TV Club Rick Grimes deserved a better sendoff than The Walking Dead’s idiotic goodbye | Deadspin Michael Thomas’s Cell Phone Celebration Was Cool, No Matter What The Announcers Said | Jezebel Mo’Nique Gives Rebel Wilson a History Lesson After ‘Plus-Sized’ Comments | The Root Iowa Teacher Who Wore Blackface Cries…
League of Legends developer Riot Games opened its annual world championships with a special K-pop augmented reality performance created specifically to promote its new K/DA skins.
Riot introduced four new K/DA skins for League of Legends players recently, and to celebrate the launch, the developer teamed up with popular K-pop stars Madison Beer, (G)I-DLE, and Jaira Burns. The song, “Pop/Stars,” is performed by the aforementioned artists in the video above, and they’re accompanied by some of the four K/DA skins onstage via augmented reality.
Not only is the opening ceremonies performance incredible to watch — especially as AR versions of the K/DA skins glide across the stage or emerge from the air — but the song is also a straight up...
It’s not unusual to see a Fortnite dance celebration at the end of a goal in any sport, so it was only a matter of time before the battle royale game officially teamed up with someone to bring that connection in-game. Today, Epic Games announced a partnership with the National Football League that will bring a variety of jersey cosmetics that players can wear.
According to Epic, these outfits can look like any of the thirty-two NFL teams on the roster, though players will be able to choose their own number. There will also be a made-up Fortnite team jersey. All jerseys will be available on November 9th in the in-game shop, though the price is unknown. Based on the video accompanying the announcement, it seems that this tie-in will also...
A large part of parenting is trying to raise our kids to be good citizens. We give them chores to teach them to contribute to the work of the household, we take them to volunteer to get them involved in their community, and we model kindness and respect to those around us.
Cameras have been getting progressively more advanced from a technical side of things. Some companies are replacing simple dials and knobs with giant touchscreens and even integrated Adobe Lightroom software. Taken in that light, the Yongnuo YN450 seems like the logical conclusion here: it’s a full-fledged mirrorless camera with support for Canon’s EF line of lenses, but it also runs Android Nougat on a 5-inch touchscreen display, via PetaPixel.
And it sure does look a whole lot like Youngnuo has literally bolted a camera together with an Android phone. The photography side of things offers a 16-megapixel Four Thirds sensor that can shoot in RAW, along with 4K video at 30 fps (and the aforementioned Canon EF lens compatibility).
But...
We roasted Verizon last year when it brought it merged its AOL and Yahoo purchases into a new group called Oath. Today, the company’s CEO Guru Gowrappan announced that Oath is no more; Verizon’s collective media outlets will be called the Verizon Media Group starting in 2019.
This shift comes with other organizational changes that mostly involve segmenting Verizon’s respective businesses from one another, including new consumer and business-focused groups. Oath’s media assets (including the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, and Tumblr) are all continuing onward under the new, less bizarre parent company name.
Oath, HuffPost's oddly-named corporate parent company that came of merging AOL and Yahoo, is phasing out the name and...
The sequel to Anki’s lovable, Pixar-like toy robot is much more powerful. But it’s still very much a toy
The use of psychoactive cannabis stretches back to ancient Mesopotamia. Tool use stretches back to our pre-human ancestors. These mighty forces converge on /r/StonerEngineering, a subreddit for weed hacks.
You don’t necessarily need to buy a new mattress to get a better night’s sleep: Sometimes, a mattress pad will do, and one of Amazon’s most popular options is 25% off today with promo code KINJAPAD.
The end of the year is fast approaching, bringing with it the yearly anxiety of what the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne” are, and what gifts you should be getting for the wonderful people in your life. Whether that’s for friends, family, coworkers, pets, they, them, him, her, secret Santa, or white elephant, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what to get people.
So to make your lives a little easier in 2018, we’ve tapped into the collective knowledge of The Verge to put together a list of great gifts for all manner of ages, sizes, and budgets. Or at least you might get a good present idea for a loved one from our recommendations.
Editorial lead: Michael Moore
Art direction: James Bareham
Photography: Amelia Holowaty Krales
R...
Miami! The Vice city, the CSI: city, the Hotline city, the Kourtney and Kim Take city. Home of Dave Barry, Tony Montana, and not actually Will Smith. I’m drivin’ here! That’s how Miamians talk. I’ve only been to Miami Beach and the Wynwood Art District, surrounded by my fellow yuppie hipsters. What did I miss? What’s…
“Every time we interact with Facebook… we make them more powerful.”
