No, you don’t need a sous-vide. You don’t need one from Mellow or Anova or Nomiku. A sous-vide will not make your life better or easier or more fashionable. This is not a crockpot. This is not an instant pot. Dinner won’t magically appear at 6:30pm. Despite what sous-vide makers tell you, food will not always be the perfect temperature or consistency as long as the word “perfect” is subjective.

You won’t always even be sure you like the food that comes out of your sous-vide.

So what are these various sous-vide contraptions? They’re experiment machines. If you like to play around in the kitchen, if you’re OK with a meal occasionally turning out a little weird or a little raw in exchange for that one magic night when everything tastes out-of-orbit amazing, then perhaps a sous-vide is for you. But disabuse yourself of the notion that you’ll be using this every night to feed your large family of toddler children. This is for the big kids and the people who can chug wine if the fat on your meat never rendered. This is for the stay-cation date night.

If 2016 was the year that true home-VR systems arrived, 2017 may be best described as the year that they didn’t die. Backhanded as that may sound, this compliment is indeed sincere. In spite of a lack of major, industry-changing hardware arriving, virtual reality games and apps continue to be produced, and aging headsets continue to sell (thanks, in part, to dropping prices and cheaper compatible computers).

As a result, the year in VR was less about holy-cow-wow innovations and more about smarter, more-compelling VR content finding its way to system owners. And with more users, true VR multiplayer is starting to emerge, which means it’s getting a little less lonely inside of these headsets.

In the end, the best VR content stands out for delivering experiences that are altogether impossible on flat screens, and that rule guides my picks for the best VR content in 2017. Games dominate this year’s list, if only because last year saw so many incredible applications that have yet to be topped. But this list contains a couple of exceptions. (Last year, I called Google Earth VR and Tilt Brush “killer apps,” and I further stand by those compliments thanks to major, free updates to both apps in the past 12 months.)