I really want to deliver you some good news, here. I want to tell you that the Psychonauts, long thought lost to the fabled realm of cult classics, have made their triumphant return in a game thats truly worthy of their twisted world of psychic agents. I want to tell you about a mind-bending VR experience that plays with your psyche in clever, astonishing ways, just as Raz did when he climbed into the heads of characters in the first game.

Sadly, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin is not that experience.

There are things to love in this brief spin-off to the 2005 platformer that developer Double Fine made its name with. The cast, for example, is back together and writer and development legend Tim Schafer hasnt lost his grasp on them. Rhombus of Ruin is VRs first introduction to the wit, soul, and sheer creativity of Double Fines world building, and in that respect it doesnt disappointment. Id chuckled to myself multiple times within the first scene, and some of the games sights are truly spectacular. No one does weird quite like these guys, and it shows here.

Back in control of Raz mere minutes after the cliffhanger ending of the first game, the developer has crafted a 2-3 hour adventure in which youll attempt to save the father of your maybe-girlfriend, Lili. Its seen clear opportunity in translating the first games psychic power-infused platforming into a VR puzzler that more closely resembles one of Schafers classic point-and-click adventure games like Grim Fandango or Day of the Tentacle.

As well intentioned and respectable a throwback this might be clearly influenced by the design challenges of VR that can cause simulation sickness it ultimately leaves this chapter in the Psychonauts saga feeling decidedly inessential, restrictive, and dated.

Many of the games core mechanics are incidental, and not anywhere near as satisfactory to use as they should be. If youre familiar with VR, then youve probably picked things up and moved them with your mind before. Its a mechanic as old as the first full retail VR games like Lands End on Gear VR; you look at an item, you press a button to bring it towards you, and then you move it by steering your head.

Its a necessary component of the game, but it would have you think its novel and empowering, when really its a somewhat laborious way of shifting items around. As harsh as that sounds, its consistent with most of the powers you can use; serving a design purpose more than a genuinely fun mechanic to utilize. Body-hopping clairvoyance, for example, is much the same, a mesh of mechanic and locomotion that doesnt excuse the fact everyones rooted to the same spots.

Pyrokinesis, meanwhile, suggests sections in which you can giddily burn your surroundings to the ground, but these never materialize. Its reduced to often redundant actions like burning specific items that block your path, and feels almost totally useless once the more satisfactory Psi-Blasts come into play, which at least give a kick to their use.

I just never felt like the more powerful psychic agent Raz had grown to become by the end of the first game. Theres an argument to be made for Double Fines intentions to deliver a different kind of experience, but it comes off as overly limited.

There are glimpses of what the game could have been, which occur when the puzzle-solving is at its spontaneous best. Rapidly flinging suitcases down a corridor to block a door, or shattering the glass of a fish tank to snap someone out of a trance were impulse-based actions where I reacted naturally to the world around me. When I stumbled with working out which power I needed to use where, however, characters would repeat unhelpful lines of dialogue ad-nauseum.

Psychonauts In the Rhombus of Ruin never really gets inventive with VR, at least not until two sequences towards the end in which you visit the mind of a fan favorite character. Though this involves a trite boss fight, theres an element of storytelling here that truly capitalizes on the connections VR can enhance with characters, and the clever spins it can take with scale and environments. I had hoped for the trippy, surprising ride these precious few moments delivered right the way through, but ultimately this was all it could muster even in the short run time.

A missed opportunity for sure, then, made all the more bitter by the fact the series didnt need to radically reinvent itself to fit VR. Luckys Tale and Wayward Sky show third-person platforming works in VR, and the latters mix of first-person gameplay proves Double Fine could have had the best of both worlds here. Ultimately, its just like PSVRs Batman game, missing crucial elements of what makes the IP so compelling.

Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin gives fans a reason to be excited for Psychonauts 2, if only because it shows Double Fine hasnt lost is grasp of the wonderful world it concocted 12 years ago now and not much else. As a VR game this is most often dated and only rarely the eye-opening adventure that a VR game about characters that can climb inside your psyche should be. Im happy that the Psychonauts are alive and well, however anyone but the series most devoted fans should wait until next year for what will hopefully be the coming home party they so truly deserve.

Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin will be available on PlayStation VR for $19.99 on February 21st 2017.Read our Game Review Guidelinesfor more information on how we arrived at this score.

Tagged with: double fine, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin

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Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin Review: A Middling Misfire - UploadVR

Considering over 1.7 million people contributed $143 million to make the game a reality, its no surprise that painting doubt over one of the games coveted features cancause a bit of an uproar. Most recently, Star Citizens senior graphics programmer Ben Parry had the community up in arms when he seemingly squashed the potential of Star Citizen coming to virtual platforms.

As reported on Gamecrate, Parry responded to a question in the RSI forums that asked if the switch to the Amazon Lumberyard game engine would facilitate VR support and he responded with this:

Sorry to say, do not hold your breath for this. Ignoring the render tech for VR itself (which given the work weve done, would definitely be a read-and-rewrite job, not a merge-this-file job), making a game properly VR-compliant takes a lot of work at the design and testing level regardless of the engine used. Wed probably need to get the framerate up a bit higher too, come to think of it.

VR support was etched in stone when the game reached the $12 million mark in their funding even though, at that time, it only promised Oculus Rift support for the hangar module where you can explore your ships in a closed environment. More VR rumblings happened from that point and, in early 2016, lead dev Chris Roberts declared there was a refocus happening to make VR support a reality and that the game would support all major headsets eventually. Keep in mind that the game was running on CryEngine at that time and a complete engine shift would probably raise a few new obstacles in VR integration, but Parrys statement made it seem like a really long shot entirely. A couple days later, though, he took to Reddit to clarify:

Hi, I should probably let this lie, but I wanted to clarify that, If at all was definitely NOT what I was getting at. I was answering a simple does X mean we get Y type question, from a tech perspective, and the answer is no it doesnt, because thats not the main hurdle. I didnt in any way intend to suggest it had been removed from the plan.

Star Citizen is one of the most ambitious gaming undertakings of recent years and maybe ever, shaping up to contain a massive swath of gameplay experiences that bring outer space to life for gamers inside and outside of a ships cockpit. Its not impossible that the game will launch with VR support for a couple modules. Though Parry did say its not off the table entirely, it may be time to reel expectations in a bit and not expect full VR implementation until well after the launch of the full game.

Tagged with: chris roberts, flight sim, roberts space industries, Star Citizen

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Star Citizen May Still Get VR Support, But Framerate is a Concern - UploadVR

We wont see Samsungs next Galaxy smartphone, the unannounced S8, at Mobile World Congress next week, but it shouldnt surprise you to hear that, when we do see it, it might well come with a new version of the Gear VR.

That is according to smartphone industry leakster, Roland Quandt, who today noted that the next model for the Gear VR, dubbed SM-R324, is on its way, and will largely be the same as the previous model, only changed slightly to fit Samsungs new phone. You might remember that the last model was leaked early on an Indian import website, but we couldnt find any such information to corroborate this version and Quadnt doesnt cite any sources, so take the next with a pinch of salt for now.

Samsung Gear VR SM-R324 is coming same as SM-R323 for S7, but gets different front cover to hold Galaxy S8 and a single hand controller.

Roland Quandt (@rquandt) February 20, 2017

But heres one very interesting aspect of Quandts tweet; he says it will be coming with a single-hand controller.

Previously, Gear VR has utilized an on-board touchpad for control, and supported Bluetooth gamepads for titles that require more elaborate input. While this will likely be the case with any proposed new version of the device, the alleged addition of this controller is hugely interesting. Not only could it mean Gear VR gets its first dedicated external input method, but theres room for deeper speculation here too.

Daydream, the mobile VR ecosystem from Google, uses a single-hand controller too. Samsung itself has partnered with Google to make a Daydream-compatible mobile phone, which could well be the Galaxy S8 should it fall in line with Googles reference specs. Could it be that this controller is a Daydream remote similar to the one that ships with the Daydream View? If so that has some pretty big implications for the device but, again, thats only speculation at this point.

With the S8 expected to skip out MWC, were not quite sure when Samsung is planning to show it off. One things for sure; with the distaster that was the Galaxy Note 7 still fresh in the mind, the company is going to need to pull out all the stops to win back its audience.

Tagged with: Galaxy S8, gear vr, samsung

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Report: New Gear VR Planned For Galaxy S8, Comes With Single Hand Controller - UploadVR

One of the first things Donald Trump did when he took office was temporarily gag several federal agencies, forbidding them from tweeting.

In response, self-described government workers created a wave of rogue Twitter accounts that share real facts (not to be confused with alternative facts, otherwise known as lies) about climate change and science. As a rule, the people running these accounts chose to remain anonymous, fearing retaliation but, depending on how they created and use their accounts, they are not necessarily anonymous to Twitter itself, or to anyone Twitter shares data with.

Anonymous speech is firmly protected by the First Amendment and the Supreme Court, and its history in the U.S. dates to the Federalist Papers, written in 1787 and 1788under the pseudonym Publius by three of the founding fathers.

But the technical ability for people to remain anonymous on todays internet, where every scrap of data is meticulously tracked, is an entirely different issue. The FBI, a domestic intelligence agency that claims the power to spy on anyonebased on suspicions that dont come close to probable cause, has a long, dark history of violating the rights of Americans. And now it reports directly to President Trump, who is a petty, revenge-obsessed authoritarian with utter disrespect for the courts and the rule of law.

