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TechNews
What Is Blue Box? Gamers Believe It’s Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hill
Tens of thousands of people are coordinating online in search of clues surrounding what’s either a series of curious coincidences or a conspiracy led by one of the world’s most celebrated video game directors.
It starts with a PlayStation 5 game called Abandoned. In April, Sony Group Corp. unveiled the project from a small Dutch company, Blue Box Game Studios, with scant details. From there, an elaborate theory emerged that the game does not exist and that it’s actually a secret, new project from the beloved and eccentric Japanese game maker Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear series.
Followers set up a community on Reddit to examine the mystery. It now has more than 5,000 members. The hype was fed, in part, by Kojima’s mythic record of stunts and gamesmanship. In the past, the video game legend has generated fake companies and hired actors. To some, the various comments and actions of Hasan Kahraman, the head of Blue Box, have contained strange discrepancies and seemed to fit within Kojima’s patterns.
In an hour-long interview with Bloomberg, Kahraman attempted to demystify several of the assertions underlying the conspiracy: His game has no connection to Kojima; his studio consists of “a network of friends;” and he is a trained game developer, not an actor, he said.
A piece of new evidence supports that last point. Kahraman has regularly posted for the last three months on a forum for Unreal Engine game developers, answering questions and responding to others, according to screenshots shared with Bloomberg by a game developer unrelated to any of this who asked not to be identified because the forum is private.
The truth, as Kahraman tells it, is far less intoxicating. An unknown company is awkwardly navigating a big opportunity to capitalize on an unexpected surge of interest and to do so without alienating Sony or betraying promotional agreements.
“It doesn’t matter how much I try to debunk all this,” Kahraman said by phone. “People don’t believe it. They just expect something that’s not out there. It bothers me.”
A conspiracy theory can come from anywhere. Often, as with the moon landing, the assassination of John F. Kennedy or Sept. 11, it grows on the fringes of a major event. But sometimes, it can seemingly spring out of nowhere and spread, especially in the internet age, with ferocity.
Blue Box is more innocuous than the others but grew practically as fast. It’s driven by a long list of possible connections between Hasan Kahraman and Hideo Kojima. Some of the supposed links are spurious, but others are more convincing. The two men share initials, and the name Kahraman in Turkish translates to Hideo in Japanese, according to Google Translate.
These beliefs have gained traction due to Kojima’s history of hosting elaborate marketing stunts to unveil games. The trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was first shown in 2012 with a mysterious video featuring a logo for an imaginary company called Moby Dick Studio. Kojima even hired an actor to play the company’s fictional chief executive officer, Joakim Mogren, for an interview. Joakim is an anagram for Kojima, reflecting the director’s penchant for playing with pseudonyms.
Next, Kojima used another fake company name for a 2014 game demo called P.T. When players completed the demo, they were treated to a teaser for a new game in the horror franchise Silent Hill, billed as a collaboration between Kojima and film director Guillermo del Toro. The project was canceled a year later as part of an acrimonious split between Kojima and his former employer, Konami Holdings Corp.
Abandoned
Source: Blue Box
Suspicions about Blue Box started almost immediately after it announced Abandoned in April, but they went into overdrive last week following a since-deleted Twitter post from the company. The tweet said Abandoned was a code name and that the final title would start with an S and end with an L. This stoked speculation that the game would morph into Kojima’s long-awaited new Silent Hill game, propelling a two-month-old Abandoned trailer to more than a million views on YouTube.
Over the past few days, Reddit sleuths have only hardened their convictions. The original Sony blog post for Abandoned was full of red flags. It promised realistic graphics at 4K resolutions and frame rates of 60 per second, benchmarks that would be difficult to hit for the most established game studios, let alone a tiny one like Blue Box. Sony didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As the days went on, fans discovered more oddities. Blue Box claimed to have a team of more than 50 people working on the game; yet, LinkedIn showed no employees other than Kahraman. Blue Box also said the game will be revealed through a PlayStation 5 application designed as an interactive trailer, which has never been done before.
