Think your morning commute down I-35 or MoPac is bad? Try spending more than three hours on the road driving to Austin from a city like Dallas or Houston. Thirty-thousand people, termed “super-commuters,” from each respective city did this in 2009 according to a study by NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation.

Austin has been a hotspot in the burgeoning virtual reality industry ever since early prototype headsets made their way into local software developers’ hands. Despite this, access to VR has been limited. One company is hoping to break outside the niche and expose a wider swath of Austinites to this gotta-see-it-to-believe-it technology.

Several friends have been telling me it’s a good idea to get hooked up with a VPN, a virtual private network, so as to keep my personal data secret and unsold online, unlike what typically happens in the wide-open web. And, you know, those friends certainly meant well. But they were wrong.

With a Southern preacher’s vigor and his renowned diplomacy, CNN host and commentator Van Jones reinvigorated his passionate call to “decode Trump” and his supporters, while continuing his walking back of his much-criticized praise of President Trump’s first address to Congress.

SXSW Music nabbed the morning headlines with the unveiling of a second keynote speaker and 200-plus acts on the 2017 bill. But the conference also dropped a few non-Music speakers into the mix today, including a Muslim journalist who started a movement and a producing powerhouse who co-parented a Terminator.

For the past six years, Journal to Save Your Life has served hundreds of adolescents and young adults across the globe as a web-based program. Now, founder Holly Werstein plans to take her mental health initiative mobile.

Just how beloved is Pokémon Go? Well, people love it enough to venture to the Capitol grounds in the Texas heat, mingle with other players, and hope for an encounter with one of those elusive virtual creatures.

Some of the greatest technological leaps were met with shrugs. The smartphone was seen, at first, as an unnecessary luxury before replacing the very fabric of society with an interweb of Tweets, posts, Grams, Vines, and Snaps. Like that, two smaller bits of locally designed tech might get filed in your brain's wtf folder at first.

You can do a lot in VR these days: fall, fly, or float. But as we learned in the 1992 film Lawnmower Man there’s at least one more thing, which was the topic of Friday's VR Porn panel, part of SXSW's fledgling VR/AR track. Of course, we don’t really have to tell you that do we? Kidding! We all know you weren’t there. (Wink!)