Let’s cut the crap and stop pretending there’s anything you want to watch this week besides The Great British Baking Show: Collection 6 (better known as Series 9 in the UK). It’s the most soothing show that ever there was and we all know it.
The thing about bullet trains is that they’re always on rails
Amazon’s latest brick-and-mortar shop, one of its 4-star stores, opens today in Berkeley, California, marking the third 4-star location in just two months. The 4-star store, which sells a mix of Amazon-made electronics like Echo speakers and Fire tablets and other popular items sold on Amazon.com with at least 4-star customer rating or above, first opened in New York City back in late September. Last week, a listing for a new store in Colorado popped up, and Amazon confirmed that the location — in Lone Tree outside of Denver would be opening on Thursday of last week with one in Berkeley coming soon.
Now, it appears the opening was imminent, as Amazon says its Berkeley location is opening its doors today for the first time after a...
Starting today in the US, Amazon says it’s removing the minimum purchase requirement for an order to qualify for free delivery for non-Prime members. Normally, you have to spend $25 in order to qualify for free standard shipping — which usually takes between five and eight days — from the online retailer. An exact end-point was not given for the promotion, which Amazon described as a limited-time offer for the holiday season.
The promotion comes as Target last month introduced free two-day shipping in an attempt to capture more of the market during the holiday shopping rush. Walmart offers free two-day shipping on orders of $35 and up. Amazon’s promotion will further ratchet up the pressure on these incumbent retailers, making it...
I’m a sucker for anything that takes text data and turns it into something visual. This week I came across Location History Visualizer, a tool that creates a heat map using your Google Location History.
TCL’s 2018 6-series TVs are famous for offering every form of HDR (including top-shelf Dolby Vision) and excellent Roku software in an affordable package, and the 5-series has basically all of the same features, save for a metal body and local LED dimming zones. It still supports Dolby Vision, it still has an advanced…
Hello all you bags of Internet horror meat, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only outlaw dating advice column north of the Rio Bravo.
No matter what your political affiliation, you can probably agree on one thing: politics have gotten stressful.
GM made a fun surprise announcement at this past week’s Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) trade show: an all-electric Chevrolet Camaro concept with 700 horsepower meant to bust out a quarter mile run in about nine seconds. And unlike EV performance cars like the NIO EP9 or the upcoming second-generation Tesla Roadster, which are purpose-built, the Camaro concept appears to be a beautiful, cobbled-together Frankenstein’s monster of a car.
The car, dubbed the eCOPO Concept (after the original COPO Camaro special order performance models from the late 1960s) looks like any other modern Camaro from the outside, even in electric blue paint. Inside is much different. For instance, the eCOPO is powered by a combination of...
If you use Facebook (or even if you don’t) you probably know that advertisers have some information about you. Targeted ads are Facebook’s special juice, and scroll down your timeline will likely prove that the ads you’re seeing are anything but random. What you may not realize; however, is that you can also see…
For fans of The Walking Dead, Steven Yeun is a familiar face — he played fan-favorite character Glenn Rhee over the course of six years and seven seasons of the show, in the process earning a fandom and rapidly kickstarting a widely varying acting career. Asian-American actors often struggle to find roles that don’t fall into simple, predictable stereotypes, but Yeun has kept things complicated, playing a conflicted animal-rights activist in Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix weird fable Okja, a confident union agitator in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, and lone-wolf pilot Keith in the animated series Voltron: Legendary Defender.
Yeun’s latest film, Burning, adapts the 1992 Haruki Murakami story “Barn Burning,” about an awkward Japanese outsider...
There are a ton of podcasts out there, but finding the right one can be difficult. In our column Pod Hunters, we cover what we’ve been listening to that we can’t stop thinking about.
Just two days after the deadly school shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, authorities in Vermont arrested 18-year-old Jack Sawyer, who told a friend that he planned to commit a similar shooting at his former high school. The revelation had a bombshell effect on the state: Republican governor Phil Scott eventually signed three bills that implemented some restrictions on gun ownership in the traditionally gun-friendly state. Earlier this fall, Vermont Public Radio released a five-part podcast called Jolted that delved into the...
Guillermo del Toro is behind some of cinema’s most inventive and visually-pleasing genre films in recent years — Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, Hellboy, and The Shape of Water all enjoy stunning costume and set design that complement their stories and which stand out from the rest of what you might see in theaters. A new video from YouTuber Kristian Williams, (aka kaptainkristian) explores why the filmmaker’s movie monsters are so memorable, especially in an age when CGI is so prevalent.
