Chanoatx

I have a confession to make: I like books. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s followed this monthly list, but I don’t mean just reading them. I’m fascinated by the form of a book, the book as a technology, and an object that’s changed how we transmit information from one person to another.

Recently, I came across a really interesting book put out by the Library of Congress: The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures. It’s a history of the card catalog, and it proves to be a really interesting look at not only the system itself, but also the history of public libraries in America. Plus, there are lots of really gorgeous pictures of catalog cards, which makes this book a delight to flip through if reading about the history isn’t your thing.

The card catalog system is one of those things that you don’t ever really think about, but while it seems like an obvious organizational method today, its creation was somewhat controversial at the time. More than that, it helped to cement the purpose of the Library of Congress as a resource for the nation’s libraries, not just a repository for the nation’s books.

The summer is the busy time for publishing, and accordingly, there are a ton of new books that will undoubtably end up in the Library of Congress — or at the very least, on your bookshelf.

June 1st

Valerian: The Complete Collection, Vol 1. by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres

Luc Besson is set to release his adaptation of Pierre Christian’s French comic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in July, but if you’ve been intrigued by the trailers and can’t wait to check it out, the entire comic series is being rereleased in a series of omnibus editions, the first of which comes out today. This volume contains the first two books: The City of Shifting Waters and The Empire of a Thousand Planets. The book also includes some bonus features: interviews with the author, artist, and Besson.

Beren and Luthien by J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien’s estate has been steadily releasing new material from his papers, and the latest is one of the earliest stories in his Middle-earth series: Beren and Luthien. It’s a romance between two characters, Beren and Lúthien, and it is based loosely on Tolkien’s own relationship with his wife Edith.

June 6th

A Peace Divided by Tanya Huff

In this second installment of Tanya Huff’s Peacekeeper series, Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr has walked away from the Confederation Marine Corps after learning what she was fighting for. But she’s not abandoning her mission: she’s assembled a group of loyal friends to take on missions that the Corps wouldn’t. When an archeological team is taken hostage, Torin’s team is sent in, only to find that their mission is far more complicated than previously thought. Publisher’s Weekly calls the book a “fast-paced thriller bristling with treachery and intrigue.”

Image: Resurrection House

Necessary Monsters by Richard A. Kirk

A convicted thief and bibliophile, Lumsden Moss, escaped from prison, and found an opportunity to steal a rare book from the man who put him away. Unfortunately, that’s painted a target on his back from some very bad people, and he’s now on the run. The book contains some secrets from a cursed and long-lost island, in a world where magic and technology are inseparable.

The Rebellion’s Last Traitor by Nik Korpon

Decades of war has shattered Eitan City, and to help restore order, the Tathadann Party rewrites history by outlawing the past. One man, Henraek, is a memory thief, stealing memories from civilians, until he harvests a memory of his own wife’s death. Now, he’s going to do whatever it takes to discover the truth about her killing, even if it means turning on the people he was most loyal to.

Supreme Villainy: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Most (In)Famous Supervillain Memoir Never Published by King Oblivion and Matt D. Wilson

King Oblivion, PhD is the most famous supervillains in the world, and as the CEO of the International Society of Supervillains, he’s responsible for Nixon’s election, the theft of Japan (the entire country), the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and quite a bit more. Author Matt D. Wilson discovered Oblivion’s moldering manifesto in one of his lairs, and with a bit of editing, has published them into a tell-all about the late author’s life.

The Sandcastle Empire by Kayla Olson

Eden’s life was easy before the war. But in 2049, the militant Wolfpack gang controls the Earth and its resources, and Eden knows the location of the last neutral place left, Sanctuary Island. She escapes a labor camp and travels to the island, where she meets others who resist the Wolves. But when her friend goes missing, she discovers that the Sanctuary is more dangerous than it appears. The film rights for the book have already been snapped up by Leonardo DiCaprio.

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne Valente has written a number of really unique and interesting novels, and in this latest, she turns her attention to the women of superhero comics. This book is a series of linked stories from the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, as well as female heroes and sidekicks, who have been kicked out of the way to help their male counterpart’s story move forward.

June 13th

The Sacred Era by Yoshio Aramaki, translated by Baryon Tensor Posadas

In the 1970s, Yoshio Aramaki wrote one of the best-known works of Japanese science fiction, The Sacred Era. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, a student named K journeys to the capital of the Holy Empire to take The Sacred Examination, which will qualify him for metaphysical research service in the court. He’s assigned to a secret department, which sends him on the path of an executed heretic on an interplanetary journey.

The Black Elfstone by Terry Brooks

Terry Brooks is bringing his epic Shannara series to a close with a four-part mini-series, The Fall of Shannara. The Black Elfstone is the first installment, and sees an unknown enemy threatening the peace that has lasted for generations. A party is dispatched to investigate this threat and to figure out how to save the Four Lands.

Image: Pyr Books

Wilders by Brenda Cooper

The first installment of the new Project Earth series, Wilders follows Coryn Williams, who grew up in the megacity of Seacouver. While everything is provided in Seacouver, she’s unhappy. So when her parents commit suicide, she decides to search for her sister, who left the city to join a “rewilding” crew that works to restore the land. When she leaves the city, Coryn finds that life is far more dangerous than she expected, and discovers a plot that could threaten her home.

The Space Between the Stars by Anne Corlett

In this debut novel, Jamie Allenby just wants to go to space. She emigrates from Earth and finds work on a distant frontier planet, coping with the loneliness of space when a virus decimates the local population. A garbled message from home gives her some hope that someone from her past might still be alive, and along with a band of survivors, they return home to find that in their absence, they’ve changed just as much as Earth has.

Prey of the Gods by Nicky Drayden

South Africa has a promising future in Nicky Drayden’s debut novel, Prey of the Gods. People have personal robots, the poor are helped by renewable energy initiatives, and genetic engineering has opened up a huge industry in the region. There are some problems on the horizon, however, such as a new hallucinogenic drug and an AI uprising. It’s up to a powerful Zulu girl, a mind-reading teenager, a pop singer, and a politician to help save the country.

Soleri by Michael Johnston

Michael Johnston’s new epic fantasy draws from Egyptian history. In it, the ruling family of the Soleri Empire hasn’t been seen for centuries, but they rule the four kingdoms with a tight grip. When an expected eclipse doesn’t occur, political infighting begin to tear apart a dynasty that’s stood for millennia.

The Changeling by Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle made a splash recently with horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom. His latest novel begins with a new father, Apollo Kagwa, dreaming of his childhood. When his wife abruptly vanishes, he goes on a quest to find her, which leads him to fantastic places that connect back to his own missing father. Kirkus Reviews gave it a coveted star rating, saying that “LaValle has successfully delivered a tale of wonder and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a parent.”

Image: Solaris Books

Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel Ninefox Gambit earned a pair of Hugo and Nebula nominations, and its follow-up, Raven Stratagem, picks up right after its end. Captain Kel Cheris has summoned Shuos Jedao, a long-dead general, to put down a rebellion, only to be possessed by the ghost. At the same time, aliens known as the Hafn are invading, and Jedao might be the only person who can stop them. Lee’s take on space opera and military science fiction was intriguingly different, and this new book looks just as exciting. Publisher’s Weekly awarded the book a star rating, calling it “a stunning sequel,” saying that it “contains a satisfying mixture of interstellar battles, politics, intrigue, and arcane technology.”

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

McGuire recently earned a Nebula Award and a Hugo nomination for her novella Every Heart A Doorway, which is part of her Wayward Children series. This is the story of what happened to Jack and Jill before they arrived at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Jacqueline is quiet and police, while Jillian is a thrill-seeker. As children, they discover an impossible staircase and step into a fantastic world complete with vampires and mad scientists. The novella earned a star rating from Publisher’s Weekly, which described the novel as an “exquisitely written fairy tale ... about the choices that can alter the course of a life forever.”

Want by Cindy Pon

Set in a near-future Taipei, Jason Zhou lives in a world where only the wealthy can afford to stay alive, protected by suits from pollution and disease. He’s resolved to change things after his mother dies. Along with a group of friends, he infiltrates the ranks of the wealthy in an attempt to destroy the Jin Corporation, which manufactures the suits that the rich rely on. Along the way, he falls for the daughter of the company’s CEO, Daiyu, and he’s forced to choose between his heart and his values.

Cormorant Run by Lilith Saintcrow

Years ago, there was an event — something that opened up a void, killing everyone inside of it. Those who enter are known as Rifters, who often come back with fantastic technologies. Svinga is one such Rifter, and she’s hauled out of prison to search for a legendary piece of technology, the Cormorant. It’s a dangerous mission, but she has plans of her own.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom by Bradley W. Schenck

This novel imagines the future as predicted in the 1939 World Fair, complete with mad scientists, robots, rocket engineers, and space pirates. It’s an homage to the era of pulp fiction, and when the Info-Slate switchboard operators are abruptly fired, Nola Gardner hires freelance adventurer Kelvin “Dash” Kent to find out why. When they dig deeper, they find that there’s a plot in play that threatens the entire city of Retropolis.

Our Dark Duet by Victoria Schwab

In this sequel to Victoria Schwab’s novel This Savage Song, Kate Harker is a monster hunter who was thrown together with a monster named August Flynn. Six months later, the war between humanity and monsters has come, and the two are pitted against one another. However, there’s a new, terrifying monster that’s emerged from the shadows, one that will test them all.

Image: Saga Books

The Witch Who Came In From The Cold by Lindsay Smith, Max Gladstone, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Ian Tregillis, and Michael Swanwick

Serial Box is a publisher that’s been releasing serialized stories online for a couple of years now, and their latest, The Witch Who Came In From The Cold, is an intriguing spy thriller set at the height of the Cold War. Now collected into a single volume, the story follows spies and sorcerers in 1970s Prague, holding the balance of the East and West in their hands. Publisher’s Weekly gave the book a star rating, noting that the individual “installments are easy to read one at a time, but the tangles of alliances, secrets, and shocking double-crosses will have readers up all night mumbling, ‘Just one more.’”

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

Neal Stephenson has teamed up with historical novelist Nicole Galland (they previously worked on Mongoliad) for a new novel: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Set in the near future, Melisandre Stokes, a linguistics and language expert, is approached by the military to translate some old documents. What they contain is earth-shattering: they prove that magic existed before the scientific revolution, and that the industrial revolution essentially weakened magic. The Department of Diachronic Operations has a plan and a device: they want to bring magic back, and to send an operative back in time to ensure that magic never went away in the first place. Kirkus Reviews gave the book a star rating, saying that the book is a “departure for both authors and a pleasing combination of much appeal to fans of speculative fiction.”

Virology by Ren Warom

In this follow-up to Ren Warom’s Escapology, Shock Pao opened up the virtual world known as the Slip, and with some stolen tech, he’s the one in charge of the world’s systems. That’s put a target on his back, and he’s running out of places to hide.

June 20th

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss

Theodora Goss is an acclaimed short story writer, and in her debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, she mashes up a bunch of classic science fiction characters. Mary Jekyll, daughter of Dr. Henry Jekyll, is orphaned, and she decides to go after her father’s murderer, Edward Hyde. She comes across Hyde’s daughter Diana, and with the help of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, she finds other women who were created through experiments: Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherin Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein. Along the way, she comes across a secret society of mad scientists, and it’s time for the monsters to take on their creators.

