If you try to describe 3D printing to someone, you can’t help but channel a little science fiction. “You put designs in this machine, which then just like...makes it.” I’m convinced that its the great-great-great-grandfather to the oft-referenced Star Trek replicator. Luckily, I already like my tea Earl Grey and hot.
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One of the best things about a video game where you can do anything is the option of doing nothing. Which is to say for me, the most entertaining moments of Grand Theft Auto V weren't the elaborate set pieces (though the bank heist was certainly nice), or the thrill of driving expensive cars at dangerous speeds, or the ability to cause general mayhem and watch madness unfold. Nor was it the soundtrack, which was certainly excellent. Instead, I gravitated toward the calmer moments, the eyes of the storm in a game that was all hurricane.
One of those was golf. Over the six months I sunk into GTA V, I spent hours playing as Michael De Santa at the Los Santos Golf Club, taking a perverse pleasure in the fact that an entire virtual world swirled around me. As Michael, I'd killed hundreds (if not thousands) of virtual humans—some who deserved it, some who happened to be standing on the road as I was flying down the highway evading the fuzz—and was simultaneously under the employ of the Feds, a shady studio head, and a Mexican cartel.
But on the golf course, all of that melted away. There was no mechanic where I could accidentally trip up the next part of the story, or trigger someone into shooting me. There was only golf. The pleasure I took in knocking back nine holes on the course was immense. I eventually got so good that I even beat Castro Lagano, the golf-obsessed philanderer who needs a ride to the country club and is at least good enough to play on the GTA equivalent to the National Tour.
Another was driving around peacefully. No speeding, no driving in the other lane, no knocking trashcans or signs over for kicks. I covered the entirety of GTA's map, drinking in Los Santos, its virtual facsimile of Los Angeles. The streets, the mountains, the deserts, the beaches, the weird hippie encampments on the outskirts, all offered rich landscapes to be explored. And explore I did, until I knew Los Santos well enough to drive around it without a map.
Related: VICE's documentary on the American obsession with Pinball:
The similarities between Los Santos and Los Angeles are well-documented—the GTA fansite GTAist offers perhaps the most definitive proof of this, in which a fan recreates 22 stills from the game, showing the painstaking detail the team at Rockstar Games put into rendering the virtual world. One of the highlights of any GTA is the vivid setting they take place in, but in previous games the host cities were smaller; more like Epcot replicas than the real thing. Even GTA IV, which rendered a New York full of shadows and grays, failed to recreate the part of Brooklyn I lived in, eschewing the hipster milieu of Brooklyn and Greenpoint and instead focusing on the drab industrial wasteland it had once been. (Though it's worth mentioning that some elements of Williamsburg were folded into BOABO, the game's version of BK's tech-y, hip DUMBO neighborhood.)
When, six months ago, I moved from New York to Los Angeles, it was already like I knew the place. On one of my first days in the city, I drove from Venice to Santa Monica, and then to Beverly Hills, continuing upwards into the Hollywood Hills. I'd seen all of it before—the place in Venice (Vespucci in GTA V) where Michael vented to his mindless therapist; the Santa Monica (Del Perro) pier where Trevor snipes the crooked federal agent Steve Haines; Rodeo Drive (Portola Drive) where, as the gold-hearted gang-banger Franklin, I'd gone to buy myself some new clothes. I took in the Hollywood sign, rendered in the game as the Vinewood sign. It's sensations of familiarity that make a strange place feel more like home—even if I was seeing this stuff for the first time, I'd already been there virtually, and with few real friends to my name in the city, it was as close to a welcome as I was likely to get.
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The game doesn't stop at replicating Los Angeles geographically—it also renders the vapidity and general ridiculousness that people associate with the city. When he reviewed the game after beating it in a single, 38-hour session, BuzzFeed's Joe Bernstein wrote of Los Santos, "It is a funhouse, a place where cliché endlessly pinballs off cliché and yields something new. In its pastiche, and in its systems-level scope, GTA V resembles, at times, a high postmodern novel."