In this environment, how easy is it to create and maintain a Twitter account while preserving your anonymity even from Twitter and any law enforcement agency that may request its records? I tried to find out, and documented all my steps. There are different ways to accomplish this. If you plan on following these steps you should make sure you understand the purpose of them, in case you need to improvise. I also cant guarantee that these techniques will protect your anonymity there are countless ways that things can go wrong, many of them social rather than technical. But I hope youll at least have a fighting chance at keeping your real identity private.

For this exercise, I decided to pick a highly controversial political topic: Facts. I believe that what we know about reality is based on evidence that can be objectively observed. Thus, I created the completely anonymous (until publishing this article, of course) Twitter account @FactsNotAlt. Heres how I did it.

Threat model

Before we begin, it helps to define a threat model, that is: what we need to protect; who we need to protect it from; what their capabilities are; and what countermeasures prevent or mitigate these threats.

Basically, its impossible to be completely secure all the time, so we need to prioritize our limited resources into protecting what matters the most first. The most important piece of information you need to protect in this case is your real identity.

Law enforcement or the FBI might launch an investigation aimed at learning your identity. It may be to retaliate against you getting you fired, charging you with crimes, or worse. Your Twitter account might also anger armies of trolls who could threaten you, abuse you with hate speech, and try to uncover your identity.

If the FBI opens an investigation aimed at de-anonymizing you, one of the first things theyll do is simply ask Twitter and every other service that they know you use for information about your account. So a critically important countermeasure to take is to ensure that none of the information tied to your account phone numbers, email addresses, or IP addresses youve used while logging into your account lead back to you.

This is true for all accounts you create. For instance, if you supply a phone number while creating your Twitter account, the phone service provider associated with that number shouldnt have information that can lead back to you either.

Another concern: The FBI also might go undercover online and try to befriend you, to trick you into revealing details about yourself or to trick you into clicking a link to hack you. They might make use of informants in the community of people who follow you on Twitter as well. Organized trolls might use the same tactics.

Hiding your IP address with Tor

An IP address is a set of numbers that identifies a computer, or a network of computers, on the internet. Unless you take extra steps, every website you visit can see your IP address. If youre using Twitter while connected to your home or office Wi-Fi network, or your phones data plan, Twitter can tell. If they hand these IP addresses to the FBI, you will very quickly lose your anonymity.

This is where Tor comes in. Tor is a decentralized network of servers that help people bypass internet censorship, evade internet surveillance, and access websites anonymously. If you connect to Twitter while youre using Tor Browser, Twitter cant tell what your real IP address is instead, theyll see the IP address of a random Tor server. Tor servers are run by volunteers. And even if any of the servers bouncing your data around are malicious, they wont be able to learn both who you are and what youre doing.

This is the primary benefit that Tor has over Virtual Private Network, or VPN, services, which try to help users hide their IP addresses. The FBI can go to a VPN service to learn your real IP address (assuming the VPN keeps a record of its users IP addresses, and cooperates with these requests). This isnt true with Tor.

To get started with Tor, download Tor Browser. Its a web browser, like Chrome or Firefox, but all its internet traffic gets routed over the Tor network, hiding your real IP address.

Using Tor Browser is the easiest way to get started, but its not perfect. For instance, a hacker who knows about a vulnerability in Tor Browser can discover your real IP address by tricking you into visiting a website they control, and exploiting that vulnerability the FBI has done this in the past. For this reason, its important to always immediately update Tor Browser when you get prompted.

You can also protect yourself from Tor Browser security bugs by using an operating system thats designed to protect your anonymity, such as Tails or Qubes with Whonix, (Ive written about the latter here). This is more work for you, but it might be worth it. Personally, Im using Qubes with Whonix.

Getting an anonymous email address

Before you can create nearly any account online, you need an email address. While popular email services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail let anyone make an account for free, they dont make it easy to do so anonymously. Most of them require that you verify your identity with a phone number. You can in fact do that anonymously (more on that below), but I prefer using an email provider that is happy to give addresses to anonymous users.

One of these providers is SIGAINT, a darknet-only service that forces all its users to login using Tor to read or send email. The people who run it are anonymous and it contains ads for (sometimes very sketchy, sorry) darknet websites. However, you do end up with a working, anonymous email address.

If you prefer not to use SIGAINT, another good choice is Riseup, a technology collective that provides email, mailing list, VPN, and other similar services to activists around the world. Accounts are free, and they dont ask for any identifying information, but you do need invite codes from two friends who already use Riseup in order to create an account.

Yet another option is ProtonMail a privacy-friendly email provider based in Switzerland that asks for minimal identifying information and works well over Tor. However, to prevent abuse, they require Tor users to provide a phone number (that they promise not to store) to receive an SMS during account creation. So, if youd like to use ProtonMail instead (or any other email service that requires a phone number when creating an account over Tor), follow the steps below to create an anonymous phone number first.

I decided to use SIGAINT. In Tor Browser, I went to SIGAINTs onion service address, sigaintevyh2rzvw.onion, which I found on their public website. This is a special type of web address that only works in Tor Browser, and not the normal internet. From there, I filled out the form to create a new account.

Thats it. Ive now created a brand new anonymous email address: factsaretrue@sigaint.org.

Getting an anonymous phone number

While attempting to create a Twitter account, I quickly hit a snag. Even if I provide my (anonymous) email address, Twitter wont let me create a new account without first verifying my phone number. (You might get lucky and get the option to skip entering your phone number it doesnt hurt to try but if youre coming from a Tor node that isnt likely.)

This is a problem, because I obviously cant use my real phone number if I want to remain anonymous. So to proceed, I needed to figure out how to get a phone number that isnt tied to my actual identity. This is a common problem when trying to stay anonymous online, so you can follow these instructions any time you need a phone number when opening an account.

There are other ways to do it, but I chose a conceptually simple option: Buy a burner phone anonymously, use it to verify my new Twitter account, and then get rid of it. I wandered around downtown San Francisco looking in convenience stores and pharmacies until I found what I was looking for in a 7-Eleven.

Using cash, I bought the cheapest TracFone handset I could find (an LG 328BG feature phone as in, not a smartphone) as well as 60 minutes worth of voice service, for a total of $62.38 after tax. You might be able to find cheaper cell phone handsets if you look long enough.

If youre going to get a burner phone and want to maintain your anonymity, here are some things to keep in mind:

After buying phone service, youll need to activate the phone. This process will be different with different phone companies. TracFone requires you to activate your handset either by calling their phone number from a different phone obviously not a good option for someone trying to remain anonymous or by activating online at their website. I activated my burner phone online using Tor Browser.

Once youve activated your phone, you can use the phones menu system to learn what your new phone number is. On my LG 328BG, I pressed Menu, selected Settings, and finally Phone Information to find it.

Creating a Twitter account anonymously

Finally, armed with an email address and phone number that arent in any way connected to my real identity, I could create a Twitter account.

Before making an account, grab your laptop and burner phone and go to a public location that isnt your home or office, such as a coffee shop. When you get there, power on your burner phone. Keep in mind that this location is now tied to your burner phone, so you might wish to do this step when youre traveling in another city.

Using Tor Browser, I navigated to https://twitter.com/signup and signed up for a new account. The new account form asked for my full name (Facts Are True), my email address (factsaretrue@sigaint.org), and a password.

After clicking Sign up, I was immediately prompted to enter my phone number. I typed my anonymous phone number and clicked Call me. A Twitter robot called my burner and read out a six-digit number, which I typed into the next page on Tor Browser. It worked great.

With the phone number verification step complete, I powered off my burner phone. Once youre sure you dont need your burner phone anymore, its a good idea to get rid of it.

Toward the end of the signup process, Twitter prompted me to come up with a username. After many tries, I found one I liked: @FactsNotAlt. After clicking through the welcome screen, I was finally logged into my new anonymous account.

I went ahead and confirmed that I control my factsaretrue@sigaint.org email address.

And there you have it. I set up my new account and began tweeting about things that are true.

Maintaining the Twitter account over time

If youre following along, youve now created a completely anonymous Twitter account as well. Congratulations! But your work has only just started. Now comes the hard part: Maintaining this account for months, or years, without making any mistakes that compromise your identity. I wont be following these tips myself with the @FactsNotAlt account Ive already outed myself as the owner. But for anyone who is trying to anonymously maintain a popular Twitter account, here are some things to keep in mind.

Be careful about how you interact with people:

Compartmentalize:

Many successful Twitter accounts have a team of people who run them instead of a single individual. If youre part of such a team, or thinking of sharing access to your existing account with someone new:

And finally, keep in mind that after all this, Twitter can always kick you off for their own reasons. And if your account gets hacked and the email address associated with it is changed, youll have no way to recover it.

Good luck!

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How to Run a Rogue Government Twitter Account With an Anonymous Email Address and a Burner Phone - The Intercept

For as long as humans have had a way of committing moving images to tape, pixelated frames have been used to document the sinister, the peculiar, and the downright unexplainable. YouTube has long been a repository for some of the creepiest mysteries of the modern age ever caught on camera, and the endlessly obsessive and curious internet hive mind has ferreted out the truths lurking behind many of these eyebrow-raising videos. But occasionally, that is not the case.

These are six of those stories.

One of the most notorious pirate broadcasts of all time, preserved well beyond its intended lifespan, occurred on November 22, 1987, during a Chicago station's nightly local news broadcast. After turning black for 15 seconds, the picture reappeared but now showed a person wearing a Max Headroom mask, situated in front of a rotating piece of corrugated metal and accompanied by a humming noise. Technicians at the station managed to halt the pirated broadcast by switching the microwave transmitter they were using to broadcast, suggesting a hack by a strong pirate microwave signal nearby.

