Ryan Mustard

“Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final.”

Hunter S. Thompson.

The early enrollee already has some believers.

Forget a redshirt -- the 2016 season for Texas Longhorns football will feature early enrollee quarterback Shane Buechele on the field. Four and a half months away from the opener against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, head coach Charlie Strong was unequivocal about Buechele's future playing time when asked about it by Ricky Williams on the Longhorn Network.

Yeah, pretty excited to watch Coach Strong and Ricky talk tomorrow on Texas Gameday.

Coverage starts at Noon CT.https://t.co/gkJgSC14qo

— Longhorn Network (@LonghornNetwork) April 16, 2016

"Oh, god yes. He will play in the fall. He will play."

In listening to Strong and his players, it's not hard to figure out why.

No matter what time of day it is, when Strong walks down a hallway in the Texas football facilities, odds are that Buechele will be there. He's just a gym rat like that.

To understand what it takes to be a professional athlete, it takes a professional work ethic, and the 6'1, 191-pounder soaked that attitude up from his father Steve, who played 10 years as a utility infielder in the major leagues. The elder Buechele didn't do it by being the most talented player on the field, he did it by paying attention to the details, making easy plays look routine in the field, and taking his base when opposing pitchers ventured too far inside.

Now his son is taking those efforts to heart after an incredible prep football career at Arlington Lamar that culminated with 6,379 total passing yards and 73 touchdowns. Despite a lack of ideal size and despite time spent excelling on the baseball diamond like his father, Buechele still finished as the No. 4 dual-threat quarterback in the country, according to the 247Sports Composite rankings.

In football, there's no position more difficult to evaluate than quarterback -- there are no guarantees of any players making the leap from high school to college or college to the NFL. The best in the business still make mistakes that cripple franchises and programs. But Buechele has seemingly accomplished that feat remarkably well leading into his first public action as a Longhorn on Saturday.

No one knows it better than the players. Strong recounted the story of senior quarterback Tyrone Swoopes coming to him and telling him that Buechele is someone who can get it done and will make him better as a player.

If Swoopes says those things with his coach in candid moments, when sophomore offensive guard Patrick Vahe shares his feelings on Buechele, it's easier to believe that he's being sincere.

"The thing that impresses me about him is that he's a player that's trying to make it," Vahe said. "I understand his story that he told me. I love Shane, man. He's a good guy. So that's what really impresses me about him."

For new offensive coordinator Sterlin Gilbert, it's about Buechele's understanding of the offense and what he wants a quarterback to accomplish in it.

"He's headsy," Gilbert said. "He's got a live arm about him. He carries himself well. He's got a high football IQ, competitive, and just a guy that he's urgent about what he does and how he does it. But he's got a lot of room for growth or improvement."

Among all the superlatives cast towards Buechele, citing room for improvement hardly qualifies. Yet, it's one of the most heartening aspects about the young passer -- no matter how much he's already maximized his skill set with an arm that belies his size, an intuitive understanding of the game, and a relentless work ethic, it would be ludicrous to imagine that he doesn't have an impressive ceiling to reach.

And so Buechele is already working in an incredible vacuum. No matter what Swoopes and sophomore Jerrod Heard do moving forward, there will be opportunity available for the youngest of five scholarship quarterbacks on the Texas roster.

He's earned it, already.

Read 46 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The cyberpunk dystopian future of Blade Runner, with its artificial landscapes, might never become a reality. We’re heading into a much weirder version of the future.

Read more...

Earlier this morning, HTC announced its new smartphone, the HTC 10, revealing that the Android device will have the ability to wirelessly play audio through devices and speakers that support streaming via Apple's AirPlay feature (via SlashGear). In addition to AirPlay support, the basic specs of the phone include a 5.2-inch display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, 3,000 mAh battery for two full days of charge, and a USB Type-C port.


The addition of support for AirPlay makes the HTC 10 the first Android smartphone to work with Apple's audio and video streaming feature out of the box. AirPlay's inclusion into the HTC 10 also means that the Android device will be able to stream directly to the new Apple TV.

The move is a deliberate one by HTC, according to Darren Sng, vice president of product marketing for the company, as it plans to make its smartphones as feature rich as possible, even if it means support for third-party software. The company would even be open to including Apple Pay in its devices, if Apple ever opened up the mobile payments service to other manufacturers.

"We are platform agnostic," Darren Sng, vice president of product marketing, says of the company's ambitions. That extends beyond just streaming standards, too: if Apple made Apple Pay available to third-party manufacturers, or Samsung did the same with Samsung Pay, the exec says, HTC would jump at the opportunity.

"You wouldn't want credit card companies to determine what you can put in your wallet," Sng points out, "so why would you want a particular vendor to decide what payment you put in your phone?"