The situation grew stranger when Geoff Keighley, a video game personality who interviewed Kojima’s fake CEO in 2013 and has helped reveal many of the director’s games, hinted on Twitter that he would be involved in the unveiling of Abandoned. Keighley, a longtime friend of Kojima, did not respond to a request for comment.
In the interview with Bloomberg, Kahraman said he has been making games since he was a kid. He hasn’t had much success.
Blue Box tried to raise just under $12,000 from a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 to make a horror game called Rewind. The crowdfunding project ended with $207 in pledges. Kahraman canceled the Kickstarter, writing that Rewind would be “fully funded by a private investor,” but the game never came out. A different game connected to Blue Box was buggy and poorly received when it debuted last year.
Speaking with a Dutch accent, Kahraman said Abandoned has been in development since 2017, although the “concept was changed a lot of times.” He said the Blue Box team consists of 10 people and that he had outsourced work to several other studios, which accounted for the 50 figure he mentioned earlier. He said he’d attracted the attention of Sony in 2015 following that failed Kickstarter.
But the conversation raised many more questions. Kahraman would not make other members of his team available for interviews and would only identify one, who didn’t respond to a request for comment. Kahraman said he had signed a contract with Sony but wouldn’t offer specifics. He also said the game was funded by investors but wouldn’t say who. “There is a reason for that, but I really can’t talk about it,” Kahraman said.
Kahraman named two of the “six or seven” outsourcing companies that he said Blue Box is working with: Nuare Studio and Dekogon Studios. Representatives for both companies declined to comment.
In a follow-up message, Kahraman said he plans to hold a live-stream video soon to answer questions and show the faces of his team. “People need it. Fast,” he said.
All the attention on Kahraman’s game could turn out to be a curse. The makers of Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky each made outlandish statements about what their game would be capable of and failed to deliver at launch. The hype turned to vitriol when the products were finally released.
Kahraman said Abandoned would be properly revealed within the next month and that he hoped it would put an end to the conspiracy theories: “If people still continue to believe in this rumor, that’s up to them.”
A New Apple iPhone Could Lift the Stock. Here’s When It Might Be Coming.
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The new iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro on display during launch day on October 23, 2020 in London, England.
Ming Yeung/Getty Images
Apple
stock has been dead in the water this year, as investors absorb the stock’s 81% surge in 2020—and think through the ramifications of the company’s fantastic March quarter financial performance, ongoing regulatory attention and continuing component shortages.
What Apple (ticker: AAPL) stock need is a new catalyst—like the fall iPhone launch.
Apple announces a new generation of iPhone every fall. Last year, in an announcement delayed by the pandemic, Apple unveiled the iPhone 12, the company’s first generation of 5G handsets. That launch was preceded by deafening buzz, and widespread speculation about a pending “supercycle” that would accelerate demand. And in fact, iPhone sales were up 66% in the March quarter, the first full reporting period since the launch.
There’s basically no buzz at all on the iPhone 13 (or whatever the next generation is called). But the new phones surely are coming. Wedbush analyst
Dan Ives
asserted in a research note Monday that an announcement is likely the third week of September. (The company has not actually announced a date, and isn’t likely to do so this far in advance.) He thinks the iPhone 13 will include a new 1 terabyte storage option, with a number of feature enhancements, including Lidar—laser-based radar—across all models, which should drive more adoption of augmented reality applications.
Ives says that his checks with the Apple supply chain in Asia finds that the company is targeting 130 million to 150 million overall units in the calendar second half. He adds that iPhone 13 appears to be 35% to 45% of iPhone third-quarter builds. He adds that initial build orders are in the 90 million to 100 million unit range for iPhone 13, up from his original estimate of initial orders of 80 million on iPhone 12.
His view: the surge in demand for 5G phones should continue from here, with a boost from the post-vaccine reopening environment.
Apple stock on Monday is up 1% to $131.68.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com
KeyWe – Release Date Trailer – Nintendo Switch – Nintendo
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Prime Day 2021: best gaming deals for PlayStation, PC, Xbox, and Switch
There are usually good gaming deals happening all the time, but Prime Day is especially good to gamers. Amazon is currently hosting some amazing deals on PlayStation 5 games, as well as headsets, headphones, phone clips, keyboards, mice, controllers, and other popular accessories. Other retailers are hosting attractive sales, too, as evident in our roundup of the best anti-Prime Day deals.