That same night, PBS member station WTTW fell victim to the same hackers during a broadcast of the Doctor Who episode "Horror of Fang Rock." This time, the pirates were able to cut in for a full 90 seconds, and used the time to spout advertising slogans and seeming nonsense. The clip ended with the Max Headroom mask-wearer pulling down his pants, receiving a spanking from an unidentified person in a French maid outfit, and yelling "They're coming to get me!" The WTTW broadcast was being sent from the Sears Tower microwave dish and because there were no technicians on duty at the time, they were unable to trace the signal.

The identity of the hackers and what the videos mean beyond a simple joke remain a mystery to this day. Occasionally, the wide world of the internet will stumble across a character that seems like they could have pulled off the Max Headroom hack, only to dismiss the theory later. The most current thinking on the subject suggests it was someone within the Chicago Broadcasting Community because the technology required to pull off a huge microwave hack wasn't available to the average consumer in the late 1980s.

One of America's most well-known conspiracy theories -- that an alien ship crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1950s -- is still giving willing theorists thrills more than 50 years later. In 2011, a new YouTube user named "ivan0135" uploaded a series of four videos that claimed to have been culled from leaked classified material. The uploaded information and film footage introduces us to a purported test subject known as "Skinny Bob," who appears to be an eerily realistic alien life form.

Is it real? The videos claim the footage was collected between 1942 and 1969, but post-production techniques seem to have been applied. If you look at the bottom left of the Skinny Bob video, the timecode appears to be flashing at a different rate than the footage, suggesting a digital post-production trick.

Even if the ivan0135 tapes probably aren't actual aliens (just like Roswell was most certainly not an extraterrestrial craft), the computer animation skill on display is an impressive work of special effects that has still gone uncredited for five years.

In 2008, on a 4chan board for paranormal posts, a user put a link into the "unsecured webcams" thread that showed a live-stream of a woman who was unconscious -- possibly even dead -- in a contorted position. The stream was coming from Seoul, South Korea. The woman woke up 10 hours later, and revealed that she had merely been sleeping in an odd position, but the attention of the internet had been piqued.

The woman, dubbed Chip-chan, was constantly broadcasting on webcam and falling asleep at odd times and in odd positions. She kept a blog and a YouTube channel where she told her odd story. The woman apparently never left the apartment and started making signs that were translated into various paranoid accusations like: "Don't get tricked, don't get fooled. Early every morning. If someone comes that paralyzes the person. I can't be stopped."

Over years, internet detectives pieced together a dossier of information on Chip-chan, including her contact e-mail and exchanges with the woman herself. She claims that a Korean police officer she calls "P" implanted something called a "Verichip" in her that keeps her forcibly in her apartment and can cause her to fall asleep at will. After Chip-chan's apartment was found via Google Earth sleuthing, concerned parties contacted the police in Seoul who said they were aware of a mentally disturbed woman who kept to herself except for occasional appearances at anti-government protests where she would photograph police officers.

In March 2015, a YouTube user named "unfavorable semicircle" sprang into existence and began uploading videos a month later. Most of them were only seconds or minutes long. Some included distorted voices uttering a letter or number. But the most notable quirk of the account was the sheer number of videos it uploaded: tens of thousands, causing YouTube to shut it down for violating the spam-related portions of its terms of service. Since then, the unfavorable semicircle project has continued on Twitter and a new YouTube account that continues to release videos to this day.

Most speculation about what unfavorable semicircle is trying to accomplish is centered on finding a reliable way to decode the videos. A similar YouTube channel that had puzzled online sleuths in the past had specialized in uploading videos featuring colored geometric shapes and tones, and it was eventually revealed to be the still active Google test channel Webdriver Torso. Unfavorable semicircle's return after the first channel was blocked has led most theorists to suspect it is some sort of coded art project or even an electronic numbers station.

More than likely just an amateur film about two students' exploration of an abandoned asylum, the "Pennhurst Found Footage" has yet to be attributed to a filmmaker or individual. It also hasn't been reliably connected to a real-life crime, which casts doubt on its claim that the footage involves "missing" college students. Nonetheless, the film's two parts are prefaced by intentionally creepy text stating that the students seen in the video have never been found.

The mysterious part of the video is its ending, which cuts suddenly from a staircase inside the abandoned mental institution to a scene in the surrounding forest in daytime, even though the time code on the camera shows only 32 seconds elapsing (which wouldn't have been enough time to exit the facility from the stairwell where the students had been investigating).To date, no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility for this likely hoax, even as internet mystery-hunters are still trying to find answers.

An "ARG" is the abbreviation for an "Alternate Reality Game," or a fictional experience that extends its narrative into real life. There have been ARGs to promote products like movies and albums, and there have been ARGs that exist purely as an experience you have offline. Because of the nature of these types of games and experiences, sometimes it's hard to tell which parts of them are real and which aren't.

Such is the case with "deeper," a channel that uploaded cryptic videos with distorted audio and old camcorder footage in 2016. The hive mind of internet sleuths, particularly on 4chan, quickly set about trying to decode the mysterious videos by running the beeps that appeared at the end of certain clips through a spectrogram -- a process that revealed the names of actual cold cases from the state of Colorado in the 1980s. Different codes have continued to be hidden in the videos and their associated descriptions, but nothing has led to a big reveal, nor have any of the cold cases referenced been solved.

It's unlikely that this ARG was posted by a murderer who grew a conscience and decided to confess through YouTube ciphers that use old Daniel Johnston songs, but then again... The last video was uploaded two months ago.

Sign up here for our daily Thrillist email, and get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun.

Dave Gonzales is a frequent contributor to Thrillist Entertainment and loves internet mysteries.

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Crazy Videos on YouTube That No One Can Explain - Thrillist

Carl Gorhams grieving memoir of his partners death is most effective when it focuses on their daughter, writes Molly McCloskey

Carl Gorham: Days. Weeks. Months. Faster and faster. We have no time to lose. Because life is uncertain. We dont wait. We do.

Book Title: The Owl at the Window: A Memoir of Loss and Hope

ISBN-13: 978-1473642324

Author: Carl Gorham

Publisher: Coronet

Guideline Price: 14.99

It may be middle age, but it seems to me that everyone is talking about death. On the one hand are the transhumanists, proponents of radical life extension, mind uploading, and cyrogenics the latter in the news recently when a terminally ill 14-year-old in the UK won the right to be cyrogenically preserved.

Then there are those who exhort us to live well and accept death. In this camp are the death doulas, the death positivity movement, and the Order of the Good Death (Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety of modern culture is not). Death cafes where strangers gather to discuss death are springing up around the world.

I cannot imagine these salons and I wouldnt want to try one, though as Raymond Tallis notes in The Black Mirror, a work in which he observes himself from the imagined vantage point of being dead, talking about death may be even more evasive than remaining silent: we cant but sound portentous or hollowly laconic.

While transhumanists want to live forever, or at least for a lot longer, many of us (and I include myself here; few things cause me greater anxiety than the thought of thawing out, defenceless, in an unimaginable future) want to fear death less and die feeling human. Atul Gawandes hugely successful Being Mortal is about improving the quality of end-of-life, as is the well-known work of BJ Miller, a triple amputee and hospice and palliative medicine physician.

Perhaps the increase in people narrating their own last days Christopher Hitchens, Jenny Diski, Oliver Sacks, Tom Lubbock, Paul Kalanithi is a reflection of the growing desire to claim ownership of this final process. Of course, it may also be the logical next step to our having narrated every other aspect of our existence.

What also proliferates are the memoirs of those left grieving. One of the latest is The Owl at the Window by Carl Gorham, the award-winning creator of the animated sitcom Stressed Eric and numerous other sitcoms and film scripts.

In 1997, Gorham and Vikki Sipek are two thirtysomethings living the dream she flying high in the fashion industry and he enjoying a US bidding war for his work, their lives a living, breathing Sunday supplement. Then Vikki finds a lump in her breast. So begins 10 years of operations, chemotherapy and scans, awaiting results, fearing the worst.

[W]ere in a different race now, Gorham writes. Were running, running, trying to stay ahead of it. And time feels different. It seems to race by. Days. Weeks. Months. Faster and faster. We have no time to lose. Because life is uncertain. We dont wait. We do.

They give birth to a daughter, Romy, who is three when her mothers cancer returns. On a family trip, passing through Hong Kong, Vikki lapses into a coma. While she lies in hospital, Gorham and his daughter wander, dazed, through the surreal landscape. A friend of a friend offers them a house. Imagining a luxurious refuge, they instead find themselves in a ramshackle cottage, its environs distressingly apposite: to get there they must walk through an unlit wood and across a graveyard where snakes and Komodo dragons lurk.

Vikki dies in Hong Kong, and Gorham embarks on the business of grieving and of single-parenting, the day-to-day of keeping Romy connected to her mother: too much talk of Vikki sounds false and hectoring, but too little and Romy may lose the sense of Vikki altogether.

Grief, like all abstract nouns, is difficult to narrate, and when such a narration has power it is because an intense particularity has been brought both to the day to day and to the person being mourned. Vikki, unfortunately, remains frustratingly distant. She is always quiet and unassuming but also bustling with brilliant energy, and she never quite assumes dimensions. Grief itself falls victim to too much telling and too little showing: I cant accept it. Not now. Not yet. I cant contemplate it. The thought of never seeing her again. Its too much. Too utterly terrifying.

