Anders and I watched Project Hail Mary last night, which I had seen in the spring, but he hadn’t. When we were done, the bronze World Cup match was just coming up to the halftime mark, and England was leading France 4-0. 0! What the hell, France! We were both boggled. The last 4 teams in this year’s World Cup are the top 4-ranked teams in the world: Argentina, Spain, France, and England. There has been quite a bit of controversy about the fact that these 4 teams were seeded into the groups in such a way that they could not meet each other before the semi-finals. And so the top teams are the ones that reached the semi-finals. Each of the top 4 teams won their group, which was no surprise.
Anyway, I was so surprised about France taking such a drubbing that I didn’t go to bed as I intended but stayed up to watch the rest of the game, and boy, was I glad I did. It was probably the most ridiculously exciting 45 minutes of soccer I’ve ever watched. France was getting their ass handed to them in the first half, but they came roaring back in the second half and dominated the play, scoring 4 goals in record time. But England still managed to pull ahead with 2 more goals, finally beating France 6-4 when the whistle blew.
So now we’re interested in watching the final tonight, even though neither one of us really cares about Spain or Argentina or who wins the Cup. The biggest problem is that the 2 big Swedish television stations divided up the exclusive rights to broadcasting the games for the Cup, and we can’t watch any of the games on TV4 as they’re not on our package…and of course, the final is showing on TV4, not SVT. And to sign up for TV4 would cost several hundred kronor and we’re not really interested in paying so much just to watch a game we don’t really care about.
As we were takling about that problem in our family group chat this morning, Bryce (my nephew) offered to stream it for us on Discord, as he was going to be doing it anyway for his sister in Taiwan, since she can’t watch the game for free either. And that resulted in this exchange between him and me:
I actually knew that Discord and Slack were some kind of app or site, but have never had any reason to investigate further, and obviously they’re not something most people of my advanced (!) age use. That I know of. I don’t actually know. hahahahhaa! I DO know Teams, as we use it for work, so once he explained a little bit more, I was onboard, and we will hopefully be able to watch the game with Bryce’s help, in just a couple of hours. Though I don’t think I can stay up as late as I did last night (the game wasn’t over until after midnight), because I have to work tomorrow.
Back in 2015, Martin, who was 18 at the time, called me a fossil because I was using Firefox instead of Chrome. And that was 11 years ago. I’ve only gotten older since. And I only just squeak into the Boomer category, since I was born in the second half of 1964, which is officially the last year of the “baby boom” after WW2. But still. I can’t keep up very well anymore, and as a further sign of my elderly status: I don’t really care. Get off my lawn, you young whippersnappers, with your Discord and your Slack! Although now I’ve registered for an account on Discord, so that we can watch the game tonight, so even if I’m a boomer, I’m a COOL ONE, now.
Right?
OK Boomer.
Mood: silly
Music: Anna Vaus—Probably Shouldn’t