via Facebook http://on.fb.me/1NjT2ex
Monday, November 30, 2015
Weight Watchers' App Isn't Working And People Are Furious
A technical upgrade caused the popular food- and activity-tracking app and website to go glitchy on Thanksgiving, of all days.
Jennifer Hudson speaks at the opening of The Weight Watchers Jennifer Hudson Center in 2011 in Chicago.
M. Spencer Green / AP
Weight Watchers has a loyal digital following: About 1.5 million people pay to use the weight-loss program's website and app. And on Thursday — Thanksgiving — the company introduced an upgrade that included a new design and streamlined features.
But the website and app have since been glitchy to the point of being unusable, according to customers who are unhappy that the service went down during arguably the most food-centric time of year.
Users normally log their food and exercise in the program, which then calculates points (rather than calories) and tells people how many points they've used on a given day and how many they have left. Amber Kowalski, a 25-year-old from Fishkill, New York, who's been a paying subscriber at $45 a month since March, told BuzzFeed News that the app has been deleting her entries, recording them multiple times, or entering them incorrectly.
"I literally depend on it for everything," Kowalski said. "Anything that goes in my mouth or I think about eating, I do. When you're doing this it literally is a lifestyle change and you need to depend on this. The biggest thing that people are upset about is it's the holiday season. Thanksgiving is when it was down — that's one of the biggest times of the year. It's not good for someone trying to diet or eat better, and you couldn't even keep track of what you're eating."
via IFTTT
Buying A Hoverboard Is Harder Than You'd Think—These People Want To Change That
Steve Jennings / Getty Images
If you’re in the market for a hoverboard these days, you’re unlikely to have much luck with America’s biggest retailers, none of whom are carrying the self-balancing scooters in their stores. Instead, you might end up doing business with a Swedish teenager.
Gustav Lundin, a 16-year-old student in Sweden, sells the devices online at $550 each, from a base of operations in his parents' garage.
Lundin lives in the small city of Gävle, about two hours' drive north of Stockholm, and controls only the tiniest sliver of the global hoverboard market. But his little website, Astowheels.com (tagline: "One Step Ahead"), resembles countless others that enterprising souls have set up through the e-commerce platform Shopify. In the absence of dominant brands being pushed by major retailers, the hoverboard business has become a massive cottage industry — and a massively fragmented one.
The boards themselves have become something close to a commodity, made in roughly identical fashion by numerous Chinese factories. The white-label products are resold by middlemen large and small, under the kind of dinky, half-baked brands you would associate with a pop-up stall selling cheap mobile phone covers in a suburban mall. Basic computer skills and enough cash to place a bulk order with a manufacturer or distributor is all you need to become an online hoverboard merchant. That, and a fair amount of gumption.
Lundin has plenty of that. The teen has been wheeling and dealing since he was a kid, when he sold four-leaf clovers. He moved on to selling e-cigarettes and mobile chargers. "I would rather do business than go to school,” he told BuzzFeed News. "When I come home from school, I do business. When I wake up, I do business. On the weekend, I do business."
"I want to get the biggest hoverboard store out there," he said. "I want to be the top one."
Ethan Miller / Getty Images
Fifteen years ago, it was a different two-wheeled novelty that captured the nation’s attention.
The Razor scooter, introduced to the U.S. in 2000, sold more than five million units in its first year, and by 2010, it had sold 35 million. There’s little reliable data on hoverboard sales, but it’s safe to assume they are far from Razor territory. And one big reason why, according to the Razor founder, is that the company had unambiguous patents covering the scooter, and quickly crushed the imitators and black-market brands with a flurry of lawsuits.
“When something is this popular, there’s a lot of people who immediately make it regardless of the patent and don't care about patents at all,” said Carlton Calvin, who remains president of Razor USA after co-founding the company more than a decade ago. “We had a huge problem with that when we first began too.” According to Calvin, Razor USA sued more than 20 sellers of copycat scooters and received injunctions against them in the early 2000s.
“It makes it more difficult, for sure, for the market to develop when there’s a lot of controversy about the patents,” he said. “In our case, it was very clear we had the patent. One of my advantages is I was a lawyer before I was a businessperson, and my wife was a lawyer. We used her firm to do the litigation. We were able to do it very quickly and we were very familiar with the process.”
For now, nobody has managed to do with hoverboards what Razor did with scooters. (To be fair, Razor scooters were a lot cheaper at $100 a pop.) There’s no single dominant brand, no dominant owner of intellectual property rights, and nobody with a sales channel that reaches into Main Street stores across the country.
But the latest entrant to the market has 15 years of experience doing just that. That’s because Razor USA is getting into the hoverboard business.
In mid-November, BuzzFeed News reported the company has purchased exclusive rights to a patent by inventor Shane Chen for a “two-wheel, self-balancing personal vehicle” that he has been selling under the Hovertrax brand name. Chen’s patent has yet to be tested against competitors selling their own brands in the U.S., but Razor has the resources and know-how to get its product into the market in a big way — and take on competitors selling knockoffs.
Razor declined to comment on specific legal actions, but its vice president of marketing told BuzzFeed News “it’s fair to say that Razor always enforces its intellectual property rights. As the exclusive licensee, we would expect to do the same with the Hovertrax.” The company expects its hoverboard to be on sale at major retailers' websites by the second week of December, though didn't say if it would make it into stores.
The company is already well aware of the potential market for two-wheeled electric people movers. It has sold tens of millions of its signature scooter over the last decade and a half, and in recent years, its sales of electric scooters have taken off.
“We sell so many I don’t even want to say the number because I don’t want other people to do it,” Calvin said in an interview before the Hovertrax acquisition. “That has been growing steadily for probably 10 years but again, exploded maybe five or six years ago. It’s much bigger than the non-powered scooters.”