Transformation by James Gunn

James Gunn (not the director of Guardians of the Galaxy) is one of the last authors from the original golden age of science fiction, and with Transformation, he brings to a close a trilogy that he opened with Transcendental and Transgalactic. Riley and Asha crossed the galaxy, discovered the Transcendental Machine, and have been turned into something more than human. The worlds at the end of the Federation have gone quiet, and they’re dispatched to investigate. Along with a planetary AI, a Federation agent, and a member of a group bent on destroying the AI, they have to come together to fend off a more powerful threat than the Transcendentals. Clarkesworld Magazine spoke with Gunn about the series last year, if you want to know more.

Indigo by Charlaine Harris, Christopher Golden, Jonathan Maberry, Kelley Armstrong, Kat Richardson, Seanan McGuire, Tim Lebbon, Cherie Priest, James A. Moore, and Mark Morris

What stands out about Indigo is the fact that it was written by 11 separate authors. The collaborative novel follows Investigative reporter Nora Hesper who moonlights as Indigo, a vigilante who can manipulate shadows. She’s after a cult called the Children of Phonos, and after one battle, she learns a secret from a dying cultist that makes her question her own origins.

Image: Tor.com

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

Last month, we posted an excerpt from Stephen Graham Jones’ upcoming novella, and we’re really excited to dig into it. The story is about a 15-year-old boy who catches a glimpse of someone he thinks is his mysteriously deceased father. When he investigates, he discovers that his house is much bigger and more dangerous than he imagined. Publisher’s Weekly says that “the immediacy of Jones’s fiction is wonderfully refreshing and not to be missed.”

Shattered Minds by Laura Lam

Laura Lam returns to her futuristic world of Pacifica, which we last saw in her novel False Hearts. Carina was a biohacker who became disillusioned with her work on brain recording and the disturbing things she saw. She quits and becomes addicted to Zeal, and acts out horrific fantasies in the digital dream world. When a co-worker sends her pictures of a murdered girl and is then killed by her former employer, Carina has to track down the clue to the murder, a case that could have a profound impact on herself and the world.

Image: Mythic Island Press

The Last Good Man by Linda Nagata

One of my favorite trilogies of all time is Linda Nagata’s three The Red novels, a near-future, military science fiction series. She’s returning to military SF with The Last Good Man, about former Army pilot True Brighton. Brighton is employed at a private military company called Requisite Operations, which uses robots, artificial intelligence, and big data to enhance soldiers in the field. When she makes a scientific breakthrough, it leaves her questioning everything. Publisher’s Weekly gave the book a coveted star rating, saying that the book is a “thrilling novel that lays bare the imminent future of warfare.”

Godblind by Anna Stephens

A thousand ago, the Mireces were exiled from Rilpor for worshipping the bloodthirsty Red Gods. When Rillirin, an escaped Mireces slave, arrives at the border, she threatens to undo the life that Watcher Dom Templeson has set up, letting his followers learn some of his darkest secrets. And as political tensions within Rilpor flare, the Mireces are plotting to return.

June 27th

Unbreakable by Will McIntosh

Will McIntosh has written some of my favorite science fiction novels, and for his latest, Unrbeakable, he’s turning to self-publishing. Celia has never left the walls of her town: all she knows of it is that there’s an audience out there that come in once a week to watch her and her fellow residents attempt to break world records. A friend of hers is dying, and she escapes to help him. Aided by a mysterious stranger and a hostile clown, she’s going to be pushed to her limits in a strange new world.

Image: Penguin Random House

The Waking Land by Callie Bates

In this debut novel from Callie Bates, a girl named Elanna Valtai grew up in the court of King Antoine, a hostage to keep her father in check. She discovers that she has fantastic powers: she can make flowers grow in her hands, and more. However, magic has been forbidden ever since her home was conquered by the Paladis Empires two centuries ago. When the King is murdered, she flees to her homeland when she’s accused, only to find that that she no longer recognizes her home.

The Bones of the Earth by Rachel Dunne

The next entry in Rachel Dunne’s Bound Gods series, a priest named Joros has assembled a team of fighters to win the coming fight for control of the world and its mortal residents. In the preceding novel, In the Shadow of the Gods, Joros and his company burned the hand of one of the evil twin gods, Fratarro, and they’re dealing with the outcome. As they lick their wounds, Joros has to try and hold the group together, because things are going to get much harder from here on out.

Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory’s has written some fantastic novels in his career, and his next looks to be just as interesting. Teddy Telemachus conned his way into a classified governmental study about telekinesis, where he met his wife, Maureen McKinnon, a real psychic. They marry, have children, and make their way around the country as performers. Then, everything changes. After withdrawing from the public eye, they’re forced to use their powers to protect themselves from criminals, the government, and the general public.

Escape Velocity by Jason M. Hough

Jason Hough’s novel Injection Burn came out earlier this week, but you won’t have long to wait for its sequel: Escape Velocity comes out at the end of June. In the first novel, Skyler Luiken is the captain of a starship headed to a distant planet to make it through the Swarm Blockage and rescue them. Along the way, they discover fellow ship captain Gloria Tsandi and her crews on the same mission.

In this second novel, they (spoilers) make their way through the Blockage, but but now they have to contend with enemies on the ground, and the return back to Earth.

Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too by Jomny Sun

An alien lands on Earth and finds that he’s incredibly lonely, and works to make himself at home when he realizes that he’s not quite alone. Along the way, he finds a whole bunch of other creatures who in strange places in their lives, such as a bear who’s sad that everyone runs away from him, and a tadpole who’s contending with turning into a frog. The book is based off of the popular Twitter account, @jonnysun.

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck

Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck has written some of the best fantastic fiction that I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read her collection of Weird short stories, Jagganath, do yourself a favor and pick it up immediately. Now, her novel Amatka has been translated into English for the first time. An information assistant named Vanja goes to the winter colony of Amatka to collect some intelligence on behalf of the government. However, something strange is going on, and as her visit lengthens, she discovers evidence of a plot and coverup that threatens the colony.

The Witchwood Crown by Tad Williams

The first installment of the new Osten Ard series from Tad Williams is set more than 30 years after the last installment of the series, To Green Angel Tower. An envoy to the rulers of Osten Ard is attacked and left for dead, and dark rumors are swirling around the kingdom about forbidden magic. War is coming, all while King Simon works to prevent his kingdom from falling into chaos. Kirkus Reviews gave the book a star rating, saying that it’s a “richly described, meticulously plotted, and multilayered narrative tapestry featuring a diversity of adeptly developed characters and multiple storylines, this is flawless epic fantasy.”

Researchers found bouldering helps alleviate symptoms in people struggling with depression and anxiety.

Bouldering requires mental focus, physical exertion, and, oftentimes, a friend’s help. Those factors make the activity a unique tool in treating depression, according to a study by the University of Arizona.

Researchers Eva-Maria Stelzer, a doctoral student at UA, and Katharina Luttenberger, a doctor in human biology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), last week published their findings from a 24-week study.

The results suggest the physical, mental, and social aspects of bouldering can markedly reduce feelings of depression and anxiety.

Bouldering To Treat Depression

Stelzer and Luttenberger led a team that evaluated more than 100 participants in Germany, where some hospitals use climbing as a therapeutic treatment.

Most participants were new to bouldering. Individuals were divided into two groups: Half had immediate access to bouldering, the other half had to wait.

Each person bouldered for three hours a week for eight weeks, and researchers measured their depression levels using the Beck’s Depression Inventory at various points throughout.

The findings showed that during “therapy” the scores of those with immediate access to bouldering improved by 6.27 points. Or, a full severity grade lower, dropping from “moderate” depression to “mild.”

By comparison, those who had to wait to boulder had an improved score of 1.4 points.

According to the study’s authors, bouldering is effective for a number of reasons.

“You have to be mindful and focused on the moment. It does not leave much room to let your mind wonder on things that may be going on in your life—you have to focus on not falling,” Stelzer said.

“Bouldering not only has strong mental components, but it is accessible at different levels so that people of all levels of physical health are able to participate.”

Stelzer will present the findings during the Association for Psychological Science Convention, held this week in Boston.

Not A Cure

Both Stelzer and Luttenberger are experienced climbers. They noted the sport’s immediacy and demand for focus made it a prime fit to help with depression.

But the social elements of climbing and bouldering were also integral. Stelzer noted that isolation is a key culprit in the fight against depression.

In addition to the eight-week “climbing intervention” researchers taught participants about meditation, mindfulness, and how to cultivate “positive social interactions” over the 24-week study.

As a result, the researchers are developing a manual that outlines an eight-week program that incorporates bouldering and psychotherapeutic counseling.

“I hope this study and future studies are able to impact a life,” Stelzer said. “Even though a variety of treatment options exist, less than one-third of people receive treatment for their symptoms.”

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 16.1 million American adults cope with depression.

The study’s findings are encouraging, though bouldering itself is not a cure-all.

As Luttenberger noted, “I’d always encourage patients to do the sport they like — may it be climbing or something else — as a sport is a wonderful possibility to prevent all possible sorts of illnesses, mental and physical.”

The post New Study: Treat Anxiety, Depression with… Bouldering appeared first on GearJunkie.

Wacom introduced two new styluses today, one optimized for Windows 10 and another for iOS devices. Bamboo Ink, the Windows Ink stylus, is designed for writing, although it comes with three different nibs — soft, medium, and firm — for different feels. The pen works with lots of Windows devices, which Wacom says it’ll list online.

We could have anticipated this new pen given that Microsoft announced at Build earlier this month that it was expanding what people can do with their styluses. They can use the pen to interact with the Edge browser, navigate windows, write in text boxes, navigate, scroll, and select text, among other things.

Wacom is also catering to iOS users. The Bamboo Sketch has a swappable fine tip and is for sketching or drawing on an iPad or iPhone. It pairs over Bluetooth and is pressure sensitive, even on iPads other than the iPad Pro that don’t support the Apple Pencil. The Sketch charges over a custom magnetic connector and USB, and it should last for 15 hours on a charge.

Both styluses will cost $79.95 and will be available on Wacom’s website, Best Buy, and other select retailers starting in June.

Chipotle Mexican Grill today announced that it has identified the malware that was responsible for the credit card hack earlier this year. Alongside the news, it also released a new tool to help customers check whether the restaurant they visited was involved. When pressed by The Verge, Chipotle did not disclose the exact numbers of restaurants affected, but said “most” locations nationwide may have been involved.

“The malware searched for track data (which sometimes has cardholder name in addition to card number, expiration date, and internal verification code) read from the magnetic stripe of a payment card as it was being routed through the POS device,” Chipotle said in a statement. “There is no indication that other customer information was affected.”

We browsed through the tool and found that every state Chipotle operates in had restaurants that were breached, including most major cities. The restaurants were vulnerable in various time frames between March 24th and April 18th, 2017. Chipotle also operates another chain called Pizzeria Locale, which was affected by the hack as well. (The list of identified restaurants can be found here, which includes locations in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, and Ohio.)

Chipotle noted that not all locations have been identified, but it’s a starting guide to check whether your visit lines up with the breached period. If so, the company suggests you file a police report, contact the Federal Trade Commission, or place a fraud alert or security freeze on your bank account. The latter may require out-of-pocket charges, which the customer is liable for. Chipotle isn’t legally required to offer credit protection for affected customers, making it just another one of the many things Chipotle can screw you over for.