The HTC 10 is the company's flagship smartphone for 2016, coming on the heels of last year's HTC One M9 device. Anyone interested will be able to purchase the HTC 10 in May for an unlocked price of $699, and various, undisclosed carrier prices. The phone can be pre-ordered from HTC's website today, and in the United States users will be able to choose from black and silver color options, while other markets will include a third alternative of gold.

Read More: JBL Announces Noise-Canceling Headphones Powered by USB-C


Discuss this article in our forums

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sony today announced plans to bring the PlayStation 4's Remote Play capabilities to the PC and Mac through an update that will be released tomorrow. With the update, PS4 owners will be able to play games remotely through a PC or a Mac.

Remote Play is a feature that lets the PlayStation 4 send audio and video to a peripheral device, but it was previously only compatible with Sony's handheld console, the PlayStation Vita, the PlayStation TV set-top box, and select Sony smartphones and tablets. Remote Play has been around since the PlayStation 3 and the PSP, but Sony has never made an effort to expand it before.


The decision to bring Remote Play to PCs and Macs comes after Microsoft introduced a remote gameplay feature for the Xbox One, allowing Xbox games to be played using a PC that runs Windows 10. Sony's feature is more robust as it also works with Macs and it works remotely -- the Xbox game streaming feature requires a connection through a home network.

Sony makes Remote Play compatibility a requirement for all PlayStation 4 games that don't use peripherals, so most users will find that their entire PS4 game catalogs can be streamed to a Mac or PC.

On Macs, Remote Play will work with the latest versions of Apple's OS X operating system, OS X 10.10 Yosemite and OS X 10.11 El Capitan. On PCs, the feature is compatible with machines running Windows 8.1 or 10 or later. A single DualShock 4 controller can be connected to a PC or Mac via a USB cable to serve as the gameplay controller for Remote Play.

Games can be played in several resolutions and at several frame rates, adjustable based on Internet bandwidth. Resolution defaults to 540p, but can be changed to 360p or a max of 720p. The default frame rate setting is 30fps, adjustable to 60fps.

Remote Play will be available as soon as the PlayStation 4 is updated tomorrow. Once the update goes out, Mac and PC users will be able to download the software to enable the feature from the PlayStation Remote Play website (download is not yet live).


Discuss this article in our forums

And now, an epic tale of love and dedication only possible through video games.

Read more...

"A lot of people have started calling me the Melkman." (Nobody calls him the Melkman.)

When wide reciever Jordan Shipley's career with the Texas Longhorns and in the NFL came to an end, he had a difficult choice to make.

What to do next?

"After retiring from football, I was lost," Shipley said. "My dad always told me, ‘Son, if you do what you love, find a way to do that and you'll never work a day in your life.'"

So the struggle for the standout pass-catcher had come to an end as the solution manifested itself in the form of elk. Milking elk that is, or Melk.

YETI even went as far as to mock up a Melk gift pack, which, in typically YETI fashion, would retail for $401.16. Get it?

There's also a special, limited-time offer -- order now and receive a sample from Jordan's private melk stash. So far, the reviews have been mixed, but the product description is a must-read.

"When I first started milking elk, I knew that I couldn't change dairy forever without some help. So when YETI approached me about bringing melk to the masses, I was elated. They've created a solid product, from the pumping ducts to the nipple attachment."
-Jordan Shipley

"I can't say that I've had it but, you know, to each his own."
-Colt McCoy

After two years of relative peace , various recent events are dragging the players of online space MMO EVE Online towards another massive war. This time it’s between the game’s biggest coalition, The Imperium, against an alliance of smaller factions.

Read more...

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Wireless audio company and Apple Music partner Sonos has announced it will lay off employees as it restructures the business towards a new focus on music streaming and voice control.

The reasoning behind the move came in a blog post yesterday by Sonos CEO John MacFarlane, who called it an "investment in the future of music" that would allow the company to remain profitable, but which came with "very difficult" consequences. No details were given on the extent of the job cuts.


MacFarlane said the change would first see Sonos "lean into" the area of paid streaming services, following an irreversible shift in the music ecosystem, led by Apple.

This past year, when Apple announced its entry with Apple Music, we saw and helped drive a dramatic acceleration of paid music subscriptions. With Apple's influence, the entire ecosystem – labels, artists, management – began to embrace and advance streaming all over the world.

Now, this shift is irreversibly started, and everyone in the ecosystem is adjusting to a world of streaming services. The Beatles library, now available on all the streaming services, is a perfect example of how labels are leaning into streaming.

MacFarlane said the path forward for the music industry and for Sonos is "crystal clear" as he announced it was "doubling down" on streaming music, with an aim to build "incredibly rich experiences" as consumers inevitably grew dissatisfied with existing solutions for listening at home.

The CEO offered few details on the products or services that would be at the center of such experiences, but identified voice control as the way forward, calling the company "fans" of Amazon's Alexa personal assistant and Echo hardware.