While Razor has the experience in rolling out a dominant two-wheeled device, it rose to the top of the market back in the early 2000s, when e-commerce was still in its infancy, social media didn’t exist, and old-school retail techniques still ruled the business. Calvin is aware that things have changed since the scooters burst into the public consciousness.
“The concept of the internet was big but the actual people buying on the internet was not nearly what it is today,” he said. “The only way to sell things was with retailers, basically. I’m sure there were internet people too, but we were really focused on retail distribution and stopping counterfeiters and people violating our patents in retail.”
As the patent situation slowly untangles itself, the country’s biggest retailers are keeping themselves at arm's distance from the market. Toys R Us confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it will sell self-balancing scooters online in time for the holiday season and perhaps in select stores, while Walmart recently reneged on its plans to carry the device online for the holidays.
The about-face of the world’s biggest retailer underscores how splintered the market is: Walmart said in September that it expected self-balancing scooters to be a “hot holiday gift,” even “as hot as the Razor scooter.” One month later, it said it “probably won’t have it for the holiday season.” When asked if the decision was related to the patent battle, a spokesperson said: “I wouldn’t peg it to that. That’s one of the factors of course, but we’re looking at all the factors. There are myriad factors that go into a decision like this.”
Brookstone, a store whose entire brand seems built to embrace the blue LED lights and half-baked futurism of the hoverboard, briefly sold the IO Hawk model online, but has since pulled the item from its website and taken down a promotional video. A few steps away from a Brookstone store in downtown San Francisco’s Westfield Mall, a kiosk now has hoverboards on proud display under a different brand: Smart Drifterz. (A Brookstone store manager told BuzzFeed News that the thorny legal situation around the hoverboards factored into the company’s decision, though requests for official comment were not returned.)
Target exhibited some of the retail disarray around hoverboards in an exchange with BuzzFeed News. On Oct. 19, an external spokesperson for the company confirmed Target will sell a version of the board on Cyber Monday, online only. The next day, she said “there’s a change in direction — Target will not be offering a hoverboard this holiday season.” A few hours later, an internal spokesperson followed up to say: “We’re still working through plans and looking to carry them online. Just nothing concrete to share at this point.” On Nov. 13, the company said it will carry the $500 self-balancing Swagway board on its website, where it’s available now.
“This is a hot item for the holiday season and we needed to find a vendor that could provide us with adequate inventory,” a spokesperson said in an email.
RadioShack said it will not be carrying the hoverboard this season while Best Buy, as of Oct. 21, didn’t have any idea as to whether or not it will be selling the product.
Consumers are better served online where sites like eBay and Amazon have page after page of hoverboard listings. An eBay spokesperson said a hoverboard is sold once per minute on the site, which has more than 10,000 hoverboard listings going into the holiday shopping season.
eBay / Via ebay.com
Although the big stores are staying out of the fray, the opacity of the market means mom-and-pop stores are also struggling to get a piece of the action. One store that started carrying hoverboards this summer, when the craze was just taking off, was Flying Point, a small chain of surf shops in the Hamptons on New York's Long Island. The devices generated considerable buzz among the affluent vacationers in Sag Harbor and other upscale towns. "I saw these kids flying down the streets on them," said Jamison Ernest, a venture capitalist in New York. "It looked amazing."
But selling them was another matter.
Flying Point purchased its hoverboards from a Kansas City, Missouri, company called MonoRover, which in turn bought them from a factory in southern China. But Molly Lucas, who manages a Flying Point location in Southampton, soon discovered she was being undersold by her own supplier. While Flying Point sold the hoverboards for $850 in its stores — at a markup that Lucas said left her with only a thin profit — MonoRover was selling the same devices on its own website for just $599.
Customers noticed. "I feel like a complete asshole when someone's like, 'Well, I can get it online for $200 cheaper,'" Lucas said. "In this day and age where you can buy everything online, we price-match everything. But we can't with this."
MonoRover's president, Lucas Assenmacher, said he recommended that distributors sell the hoverboards for a minimum of $599. At that price, he said, distributors like Flying Point could still earn a "fair margin."
Still, Molly Lucas said, selling the hoverboards was "nothing but a pain in the ass.”
Christopher Furlong / Getty Images
Selling hoverboards may be a pain in the ass, but wait until you fall off one. Social media is littered with evidence of disastrous tumbles, and in the kind of freewheeling tech and creative-industry offices where the boards have become a favored gadgets, tales of epic crashes are widespread.
Some, including Razor USA’s Carlton Calvin, say hoverboards remind them in some ways of Heelys, the shoes with built-in roller skates in their heels, which became ragingly popular among 6- to 14-year-olds in the mid-2000s. The company is a cautionary tale for trendy wheeled gadgets that look cool but lead to a lot of people hurting themselves.
Heelys went public at the end of 2006, at the height of the brand’s popularity. The company was pulling in close to $200 million in annual sales at the time, and was valued at more than $1 billion.
But it never got to $200 million in sales. After another strong year, its revenue began evaporating at a startling pace as injuries mounted and the trend faded. Accidents involving roller shoes led to about 1,600 emergency room visits in 2006, the Associated Press reported.
The company, which hinged its success entirely on wheeled shoes, desperately sought to diversify into non-wheeled footwear and was confident enough in its ability to turn itself around that it rejected a $143 million takeover offer from Skechers in 2008 as "inadequate."
Ultimately, Heelys’ revenue dwindled down to around $30 million a year in 2011 — the next year, it agreed to be purchased by Sequential Brands for about $63 million. Have you seen many kids wearing Heelys lately?
If hoverboards ultimately end up looking more like the briefly trendy wheeled shoes than the durably popular Razor scooter, it might be because they're simply not safe. Ernest, the New York venture capitalist, said he was initially excited by the prospects for the industry, but hasn't considered any investments in the field due to the risk of injury liabilities.