Theme park attractions don’t normally require real suspension of disbelief. You strap into a vehicle, get swung around a bit, and then you’re off and running to the next line. But when you’re dealing with an entire immersive world, like Disney’s new Pandora: The World of Avatar, that dynamic changes. There has to be a narrative behind the ride, an in-world reason for people to line up when they’ve ostensibly traveled to an alien world known for its lush, exotic landscapes.

Pandora’s flagship attraction, Flight of Passage, might as well be a case study in how to pull off that kind of challenge. It’s a 3D motion simulator ride that lets visitors link to a Na’vi avatar, straight from the core conceit of the film, and take an aerial tour on one of the planet’s wild Banshees. It’s a technological marvel, seamlessly creating the illusion of careening through valleys and soaring past floating mountains. But it’s also a remarkable exercise in storytelling, linking the film to the physical park in its own unique way, resulting in one of the most immersive ride experiences I’ve encountered.

“There were a number of things that people really wanted to do on Pandora, and one of them was flying on the back of a Banshee,” David Lester, show programmer at Walt Disney Imagineering, tells me on a busy press day. In the world of theme parks, Imagineers are the closest thing you can find to rock stars, and the company has doubled the number of Imagineer groups available to discuss Pandora in order to meet the demand. “Every decision about how to create this experience, what technology to use, was all designed with that in mind: How do we make it feel like every person engaging in this experience is truly there?”

With Flight of Passage, that starts with the premise of the park itself. It’s been 100 years since the events featured in the film Avatar, and people now visit Pandora to learn about its exotic plants and wildlife. Years of abuse from humans harmed its fragile ecosystems, however, and a group called the Pandora Conservation Initiative has begun to track the world’s various keystone species — specific animals or plants that support the ecosystem as a whole. One of those is the Banshee, known to live in Pandora’s floating mountains, and as a result PCI has begin using an updated version of the avatar mind-linking technology to monitor their progress.

The ride actually begins long before visitors get anywhere near flying. The entrance to the attraction is essentially a waterfall-laden hiking trail, providing a glorious view of the park’s massive floating mountains and the valley below. Once inside, guests find themselves inside a cave filled with old paintings from Na’vi history, before discovering the remains of an old abandoned building from RDA, the mining company from the film that caused so much havoc in the first place. But as the path winds on, it’s revealed that the bioluminescent jungle has already begun to creep in and devour the ruins, an incredibly detailed landscape that evokes the struggle for dominance between humanity and nature.

That’s really just the beginning, because the lines for Flight of Passage are expected to be long. The entire queue was designed to support around a six-hour wait time, if needed — a mind-numbing prospect – but it makes the importance of a line as an attraction unto itself even more important. I remember riding Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure in the 1990s, which turned the queue into a puzzle-decoding quest that featured appearances from movie characters and a set that visitors could physically move and interact with. Those elements are no longer active today, but at the time they actually left more of an impression on me than the ride itself because they told the backstory of the entire attraction. Flight of Passage takes that same basic approach, but amplifies it — particularly when the queue leads guests to the PCI research labs.

That’s when it feels like you’re almost literally stepping onto the set of Cameron’s original film. A multitude of small science experiments dominate a workstation in the center of the room, while nearby an amnio tank holds a fully-grown avatar, ready to be brought out of stasis. It’s impressive how much that visual grounds not just the ride, but the entire park. Cameron’s Na’vi were always computer-generated creations, but here they’re recreated perfectly; the avatar’s CG-smooth skin and subtle blue shading turned physical, and totally believable.

After snaking through the labs, a few video introductions lay out how audience members will be linked to their avatars, and then they’re led into the ride itself. Avatar technology has evolved to the point where the process can be performed with nothing more than a “link chair” — basically a bicycle-like apparatus with haptic feedback — and a pair of “flight goggles” that serve as 3D glasses.

The ride mechanics are similar to Soarin’, Disney’s hang-glider simulator. When it begins, audiences face a gigantic 3D screen, with the chairs pivoting and tilting to recreate the feeling of plummeting down the face of a cliff, or pulling left in a tight corkscrew around a floating mountain. Bursts of wind and sprays of mist enhance the sense of immersion, while visually it appears you’re inside Avatar itself. Audiences first met Pandora and the Na’vi in 3D CG environments, and returning to that kind of world in Flight of Passage feels totally organic.

Throughput is obviously a priority — there are eight link chairs per room, two rooms per floor, and several floors for each of the four screens used in the attraction. But the four-minute ride itself is so engrossing you never really have time, nor inclination, to realize you’re doing anything but flying by yourself.

“We're illusion designers,” Imagineering executive producer Amy Jupiter tells me. “The whole thing about individualized flight is that the technology is supposed to fall away. That's our job, to really help you know that you're flying on a Banshee. The first thing that says, ‘Oh, technology!’ will take you out of that.”

While the attraction excels at conveying the thrills and adventure of aerial flight, its most magical moments are ones of calm, quiet serenity. After a particularly adventurous turn, my Banshee came to a rest in a dark cave full of bioluminescence (unlike something like Star Tours, there’s only a single track in Flight of Passage). I could hear my Banshee’s belabored breathing as it calmed down, but I could also feel it. The link chairs actually simulate the sides of the Banshees, so you can physically feel their breathing in slight movements between your knees. There’s a comforting intimacy to it, similar to what you experience riding a horse, that bonds you to the “creature” and makes the illusion come alive in a totally unique way.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about Flight of Passage isn’t the breathtaking visuals or its ability to simulate the illusion of flight. It’s how it fits into and actually improves the larger experience of the physical park itself. The attraction’s use of the avatar mind-projection premise and its 3D visuals are a direct link to James Cameron’s 2009 film; it’s as if you’re actually experiencing a scene from the movie itself. But because it’s wrapped in the larger conservation narrative of Pandora, it serves as glue that binds the film and theme park together.

I entered the new land marveling at its flying mountains; I rode Flight of Passage in awe of Pandora’s larger splendor. But I left the attraction with an entirely different context for the physical landscape that surrounded me. The terrain of the Valley of Mo’ara became just that — a smaller location within this much larger world I’d just seen — and that impact underscored just how powerful the illusion of immersion can be in a theme park environment.

Talking to the team at Imagineering, of course, that seems to have been the goal all along. “It all came from the very beginning. [Imagineering executive] Joe Rohde's and James Cameron's vision for what this experience would be,” Lester says. “It was challenging to balance all those pieces, but it was also our goal. That's what we do at Imagineering: try to do the impossible.”

Instagram isn't just for posting pictures of food anymore. Whether you like it or not, the app has branched out to become a Snapchat competitor too, and now its direct messaging abilities are getting an upgrade.

First off, you can now send landscape/portrait photos and videos in direct messages without cropping them first. It seems kind of silly that was a requirement until now, but this should save users some time when sharing media.

Read More

Instagram now supports links and landscape/portrait images in direct messages was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

If you thought movie subtitles are just benign text files you can download to your computer and use without fear, think again. 

A report from security company Check Point claims that subtitles can be extremely dangerous, potentially allowing malicious hackers to completely take over your computer. 

The subtitles come in many different forms — over 25, according to the report — and the way media files such as VLC or services such as Popcorn Time use them is often insecure.  If a malicious user slips in a dangerous file instead of an actual subtitle, he can do a lot of damage to the victim's computer. Check out how an attacker can take control of the victim's machine in the video, below.  Read more...

More about Tech, Hackers, Exploits, Subtitles, and Tech

In July 2016, Artem Vaulin left Ukraine for a vacation to Iceland with his family, but he never made it to his destination. During a layover in Poland, Vaulin — the 31-year-old accused by the United States of operating KickassTorrents (KAT), the web's most popular place to illegally obtain movies, songs, and video games — was arrested by authorities.

Until last week, Vaulin had been held at Warsaw-Bialoleka Investigative Detention Center with little contact to the outside world while the Polish government evaluated a US extradition request. Last Tuesday, two days before his release, The Verge sat down with Vaulin in his jail cell for a two-hour interview — the first since his arrest — to discuss his extradition fight and his life inside jail.

The day before I arrived at Bialoleka, I attended a court hearing in Warsaw to decide on a request made by Vaulin's attorneys that, after 10 months, he be released on bail for medical reasons. Vaulin suffers from a spinal condition from well before his arrest, his lawyers say. Just like with his previous requests, the court turned him down. But this past Thursday, the court unexpectedly reversed its decision.

Today Vaulin is out of jail, but unable to leave the country. He was released on $108,000 bail, according to his lawyers, and his passport was confiscated. An extradition process could take months. In the meantime, he is living in a rented Warsaw apartment with his wife and five-year-old son.

"We are pleased that the Polish Court allowed Artem Vaulin to be free on bail," said Ira Rothken, the Silicon Valley-based lawyer representing Vaulin. Rothken is perhaps best known for defending accused Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. "This will allow Artem to care for his health, be with his family, and assist in his legal defense."

Founded in 2008, KickassTorrents became the go-to destination for torrenting movies after the Feds took down Dotcom's juggernaut of a file-hosting service in 2012. According to the criminal complaint against Vaulin, filed on July 8th, 2016 in the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, 50 million people visited KAT each month, making it the 69th most-visited site in the world. Prosecutors said KAT distributed $1 billion worth of copies of songs, films, and other media. They also said Vaulin pocketed tens of millions of dollars from ad revenue.

Vaulin’s story is unique because few website operators have gone to jail for as long as he has without being convicted. Fewer still are believed to have been sent to a place like Bialoleka.

Vaulin recalled that not long after his arrest he needed to be taken to the hospital for back pain. He was astonished to learn he would be escorted by four policemen wearing ski masks and armed with machine guns. During the ambulance ride, with the siren blaring and the lights flashing, Vaulin says one of his guards told him they had heard he was responsible for the murder of three people.

"No," a spooked Vaulin told the guard. "It's just about torrents."

Photo by Olga Nikolayeva

In the 2000s, the early days of torrenting, web piracy allegations were nearly always settled in civil court, not criminal court. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, co-founders of the first mainstream file-sharing site Napster, were the target of lawsuits that caused their company to go bankrupt, but neither Fanning nor Parker went to jail. The same went for the founders of LimeWire, Hotfile, TorrentSpy, Isohunt, Grooveshark, and all the other companies that were accused of enabling piracy and sued out of existence. Among the few who were convicted and sent to prison were the three founders of The Pirate Bay, probably the best-known and most defiant file-sharing service of all time. According to reports, Peter Sunde served five months and Fredrik Neij spent less than eight months in jail. It's unclear how much time Gottfrid Svartholm Warg actually served for copyright violations as he was given a concurrent multi-year sentence for non-related hacking offenses.

The US signaled a change in attitude on January 19th, 2012 when New Zealand police busted Kim Dotcom on behalf of the US Department of Justice in a dramatic raid. Today, Dotcom remains free on bail in New Zealand, fighting US extradition attempts. Dotcom’s high-profile arrest was a sign that the US would encourage international agents to take down serial criminal copyright violators in much the same way they prosecute dope dealers and organized crime figures. The scare tactic seems to be effective. In the past few months, some of the web's top file-sharing hubs, including TorrentHound, What.cd, and Torrentz.eu have closed down. Just last week, ExtraTorrent notified users that it was going offline forever. "Thanks to all ET supporters and torrent community. ET was a place to be..."

