HTML5 mind blowing

Arcade Fire and Google Chrome team up for an emotional cross promotion

"The Wilderness Machine" creates something purely digital and brings it back toanalog form.
Arcade Fire is a band particularly clued in to the capabilities of the Internet.

Is it a music video, a guerilla Google Chrome promotion, or an elaborate showpiece for HTML5? It's hard to say, and it could be all of those things.

But The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive online movie experience created by Chris Milk and "some friends at Google" with HTML5 for the Arcade Fire single "We Used to Wait" is one thing — fuckin' COOL.

The site (which, as to be expected, begs for Chrome) prompts viewers to provide their childhood address and then, using elements of a short film created by Milk and the technology of Google Maps (particularly the satellite feature), sends the viewer on an emotional journey to his or her own past, culminating in a "postcard" they write to their childhood self.

The video inhabits a dozen separate windows that pop up and close unprompted across the screen for a layered effect best experienced with all other applications closed. Once concluded, it gives viewers the option of sharing their postcard. If they opt to share, it will be sent either to Arcade Fire to be played on their North American tour or to another viewer. If you receive a postcard from the project — in hard copy, "analog" form — you can plant it.

The envelopes are seeded, and if planted will grow into a tree — a major theme of the video.

HTML5 is being billed as the next major revision in coding, and if this project is any indication, the realm of its possibilities is staggering.

I've spent my entire morning mapping the site to different nostalgic addresses, sending the film's hero or heroine (the protagonist kid-in-a-hoodie is ambiguously gendered) running around my old high school, church and beach house.

The project was produced by Academy Award-winning media company Radical Media and is an impressive portent of what's to come in coding and in music. Arcade Fire — whose lead singer Win Butler grew up in The Woodlands — seems particularly clued in, and I'm eager for their next move.

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income analysis

Texas families need to make this much money for one parent to stay home

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

With costs to raise a child soaring over $20,000 a year in Texas, some households might decide to have one parent work while the other stays at home to raise their child.

As the cost of raising a child balloons in major cities like Houston, many families are weighing the choice between paying for child care or having one parent stay home full-time.

A recent analysis from SmartAsset determined the minimum income one parent needs to earn to support their partner staying at home to raise one child in all 50 states. In Texas — not just Houston — that amount is just under $75,000.

The study used the MIT Living Wage Calculator to compare the annual living wages needed for a household with two working adults and one child, and a household with one working adult, a stay-at-home parent, and one child. The study also calculated how much it would cost to raise a child with two working parents based on factors such as "food, housing, childcare, healthcare, transportation, incremental income taxes and other necessities."

A Texas household with one working parent would need to earn $74,734 a year to support a stay-at-home partner and a child, the report found. If two parents worked in the household, necessitating some additional costs like childcare and transportation, it would require an additional $10,504 in annual income to raise their child.

SmartAsset said the cost to raise a child in Texas in a two-working-parent household adds up to $23,587. Raising a child in Houston, however, is somewhat more affordable. A separate SmartAsset study from June 2025 determined it costs $21,868 to raise a child in the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands metro.

In the report's ranking of states with the highest minimum income needed to support a family with one working adult, a stay-at-home parent, and one child, Texas ranked 32nd on the list.

In other states like Massachusetts, where raising a child can cost more than $40,000 a year, the report acknowledges ways families are working to reduce any financial burdens.

"This often includes considerations around who’s going to work in the household, and whether young children will require paid daycare services while parents are occupied," the report said. "With tradeoffs abound, many parents might seek to understand the minimum income needed to keep the family afloat while allowing the other parent to stay home to raise a young child."

The top 10 states with the lowest minimum income threshold to support a three-person family on one income are:

West Virginia – $68,099
Arkansas – $68,141
Mississippi – $70,242
Kentucky – $70,408
North Dakota – $70,949
Oklahoma – $71,718
Ohio – $72,114
South Dakota – $72,218
Alabama – $72,238
Nebraska – $72,966

texas income smartasset family