He knows the risk firsthand. Trying out a hoverboard at a friend's house, he took a hard fall onto a tile floor, fracturing his wrist.
The hoverboard industry, Ernest said, "is going to have tremendous liabilities as soon as somebody really cracks their skull open or gets killed on one." Police departments around the world have begun reminding the public that in many jurisdictions — including New York, London, and Sydney — riding a hoverboard on public footpaths or roads is illegal.
“I don’t want to be the Christmas Grinch, but I want people to know and send a message that these new toys have real safety concerns,” said a statement this week by Duncan Gay, the minister for roads in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state. “Riders endanger themselves because they’re unprotected around other vehicles.”
Few hoverboarders would be reckless enough to take one for a spin on a highway, and for now, indoor spaces remain the board’s most welcoming terrain. But risks remain, even on carpeted corporate floors under bright fluorescent light.
Tales of hoverboard injuries and near-misses in American offices are abundant, and disaster has struck many in the world of startups and technology. Rob Rhinehart, the founder and CEO of Soylent, ambled around Los Angeles in a medical boot earlier this year after busting his ankle falling from one of the boards.
BuzzFeed’s offices in New York and San Francisco have each hosted spectacular hoverboard crashes. In Manhattan, one author of this article went down so thoroughly that a trash can was destroyed in the process; in San Francisco, bureau chief Mat Honan introduced his ass to the floor in a manner one onlooker described as “poetic...like a cartoon man slipping on a banana peel.”
Omar Choudhry, a designer at Whipp, a startup in London, said he was thrown from his hoverboard (which he purchased from someone he met through a friend) when the battery suddenly died. He narrowly missed smashing his face into the edge of a glass table. But Yousif Al-Dujaili, Whipp’s co-founder, remains a big hoverboard fan regardless.
"It's almost like Jedi mind tricks,” he said. “Use the Force. Think about where you want to go."
via IFTTT
Apple Music Comes To Sonos On December 15
At long last Apple Music is headed to Sonos. Making good on a promise made back in June, Sonos said Monday that Apple's new streaming music service will debut on its wireless speakers before the end of the year. Apple Music will become available as a public beta on Sonos starting December 15 with general availability to begin in early 2016.
"We're big fans of Sonos," Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue told BuzzFeed News. "We've been looking forward to this."
Sonos will let people access Apple Music's For You, My Music, New, and Radio — basically everything but "Connect," a social feature intended to link artists with their fans. The focus is curated streaming, which Sonos co-founder and CEO John MacFarlane says drives most of the music listening that occurs on Sonos speakers these days.
"Well over 90 percent of the music people listen to on Sonos speakers is from streaming services," MacFarlane told BuzzFeed News. "We think Apple Music is going to be a catalyst that will raise that percentage even higher. What we've found is that as Sonos owners discover streaming services like Apple Music they use the local collections they have on their home computers and cell phones less and less."
For Sonos, which has long offered a robust menu of streaming music services, the addition of Apple Music seems a no-brainer, particularly since its Beats Music predecessor had been available on Sonos since January of 2014 until it was shut down on November 30. So why wait? Why did Apple not offer Apple Music right out of the gate? "It's important to get the integration right the first time out," Cue told BuzzFeed News. "Apple has a high bar for this stuff; So does Sonos. Apple Music isn't even 6 months old yet, so this really did not take much time at all."
Sonos, which recently debuted a new flagship speaker -- the PLAY:5, as well as a very slick speaker-tuning application called Trueplay, is the latest non-Apple platform to debut Apple Music in as many months. In early November Apple brought its streaming music service to Android, the first time the company has ever offered one of its services on Google’s mobile platform.
via IFTTT
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Friday, November 27, 2015
These Are The Trashy Consequences Of Blue Apron Delivery
Of the many small indulgences and unbidden conveniences the current tech boom has given us, one of the most enticing might be the luxe meal-kit-in-a-box: A cardboard box of pre-packed ingredients, delivered to your door once a week or so with idiot-proof recipes included. For anyone who's come home after a long day at work to find an empty fridge and a utter unwillingness to cook or shop the appeal is obvious: A kit offers the ease of takeout, but the joy (or bragging rights) of cooking, all for the low, low price of (roughly) $10 per meal.
Indeed, the consulting firm Technomic estimates that over the next decade, the meal-kit market will become as big as a $5 billion industry. More than half a dozen venture-backed, slickly marketed companies — among them Plated, Purple Carrot, HelloFresh, ChefDay!, Chef'd, GreenChef, Din, Peach Dish, and Blue Apron — are chasing the space, all with slightly different glosses and specialties. But at three years old, Blue Apron appears to be the breakout, with a $2 billion valuation, a footprint covering the majority of the country, and monthly delivery rate north of 5 million meals a month, according to a November Forbes profile. (Blue Apron declined be interviewed for this article.)
Last week, the service offered omnivores on the two-person plan "trattoria-style cheeseburgers with crispy rosemary-garlic potatoes and aioli," "seared chicken and roasted sweet potato rounds with a chestnut and Brussels pan sauce," and "North-African spiced shrimp with dates, kale, and carrots" — all delivered to your door in pre-portioned packages, and with prep times of about 45 minutes at most. Here's what it would all look like on the table, according to the recipe cards enclosed:
And straight out of the box, this is what it looked like:
Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News
And this is what remained, after cooking: Nine plastic baggies of varying sizes; four clamshells, also plastic; a pair of tiny containers that had held about a tablespoon of chicken demi glace and a pat of butter, respectively; a sheaf of recipes, instructions, and promotions printed on thick cardstock; the foil bag from a few tablespoons of tomato paste; three paper bags, now soggy and damp from refrigeration and condensation; a cardboard box stamped with cheerful, cartoonified cooking implements; three thick plastic meat packages; two gel-filled icepacks; and a foil bag not unlike the ones marathoners wear to keep warm. (Plus the compostable peels from three lemons and skins from a head of garlic and a purple onion.) It was, in other words, a lot of waste for three meals for two people. But that's just a mere six meals; consider Blue Apron's 5-million-meals-per-month figure, and you start to get a sense of what kind of waste it produces — to use a Silicon Valley term of art — at scale.
Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News
Blue Apron argues that by portioning out its ingredients exactly, it helps cooks reduce the approximately 31% of post-harvest food that goes wasted in the country. That's a compelling argument on paper, and one that makes intuitive sense to anyone who's ever tried to follow a fancy recipe exactly and ended up with a partially zested lemon and seven-eighths of a head of black garlic in her fridge. (WTF, black garlic?) But it's a little harder to swallow when you're staring down a plastic bag containing about three tablespoons of all-purpose flour — a bag that's likely been shipped across the country to your doorstep.
According to that same Forbes article, Blue Apron sources its ingredients from 100 different family-run farms, and according to an August Pacific Standard report, it delivers to 85% of the country from two distribution centers nationwide — meaning that before it makes it to your doorstep, there's a decent chance your lacinato kale and premium ground beef crossed the better part of the United States in a refrigerated truck.
Blue Apron also makes a point that "all of [its] packaging material is biodegradable to recyclable" — in fact, it's stamped right on the box, under a headline saying "Eco-Friendly Packaging." And its website offers an extensive (if hard to find) guide to recycling packaging. But as Nathanael Johnson points out in a deliciously irate Grist post titled "Blue Apron, You're Just Making it Worse," all that recycling is easier said than done.
Those tiny baggies, for example, are made of low-density polyethylene, a type of plastic that is nominally recyclable, but that most cities won't accept for curbside pickup. (Mine is one of them; Blue Apron's "recycling locator" tool suggested that I walk the trash about three-quarters of a mile away to, ironically, my local grocery store.) The ice packs are only recyclable once you "let [them] thaw, cut off a corner, and empty the water-based solution into the trash," according to Blue Apron's own guidelines. The foil liner is #7 — "miscellaneous" — plastic, which, according to Earth911, "many curbside programs will not accept at all." Of course, you can always take all this stuff to your municipal waste facility, but it's hard to believe that the type of person who doesn't have time to go to the grocery store would willingly hop in the car for a weekend trip to the local recycling plant, either. Blue Apron also offers cooks the option of sending back the waste (save for "any meat or seafood packaging") — once it's been collected from at least two deliveries, and rid of food residue, carefully rinsed, and compacted.
Blue Apron does seem to be thinking about this stuff. The recycling guide is helpful, if optimistic, and founder Mathew Wadiak told Pacific Standard's Keira Butler that the company "buys from environmentally conscious suppliers — farms that use cover crops and no-till techniques instead of carbon-intensive synthetic fertilizer, for example." (BuzzFeed News couldn't verify this.)
And besides, industrial food production is already an incredibly complex and tangled process. Meal-delivery services might produce a whole lot of landfill waste, but for someone who lives miles away from a grocery store, the fossil-fuel impact of hopping in the car and picking up a meal's worth of ingredients — which were likely also shipped across the country, or even across the planet — might be worse.
But the shrimp and couscous were genuinely delicious, and all the rest of it was pretty good. And cleanup was a breeze, because everything went straight into the trash.
via IFTTT
Here's What You Should Actually Buy on Black Friday
The best and worst stuff to buy this weekend.
Black Friday, as you probably know, is a post-Thanksgiving tradition that can get, um, out of hand.
You should only have to brave this madness for the *best* deals, so I scoured dozens of ads for the deepest discounts.
Then, I cross-checked every deal with this Consumer Reports guide on when to buy the lowest priced products and this highly detailed Adobe Digital Index report that looked at 55 million products from 4,500 retailers from 2008 to present.
Walmart / Best Buy
GODSPEED.
via IFTTT
Thursday, November 26, 2015
∞ run away ∞ by Tim_Ackermann_photographie http://buff.ly/1LByf4Y
via Facebook http://ift.tt/1XuHR8m
We Tried To Make Soylent Actually Taste Like Food With DIY Recipes
For Best Results, Watch In A Browser Or Using The YouTube Mobile App:
Soylent may have little mass appeal — it seems safe to assume most people enjoy eating food — but those that do drink the bready formula regularly have coalesced into a tight knit community. And one thing that community loves to do, and has done since its earliest days, before the pre-mixed Soylent 2.0 debuted, is share recipes. Most of the media attention to Soylent has focused on the off-the-shelf version. But we wanted to see what it tasted like done up right. You know, the kind of Soylent your grandmother might make for Thanksgiving.
Since its inception, Soylent has been an "open source" food project. The ingredients and ratios and methods were released, iteration by iteration, in blog posts, and read by people who wanted in on the high-efficiency diet.
This explains much of why Silicon Valley investors are interested in Soylent, not just because it is a product that can "disrupt" food, but because of its community. In a blog post, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon likened the Soylent drinkers to GoPro users. (Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in BuzzFeed.)
"Investors decided not to invest in GoPro because they saw it as a camera company, and camera companies generally get quickly commoditized," Dixon wrote. "However, investors who properly understood GoPro saw it primarily as a highly engaged community of sports enthusiasts, something that is very hard for competitors to replicate."
So, if we're looking at Soylent as the potential future of food, the collective abilities of its "community of people who are enthusiastic about using science to improve food and nutrition," as Dixon — who ended up investing in Soylent — describes it, are just as important as the original product.
