Exploring a new city abroad or within the country is exciting, but also exhausting airplane flights, luggage, lodging and currency exchange if youre overseas. You have to be on your A game when traveling! Vacations are great, but consider a staycation if you need some time to get yourself together and explore the beauty in your own backyard.

A staycation gives you time off to do whatever you want in your city. I recently took a weeklong staycation and it was amazing! It was just what I needed to wrap up summer and prepare for the busy fall season. And Atlanta is a beautiful city, and often times us residents dont fully appreciate where we are.

Just like a vacation, you must have a plan of what youll do during your time off. With a staycation you can be more flexible and go with the flow, but youll still want to have a few goals to check off. Every city is different, but here are seven must-haves for a perfect staycation wherever you live.

Be a hometown tourist.

Explore the attractions in your city that you may sometimes take for granted because you live there. Even if youre town isnt known for something big, look into local shops or restaurants that you havent been to before. Take a stroll through the park, go to the farmers market, learn more about your city and get involved in making it better.

Enjoy good food.

Say goodbye to the frozen meals and bland sandwiches that you usually bring to lunch during a typical workweek! During your staycation, explore new restaurants in your city, or visit your favorites to thrill your taste buds. Ask your friends, family and coworkers what their go-to spots are to discover other restaurants to try. Then set up lunch or breakfast dates throughout the week with people you havent caught up with in awhile or new connections. You can also treat yourself to a meal if you want to go solo!

Get moving!

Whether you struggle making time to workout or its apart of your daily routine, a staycation grants you the opportunity to get some physical activity in. Take a new workout class or go for a morning jog everyday. This break is about taking care of yourself, and what better way to do that than to exercise.

Be a lifelong learner.

From cooking to sewing to digital marketing there is always something new to learn. Sometimes we get so bogged down with work and our other day-to-day responsibilities that we dont feed our brain with new information. Find something that interests you and learn more about it during your staycation. You can go to a museum or exhibit, take a class, or go to YouTube academy it doesnt matter how you do it, just make sure you learn something new during your time off.

Reconnect and be social.

Hang with old and new friends. Meet for coffee, lunch or happy hour. Turn up at a club or bar at least once! Enjoy the people that youre with and look to expand your circle with more people who will inspire you and help you grow.

Find time to relax, and do what you want to do.

Everyday during your time off shouldnt be jam-packed. The beauty of a staycation is that youre able to go with the flow and follow your heart to determine what you want to do.

Give yourself an opportunity to do nothing. Take naps, sleep in some days, enjoy a nice bubble bath, binge watch a new show. Each day assess how youre feeling and what you have the energy to do. If youd rather relax at home than be a hometown tourist one day, than do just that. Its YOUR staycation.

Reflect and be still.

Often times, were busy going through the motions and the hustle and bustle of everyday life. This leaves us with no time to reflect on where weve been and where we want to go. Find a moment to be still during your staycation. Pray, journal, meditate and have alone time with God to get clarity and comfort on things that may be troubling you. You can learn a lot when youre still enough to hear God speak to you.

After my staycation, I went to work feeling like a new woman! I caught up on much needed sleep, received clarity on my calling and built on life-long connections.

Definitely consider taking a staycation this year, or plan one for 2017! It may be just what you need to recharge your brilliance and prepare to slay this season in your life.

Read more: http://thoughtcatalog.com/teyonna-ridgeway/2016/09/7-easy-ways-to-make-a-staycation-fun-and-refreshing-without-leaving-your-city/

A slick postscript to the 1999 low-budget hit panders to a young audience by swapping the originals slow-burn for gory theatrics and modern gadgets

Given the quite terrifying frequency at which low-budget, low-wattage and lowbrow horror films are released at the moment, its strange and sweetly nostalgic to remember a time when the genre was less ubiquitous.

Back in the early 1990s, scary movies were about as profitable as Adam Sandler movies are now. After the repetitive slasher movies of the 1980s, the genre had given up the ghost and no one was interested in bringing that ghost back to scare a new generation of horny teens. In 1996, Scream changed things somewhat, proving that with the right amount of energy, self-awareness and originality, horror films could make money again.

The next seminal moment arrived at the tail-end of the decade as The Blair Witch Project arrived out of nowhere, quite literally, with no stars and precious little budget yet it created an entirely new sub-genre: the found-footage horror. It utilised viral marketing like no film before and despite its inauspicious beginnings, managed to make $248m worldwide. A rushed, universally loathed sequel was thrown into cinemas the year after and forgotten about just as quickly; but the self-shot style of the original endured and its influence was felt for the following 17 years.

For a while it was refreshing with Cloverfield, Rec and The Bay all finding neat ways of telling familiar tales. But by the sixth Paranormal Activity film, the line: Put the camera away! became as tired as Ill be right back.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/sep/12/blair-witch-review-horror-sequel

Our online worlds are full of colors, words and sounds but lack something major scents. Could that ever change?

When David Edwards founded the oPhone, he hoped scent messages would become the next big thing in the digitisation of our online lives.

The device looked like a high-tech cruet set, and allowed a friend with an iPhone app to send you bespoke olfactory messages alongside photos. Send a picture of your dinner, tag it with four different tones, and whoevers on the receiving end can sniff it from the vase-like tubes of the oPhone.

