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A great way to discover the heart of a city—the cool cafes, eclectic boutiques, authentic restaurants, art districts, etc. is to go to the places the locals go. Forget about carrying outdated guide books around town or trying to figure out if a website travel review is from a tour operator or legitimate traveler, several start-ups have created apps to link tourist with local people who can provide first hand experiences about what to eat, see and do.

[Related: 5 Reasons Why Millennials are Traveling to Trinidad and Tobago]

1. Localeur –  Features a community of recommendations from locals on the best places to eat, drink and play. Simply download the app and gain access to a community of recommendations on everything from where to find the best dim sum in New York to the best boozy bars in New Orleans. Recognized as one of the top apps for travel by the Today Show and Forbes, the app is in 14 major U.S. cities with plans to expand to as many as 25 cities by the end of this year.
2. EatWith – Encourages people to have dinner with strangers in foreign countries. With locations around the world including the United States, Russia, Turkey, Japan, Budapest, and Hong Kong to name a few, the eat with app is a perfect digital companion, especially if you’re traveling solo. Here’s how it works: First, the EatWith team interviews each host (currently only 4% of chefs are accepted). Chefs range from professionally trained, Michelin-starred chefs to home cooks. Then guest browse unique experiences and book their seat for brunch, lunch or dinner.
3. HeyLets – A social city and travel guide with recommendations in over 90 countries. Unlike most review apps and sites, the app is filled with positive reviews only. In less than 200 characters users can review beautiful photos and videos that provide insight into what’s happening around town. And, you can follow people whose experiences inspire you, create a wish list experiences that you want to try and earn status points when people wish list your posts.
4. Feastly – Whether you’re looking to explore the Hawker Food Stalls in Singapore or taste Filipino-inspired tapas and cocktails in San Francisco, Feastly offers shared dining experience in unique locations around the world.
5. Grouper –Matches you and your friends with other people who have similar interest. Here’s how it works: Based on your preferences, Grouper uses a scheduling tool to find a time and location. Take note, this is not a dating site. It simply takes the headache out of coordinating groups of like-minded people by setting up drinks between 2 groups of friends.

Do you have any favorite apps to help you avoid touristy hot spots and experience city culture from a local point of view? Leave me a comment below.

(Fair warning: This recap contains Westworld spoilers, and we’re secretly broadcasting from an abandoned theater in Sector 3.)

Maeve, Maeve, Maeve. What are we going to do with you? Or, really, what are you going to do with us?

After a bit of casual violence in the background of her stroll to work, Thandie Newton‘s character has figured a pretty simple way to end up backstage early in the day: just insult the tiny-handed manhood of a lumbering mass into choking you to death during sex. Voila. Meanwhile, the Man in Black (Ed Harris) gets some poetic knowledge of the Maze from Teddy (James Marsden), who gets to use a Gatling gun on his past; the DELOS business plot thickens as we meet board member Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) and witness Screaming British Guy Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) deliver a urine-based two-week notice; and, finally, the corporate espionage entangles Theresa (Sidse Babet Knudsen), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), Elsie (Shannon Woodward) and…maybe??…Arnold (??).

But let’s start with Maeve. Newton owns “The Adversary” as the most powerful fragile figure–a being who essentially gets to see Heaven’s construction crew. As Felix (Leonardo Nam) tours her through the various levels, she bears witness to how all of life’s little movements can be programmed and rehearsed. All the human touches are invisible bits of code. One more dry run of your card game. One more status update on your bison. You can only say what the computer says you can say as you say it. She watches her old life used as advertisement (with a cameo by William-helping Host Angela (Talulah Riley), which throws another fun wrench into the timeline.

She witnesses the clean up of Westworld‘s recurring genocide, and then she decides to get some upgrades.

Maeve is now a puppet who has discovered the strings (pretty chill about it all, too, considering) and has chosen to trade those strings for weaponry. Her entire arc here evokes the very last shot in Ex Machina. Or a human version of the raptor escaping Jurassic Park. She’s capable of so much, but we also learn that someone else has already been tampering with her specs. Arnold? Maybe. Probably.

Which leads to the big question of this episode: who is he/she/it? Is Arnold still alive despite Ford (Anthony Hopkins) thinking he’s dead? Is Arnold alive in some other way — his brain transplanted into something else? A Host? Bernard?

Is he the one broadcasting the pirate signal that’s making Hosts lose their plastic noodles?

Unraveling that mess is going to take more than a few episodes, but the tangled web got spun this week with a huge chunk of characters all circling different threads before reaching the same needle point.

