Whoever thinks the ‘70s and ‘80s produced the best sci-fi clearly hasn’t spent enough time with ‘90s hip-hop and R&B; give me the bizarre, wet, womblike space videos between 1996 and 1999, please. It’s a tough call, with Missy Elliott’s crushed Cartier up-to-there eyeshadow and TLC’s strap-on traffic signals, but this video, in which Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson turn into viscous, Alex Mack-style "water" and slither across some kind of intergalactic sex dungeon, just slays.

Bear with me — this is milk infused with a syrup that tastes like coffee. It’s not caffeinated, but it is the official state drink of Rhode Island. Order it along with, rather than instead of, your morning cup at the diner. It’s all the best things about coffee ice cream and chocolate milk, and it makes me feel like an eight-year-old playing grownup. Whenever my roommates go back to the homeland I try to convince them to bring it back for me.

The State, a Dubai-based website and large-format print mag, publishes features, essays, and blog posts covering speculative design, futurism, and politics; think drones, placehacking, temporary autonomous zones, and tons of high-design GIFs. Its stories come from Laos and Rio and Sweden and, of course, the UAE; now, with its mix series "Transmissions" The State has become one of my go-to places to hear new music. With mixes from the novelist Teju Cole and the owner of the Pakistani label Forever South, Transmissions is still young but it’ll probably only get better.

Aeon Magazine is a pretty small operation, but with just under a dozen staff members, it still manages to publish one, usually excellent, essay every weekday. Sure, the publication describes itself as a magazine about "ideas and culture," but with editors coming from OMNI, the LA Review of Books’ science section, and various university philosophy departments, it’s really their face-shattering coverage of the Big Questions I come back for. Read Aeon for, among other things, a humbling synopsis of human extinction studies or a dispatch about boredom and insanity from a three-month simulation of living on Mars.

Okay, so I tried talking to Andrew Webster, The Verge’s excellent video game reporter, about this side-scrolling masterpiece and he totally shut me down — I believe the word he used was "old." Luckily, I don’t care what Andrew thinks: I’m addicted to this game in a way I haven’t been since Mario Kart. You play as a tiny bird (or is it a hedgehog or a bat?) and rely, alternately, on the laws of gravity and an army of "clones" to squeeze past obstacles on some steampunk dream of a jungle planet. For a puzzle game, the pacing is immaculate, and the sound design is so good it’s morbid — when your bird (hedgehog, bat) gets iced by a buzzing razor the little squelching sound will totally make you go "awww" every time.