Vaulin’s incarceration in Bialoleka, 17 miles north of Warsaw, seems to be another warning to file-sharing moguls.

Bialoleka was built in 1952 during the Soviet Union’s rule over Poland. The 1,300-person detention facility once held some of the leaders of Solidarity, the independent Polish labor movement that became a symbol of resistance and eventually helped bring down the USSR. Today it holds a range of criminals, including violent offenders.

From outside, the jail looks like any other: four drab buildings surrounded by high walls topped by barbed wire. When I entered his cell, Vaulin was lying on a hospital bed that had been brought in for him. The cell was about 25 square meters, which is a little small for two people. With pastel-colored walls and plentiful sunlight coming through the barred window, it was cheerier than I had expected. One of Vaulin’s lawyers, Katiana Pacewicz, said, "This is the VIP room. Other rooms, not so nice."

Pacewicz and Vaulin's wife, Olga Nikolayeva, said Vaulin typically shared a 15-square-meter cell with three other inmates. That area — the size of a single-car parking space — contained a toilet, four men, their possessions, and two sets of bunk beds. Vaulin says that for a time he was placed in a cell with a man accused of murder. According to Pacewicz, this was just one of the many ways that the jail and Poland's government regularly failed to meet the standards recommended by the European Union for the humane treatment of prisoners.

Photo by Greg Sandoval

"(Jail cells) shall only be shared," wrote EU ministers in 2006, "if it is suitable for this purpose and shall be occupied by prisoners suitable to associate with each other."

Vaulin’s lawyers also stressed the facility’s administration's disregard for Vaulin's back pain. During visits to the hospital, he was forced to sleep with his leg chained to the bed. Back at the jail, Vaulin was transferred between cells seven times; he was made to carry all his possessions to a new cell in one trip: books, legal papers, cups, pots, etc.

"The first time I had so much pain," Vaulin said. "Yes, I told the guards. But they work 9 to 5. It is a job and my problem doesn't interest them. One told me: 'If you're healthy enough to talk, then it's not urgent.’"

Though Vaulin is not a confident English speaker, with the help of his English-speaking attorney and an English-Russian Dictionary, he makes himself easy to understood.

Prisoners receive the same meal every day, according to Vaulin. Earlier his wife had complained that he had dropped weight during his incarceration. Because he wore loose-fitting pants and a T-shirt, it was difficult to tell his condition. Beside the fact that he was laying in a hospital bed, he appeared healthy.

The facility’s officials did not respond to an interview request last week.

The US government has said in court that Vaulin has only himself to blame for his incarceration in Poland.

"He is in custody based upon his own decision to resist extradition," said Devlin Su, a DOJ prosecutor, during a hearing on Vaulin's case last January. "He could easily have agreed to extradition back when he was arrested in July. He could agree to it now. He doesn't have to sit in jail in Poland. The only reason he's doing that is because he wants to put up as many roadblocks as possible."

“We believe the indictment lacks merit,” says Rothken. “We have a motion to dismiss pending in federal court in Chicago."

I asked Vaulin about the charges against him, and if he ever operated KAT until his arrest in 2016, as the US government alleges. Did he knowingly commit copyright infringement? Vaulin said Rothken advised him not to discuss any specific allegations about his case.

But he did offer this: "I'm a businessman. When I start a business I consult lawyers. I was never told that anything I was involved in was against the law."

"I'm not crazy," Vaulin said, clarifying that he was speaking hypothetically. "If someone came to me to tell me the United States was angry with something I do, whatever it was, I would stop."

Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for the US District Court in Illinois, which filed the indictment against Vaulin, declined to comment on Vaulin's statements.

In the criminal complaint, prosecutors say they can prove Vaulin founded and operated KAT, tried to conceal the nature of its business, and flatly "ignored" the requirements under copyright law that service providers must obey if they don't want to be liable for their users' copyright infringement.

Investigators say it was Vaulin who registered KAT's site in 2009, and it was Vaulin who updated KAT's Facebook fan page. They claim Vaulin was the one who directly controlled the bank account where millions of dollars of KAT's ad revenue poured in each month. They say they know all this by tracking his IP address, along with information provided by Apple.

Some in the tech press have mocked Vaulin for not doing a better job of concealing his identity, calling his use of an Apple email a "colossal screwup." But Vaulin insists he was unaware of any wrongdoing. He traveled widely through US-friendly territories during the time he is said to have run KAT.

"I wasn't afraid to travel," he said. "I had nothing to hide."

The United States maintains that Vaulin was aware of his criminal activities, and that's why he attempted to mask KAT's piracy operations by tucking them inside a dummy company called Cryptoneat.

"Cryptoneat is not a company," Vaulin told The Verge. "It's just a brand, a trademark that I created. There are no employees. It's a good name that I liked and intended to use someday. Someone in the Justice Department made a mistake. A company called Cryptoneat doesn't exist."

As the conversation wrapped up, stewards rolled up to his cell with a couple containers of food.

Vaulin insists that he’s innocent, and he holds no grudges toward the studios that encourage the zealous prosecution of individuals taking part in file-sharing services.

"No, I don't hate [the Hollywood studios]," he said. "They are just interested in making money. They want to save their business. They don't want to compete. But putting me in prison isn't going to help them. Torrents aren't going to stop. Everybody in poor countries torrents. Some of the guards [here] told me they torrent."

Instagram’s ephemeral live stories are coming to the Explore tab. Starting today, you’ll be able to browse stories by their location or their hashtag, as long as they were shared from a public account. It’s a feature that will show off the massive amount of photos and videos being shared around the world every day on Instagram. And, as with most story-related features, it’s an idea Snapchat had first.

Starting today, you’ll see new “rings” at the top of the Explore feed showing you stories taking place near your physical location — a city, for example. Tap into it and you’ll see public stories that were tagged with that location (“San Francisco”). If you want to hide an individual post from search, go to the list of story viewers and tap ‘X’ on the story.

Instagram’s twist on the search is to enable it for hashtags as well as locations. Search #ootd to browse other peoples outfits of the day, for example, or #fromwhereirun to marvel at the self-absorption of joggers. Hashtag search will be available in “coming weeks,” the company said.

In a brief test of story search, I found it to be a fun way to teleport around the world and watch people goof off. If you’re a student of the Great Story Wars of 2017, the most notable thing about today’s launch is that Instagram’s story search is global from the start. Snap announced story search March 31st in “select cities” but refused to say which cities those were; it didn’t roll out to San Francisco, where I live, until this weekend. Which is to say that Snapchat users may see story search in Instagram before they see it in Snapchat.

Not all of your Instagram pics are winners, and Instagram knows it. So the company has started rolling out the ability to hide your published photos, keeping them tucked away in a private section of your profile that only you can view. Photos can later be unhidden and returned to their proper place in your profile, too.

Instagram refers to the new feature as your “Archive,” and the ability to “archive” photos is starting to appear in the “...” menu where you could previously go to edit, share, and delete photos.

In fact, “archive” shows up as the first option in that menu, and not because it’s first alphabetically: the archive option doubles as a way to keep people from deleting their photos. You’re still able to fully delete a picture if you want to. But with the archive, you have the option of hanging on to slightly embarrassing pictures that you may still want to see again.

Instagram users are able to browse photos in their archive just like any other part of their profile. From inside the archive, photos can also be restored to your profile page so that everyone’s able to see them again. It’s a minor feature, but it seems like it could be helpful here and there.

The archive option appears to have begun rolling out a couple days ago. Not everyone has it yet, but it seems like the feature is beginning to appear for everyone. It’ll show up in the top right corner of your profile page in the app; a little pop-up will appear to highlight the new addition.

While traveling abroad in Western Europe for the past two months, I felt a palpable disdain toward our government. Many of my foreign climbing friends asked me how we could elect Donald Trump as our president and, short of defending my own vote, there is little I can say to explain. But instead of using Trump’s election as an excuse to give up on politics, I’m trying to dig in.

Americans are experiencing unprecedented threats to our public lands. Both state and federal lawmakers have introduced measures threatening to sell off millions of acres, weaken public management, underfund land management agencies, and increase land development at the cost of public access—that means less space for climbing, paddling, hiking, and all the other ways we love to play in the outdoors. So last week I flew back from on a two-month climbing trip in Europe to lobby on Capitol Hill in defense of our public lands. My role was to serve as one of the athlete ambassadors for the Access Fund and the American Alpine Club, alongside Alex Honnold, Kai Lightner, Caroline Gleich, Libby Sauter, and Tommy Caldwell.

On Thursday morning, we all congregated for a primer on public land policy. For example, I hadn’t heard of the Antiquities Act of 1906 before, but it’s one of the most important mechanisms presidents have for setting aside national monuments. Led by American Alpine Club CEO Phil Powers, we met with various Congressmembers sympathetic to our cause, including Senator Bernie Sanders, who told me he was in complete agreement about the significance of the outdoor industry and the need to defend legislation that protects public lands.

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We spent the day on Capitol Hill meeting with lawmakers in their offices and spreading our message. The culmination was speaking at a Congressional Briefing before a packed room. Tommy, Alex, and I each spoke, and Kai and Libby joined the stage for a Q&A panel. I focused on the growth of the climbing industry over the past decade, and highlighted the fact that our National Parks are huge sources of international tourism and help support local economies around the country. According to a new study from the Outdoor Industry Association, the recreation economy supports $887 billion in direct consumer spending, 7.6 million American jobs, and $124.5 billion in federal, state, and local tax revenue.

At the forefront of our meetings was discussing the president’s recent order to the federal government to review the Antiquities Act and more than 20 national monuments, including Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. Bears Ears includes the ultra-classic Indian Creek climbing area and many other remote climbing destinations. But since its establishment by President Obama in December, Utah lawmakers have been pressuring President Trump to rescind it. Trump’s call for a review is the first step in undermining the authority of the Antiquities Act and could potentially unravel protections on some of our favorite parks.

What struck me as surprising was the interest that the representatives we met with had in our sport. I didn’t anticipate that sharing memories of my time outdoors—climbing at Indian Creek or visiting Joshua Tree—could evoke empathy in politicians. Senator Tim Kaine made a special appointment for a photo opp and to attend our Congressional Briefing, and to discuss his mutual love for the outdoors. That evening, he tweeted, “Great meeting @sashadigiulian today! A powerful role model & advocate for the outdoors. Plus… she’s a Virginian!”

"People find climbers to be incredibly exciting. We are like a special interest group,” Alex Honnold says. “We can harness that to help deliver the message and make what we value known and hopefully make change.”

I couldn’t agree more. As outdoor athletes and enthusiasts, we have a responsibility to our community beyond sheer performance. We have platforms to reach more people than we may know personally, and connections to business leaders and politicians that can influence legislative changes. We need to ban together and make our voices heard.

The comment period for the revision of Bears Ears has just begun and it is only two weeks long. It is incredibly important that we all weigh in. Go here, and sign your name to a note to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke letting him know that our outdoor spaces need to be protected.

While all you Yosemite camping hopefuls furiously refresh the Recreation.gov website this morning to reserve your campsite, it’s more than likely the good ones were all instantly snapped up by bots. Time to make some new plans for summer.