Right now, nobodys waking up at 3am saying, I really want to send a scent message, Edwards told the New Yorker in April this year. But one day they will.

The oPhone didnt take off, and the company has now shifted focus to a scent speaker called the Cyrano, which similarly uses a range of scent capsules to emit playlists of smells.

Compared to our real world interactions, our online lives are devoid of scent an underrated but powerful part of our sensual world.Our digital cultural, so soaked in visual and aural stimuli, is odourless. So why didnt his marriage of smell and picture messaging excite more interest?

From a technical point of view, smell is simply harder to mass communicate than sounds and pictures. There are two main technological obstacles to making smell transmissible by digital means, explains biophysicist and author of Perfumes: The A-Z guide, Dr Luca Turin.

First, there are no odor primaries like RGB or CMYK. That means you cannot obtain the full gamut of doors from mixing a few. Second, it has, for mysterious reasons, proved impossible to stimulate the olfactory epithelium directly by any means tried so far. This means that it is currently impossible to elicit a sensation of smell without there being an actual chemical in the inhaled air.

But as well as these significant scientific barriers, scent occupies an uneasy position in our modern culture.

The hankering for artisanall scent

Scent is big business in 2016. An estimated 2,400 new fragrances will launch this year, and amongt these are a growing number that position themselves as artisanal scents emphasising the connection with physical materials rather than abstract nouns. Artist and composer Paul Schtze has sought to create perfumes based on personal memories of storms and old books, while Louis Vuittons CEO Michael Burke has said he wants to company to move towards the creation of artisanal fragrance that harks back to the ways they used to be conceived of and purchased. Why?

If you have craft beer, and clothes being made by hand in a small boutique, youll also have perfumes that have that artisanal feel to them, explains Dr Morgaine Gaye, a food futurologist and one of the curators of this years FutureFest in London. However the irony is these perfumes are artificially made. Theyre molecules constructed by chemistry as opposed to real molecules from nature. So although it may look artisanal, the reverse is often true.

The reasons behind our generations hankering for craft experiences are nebulous, drawing on everything from disposable incomes to dwindling trust in international corporations. In terms of digital culture, however, the desire for something with the whiff of craftsmanship is arguably a counterpoint to a life increasingly lived online.

While projects like the oPhone long to bring olfactory experiences into digital communication, perfumes that emphasise their (albeit illusory) connection to natural scents move in the opposite direction, scratching an itch technology cant.

The more were plugged into the virtual world, the more we deeply appreciate the contrast moments in our human experience, says designer and olfactory artist Mindy Yang. Intuitively, we realize that we are starved of certain sensations. With the rise of digital culture, society has, perhaps subliminally, become more interested in the missing sense what we smell.

This interest in scent isnt only happening within the worlds of perfume and fashion. Over the past few years a number of cultural projects have set out to focus on the power of sensory experiences, from the use of a smell map at Hampton Court Palace for an olfactory tour of the smells of a royal palace, to the Tate Sensorium, which in 2015 let users experience visual art alongside smells, tastes and sounds. Artists such as Victoria Adams, Brian Goeltzenleuchter and Rachel Morrison, to name a few, all position scent as a core part of their practice, pulling on ideas of personal memory, tactility and the power of scent to evoke feelings of desire.

We are defenceless to smell

There is commercial interest in leveraging this power. Yang is exploiting this to creates scents specifically designed for individual brands. Similar to lighting and sound design, I compose invisible frequencies that sets the tone in the physical space, she explains. There is no guard against a fragrance as an emotional trigger so long as one is not anosmic [unable to discern smell]! Done right, olfactive marketing is an incredibly powerful tool.

The olfactory system in our brain has a close relationship with the limbic system, which is strongly involved in a persons emotional life. This gives scent the power to affect our emotions in a way that is much more direct than visual and auditory stimuli. While we may have developed certain barriers to the predictable tropes and rhythms of poster and radio adverts, the effect of smell is much harder to block. You can understand why companies want to tap into it.

You can not look, and you can not listen, but you cant not breathe, says Gaye. So you cant not smell. So you dont have a choice. The brands that are doing it more cleverly are the ones where you dont know it is happening. You never question it. Nescaf, with the glass jars with plastic lids and foil, have been embedding the smell of Nescaf in the labels for decades, so you smell it off the shelf. You smell it as a brand, but you dont know youre smelling it.

Gaye also tells me about a tactic used by the London toyshop Hamleys, which pumps out the smell of pia colada because it makes the parents linger longer. Techniques like these are hard to control, however, with sensory effects being so unpredictable depending on everything from specific cultural associations to the days weather. But that isnt stopping brands trying to stoke involuntary emotional responses to their products, though.

Department stores and coffee jars arent the first to connect scent to involuntary feeling. The seductive control of the senses has been dabbed on the wrists of churches, brothels and hospitals throughout history to ease us, to soothe us, to excite us. Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will, writes the German author Patrick Sskind in his 1985 novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.

Whether its devices likes the oPhone trying to introduce scent into digital messaging, or olfactory brand strategists that want to leverage our limbic systems, organisations are growingly aware of our cultures desire for sensory experiences. In a time of virtual reality and scentless social networks, its perhaps no wonder that we as a culture have such a desire for something that instinctively feels real and authentic even if it was made in a lab.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/16/smell-digital-technology-ophone-cyrano