No one really cared for the game, we were mainly interested in the half-time show by Rihanna and the commercials.

Lucky for me, I have friends who love to cook, so there was grilled lobster, kabobs, steak, and some other sides. 

Some conversation topics: biking, S's rating of sunsets, Spain, ChatGPT/Ai chat, Pixel, wedding photos, and... the recent fires! There were 3 G00gler's there, along with some other devs, and there were both new-hires and L7s. As an outsider, it was fascinating to see how everyone kind of knew similar people - who got fired, and what not. Someone's whole team of about 400 people had a 20% cut of devs, they cut their entire branch from another country. And when I asked why, the reason (for that person's team) was that THOSE group of people were working on a project that for the past 3 years, was a priority project, but the same project no longer was important. So Googl just cut everyone who was working soley on that project! They were GOOD devs! And a diff dev from another team who worked on a compiler also got cut (meaning, someone who worked backest of backends methink.)

Moving on, I decided to ask if there were any front-end devs who got fired, and yes - the only front-end dev from this guy's team got fired. 

I've decided there's no pattern here between job security with front and back end. And I've yet to decide whether I'm a front or back-end dev, but I did announce to as many people as I can that I'm going to learn HTML/CSS/Javascript, so hopefully by the end of this month, I'll feel more versed - and then start job hunting with more background knowledge.

Oh yeah -
comments about Rihanna. Her deal was that she'd only agreed to host the half-time show if they would only use her products for the entire thing (meaning outfits and make up, and whatever else she sells). Can't believe she was preggo during the whole thing, I would have fainted standing up on that platform she was on. S commented that in the trailer she looked like a character from Dr Seuss, which ain't wrong! 
 

There were some ok commercials, the funniest one being about Premaure Electrification (video)

// ETA: Other ads, I guess, that were perhaps crowd pleasers: beer fighting ad, the superstar workday ad (who also had fires), and the one with the scrubs characters...=')