It is Romy who animates the narrative, enacting her grief in a way that seems instinctive, primal and delicate. Nine months after her mothers death, Romy constructs a cardboard reproduction of Vikki, which she christens Cardboard Mummy. Cardboard Mummy is one of the family, watching TV, propped up at the dinner table, belted into the passenger seat on trips to the supermarket. Romy talks to Cardboard Mummy about all manner of things and solicits her advice.

When Romy decides to bring Cardboard Mummy to school for show-and-tell, her father fears the worst bullies tearing Mummy to pieces, his daughter a laughingstock. But Romy manages the performance with exceptional poise, telling the class about her mummys illness and everything that happened in Hong Kong . . . and how Mummy is in the ground at the church now and how we are all so sad and how we will always be sad.

This turns out to have been an astonishingly intuitive act of catharsis, because after that, Cardboard Mummy begins to recede. She sits in the hall, and Romy doesnt pick her up as often, though shes happy Mummy is there. Mummy is now spoken of with fondness and nostalgia, like an old friend who has moved away to the other side of the world.

In exteriorising her mothers presence through a cardboard effigy, Romy seems to have marked for Vikki a territory in her own life and psyche. It is a reminder of how, with our sophistication and our lack of ritual, we have lost the hang of being with the dead.

It also reminds us of what we all vaguely know and which may give us solace or pause as we contemplate our own demise: that biological death is an endpoint to existence on one plane only. The impact we have on others doesnt cease when we do.

As philosopher Gabriel Rockhill noted in a recent New York Times column on discussing death with his son and how these psychosocial dimensions of ourselves persist: In living, we trace a wake in the world.

Molly McCloskeys new novel, When Light Is Like Water, will be published by Penguin Ireland in April.

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The Owl at the Window review: They the living - Irish Times

New York Times

Tax Software: The Basics Work, but Peace of Mind Costs Extra - The ... New York Times These programs have gotten much better, and are now selling added, and perhaps unnecessary, features. What's next? Tax reviews over cocktails? and more »

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Tax Software: The Basics Work, but Peace of Mind Costs Extra - The ... - New York Times

WordPress is the most popular blogging and CMS platform in the world. Everyone whowants to have control over their website without spending a lot of money on maintenance should look to WordPress.

Ive personally installed hundreds of WordPress installations for clients in my past jobs. In fact, all of the web properties we manage at Bacic Media Group currently run on the WordPress platform, and we have no intentions on changing to anything else right now.

In this article, well go over how to install a fresh copy of WordPress on any host with cPanel in under 30 minutes.

Keep in mind that if your web host has a 1-click option to install WordPress, then you should use that as it does all the work for you. But for those that do not have that option, follow these simple instructions to get the job done.

The first thing you will need to do is download the WordPress files on WordPress.org. My preference is tar.gz version because it is smaller in filesize, but the zip version works just as well.

The next thing we need to do is create a MySQL database. To do that, we need to log in to our cPanel account. Once were in the cPanel dashboard screen, we will click on MySQL Database Wizard and follow the steps in order to create the database and database user.

Step 1

In the first step, we simply create a database by specifying what name we want it to be. Just make sure you write this down as we will need it later when we run the WordPress installation.

Step 2

The second step is creating the actual MySQL user by specifying the username and password. You will also need to write down these credentials somewhere for later use.

Step 3

The last step is to associate the database user with the database. The easiest way is to simply check off the All Privileges checkbox and click next.

The next step is to upload the WordPress files we downloaded in the first step.

So again, login to cPanel and click on File Manager. As an option, you may also upload using FTP, but for simplicitys sake, we will use the cPanel File Manager.

Step 1

When youre in the File Manager, click on the public_html folder, which will take you to the root of your website.

Step 2

Once inside the public_html folder, click on the Upload button in the File Manager toolbar and select the WordPress zip file we downloaded in the first step.

Step 3

Once uploaded, click on the Go Back link to go back to the File Manager.

Step 4

Click once on the file we uploaded to highlight it, and then click on Extract button in the File Manager toolbar. If you would like to install it in a specific folder, specify it in the textbox in the confirmation dialog. Otherwise, just leave that setting unchanged.

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How to Install WordPress in Under 30 Minutes - AllBusiness.com

Its been almost a year since the latest round of VR headsets were released, and while hardware and technology is all fine and dandy, it doesnt mean squat without solid experiences. Thats what 2017 is all about: content, content, content. While 2016 saw creators doing some amazing stuff in VR, 2017 is already shaping up to be the year that defines and advances the medium, and thats exactly what Oculus Story Studio has done with Dear Angelica.

With a run time of about 12 minutes, Dear Angelica is a brief yet powerfully emotional journey like no other Ive experienced in VR. The story of the relationship between a child and mother isnt overly unique or full of surprises, but it is a universal narrative of connection, comfort, joy, sadness and eventually loss that everyone can relate to, and that makes for an engaging and far-reaching piece.

Dear Angelica begins in a sparse, dark room, with Jessica (Mae Whitman) burrowed in her bed writing a letter to her late mother actress Angelica (Geena Davis) as Jessica watches her old movies on a seemingly weightless television, a set piece that pops up again and again and acts as Jessicas lifeline to her mother. You stand over Jessica as ribbony script appears before you, syncing with Whitmans voiceover. Its simultaneously intimate and detached, serene and unsettling, and I felt as if I was both an unwelcomed intruder yet trusted confidant in both Jessicas room and mind as I heard her deepest thoughts.

While the scenes in Jessicas room are placid and subdued, as Jessica reminisces about her mothers movies and the time they spent together, you are hastily enveloped by a torrent of vibrant, colorful brushstrokes. Frantic images appear all around, and its as if youre in the middle of a painting during creation. Tying in with the calligraphic style of the script, illustrator Wesley Allsbrook uses a ribbon-like style in her artwork which draws the eye across vast spaces, compels you to look to and fro and conveys a sense of frantic motion. Its beautiful and overwhelming all at the same time, and I felt as if I was surrounded by an ever-growing paint tornado.

Because of her mothers time in the limelight, Jessica admits that she cant always remember what was a personal family experience and what was part of one of her movies. As such, Dear Angelica moves between impossible scenes to more mundane settings such as a mother-daughter ketchup fight in a diner. The art itself even fits the emotional feeling of the piece as an ephemeral, dreamlike memory as individual ribbons contract and break up as you get closer to them, giving a sense that you can never really touch what is there. Its all very intense and powerful. Ive been fairly unimpressed with realistic 360-video experiences in VR thus far, but Dear Angelicas use of animation and illustration in VR is magical. Because of this constant movement and the fact that the art is all-encompassing, I never felt at a loss for where to look nor did I feel like I was missing anything.

I was also impressed with the little details in Dear Angelica. Crouching to look under Jessicas bed revealed a nest of dirty clothes and junk shoved in the corner, which is something youll never see in a flat-screen experience, and I noticed some smaller Jessicas tucked away yet still overlooking the action in certain scenes that compelled me to watch Dear Angelica multiple times to see what else I could find.

Ultimately, Dear Angelica is an emotional vehicle meant to stir the brain and heart, and the illustrations, voice acting, music, story and direction all come together impeccably to build on the poignancy of the piece. The transition from dim, quiet and mournful to vivid, chaotic and bustling then back again takes you up, up, up only to slam you forcefully into the concrete and make you face the inevitability of what Jessica is going through. The use of scale also plays a big part in the emotional impact as the colorful, movie-like scenes are portrayed with gigantic figures and the real-life, somber scenes appear as tiny, desaturated dioramas.

Dear Angelica is beautiful and brutal, heart-warming and gut-wrenching. Experiences like Dear Angelica show the power of the medium to be a conduit for emotion and empathy, and perfectly exemplify why VR is the most immersive, transformative, transportive, and powerful storytelling medium to date. This is a must-see experience, and one you should share to display the piquancy of VR storytelling.

Dear Angelica was released on January 20th, 2017 and is available for free at the Oculus Store. Check out our Review Guidelinesfor more information on how we arrived at this score.

Tagged with: Dear Angelica, oculus story studio, vr review

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Dear Angelica Review: If Someone Cries in a VR Headset, Does Anyone See It? - UploadVR

9 to 5 Mac

Become Tech Savvy: How to save your data manually with iPhone, iPad, and Mac 9 to 5 Mac ... have to have an external device, you can access your data from any device that you're logged into your iCloud account or any computer from icloud.com. Just keep in mind it does use your iCloud storage and is usually best for uploading one file at a ... The State of iBooks in Early 2017TidBITS all 2 news articles »

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Become Tech Savvy: How to save your data manually with iPhone, iPad, and Mac - 9 to 5 Mac

The combination of technology and genre focus that led to the creation of VR horror games feel like a match made in Hell(for horror buffs, thats a good thing). After all, horror games are most effective when you feel immersed in their dark, threatening worlds. And theres no better way to immerse yourself in a game than to strap on a VR headset and just jump right in.

A number of fine horror games are already available, with Resident Evil 7 [Review: 9/10] being the most notable and recent. But maybe youve played through them all by now. Maybe youre itching for another fright-fest you can dive into in VR. Luckily for you, a number of VR horror games are currently in the works. Here are some of the most promising ones youll be able to play in the near future.

Visage is a Kickstarted game from SadSquare Studio that wears its inspiration on its sleeve. That inspiration is P.T., Konamis playable teaser for the doomed game Silent Hills. The difference is that you wont be playing Silent Hills anytime soon (or P.T. for that matter, unless you downloaded it while it was available on the PlayStation Store). Visage, on the other hand, will actually materialize.

