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Verge Favorites: Trent Wolbe

Verge Favorites: Trent Wolbe

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Verge staffers aren't just people who love technology. They're people who love stuff. We spend as much time talking and thinking about our favorite books, music, and movies as we do debating the best smartphone to buy or what point-and-shoot has the tightest macro. We thought it would make sense to share our latest obsessions with Verge readers, and we hope you're encouraged to share your favorites with us. Thus a long, healthy debate will ensue where we all end up with new things to read, listen to, or try on.

World Dissolver EP

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When I become President of the Universe the first thing I’m going to do is make the creation of any new music punishable by death... unless it’s by Ceephax Acid Crew. There’s simply nothing else we need to know about the past, present, or future of music that’s not contained in the triumphant square waves and marching bass lines steaming out of the World Dissolver EP. It’s the kind of music that Jesus would have made if he had focused on drum machines instead of carpentry and had a set of HTML skills that stopped being updated in 1996, but more Anglo-Saxony than Jewy. Throw all your other MP3s into the trash compactor and stop listening to music that wasn’t created by the ultimate human.

Really3D

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When I become President of the Universe the second thing I’m going to do is make the creation of any new video content punishable by death... unless it’s by Really3D. Forget CNN, Vice, Werner Herzog, and even The Verge: there’s no better visual summation of modern history than the super-shitty, completely terrible, and 100 percent-accurate renderings of cultural flash points that this YouTube user pukes out every couple of days. I suggest you dive into the third dimension with a little "Realistic 3D Sonic," maybe get eaten by some "Jurassic Park - Realistic Dinosaurs," and then go to bed after experiencing the ultimate media commentary that is 20th Century Fox In Real Life. Because there are only two kinds of people in this world: 3D people, and really 3D people.

DeWalt 20vMAX Impact Driver

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I used to be a lot like you: someone who, whenever they tried to put together IKEA furniture, found themselves with a bunch of shitty, splintered MDF all over their floor instead of a sick new floating bookshelf or space-saving platform bed / storage unit. Then I invested in this honeybee-colored magic stick, capable of delivering 117 foot-pounds of torque at over 2,800 revolutions per minute, and, more importantly, 3,200 impacts per minute — that means it acts like a normal drill for creating pilot holes, but if your host material is too hard to accept a screw with a conventional twisting motion this crazy super-loud jackhammering action kicks in. It sounds like someone is firing a tommy gun into a village of innocents but really you’re just making a secure connection between components of a super-efficiently-designed piece of home ware. I basically remodeled my entire house using only a butter knife, some chicken wire, and this outrageous power tool that you could definitely use to kill someone if you needed to.

'Below Stairs'

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If you think rich white people are overeducated, resource-sucking parasites with an inborn penchant for exploitation and narcissism, you’d be totally right! But Below Stairs, "The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired Downton Abbey," will at least help you understand that you shouldn’t take it personally because before white people subjugated other ethnicities they had absolutely no problem making a complete mess of other white people’s lives. Like The Diary of Anne Frank or Django Unchained for prewar England, it’s a first-person account of a young woman’s slog through a half-century of domestic service, where Powell’s superiors made her do things like polish brass kickplates until she developed arthritis and scrub floors until her fingers bled. Also, did you know the only reason people used to have like 18 children was because having sex was cheap and the only way they ever got to have any fun? Depressing, yet far more digestible than Finnegan’s Wake, Below Stairs is a good look at how the richest people in the world construct oppressive economies around their own outrageous senses of entitlement.

'King of Tokyo'

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If you’re looking for a cheap way to have fun with friends that isn’t buying a couple of 40s and binge-watching True Detective on your ex-girlfriend’s HBO Go password, look no further than this board-card-and-dice game created by Richard Garfield, the OG nerd behind Magic: The Gathering. Normally I HATE board games — the last one I remember enjoying was Mouse Trap — but King of Tokyo plays more like a video game than Monopoly. It’s full of weird power-ups like "alien metabolism," "eater of the dead," and "giant brain" that make you go insane with rage and / or ecstasy when they’re deployed. And it’s precisely designed with the sort of mechanics that make it possible for a seven-year-old noob to trounce a 30-something veteran from out of the blue. That teaches everyone at the table (up to six people, actually) that while life isn’t always fair, it can always be fun.

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