A key reason for why del Toro’s films are so memorable is the attention to detail and effort put into the design of his characters, and how they interact with their surroundings. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Williams notes that the faun complements his...
Guillermo del Toro is behind some of cinema’s most inventive and visually-pleasing genre films in recent years — Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, Hellboy, and The Shape of Water all enjoy stunning costume and set design that complement their stories and which stand out from the rest of what you might see in theaters. A new video from YouTuber Kristian Williams, aka kaptainkristain explores why the filmmaker’s movie monsters are so memorable, especially in an age when CGI is so prevalent.
A key reason for why del Toro’s films are so memorable is the attention to detail and effort put into the design of his characters, and how they interact with their surroundings. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Williams notes that the faun complements his...
Steve Jobs changed the world of laptops 10 years ago when he introduced the MacBook Air by removing it from a tiny paper office envelope. It was a moment that shocked the audience at Apple’s Macworld 2008 keynote, and sent shockwaves through the entire PC market. Apple created a wedge shaped laptop that at its thickest part was still thinner than the thinnest part of the Sony TZ Series — one of the thinnest laptops back in 2008. No other PC maker had anything that could compete, and it took years for the PC market to find an answer.
Apple’s MacBook Air from 10 years ago signaled a new era for laptops, but the company’s latest refresh, unveiled earlier this week, shows how the competition has caught up. While the original MacBook Air...
A huge discount on the Instant Pot, an incredible TV value, and discounts on big brands from Backcountry lead off Sunday’s best deals from around the web.
In October, Elon Musk said that the Boring Company’s proof-of-concept tunnel in LA will open to the public on December 10th. Last night, he said on Twitter that the opening is still on track, and posted a video of his walk down the entire length of the tunnel.
The sped-up video takes just over 30 seconds, and shows off the tunnel that Musk describes as “disturbingly long.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2018
Construction on the tunnel began over a year ago, and extends from SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters, to an LA suburb. Since then, the Boring Company has been selected to build tunnels for Chicago and Washington DC, and has sketched out plans to build a larger network of tunnels under...
Motorola today announced that it’s bringing the Motorola One to the United States a few months after the Android One phone launched internationally. It will be available exclusively from Best Buy for $399; you’ll be able to order it online (in black) beginning November 9th or find it in stores (in white) as of November 11th. The One is sold as a GSM-unlocked device, so it’ll work on AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Verizon or Sprint.
The Motorola One has a 5.9-inch display (720x1520) with a notch and a chin big enough for Moto to stamp its logo on. The rest of its spec sheet is also on the mid-range side: you get a Qualcomm 625 processor, 64GB storage (with microSD), 4GB RAM, a 13-megapixel camera, and an 8-megapixel selfie cam. Its battery...
A new report from noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested that Apple’s 2019 iPhone offerings will come with an upgraded Face ID camera system.
Kuo, (via MacRumors) says that he believes that Apple will utilize a new sensor that will better illuminate one’s face “to lower the impacts from visible lights of environment in order to improve the Face ID user experience.”
The report also suggests that Apple might introduce another range-sensing system with a Time of Flight 3D camera in its 2019 or 2020 iPads (potentially with the 2020 iPhones. This type of sensor measures the time in which a light dot travels between the camera and subject, and could be used to capture 3D images. The system could potentially be used for augmented reality...
I couldn’t decide if I wanted to play MapleStory 2 when it was released globally in October. I had eagerly anticipated it since its South Korean launch in 2015, but now that it was here, I needed to see if my friends and boyfriend — whom I met in the original MapleStory — wanted to join, so that I would have a guild and people to party up with on quests.
It wasn’t long before they seemed bored by it. During the beta testing phase this May, hardly anyone was approved to be a beta tester, so the worlds of Maple were lonesome. Then in the weeks leading up to MapleStory 2’s global launch, nobody said a word in my Discord channel. Nobody, it seemed, cared. That included me — I planned to spend this winter getting comfy with my PS4, trying...
AmazonBasics makes pretty much everything at this point, and generally speaking, it’s a brand you can count on to be affordable and of good quality. While Amazon runs discounts on individual AmazonBasics products with some regularity, a whole bunch of it is on sale right now.
