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There are only a handful of albums that I think qualify as genuinely scary. You Won't Get What You Want by Daughters, and Swans To Be Kind both immediately come to mind. But those records come with… let's say, baggage. I've Seen All I Need to See lacks some of the atmospheric spookiness of To Be Kind and the flashes of pop-tinged menace of You Won't Get What You Want, but it makes up for that with unrelenting brutality. It's not the soundtrack to a slasher film, it's the most violent scene in the bleakest horror film, rendered as blown-out…

Adobe’s computational photography app, Project Indigo, had a bit of trouble adapting to the new square-format selfie sensor in the iPhone 17 series. For the last month or so, the app simply didn’t support Apple’s latest phones at all. Adobe was working behind the scenes to get things up and running, and posting occasional updates to the Adobe Community forums. But the company has decided to simply turn off access to the front-facing camera entirely, in order to get some version of Project Indigo out the door with iPhone 17 support. The app debuted back in June and immediately started…

"Sharp Dressed Man," by ZZ Top. Hard on a good day, Medium when my friends were over, Expert once and then never ever again. That was my Guitar Hero sweet spot. And for years, it seemed like everybody had one. The plastic guitar controllers became a staple of living rooms everywhere, and the songs - from big bands, small bands, and bands that didn't even actually exist - became huge hits. Long before TikTok was the most important thing in music, getting your track on a Guitar Hero setlist could change your life forever. For this episode of Version History,…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 103, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, sorry everything's so expensive this week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about gooning and Costco and protein bars and the Jonas Brothers, bingeing Nobody Wants This season two, trying to figure out how to save $4,500 for the new Rivian e-bike, telling anyone who will listen that T-Pain's still got it, learning everything I can about the Louvre heist, playing a surprising amount of…

Robots will be flipping your burgers soon. Right now, there are robots stocking convenience store shelves in Japan. We haven't embraced that tech here in America yet, but it's hard to imagine 7-11 or Walmart won't at least experiment with it soon. Walmart gave up on its shelf-scanning robots in 2020, but machine vision and AI have improved a lot in the last five years, and it's only a matter of time before it's a machine refilling that row of family-sized Fruity Pebbles and not a kid earning some extra cash during senior year of high school. Truth is, there…

You can grab a four-pack of AirTags for just $64.99 right now. Apple’s AirTags have become one of my essentials while traveling, namely because they let me check whether my luggage is in the right place instead of panicking at the baggage claim. And right now, you can get a four-pack of AirTags at Amazon and Walmart for $64.99 ($35 off), which is just a few cents short of the bundle’s all-time low. The sleek Bluetooth trackers let you check their location using Apple’s Find My app. If the item is out of Bluetooth range, you can flag the AirTag…

MSI’s flagship is indeed titanic in stature, and certainly price. It's easy to get into the weeds on a hobby, especially if you're into PC gaming and dreaming of the highest levels of graphical performance. But how much is too much for hardware? Spending top dollar on graphics power, processing, RAM, storage, etc. - like many things - eventually leads to diminishing returns. When it comes to gaming laptops, MSI's $5,699.99 Titan 18 is well beyond that inflection point. But it's also like nothing else. It's not very logical to spend that much when other excellent gaming laptops are nearly…

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries out raids across the country, the agency is working rapidly to expand an online surveillance system that could potentially track millions of users on the web. Federal records uncovered by The Lever reveal that ICE is paying $5.7 million to use an AI-powered social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs, something Will Owen, the communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), calls an "assault" on democracy and free speech. The "real-time intelligence" platform is capable of ingesting and analyzing vast amounts of publicly available data, like social media … Read the full…

It took me a while to get into Ball x Pit. The new roguelike blends elements from games like Breakout, Vampire Survivors, and even city builders, creating a complex mix of ideas. But as is the case with many roguelikes, once I figured everything out well enough to get a taste of my first win, delving back into the pit for another round was all I could think about. Ball x Pit barely has a story - it's more like a setup. The initial moments of the game show a multi-tiered Gondor-like city called "Ballbylon" being struck by a giant,…