So the USA actually won yesterday. 2-1 over Ghana, John Brooks heading in the winner in the 86th minute off a corner, and I watched maybe forty percent of it live because I was pretending to pay attention in a status meeting with my phone face-down on the table.
I want to talk about the game for a second but honestly what I really want to complain about is WatchESPN.
If you don't follow soccer (I don't, really, outside of World Cup years, and I'll fully admit that), the setup is this: ESPN has the US broadcast rights this time around, and if you want to stream a match on your phone or laptop instead of being near an actual TV, you need the WatchESPN app, and the app wants you to log in with your cable provider credentials before it'll give you anything past a highlights reel. I have Comcast. Comcast's login page, at least on my phone yesterday around 11:50am eastern, took something like four tries to accept my password, and by the time I got in the match had already started and Ghana had a shot go just wide that I only know about because Twitter told me, loudly, in about six different replies before I could mute the World Cup hashtag.
That's the other thing nobody warns you about with live sports and social media at the same time: the spoilers are relentless and there is no good way around them if your feed has any sports people in it at all. I unfollowed nobody, muted nothing in advance, and paid the price. Somebody I follow for, of all things, JavaScript tweets was somehow the first to break the Brooks goal to me, forty seconds before I actually saw it happen on a buffering 240p stream hunched over my desk. Rough way to find out.
The stream itself wasn't terrible once it loaded, which is more than I expected honestly. A couple stutters in the second half, one full drop where I had to refresh and lost maybe ninety seconds, but for a free-with-cable-login stream on a Monday during work hours with what I assume was an enormous chunk of the internet doing the exact same thing I was doing, it held up okay. I've had worse experiences watching stuff that should be way less demanding.
I did the responsible thing and closed my office door for the last fifteen minutes, which nobody questioned because everybody in this building was doing the same thing. That's maybe the nicest part of a World Cup happening during the workday — there's a weird unspoken agreement that productivity just isn't going to be a thing between certain hours, and nobody fights it too hard. I walked past three other offices with the game up on a second monitor. One guy had actually pulled a small TV out of a closet somewhere. I don't want to know how long that's been sitting in there waiting for an excuse.
Small tangent, not really related except that it also happened this week: I spent Saturday afternoon finally poking at Swift, the new language Apple dropped at WWDC a couple weeks back. I'd put off touching it because the Xcode 6 beta felt half-finished the first time I opened it, crashed twice within ten minutes, and I figured I'd rather wait for it to stabilize than fight the tooling on top of learning new syntax. It's better now, or at least it crashed on me only once this time, which I'm counting as progress. The optionals thing is going to take some getting used to. More on that another day, maybe, once I've actually built something instead of just typing "hello world" into a playground and nodding at it.
Anyway. USA plays Portugal on Sunday, which by all accounts is going to be a much tougher match, and I already know I'm not getting through that one at my desk. I'm taking the afternoon off and watching it properly, on an actual television, with the login already saved and tested ahead of time so I'm not fumbling through a password screen while everyone around me finds out what happened before I do.