The folks at KQED (San Francisco’s local PBS station) uncovered the prevalent use of bots to book campsites throughout California’s park system. If you needed yet another reason to hate the tech-elite of Silicon Valley, now you have it. To save time and effort and ensure success, many coding-savvy Californians are creating bots to win those all coveted campsites or even trail permits through sites such as Recreation.gov. You and I don’t stand a chance.

If you are not familiar, a bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive (like refreshing a website for availability) at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone.

For now, it seems that most of these bots are created for personal use only, not to reserve all the campsites in Yosemite for the whole summer and then sell them on for a profit, for example. However, according to KQED, California State Parks has already shut down a vendor called “Adventure Man” who did just that.

A legal gray area in terms of personal use, there is technically nothing stopping the rest of us from using bots ourselves to do the same thing — the code for the Yosemite bot is posted on GitHub. The problem is, you need to understand how to use it and I wager that the majority of people looking to camp in Yosemite don’t.

When KQED spoke to representatives from both Yosemite and the California State Parks system about the bot issue, they both see the real problem as lack of inventory. For example, there are 459 campsites in Yosemite to be spread between 4 million visitors each year. As the number of campsites is pretty much finite and the number of visitors continues to grow year on year, the problem will only get worse — bots or no bots.

For me, this is the impetus to head into the backcountry and skip the campsites or cabins all together. Now, about that permit bot…

Last fall, Chinese company DMG Entertainment bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe, a huge, interconnected epic fantasy world that includes some of the author’s best-known works. Now, DMG is using VR to pitch the story and world to potential buyers.

The company is reportedly spending “seven figures” to build the 15-minute VR session, according to Variety. It’s apparently based on the first book of Sanderson’s series The Stormlight Archive, The Way of Kings, an adaptation of which is being written by Saw writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan.

Variety reports that DMG is “two months into production on the virtual reality experience,” and that it’ll only be available to studios, although it will eventually be brought to consumers. Sanderson told Variety that “it’s amazing,” and explained that it includes storms, fights, and “canyons filled with alien life.”

While most pitches include the screenplay, artwork, or a sizzle reel to convince studios to pick up a story for a pilot or show, VR as a selling tool is something new. The intent is to show studios the depth of the world, comparing its potential to that of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth or George R.R. Martin’s Westeros.

Strava Inc., maker of a fitness tracking app that caters mostly to outdoor athletes, has just announced a new feature: “Athlete Posts,” a kind of blogging platform within its existing app that lets select athletes write extensive stories and publish photos. The move is clearly a part of Strava’s desire to turn the app, which for a long time was used predominantly by cyclists, into less of a niche fitness app and more of a social network by traditional social network standards.

Athlete Posts, to start, will only be available to 36 select athletes, including professional athletes, former pros, and a triathlete who has completed 50 Ironman races in 50 days across all 50 states (really, this is a thing). The idea isn’t for them to just post a couple notes or photos about their epic adventures, something you can already do in the Strava app; but to write about training tips, suggested gear, or even more personal stories. One of the examples Strava gives is “Food Hacks for Traveling Athletes.” Eventually, the plan is to roll Athlete Posts out to all Strava users, sometime “later this summer.”

Strava, Inc.

It’s a feature that borrows heavily from pretty much every existing social network (with the exception of Twitter, which has held fast to its 140-character limit) and the goal behind it is clear: to get users more engaged in content within the app so that they’re more inclined to use the app, feed the data beasts, and maybe even upgrade to a premium account. The $7.99 per month subscription is one of the ways Strava makes money; the other is a service called Strava Metro that involves Strava selling user data to urban planners and departments of transportation that want to better assess traffic and commute patterns.

San Francisco-based Strava won’t say how many users the app has, or how many of those users pay for the app versus those who use the free version. But it has said it gains a million new members every forty-five days and that each week approximately eight million activities are uploaded to the app. And Strava, to its credit, is still a privately-owned fitness company at a time when many of its competitors have been snatched up by big-brand apparel companies.

But Strava is still primarily an app for outdoor sport enthusiasts or people aspiring to be one; it boasts of having more than 600 professional athletes on its platform, Olympic champions have used it to track gold-medal wins, and even non-professionals tend to get highly competitive in the app. So Strava either has to double-down on its current audience and extract more value from those users; or strive to become a household name among non-enthusiasts. Athlete Posts seem like it could potentially help with both.

When a planned rest day turns into a rest week or a nagging injury keeps you out of the game for longer than anticipated, you expect a little guilt over dropping your exercise habit. But we consulted the experts to break down what happens when workouts grind to a halt and what they have to say may surprise you. It's okay to take time off, but there are physiological changes that you should be aware of. The good news: while some gains do vanish overnight, most are reversible or don't take much effort to maintain. 

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Blood Pressure Rises

In the short term, your blood pressure will change within a day depending on whether you work out or not. “With blood pressure, things happen very quickly, and they also cease very quickly,” says Linda Pescatello, a blood-pressure researcher at the University of Connecticut. Exercise causes increased blood flow, meaning your arteries temporarily widen to facilitate greater circulation. They tend to stay slightly larger for about 24 hours, but if you don’t get your heart rate up within a day, your blood pressure returns to baseline.

Quick response time aside, these acute effects don’t change the structure of the arteries themselves. It’s actually training adaptations (in addition to diet and genetics) that allow you to lower your blood pressure substantially after three months of consistent exercise or, alternatively, begin to narrow your arteries when you don’t work out for a long time.

Although daily movement is important to health, it takes around three months for your arteries to feel the impact of your dropped gym habit. It’s not until that point that they’ll begin to stiffen and narrow, so a few days’ rest won’t hurt you. But be warned: if you nix exercise for such an extended period, it will take another three months of steady exercise to get your arteries back to their best shape once you do return.

A little goes a long way. “The more you do, the better off your blood pressure is,” says Pescatello. “If you only got in exercise for half of a week, you’re still going to see some benefit…something is always better than nothing when it comes to blood pressure.”

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Skeletal Muscle Starts Resisting Insulin

When we exercise, our muscles process insulin and absorb the resulting glucose as energy. Reduce that energy expenditure and your muscles will adapt physiologically to become a little less insulin sensitive, says John Thyfault, a researcher at the University of Kansas.

Losing insulin sensitivity means your body converts sugar into fat rather than using it as energy to power your movements. And while that adaptation helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors survive a feast-or-famine lifestyle, it’s bad news for the modern desk jockey, because improper regulation of insulin can prompt your cells to store some of what’s not used in muscle movement as fat. This change puts you at greater risk for the foundation of other conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes and inflammation.

Thankfully, your body can adapt pretty quickly to increased insulin sensitivity with just a little bit of exercise and healthier eating. High-volume and high-intensity exercise can be equally effective at making your body more sensitive. Just a 30-minute walk or a ten-minute HIIT regimen a few times a week will suffice for keeping your body eagerly processing insulin.

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Muscles Shrink

You’re going to get small—and it’ll happen fast. The visible gains you made from a lifting routine will diminish within a week of quitting the weights. But smaller doesn’t mean weaker. “The thinking has changed recently,” says Jeremy Loenneke, exercise physiologist and assistant professor at University of Mississippi. “It suggests that muscle strength is probably not related to muscle size.”

Loenneke’s research, coupled with similar studies on muscle strength versus size, suggests that strength gains are actually dependent on neural responses in the brain or spinal cord. Weightlifting doesn’t just break down muscles and build them up bigger. It actually improves communication between the brain and the muscles being activated. That means your “strength” won’t be determined by the size of your biceps, but by the actual capacity of your brain and muscles to complete a certain task.

“If you have a weekend away on vacation, it’s probably not going to have a big impact on muscle size or strength,” says Loenneke. “Now, if you take off a month, you’ll lose muscle size, but strength is going to be relatively maintained.”

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VO2 Max Drops

VO2 max—the maximum amount of oxygen you can get into your system—matters because it helps determine your cardio capacity and performance potential. Edward Coyle, a physiologist at the University of Texas, has dedicated his career to better understanding the role VO2 max plays in an athlete’s physiology and how quickly it begins to diminish.

One of Coyle’s studies unearthed hard numbers to create a timeline for VO2 drop-off. After 12 days, it dropped an average of 7 percent in test subjects, but then held steady until 21 days after the athletes’ last workout. By 56 days, VO2 max had dropped by around 14 percent, and finally hit a 16 percent decline after 84 days. But Coyle says 12 is the key number: “It turns out the decline follows a half-life of about 12 days. You decline half of the level from where you start during the first 12 days.”

However, even Coyle says VO2 max isn’t everything—you have to be able to put that oxygen to use, after all, and that means factoring in exercise economy (how efficient you are) and lactate threshold (how fast you can run or how hard you can push before your quads turn to stone). It’s also important to look at what was previously gained to determine where you’ll be after a lengthy break. According to Coyle, for every week you remain idle, it takes about three weeks to regain the lost adaptations. If you’re starting at an incredibly high level of fitness, this isn’t a huge deal, but if you’re just beginning to exercise, it may be harder (or more discouraging) to come back from a period of exercise abstinence.

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Grumpiness Takes Over

A single hike, swim, run, or ride almost instantly makes you happier, thanks to a rush of feel-good endorphins. But turn that one afternoon outing into a long-term daily habit and you’ll see bigger mood boosts every time, according to a study in Psychosomatic Medicine. Get out of the habit and your emotional drop will be much steeper, too.

Additionally, staying active may fight anxiety. Michael Otto, a psychologist and professor at Boston University, explains that exercise can mitigate anxiety by firing up your fight-or-flight response, the evolutionary trigger for adrenaline, sweat, and increased heart rate when faced with a challenge. When you stop exercising, your body forgets how to handle stress. Because you’ve allowed your natural fight-or-flight response to atrophy, you’re less likely to experience something tough—whether an interval workout or a stressful workplace relationship—in a positive way. Instead, you get anxious.

“Many people skip the workout at the very time it has the greatest payoff. That prevents you from noticing just how much better you feel when you exercise,” Otto said in an article for the American Psychological Society. “Failing to exercise when you feel bad is like explicitly not taking an aspirin when your head hurts. That’s the time you get the payoff.”

A few months ago our family had the most amazing experience. It was Christmas day at Taos Pueblo, the longest continually inhabited Native American community in the country. Thick storm clouds hung over Taos Mountain, snow pelted our faces, and three inches of freshly fallen powder squeaked beneath our boots as we joined several hundred other visitors to watch the pueblo’s traditional Christmas Day Deer Dance. The sign at the entrance was non-negotiable: NO PHOTOGRAPHS OR CAMERAS OF ANY KIND. So we left our phones in the car. 

For more than an hour we watched the sacred dance. It’s not a performance; it’s a ceremony. First the women danced, in beautiful bright dresses and bare arms. Then the men appeared, walking silently in two lines from the pueblo buildings. They wore fresh deer hides and little else; others wore mountain lion skins or fox pelts or raven feathers. Some were dressed as hunters, with arrows in their belt. They danced in a tight circle for a long time; they did not appear cold, and they took no notice of us. Occasionally, one of the hunter dancers would catch one of the deer dancers and sling him over his back and make a break for an opening in the circle, whooping as he did. One of the elders had built a fire and we stood around it at a respectful distance, warming our hands. 

