ExistentialEnso

When Soylent, the nutritionally complete meal replacement, first debuted, I was incredibly skeptical. I love food. A lot. And the idea of devoting any of the allotment of calories I can healthily consume in a given day to something so comparatively bland and boring seemed silly. However, I recently decided to try it and quickly became an enthusiastic convert. I can’t imagine going for long without real food, but I could never imagine doing the same now with Soylent either.

I embarked on this experiment with my girlfriend, and we originally planned to just replace breakfast with Soylent. We ordered two boxes, one of Cacao and one of Nectar. The flavoring in the latter, frankly, is disgusting. The lemon notes to it taste more like Lemon Pledge than something belonging in food. However, Cacao tastes like a creamy bottle of chocolate milk. I have yet to try the other flavors, though I have a box of the new Vanilla caffeinated variety on the way.

When one tries any sort of nutritional or health product, it is important to be mindful of the placebo effect. Expecting something to make you feel better will often make it do just that. However, the first bottle left me feeling energetic and satisfied, so we decided to do a second for lunch that day. We have replaced every single breakfast and lunch since, while still allowing for a rather sizable dinner of “real” food.

The results are profound already. I’m down a few pounds. We have spent a lot less time deciding meals, cooking, cleaning up, etc. Waste for these meals is reduced to a single, recyclable bottle. We have saved a lot of money. Even after heavy dinners like pizza, I found myself not feeling the usual bloated fatigue that often comes from consuming unhealthy food.

In a couple of instances, I drank a bottle of Soylent on a completely empty, audibly growingly stomach, worried that it would not be enough to satisfy me. In both cases, not only did it quell the rumbling of my stomach, but it made me feel psychologically satiated as well. It took over four hours before I even had a substantial appetite again.

But what about my love of food? As much as I’ve come to love Soylent Cacao, it certainly is no perfectly medium-rare steak or hearty bowl of curry rice. However, a few weeks ago, I had a realization that prompted me to reconsider Soylent in the first place: by trying to make every meal special, I was ensuring that few meals actually were. I took food for granted.

The real meals I have eaten in the past week are among the most I have ever enjoyed. Never have I felt desperate for real food, but I savor each bite several times more. Before, it was often hard for me to remember what I had eaten more than a couple of days before, despite the fact the food we were eating was anything but boring. But meals blurred together. Now, I have vivid memories of each meal. By whittling down my experiences with food, each becomes more profound.

Soylent is not for everyone, nor could I ever imagine ever giving up real food completely. However, it is easy to underestimate how much food complicates your life and how much Soylent can simplify it. I encounter a lot of people reacting to Soylent with skepticism and/or revulsion, and as someone who used to be staunchly among them, I have to now say flat out: I was wrong. 

Last Friday marked the release of Crash Bandicoot: N Sane Trilogy, a remake of the original trilogy of games for the first Playstation. The trend of re-releasing old games is anything but new. The Playstation Store has whole sections devoted to it, and most of them simply function by running the original game code as-is, sometimes with improved textures and/or models if you're lucky, and these days usually trophy support as well (or achievements when this phenomenon occurs on other platforms). I have, admittedly, spent a considerable amount of money supporting this trend. And, while I would rather see games made available in this way than not at all on modern consoles, the approach Crash took is the “right” approach.

Ground-up remakes are not a new concept. SquareEnix quite famously took a similar approach in remaking Final Fantasy IV (originally II in the US) and V as well as Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. But traditionally, game companies have avoided this approach, as the resources required are many orders of power higher. N Sane has no lines of code from the original game and, though each environment and animation is recreated with meticulous detail, it was all from the ground up anew.

In SquareEnix’s case, none of the remakes were given nearly as much attention by not just the press but the company itself. They were afterthoughts, and even technically speaking, they were not attempting to create something cutting edge. Re:chain of Memories reused the engine and assets from the other Playstation 2 Kingdom Hearts titles, and the 3D Final Fantasy remakes originally debuted on the Nintendo DS. Their graphics were not much better than the almost decade older Playstation 1 Final Fantasy trilogy.

Of course, in Crash’s case, the lack of any new games minus a couple of mobile kart racing titles meant that demand was higher than ever, and recouping costs becomes more of a safe bet than franchises with titles saturating the market already. Crash also used to be a tentpole of Sony’s advertising, giving it more teeth than cult classic titles given new life through enhanced re-releases like the Dark Cloud duology. However, the massive sales success demonstrates it is an effective tactic for reviving dead franchises. Hopefully Activision keeps this in mind with “classic” Spryo (i.e. not Skylanders) and whoever holds the Tomba intellectual property does the same. This is an easy way to revive hibernating fanbases.