Voice recognition isn't new; today it's nearly ubiquitous with Siri, OK Google, and Cortana. But the Echo found a sweet spot in the home and will impact how we navigate music, weather, and many, many other things as developers bring new ideas and more content to the Alexa platform.

Alexa/Echo is the first product to really showcase the power of voice control in the home. Its popularity with consumers will accelerate innovation across the entire industry. What is novel today will become standard tomorrow. Here again, Sonos is taking the long view in how best to bring voice-enabled music experiences into the home. Voice is a big change for us, so we'll invest what's required to bring it to market in a wonderful way.

Sonos made a name for itself by offering wireless sound systems that connect to an app which integrates third-party music streaming services including Spotify and SoundCloud. Apple Music content became available on Sonos wireless speakers in February after extensive beta testing by hundreds of thousands of listeners.

Sonos faces increasingly stiff competition as companies like Google, Samsung and Bose continue to expand their own wireless home audio solutions. However, while Amazon announced two new voice-activated audio products just last week, it also released accompanying SDKs and APIs which enable any device to respond to voice commands, opening the door for potential Sonos speaker integrations in the future.


Discuss this article in our forums

On Last Week Tonight last night, John Oliver took on the #brand running for President known as Donald Trump. Or, as he would have been known had one of his ancestors not changed his last name, Donald Drumpf. If you'd like to play along at home, you can install the Drumpfinator Chrome extension, which will replace any mentions of "Trump" on the web with "Drumpf".

Tags: 2016 election   Donald Trump   John Oliver   politics   video

On gamedays against the Sooners, it's easy to endear yourself to the Longhorns faithful.

Texas Longhorns head coach Shaka Smart hasn't ever played the Oklahoma Sooners in Austin as the head coach of the Longhorns, but let's just say that he already understands how to inspire the students before the game:

@BleacherReport @BDavisAAS OU Sucks #HookEm pic.twitter.com/3wXio9m1Ku

— Jordan Eisner (@jordaneisner) February 27, 2016

Good on you, coach. You're learning fast.

By the way, it's 1:08 p.m. CT and OU still sucks.

In this installment of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou examines how the Coen brothers shoot characters in their films close up with wide lenses to created empathy and comedy.

Tags: Coen brothers   film school   movies   Tony Zhou   video

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The former LSU coach will remain a brick in Charlie Strong's wall in Austin.

After several days of consideration and what was reportedly a matching offer from the Texas Longhorns, defensive line coach Brick Haley will remain in Austin for at least a second season after turning down the Texas A&M Aggies, according to multiple reports. Chip Brown of Horns Digest was the first to break the news on Wednesday morning.

Texas A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin is looking for a new position coach to replace departed defensive tackles coach Mark Hagen, who recently left College Station to coach defensive linemen for the Indiana Hoosiers, his alma mater. On Friday, the news first emerged that Sumlin had approached Haley about the possibility of joining his staff under defensive coordinator John Chavis, with whom Haley worked from 2009 to 2014 and reportedly has a strong personal relationship.

In an effort to keep Haley at Texas, head coach Charlie Strong met with his position coach on Monday following the official job offer from A&M, at which point he likely informed Haley that the Longhorns would match the offer from the Aggies. Since Haley made only $235,000 at Texas last year, he's now in line for a raise following a recruiting cycle in which he helped land four prospects from the state of Louisiana. Two of those players were among the five defensive tackles inked by the Longhorns in the 2016 class.

The decision by Haley to stay at Texas and work with the defensive tackle class he assembled is a welcome development because of his recruiting ability and also because of the major staff turnover that has already happened during Strong's tenure. In fact, had Haley left, Strong would have needed to hire a third defensive line coach in three years.

The final remaining hire for Strong this offseason will be a defensive backs coach following last week's dismissal of Chris Vaughn as a result of alleged improprieties during his tenure at Ole Miss. Purdue Boilemakers defensive backs coach Taver Johnson and Arkansas Razorbacks defensive backs coach Clay Jennings are the current frontrunners.

Dennis Overbye, reporting for the NYT:

A team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago (Listen to it here.). And it is a ringing (pun intended) confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.

More generally, it means that scientists have finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.

Remarkable science, and a testimony to Einstein’s extraordinary genius.

Don’t skip the video — it’s wonderful.

Four Xbox 360 games become backwards-compatible on the Xbox One today: Sam and Max: Beyond Time and Space, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Lego Batman and Trials HD.

Read more...

Rocket League is finally coming to Xbox One this month. February 17, to be exact.

Read more...

New audio app from Rogue Amoeba:

Suddenly, it’s easy to pass audio between applications on your Mac. Create virtual audio devices to take the sound from applications and audio input devices, then send it to audio processing applications. Loopback gives you the power of a high-end studio mixing board, right inside your computer.

