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Aug 22, 2018 • 6min

Oh Hey, Don't Steal Reviews, and the Rest of This Week in Games

Let's get this out of the way: A lot of norms were disrupted in the videogame industry this week. There was news of a writer at a top gaming site allegedly plagiarizing reviews, and also reports that the Chinese gaming market is having troubles. Oh, and Diablo III is making the leap to the Nintendo Switch. Up is down, down is up, and a lot of things are out of whack. So let's expect the unexpected and get right to it. PSA: Do Not Plagiarize Your Game Reviews. Seriously. Don't.
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Aug 21, 2018 • 8min

Elon Musk Is Broken, and We Have Broken Him

Of all the striking things about the interview with Elon Musk The New York Times published Thursday night—the tears, the lack of regrets over certain tweets, the fact that rapper Azealia Banks may somehow be part of Tesla’s financial future—was Musk’s claim that he’d be ready to abandon his role as Tesla CEO and chairman. “If you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know. They can have the job,” he told the paper.
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Aug 21, 2018 • 5min

Owning Guns Is Sort of Like Owning Rattlesnakes

In his short story “Rattlesnakes and Men,” science fiction author Michael Bishop describes a town where everyone is required by law to own a dangerous rattlesnake. It’s a scenario that he says is no more absurd than how America treats access to guns. “We lost our son at Virginia Tech in 2007, in the shootings there,” Bishop says in Episode 322 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
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Aug 20, 2018 • 7min

17 of This Weekend's Best Tech Deals, From Apple to Xbox

It's almost time to send the kids back to school, and that means you'll want to check out our Back to School buying guide ... but before that, there are a few tech and gaming deals you may want to peep for yourself. With some help from our friends at TechBargains, we've compiled our favorite deals for the weekend. Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 is Available for Preorder We gave the new Samsung Galaxy Note 9 an 8/10 and our coveted WIRED Recommends award.
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Aug 20, 2018 • 8min

A Guide to Finding Your Ideal Movie Ticket Subscription

A year ago today, MoviePass introduced a radical new business model: Go see a movie a day, every day, for just $10 per month. At the time, it seemed too good to be true. As it turns out, it was. The company has since burned through cash at an unsustainable rate, aggravating customers with limited screenings, punishing anti-fraud measures, and general uncertainty about the future. Today, in a bid to stay afloat, MoviePass officially abandoned its unlimited buffet.
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Aug 17, 2018 • 6min

Sidewalk Labs' Bid to Reinvent Toronto Starts With Shape-Shifting Streets

The hexagonal slices of wood don’t look like much. There’s the shape, sort of interesting in its architectural way, and the neutral wood color. A few are studded with bright, white lights, right in the center, which is fun. And the way the hexagons, each the size of a manhole cover, have been bunched into clusters feels natural and sensible. Surely a Fibonacci sequence is hiding somewhere in there.
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Aug 17, 2018 • 5min

How to Track Your Heart Rate With Wearables

You probably learned how to track your heart rate in school: Put your finger on a pulse point, like the inside of your wrist, and count how many pulses you feel in a minute. That yields your heart’s beats per minute, or bpm. Cool trick! you thought. And you promptly forgot about it. But your heart rate can be a useful piece of data. It’s a reliable metric for setting fitness goals that puts your cardiovascular health—ahem—at the heart of your workout.
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Aug 16, 2018 • 7min

Review: Tern Link A7

In my eight years on college campuses—first as a student, and then as the girlfriend of a grad student—my cheap, beater bike was stolen four times. Once, the wheels were gone. Another time, the seat. Twice, it just vanished into the ether, leaving only a busted U-lock and broken dreams in its wake. Even if the bike itself only cost fifty or a hundred bucks, the inconvenience was annoying.
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Aug 16, 2018 • 4min

These Are Our Favorite Back to School Deals

Back-to-school shopping might evoke memories of wandering through big box store sales and throwing Trapper Keepers and pencils into a shopping cart. But nowadays, you're more likely to hunch over a laptop to hunt for great prices than you are to fight for a parking spot at the local mall. If you're looking for college essentials, or a great laptop or tablet, we have a few suggestions.
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Aug 15, 2018 • 5min

If a Group Text Gets Read and No One Reacts, Did It Happen?

I often worry I'm an under-reactor. It's not that things don't affect me, or that I'm needlessly stoic—born-and-bred Midwesterners like me tend to be level-headed. (Or at least as even-keeled as one can be in 2018.) This is a purely performative kind of reaction I'm talking about: I don't add the "angry" face to Facebook posts from old high-school classmates, don't "heart" nearly as many tweets as maybe I should. I probably don’t even double-tap enough sunset posts on Instagram.

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