While we can’t expect to see price cuts on next-gen consoles like the PS5 or the Xbox Series X — or even availability, for that matter — there might be some surprise game or accessory deals you weren’t expecting. We’ve gathered the best gaming deals below, and we’ll be updating them throughout Prime Day alongside our main post, which highlights the best Prime Day deals happening now.
The best game deals for Prime Day
- Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition is $50 at Amazon (usually $70), the best price we’ve seen on Insomniac’s second outing with the popular superhero.
- The Nioh Collection is $50 at Amazon (typically $70), matching the lowest price we’ve seen on the remastered, 4K collection.
- Returnal is $50 at Amazon (normally $70), the lowest price we’ve seen on what is arguably the best PS5 exclusive thus far.
- Sackboy: A Big Adventure is $30 at Amazon (usually $60), the steepest discount we’ve seen yet on the charming platforming title.
- Demon’s Souls is $50 at Amazon (normally $70), matching the best price we’ve seen on the challenging launch title for the PS5.
Gaming mouse deals
Razer’s latest Basilisk is a solid option if you like the fit of Logitech’s G502 series mice but want something that looks a little more slick. Ergonomically, they’re very similar, and this model even has a scroll wheel with adjustable tension.
The best gaming laptop deals for Prime Day
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 is a bold and colorful gaming laptop with powerful chips inside. This configuration has a 240Hz screen, an Intel Core i7-10875H, a GeForce RTX 2070 Super, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.
- Razer Blade 15 Base (Intel Core i7-10750H, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, FHD, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD) is $1,000 at Amazon (usually $1,500), a 33% discount and the best price we’ve seen on the laptop.
- Acer’s Predator Triton 500 (Intel Core i7-10750H, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super, 16G RAM, 512GB storage, 300Hz) is $1,300 at Amazon (normally $1,800), the biggest price drop we’ve seen yet.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The best gaming headset deals for Prime Day
- SteelSeries’s Arctic 1 Gaming Headset is $35 at Amazon (usually $50), matching the lowest price we’ve seen yet on the budget-based, multi-platform gaming headset.
- Razer’s BlackShark V2 Gaming Headset is $80 at Amazon (normally $100), matching the lowest price we’ve seen on the multi-platform gaming headset.
- Razer’s Kaira Pro Wireless Gaming Headset is $120 at Amazon (usually $150), the lowest price we’ve seen on Razer’s feature-rich headset for the latest Xbox consoles.
- HyperX’s Cloud II Gaming Headset is $80 at Amazon (usually $100), matching the lowest price we’ve seen this year.
- HyperX’s Cloud Stinger Gaming Headset is $35 at Amazon (normally $50), falling just short of the lowest price drop we’ve ever seen on the multi-platform headset.
- HyperX’s Cloud Alpha S Gaming Headset is $100 at Amazon (typically $130), nearly matching the lowest price we’ve seen on the wired, PC-compatible headset.
- HyperX’s Cloud Flight Gaming Headset for the PS4, PS5, and PC is $100 at Amazon (usually $140), matching the lowest price we’ve seen recently.
- Razer’s Kraken Ultimate Gaming Headset is $70 at Amazon (typically $130), just shy of the lowest price we’ve seen on USB headset.
- SteelSeries’ Arctis 5 Gaming Headset is $70 at Amazon (usually $100), matching the lowest price we’ve seen on the flagship headset.
The best gaming keyboard deals for Prime Day
The best gaming monitor deals for Prime Day
Miscellaneous gaming deals for Prime Day
Leaked memo confirms OnePlus will become an Oppo sub-brand
Last week OnePlus CEO Pete Lau said in a forum post that the company will “further integrate” with Oppo, but didn’t elaborate on how that’d work in practise. Now, leaker Evan Blass has obtained a document that serves as a talking points memo for use by OnePlus PR, and it explains the integration in plainer terms.