Like P.T., Visage promises to make chilling use of horror imagery, jump scares, mystery, and tension as you make your way through an abandoned house thats been the scene of many gruesome deaths. As you progress, the stories of those who died will bubble up to the surface in all-too-horrifying ways.

The developers promise a single play-through of Visage will last between six and seven hours, with replay value added by way of certain randomized events. Look for Visage on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR sometime in 2017.

Developed alongside the horror movie of the same name, Dont Knock Twice is VR game based on an urban legend about a witch who resides in a decrepit old manor. You play as a mother searching the house for your daughter, who made the mistake of you guessed it knocking twice on the front door. As you soon find out, the house contains mysteries youll have to solve and horrors youll have to face before you can come to your daughters aid.

You can play a Dont Knock Twice demo now on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The full game is set to launch in April on both headsets, as well as PlayStation VR and non-VR platforms.

Its hard to know quite what to make of Get Even, an upcoming VR game from Bandai Namco and The Farm 51. Thats because the trailers dont make a whole lot of sense, and the developers are keeping their lips sealed. What we do know is that you play as Cole Black, a man apparently trapped in a run-down asylum, who has to save a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her chest.

The terrifying things you see as you try to figure out whats going on may or may not actually be happening. All you really know is that you have a camera and an array of weaponry on hand to ward back the forces of evil. Or do you?

Whether the developers can turn this mind-bending premise into a killer VR game remains to be seen, but its worth keeping an eye on. Look for Get Evenaround May 26, 2017 for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.

If you consider yourself a horror fan, youre probably familiar with the Paranormal Activity movies. This game is based in that universe, which is to say that it brings demons into everyday settings. When we tried it last, we saw someone literally throw off their headsetit was so scary.

Like many other upcoming horror titles, Paranormal Activity puts you in a spooky abandoned house and has you wander around, trying to figure out whats going on. Meanwhile, a pall of terror and tension presses down on you as strange things begin to happen. Doors slam, lights flicker, bloody letters spelling out Lucifer appear on the wall. Basically, things start to get weird.

Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul will land in Early Access on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on March 14, 2017, with a final version landing a little later on those headsets as well as PlayStation VR.

Were used to controlling VR games using gamepads, motion controllers, and head movement. Stifled adds another method: sound. The game world is completely black until you either make noise into your microphone, or your character makes noise in the game. When that happens, your surroundings materialize thanks to echolocation. In other words, you experience the world like a bat. We were enamored with how it comes together when we went hands-on with the demo.

Theres a catch, though. Youre not alone in the darkness, and when you make sounds, enemies can hear you, too. It seems like a creative and unique setup for an intense horror experience. Watch the video to see it in action, and look for Stifled on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR (along with non-VR platforms) sometime in 2017.

If you have an Oculus Rift and an appreciation for Hollywood talent in your horror games, Wilsons Heart deserves a spot on your radar. This black-and-white psychological thriller stars Rosario Dawson, Alfred Molina, and Peter Weller (yes, RoboCop himself) as characters in a mysterious hospital in the 1940s.

You play as Robert Wilson, a man who wakes up to discover his heart has been replaced by some kind of strange gadget. Your job is to make your way through a hospital filled with era-appropriate horrors to retrieve your vital organ. Wilsons Heart is slated to release on Oculus Rift with Touch in 2017.

Haunted houses and abandoned asylums are scary and all, but few places on earth are more perilous than the bottom of the ocean. Thats where you find yourself in Narcosis, a game about an industrial diver whos stranded on the seafloor, with nothing but a few tools, a flashlight, and a limited supply of oxygen. The goal is to find a way to the surface before you die or go insane.

The idea behind Narcosis was to create a survival horror game using no supernatural elements. The enemies you encounter are actual deep-sea creatures, and the dangers you face are all too real for divers. Narcosis is scheduled to launch on Oculus Rift sometime this year, and other platforms later.

Tagged with: Don't Knock Twice, PSVR, Resident Evil 7, rift, Visage, Vive, VR, wilson's heart

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7 VR Horror Games to Look Forward to After Playing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard - UploadVR

With the recent release of The Lego Batman Movie, we've been catching up with the UK's ONLY Lego certified professional.

His name is Duncan Titmarsh and his workshop, Bright Bricks, is in Bordon.

Last week to mark the arrival of the film, he created a LEGO Batarang standing over three meters tall for London's South Bank.

It consisted of 35,000 LEGO pieces and is 133 times the size of the LEGO piece it is based on.

Duncan started putting together LEGO models nine years ago in his shed and now he's made it his profession which takes him all over the world.

Recent projects at Bright Bricksinclude a 6,000,000 brick model of Tower Bridge (the worlds largest ever LEGO brick model) for Land Rover and recreating John Lewis' iconic Christmas adverts in LEGO bricks.

Duncan has also previously built Lego artworks and sculptures including a room-sized replica of Wembley Stadium, a model of the London Olympic Park as well as a life-size tiger cub commissioned by Stella McCartney.

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This might be another way of saying that the idea of living forever is as influential as the actual possibility of living forever. Immortality is a long shot. But why is it such big business now?

The future, as a concept, has always been lucrative; the more abstract, the better. Though OConnell doesnt focus strictly on Silicon Valleytranshumanists dot the globetranshumanism is a distinctly Californian project. The state has a long legacy of self-improvement programs, exercise crazes, and faddish diets, amounting to a unique brand of bourgeois spirituality. California is a pusher for freedom. Lifestyle is supreme.

These days, this utopian futurism can take the shape of New Age management philosophy, corporate wellness, or the annual conference Wisdom 2.0, which brings together tech luminaries and the spiritual leaders of industry, from Eileen Fisher and Alanis Morissette to the CEOs of Slack and Zappos. Recent years have seen an uptick in venture capitalbacked products that carry the promise of not just a better, more productive you, but a better life overall. From Soylent (a meal-replacement drink) to nootropics (capsules that purportedly level-up ones cognitive ability), investors are pursuing extended youth, neurological enhancement, and physical prowess.

Of course, much of this is less new than it feels. In Silicon Valley, there are no new ideas, only iterations. Soylent looks a lot like SlimFast, a protein drink marketed to dieting women since the 1970s. Nootropics tend to contain ingredients like l-theaninefound in green teaand caffeine. These companies web design has a lot to do with this illusion of newnesssexy front-end design signals trustworthiness and hints that there is something technologically impressive happening on the back end. Their products get a boost from their association with work-addicted engineers, who turn to them as high-tech solutions to self-created high-tech problems. But this promise is bigger than Silicon Valley, and carries with it a distinctly Californian air of self-improvement, of better living through technology.

It is tempting to see transhumanism, too, as merely the latest rebranding of a very old desire. Many of OConnells subjects specialize in the hypothetical. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist who sees death as a disease to be cured. Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist working on mind uploading, wishes literally to become an emotional machine. He is also an artist who creates digital scenes resembling early-web sci-fi fan art, and gives them dreamy names such as Dance of the Replicators and Air Castle. Zoltan Istvan, a former journalist who claims to have invented the sport of volcano-boarding, ran a presidential campaign that saw him travel across the country in a coffin-shaped bus to raise awareness for transhumanism. He campaigned on a pro-technology platform that called for a universal basic income, and promoted a Transhumanist Bill of Rights that would assure, among other things, that human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms be entitled to universal rights of ending involuntary suffering.

Then theres Max More, a co-founder of Extropianism, who runs the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcor is a cryopreservation facility that houses the bodiesor disembodied heads, to be attached at a later date to artificial bodiesof those hoping to be reanimated as soon as the technology exists. The bodies, OConnell writes, are considered to be suspended, rather than deceased: detained in some liminal stasis between this world and whatever follows it, or does not. Alcor is the largest of the worlds four cryopreservation facilities, and houses 149 patients, nearly 70 percent of whom are male. (Alcor also cryopreserves pets.) Its youngest patient is a two-year-old who died due to a rare form of pediatric brain cancer; her case summary, posted on Alcors web site, shares that her parents, both living, also intend to be cryopreserved. No doubt being surrounded by familiar faces of loving relatives will make the resumption of her life . . . easier and more joyful, the case summary ends hopefully, heartbreakingly. To date, science has not suggested that reanimation will ever be possible; the dream of re-uploading ones mind into a new, living body, at a yet-to-be-determined date, remains just that: a dream.

Those working on immortality are long-term thinkers and fall, broadly, into two camps: those who want to free the human from the body, and those who aim to keep the body in a healthy condition for as long as possible. Randal Koene, like Max More, is in the first group. Instead of cryonics, he is working toward mind uploading, the construction of a mind that can exist independent of the body. His nonprofit organization, Carboncopies, aims for the effective immortality of the digitally duplicated self. Koene compares mind uploading to kayaking. It might be like the experience of a person who is, say, really good at kayaking, who feels like the kayak is physically an extension of his lower body, and it just totally feels natural, he tells OConnell. So maybe it wouldnt be that much of a shock to the system to be uploaded, because we already exist in this prosthetic relationship to the physical world anyway, where so many things are experienced as extensions of our bodies.

Aubrey de Grey is in the second, body preservationist group, whose efforts tend to be slightly more modest: Rather than solving death, they focus on extending life. His nonprofit, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, focuses on research in heart disease and Alzheimers, and other common illnesses and diseases. (SENS, like many organizations the transhumanists are involved with, has received funding from Thiel.) De Greys most mainstream contribution is the popularization of the concept of longevity escape velocity, which OConnell explains as such: For every year that passes, the progress of longevity research is such that average human life expectancy increases by more than a yeara situation that would, in theory, lead to our effectively outrunning death. One might dismiss such transhumanist visions as too extreme: so many men, so much hubris. And yet, at a time of great cynicism about humanityand the future were all barreling towardthere is something irresistible about transhumanism. Call it magical thinking; call it radical optimism.