First, there’s Ford, who refuses to destroy our favorite sleepy village and then mysteriously appears–previously unseen–from the corner when Bernard stumbles onto Ford’s secret robo-family. Yes, the Little Boy is him. Yes, his robo-dad drinks. Yes, his robo-dog actually chases (and catches!) small animals. Once again, things get confused here. Ford explains that his family was built by Arnold, that they’re first generation. If that’s the case, what’s up with Clunky Cowboy in the basement? Beta test?

It’s still impossible to know whether Ford is a villain–or if Westworld has a villain at all. He seems a man lost in reverie, but not so obsessed that he’s lost perspective. Maybe the board sees it that way: there’s apparently no love lost on his expensive, disruptive new narrative, but is that so great a sin?

Before being attacked by Ford’s robo-dad, Bernard gets the scoop on the smuggled tech from Elsie, who has effectively circled back to the first malfunction from the very first episode. It turns out the Hosts might have not gone haywire and poured milk all over their murder victims because of Ford’s memory upgrades, but because some of them have extra hardware installed to get proprietary knowledge out of the park.

That, or Arnold is controlling a bunch of them. Either way.

So Bernard has to juggle a bad break up with Theresa, while Theresa juggles the arrival of Charlotte to oversee transitions, while Screaming British Guy juggles a bunch of tequila and some serious self-loathing, while Elsie juggles the discovery of Theresa’s corporate sabotage and relays all that information back to Bernard.

Like I said, tangled. Although it’s a bit odd that Theresa is put so much at a distance even before Elsie tells Bernard the truth. He isn’t confronted with the awkward dilemma of choosing between love and loyalty; he’s driven doubly away from a person he was in bed with just last night. Theresa, for her part, is a fantastic character who seems utterly straightforward in her calculations. Screaming British Guy, on the other hand, is disposable. So far he’s existed to get run over by Ford, dismissed by Theresa, and, hopefully, fired by Charlotte without ever adding anything into the story.

I said it after the first episode, but this dude is about to go Ephialtes on everyone, 300 style. Maybe he’s actually been behind the corporate theft. That would at least give him some purpose.

Whatever the case, this corporate storyline just got a steroidal injection, and I hope Elsie is okay (even though Woodward is trolling everyone). If it’s actually Arnold who’s attacked her, I have the strangest gut feeling that it’s actually Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), the security team lead. He’s the kind of barely-there figure who’s just involved enough to make sense as a surprise without being obvious.

On the other end of the universe (and the timeline?), the Man in Black and Teddy discuss how the Maze is meant to be a myth from the indigenous culture, representing the totality of a man’s life, with an ever-dying, ever-living being at the center who has built the borders around his home to attain something he’s never had: peace, most likely.

This monologue reads exactly like a cinematic from a video game–deepening Teddy’s story alongside a glimpse at his dark past with Wyatt as he buries a bunch of spring-loaded bullets into the chests of the soldiers blocking their way. What’s even more interesting is that, before they can head down to the encampment, they spy two soldiers who they can conveniently kill and steal uniforms from. It’s like–as in a video game–the solution to each quest’s problem presents itself exactly when you need it.

Teddy is Maeve’s opposite, lacking in any kind of sentience, but still proving to have layers. He’s still playing Host, but we’ll have to wait until next week to figure out what Maeve is playing at. Now that she’s so smart, maybe she can apply for Screaming British Guy’s job.

SOME STRAY THOUGHTS:

• What if someone pays top dollar to go to the park specifically because they heard the Teddy story is awesome, but he’s off with someone else for days on end? Is there a customer service telegraph line?
• Kudos to the property masters for getting Sizemore’s urine the right shade of yellow. Dude had been drinking all day.
• DELOS offices are super dark, which doesn’t seem conducive to efficiency or employee satisfaction.
• If William’s timeline is from thirty years ago, and Angela was his park entry Host, how long have they been using that commercial?
• The guy who fuck-strangles Maeve has to go home to his wife and kids.
• If Ford can tell when the Little Boy is lying, he could definitely tell that Dolores was lying when she pretended not to know Arnold, right? Right.

Images: HBO

Until next time, here’s what Westworld has in common with Twitter:

Gratitude is good for you! Science tells us that practicing gratitude helps improve our health and overall happiness. This year, help your family out by making a DIY Gratitude Journal that everyone can write in. I posted instructions for this cute Thanksgiving craft idea over at Live.Craft.Love, so go check it out: [DIY Gratitude Journal]

Today, The Game Awards (taking place in Los Angeles on December 1st 2016) announced that not only would the show air live on Twitter, but it will air live in virtual reality on NextVR as well as on other platforms. Full details below courtesy of their press release.