The holidays are coming up fast which means it’s time to start crafting that perfect Out of Office message. I used to try and be creative with these, but at some point reverted to the classic “I’m out until X. Email this guy if you need something.” It’s not exactly going to put a smile on anyone’s face, but it gets…
Mexicans love a good fiesta and we also sure love to eat—fortunately, the two are never mutually exclusive. Día De Los Muertos (Day Of The Dead) is one such food-filled Mexican holiday that has gone through its fair of changes; what was previously a celebration held at the beginning of summer is now a three-day affair…
Ever wonder where your tax dollars are actually going? While I have a decent general idea of what the government funds, I’ve never taken a look at how my money specifically is being used by the state and federal government.
You can find a lot of Halloween-themed coverage on The Verge, but this week also marked the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos — and the 20th anniversary of Grim Fandango, the classic adventure game that was heavily inspired by it. Grim Fandango was one of the last games from the acclaimed studio LucasArts, and its clever blend of noir pastiche and folklore has earned it acclaim since the very beginning, when GameSpot praised its “great writing and beautiful art direction.”
There’s a less-than-proud tradition of artists ripping off surface-level Día de Muertos imagery, an issue game director Tim Schafer has discussed: “I knew I was appropriating someone else’s culture, so the idea was to be as authentic as possible and do as much research as...
Daylight Savings Time officially ends tonight. Clocks get rolled back an hour overnight, which means for next new months the sun is going to start setting around the time you’re likely headed home from the office and we’ll all see a bit less daytime.
Amazon is apparently narrowing in on its location for its second headquarters: Crystal City, Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington DC in Northern Virginia. The Washington Post says that the company has “held advanced discussions” that are “more detailed” than similar talks happening in other candidate locations in the immediate region and around the country.
The Post says that the talks have included discussions about which buildings the company can occupy, and how quickly it can more employees there. It cites two people “close to the process” that indicate that Amazon could likely move “several hundred employees” into a pair of office buildings within nine months if the city is ultimately selected.
Sources also tell the Post that...
Last week we put out a video about how the golden age of streaming services — where you sign up for one service and find a wealth of content from all over — is rapidly ending. And tellingly enough, one of the best examples of a service like that, FilmStruck, which specialized in classic cinema, announced plans to shut down just days later.
I’ve complained about this plenty of times before, but you can already feel the squeeze, especially on Netflix. Netflix isn’t just pushing its own TV shows because they’re new — it’s pushing them because they’re the only content Netflix can truly guarantee.
In some ways, it’s the à la carte TV dream — now you’ll just have to pay for the streaming service you want. But when you have to sign up for more...
Black Friday isn’t quite here yet, but we wouldn’t blame you for assuming it was late November already given the amount of deals that have started to pop up. Target has unleashed its Black Friday ad, and we expect others to follow suit shortly.
Before things get too hectic with shopping for the holidays, there are a some really good deals to check out — a few of which will expire pretty soon.
Expiring later today, November 3rd, is the big promo blitz for Red Dead Redemption 2 that takes $100 off an Xbox One console when you buy the new open-world game. Developer Rockstar’s latest title comes free in this promo, plus you’ll get a new console for the cheapest prices we’ve seen yet. Find a few of the best bundles below, and check out more...
Big savings on Amazon’s furniture brands, an essential cookbook, and one of the best Dyson discounts we’ve ever seen lead off Saturday’s best deals from around the web.
Wireless carriers are preparing for 5G connectivity, the next generation of cellular networking that promises to bring faster download speeds to consumers. Hardware manufacturers are also getting ready, with plans already in motion for a number of devices that will take advantage of those faster networks. A new report suggests that Apple will release its 5G phone in 2020.
The FCC granted Apple approval to experiment with 5G technology last year, laying the groundwork for a 5G phone down the road. A report in Fast Company cites “a source with knowledge of Apple’s plans,” who says that the phone will be released in 2020. The report also notes that the company plans to use Intel’s 8161 5G modem chip, although there are still some technical...
Kim Stanley Robinson is known for his heady and thought-provoking science fiction novels. Aurora turned the concept of a generation ship on its head, following a decrepit interstellar ship sailing for a moon in the Tau Ceti system, while New York 2140 examines the economics of climate change. His latest, Red Moon, is set within spitting distance of today, envisioning the power struggle between an ascendant China and a declining United States. While it’s chock-full of ideas, it’s an underwhelming read compared to his recent stories.
China’s rise as a major power has become a curious focus for science fiction in recent years. This isn’t even the first book depicting lunar clashes between China and the US this year — David Pedreira’s novel...
Three new studies show the technology’s promise