Except for the clothing worn by visitors, there was nothing to suggest it was 2016. It could have been 1925 or 1825. The women’s dresses and the men’s costumes, too, would have changed little over the centuries. Smoke crept into the sky from chimneys in the 1,000-year-old multi-level adobe buildings. The most notable absence, of course, was smartphones. Nobody was holding them up in front of their faces, arms outstretched above their heads, jockeying for a better position in the crowd. We weren’t watching the dance through our devices, we were witnessing it with our whole selves. 

In the 22 years I’ve lived in New Mexico, it was easily the most remarkable thing I’ve ever experienced. I became aware, with a sense of growing alarm, that I wanted to remember everything, but I didn’t have a camera. I would have to remember the smell of the burning juniper boughs and the feel of the frigid wind strafing my face, and the women’s white leather moccasins and elaborately beaded dresses and the awestruck expression on my young daughters’ faces. 

We live in an age of hyper-documentation. Resource Magazine estimates that more than one trillion digital photographs will be taken this year, nearly 80 percent of them on smartphones; the average American snaps three per pictures day. That doesn’t sound like much until you do the math: 1,000 per person per year, not including special occasions when you take dozens of rapid-fire outtakes of the same scene. 

Psychologists have raised the concern that taking too many pictures of one’s children will make them ego-centric or overly critical of themselves. Then there’s the question of memory: Do photographs enhance our memory of certain events or impair it? A 2013 study by psychologist Linda Henkel, published in Psychological Science, followed participants through a museum and found that those who took pictures recalled fewer objects on display and fewer details about those objects; taking a photo sends a message to our brain that our camera will do the remembering. We’re so busy focusing on getting the right image that we miss the moment. 

Photographs also create a mental and technological backlog: they clog our hard drives, our cloud storage, our phones, even our minds. When my eight-year-old daughter saw how frazzled I was by the sheer volume of data in my life—much of it my own creation—she said, “Mama, you need to delete some things from your brain.” My phone is so jammed with photos and data it no longer rings, and I haven’t been able to take a picture in weeks. Even when I delete hundreds at a time, I still have no room. 

On one hand, it’s a drag to leave the camera tucked away. I miss taking pictures of my daughters moving through their days, the little loveliness I might otherwise forget, like the two of them reading side by side at our neighborhood bookshop, heads bent over a page. Or my six-year-old repeatedly leaping into the air on the walk to school today, trying to touch a tree branch just out of reach, would have made good video, and I would have liked to photograph the pretty tulips and lilac bushes lining the street. And yet, like that magical day at Taos Pueblo, it’s also strangely liberating. I’m not walking through my days looking for ways to capture them for the future; I feel less like a consumer of my life, and more like the one living in it right now, moment by moment. Maybe the universe is trying to send me a message. Pay attention with your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands. These are the details you will never forget. 

The solution to our photo deluge isn’t black and white. Henkel, the study’s author, concedes that looking at photographs does help us retrieve older memories we may have forgotten. The key is to be conscious of how, when, and why we’re taking photographs—to preserve a moment, to capture a feeling, or to publish on social media? And, once in a while, as I learned at Taos Pueblo, it’s helpful to leave your camera or phone behind and be fully present in the moment. Afterwards, encourage your children to find other ways to preserve the memory, by writing stories or poems or drawing pictures. 

Finally, make an effort to edit and print the pictures you do take. Make a photo book or picture album or frame favorite images for your wall. Pictures can’t reinforce or shape our memories, and our family’s personal stories, if they’re stored in files we rarely open. We need to be able to see them. 

My father was a photographer and picture editor at National Geographic for nearly 30 years. He spent his whole career taking pictures and then his whole retirement editing and archiving them. When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2010, his project took on a new urgency and became a race to the end. Seven years later, his professional collection seems almost quaint compared to the average smart phone user’s photo library today, but the task plagued him until the very end. And yet I’m so glad he finished. I keep his pictures on an indestructible hard drive under my desk, and looking at them from time to time is like having a little visit with Dad—and my childhood. Someday I’ll get around to having some printed in black-and-white for my walls. Just as soon as I delete some other stuff from my brain.

Residents in Amherst, New York have been on a wild goose chase for more than a month looking for a Canada goose walking around with an arrow through its neck. 

Yes, you read that correctly. There's an actual arrow stuck in a goose's neck. And the goose is still alive and kicking and balancing her long neck pretty well between the two sides of the killing contraption.

According to the local ABC affiliate, animal groups are still unable to catch the goose, and Amherst authorities don't know how she wound up sustaining such an injury. However, this badass goose seems to be a-okay. She's been flying, pecking at grass, and flapping her wings like a normal, un-speared bird.  Read more...

More about Arrow, Animals, Goose, Viral Videos, and Watercooler

Warmer weather brings the opportunity to get outside. Tomtom's collection of Off The Beaten Path National Park Trails are a great place to start. From California's Joshua Tree to the...

Visit Uncrate for the full post.

Challenging Mother Nature is never a good idea. Legends have been written about arrogant humans who perished trying to defiantly piss into the wind. 

But sometimes you need to show the entire school that you're a badass — pneumonia and skin damage be damned. 

That's apparently what one kid recently decided to do when a massive hail storm began pelting students on campus. Instead of fleeing for cover, our unknown weather defier decided to stand in the middle of it all, hands in his pockets, without a care in the world. 

More about Standing Out From The Crowd, Rain Storm, Hail, School, and Watercooler

Bold colors, unique styles, and a good cause, these paintings capture the beauty of our national parks and give back, too.

For as little as $40, you can house prints of the USA’s sacred wild spaces.

Introduced in 2016, the Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series showcases more than 20 national parks as painted by dozens of different artists. The prints range in size from 18″x24″ to 24″x32″. Postcard and notebook options for the scenes are available as well.

For each print it sells, The National Poster Retrospectus will donate five percent of proceeds to the National Park Foundation. Fifty-Nine Parks, as its name suggests, intends to feature a poster for every national park.

National Park Print Series

The artists behind the work cover a range of styles and all use engaging, dynamic colors. From solid-color paintings to prints with intricate brush strokes, these artworks will have their own unique charm.

–Which one do you think would look best in your living room? Purchase your own here.

The post Celebrate & Support National Parks With Outdoorsy Artwork appeared first on GearJunkie.

Looking for the best daypack? Expert gear editors at OutdoorGearLab tested ten of the highest rated products available on the market today. Each contender was evaluated while engaging in activities such as hiking, running, biking, climbing and everyday errands. Once the final testing was complete, each contender was ranked in the areas of comfort, weight, versatility, ease of use and durability. Awards were granted for best overall product, best bang for the buck and top pick award for balance of low weight and features. See the full review now live on OutdoorGearLab.com.

Last week, Kristine Tompkins signed over one million acres of land to the Chilean government for the creation of a series of national parks. Decades in the making, this land was saved from industrialization and preserved for both wildlife and ecosystem prosperity as well as for the people to sustainably enjoy these wild spaces.

Kristine is the former CEO of Patagonia. In 1993, she retired, married The North Face founder Doug Tompkins, and they both moved to southern Chile. Why Chile? At the time, South Chile was facing a growing threat from forestry, mining, hydro dams, and industrial aquaculture. The pair believed it had great potential in terms of conservation so they set out to purchase acres upon acres of land with the plan to preserve it.

While first met with huge skepticism from the Chilean people who though they were out to steal parts of the country out from under them, the couple soon won everyone over as they worked for a quarter century to create and expand national parks in Chile and Argentina — including Pumalín Park, a public-access 800,000-acre nature reserve in the south of Chile’s Lakes Region. They worked hard to recover imperiled wildlife, demonstrate organic agricultural practices, promote healthy local communities, and support leading-edge activism.

These efforts continue today under Tompkins Conservation that Kristine still runs. The idea was always to hand back much of the land for the Chilean people to enjoy and last week that was made official. Sadly, Doug did not live to see the signing — he died in a kayaking accident back in 2015. “I know that if Doug were here today, he would speak of national parks being one of the greatest expressions of democracy that a country can realize, preserving the masterpieces of a nation for all of its citizenry,” Kristine said.

The Chilean government will match the donation with a further 949,000 hectares or roughly 2.3 million acres of land. The land will create 17 different parks that stretch from the Chilean city of Puerto Montt down to Cape Horn, some 2,000km (1,250 miles) to the south.

Who wants to go visit?!

Michael Whelan is one of the best science fiction and fantasy artists in the business. Over his 40-year career, he’s won 15 Hugo Awards, and been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His art has become iconic, with an instantly recognizable style marked by bright, saturated colors and swirling skies. He’s especially known as a covers artist for books including Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s A Memory of Light. (Also, in a fun bit of trivia, he did the album artwork for Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell.)

Since the 1990s, Whelan has mostly retired from commercial commissions, as he’s shifted his focus more on his professional gallery work. But he still does the occasional book project for titles he’s passionate about, including Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. And with the reveal of the cover of the latest Stormlight novel, Oathbringer, Tor has published a look into Whelan’s process of bringing Sanderson’s writing to life.

Illustration by Michael Whelan / Tor

Part of the process involves a series of monochromatic value studies, which are typically smaller, rougher sketches that let Whelan try out different takes on a concept to get a feel for what the final artwork might look like.

Illustration by Michael Whelan / Tor

The Oathbringer cover depicts a character magically rebuilding a breached city wall to defend it from a hulking stone giant — while wielding a massive sword, of course.

Illustration by Michael Whelan / Tor

Like Tor’s earlier dives into Whelan’s process, this is a fascinating look at how designs develop from exploratory sketches to final cover art. For a more complete look at the process (including Whelan’s commentary), check out Tor’s site.

Oathbringer is scheduled to be released in November.

Illustration by Michael Whelan / Tor

It’s March, which means that there’s a whole new slate of books ready to crowd our bookshelves — books about robots, revolutions, and vast space empires to tear into.

Earlier this year, I mentioned that I’m trying to expand my reading horizons in 2017. Left to my own devices, I tend to sink into science fiction and fantasy novels, but I’ve been trying to whittle down my pile of other books lately. One book I recently knocked off the list is The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World by Abigail Tucker, which is an utterly fascinating look at our shared history with cats. Cats have been with us for millennia. Unlike dogs, which we domesticated, they sort of just showed up to hang out. As the servant of two cats, I thought it was an enlightening read.

Still, there are a bunch of really cool-looking science fiction and fantasy novels coming out in March that I’m looking forward to digging into.

March 7th, 2017

Talos Books

Lotus Blue by Cat Sparks

Star and Nene are orphans who are part of a caravan of traders in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by rogue semi-sentient machinery and other monsters. When their caravan sees a satellite crash to Earth, Star ends up on a journey that takes her far from home. Aided by Quarrel, an ancient super-soldier, she has to learn to trust her unlikely allies as a long-sleeping war machine awakens in the desert, and threatens all of humanity.

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar

In Kalfar’s debut novel, a Czech orphan grows up to become his country’s first astronaut. Offered the chance to become the first human to travel to Venus, he comes to realize the steep cost of such a mission on himself and his family. On top of that, he forms a bond with a possibly imaginary alien spider while en route to Venus, and sinks into a series of conversations about the nature of the universe with his unlikely companion.

Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan

Fantasy author Brian McClellan kicks off a new series, Gods of Blood and Powder, set in the same world as his Powder Mage trilogy. The new frontier nation of Fatrasta is facing new problems from within. Insurrection in the capital city of Landfall is in its infancy, and spy Michael Bravis, veteran Mad Ben Styke, and mercenary general Lady Vlora Flint must protect the city as even greater challenges arise.

