I know, I know. Half the internet is still passing around that photo of a cherry-red Tesla drifting through space with a mannequin in a spacesuit behind the wheel, and yes, I watched the SpaceX livestream on my phone during lunch last week like everybody else. But that's already been written about by every tech outlet with a pulse, so I'm going to leave Starman alone and talk about something dumber and smaller that's actually eaten more of my actual evenings this month: HQ Trivia.
If you don't know it yet, you will soon, probably from a friend texting you "IT'S STARTING" at 8:58pm. It's a free live trivia app, two games a day on weekdays now (3pm and 9pm Eastern), just the 9pm one on weekends. A guy named Scott Rogowsky hosts it, doing this bizarre game-show-announcer bit that somehow works even though half the time he's clearly making jokes up on the spot. Twelve multiple choice questions. Get all twelve right and you split whatever the cash prize is with everyone else still standing. Miss one, you're gone, no second chances, just a little animation mocking you and an ad for the next game.
The prizes aren't life-changing, usually a few thousand bucks split among however many hundred or thousand people survive to the end, so your actual cut can be something like $1.68. I've won exactly once and I think I made enough to buy a coffee, and I was still weirdly thrilled about it. That's the part that gets me. It's not the money. It's that for about ten minutes, a genuinely huge number of people are all doing the same dumb thing at the same time, texting each other about question 7, yelling at their phones. I haven't felt that about an app since the first few weeks of Draw Something, and that was 2012.
Here's my actual complaint though, and I'm allowed one: the servers cannot handle this. Every single night around question 8 or 9, right when it actually matters, the stream freezes, the app crashes, or the questions get delayed by a few seconds that feel like forever. Last Thursday I was out at a bar (bad wifi, obviously, that's on me) and got booted at question 10 with no way back in. My friend at the same table on a different carrier kept going and won a dollar and change. I'm choosing to be gracious about this. Mostly.
Also this week: the Winter Olympics opened in Pyeongchang, and the opening ceremony had Intel flying over a thousand drones in formation to build shapes in the sky, including a snowboarder, which apparently set some kind of record for most drones airborne at once. Except — and I only found this out reading around afterward — the footage that actually aired during the broadcast was pre-recorded from an earlier rehearsal, not a live shot of what was happening over the stadium that night. Nobody lied exactly, it was in some fine print somewhere, but it still bugs me a little. If you're going to do the "look how many drones we can fly" thing, just let it be live, even if a few of them crash into each other. That's more interesting than a perfect canned clip anyway.
Anyway. Back to trivia, since that's apparently my life now. There was a question a couple nights ago about which country has the most time zones and I got eliminated because I said Russia instead of France (France technically wins because of all its overseas territories, which felt like a trick question written by someone who'd just looked it up on Wikipedia twenty minutes earlier, honestly probably true). My roommate has started setting an actual alarm for 8:57 which I find both funny and a little concerning for both of us.
I'm curious if this thing is still around by summer or if it's one of those apps that burns hot for three months and then just quietly stops being a thing people do, like Yo, or those disappearing photo apps from a few years back. Given how often it crashes under its own popularity, I could see it going either way. For now though, my phone buzzes at 8:58 and I stop whatever I'm doing, every single time, which is more than I can say for most apps I've downloaded in the last year.