“With the integration, OnePlus becomes a brand within Oppo, however will continue to function as an independent entity,” reads the most pertinent answer. The memo also says that Lau’s role as chief product officer at Oppo will make him responsible for the product strategies of both Oppo and OnePlus.
This isn’t particularly surprising. Here’s what I wrote last week following Lau’s post:
Reading between the lines, it sounds like OnePlus will essentially be treated like a label of Oppo’s, maintaining a separate consumer-facing operation but with business activities merging in areas beyond product development.
The memo confirms that this is essentially what’s going to happen, removing any need to read between the lines. “With the merging of both the firms, we will have more resources at hand to create even better products,” it says. “It will also allow us to be more efficient in our operations.” OnePlus and Oppo had already merged their R&D departments around the turn of the year, so the further integration is more to do with streamlining day-to-day business operations.
OnePlus customers shouldn’t necessarily expect too much to change — the shared ownership and supply chain meant that there have been similarities between Oppo and OnePlus phones for as long as OnePlus has existed. But now that OnePlus is acknowledging the relationship out loud instead of acting like it’s a scrappy startup, all eyes will be on the company’s next round of flagship phones.
ISS astronauts complete six-hour spacewalk to install solar panels | Space
French and American astronauts have completed a six-hour spacewalk as they installed new solar panels to boost power supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), Nasa said.
“It is a huge team effort each time and couldn’t be happier to return with @astro_kimbrough,” Frenchman Thomas Pesquet tweeted on Sunday, referring to his American colleague Shane Kimbrough. Pesquet is with the European Space Agency, Kimbrough with Nasa.
The two men, who arrived on the space station in late April, activated the internal batteries in their space suits at 11.42 GMT, then opened the hatch to the ISS airlock.
They then continued the work of positioning, attaching and deploying six new-generation solar panels, referred to as iROSA, for Roll-Out Solar Array.
The solar wing unrolled like a red carpet once the final set of bolts was released, relying solely on pent-up energy. The slow but steady extension took 10 minutes, with station cameras providing live TV views. “It is beautiful,” Pesquet called out.
“Well done, both of you,” Mission Control replied once the operation was complete. “That was great to see.”
As the six and a half hour spacewalk concluded, Kimbrough, who has three children, wished “Happy Father’s Day” to all the flight controller dads. “Thanks for working with us on a Sunday.”
The new solar wing – with five more to come – will give the ageing station a much needed electrical boost, as demand for experiments and space tourists grows.
The 19-metre (60 foot) panels were delivered to the station early this month by an uncrewed SpaceX flight. The astronauts are slated to complete the installation of a second solar panel array on Friday.
The panels will power both daily operations and the research and science projects carried out on the ISS and are expected to have a 15-year lifespan.
A first spacewalk on Wednesday ran into several snags, notably problems with Kimbrough’s spacesuit. He temporarily lost data on his spacesuit display unit, and then suffered a brief spike in the suit’s pressure reading.
Sunday’s outing was the fourth time the two astronauts had ventured into space together. In addition to Wednesday’s spacewalk, they did so twice on a 2017 mission, attached by tethers to the space station as it orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 400 kilometres (250 miles).
In all, there have been 240 ISS spacewalks as astronauts carry out the work of assembling and maintaining, as well as upgrading, the station.
Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report
Best Prime Day TV Deals 2021: Sony 75-Inch 4K TV For $600 Off; Fire TVs Starting At $100
Amazon Prime Day arrives this week, running June 21-22, and it’s one of the best opportunities outside of Black Friday to pick up a new TV for less. Whether you’re looking for a budget option or a high-end gaming TV, you’ll have some great Prime Day TV deals to choose from, both at Amazon and competing stores like Best Buy, the latter of which is running flash sales every day through Tuesday.
For Prime Day 2021, Amazon is discounting a wide range of Fire TVs from Toshiba and Insignia, starting at just $100 for a 24-inch HD smart TV up to a 65-inch smart 4K TV for $450. These are great options for streaming-focused households or for sticking in a bedroom, gym, or anywhere else you need an extra screen. Prime Day Fire TV deals also include markdowns on a Fire TV 4K Essentials bundle ($56) and the Fire TV gaming bundle ($74), which includes the Luna Controller.