THE GAME AWARDS 2016 TO BE ONE OF THE MOST WIDELY DISTRIBUTED DIGITAL EVENTS IN HISTORY

The Video Game Industry’s Biggest Night Will Be First Awards Show to Air Live in Virtual Reality with NextVR; First Awards Show to Air Live on Twitter; Groundbreaking Partnership with Tencent Brings The Game Awards Live to China, The World’s Largest Gaming Market

LOS ANGELES (November 2, 2016) – The videogame industry’s biggest night is about to become one of the widest distributed digital events in history. Today, The Game Awards announced that its 2016 gala event, scheduled to air live from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Thursday, December 1, will celebrate the best games of 2016 across a record number of global screens and platforms, including a landmark live broadcast in virtual reality, the first live awards show broadcast on Twitter, and a historic live simulcast in China, in partnership with Tencent.

Hailed by The New York Times as “The Oscars of the gaming world,” The Game Awards unites game industry creators, eSports champions, influencers and Hollywood names for a night of awards, exclusive game world premieres and musical performances. Produced, hosted and financed by media entrepreneur Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards is accessible to watch around the world across all major mobile, desktop and console devices used to play games.

“Video games have the power to unite communities from all over the world, and this year we will share the power of gaming with more people than ever before,” said Geoff Keighley, creator/producer of The Game Awards. “For 2016 we will expand our all-digital, no-friction path to global distribution through partnerships that include the first live awards show broadcast on Twitter, an initiative with Tencent to bring The Game Awards live to China, and our innovative, first-of-its-kind live VR broadcast with Next VR.”

Through a partnership with NextVR, the leading virtual reality broadcast platform for live-action content, The Game Awards will be the first award show to livestream in virtual reality. Accessible via the NextVR app, the live VR broadcast of The Game Awards will feature VR camera rigs placed throughout the Microsoft Theater. The collaboration between NextVR and The Game Awards gives viewers multiple vantage points of the show including a front row seat next to some of the biggest names in the industry. An on-stage robotic camera, built especially for the show, will move around during the broadcast to continually give VR viewers a new perspective on the awards and musical performances.

Further expanding its global reach and distribution, The Game Awards will air a live localized version of the show on Tencent‘s integrated Internet platforms in China, including QQ.com. In addition to watching a live translated version of the show, Chinese viewers can use WeChat, QQ.com, and Tencent News App to vote on a special “Fans Choice Award,” based on nominees selected by Tencent’s gaming editors. The winner of the award will be announced during the live global broadcast.

On Twitter, The Game Awards will be the first live awards show broadcast on the platform, creating a unified experience for viewers to watch and comment on gaming’s biggest night. Live Twitter comments on breaking news and the results of Twitter user polls will be integrated into the broadcast.

For the first time The Game Awards will air on Facebook Live, bringing video game’s biggest night live to Facebook users around the world. In addition, Facebook is partnering with The Game Awards to create a special Backstage Facebook Live Room for nominees and digital influencers to go live on their pages and interact with fans in real time.

The Game Awards will once again return to web, mobile and console platforms around the world, airing on PlayStation Network, Steam, Twitch, Xbox Live, YouTube, and highlights will also be featured in a Snapchat Live Story. Additional details about distribution below:

• Snapchat will once again cover The Game Awards, partnering to produce a “Live Story” that curates highlights from the awards for the platform.
• Viewers on Xbox Live won’t just watch The Game Awards – they will also compete against their friends with an interactive overlay experience to guess the winners in top categories. A real-time leaderboard will track the top Xbox Live players.
• On Twitch, The Game Awards 2016 will once again be open for co-streaming, allowing broadcasters to add their own live commentary over the show from their channels at home. In addition, for the first time Twitch and The Game Awards will partner to offer live on-site co-streaming, allowing select Twitch streamers to broadcast from inside the Microsoft Theater.

Returning for 2016 is “The Game Awards Sale,” an opportunity for fans watching on PlayStation Network, Steam, and Xbox Live to purchase select nominated games at a discount.

The Game Awards 2016 is executive produced by Geoff Keighley and Kimmie H. Kim. LeRoy Bennett is creative director, and Ryan Polito is director.

Details on nominees, world premieres, presenters and musical performances for The Game Awards 2016 will be released in the coming weeks. Tickets are now on sale for purchase via AXS.com

For more information and to stay up to date on the latest announcements, please visit www.thegameawards.com