Soylent
The DIY Soylent forums are what happens when that community comes together to work on improving Soylent. Or, at least, changing it, often drastically. Perusing the forums for recipes turns up some provocative possibilities. While some are optimized for weight loss or gain, or other useful properties, many are just downright creative, seeming to exist for the sheer possibility of their own existence. Soylent that tastes like an Orange Julius? A possibility. Who hasn't daydreamed, at one time or another, of subsisting entirely on "Chocolate Silk?" And, for pure ingenuity, you have to appreciate a Corn and Bean Pudding Soylent recipe.
Ainsley Sutherland / BuzzFeed
For our taste test, we opted to stick to a simple three-course tasting menu: Original Soylent as a starter, People's Chow: Tortilla Perfection! as an entree, and Liquid Cake for dessert.
Both "Tortilla Perfection!" and "Liquid Cake" are popular on the Soylent forums — the Tortilla variation actually has the most comments of any DIY recipe — and featured mostly easy-to-get ingredients. The recipes on the forum are meant for bulk consumption — usually several days' worth at least — so buying ingredients the just to sample recipes is difficult. Usually, if you pick one, it's a commitment. But, then again, subsiding on Soylent is quite the commitment in and of itself.
Eight BuzzFeed employees sat down to try Soylent variants, most for the first time, although none were anything of a Soylent connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination. So, the original recipe was included to establish a baseline for the taste test. We set up a 360-degree camera on the table in our office kitchen, handed out the cups of Soylent, and recorded the whole thing in virtual reality (kinda).
Original Soylent:
To kick things off, we tried the powdered, off the shelf version of Soylent. It did not go well. Soylent was described as "bready," and "more moist than water," and the overall sentiment was that the formula was bland and the thick, cloying texture left much to be desired. A little like drinking pancake batter, or something similar.
People's Chow: "Tortilla Perfection!"
For most of the DIY recipes, you simply take original Soylent and use that as a base for a new recipe — harnessing its blandness to layer on flavors. Tortilla Perfection! is a frontrunner on the forum, with over 1,400 comments, a series of improved formulas (we used version 3.0.2), and an intriguing flavor profile. Add the promise of a Soylent variant that billed itself as "nutritionally complete," "relatively inexpensive," and "fart-free," and we had our main course. To make Tortilla Perfection, you need:
- Masa Harina (a corn flour)
- a Whey Protein Isolate
- GNC Mega Men® Sport - Vanilla Bean
- soybean oil
- and some supplements like Potassium Citrate and Choline Bitartrate
The additions did not improve the Soylent. It was sandy — although mixing in a blender might have solved the textural issues — and had a mealy flavor that was stronger than the original recipe, but in a way that makes you realize that maybe bland is the best option for Soylent. It was so thick that for an instant after swallowing, it stopped in my throat, which caused me to experience a moment of strong, but thankfully brief, panic. Would not recommend.
Liquid Cake
For the dessert course, we opted for a dessert Soylent. In this case, Liquid Cake. A significant portion of the DIY forums are dedicated to sweetening the formula, and this was a relatively sober-sounding option. To make it, you need:
- a lot of vanilla-flavored whey protein
- ultra fine oats (the recipe recommends Scottish oats)
- Psyllium Husk powder (the brand we got? "Colon Pure")
- rapeseed oil
- and a host of multivitamins and supplements
Liquid Cake fared, by far, the best of the three. "It tastes like cake batter" seemed to be the overwhelming sentiment. And by "tastes like," that also means "feel like." Liquid Cake does, in fact, taste like you're drinking a vanilla-y cake batter directly from a mixing bowl. So better, sure, but still not great.
The panel was mixed on whether it was improved by whiskey.
via IFTTT
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Can We Talk About How Creepy The Hug Emoji Is?
More like the “coming to strangle you in your sleep” emoji.
Apple recently added some new emojis to its arsenal. If you've updated to iOS 9.1, you probably have used them already.
One of them is this SUPER CREEPTASTIC smiley face with jazz hands attached to its chinless face.
Did you know that this is supposed to be a "hugging face"????
I mean... it looks more like a Making Jazz Hands Before I Strangle You In Your Sleep emoji.
via IFTTT
How To Actually Play Adele's CD
So you’ve purchased a “compact disc”…
So you've purchased the CD version of Adele's 25, something unthinkable in 2015.
via IFTTT
19 Out -Of-This-World "Star Wars" Crafts To Keep Die-Hard Fans Busy
You don’t know true dedication to the cause until you’ve spent all night building your own miniature replica Death Star.
Han Solo Soap
You'll get him out of there eventually. Learn how to make it here.
Toilet Tube Characters
Stage lightsaber battles in your bathroom. Get the directions here.
Darth Vader Shoes
Take a walk on the dark side. Check them out here.
Star Wars Planet Mobile
We won't judge you if you hang this up in your room instead of your kid's. Learn how to make it here.
Via madincrafts.com
via IFTTT
Here's What 7 Tech Companies Do With Their Leftovers
Silicon Valley companies offer their employees an enormous amount of free catered meals. This is what they do to prevent food waste.
Google's offices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale work with a program called Chefs to End Hunger. In Mountain View alone, Google has more than 39 cafes. The food goes to an East Bay nonprofit called Hope for the Heart, which distributes food to soup kitchens and the like. "Most of our food goes to a transitional homeless housing center in Oakland where residents do the finish food prep and participate in meals," a Google spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. In the next month, a "large number" of Google's chefs will work at shelters "to further help them understand the importance of what they are doing." In order to minimize potential waste, Google kitchens around the globe use a tool called LeanPath.
