So it's 3.14.14 today, which apparently a bunch of people on Twitter are treating like the pi day to end all pi days, since it's not just March 14th but the whole date lines up with 3.14.14 the way the "real" one, next year's 3/14/15, is supposed to nail it down to the decimal at 9:26 in the morning. I'm not going to pretend I care that much about the math trivia. What I care about is that someone in my office actually baked a pie and brought it in around 10am, and it was gone by 10:20, and I did not get a piece because I was on a call with a client who wanted to know why his site's contact form kept eating submissions (turned out to be a plugin conflict, not exciting, fixed it in twenty minutes).
The bigger thing on my mind this week has nothing to do with pie. It's Titanfall. It came out this past Tuesday, the 11th, on Xbox One and PC, and I have not been a productive human being since. I bought it on PC through Origin for $59.99, which, fine, that's the going rate for a big release, but I will never not be annoyed that EA makes you install their launcher on top of Steam just to play a game you already own. Origin is slow, it nags you about friends you don't have, and it crashed once on Friday night mid-match, which dropped me from a game I was actually winning. That's a small thing to be mad about but I was mad about it.
The game itself, though. I get why people are losing their minds over it. The wall-running and the double jump change how you think about a map completely, you're not hugging cover the way you do in every other shooter, you're using the walls as extra floor. First time I chained a wall run into a jump into calling down my Titan mid-air I actually said "oh" out loud, alone, in my apartment, like an idiot. There's no real single-player campaign to speak of, it's dressed up multiplayer with some voiceover, and I don't think that's a flaw so much as just an honest thing about what the game is. I've read some people online expecting a Call of Duty-style campaign and being let down, and I think that's on them for expecting it, not on Respawn for not building one.
I put something like fourteen hours into it between Thursday night and Sunday, which is a lot for me at 31 years old with a job that starts at 9. I told myself Sunday I'd stop by 11pm. It was 1:40am when I actually closed the laptop.
Here's the pi day connection, such as it is. Back in December I bought a Raspberry Pi, the original model B, from a UK reseller because it was cheaper shipped than buying it through the couple of US sites carrying it at the time. Thirty-five dollars for the board, another twenty or so for a case and an SD card. My plan, and I remember typing this out in an email to a friend, was to turn it into a little retro emulation box hooked up to the TV, maybe run RetroPie on it once that project matured a bit more. It is still in the box. Unopened. Sitting on a shelf next to my router where I can see it every single day and feel a low hum of guilt about it.
I don't have a tidy reason for why it's still sealed. Titanfall ate my free time this week, sure, but that's an excuse for the last five days, not the last three months. I think there's a particular kind of tech purchase where buying the thing satisfies most of the itch you had, and the actual doing of the project was never really the point. I'm not proud of that. I'm also not opening the box tonight, because I've got another Titanfall match to play before bed, and the pie situation at the office tomorrow might actually work out in my favor if I get there before 10.
Anyway. Happy pi day, or whatever. Ask me again next March how the Raspberry Pi's coming along. I make no promises.