Admittedly, the games proved to be a bit of a frustration at first, to the point I disliked them. The fact that they were so exact a recreation of the originals meant I relied heavily on muscle memory. Even if the levels themselves are the same, the controls and, perhaps more profoundly, the physics are different. Ultimately, these actually make the game better, though for someone like me who completed (not beat, completed—stuff like gems and relics included) the second and third games many times over meant it was hard to “unlearn what I had learned.”

However, this uncanny valley-level recreation works for stuff of this sort. As excited as I am for the remake of Final Fantasy VII, SquareEnix’s deviation from this philosophy has me somewhat disappointed. I’m sure the game will be great. I’m sure it will have many things about it that the original lacks I will enjoy. But it will never replace the original. The high adrenaline action will undoubtedly be fun, but some part of me will always love carefully planning out attacks in a boss fight for each character. Of course, this also ensures that it will not have to compete quite as much with the original, which may be something that guided their direction.

After spending most of the weekend playing the game, I just don’t see myself going back to the originals. The adjustment to the old controls would, without question, prove frustrating once again, and there is not anything other than the extra life sound—it just doesn’t have nearly as much punch—that the originals provide that I miss.

Though Crash will need to innovate beyond what the originals did gameplay-wise, something it had unsuccessfully attempted once before, the project also ensures they have the tools needed to make new content in the vein of the old, something done to great success with the new expansion packs to some old strategy games like Age of Empires II. Even better would be level creation tools.

Regardless of where the Crash franchise itself goes from here, the success of this release should serve as a template for others. The demand for old content is there, but the more time invested in modernizing it, the more likely it will be to succeed. This is especially important for games from the Playstation 1 era, where a fresh coat of paint does little to hide a game’s age. Hopefully we will someday view this as a seminal moment not just for Crash but for the industry. 

Few things inspire as intense a divisiveness and passion as politics. Perhaps religion and phone choice come close, though none is perhaps as immediately relevant to politics as, of all things, video games. In most competitive areas of human existence, there is no one all encompassing strategy that perfectly prepares you for what your competitors might attempt. As society and its problems evolve, so do the strategies necessary to win in the political arena. It’s clear that the strategies the Democrats are employing have failed. In particular, the party should look to Nintendo to understand how to turn around their slow slide into powerlessness.

The DNC and GOP, for decades, operated roughly akin to the rivalry between the Xbox and Playstation: though power has swung more to the GOP than it has in awhile, for the most part, neither has had long periods of dominance. The balance of power has shifted back and forth constantly. However, the problem is, over time, especially after the Clinton era, Democrats have focused more and more on trying to compete toe-to-toe with Republicans on the issues they deem important. Most policy-making and campaign platforms have started by asking what the Republican position is and, from there, to only stray so far. The theory is it is important to not alienate the moderates.

Nintendo once operated in much the same fashion as Xbox and Playstation. Of course, they were largely responsible for resurrecting the industry after a major crash in the early-to-mid 80s. Though games for the Nintendo 64 were severely limited in space by comparison to the Playstation 1 due to the lack of an optical drive, it was a substantially more powerful machine. However, after a disappointing performance with the GameCube, Nintendo began to rethink their approach. A book came out in 2005 that, by Nintendo’s own admission, had an immense impact on their executive culture, Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. 

The core theory of the book is that one can compete in “blue oceans” or “red oceans,” the insinuation being that the latter is fraught with blood. Rather than compete directly with your opponent, it is better to focus on establishing how you are compelling in entirely different ways than your competitors. Instead of trying to make something similar to an Xbox 360, Nintendo created something radically different in the form of the Wii. The 2016 election was the reddest ocean the political arena had seen in awhile. Clinton’s ads and talking points focused, at record low levels, on actual policy, instead focusing on the ways she wasn’t Trump.

Red oceans in politics are leading to red victories. For the Left to win in America, we need to pivot towards the blue. The reason why folks such as Corbyn and Sanders were such a surprise to the establishment is that they were “Blue Ocean” candidates. They were deeply focused on offering a genuinely compelling alternative rather than simply attacking their opponents. Yes, the “for the many, not the few” slogan cut to the heart of the Tories’ philosophies, but it did so in a way that not just drew boundaries but placed an enormous gulf between the two of them. Their message was far more substantive than anything the Democrats have provided in decades.

That’s not to say this strategy is foolproof. The Wii U had underwhelming sales and almost killed Nintendo. But in this case, the failure happened because of ways the tech world differs a lot from politics. Nintendo was trying to offer something completely different than what audiences had ever seen before. All a “Blue Ocean” politician has to do is actually focus on issues that excite people that aren’t usually brought up: free tuition, single payer, drug law reform, or even, dare I say it, universal basic income.