4K TVs from brands like LG and Sony are discounted as well, from the Sony X950H 75-inch 4K Smart TV for $2,000 to the LG 65-inch CX OLED 4K TV, our top pick for gaming, for $1,850. Check out the best Prime Day TV deals available now below–we’ll continue updating this story as more great discounts appear online. And if you’re looking to upgrade your home theater room further, check out the best Prime Day soundbar deals.
$380 (was $490) | Sunday flash deal
Exclusively at Best Buy today only, you can snag a Hisense 60-inch 4K TV for $110 off. Well-rated with an average 4.6 out of 5 stars, the Hisense A6G Series TV supports Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10, auto low-latency mode for smooth, lag-free gameplay, and DTS Virtual:X for immersive audio. It also has the Android TV interface for streaming from services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Disney+.
If you’re just looking for a no-fuss 4K set and love the Amazon Fire TV interface, then the two combine in Insignia’s 65-inch TV that includes Amazon’s streaming box inside. That means no fussing with new apps or an unfamiliar OS, just the same streaming collection and navigation that you might already be used to. Even if having Fire TV doesn’t matter to you, you’ll still benefit from the crispness of the 4K panel and the large screen size. This could be a main TV in your home, and it costs less than 500 bucks right now.
More Insignia Prime Day deals:
Insignia is one of the brands Amazon is heavily pushing during Prime Day with cheap HD and 4K TV deals.
A 2021 Toshiba 55-inch 4K TV is discounted among Prime Day’s TV deals–the C350 Series TV features Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10, DTS Virtual:X surround sound, and, of course, has Fire TV built-in so you can surf multiple streaming services with one device that does it all.
More Toshiba Prime Day deals:
Like Insignia, Amazon is pushing Toshiba TV deals hard during Prime Day. They all come with Fire TV and offer an affordable range of 720p to 4K displays.
LG has carved out a space in the market exclusively for its OLED TVs, and for good reason. The CX might be 2020’s consumer model, but it’s still one of the best 4K TVs you can buy today for any content, and especially if you’re looking for a premium experience for movies and games. With its support for Dolby Vision, incredible contrast and color reproduction, and inclusion of four HDMI 2.1 ports, it’s a good investment for the future, too. And even before Prime Day, you can grab it for a great price.
Sony’s X950H offers a stellar picture as well as some great tech that makes it easy to recommend. The X950H has Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision as well as a fast 120Hz refresh rate and crisp 4K resolution with HDR. While its lack of HDMI 2.1 is a bummer, it’s still a wonderful TV for gaming and watching movies/TV thanks to its fast and efficient X1 processor. It comes with Google assistant built-in, too. The 75-inch model is on sale for $2,000 at Amazon, down from $2,500.
While the CX is balanced for price and performance, LG does offer a tier higher with its GX line, which is at its lowest price at Amazon right now. This deal on the 77-inch is vastly more expensive, but you get the same features–incredible HDR support, HDMI 2.1, and more–with a much bigger display that also comes with a handy wall mount. That allows you to place it flush with a wall, making it look like a piece of art when it displays one of its many dynamic wallpapers. If aesthetics are as important as image quality, then it doesn’t get much better than this.
Another great pick from Sony is the X80J, which launched earlier this year. You lose out on HDMI 2.1 support at this price, but you still get a suitably large 65-inch display with HDR support (including Dolby Vision) and low-latency game modes for all your consoles. The TV is equipped with Google TV, the latest streaming suite from the company that has started replacing Android TV. Its ADS panel is like a typical IPS one, which means you can depend on great color reproduction and even better viewing angles.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event.
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Warzone Players Found A Door That Instantly Kills Anyone Who Touches It
Last week, the new update for Call of Duty Warzone launched. It was the start of Season 4, bringing new content to the popular battle royale shooter. It also seems to have added a killer door that will instantly end the life of anyone who gets too close.