Which is to say, Los Santos people tend to do all of the things our worst perceptions of Los Angeles people do. Talk radio hosts scream about nonsense, ad infinitum. Michael's wife cheats on him with her yoga teacher. Franklin works out constantly at Muscle Beach. Trevor hangs out with a weed activist and hallucinates that aliens are attacking him (OK, the last part of that isn't quite realistic). Everyone is an asshole to you when you're driving, which in my experience, is a fairly accurate representation of how LA streets work.
Recently, it was announced that Rockstar was done expanding on GTA V, capping off a run that saw the game earn current-gen releases for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, as well as retrofitted for online gameplay with special, online-only heists. For those hoping that the game would never end and instead continue expanding until the sun exploded and the oceans boiled, this is a disappointment. But for me, not so much, as I've gotten all I need out of the game. And now, I live in it.
Follow Drew on Twitter.
Biohacking is one of those buzzy blanket terms used to describe a whole spectrum of ways that people modify or improve their bodies, from fairly tame experiments like drinking nasty butter coffee to more intense modifications like growing extra ears out of their arms .
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Thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web, a DIY electronic musician in New Zealand can release his music online, garner the attention of a cool boutique electronic label in Canada, then release a mind-blowingly good album on that label— all from behind a laptop screen. Wywy Brix is that musician, and Richard MacFarlane's exquisite 1080p is that label.
Wywy Brix's music transcends the increasingly silly IDM tag. His new album, Clear Licorice, is somehow simultaneously fun, sobering, and emotionally resonant. Some tracks make you want to dance, others make you want to meditate, and others make you want to saunter freely through a windblown wheat field contemplating the futility of existence. Ultimately, though, the album is full of killer springtime jams to shake off any remnants of your seasonal affective disorder. Listen to the exclusive stream above.
Preorder Clear Licorice here.
Canadian artist Shane Wilson transforms massive moose antlers into magnificent works of sculpture inspired by his natural surroundings in northern Ontario. Using ethically sourced antlers, horns, and skulls from native animals, Wilson painstakingly carves beautifully detailed scenes from the Canadian wilderness as well as intricate geometric, organic, and traditional patterns. His skill and care can turn a huge pair of solid moose antlers into branches covered in perching birds, a forest or mountain scene, a complex maze of Celtic knotwork, or even a dreamy interpretation of the Aurora borealis (bottom image).
Head over to Shane Wilson’s website to check out more of his stunning antler carvings.
[via Hi-Fructose]
A video of fearful tourists running from a mother bear and her cubs as they attempted to cross a bridge at Yellowstone National Park has emerged this week.
Filmed by Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks videographer Winston Greely, the video shows park visitors fleeing from the mother bear and her cubs as Park Ranger John Kerr shouts off-camera, “Keep going! Go! Go!” Luckily, no one was hurt and the bears safely crossed back into the forest.
Bridgetgreat
Bridgeti am sad myranda's hipbones didn't make the cut *unintentional rimshot*
Chrys watches GoT [x] [reddit]
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Bridgetman i bet playing Bangarang on guitar is a blast -_-
Bicem Sinik might be Turkey’s Dr. Woo. This young female artist uses fine monochromatic lines to create geometric animals and other minimalist forms. The difference between Bicem Sinik and Dr. Woo is that Sinik sometimes uses subtle dots for basic shading, creating some depth in her images.
But there are problems with this style of tattooing. Marie Terry of Tattoo Artist London writes, “With the rise of dotwork and linework, these discreet tattoos have become a kind of fashion, in spite of their potential short life as healing and time would make them less visible.”
More info: Instagram | Tumblr (h/t: ufunk)
Bridgeti don't even understand how the author was capable of grasping how to use a computer or typewriter or pencil to write this.
I hate food.
I don't mean I always physically retch at the prospect of having to eat. There's some food I enjoy, albeit a small selection. Sofritas burritos at Chipotle make the cut. Pizza is all right. Rather, I hate that food occupies the role it does in my life, and in society at large.
