down over the Midwest is some kind of breaking scientific discovery. My grandmother would've just called it January.
Anyway. I'm not going anywhere today, which as it turns out is fine, because the entire tech internet is currently happening eighteen hundred miles away in Las Vegas and I can watch all of it from under a blanket with a space heater pointed directly at my feet (the good one, not the crappy Holmes one that trips the breaker every time the microwave runs, I will die mad about that heater).
CES kicked off this week and my RSS reader looks like it had a seizure. Every single feed I follow, all at once, all CES, all the time. I'm not going to do the thing where I list out forty product announcements because you can get that literally anywhere right now, every gadget blog on earth is doing that post today and honestly most of them are doing it better than I would with a wifi connection this flaky. What I will say is that the one announcement that actually made me sit up was Sony saying they're bringing PlayStation Now, streaming PS3 games straight to your TV or eventually other devices, no console needed. That's the one that stuck with me out of the whole press day, more than another round of curved TVs nobody asked for or the fortieth company slapping "smart" in front of a refrigerator. Streaming actual games, not just video, off a server somewhere — if that works even half as well as they're implying, that's a real shift in how people think about owning a console at all. I'm skeptical it'll run well on my connection out here, but I'm still interested.
The curved TV thing though, I have to say something. Everyone at CES this year seems to have decided curved screens are the future, and I genuinely do not get it. Unless you are sitting dead center at exactly the recommended distance, a curved TV makes the picture look worse at the edges, not better. It's a solution to a problem regular flat screens didn't have, dressed up as innovation. I said this to my brother-in-law over the holidays and he looked at me like I'd insulted his firstborn, so apparently I'm alone on this one. Fine. I'll be over here with my boring flat 1080p set that cost four hundred dollars less.
Meanwhile the actual news in my house today is that the cold snapped one of the pipes under the kitchen sink sometime overnight, not badly, just a slow drip, but enough that I spent forty-five minutes this morning under the cabinet with a flashlight in my teeth instead of drinking coffee like a normal person. There is nothing like discovering a plumbing problem before you've had caffeine to really set the tone for a day. It's fixed now, or at least stopped, with a hose clamp and some patience, which is the exact skill level I bring to home repair — good enough, probably temporary, ask me again in March.
I keep thinking about how different this week feels from a normal work week just because everyone's attention is pointed at one city for four days straight. There's something almost nice about it actually, this shared thing everyone's half-watching, even from a couch in a house with a busted pipe and a heater that only works if nothing else is plugged in. I doubt I'll remember a single specific product from this CES a year from now. I already can't remember most of what got announced two years ago, and at the time it all felt urgent too.
Staying in tomorrow as well, according to the forecast. Might actually get some real work done instead of doomscrolling gadget blogs, but I wouldn't bet on it.