A quest for immortality may be the ultimate example of overpromising and under-delivering, but it will still deliver something. Indeed, plenty of the Extropian dreams of anti-aging have already been realized, though these accomplishments now look less futuristic than we previously imagined. Thanks to improved health care, sanitation, and education, we are living longer than our ancestors could have imagined. We sleep with our cell phones. Prosthetics have become increasingly personalized and affordable. Roboticized microsurgery blurs the lines between human and machine skill. In more staid quarters (where most of the money is), the quest for transhumanism is simply biotech.

OConnells focus is on the more extreme transhumanists, those committed to eternal life. But he also meets a few of the transhumanists taking this more incremental approach, edging us closer to longer and healthier lives. Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist working on brain-machine interface technology, created a robotic exoskeleton that can be controlled by brain activity. He exhibited it at the 2014 World Cup, to give a sense of how human and robot might work together in the future. A clear practical application of his work would be to help paraplegics increase their mobility and activity. Its technology that doesnt demand that we radically overhaul our idea of reality. It allows us to make minor adjustments.

Nicolelis does not seem to share the technologists passion for scalability; though he has proven that brain activity can be translated into dataand that data can be translated into movementhe is not drawn to large-scale projects like whole-brain emulation. I dont think we will ever be able to broadcast from one brain to another the essence of the human condition, he told Popular Mechanics last year. We love analogies, metaphors, expecting things, and predicting things. These things are not in algorithms.

As transhumanism gradually alters the length and quality of human life, it will also alter political and cultural life. If the average human life were to span 100 healthy years, then society, the economy, and the environment would be drastically transformed. How long would childhood last? What would the political landscape look like if baby boomers were able to vote for another 50 years? OConnells foray into transhumanism comes at a moment when our democratic institutions look weaker than ever. Wealth is increasingly concentrated among a small group of people. The future, while always uncertain, looks, for many, particularly bleak. Envisioning a future in which transhumanisms wildest desires are realized is a heady thought experiment, one that quickly devolves into a vision of dystopia: too little space, too many bodies, andif brains are uploaded from centuries pastobsolete software.

As exciting, ambitious, fantastical, or practical as the transhumanists aims may be, they neglect to offer a fully fledged vision for society should they be successful. It would hardly be the first time that actors in Silicon Valley, with an emphasis on speed and scale, innovated firstthen scrambled to address the repercussions after they had already arrived.

This is both a core promise and the fundamental problem of transhumanism: It exempts those involved from their debt to the present. As Bill Gates put it in an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. OConnell finds it odd, too, that billionaire entrepreneurs are more interested in developing AI than in eradicating grotesque income inequality in their own country. Of course, experimentation is essential to progress, and researchers claim their work will benefit all of humanity in the future. But it raises the question: What future and for whom?

There is something deeply sad about transhumanism, tooa yearning, one that perhaps harks back to the self-improvement doctrines that have so colored California since the halcyon days of the midcentury. The promise of a better worlda better youis hard to turn away from these days. We are not more than human; we have not found a way to transcend. In the weeks between the election and the inauguration, our collective visions of the future adjusted to accommodate the possibilities of rampant corruption and the rapid perversion of constitutional freedoms, among many other things. It feels indulgent to fantasize about a future in which humanity is optimized for immortality; it feels indulgent to fantasize about a future at all.

Yet I cannot fault the transhumanists for wanting more: more from life, more of life itself. In How We Became Posthumanpublished in 1999, and now a touchstone of writing on transhumanismthe literary critic N. Katherine Hayles detailed her ideal version of a posthuman world:

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.

To focus on the extremes of posthuman ambition is, it seems to me, to miss the point. As a species, we are slowly nudging along a spectrum. Hayless vision is solidly in the middle with its mortality and fallibility, rendered not obsolete but more manageablemore human.

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Only Human - New Republic

Mylestone lets you access your personal memories through Alexa TechCrunch What if our photographs and social media updates could be turned into memories we or our children could later access just by asking a virtual assistant, like Amazon's Alexa? That's the premise behind a new startup called Mylestone, which is ... and more »

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Mylestone lets you access your personal memories through Alexa - TechCrunch

Editors Note: This guide is an edited version of a guide contributed by a dedicated member of the Onward community named Alex Tukey; he goes by the online name Nightfiree. The original, living version of this guide can be found in this Google Doc and may receive more consistent updates than this version. This version has been adapted and reprinted with Tukeys permission. Follow Alex on Twitter here.

Thiswritten guide is to serve as a generally informative starting point for playing the VR-only tactical team-based first-person shooter, Onward. You can download the game on Steam Early Access right now. I notice a lot of threads about questions ranging from how to improve at the game to technical issues like improving framerate. I want to cover them all to the best of my abilities. The ultimate idea is that this becomes a manual for any and all Onward players.

My top recommendation before I get startedto get better at this game, regardless of existing skill level, is to join the Onward Discord. Doing this will open up a forum to ask any and all questions you have about the game. Additionally if you want to look for a team to play with, or are interested in playing in the communitys Bi-Weekly Onward Tournaments, that is where you will want to be.

The Guide is broken down into the following topics in order and each of the headings are clickable links to jump straight to the corresponding section:

Control Basics:Discusses basic interaction of the controllers and items.

Game Mechanics:Discusses game objectives / important info to know during rounds.

Settings:Discusses basic settings such as audio and grip functionality.

Technical Assistance:How to increase framerate and other plugins you should have.

Additional Information: This is where Ive compiled a list of links and other resources to help you after reading this guide.

(For touch users, if I say click down, this means move the thumbstick down and then click in. The majority of this guide will be written with the Vive controller in mind, but its 100% playable on Rift with Touch.)

Movement

Movement in Onward is unique in that it is based off of your trackpad/stick and the angle of the controller.To sprint double click up on the trackpad/stick.The faster you move the louder your footsteps will be. Crouching makes your footsteps almost completely silent.

The angle of your weapon can determine your speed. The reasoning for this is that if youre holding a rifle with both hands, you need to have the rifle down to sprint, and when you draw the gun up to your eyes you slow down. This has some side effects, in that sometimes it seems youre not running at max speed because your controller is not angled properly. People also can find ways to aim down sights while keeping full movement speed, but thats cheesing the system a bit.Additionally if youre experiencing performance issues youre run speed can be effected.

Weapon

To grab a weapon off your chest hit the grip button. You should always hold weapons with both hands. You lose massive accuracy one handing any weapon, including pistols. If you want to increase accuracy I recommend crafting yourself a PVC mount. This stabilizes your aiming significantly since both your front and back hand dictate accuracy. Stabilizing both hands helps a lot. Attach a strap to the mount so you can have both hands free for grenades and medkits.

There is a litany of mounts on the Onward discord and a thread meant just for discussing different mount types. My mount is not the only one and I recommend you check that out since there are a few solid pre-made options for sale as well.

Reloading

How you reload a gun varies from gun to gun. LMGS (Automatic Rifleman Class) are reloaded differently than every other gun. Some weapons will have the magazine drop out from it when clicking down on the dominant hands trackpad/thumbstick. The other guns require you to use your free hand and, while clicking down on the dominant hands trackpad/thumbstick, grab the clip out of the gun by pulling the trigger.

If you have an LMG you MUST load it at the start of a round. It does not come pre-loaded unless its a G3. Additionally for MOST LMGs you have to lift the top open, grab the ammo out of the ammo drum, place it into the gun, and then close the top and cock the chamber.

Additionally you can drop clips on the ground and as long as they are not empty you can pick them up again. You cannot share clips between teammates.

Grenades

To throw a grenade grab it off your chest using a free hand and the trigger (not the grip button). Pull the pin out of the grenade. To do this use your other free hand and reach for the pin and pull the trigger.

Pulling the pin does not start the cooking process but assures that once you release the trigger the grenade will be let go from your hand. To start cooking the grenade click down on the trackpad/stick. To release the grenade either release the trigger or click and release it, (this is determined depending on if you had the trigger depressed when you started cooking the grenade or not). You have 5 seconds before it explodes.

You can cook any grenade, but cooking a smoke grenade will cause the smoke to start billowing in your hand and then create a trail when thrown. This makes for faster deployed smokes and opens up possibilities for proper smoke grenade rolling. If you only prime the smoke and throw it, it will not deploy until it hits the ground.

Medkits (syringe)

Similarly to grenades in order to grab a medkit/syringe off your chest click the trigger (not the grip button). To administer a medkit pull the trigger and push down on the trackpad.

Medkits can heal you if you have been hit but not downed, and used to resurrect people that have been downed but not killed. We will talk more about resurrecting and game mechanics in the next section.

Radio/Mic

Your mic is always open in this game. The mic that is selected is determined by the mic you have set in the SteamVR settings. An open mic means that while youre in a lobby everybody can hear you. Once the game starts your voice chat becomes proximity chat. This means that if people are near you and you talk they can hear you, the closer they get to you the better you can be heard. Enemies and teammates can hear you and you cannot turn this off unless you mute your Vive mic all together.

To communicate while far away from your team, use a free hand and reach to your non dominant hand shoulder and hold the trigger (if youre right handed reach for your left shoulder for example). If done correctly, you will hear a click and this means everybody can hear you on your team but with a little static to mimic the sound ofa radio.