The primary motivation against doing so is that politicians who rock the boat too much, especially in ways that are unfriendly to big business or the military-industrial complex, miss out on much needed campaign-funding. But the constant upsets recently in the political world demonstrate how brute force spending has become less and less effective a campaign metric. After all, perfectly pruned centrist darling, Jon Ossoff, had a whopping six times the spending of Karen Handel and still lost.

When the debate becomes about whether or not you will raise taxes, “classic” Democrats have already lost. However, when a candidate can sell a compelling vision for why they aren’t promising lower taxes that amounts to tangibly more than maintaining the status quo, people hop aboard. The so called “centrists” might better be thought as independents. Time and time again shows that they are willing to stand behind policies from either party that are anything but moderate as long as they are packaged and presented in a way that is a compelling solution to the problems they see in the country.

As Mr. Ossoff did, you can promise to lower taxes and balance the budget all day long, but the conservatives who that will impress will, for the most part, simply vote Republican. Instead the narrative on the Left has to focus on our identity and not the ways we differ from the Right. We have to define our own narrative rather than simply respond to theirs. We have to tell a story and convey a vision that is uniquely inspiring and wholly our own.

Photograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty

Last year was a difficult time for the American progressive. All of the momentum, hope, and excitement built by the Bernie Sanders campaign was dashed as the primaries wore on, and to make matters worse, Trump, the antithesis of progress and social justice, wound up the ultimate winner of the election. The Brexit vote only served to solidify the feeling that 2016 marked a turn back towards principles like conservativism and nationalism that marked a stark departure from the Obama Era before it.

However, the results of the recent election in the United Kingdom not only staunched that loss of progressive power worldwide but issued a rallying call. All of the criticisms levied against Bernie Sanders—that he was too extreme, too unrealistic, too unappealing for moderates—were lobbed at Corbyn as well. The man who highly visible liberals from J.K. Rowling to Obama himself thought would destroy the left-wing’s presence in Westminster in fact was the one to save it.

Much attention was focused on the Millenial voters who came out in record numbers to make Corbyn’s success a reality. For once, our generation played the hero, not the cause, in the establishment’s narrative of world events. This is key, as most are quick to accept the idea that these sort of ideas are popular with young people but historically are reluctant to think young people will actually show up to make that popularity heard.

A confounding variable in many people’s minds, no doubt, is the historical tendency of generations to move to the right in adulthood. I’ve had many folks try to temper my enthusiasm for progressivism by pointing out this fact. However, this shift is happening to a much smaller degree than in previous generations. The reasons for this aren’t surprising.

The system’s sins are finally catching up with itself, and the impact is disproportionately felt by the young. Even stories of big success like mine are filled with stories of past frustration over how much we had struggled in the face of a system that was entirely ill-equipped for us. As the Trumpistas shout “Make America Great Again!” so many Millenials want to make it great for the first time, recognizing that it was never truly great for anything but affluent, white men.

Of course, some detractors have tried to focus on the fact that that is what people like Sanders and Corbyn are: fairly affluent white men. But this is using not just identity politics but politics as a whole in a perverse fashion. Political positions do not exist for the careers of the people who occupy them. They exist for the people they are supposed to benefit. While there are examples where the absence of diversity can feel deeply insulting, such as a room of men making decisions about women’s healthcare, ultimately it is more far more important in these instances to focus on the millions of people of diverse demographics who will benefit than the politician themselves.

This is why, even as a woman, I had no hesitation supporting Bernie: he had the platform that, from as far as I can tell, would benefit women the most, even if supporting him would disadvantage a singular woman in the form of Clinton. To focus on the significance of her womanhood as millions of women around the country struggle with numerous issues that she has not worried about for most of her adult life, if anything, alienated her from a lot of both Millenial women and older moderate women. Though it can be inspiring to see women in roles of high power, ultimately the glass ceiling has to be shattered from the bottom.

This mentality, not a “desire to impress boys” like some said (which is doubly ironic given that women who support Sanders are disproportionately queer), is going to prevent Clinton and her successors, whether merely ideological or biological as well (I’m looking at you, Chelsea), from achieving success on the national level. The Third Way has shown to be a path towards accumulation of wealth in the hands of the 1%. Neoliberalism is in its death throes, and the DNC will be taken down with it unless it accepts this.

