As my annual aging draws nearer, I guess now is as good of time as any to bust out a good old fashioned “back in the day” kind of posts. But over the weekend, I wanted to watch a stream of a League of Legends match because of course I would. But instead of watching it on a computer screen, I figured why not watch it on my big screen television, because such a thing is possible? So I turned on the XBOX One that I have no games for, because I basically plunked down $300 for a glorified app player, so I could log into Twitch and watch.
But first, there’s an updated that needed to be applied, and it was somewhere in the vicinity of 2.3 GB. Even hardwired, that’s still a little bit of time to move that much data. So I sit around with my thumbs up my ass waiting for this update to download and install, before finally, it’s completed. Turns out that I don’t have Twitch installed on my XBONE, so I have to download that. Update required.
So while Twitch is updating, I figure why the fuck not just get on my PC and just watch it on a monitor instead, so I turn on my computer, only to find out that there are now Windows updates that need to be installed, and my virus protection software has found updates and would like to apply them.
Long story short, by the time I managed to get the game I wanted to watch up and running, it was practically 21 minutes into the game, and just about already decided.
While it’s true that technology has made grandiose advances, to where we can get HD streaming of live competitive events onto our large screen media, and have internet speeds that are a billion times faster than the 28.8 mpbs modems from the mid-1990s, it’s not without its own prices of aggravation.
Gone are the days when mom and dad brought home a Super Nintendo, where you could plug in the power and AV jack, and within ten minutes be discovering the joy of riding Yoshi, eating every enemy in sight, and figuring out the nuances of cape flight and seeing how many enemies Mario could jump on without touching the ground.
Now, you get an XBOX or a Piss4, play cord-Tetris to see if there’s even an open HDMI jack, or settle with component cables, before you even turn the machine on in the first place. Once on, there’s the inevitable first system update that are usually 2-4 gigs, which then requires internet connectivity, and the debate on whether to go wireless, or actually find a way to snake an Ethernet cable(s) to the respective systems. Eventually, you’ll finally get Halo 4.2.5 HD Remix into the disc tray and running, only to find out that the game itself has a 267 MB update to patch out the hovering tea-bagging that has plagued PVP over the last four months. By the time player one has fired a single round, nearly 45 minutes have been spent unboxing, wiring and waiting on updates to download and install.
It’s absolutely great that due to the power of the internet, and the fact that with each passing day we as society are more and more permanently connected to it, we’re able to have every electronic device we know capable of being up-to-date with the most recently, most up-to-date soft/firmware so that things can be “easier.” However it’s gotten to a point where the updates are so frequent to where it’s just this exasperating feeling of deflation every time you turn on a device or open a program, only to be halted in place while a mandatory update derails your time.
There are plenty of times when I just want to turn on my television and watch something, without having to wait for the player, the television, the firmware and the wireless connection to require 35 updates and having to wait 20 minutes to watch a 30 minute program.
