Hasta La Gadget!

 The problem with tiny robots, if there can really be said to be one, is that you can’t put enough stuff on them. Cameras and motors don’t shrink down very well, meaning if you want your robot to grab something, you’d better come up with a new way to see it and hold onto it. And that’s just what Finnish researchers have done with this bio-inspired, super-small gripper! Read More

Verizon has introduced SmartHub, a new 4G LTE router designed for your smart home devices. This hub taps the carrier’s own network, of course, to offer high-speed Internet access for a variety of WiFi products, including your phone, tablets and laptop. Verizon says that the SmartHub, when used with the related app, can be used to control a variety of … Continue reading

It might be time to reconsider how often you scroll through curated photos. Instagram is the worst social media app for young people’s mental health, according to a new report by the Royal Society for Public Health in the United Kingdom.

Researchers assessed 1,479 people ages 14 to 24 on how Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat made them feel in both a positive and negative way. Participants answered 14 questions in total about each social media platform, including whether or not they experienced feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness while using the apps.

The assessment also addressed how the platforms impacted body image, quality of sleep and bullying. Additionally, there were questions designed to determine the level of FOMO the users experienced after they looked at each social media feed. This all was to measure each social media site’s impact on the users’ overall wellbeing.

Instagram made the participants feel the worst in terms of wellbeing, followed closely by Snapchat, Facebook and then Twitter, according to the study. Only YouTube made participants feel slightly better. All five social media platforms were reportedly associated with a cycle of poor sleep and tiredness.

Part of the reason Instagram scored the worst in wellbeing is because of the app’s reported effect on body image. 

“Instagram easily makes girls and women feel as if their bodies aren’t good enough as people add filters and edit their pictures in order for them to look ‘perfect,’”one participant from Northern Ireland said in the study. 

The practice of editing photos contributes to “a generation of young people with poor body image and body confidence,” the authors explained.

In order to alleviate this effect, researchers recommend that social media platforms make it clear to users when a photo has been digitally manipulated. One idea is to provide a small icon or watermark at the bottom of a photoshopped or filtered photo. 

The scientists also advise that social media platforms remind users when it’s time to sign off. One suggestion is for app developers to track how much time users spend on social media, providing a pop up when he or she nears “heavy usage,” the study authors wrote. 

The research supports previous evidence that social media use can have a negative effect on mental wellbeing. A 2015 study found that more than two hours of social media use is linked with mental health issues, psychological distress and suicidal thoughts in teens.

But all of this isn’t to say that you should delete your apps entirely. They can also be helpful in certain circumstances.

For example, the study found that Facebook provides the opportunity for young people to learn about the mental health experiences of others through posts their friends may share on their newsfeed. Social media can also be a positive platform for self-expression. “Liking” pages and groups helps users and marginalized individuals find emotional support and build community, according to the study. 

Instagram has been working to focus on mental health, too. The app, which has nearly 700 million users, launched a campaign earlier this month aimed at starting a conversation about mental illness on its platform. Anecdotally, some users describe Instagram as a positive influence on their mental health because, like the study found with Facebook, it connects them to a community of other people dealing with the same issues. 

The trick is to be mindful. Too much of anything ― even time spent online ― can be detrimental. Tap into your digital social networks when you need them, by all means. But it’s important to keep in mind that they rarely paint the whole picture of someone’s life. 

And then lean on your in-person network for support, too. 

H/T CNN

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In a now infamous clip from July 2015, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) suggested on ABC’s “The Week” that Donald Trump might become the president. To this, host George Stephanopoulos and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman broke out into laughter.

Then, and since that time, Trump’s words and actions have appeared so ridiculous and terrible that from a certain perspective, it is darkly hilarious this person became the President of The United States.

In the week leading up to the “Saturday Night Live” season finale last weekend, Trump-related reporting went into overdrive, as The New York Times and The Washington Post published extremely damaging stories about the current administration on a daily basis. By Thursday, the Times felt their readers could use a story titled “Trying Not to Drown in a Flood of Major Breaking News.”

After an “SNL” season defined by very popular but hit-and-miss Trump parodies, the show finished with an episode that barely even addressed the major headlines of the past week. In a cold open that mirrored the show’s opening after Hillary Clinton’s loss, Alec Baldwin played Trump while singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” The real Trump had had a terrible past few days, and the show probably correctly assumed the viewers already knew that. It seems the writers decided there was little they could possibly add, other than acknowledge it, shrug and wink.