Via linkedin.com
Twitter donates both catered and boxed food to Food Runners San Francisco, a non-profit that relays more than 5,000 meals a day in the city through a network of volunteers. The program was initiated by Bon Appetit Management Company, an established corporate caterer that manages on-site restaurants for other Bay Area tech offices as well, including PayPal, Oracle, Adobe. Twitter told BuzzFeed News that the program to donated started at its old office on Folsom Street and that it donates from all of its cafes at its Mid-Market headquarters.
Dropbox
At its San Francisco headquarters, Dropbox's in house food programs serves more than 1,000 people everyday. The company does not participate in a regular food-recovery program but a spokesperson said leftovers were "repurposed into other food items" and put into "pizza toppings or soup ingredients." The spokesperson said Dropbox makes a lot of its food to-order and "definitely very organized of minimizing waste and making sure we find ways of incorporating leftovers." As for Dropbox's popular sushi offerings, the spokesperson pointed out that the kitchen uses salmon bellies from fish for other dishes for its sashimi rolls. During the holidays, Dropbox works with San Francisco City Impact, which collects perishables from the company's Soma headquarters.
Via instagram.com
Uber
Uber uses catering company in the Bay Area that partners with Food Runners.
Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News
via IFTTT
What Happens To Tech's Free Food?
Dreamforce is an annual conference hosted by the software company Salesforce. It’s a massive event that tends to subsume downtown San Francisco — blocking off city streets, clogging traffic, booking up Airbnbs, filling up every over-the-top nightclub in the vicinity. This year, Salesforce even commandeered a cruise ship, docked in the San Francisco Bay, to act as a floating hotel.
That accommodating attitude extends to food offered to conference-goers. This year, the spread was so abundant that a non-profit group called Food Runners San Francisco was able to rescue 4,000 boxed lunches that would otherwise have gone to waste. “That’s only the 4,000 that I know about,” Nancy Hahn, director of operations at Food Runners, told BuzzFeed News. “The year before, it was probably similar,” said Hahn. “Those are the ones that we see, it could be more.”
Excess like that from tech companies is not hard to find. Airbnb, for example, left 1,855 pounds of extra food on the table last year at annual employee convention called One Airbnb.
Airbnb’s numbers are more precise because the company made a rare move by paying Food Shift, a non-profit focused on reducing hunger, to manage the recovery. Food Shift’s tally from just one breakfast and lunch during the four-day conference totaled 761 pounds of excess food, including 138 pounds of polenta, 78 pounds of scrambled tofu, 153 pounds of yogurt, 15 pounds of bacon and nine pounds of Mascarpone cheese. At another recent pickup, from a 140-person tech-company lunch, Hahn found 75 leftover burritos. “Ten burritos, I understand,” said Hahn. But “how do the amounts get to be so large?”
Boom times beget decadent behavior, and the only thing flowing more freely than startup funding right now is free food. During the height of the dotcom bubble, companies like Google began offering meals as a perk to maximize productivity from employees who worked long hours. But like other aspects of Silicon Valley culture — hoodies, ping pong tables, sleeping at the office — what was once utilitarian has mutated into parody. “The opulence and the abundance and the excess [of food] is kind of synonymous to what was going on in Rome before the crash,” Dana Frasz, the founder of Food Shift, told BuzzFeed News.
Indeed, if you are employed by a tech company in the Bay Area right now, or invited to their events, the supply of subsidized food within hand’s reach is almost endless. Silicon Valley campuses are now dotted with kitschy food trucks, Indian restaurants, and raw food pop-ups as an alternative to already-bountiful cafeteria buffets. Office micro-kitchens are brimming with free snacks and organic produce, cater waiters offer up artfully arranged hors d’oeuvres at hosted happy hours, fireside chats come with gourmet grazing options, and boxed lunches have been known to contain a fancy cut of meat. Elaborate menus, posted online, change daily. Last Friday’s lunch at Facebook’s Full Circle cafe, for example, was Hunger Games-themed, including dishes with names like Cinna’s Creamy Rosemary Orange Chicken and Prim’s Baked Grape Leaf and Basil Wrapped Goat Cheese. Startups like Zesty, ZeroCater, and Cater2me — middleman between offices and local restaurants and food vendors — have now begun to pop up, most backed by the same venture capital funding that propped up demand in the first place. “There’s a lot of pressure …. to never be caught without,” said Hahn. “No one can be one chip short. Ever.” Caterers have told her, “‘Oh my gosh, you should hear what we hear if we’re one portion short.’”
And all that food — spurred by the fear that anything less than abundance will hurt employee hiring and retention — leads to a lot of food waste.
But this is not another Google bus debacle, during which multi-billion dollar tech corporations and their luxury shuttle buses quickly became a symbol of the industry’s indifference toward its neighbors. Silicon Valley has, for the most part, been conscientious about the community when comes to surplus prepared food. Oftentimes that means signing up for free food-collection services, or partnering with pre-existing charities. According to Hahn, tech companies are the source of roughly 50 percent of the excess food picked up by Food Runners San Francisco, which now receives enough donations to deliver around 17 to 18 tons of food a week. And at Peninsula Food Runners, which is located in the startup-saturated South Bay, the percentage of surplus from tech companies is around 70 percent. Founder Maria Yap says hers is the only organization collecting prepared food in the area, so weekly she’s moving around 35,000 pounds of food. “GoDaddy, LinkedIn, a lot of these places have more than one cafeteria — and of course I deal with corporate caterers.”
But while non-profits told BuzzFeed News they are grateful for all the surplus food, the deluge can be overwhelming. The burden of redistributing corporate spillover falls on agencies that offer their services for free and depend on volunteers. “I’ve heard so many people in the food recovery realm say it’s too much,” Frasz told BuzzFeed News. Non-profits and church groups are overextended. “When you have to send not just one car, but three cars to a tech company to pick up what they have leftover in one day.”