Eating is, at root, just a regular biological process like urinating or defecating. But while we've managed to successfully minimize the burden those place on our daily operations, American society at the present moment seems to relish making the process of supplying calories and nutrients to your body more complicated and burdensome than it needs to be. People who could easily afford to never cook again instead just invest in ever-fancier kitchens with ever-sharper knives and ever-more sophisticated appliances. It's like if, instead of creating municipal sewage systems, city dwellers invested in progressively more elaborate and expensive outhouses.
Me, cooking. (Shutterstock)
"But cooking is fun!" you say. Wow. Wrong. Cooking is a tedious process that can result in you stabbing yourself or burning your house down. It's awful. If you think it's fun, you should consider trying actually fun things such as drinking at bars and playing "Mario Kart." Moreover, even if you've somehow deluded yourself into thinking that cooking is fun, that's hardly justification for the role it plays in our lives. I greatly enjoy "Mario Kart," but if you told me that unless I played it two to three times per day — while making sure my consumption of red Koopa shells stayed below a recommended daily value — I would literally die, I'd be pretty upset.
All of which is to say that when I discovered a programmer named Rob Rhinehart had designed a nutritionally complete liquid food replacement called Soylent, I was intrigued. When I first wrote about Rhinehart's concoction, it was just a DIY project, and he was just starting to recruit beta testers. But by now, Soylent is an actual company making regular shipments to a growing customer base. It has a large, enthusiastic community around it, creating their own mixtures and incorporating Soylent into recipes. It's inspired imitators and competitors like MealSquares and PowerSmoothie.
But despite my feelings about food, I haven't gone full-bore. Yes, I have a dozen-odd bags of Soylent lying around my kitchen and a bunch of MealSquares in the fridge. I drink Soylent every so often. I find the taste sort of palatable. But it hasn't replaced food. It hasn't even replaced one meal out of the day, as I expected it to. Here's why.
Shut up. Yes, Soylent is easier to prepare than a home-cooked meal made from scratch. But that's like saying that biking from New York to LA is easier than crawling on your hands and knees while being stung by wasps. Both take up entirely too much time and effort, and one is actively painful. More to the point, a home-cooked meal isn't the relevant counterfactual. When I eat non-Soylent dinners, they're almost always acquired at Chipotle, Subway, 7-Eleven, or my local bodega's sandwich counter. The question isn't "Is this easier than trying to roast Brussels sprouts?"; it's "Is this easier than walking five minutes to the nearest takeout?"
Soylent is definitely not easier than walking five minutes to the nearest takeout. Most of my supply is Soylent 1.0, the initial version of the substance. Preparing it doesn't require that many steps. Your first order includes a pitcher; per the instructions, you simply dump an entire bag of Soylent powder into the pitcher, add oil (either the fish/canola oil blend provided or your own), fill the pitcher with water, and shake. Leave in the fridge for a few hours — or, better yet, overnight — and drink.
I hit more than a few snags in this process. One was the choice of oil. I initially used some olive oil, since I didn't have canola oil in the house. Big mistake: it tasted horrific. But once I got canola oil it tasted fine, so we can chalk that one up to my own laziness and/or incompetence. That aside, the oil was still a problem. Once I left the Soylent overnight, it separated out, and the Soylent looked like this:
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Dylan Matthews
Soylent 1.0, overnight. (Dylan Matthews)
It's pretty gross! Shaking it up again renders it drinkable, but it's not an especially appetizing thing to look at. Soylent 1.4, the latest version, eschews the oil component and includes the fat in the powder itself. That makes for a slightly easier process. But the fat still separates out overnight:
Soylent 1.4, overnight. (Dylan Matthews)
The biggest issue, taste-wise, was clumping. Pitchers aren't actually great mixing tools; powder gets stuck to the bottom, it's hard to maneuver mixing implements like spoons or chopsticks, and the Soylent pitcher is tall enough that those implements aren't actually that useful. The result was — even after a night in the fridge broke up those clumps a bit — a drinkable but chalky and occasionally dry mix. It definitely beats cooking, but it could be a lot better.
