The Outline

Joe Veix

Joe Veix
The Future Sep 11

The hills are alive with the sound of money

The Square card reader converts your credit card information into noise. Dissonant, terrifying noise.

Culture Sep 04

Hey Keanu Reeves, you have an unclaimed gift card

California’s unclaimed property database is full of celebrities owed paltry sums of money.

The Future Jul 22

One man, eight years, nearly 20,000 cat videos, and not a single viral hit

How an animal lover’s hobby of recording himself feeding stray cats exemplifies the glory of the anonymous web.

Culture Jun 27

How I transformed my crappy laptop into a powerful gaming machine

Cloud streaming is possibly bad for the environment and the market, but very fun for me.

Culture Jun 17

Meet Lord Rod, the sweet potato king of Yokohama, Japan

There’s only one thing to call a person who installs an oven to roast sweet potatoes on the back of their Mazda Miata: a legend.

The Future Jun 07

Printers will always be terrible

As time goes on, printers will get worse and worse until none of us own one.

Culture Apr 30

You can’t beat an unwinnable game, but you can break it

There is no end to simulators like ‘SimCity’ and ‘Roller Coaster Tycoon’. There is only terrifying perfection.

The Future Mar 29

We could have had ‘The Real World’ on Mars

As all the weird stuff on the internet slowly goes extinct, let’s take some time to remember the glorious goofballs who auditioned for a reality show on Mars.

Culture Feb 28

I don’t wanna do my video game chores

The new ‘Red Dead Redemption’ reveals the biggest problem with marquee games today: they’re boring as hell.

The Future Jan 14

Shoot the Facebook Messenger

Everyone’s least-favorite social network has a new scheme to beam ads directly onto your phone.

Culture Oct 29

The curious case of Kid Rock vs. Authority

How a years-old tweet from Donald Trump’s favorite rap-rocker inadvertently explains the entire modern conservative movement.

Power Sep 10

What’s a car supposed to sound like?

The engine noises we hear from inside our cars are already fake, so why can’t they be fun?

The Future Aug 20

Robot security guards will be pointless until they’re terrifying

The curious case of the gas station security robot and the surveillance state that ate itself.

The Future Aug 13

Goatse is the golden ratio of the digital age

On the enduring aesthetics of the grossest image on the entire internet.

The Future Jul 21

How to beat LinkedIn: The Game

A strategy guide for using a semi-pointless social network in all the wrong ways.

Culture Jul 15

‘Borat’: Where are they now?

It turns out being in Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 comedy didn’t ruin too many people’s lives!

The Future Jun 23

Working towards a complete theory of meme relativity

Are memes coming and going at a faster rate, or is the pace of life itself accelerating?

Culture May 06

Lifehack: How to smuggle an Impossible Burger into In-N-Out

My hands will never not smell like meat.

The Future Apr 22

The American Dream hasn’t popped yet

How Billy and Summer Pierce penetrated the pimple-popping zeitgeist.

Power Mar 31

It’s weirdly hard to steal Mark Zuckerberg’s trash

Private security guards, dead ends, and a whole lot of paranoia: Here’s what happens when you try to rummage through the garbage of the man who owns the world’s secrets.

Culture Mar 02

Our solar system sounds like a depressed Radiohead cover band

An experiment that converts NASA data into music reveals how sad a planet can be.

The Future Feb 04

The ecstasy within the agony of troll games

Some video games are so hard that they become works of art.