The dangerous door in question can be found in a salt mining facility, in a large building. At first glance, the door looks boring and safe. But if you get too close to it the door will drop your ass faster than a sniper rifle.
Players are sharing video clips of this deadly door. Most players theorize this is a bug, which seems like a logical explanation to me. Others have also suggested that this bug and the deadly door might be connected to the red doors that have begun popping up in Warzone since the last major update.
These red doors act as a sort of fast travel system, letting players get around the large Warzone map a bit quicker. What makes things tricky is these doors don’t always spawn in the same location and can lead to various pots, making it hard to predict what will happen once you go through. However, none of these red doors are supposed to kill you the moment you touch them.
So maybe this is supposed to be a red door spawn, but something has gone horribly wrong behind the scenes, somewhere deep in the code of Warzone. That wouldn’t surprise me. After all, Call of Duty Warzone is a huge game.
G/O Media may get a commission
Earlier this year, Call of Duty Warzone players were using overpowered trucks to kill multiple players and win matches. This led to a cargo truck meta for some time. Now a boring door is killing people the moment they touch it.
And here I thought Warzone was a game about dodging bullets and using guns, not dodging killer doors and trucks.
(H/T: ComicBook.com)
Read More: Warzone Feels More Like Call of Duty Than Blackout Ever Did
Tech workers worked from road during Covid, may not return
Courtesy of Kartik Vasan and Smriti Bhadauria
When Erica Horn received a work email in May 2020 saying her company would be fully remote for the next year, she knew right away it was time to live out her long-held dream of living out of a van.
“Nothing else made more sense than van life once that reality became true,” said Horn, who lived in Oakland before moving into her van. “I had no reason, nothing, tying me to that specific location or that amount of rent.”
Horn is not alone. Many workers with jobs that let them work remotely during the pandemic left behind their sedentary housing situations and moved full-time into vans. These remote workers drive from location to location in their homes, working from internet hotspots in their vans and spending their free time in nature and exploring new places.
As vaccines roll out and states start to open up, some workers are returning to their offices. But many workers who’ve adopted the van life don’t want to give it up.
“It’s become a lifestyle,” said Smriti Bhadauria, who lives in her van with her husband Kartik Vasan and their dog Everest. Bhadauria and Vasan have been traveling in their 1977 Dodge B200 Tradesman since leaving Toronto in August 2020.
“We’re extremely happy in this life and the freedom it gives,” Bhadauria said. “There’s no deadline in sight.”
Like overseas backpacking, van life appeals to those with a love for travel or the outdoors who have the privilege to work remotely and the budget to spend thousands of dollars buying and setting up their vans. They can shift the money from rent and car payments toward a lifestyle of endless travel.
“I’ve always been somebody who loves to travel, but I’m definitely a homebody at the same time,” said Cailey Dillon, who works remotely in customer service for Outdoorsy, a van and RV rental company. “I really like that with the van life you can always be traveling but your home is always with you.”
Courtesy of Kenzo Fong Hing
For some, working out of a van is less about travel and more of an alternative to leasing an office.
Kenzo Fong, CEO of tech start-up Rock, began working out of his van in May 2020 after his children began doing their schoolwork at home during the pandemic. Fong still lives in his San Francisco home, but during the days, he gets into his van and picks a new location in the city. Fong spends his day working out of the desk he’s set up in his van, and takes walking breaks to enjoy the variety of locations and gather his thoughts.
Fong prefers this to having an hour-long commute each way from San Francisco to Mountain View, California, as he did for his previous job at Google.
“I just can’t imagine myself doing that again because there’s so much flexibility working from anywhere,” said Fong, whose company builds software for remote workers.
Courtesy of Kartik Vasan and Smriti Bhadauria
‘Internet is the most important thing’
Buying and setting up a van can be a quick process. But people who really get into it can spend months or years getting set up.
Fong, for example, bought an already-converted van and financed it, and pays a couple hundred dollars each month.
“Way less than getting office space in San Francisco,” he said.