We are in a time when the system is seen as so broken by most that they will also turn to those that are its harshest critics. This is what enabled Trump, even if he is an abomination produced by that very broken system, to rise to power. Though both Sanders and Corbyn have spent decades in their countries' respective legislative bodies, they have always been some of its vocal members against the mainstream current. Words on a legislative floor are, these days, worth far more than words on the campaign trail. This divide is backed up by the fact that Sanders has spent his time since the election continuing to fight for the people, while Clinton has focused almost entirely on one subject: why her loss to Trump was not her fault. Of course, this only serves to dig the establishment Democrats' hole deeper.

Regardless of who is in our elections in the coming years, though, these events in England, even if they were an ocean away, in our increasingly globalized world, are so important for the Left in America to take to heart. Success will come on the backs of grassroots candidates whose actions back up their rhetoric and who aren’t afraid to mean it when they say they are liberal. 

Every major product announcement is about more than the product itself: it also is a signal towards the priorities and goals of the company. In this way, companies like Apple that make a big song and dance of their releases can communicate things by omission. The neglect of proper updates to the Mac Pro, a controversial update to the MacBook Pro, and many of Apple’s software decisions had left professionals feeling like Apple had begun to turn their back on them. Back in March, Tim Cook admitted the company made mistakes, and the WWDC keynote seems to prove that commitment, even if it will take until December for the company to deliver.

Of course, the move is bound to attract its fair share of critics. The all-in-one form factor has always failed to gain traction in the professional space, since IT departments generally preferred the more easy-to-service traditional desktops. However, the success of the Surface Workstation opened the door for a move to look a little less bold and one that—even if Microsoft beat them to the punch—at least feels decidedly more Apple.

The price also puts it well outside of even most of the “prosumer” market that makes up a lot of the high-end technology market. Though Apple has touted that the iMac Pro will be cheaper than the equivalent PC, even your typical insane gaming rig is going to have nowhere near those stats. This is truly a professional machine in the deepest sense possible. The power that it provides simply isn’t from having bleeding edge hardware, it’s from packing it full of it.

Though I’ve owned various Mac laptops over the years as well as one of the older Mac Pros (that shared the same case as the PowerMac G5), I’ve always strayed away from the iMac personally simply due to the fact that, if I’m going to invest in a desktop, I want upgradability. But this circumvents the problem entirely by providing something with specs so ridiculous that the ultimately the motivating factor for an upgrade wouldn’t be lack of power or space but instead features.

Even more excitingly, though, this deepens my confidence that my recent switch back to the Mac world after many years of being almost exclusively PC (minus a year of owning a MacBook Air I barely used) is not in vain, as Apple is ensuring it does not lose sight of the professional community that gave it a lot of its gains outside of the mobile and music space over the past couple of decades.

Around the time of the Intel switch a little over a decade ago, the idea of a Mac as a serious machine for tech folks was considered laughable. Only through the addition of Boot Camp did people begin to take Macs seriously. Around that time, I was working as an intern in the rather monolithic Emory University IT department, and there was a proliferation of Macs in that department for the first time.

Ten years later, the development world is full of Macs. We’re at a point where Windows Ruby developers usually compelled to install a Linux virtual machine simply because so many Ruby gems are built consistently for anything but the Unix version, simply because Macs have proliferated so much in the Ruby development space.

Though, with most languages and frameworks, the platform differences are a lot more manageable, outside of the .NET world, the MacBook Pro is a ubiquitous sight. That’s why many of the changes in the last generation—the thinner form factor and the switch to only Type-C ports—had a lot of the professional world concerned, as it seemed to focus on sleekness and style over improvements in power.

The decision to drop the other ports will likely ultimately benefit the tech industry by incentivizing movement towards a new, common standard to replace the old USB Type-A ports that have been a mainstay of both Macs and PCs for the better part of two decades. Of course, a laptop with the power of the iMac Pro would be impractical, given issues of power consumption and simple hardware space, but it renews hope that we can see some big steps forward with the refreshed MacBook Pro form factor not just in sexiness but power.

Admittedly, some of Apple’s MacBook Pro woes are not particularly their fault. Intel has struggled to offer upgrades to their CPUs that are as compelling in recent years due to the fact that we are finally reaching a point where it is difficult to make transistors even smaller simply due to the laws of physics—the transistors are only a few silicon atoms thick now.

This also leads me to wonder if we’ll see a “Pro” iPhone now, given we have Pro versions of the other two pieces of “i” hardware. There are rumors of a higher-end iPhone to celebrate the 10th anniversary, so one might expect to see the Pro moniker there. Whether or not it would be capable of converting this Android fangirl remains to be seen.

Regardless of whether or not I wind up justifying shelling out mountain of cash for one, though, the big takeaway from WWDC for me was nothing about iOS or a Siri speaker, it was that Apple is committed to ensuring that they will retain the developer community they fought so hard to win.