Knife

To grab the knife use your dominant hand and click the grip button over your non dominant shoulder. This equips the knife, but for it to stab somebody you still must pull the triggerwhile stabbing.

Tablet

The tablet lets you locate the objective as well as your teammates.To grab your tablet, reach over your shoulder and using your dominant hand click the menu button (b button for touch). For those salty vets out there who remember, you can still pull the pad out of your tailbone if you reach deep enough.

The white dot is the objective and the green dots are your teammates. A yellow dot means a teammate is injured, and a red dot means a teammate is down. No dot means the teammate is killed. If you are near a teammate it will show their location on the map, but if you are at a distance it will show their direction until youre close enough for them to show up on the mini map.

The goal in Onward is to defeat the other team in a best of 7 series. This means one series can consist of up to 7 rounds. 1 Round lasts a maximum of 6 minutes. The goal of each round is for the Marsoc faction to capture the objective, while the Volk defend the objective. A round can also end if one team has all its members killed. Marsoc knows where the Volk objective is, but Volk do not know where Marsoc troops spawn on the map.

Capturing and defending the objective is more important than killing the enemy team. The reason for this is because capturing an objective gives you two points towards the series, while eliminating the enemy team only counts as one point. The only way to score two points is if youre on Marsoc and capture the objective. Successfully defending the objective as Volk only awards you one point.

This means a few things:

Capturing an Objective

Oh wow theres an objective in this game? is something I hear pretty commonly from new players. To find the objective check your Tablet. To attack the objective you must do a few things:

Down but Not Out

As mentioned earlier you can resurrect people in this game. A teammate can be resurrected only if they are downed and not killed. Being downed means that your screen goes grey, and your character looks like they are dead at your feet. You can talk to people within a certain proximity to you, and if you reach down to your radio, you can use it by clicking the trigger on your dominant hand. This downed state will last for about 2 minutes before you are killed and returned to the lobby.

This means if you have managed to hit an enemy, and he falls to the ground, the downed enemy may be able to be resurrected and he may be communicating to his team while he is down. Its a common practice with Onward veterans to secure a kill by putting a few more rounds into a downed body in order to send that person to the lobby and out of the round. Headshots are instant kills and alwayssend the player to the lobby.

Downing and killing a person also affects your stats. If you down somebody in a round and they do not either bleed out, or die from securing the kill you will not be credited with a kill. Additionally, if you down somebody and a teammate secures the kill then your teammate is awarded with a kill, not you.

Similarly resurrecting somebody gives you 1 point under H on the scoreboard (for healing).

Loadouts

Your Loadouts are essentially your saved profiles. When you select a class (Rifleman, Specialist, Automatic Rifleman, Designated Marksman) you are given the option to choose between two profiles. These two profiles are unique to each class. This is so that you can have two different weapon loadouts per class saved. Loadouts do not change between rounds or series.

Once you select a loadout you can then customize it. The middle menu is attachments for your weapons while the right menu is attachments for your character. When adding attachments to your character you have a few options. The top selection is grenades, and is the only place you can select frag grenade. The bottom option is your secondary attachment which can be night vision goggles, body armor, or a smoke/flashbang grenade.

For night maps it is highly recommended you equip night vision as an attachment for obvious reasons.

Shooting/Damage

There is bullet drop in this game. Go into the shooting range and test it out. All weapons in a class do the same damage and have the same range. So for example if you select Rifleman, all the rifleman weapons have the same damage and weapon range.

AP rounds penetrate body armor, FMJ rounds do not. This means if you are using FMJ rounds and your enemy has body armor equipped you will do zerodamage to them if you hit their chest. For this reason its highly recommended you use AP rounds or aim for limbs/head. There is some interesting conversations around re-balancing this since in its current iteration AP rounds seem to be the dominant choice in competitive rounds with little reason to select FMJ.

If you are shot and do not heal yourself, you can bleed out and die. You can be shot twice before dying. Being shot in the head instantly kills you and sends you to the lobby.When reloading I turn the gun sideways so it makes it easier to cock the chamber. Some people have issues with controllers clanking and this may help.

Audio

There are two options realistic and normal. Realistic is very loud, normal is normal.

Grip

There are two grip options. Proximity and clicking. Proximity means that if your hand is close to the weapon, it snaps to it. Clicking means you have to click the grip button for the hands to grab hold. From my experience I prefer click to grip functionality because it allows you to move the weapon around more with 2 hands clicked onto the gun.

Height

The game wants to know your height so it can determine if youre crouching standing or prone in real life. Set it to your current height. There is a height restriction to the game so if you are under 54 you will have difficulty moving at full speed. The game will register you as 54 but if youre actually 34 it will look like youre crouching in game all the time.

First and foremost, Oculus users mustdisable ASW to ensure a smooth experience in the game.

Also, you can hold ALT while opening Onward. This opens the Unity window. You can turn the resolution down here and it will not affect the resolution of the game in the headset, however,turning down the graphics quality will affect what you see in the headset. Turning down just the resolution will turn down the resolution of the 2D display on your monitor. This is a huge FPS saver and is highly recommended if youre seeing any hiccups in performance.

For additional performance increases, download thisand turn on asynchronous reprojection, then turn off interleaved. This really helps smooth the game out.Also, super sampling makes it way easier to see things in windows / around corners but stresses your PC

Onward displays the left eye perspective on your 2D monitor. This means if you want to make a video or stream Onward you have to do some extra work to capture the right eye perspective. If you have questions about that ask away in the Onward discord.

Thats about it for the basics. Detailed strategies and meta game elements are always evolving and changing as the game updates it is still in Early Access after all. Here is a short list of resources to keep an eye on if youre into the game:

Content Creators:

Onward Twitch Streams and Youtube Channels from OnwardVR

Maps:

Official top down maps from OnwardVR

Sub-Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/OnwardVR/

Discord

https://discord.gg/RYghWZY

Are you playing Onward? If so and youd like to share some tips for new players, let us know in the comments below!

Tagged with: dante, downpour, FPS, guided, how to, onward, shooter, tactical, tips

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Onward Field Guide: Tips and Strategies for New Players - UploadVR

TechCrunch

LG reveals even more details about the G6 ahead of launch TechCrunch The phone's interface UX 6.0 is apparently designed specifically with that form factor in mind. The company is no doubt waiting until MWC to offer up a more fully formed looked at the experience, but some of the features ... The format is ... and more »

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LG reveals even more details about the G6 ahead of launch - TechCrunch

As escape strategies go, few would have picked Tennyson as a vehicle to take siblings Luke and Tess Pretty out of Edmonton and around the world.

The duos most recent six-track outing, Like What, is the kind of record best filed under screamingly unique. Consider 7:00 AM, which starts with the sound of an alarm going off and then mixes easy-jazz synths and drunk-trumpet horns with what may or may not be toast being crunched, coffee running through a percolator, and orange juice being slurped. (If such a reading is entirely off base, dont blame Tennyson for the movies they get you creating in your mind.)

Elsewhere, Like What? starts with waves lapping a shoreline and postclassical string swells, and then veers off into electro-glitch territory, marked by screeching monkeys and panic-attack breathing.

Some have written Tennyson off as a too-clever-by-half gimmick, the Guardian noting Youll either find it infuriating or intoxicating. Others have deservedly praised Like What for stitching all manner of found sound into something thats as mesmerizing as it is out-there.

What everyone can agree on is that the Pretty siblings have become a thing. When the Georgia Straight reaches them via conference call, theyre hunkered down in a Los Angeles B&B, getting set for a swing up the West Coast. Last fall found them crisscrossing North America as the opening act for French electro-gaze giants M83. And in a couple of weeks Tennyson will head overseas to Asia for the first time, to tour the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia.

Right at the top of the list of people whove been surprised by all this are the Prettys themselves.

I was uploading music online for nobody pretty much for three years, Luke says. It took a long time to realize that I could make music with the goal of getting peoples attention. And after people started paying attention, I realized that I could kind of do my own thing. But even today, all this has been strangeits hard to look at our music from the outside.

Tennyson began as a bedroom project, with Luke meticulously cutting and pasting everything from car alarms to video-game beeps and boops and then weaving in jazz-king percussion and swooping synths. That he ended up reshaping the songs with Tess for live performances was perhaps inevitable, seeing as how the two were playing around Edmonton as a two-piece jazz unit back when most kids their age were glued to the Cartoon Network.

Still, when Tennyson began to take off, it took the siblings a while to realize that people were taking notice.

It was weird, because growing up I always expected that I would go to college, says Tess. It was only in my last two years of high school that I realized, Oh, that probably isnt going to happen. It was all really strange. I know a lot of kids in my school listened to Tennyson. We went to art school, so there were people in the dance program choreographing stuff to our songs. But it wasnt like I got a lot of attentionit was more that people stopped knowing who I was, because eventually I wasnt going to school anymore.

These days, Tennyson finds itself championed by the likes of Ryan Hemsworth and collaborating with Skrillex and White Sea. Edmonton may still be home, but the duo clearly has its sights set high even after escaping.

Im working on six songs for release really soon, Luke offers. And Im pretty stoked on them.

Tennyson plays Fortune Sound Club on Saturday (February 18).

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Tennyson soundtracks movies for your mind with Like What ... - Straight.com

The road to The Gallery: Episode 2 Heart of the Emberstone is paved with slow teases, partial reveals, and gradually more interesting morsels of information. A few weeks ago we got our first sneak peek at the strange new world players will find themselves in, along with a creepy alien creature. Today, were going behind the scenes of an actual recording session with the team at Cloudhead Games.