In contrast, Horn spent months working on her van with her dad and a contractor, setting up the van to the specifications that she wanted. By the end of the project, she had spent about $60,000 — $25,000 for a used van and another approximate $35,000 on the build.
Van life vehicles need a few basics: A place to sleep, a desk or table space, kitchen equipment and some sort of bathroom setup.
But perhaps most important is the computer and internet equipment. Some van lifers only need a laptop. Others have more elaborate set ups complete with multiple monitors. But most carry at least two hot spots from different network providers so they can catch signal from at least one of the services as they hit new locations.
“Internet is the most important thing,” said Fong, who has a hotspot for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. “I basically have all the major carriers in case I need it.”
These internet requirements sometimes require innovative solutions. Horn recounts finding a great campsite in Sedona, Arizona, but not finding a good signal. So every morning she drove 30 minutes to a nearby town and parked in front of a Staples store where she could finally get a strong connection.
“It’s not always glamorous,” Horn said with a laugh.
Working a nine-to-five job can also be a nuisance for van life workers. For full-timers like Horn, a typical work schedule means they might be parked somewhere gorgeous without being able to enjoy it until the weekend.
This is why many in the van lifestyle are freelance workers, said Jess Shishler, the founder of Sekr, an app that helps people who live in vans can find campsites or wi-fi locations.
“A nine-to-five is hard but doable,” said Shisler, who also lives in a van. “The type of remote careers that allow you more flexibility of your schedule are easier to do in this lifestyle.”
Bhadauria and Vasan, for example, do project-based work.
Vasan works in information technology while Bhadauria has a digital marketing job. The two spend the early hours of their days outdoors and then get straight to work. In the afternoon, they’ll take a break from work and explore their area or drive to their next location. No matter what, they prioritize catching the sunset every evening. Ironically, much of their actual work gets done on Saturday and Sunday.
“We almost never do activities on the weekends because it’s usually crowded, so weekends end up being work days for us,” Vasan said.
Downsides include dirt and loneliness
There’s also a lot of work that goes into living out of a van.
Dillon said she was surprised at how dirty her van gets. She spent the first four months of 2021 living on the road, and she is now home in Platte City, Missouri, working and preparing to purchase an upgraded van so she can return to her travels sometime this summer. While living in her van, she would clean and clean, but the van would get dirty again as soon as the wind blew. Eventually, Dillon said, you just learn to live a little bit dirtier.
Another big challenge is dealing with the loneliness that comes with living on the road. Dillon said she felt very lonely during her first three weeks on the road, and it wasn’t until she got her dog Koda that she began to overcome that loneliness.
“I like to be a loner, but it does sometimes get a little too lonely,” she said. “Getting my dog really helped a lot with that loneliness.”
Horn said she spends parts of her days doing van chores, such as cleaning and putting away her bed each day to make space so she can live and work. She also has to empty the van’s grey water tank and portable toilet and refill her fresh water and propane.
“Most of the moments are not those epic sleeping in the most amazing place and waking up to the most amazing view, it’s very little of that in the grand majority, especially if you’re working,” Horn said. “However, those moments make it worth it.”
Bhadauria, who travels with her husband and their dog, Everest, says she doesn’t get lonely, but there are times when she misses the friends that come with living in one location. For example, Bhadauria said, she would have wanted to throw a big party for her husband’s 30th birthday, which happened during their time on the road.
“Things like that you miss, when you want a big gathering or a sense of community,” Bhadauria said.
Although she and Vasan love life on the road and plan to continue it for the foreseeable future, they understand the lifestyle is not sustainable indefinitely.
“With everything you get to a point where things start feeling boring or there’s a burn out at some point,” Bhadauria said. “If we get to that stage, we’ll be happy to go back to a home base somewhere.”
Despite the challenges of life on the road, those who spoke with CNBC said they plan to continue their nomadic lifestyle until their companies stop allowing remote work or until they get burnt out. Horn said she originally planned to live on the road for at least a year, but that’s now changed.
“At six months, I still feel like I’m just learning this, just getting the hang of it and just getting started,” she said. “I could actually see myself doing it for closer to two years, and who knows, maybe longer.”