Archangel by Margaret Fortune

The second installment of the Spectre War series, Archangel picks up with the perspective of Michael Sorenson, who appeared in the first book of the series, Nova. He’s recruited into a research and development group called Division 7, which is developing a means to kill an enemy of humanity, the Spectres. Sorenson goes into the field with new prototypes, and as they begin testing out their weapons, it’s clear that they have a saboteur in the mix, someone targeting Sorenson.

Alone by Scott Sigler

Scott Sigler brings his Generations trilogy to a close. The series began with Alive and Alight, and in this final novel, a group of young adults known as the Birthday Children overthrow their creators. They were genetically engineered to live on a hostile planet and to be overwritten with the consciousnesses of others. Now, the others are coming to take their planet from them, and they must be prepared to defend their home.

Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales about Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World by Maria Tatar

There’s a live-action version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast hitting theaters, and the folks at Penguin Classics have assembled a very specific anthology for the occasion: short stories from folklore about animal brides. There’s enough to fill a book, and Tatar puts together a neat collection of stories from all over the world.

Harper Voyager

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

I read this book last year (it was first released in the UK), and it’s a follow-up to Chambers’ fantastic novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. This is an interesting sequel, in that it follows a character from that first book, but on a completely different trajectory than I expected. Chambers weaves together two distinct stories of two individuals finding themselves in the larger universe, and it’s a wonderful, heartbreaking read.

March 14th, 2017

The Wanderers by Meg Howery

A private space company, Prime Space is planning on putting astronauts on Mars for the first time, and in preparation for the mission, Helen Kane, Yoshihiro Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov embark on a 17-month simulation of the trip out. Each astronaut must confront their inner demons and one another as they try to remain in control of their lives.

Pilot X by Tom Merritt

Pilot X is a member of a race called the Alendans, who can move through time and space to guard the timeline. For generations, they’ve been fighting the Sensaurians, a hive mind, and the Progons, a machine race, both of which can send messages back in time. When Pilot X discovers a secret war being waged in hidden parts of the universe, he has a hard choice to make: erase all three races from existence, or allow the universe to be destroyed.

Solaris

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin

This anthology has stories all about Djinn (also sometimes called genies). They’re fearsome or friendly, victims and monsters, and this book imagines them all over the world. The author lineup is incredible: Neil Gaiman, Amal El-Mohta, Maria Dahvana Headley, Usman Malik, Nnedi Okorafor, and many others.

Brothers Ruin by Emma Newman

In this alternate history (and the first of a new series), Great Britain is doing well due to its Royal Society of the Esoteric Arts. Talented mages are in hot demand, but for the poor, losing a magical son can be devastating. The Gunns have two mages in their midst, their powerful daughter Charlotte and her brother Benjamin. She works to save her brother from arrest, but when she discovers a plot by a Doctor Ledbetter, she has to go all-out to save her city and her family’s secrets.

March 21st, 2017

Infinity Engine by Neal Asher

The final installment of Neal Asher’s Transformations trilogy, Infinity Engine follows Asher’s Dark Intelligence and War Factory. Following the efforts to pursue a rogue AI named Penny Royal. The hunt has intensified as criminals such as Brockle and an enigmatic alien known as the Weaver join the hunt, each with their own motives.

Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker

In Borderlines, Mishell Baker introduced the Arcadia Project, an underground group of magicians operating in Los Angeles. Millie reluctantly returned to the project after her partner Teo was killed. She came across his ghost at the site of his death, which is strange, because ghosts don’t exist. When her former boss is framed for a brutal attack, she’s forced to track down the perpetrators and stop an attack that could leave both the real and fey worlds in ruins.

Star's End by Cassandra Rose Clarke

Esme’s family owns a star system, thanks to the wealth generated by the manufacturing companies run by her father, Phillip Coromina. She will inherit his company, and as she comes of age and begins to learn about his business, she learns some shocking truths about what Phillip was engaged in.

Chalk by Paul Cornell

Paul Cornell’s novella takes us back to the midst of Margaret Thatcher’s England, in which he called his most important work. Andrew Waggoner is targeted by school bullies, who do something unforgivable and unthinkable. Something dies in Waggoner and something new is reborn, thirsting for revenge.

Orbital Cloud by Taiyo Fujii

We posted the first chapter to Taiyo Fujii’s next novel last month, and we’re excited to dig into the rest of it. In 2020, the owner of a shooting star-tracking website sees some space debris moving strangely in orbit. Then he receives information from an Iranian scientist that puts him in the midst of a much larger conflict between major governments and titans of private space industry. As the ramifications of his discovery become clearer, a new orbital space hotel, a terrorist plot, and a military investigation all factor into the equation.

Mass Effect - Andromeda: Nexus Uprising by Jason M. Hough and K.C. Alexander

Titan Books announced an incredible lineup of authors for its relaunch of the Mass Effects literary expanded universe, and the first installment, authored by Jason M. Hough and K.C. Alexander, will hit stores this month. Bioware is keeping a lid on what the books are about, but we’re interested to see how they turn out.

Relics by Tim Lebbon

In the latest horror novel from Tim Lebbon, a criminology student discovers an underground black market for arcane objects after her fiancé goes missing. As Angela searches for Vince, her searching leads her up against a crime lord dedicated to collecting objects, and she finds that some of these objects aren’t ancient at all.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is known for his incredible visions of the future. Now, he takes a look close to home, in a book set in New York City, just over a century from now. Rising sea levels have turned the Big Apple into a waterlogged metropolis, and Robinson follows the lives of a large cast of characters making their way in this new world.

Tor Books

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

John Scalzi’s new space-opera novel isn’t connected to his Old Man’s War universe — it’s set in a fantastic new world. Humanity has spread to the far reaches of space, thanks to The Flow, and a new empire has arisen, the Interdependency. The Flow is beginning to move, and entire worlds are being cut off. A scientist, a starship captain, and the new empress of the Interdependency set off to try and salvage an empire about to collapse.

March 28th, 2017

Tor Books

Luna: Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald

In Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, a bloody power struggle outed the Helio family from its position of power on the moon. A year and a half later, the survivors try to come to terms with their survival and imprisonment, while the missing heir to the family, Lucas, is still missing. He returns to Earth to gather allies to try and bring his family back to its former glory. Luna: New Moon was one of my favorite books of 2015, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment.

Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer

In To Like Lightning, Ada Palmer introduced us to Mycroft Canner, a convict sentenced to wander the globe. In doing so, he learned of a conspiracy to keep the world in order, and the deaths that kept everything in balance. That balance is beginning to shift, and everything could come falling down.

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

In Laini Taylor’s new novel, there was a battle between gods and mortals more than a decade ago. Mortal humans were victorious, but the gods left some children behind. Those children are growing up, and now, their hidden lives are about to be uncovered.

Microsoft is launching a new game subscription service today for Xbox owners. Dubbed Xbox Game Pass, the new service will be priced at $9.99 per month for access to more than 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 backwards compatible games. Titles like Halo 5: Guardians, Payday 2, NBA 2K16, and SoulCalibur II will all be included, and Microsoft is promising a diverse range of games from top publishers. One publisher that’s not on the list is EA, which is presumably sitting out as it has its own EA Access subscription service on Xbox One.

The Xbox Game Pass subscription won’t be a streaming service, instead you’ll be able to download full games and add-ons onto an Xbox One console. If you decide to cancel the subscription you’ll lose access to the games, but Microsoft is offering discounts for people who want to purchase titles separately. Just like most subscription services, Microsoft is planning to refresh the list of games each month so some will be cycled in and out of availability.

Microsoft is planning to test the Xbox Game Pass subscription with Xbox Insiders before it’s made available more broadly in late spring. Select members of the Xbox Insider Program in the Alpha Preview ring will get access to a small number of titles today, and Xbox Live Gold members will also get early access in late spring just before the broader launch.

In January, my wife, Jen, and I pulled Artemis the Airstream south to visit White Sands National Monument, but we ended up staying at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park.

That re-route will shape all our future travel.
 
When we arrived late on a mid-winter afternoon at White Sands to find that travel trailers aren’t permitted in the park, we had to scramble for a Plan B. Normally, National Forest and BLM lands are our first choice for their easy access, but the few sites we found quickly were close to the road, shabby, and overused. That’s when Jen noticed a state park, Oliver Lee, 30 minutes to the east. There was no answer when we rang to see if they were booked, so we headed there anyway, not hopeful.

We stayed almost two weeks.

Oliver Lee Memorial is a peculiar state park. It was once part of White Sands National Monument, an odd association as the chalky gypsum dunes of the monument, nearly 30 miles away, bear no physical resemblance to the scrappy, thorny, barren, high-desert recluse at the base of the dry Sacramento Mountains. The place was significant first as a Mescalero Apache stronghold dating back to the 1400s, then as a late 19th century homestead. And though the place was transferred to the National Park Service in 1939, it didn't come into the New Mexico state park system—probably for lack of funding—until 1983.

That we could roll into Oliver Lee at 4:30 p.m. on a weekend and get an electric hook-up campsite a few days after the New Year speaks to the advantages of the state park system. Reservations in national parks are often made months, if not years, in advance, and the prices are double or more than the $14 we shelled out for a New Mexico state park site with hookups. If the national parks are the polished crown jewels of the U.S. public land system, our state parks are the geodes that litter the American West: they may not look like much at first, but crack them open, and they’re far more ubiquitous—and nearly as dazzling.

This is not an attack on the national parks system. The country’s public lands must be counted as some of our finest and most important monuments. Go see them, support them, stay there. However, they are limited commodities, and, based on our experience, they often overshadow excellent—and otherwise overlooked—state lands. 

In the Land of Enchantment, we have exactly one national park, Carlsbad Caverns, which is an outrageous place that I’ve visited numerous times. (Yeah, that doesn’t account for New Mexico’s awesome national monuments—14 of the country’s 129—or historic parks—three of of 51—or national preserves—one of 20.) Everyone should visit White Sands. Coast to coast, only 27 states have national parks. Meanwhile, New Mexico has 35 state parks, of which I’ve seen only two. There are only 59 national parks compared to 10,234 state parks nationwide.

Though I’ve often judged state parks as inferior to the national variety, based on Oliver Lee, these places are no less compelling. At the eastern flank of the park, where the mountains surge from the thorny flatlands, the Dog Canyon National Recreation Trail (#106) wends irresistibly into the hills. I’m generally not much of a hiker and had planned on a mountain bike ride on a nearby trail I’d heard about following our backcountry overnights in White Sands. But seeing that Dog Canyon path burned like a well-used game trail into the mountainside, I couldn’t resist.

We left at 2 p.m., after I’d finished work, and though Jen was slightly anxious about carrying on, we pushed deeper into the parched mountains. We saw no one, save a couple likely in their 50s huffing up the initial slope. Then it was only century plants, rocky cliffs scraping our shoulders, and silence. We hiked five miles and over 3,000 vertical feet into the arid Sacramento Mountains, ogling homestead sites from over a century ago and land that felt like we were the first hikers in weeks. We bumped a few sturdy elk at our high point, walked through a herd of deer on the way down, heard a barbary sheep clatter rocks in the dusky eve, and finished long, long after dark. Dog Canyon was—outside of my ascent up Half Dome in Yosemite National Park and a backcountry push to Machu Picchu years ago—the best hike I’ve done in two decades. And I had no idea it was sitting, waiting for me in a remote, unappealing part of off-the-map New Mexico.