This is the sort of app few people need, but for those who need it, it’s a godsend. I can see a lot of uses for this for screencasters and podcasters.

These are the work of Jesse Bray, whose portraits of famous pop culture characters have just enough geometry to them to be interesting but aren’t completely abstracted.

Read more...

Today on Highlight Reel we have parachutes, 1 player comebacks, rocket vespas, game physics gone wrong, and much more!

Read more...

And everyone present had themselves a feast.

With an important visit to see the Texas A&M Aggies looming this weekend, Texas Longhorns head coach Charlie Strong and linebackers coach Brian Jean-Mary headed to Houston to hold an in-home visit with 2016 Under Armour All-American linebacker Jeffrey McCulloch on Thursday evening.

Hookem pic.twitter.com/2Cfa34oJKL

— The Shark (@jmcculloch17) January 22, 2016

Presumably, those big smiles aren't just from the feast the group partook in:

A meal fit for a Shark!!! pic.twitter.com/59ppHxicaN

— Brian Luc Jean-Mary (@luc_brian) January 22, 2016

The timing of the in-home visit from Strong and Jean-Mary is interesting -- he opted to try to consolidate the momentum generated from having McCulloch on campus last weekend and around most of the commits and many of the top targets remaining instead of waiting to have a more final word after McCulloch takes his last visit.

At this point, there's no particularly legitimate reason to question Strong's recruiting strategies as he's managed to bury most of the memories of last season's disappointment and the roller coaster offensive coordinator search that followed.

The Aggies have gotten back into this recruitment a bit with McCulloch canceling his planned trip to Alabama and need some help at linebacker that would likely provide McCulloch an easier path to see the field than with the Longhorns.

However, don't underestimate the recruiting ability of Jean-Mary, the Texas recruiting coordinator and rainmaker from the 2015 recruiting class. Named the 247Sports Big 12 Recruiter of the Year, Jean-Mary finished No. 7 nationally in that service's rankings after serving as the primary recruiter for Malik Jefferson, DeAndre McNeal, Anthony Wheeler, and Cameron Townsend.

There's also the Houston connection that is trending in favor of Texas and the presence of Malik Jefferson in burnt orange -- the Predator and the Shark would make quite the pair of running partners for the Longhorns at linebacker.

Adult Swim Games last week announced a brand-new mobile game called Pocket Mortys, which launches on the App Store today. Based off of the network's hit show Rick and Morty, the game is set up as a parody of the popular Pokémon franchise and will set players up against a collection of alternate versions of Morty who are under the control of evil alien trainers.


As described by our sister site TouchArcade in a full preview, Pocket Mortys puts players in the shoes of Rick and tasks them with fighting, capturing, and training as many diverse Mortys as they can to have the best possible collection in the game. Adult Swim Games' new app eschews Pokémon's complex mechanics of elemental type characters for a simpler and more random "Rock, Paper, Scissors" system, focusing more on rewarding fans of the show than offering deep systems for more intense gamers.

Rather than use an entire chart of elements, it looks like most Mortys will be one of the old tried and true Rock, Paper, Scissors categories. While this may disturb the monster capture game purists out there, this game seems to be set up primarily as fan service to the Rick and Morty show.

At the moment, I don't see any in app purchases. You can do opt-in video ad viewing for the in game currency, Schmeckles. You can expect to see a Fallout Shelter-like pay structure emerge from the game at some point, but just the fact that I don't even have the option unlocked yet to view their IAP should be a testament to their decision to keep it understated and pretty discreet.

In total, users will be able to capture and train over 70 versions of Morty throughout the game, including Mustache Morty, Wizard Morty, and Cronenberg Morty. Pocket Mortys will also let players craft items from itemized references to the show, engage in side quests, and interact with characters like Bird Person, Mr. Meeseeks, and more.


Rick and Morty fans can download Pocket Mortys [Direct Link] for free today on the App Store.


Discuss this article in our forums

Well, holy shit...Werner Herzog has made a film called Lo and Behold about the online world and artificial intelligence.

Lo and Behold traces what Herzog describes as "one of the biggest revolutions we as humans are experiencing," from its most elevating accomplishments to its darkest corners. Featuring original interviews with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as Elon Musk, Bob Kahn, and world-famous hacker Kevin Mitnick, the film travels through a series of interconnected episodes that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.

From the trailer, it looks amazing. Gotta see this asap.

Tags: artificial intelligence   Lo and Behold   movies   trailers   Werner Herzog

It’s $35, and it’s fantastic.

Read more...

And now, a message from disgruntled Xbox owner Snoop Dogg.

Read more...

Ever wondered how some of the best players pull off their ridiculous tricks? Super Mario 64 player pannenkoek2012, known for beating the game in as few button presses as possible, made a video explaining his process. It’s amazing.

Read more...