Tesla-kinesis.

Would you let Elon Musk put a chip in your brain? Well, someone did. And now he can play chess using only his mind. Result. He also suddenly believes in Pizzagate and won’t be voting for Biden – but that’s probably just a coincidence.

Neuralink introduced the world to its first human test subject, a man who has been paralyzed from the shoulders down for 8 years. We assume they asked his permission before chipping him. 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh had the implant fitted by a robot surgeon last week before demonstrating his newfound abilities during a livestream on X. Can’t wait to see how the detractors jiu-jitsu their way into framing this as a negative.

I’m not sure how we ended up in a situation where the man who we are seemingly being forced to put our trust in to transform us into cyborgs and get us off this planet is the very same man who can’t even be trusted to run Twitter. He’s not the saviour we wanted, but he may just be the one we deserve. What could possibly go wrong?

Mission Simpossible.

In the latest example of an IP being squeezed for all it’s worth, it was announced this week that a live-action adaptation of The Sims will be coming to the big screen courtesy of Margot Robbie’s production company ‘LuckyChap’ – a name that apparently derives from what people say of her husband, thankfully not her horse-riding gear.

With the characters presumably speaking Simlish, you might wonder why you would want to go see a film in which you can’t understand anything being said. We’ve got 3 words for you: Min-i-ons. And the consequent cross-cultural global appeal probably didn’t escape the studio’s notice. Plus it beats hearing Charlie Hunnam confidently fail miserably at any accent he attempts.

The real question now: what will the film actually be about? Will it be a murder mystery because someone took away the doors and set the house on fire? Will it be an odd couple comedy featuring the grim reaper and a skater cohabitating as roommates? Or will it be a Little Shop of Horrors-esque musical starring a Sim-eating Venus flytrap? The possibilities are endless. And yes, those are all actual features in Sims 4. We do our research when it comes to matters of such critical importance and important criticality.

Meteor, Right?

We should hate everything about this. We desperately want to. The decadence, the elitism, the absurdity. But one can’t help but admire the shithousery required to create a $45,000 bag made from a meteorite estimated to have fallen to the Earth 55,000 years ago.

Fresh off the back of making their infamous Swipe Bag from 99% air and 1% glass, Coperni have now unveiled a version that’s 100% rock and 0% practical. Why? Because they can.

It also conveniently doubles up as a kettlebell. Hang on, are kettlebells still allowed? I don’t know what to believe now that Huberman’s been “cancelled”. It turns out he’s not a very nice man so I’ve been left with no choice but to replace my regimen of exercise, whole foods and ice baths with one of cigarettes and trifle. At least I’ll be on the right side of history. If you don’t know what we’re talking about and want to waste 20 minutes of your life, just go look at the New York Magazine article released this week. Or don’t. We’re not your dad.

Smells Like Teen Spirit.

You would imagine that having a tendency to conjure up olfactory associations of the pungent odour of sweaty teenage boys would represent the writing on the wall (Daniel 5:5–31) for a deodorant brand, yet somehow it’s never really hurt Lynx – or Axe, as our more aggressive transatlantic cousins insist on calling it.

I suppose there will always be teenage boys, teenage boys will always smell, and, as such, Axe will persist in perpetuity throughout the known universe. And according to an entirely scientific experiment designed to challenge our pre-conceived notions of the nose, Axe/Lynx might not actually smell as bad as we all like to claim.

Axe enlisted some (apparently) noteworthy brand haters to take part in a blind smell test pitting their new Black Vanilla fragrance against a fancy Tom Ford eau de parfum alternative. And in this experiment conducted and paid for by Axe, the winner was… Axe. Fancy that? We’d be even more impressed if Liquid Death didn’t do it first. Plus they get extra marks for electrocuting people, purely for a laugh. As we said: aggressive.

ASMRing.

The more eschatologically pessimistic among us may fear that the rise of AI shall represent the first domino to fall in a sequence of events which shall lead to the eventual extirpation of humanity. This new device does absolutely nothing to address those concerns. It does however solve an arguably equally important issue: the volume at which you have to speak to your voice-activated AI assistant. Baby steps.

VTouch launched the WIZPR RING this week. As you can probably guess from its name (which sounds like it was chosen by a 15-year-old graffiti artist with that really cool ‘Z’), the WIZPR is a wearable accessory which comes loaded with ChatGPT and voice assistant features, allowing users to whisper commands to it in exchange for information.

But that’s not all; it gets creepier. It also whispers back, so you can have what VTouch have called “conversations with the virtual assistant in an ASMR manner”. Nope, too weird – I’m out. I refuse to believe ASMR is anything more than a pastime of the perverted and the criminally insane. Plus I already look enough like Gollum as it is, I don’t need to complete the look by malevolently muttering sweet nothings to a ring.

Lager than Life.

Imagine being so famous that you can instantly be recognised by just your hands. This does make you wonder if the fee to show someone’s hands is the same as the fee to show their face. Intuitively you’d think not, but then where does it end? How much for an earlobe? A kneecap? If we take the elbow, would you be willing do us a decent deal on the armpit?

This Stella Artois campaign featuring David Beckham’s digits is essentially saying “we’re not showing his face, because he’s well fit”, which feels like a flagrant example of objectification. That’s something I would say if I read Vice and decided to just be really irritatingly boring at every possible opportunity. But to be fair, how do you think it makes David feel to have people always focussing on just his looks? Maybe he’d like you to appreciate him for his other qualities, such as his funny voice or more charismatic wife. Bet you didn’t think of that, did you? You insensitive bastards.

I was going to comment on how these hands probably don’t quite resemble those of your average Stella drinker, but owing to a combination of effective brand repositioning and faux working class valour stolen by trust fund beneficiaries in Hackney with names like Hugo and Tarquin III, they’re actually probably not far off. Gone are the good old days when Big Terry would have a pint of Stella in one hand and his Richmond sausage fingers forced through a sovereign ring on the other ready to be clattered off the cranium of someone who was “looking at him funny”. One laments.