Artemis was waiting for us in a 44-site campground that had only eight or ten visitors. We heated up cheese quesadillas and elk green chile from our hunt earlier in the year. And with weary legs and creaking knees, we plotted how we could visit every park in the state before the year was out.

Almost two years ago, Instagram introduced a sincerely useful feature to the app: the ability to upload multiple photos at once, letting your followers browse them by swiping on a carousel of images. It was an obvious solution to one of the Instagram feed’s most persistent problems — users who spam it with seven or eight photos at a time. Which made it all the more inexplicable that Instagram restricted photo carousels to its advertisers. The company said it might bring the feature to regular users eventually, but it made no promises.

Today, we’re finally getting the feature that advertisers have enjoyed for years. Instagram said on its blog that users will now be able to upload 10 photos and videos per post, telling more complete stories . “You no longer have to choose the single best photo or video from an experience you want to remember,” the company said. “Now, you can combine up to 10 photos and videos in one post and swipe through to see them all.”

The company suggested a variety of uses for the new format, from documenting each phase of a surprise birthday party to showing the steps for making a recipe. In that sense, the carousels can feel like a more permanent version of Instagram stories — complete narratives that live on your profile for as long as you like.

To create a carousel, you tap a new icon that mimics a photo stack. From there, you select the photos and videos you want to include. To change the order of the posts, you tap, hold, and drag. You can edit your photos and videos individually or as a group, but you only get one caption and location tag for your post. (Likes and comments are all grouped under the complete post, too.)

You’ll know you’re seeing a carousel in the feed when you see a blue ellipsis (...) at the bottom of the post. To see the rest, just start swiping. Carousels will roll out to all users on Android and iOS over the next few weeks, the company said.

MPAA ratings have always been Wolverine’s arch-enemy. The character, played by Hugh Jackman over the course of 17 years and eight previous movies in Marvel Comics’ X-Men universe, is a mutant berserker whose most prominent weapons are razor-sharp metal claws, plus the feral drive necessary to use them. But the PG-13 ratings on the X-Men franchise installments have limited what directors were willing to show onscreen. Slashing weapons do horrible damage to human bodies, but the movies have always been coy about positioning the doomed mooks Wolverine takes out, concealing the wounds and dropping the bodies offscreen.

That ends with Logan, the first R-rated Wolverine feature, and the first to openly, even lovingly focus on the character bisecting heads and punching through skulls. Inspired by Deadpool’s immense financial success, Fox authorized director James Mangold (who also helmed 2013’s The Wolverine) and his crew to go hard-R on Logan, reportedly the last film to feature Jackman in the Wolverine role. In terms of graphic violence, profanity, and even a few stray seconds of female toplessness, they embrace the rating fully. It’s an intense, brutal film, full of sudden waves of bloody mayhem. But the real brutality isn’t in the severed limbs and heads, it’s in the film’s overwhelmingly dark emotional content. This is by far the grimmest the X-Men series has ever been. There’s no cute Stan Lee cameo, no Deadpool banter or “You’re a dick” jokes. Just exhaustion, resignation, and a steady march toward the end of this particular branch of the X-storyline.

But Mangold and his co-writers (The Wolverine and Minority Report screenwriter Scott Frank and American Gods writer/showrunner Michael Green) have managed something that’s been frustratingly rare over the past decade-plus of grim-n-gritty superhero takes: they earn the tone by developing a rich, even nuanced emotional landscape around their characters. And they show a rare commitment to the theme by taking their story to an uncompromising, even horrifying finale. Plenty of recent superhero films dabble in grimness seemingly out of a feeling that it makes wish-fulfillment hero-fantasy more serious and adult. Logan tells an actual adult story about despair, decay, and death.

The film is set in 2029, at a point where the X-Men appear to be gone, and no new mutants have been born in 25 years. (The film never explains the first point, though there are some subtle, discomfiting clues that have nothing to do with Sentinels or supervillains.) Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine, is working as a limo driver under his original name, James Howlett. He’s aging badly: his unbreakable adamantium skeleton is slowly poisoning him and his mutant healing abilities are failing, leaving him heavily scarred and in chronic pain that he medicates with alcohol and anger. He mostly spends his time scrambling for money to support his old teacher, Charles “Professor X” Xavier (Patrick Stewart, returning to the role he’s played on and off since 2000), now a feeble, declining man in his 90s, unable to fully control his body or his powers. Also playing house with them: Caliban (longtime Ricky Gervais partner Stephen Merchant), a pale, sun-sensitive mutant with an extraordinary ability to scent and track other mutants. Like Logan and Charles Xavier, he’s worn and weary from traumas both clear in his situation, and unspecified in his past.

Ben Rothstein, 20th Century Fox

Caliban makes it clear that their life of hiding in an abandoned, isolated refinery can’t last: Charles Xavier’s health is declining, and he’s dependent on illegally acquired medication to hold back violent seizures that cause his powers to run amuck. Then Logan is drawn into a conflict between an organization called Transigen and its experimental subject X-23, also known as Laura (Dafne Keen), who has a great deal in common with Logan. Soon the characters are on the run together with Transigen’s cyborg security honcho Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) in pursuit, backed by Zander Rice (Richard Grant), the son of the man in charge of the original Wolverine project.

Logan was loosely inspired by the Mark Millar comics series Old Man Logan, though Mangold’s team takes virtually nothing from Millar’s storyline except the idea of a grizzled old version of Logan navigating an ugly post-X-Men future. Other cinematic touchstones are much more apparent. Mangold uses clips and quotes to draw a pointed comparison between Logan and the protagonist of Shane, the 1953 Alan Ladd Western about an aging gunfighter whose attempts to settle down with a family lead to tragedy. The “tired man travels cross-country with an endangered child” plot mimics both Children Of Men (with all the despair, though without the bravura no-cut combats) and Midnight Special (with all the spooky-kid action, though without the Spielbergian wonder). A deeply creepy moment with Laura’s classmates closely recalls the 1960 horror classic Children Of The Damned. And Mangold has said in interviews that another touchstone was Darren Aronofsky and Robert Siegel’s 2008 drama The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke as an aging bear of a man trying to come to terms with his past as his broken-down body betrays him.

But for Star Wars fans, another close parallel may come to mind. Logan is the Force Awakens of the X-Men franchise, a conscious play on audience nostalgia that passes the franchise torch to a younger generation while respecting and admiring the older one. Laura and her contemporaries pass around X-Men comics as if they were holy writ, and they regard Wolverine as a legend — not necessarily one too revered to tease, but certainly a figure of fascination and fear. Late in the film, one kid stares at Logan while clutching a Wolverine action figure, dressed in the bright yellow Spandex suit the films have always mocked and dismissed. These kids are like Rey meeting Han Solo for the first time in The Force Awakens, and finding out that their legends are real — and that they’re sadly fallible, fragile, and human. Like that film, Logan embraces all the emotions a generation of filmgoers may have about Wolverine and the X-Men, but it also pointedly moves them offscreen, in favor of a new crop of potential heroes. (A Logan sequel hasn’t been green-lit yet, but Mangold has already said he’s interested in pursuing the story as a franchise.)

20th Century Fox

That tender humanity gives Logan much more power than the bloody mayhem of the fight sequences. The heart of the film is the tortured relationship between Logan and Charles Xavier, who resent and need each other in equal measure. Their relationship is marked by profanity and insults, and by Logan’s roughness and resentment. But Jackman brings across a deep, sullen affection for the old man that undercuts all Logan’s gruff fury and refusal to play hero. Stewart, for his part, turns Professor X into a heartbreaking figure, on the verge of disintegration from age and trauma, and prone to sentimental obsession over Laura. He’s midway between a doddering grandfather and the leader he used to be, and Mangold and his co-writers eke every bit of epic tragedy out of how far he’s fallen, from a world-shaking telepath to a querulous old man who has to be bodily hauled into a toilet stall, protesting all the way. He and Logan both hate their weakness and their reliance on each other, but they’re clearly family at this point, with all the mutual dependence and complicated history that entails.

And then Laura joins the family, and her relationship with both men is just as key to the movie. Keen plays Laura as wordlessly feral, a raging echo of Logan in his younger days. Her resentment and resistance to this miserable new world are a match for his, but her indomitability and ferocious energy go a long way toward keeping the film from wallowing in its own misery.

There’s a tremendous amount of pain onscreen at all times, and only some of it is deliberately inflicted by characters attacking each other. Most of it is in Laura’s well-justified fury about her past, Logan’s watery-eyed daily physical agony, Caliban’s stress and misery over an untenable situation, and Charles Xavier’s exhaustion and guilt. No one in this film wants to be where they are, and only Laura sees a clear path to a better future for herself — one that Logan thinks is a cheap fantasy. But her endearing link to Charles and her close parallels to Logan are a winning complication that shape the familiar backdrop of a reluctant-hero story. “I know you are still good inside… you want to help us,” one character tells Logan early on. It’s a cheesy, familiar trope, drawn out into a painful and visceral story.

While Deadpool’s success made Logan possible, the two movies take radically different tones with the same basic ideas about how family makes tragedy survivable. Deadpool finds cynical, bitter, and playful humor even in the most miserable situations. Logan, on the other hand, embraces its misery, positing a world where heroism and even kindness are always brutally punished, and yet personal connection is the only meaningful resource left to its characters. Of all the X-Men movies to date, it’s the saddest and most serious, and the one that most challenges the familiar ideas of superhero narratives. But its uniqueness and its complete devotion to tragedy makes it feel like the most adult story this film series has ever told. The weight of graphic, grotesque violence hangs over the entire movie. But the daring emotional violence lingers longer, well after the lights go down on the final shot.

Advance screenings are nothing new in Hollywood. In fact, it's not unusual for a movie to be recut or even go through reshoots based on those initial reactions. Scoop Advance...

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If the partnership between Samsung’s Gear VR and Six Flags to bring you VR roller coasters last year was too much virtual and not enough reality, you’re in luck. The two are collaborating again on a new ride called The New Revolution Galactic Attack, an experience that now incorporates augmented reality for a mess of visual stimulation.

Just like the park’s previous VR roller coaster rides, attendees will again be given a Gear VR headset to wear for the duration. This time, riders will get to use the device’s passthrough camera feature and see interactive graphics overlaid on top what’s out there in the real world, which means the person sitting next to you could be part of the experience.

Some parts of the ride will be entirely in VR, such as drops from the top of a roller coaster lift hill. It’s a space-themed ride, and Six Flags says you’ll see things like a “a fighter spaceship cockpit [that] envelops the riders into a tunnel of light.” That’s not god you’re seeing, silly, it’s just virtual reality.

Six Flags claims the ride is synchronized to the graphics so it shouldn’t produce any more motion sickness than a regular roller coaster, but every person is different so you’ll have to try for yourself to figure out your tolerance for mixed reality while revving around in loops at some 50 miles per hour. You can be one of the first to try out the new ride when it debuts publicly at two California Six Flags locations later this month: Six Flags Magic Mountain and Six Flags Discovery Kingdom.