Plus, in this week’s Installer: Two reasons to visit the theater, impressive new speakers, delightful buttons, and much more.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 127, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, my Scorpion challenges your Sub-Zero to a duel, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Hasan Piker and lines and David Sacks and sleep learning, catching up on Andor (for me) and Young Jedi Adventures (for my toddler), poring over thousands of new Artemis II photos, listening to many hours of possibly the longest YouTube video ever, taking more walks thanks to Pedometer++ 8.0, losing my mind during every second of every Arsenal match, and spending far too much time setting up scenes with the Hue lights in my basement.
I also have for you an exciting comeback for a fabulous workout app, a concert doc you won’t want to miss, a new fun-sounding board game, a book about creativity, and much more. Let’s get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading/watching/playing/listening to/dipping into hummus this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
Zombies, Run! One of my all-time favorite fitness apps slash adventure games is back with new stories for the first time in forever. The story of the game’s rebirth is pretty awesome, and I cannot wait to start running to the game again. (I actually mean that! Wild!)
Boox Tappy. Nifty little accessory for tapping and scrolling on your e-reader, a lot like the Kobo Remote but actually significantly more capable (and probably hackable, in a good way). These page-turners are the kind of accessory you never really think about until you have one and then immediately becomes impossible to live without.
Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour. The latest James Cameron movie is… hang on… a concert documentary? Weird! Apparently also awesome. It’s shot in 3D, in a way that everyone seems to agree totally works, and seems to have the immersive effect everybody thought we’d only get in VR. I might need to see this one in theaters.
The Remarkable Paper Pure. Maybe the most exciting E Ink notepad on the market. $399 is a pretty good price for this category, and Remarkable made all the right decisions – more memory, more storage, no expensive and/or crummy color screen. I’m going to end up buying one of these, I can tell.
The Bose Lifestyle Ultra. Is it weird that I kind of forgot about Bose? It makes good headphones, certainly, but the brand seems to have lost a bit of its shine. This new speaker lineup looks really nice, though — and I like that it’s a whole speaker system designed to work with the streaming apps you already use, not add another one to your phone.
Mortal Kombat II. Honestly, I don’t know what you could want from this movie other than a bunch of sick action scenes, incredibly mediocre dialogue, and a wildly overdramatic story. Is this a good movie? Probably not. Will I cheer loudly the first time someone says “FINISH HIM!”? You betcha.
Mixtape. This genre of game — sort of a video game, sort of a movie, mostly a hang — is really hard to do right. I often get bored very quickly. But in the bits I’ve played so far, Mixtape has such great music and such good writing that I’m not a bit tired of it.
Game Changer: Home Edition. Big week for all of us wannabe Dropout contestants! This new board game has some fun, Cranium-style, every-game-is-different energy to its structure and seems like it’ll fit most family game nights. It’s a Kickstarter, which always comes with risks, but I’m already making space in my game cabinet for this.
Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. All of David Epstein’s books are excellent, but this set of stories about the importance of limits (and the peril of having none) is full of stuff I suspect you’ll find fascinating. There’s also a great excerpt in Wired, about the team at General Magic that basically invented the iPhone 10 years too early.
Screen share
Adam Molina has very good taste in just about everything. He’s the productivity nerd I nod along to during the Waveform podcast (which he produces), he’s always sharing cool stuff in his Cool Supply newsletter, and he seems to have basically the exact watch collection I aspire to.