So this weekend basically got eaten by two things: the Olympics opening ceremony and a stupid green pipe game that I refuse to delete even though it makes me want to throw my phone across the room. Not proud of either, really.
Let's start with Flappy Bird, because at this point I think every single person I follow on Twitter has posted a screenshot of their score in the last five days. If you somehow haven't seen it: you're a pixelated bird, you tap the screen to flap, and you have to thread yourself between green pipes that look like they were ripped straight out of the original Super Mario Bros. It costs nothing, it's got the cheapest possible banner ads running along the bottom, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the most punishing pieces of software I have used on a phone. My best is 14. Fourteen. I know people who claim to be in the 40s and I don't believe a word of it.
What gets me is how little there is to it. There's no story, no upgrades, no characters to unlock, nothing. Its the purest possible loop of fail-retry-fail-retry, and somehow that's more compelling than half the "real" games I've paid actual money for. I dont think its a good game exactly, its more like a slot machine you carry in your pocket. My thumb was legitimately sore by Saturday afternoon. I had to stop and ice it like some kind of idiot athlete of competitive tapping. My girlfriend thinks this is the funniest thing that has happened to me all year, and honestly, fair.
Then Friday night was the Sochi opening ceremony, which I watched roughly forty percent live and the rest on a tape delay because that's apparently still how NBC wants to do the Olympics in 2014, prime time only, never mind that anyone with a phone already knows the results hours before the broadcast airs where I am. I ended up watching most of it through their online stream on a laptop propped up on the kitchen counter while I made dinner, and the stream buffered constantly right through the parade of nations, which given how much money and infrastructure gets poured into these things every four years, still kind of amazes me. The ceremony itself was enormous, obviously, all snowflakes and giant illuminated horses, and there was that one Olympic ring that famously refused to open into a full circle during the actual broadcast. I only know about that because it was all over my feed within about ninety seconds of it happening, before NBC had even finished airing the segment for the West Coast. That lag between an event happening live and it airing where I live is such a weird artifact at this point, everyone online already knows the joke before you've seen the thing the joke is about.
Small thing I noticed buried in all this: Tuesday was Facebook's tenth birthday, which is a genuinely strange thing to sit with for a second. Ten years since a Harvard dorm room thing turned into whatever it is now, which is basically the water everyone's family reunion photos and birthday reminders live in. I don't post much there anymore myself, mostly just lurk, but my mom is on it constantly and that alone tells you how far the thing has traveled from where it started.
Anyway. I keep meaning to write something more useful this week, maybe something about the RSS reader situation since I'm still annoyed about losing Google Reader last summer and none of the replacements I've tried have quite stuck (Feedly works fine, I just dont love it, if that makes sense). But instead I spent an unreasonable chunk of my weekend tapping a cartoon bird through pipes and got a sore thumb for my trouble. There are worse ways to lose a Saturday I guess. I did eventually turn the notifications off on the game because the ad refresh every time you die was genuinely starting to grate, and honestly the game plays better in airplane mode anyway, no waiting on banner ads to reload between attempts.
If anyone's got a legit strategy for getting past 20 that doesn't involve just brute-forcing it for an hour, I want to hear it. I refuse to believe theres real skill involved and not just numb thumbs and stubbornness.