As one of the first VR games to release with a true narrative, voice acting, and detailed motion capture early last year when it launched with the release of the HTC Vive, The Gallery: Episode 1 The Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10] felt like a true step forward for interactive adventure games. Now, that technology is being taken even further.

In todays behind-the-scenes dev diary, were shown what its like to partake in a recording session for the upcoming second installment of the narrative adventure series, featuring BAFTA-nominated actor Adrian Hough (Assassins Creed III and X-Men: The Last Stand). Motion capture and voice over recording for games has evolved over the years to require a full range of talents from performers on par with Hollywood movie and television productions.

Since The Gallery: Episode 2 Heart of the Emberstone actually does its motion capture and voice over recording at the same time similar to the likes of Naughty Dog theyve created an in-headset teleprompter system for talent to see lines if needed. Checking a sheet in your hand isnt as easy when your vision is restricted inside of an HMD. However, one thing VR does let creators do is put their actors into the environments themselves, instead of asking them to imagine things while standing in a green screen studio.

Things can get especially complicated in though VR because the designers have less control over where the player is located during a scene and where they are physically looking in the environment. Designing interactions with those hindrances in mind presents immense challenges.

UploadVR will be one of the first outlets to go hands-on with The Gallery: Episode 2 Heart of the Emberstone at GDC in a few weeks and well deliver our detailed thoughts about the experience from the show floor. Theres still no release date set and we havent seen more than a few choice glimpses of actual footage for the next installment, but things are shaping up nicely for what is poised to be one of VRs most anticipated upcoming releases.

The next video in the coming weeks is teased as the Story and Gameplay reveal stay tuned!

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Go Behind the Scenes of a Recording Session for The Gallery: Episode 2 Heart of the Emberstone - UploadVR

The most popular platforms out there evolve at a rapid pace. Any user will know the basics but there are hidden tricks too.

Here is a list of the things that even regular users may find interesting:

FACEBOOK Regular Facebook users will probably be aware of exactly how it works across platforms they make it so easy to use! You probably also know that anyone on Facebook can message you, regardless of whether theyre friends with you or not. All of these messages go into a special inbox called message requests. If you choose to accept the request, it doesnt mean that youre accepting a friend request. But did you know that there are actually two message inboxes? Theres another one called filtered requests and you can access it from the Facebook Messenger app or if youre signed in on a web browser. Look though it once in a while and you may find something interesting.

TWITTER There are a bunch of ways to use Twitter better and power users will know all about lists, hashtags, conversations, keyboard shortcuts and mentions. But there is a way to read a lot more about your tweets, engagements, top mentions and biggest followers using Twitter Analytics. This is Twitters own analytics tool and can be accessed at http://analytics.twitter.com.

This will show you a month-bymonth account of your Twitter stats and you can use this info to grow your following. Another cool Twitter trick is to schedule tweets, done using third-party tools like Twuffer and Hootsuite.

WHATSAPP WhatsApp GIF support is currently available for iOS only. Within the app, WhatsApp has its own collection of animated GIFs that can be used directly. In the chat window, tap the + button and select photo and video library. On the lower left, you will see a search sign with GIF next to it tap to view and search the GIF collection. WhatsApp also lets you individually manage storage for friends/groups. By default, you cannot view how much data is being consumed by a chat. Go to Settings > Data and Storage Usage > Storage usage you can view your chats arranged as per the amount of storage consumed. Tap on a chat name to view details of the type of media for each chat you can even tap manage to delete the media from the chat.

YOUTUBE YouTube has a built-in feature that automatically generates captions for uploaded videos. Once you upload a video, YouTube takes some time (depending on the length of the video) to generate the transcript. You can open the video, tap the More button and select Transcript to view the text. All this text can also be copied to a notepad for later use. If you have an audio file and need it transcribed, you can use YouTube. First, you need to convert your audio file into a video file using http://www.tunestotube.com.

Then just upload to YouTube. Keep in mind that the transcription is not 100% accurate but it does beat manually transcribing something. Finally, YouTube has a section called TestTube where you can try out experimental features. Currently, theyre testing 4k video playback at 60 fps if you have a powerful enough computer and a fast-broadband connection, you can try it out.

INSTAGRAM A lot of people really love the unique filters on Instagram. However, there is an easy workaround if you really want to use one of those filters without sharing anything. This works on both Android and iOS versions of the app. First, open the app, click on your profile tab and settings (top right). Under Account and Story Settings, switch on the option to save shared photos. Then, you can load a photo into Instagram and apply your filter. Before you click share, switch the phone to airplane mode. The post will fail obviously, but the edited image will be saved to the image gallery. Theres another small trick most users may not know the ability to reorder the filters. If you favourite filters are way down the list, you can arrange them so that they come up first. While scrolling through the filters, go to the end till you see Manage. Tap this and use the three lines on each filters name to rearrange their order according to your favourites.

HYPERLAPSE & BOOMERANG On the iPhone versions of these apps, there is a hidden Labs menu that you can access by using a special gesture: you have to use four fingers and tap four times on the screen when the app is open. If this doesnt happen at first, slow down your taps, with a short gap between the first two and last two taps. In Hyperlapse, you can switch resolution from 720p to 1080p, adjust frame rate from 30 to 24fps and change the speed of the video. With the looping video app Boomerang, you can also increase video resolution to 1080p, change the video direction (forward and back, forward only, back only) plus adjust a host of other settings like frame count, playback frame rate etc. Experiment with these settings to get a unique video.

Excerpt from:

WhatsApp to YouTube, master social media with these secret tips - Economic Times

Jimmy Ruffin says it all in his 1960s hit "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted" when he sings, "I know I've got to find some kind of peace of mind. Help me, please."

This is part of CNET's "It's Complicated" series about the role technology plays in our relationships.

If you type "how do you fix a broken heart" into Google, you'll get roughly 2.5 million search results. The top of the list includes tips from WebMD, WikiHow, World of Psychology and Oprah.com (which recommends, tongue-in-cheek, to see a psychic).

Most of the guidelines are things we've all heard before -- spend time with friends, let yourself cry, write down all the positives and negatives of a relationship -- which got me wondering if there is anything decidedly more modern to cure heartache.

The process of finding love has become increasingly high-tech, with dating apps and sites like Tinder, Match and OkCupid. Social media lets you tell the world you're in a romantic relationship. Facebook gives you options to display whether you're "in a relationship," "married" or the dicier "it's complicated." But where's the tech for people sobbing into their pillows at night?

That's a "gap in the industry begging to be filled," said Donna Freitas, author of "The Happiness Effect" and "The End of Sex." "While college students spoke of apps like Tinder when I did my recent study on social media, no one mentioned anything about an app that is good for healing a broken heart."

So while the industry plays catch-up, I can offer suggestions on tech that serves in a pinch.

The app Mend touts itself as "a personal trainer for heartbreak." It puts you on a 28-day "heartbreak cleanse" that guides you through daily audio trainings and "journaling." It's subscription-based, with the first week free and $9.99 a month from then on. There's also the $3.99 Breakup Medicine app, which offers day-to-day exercises and "action tips" for getting over a breakup. If neither works, you could use the free Picture to Burn app that lets you upload photos of an ex and digitally light them on fire.

While hanging out on social media can often make you feel worse as you see friends coupling up and exes moving on, there are a few helpful Facebook groups, subreddits and Twitterbots.

Most Facebook groups for the heartsick are community forums where people can share their stories and get support from other members. Broken Heart Rehab has earnest inspirational phrases and articles about healing, like "Don't let the past control you." Similarly, HeartBroken has tips for feeling better but also throws in some scornful jokes like, "Ignoring my messages? Don't Worry! You won't receive one someday."

Reddit has at least a dozen subreddits for people in the lonely-hearts club. A few popular ones include Heartbreak (tagline: "Hearts break. Deal with it here"); BreakUps, where people discuss future, current or past separations; and Limerence, where folks talk through obsessive infatuations.

Twitterbots can lighten the spirit in the way they pair words and tweets. Consider DSCOVR:EPIC. This bot regularly tweets out whole-Earth photos taken from NASA's DSCOVR satellite, reminding onlookers just how big the world is. And the knock knock bot creates jokes using Google's autocomplete feature -- sure to make even the saddest person laugh. For example, "Knock knock! Who's there? Acorn. Acorn who? Acorn squash!"

Does your heart break every time you see an ex's photo on social media? Are you having trouble controlling your urge to online stalk past loves? Fortunately, there's a fix for that.

"Some people get into these crazy loops [by] Facebook stalking and breaking into email accounts," said Ilana Gershon, associate professor at Indiana University and author of "The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media." "People who can't control themselves ... need ways to keep themselves from being online all of the time."

Enter browser extensions. Eternal Sunshine lets you hide someone from Facebook without deleting them, while the more extreme KillSwitch will erase all your past interactions and photos of that certain someone you can't seem to forget. StayFocusd limits the time you spend on websites that hold traces of your ex.

Even Facebook has acknowledged how hard breakups can be in this age of social media. In 2015, it began testing a tool that lets you hide your ex from your news feed and remove your name from previous posts and photos with them.

In the end, though, it might not be tech that'll mend your broken heart.

Technology "helps you stay in touch," said Michael Rosenfeld, Stanford sociology professor who studies online dating. "It is only your friends who can console you when you are heartbroken."

It's Complicated: This is dating in the age of apps. Having fun yet? These stories get to the heart of the matter.

Technically Literate: Original works of short fiction with unique perspectives on tech, exclusively on CNET.

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What becomes of the broken hearted in the age of apps? - CNET