One owner reported their bored dog simply lays on top of all their buttons and ‘just starts mashing them’ — Over the past year, Stella, a Catahoula and blue heeler mix, and Bunny, a sheepadoodle, have amassed viral fame for using an array of recordable buttons to “talk” to their owners. Each button corresponds to a word, and dogs like Bunny are trained to press them to communicate with their…

All I found was a barbecue grill — It’s a Saturday afternoon, and I’m staring at someone’s barbecue grill. I didn’t intend or expect to spend my Saturday examining a stranger’s Char-Griller, but here I am, taking a picture of the grill while the presumptive owner asks me just what exactly I’m doing. If I was being honest…

And that’s not a bad thing — On March 15, just days before Chicago would issue a shelter-in-place order in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Max Plenke decided to get really into Counter-Strike. Recognizing that he was about to spend a lot of time stuck in his apartment, Plenke, a branded content editor, realized that there was…

Congestion has crippled virtual games like ‘Call of Duty’ and cycling app Zwift — On a Friday morning in April, Eric, who declined to give his last name for privacy reasons, logged into Zwift, a virtual cycling game, and lined up with thousands of cyclists from around the world to compete in Haute Route. The Haute Route is a grueling three-day race that, due…

‘You feel normal.’ ‘You feel normal.’ ‘You feel normal.’ — Just about every day now I log onto World of Warcraft, and after about an hour or so, three words pop up in my chat window: You feel normal. It’s become a daily ritual at this point. I play World of Warcraft, and World of Warcraft tells me that I…

I spent one week using binaural beats and came away unchanged — Welcome to Bad Ideas, a column in which we examine the practical limits of technology by considering the things you could do and then investigating exactly why you shouldn’t. Because you can still learn from mistakes you’ll never make. In October 1973, Gerald Oster, a biophysicist turned artist, published a…

Drinking sludge to get through the tough days — Welcome to Bad Ideas, a column in which we examine the practical limits of technology by considering the things you could do and then investigating exactly why you shouldn’t. Because you can still learn from mistakes you’ll never make. Inearly 2013, software engineer Rob Rhinehart wrote a blog post about…

To kill my digital self, I had to create an army of clones — Welcome to Bad Ideas, a column in which we examine the practical limits of technology by considering the things you could do and then investigating exactly why you shouldn’t. Because you can still learn from mistakes you’ll never make. “You have to get rid of the idea that you can…

A day of nothing flipped my brain into a low-energy mode — Welcome to Bad Ideas, a column in which we examine the practical limits of technology by considering the things you could do and then investigating exactly why you shouldn’t. Because you can still learn from mistakes you’ll never make. Over the past few months, dopamine fasts have cycled through the…