Some forums I've checked have suggested using an immersion blender to mix up the Soylent. I haven't tried it yet, but the very idea kind of offends me. Obviously I don't own an immersion blender. What am I, a newlywed? I don't have random kitchen gadgets just lying around. You know what kind of people own immersion blenders? People who cook. Soylent should be replacing cooking, rather than giving into its practices.
Preparing Soylent with a blender. (Shutterstock)
The biggest problem with cooking isn't the act itself, as bad as that part is. The biggest problem is that it requires an exhausting amount of planning. Either you go to the grocery store daily and buy small (and thus more expensive) quantities of the ingredients you need, or you go more irregularly but have to map out exactly what you're going to make over the course of three days or a week or whatever.
That's a terrible way to live, both because meal planning is the worst and because it puts your social life in a vise. What if a friend is randomly nearby and wants to grab dinner? What if you work late and the office orders Chinese food? What if you're getting drinks with somebody and they're hungry? Are you supposed to just abandon the meal plan? With nonperishable foods, sure, maybe. But with fresh fruits and veggies, you have to choose between living a life with a modicum of freedom and flexibility on the one hand, and not wasting produce/keeping your grocery budget under control on the other.
Soylent shares this basic problem, albeit to a lesser degree. Once mixed, it lasts for 48 hours, according to the packaging. I've fudged this on occasion to no ill effect, but you don't want to go crazy with it. Especially if you want to let the mixture cool overnight, this imposes similar planning demands as traditional cooking.
For example, I considered mixing up a batch Sunday night. But there are three to four meals in each pitcher. I didn't have dinner plans Monday or Tuesday nights, so that's two meals down, but I was planning on eating dinner at bar trivia Wednesday night (which is outside the 48-hour window in any case). Unless I have a Soylent for two meals each on Monday and Tuesday (or, at the very least, two on one day and one on the other), there's going to be some wasted liquid. And having two Soylent meals a day won't really work for me. I can't have it for breakfast; the Vox offices conveniently stock Chobani and cereal, and I'm not substituting Soylent I paid for in place of a free Vox-supplied meal. And I can't have it for lunch because, well…
This is the life we've chosen. (Shutterstock)
I don't like to bring lunch to work, including Soylent lunch, for the boring and obvious reason that having lunch with other human beings is sometimes a fun thing to do. This is the basic limitation of Soylent, or any meal replacement. Those of us who like it and hate cooking are always going to be the minority. We have to live in a world created by people with alien tastes and preferences, and adapting to that world entails eating normal food from time to time. "The real problem is that Soylent ignores the social and entertainment value of eating," The Verge's Chris Ziegler noted after spending a month on the substance. "Food is not merely sustenance, it’s a tightly woven part of our everyday lives. How many times have you commiserated with a colleague over lunch? Planned a date over dinner? Met with friends for drinks?"
I actually think this is a great weakness of food. We use food as a cloak over social occasions whose true purposes are too embarrassing or emotionally naked to be articulated clearly. When you meet someone cute at a party, it's awkward to say, "Hi, I'd like to have a long conversation in which we can each determine if we're potentially interested in becoming good friends and having sex regularly in the future." So instead you say, "Want to grab dinner?" and assume they'll catch your drift. Similarly, if you're talking to someone who sounds smart and funny and you want to befriend in a platonic capacity, "Do you want to hang out and see if we actually like each other in a one-on-one setting enough to be friends who hang out a lot?" is judged to be excessively honest, and so "Let's get coffee!" works instead. It's weird and dishonest and perpetuates the notion that it's somehow creepy to want healthy relationships with other people.
But whatever you think of food's effects on our discourse, they're real and pervasive and not going away anytime soon. That means that participating in the social universe requires engagement with food. Even the most convenient possible version of Soylent won't be able to get around that.
A rainstorm is expected to make its way to SoCal this Thursday, bringing along with it some cold weather and the chance for hail, thunder and lightning. [ more › ]
2x04 vs 5x05: stannis baratheon’s character growth