“Donald Trump presents something of a conundrum to political humorists who consider him a gift from God but a man who has repeatedly proven himself zanier, wackier, and funnier than whatever professional ridiculers can come up with,” wrote James Andrew Miller, the author of Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, back in fall 2015 for Vanity Fair.

Miller continued on about Trump for this piece, describing him as someone “who one-ups and out-does his own comic critics; who out-lampoons the lampooners; and who raises the bar so high that comedians have trouble reaching it.”

“SNL” may have had a very successful season in terms of achieving a relatively large viewership, as they beat out their typical ratings on just about a weekly basis.

But even if this country turned its tired eyes to “SNL” in seeking catharsis for the Trump mess, the 42nd season of the show often faltered in trying to top the inherent hilarity of the news itself.

Trump was a tower, and “SNL” never escaped that shadow.

The problem “SNL” faced this season was not lost on critics.

The Verge published a review of the Alec Baldwin-hosted episode in February with the lede, “’Saturday Night Live’ is enjoying its highest ratings in over 20 years, despite lending absolutely no credence to the argument that comedy might improve under the Trump administration.” The article went on to give praise to Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impression (focusing on her physical comedy gifts), but then argued, “The rest of last night’s mostly political episode was a series of riffs on the easiest possible joke you could make about anything Trump does: he’s stupid and he’s sad and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

A review on The Ringer of McCarthy’s turn at hosting the show in May pointed out that as this season went on, the writers seemed to struggle to cover Trump in a meaningful way. “SNL is at its best when it uses current events as a segue into comedy, rather than comedy as a means of commenting on current events,” wrote Alison Herman. “That speaks to a larger truth about ‘Saturday Night Live’: Often, the show appears to do political sketches more out of obligation than passion.”

The New Yorker focused on “the limits of Trump mockery,” pointing out that the show’s writers seemed to have more meta-jokes about how they can’t just keep making fun of him forever as the season went on. “If, in the past, ‘Saturday Night Live’ had been goading Trump to lash out, now it seemed that the show, like the rest of us, was asking him to cut it out,” wrote the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch.

Oftentimes, this “SNL” season felt like one big sigh, an under-the-breath muttering of “are we doing this again?” and then a satirical recap aimed at the deluge of bad Trump news. And, of course, none of this was helped by the show’s decision to have Trump host the show while he was still a candidate (an experience former “SNL” star Taran Killam confirmed was “not fun”).

The 42-year-old sketch show is far from in dire straits, though. As previously mentioned, the ratings were good this season. Still, there does seem to be this underlying problem ― an inadequate cog within an otherwise generally well-oiled machine.

The show just can’t beat actual news about Trump for hilarity. Even if the former is darkly and perversely funny, it still creates a huge elephant in the room for every “SNL” episode tasked with responding to the trending topics of the week. It’s always Trump. And this new reality is consistently more absurd than the political satire Americans are typically accustomed to.

Baldwin admitted to this problem in an interview with his wife, “Extra” correspondent Hilaria Baldwin, last February. “Another thing I find that’s so weird about the stuff we’re doing, we’re just repeating back what he says … Doing this is strange, but what is even more strange is this is real.”

In April, Splitsider had a great review of the show that also focused on this feeling that “SNL” inherently just goes through the motions as a result of Trump’s increasingly absurdist presidency. Here’s a passage:

“Saturday Night Live” hasn’t gotten edgy or daring or important in the age of Trump: instead life has turned into a mediocre “Saturday Night Live” sketch. “Saturday Night Live” is uniquely qualified to capture that particular moment in our zeitgeist. “What if Donald Trump were president, and he was, of course, super vulgar and obnoxious and arrogant but also super racist?” is the half-assed “Saturday Night Live” sketch idea that has become our horrifyingly half-assed reality.

Week to week, the show became predictable as well. Trump and his administration were super popular characters every single week. And so the show beat jokes to death, as if “SNL” had done featured more cowbell or Stefon over and over again, multiple times, in all its episodes.

On top of this, viewers could essentially know most of the jokes beforehand, having read about or watched it all in the news. During the week, it was likely people on social platforms like Twitter and YouTube would have made better riffs on the weekly headlines. Days later, “SNL” could offer a team of writers, expensive set design, costumes and movie stars to act out the news, but that wasn’t always enough.

This season had a few truly inspired Trump-related sketches that are deserving of the heaps of praise they received. “Through Donald’s Eyes,” starring the wrestler John Cena, comes to mind. The first iteration of McCarthy’s Spicer, obviously. “Black Jeopardy” with Tom Hanks, which came before the election but still holds up.