For-profit entities are entitled to their extravagances, of course. And food waste is a national issue, not unique to the tech industry. A 2012 report from the National Resources Defense Council found that 40 percent of the food in the United States goes uneaten. But surplus sounds callous from companies who claim to have a better vision for how the world should operate. It’s particularly troubling considering the number of neighbors who go hungry. In Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which encompasses Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale — and the headquarters of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo — one in four individuals is at risk for hunger. The national average is one in six people. In one of the wealthiest areas of the country that considers itself an incubator for the future, one in three kids are at risk for hunger.
To address the issue, in 2014, Second Harvest Food Bank launched “Stand up for kids,” a campaign co-chaired by Sheryl Sandberg. Second Harvest is the largest food bank in the region, serving 250,000 people a month, but it doesn’t work with prepared food. The agency is mainly seeking funding and Silicon Valley has been eager to oblige. Tami Cardenas, vice president of development and marketing, said they have also been “trying to appeal to young tech workers,” including a Thanksgiving-themed spoof of Drake’s video for “Hotline Bling.”
Bon Appetit Management Company, which runs cafeterias for Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more, seems headed in the right direction. The company hired a waste specialist who doubled the amount of food recovered in her first year, and Bon Appetit recently announced ambitious company-wide goals for food recovery by 2018. So far this year, its corporate accounts in the Bay Area donated 58,965 pounds of food.
When it comes to surplus food, the pick-up and delivery process is about as intricate as Facebook’s daily menus. From big tech companies with an in-house kitchen, Food Runners San Francisco is seeing twelve to 20 trays on a daily basis, said Hahn. “That’s like food for 75 to 100 people. Sometimes the shelters get full. Some shelters don’t take catered food at all. Some of the really large soup kitchens, they’re trying to serve 2,000,” so “40 of this and 50 of that” doesn’t always fit their needs.
“I know this is gonna sound really crazy,” said Hahn, but one of the challenges early on were the lids for foil catering trays. “We would go for pick up and the lids would be nowhere in sight.” The food providers would explain that they took away the lids because “the clients don’t like to see them.”
Peninsula Food Runners’ criteria for free pick-ups is whether the food would be able to feed 10 people. “They don’t think who is actually eating this,” said Yap. “Come on, you guys, let’s be green about this. Would you want a driver to come out just to get your mayonnaise and ketchup?”
Ironically, the issues plaguing food recovery are the type of problems currently in vogue with startup founders. There’s a two-sided marketplace (donors on one side, shelters and food banks on the other). It requires real-time responsiveness (donations come in at peak hours and prepared food must be delivered in a timely manner). The process is riddled with inefficiencies (mismatch between the size of a donation and the needs of a shelter). The labor force is crowd-sourced and fractured (on-demand apps require cheap couriers whereas non-profits rely on volunteers).
“I make a joke sometimes, ‘Well, there oughta be an app for that!’” said Hahn. “What if when you walked in the office in the morning you [pressed a button] that said ‘Yes, I’m having lunch’ or ‘No, I’m not having lunch today.’” Perhaps, said Hahn, companies were using waste prevention measures. “Sometimes, based on the amounts of food I see, it doesn’t seem like they’re doing that.
Yap built an application called Chow Match to make donations easier. “The programmer happens to be my husband. He was just so tired of me talking about all this inefficiency.” She said with more resources she could educate corporations concerned about the liability for donating prepared foods or whether or not there is a tax write-off. (Taxes are a concern with this perk. Last year, the IRS put “employer-provider meals” on its list of top priorities.)
Airbnb tasking Food Shift to manage those extra pounds of mascarpone and bacon is a great example of a successful partnership, Frasz said. For one, based on the feedback loop, waste was reduced by 191 pounds the next day. And secondly, Airbnb was willing to pay for the service.
In June, Food Shift released an in-depth report about waste in Santa Clara county, which includes Cupertino, Palo Alto, and Mountain View. “It exposes the hidden complexities around food recovery,” said Frasz. “I don’t think people realize how under-resourced these people are and how $300 would actually make a big deal.” It’s frustrating, she said, when “the tech company isn’t even willing to pay for the containers.”
LINK: Read more about what Google, Airbnb, Uber, and more do with their food waste here.
via IFTTT
2015 Offered Every Reason To Love And Hate Movie Sequels
From top left: Creed, Jurassic World, Magic Mike XXL, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2.
Warner Bros, Chuck Zlotnick / Universal Pictures, Claudette Barius / Warner Bros, Lionsgate
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 made $101 million this past weekend. That's a lot of money — multiple Breaking Bad storage units worth of moola. Those earnings made Mockingjay — Part 2 the fifth-highest opening of the year, but on the colossal scale on which a tentpole franchise like The Hunger Games operates, lumbering through multiplexes nationwide like a hungry giant, it was still a letdown, the lowest debut of the four movies in a series that's been a reliable global success.
Was the drop due to blockbuster fatigue? Was the film too grim, with its imagery of war and civilian slaughter and a little girl sobbing over the corpse of her parent? Are audiences less interested in the big finishes of franchises than their bright beginnings? Is the inclusion of a colon and an em dash too much punctuation for one title to bear? An argument can be made for all these points, but the final Hunger Games movie had a more fundamental problem — it just wasn't a very good sequel.
No one needs to be told that we are deep into an era in which sequels rule. Five of the top ten titles at both last year's and this year's current box office are follow-ups to existing movies, and that's not counting prequels like Minions or Marvel installments like Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man that focus on new characters even as they service a larger arc. Mourning the movie based on an original idea feels at this point passé. Instead, we might as well celebrate that there's an art to how well a film can straddle the line between its existence as a standalone object and how it references some ongoing brand — because, though there's still some cynicism toward the idea of the sequel, there's more potential to it now, too.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2
Lionsgate
If "sequel" used to connote money-grabbing retreads more often than it did something like The Godfather: Part II, these days no one would argue there isn't room for art in it, even if most sequels are still forgettable airplane-movie fodder. But it's an art in which a film should have to serve more than just loyalists, who, as with Mockingjay — Part 2, won't always reliably turn up for even a character as beloved as Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen.