“SNL” undoubtedly had many highs this year, but the season finale could not come soon enough. With Trump still in office, how many times could the show really have something new to say? The man’s been the best joke in New York City for decades. At a certain point, all anyone can do is shrug and agree that the guy is still just as absurd as the week before.

Over the course of Trump’s rise, “SNL” has been far from alone in struggling to parody him. The creators of “South Park,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone expressed frustration that Trump is so ridiculous and hinted a desire to stop including him in their show. In the latest press tour for “Veep,” the team behind the show spoke out repeatedly about how their political show could never match the absurdity of the real-life Trump presidency.

As a politician and president, Trump is an outlier in virtually every respect, so it stands to reason that even after 42 years, “SNL” is swimming in uncharted waters. And looking ahead, that means questions like, “Will the audience get burned out on Trump sketches?” and “If investigations reveal more troubling information, will things get too serious for satire?” are difficult to answer. “SNL” has seen a lot in its history and will do its best to adapt to whatever happens, but one thing can clearly be said as of now: The Trump victory was one of the best gifts to the show since it first went on the air in ‘75.

Given the seemingly endless amount of damning leaks about the Trump administration, “SNL” may not even have to reckon with a Trump presidency come next season. But in the off chance that’s not the case, the show may be doomed to exist in Trump’s dark, looming shadow.

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There are a lot of things to be said about the new “Baywatch” movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Zac Efron. Yes, it’s absurd. Yes, there are cringeworthy moments. No, it’s not as bad as “CHiPs.”

As The New York Times put it in their review of the movie, out May 25: “Like its source material, ‘Baywatch’ is sleazy and wholesome, silly and earnest, dumb as a box of sand and slyly self-aware. It’s soft-serve ice cream. Crinkle-cut fries. A hot car and a skin rash. Tacky and phony and nasty and also kind of fun.” 

This ability to be self-aware is what sort of saves the movie from falling into the trap of the stereotypical, sexist comedies we see as of late. Jokes that worked 10 or even five years ago no longer have the same effect. Women don’t want to be in nude scenes while their male counterparts get away scot-free. 

The creators behind “Baywatch” know that ― so they tried their best to add in some role reversal. 

“I think it was very important for all of us ― the cast and obviously the producers and director [Seth Gordon] ― to create female characters that weren’t just dumb and funny because they were dumb,” star Alexandra Daddario, who plays Summer in the film, told HuffPost during a Build Series interview on Wednesday. “The point was that Baywatch takes itself very seriously ― we’re all like CIA operatives but on the beach ― and all the women are very tough and strong and I think that made a lot of sense in the context of this film, and I think it actually makes it funnier. It’s a little cliché to just have the women there as eye candy ― part of the joke is that we’re all supernaturally hot, but that’s not just what it is.”

Jon Bass, who plays the “chubby” techie trainee Ronnie, echoed those sentiments, proving the point by saying he’s the only person who’s naked in the movie. 

“We do a really good job of sort of flipping the script and making sure that, yeah, the guys get their due. Because it’s 2017,” Bass told HuffPost.

“The essence of ‘Baywatch’ in and of itself is, you know, is sexy. It’s sexy, it’s beachy and it’s fun ― and we’re not throwing that out, we’re saying, ‘Look, that is a part of this movie, but we also know how absolutely hilarious and ridiculous that is.’” 

Ridiculous is the right word to describe one scene in particular that kicks off the film. Ronnie, clearly smitten with lifeguard C.J. (Kelly Rohrbach), accidentally gets himself caught in a tricky situation after an incident on the beach. 

“He gets his erect penis stuck in a beach chair,” Daddario revealed, laughing while explaining that the scene is one of the reasons she signed on for the project. “I felt that it was pushing the envelope and was just laugh-out-loud funny and ridiculous and I think that was the right tone for a film like this.” 

As for Bass, he’s privileged to join the likes of Ben Stiller and Jason Biggs on the list of actors who “get their dicks stuck in things.” (Yup, he went there.) But in all seriousness, he’s happy to be a part of a movie that pushes the boundaries without being self-serious. 

“I remember reading the script and just being like, ‘This is going to be just such a fun movie to be a part of,’” Bass said. “We had so much fun on set; we had so much fun every scene that I got to shoot with every one of the cast members. It was like a fun day at the beach. It was like summer camp.” 

Camp being the word to remember before seeing “Baywatch” this weekend. 

Watch the full Build Series interview with Alexandra and Jon below. 

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