Mockingjay — Part 2 can't be faulted for ambition in terms of scope, but it feels like precisely half a movie, picking up where Part 1 left off, with a brainwashed Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) having attempted to murder his former love Katniss. From there, it takes off at a gallop toward the Capitol, with its main characters darting through booby-trapped streets and enduring an goddamn terrifying encounter with maggot-white mutts in the sewer tunnels beneath the city. Characters die horribly, and there's little time for the impact to sink in before more running and a surprisingly anticlimactic end, with the love triangle serviced jarringly in the midst of the warfare.
Part 1 got all of the franchise's uneasy commentary on image and propaganda, and Part 2 got all of the action, and neither works particularly well as a standalone movie. Maybe that was the plan — and squeezing four films out of three hit books definitely had financial motivation — but in practice, both installments felt like they were lacking a center: one lead-up with no conclusion; the other, one long, turbulent last act. The second Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire, stood alone — compelling even if you hadn't seen the first film. But the third and fourth don't, dangling dependent on one another for context and meaning in a way that feels generally unmovielike, sandwiching characters in for one more look, including the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in his unsettling final role as Plutarch Heavensbee.
Michael B. Jordan in Creed.
Warner Bros.
Mockingjay — Part 2 may not have been a triumphant finale, but it came out the week before the premiere of what may be 2015's platonic sequel ideal. Creed, the seventh film in the four-decade Rocky franchise, is a spin-off that puts Sylvester Stallone in the trainer role alongside newcomer Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), striking a fascinating balance between the familiar and the new. It hits the marks a Rocky movie demands — the museum steps, the theme song, and the run — but it's sparing and precise with its nostalgia.
It's also canny and thoughtful about its main character. Adonis isn't a mini-Rocky — for one thing, he's the son of Rocky's nemesis-turned-pal Apollo Creed — and his story doesn't just recycle his mentor's experiences. Creed engages with the ideas of what Rocky represents: the all-American underdog with something to prove, with a need to affirm his own worth in the ring. And it sometimes jostles gently against them while serving as a sincere homage to the original that updates the story as well as its treatment of race and class.
This year's sequels ran the gamut from Liam Neeson's halfhearted Taken 3 back in January, a film that played like a joke everyone's gotten over, to Furious 7 in April, a movie that steered (sorry) into the death of lead Paul Walker on a break during filming and was even more bombastically sentimental because of it, affirming again that it's a series fond of the individual parts of its family but not dependent on them. The Divergent Series: Insurgent and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, would-be heirs to the dystopian Hunger Games throne, did fine while both feeling like they're racing against the waning interest in their lesser franchises. Pitch Perfect 2, while not as good as the first film, was still a major, female-directed hit, and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 was evidence of how hard it can be to make a comedy sequel.
There were the unasked-for sequels that flicked through theaters and vanished from memory (The Transporter Refueled, Hitman: Agent 47) and the ones that seemed to exist to wring money out of a series until no one shows up anymore (Insidious: Chapter 3, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension). There were the intriguing letdowns like Terminator: Genisys and Spectre, which felt like they ran out of space in their own universes (though James Bond is not in danger of going away). There was Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, which was simply very, very entertaining, and Avengers: Age of Ultron, which succeeded, despite its many overstuffed obligations to its shared universe. And there was Jurassic World, a massive hit but a blockbuster curiously shot through self-loathing, with its self-referential themes about jaded audiences always needing a bigger, flashier spectacle, self-aware in the fan service that bogged Mockingjay — Part 2 down.
The year's most interesting sequels have been the ones that, like Creed, push off their predecessors rather than follow too dutifully in their footsteps. Movies like Magic Mike XXL and Mad Max: Fury Road use the movies that came before them as texts to be commented on in addition to being continued. Magic Mike was a story of male strippers living large in the moment in a profession that was an enticing dead end, but Magic Mike XXL turned its attention away from its characters' futures to focus on their services and what they do to make their female customers feel desired and powerful. And Mad Max: Fury Road revitalized a long-dormant series by turning its title character into something like a sidekick in its rescue mission, referencing his past pain but, remarkably, never letting it take precedent over the more immediate trauma and experiences of the women he helps escape.
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Laurie Sparham / Fox Searchlight
These movies are actually better for being sequels, for having histories that inform what's going on onscreen without being necessary in order to follow it. Creed, Magic Mike XXL, and Mad Max: Fury Road stand perfectly fine on their own, but become richer and deeper with a familiarity of what they're referencing. They're heartening evidence that an age of sequels isn't necessarily one of diminishing returns — which is good, because the biggest sequel of 2015 has yet to arrive. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first installment of a new trilogy, is the film that will ramp up what Wired ominously referred to as "the forever franchise," sequels spiraling infinitely out into an unknown cinematic future.
Yes, the era of sequels is in full swing, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing.
via IFTTT
19 Extremely Important Things JK Rowling Taught Us About Harry Potter In 2015
Who said magic was dead?
The very important reason why the Horcrux inside Harry didn't die when he was bitten by the basilisk.
Warner Bros. / Twitter
What ~actually~ happened to Fluffy after he was finished guarding the Philosopher's Stone.
Warner Bros. / Twitter
The reason why the pure-blood Black family's home was in the middle of a Muggle housing complex.
Warner Bros. / Twitter
The reason why the Resurrection Stone still worked after the Horcrux inside it had been destroyed.
Warner Bros. / Twitter
via IFTTT
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)