Welcome to Night Vale host Cecil Baldwin shares his tech pet peeves
Welcome to Night Vale host Cecil Baldwin shares his tech pet peeves

Cecil Baldwin’s résumé includes appearances on Gravity Falls, narrating the documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, and performing as part of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company. But he is best known as the host of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, a long-running fiction show that blends macabre Lovecraftian horror with absurdist […]

Listen to the new Steam Controller buzz to the tune of Doom
Listen to the new Steam Controller buzz to the tune of Doom

You may have heard that Valve’s new Steam Controller can ring like a telephone or do the Wilhelm scream. But did you know it can sing songs, too? Let me show you. Here’s the new Steam Controller performing the “Ground Theme” from Super Mario Bros. 2: Here is “Still Alive” from Portal – fitting for […]

The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you
The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you

I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time – that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder. Lots of the top-line […]

Tech companies desperately want to film you doing chores
Tech companies desperately want to film you doing chores

This week, an AI training startup called Shift said it would clean New Yorkers’ homes for free. It has plans to expand into other cities as well, including London, and looking around my flat, I get the appeal. But there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. In exchange for the cleaning, Shift wants footage of […]

Backrooms is at the forefront of horror’s YouTube wave
Backrooms is at the forefront of horror’s YouTube wave

Though YouTube has always been a place where up-and-coming artists could be discovered and make it big, in recent years the platform has become a launching pad for some of Hollywood’s most exciting new horror directors. The filmmakers behind films like Talk to Me, Iron Lung, and Obsession all started off as content creators posting […]

Trump Mobile’s website still says the T1 Phone is ‘American-made’
Trump Mobile’s website still says the T1 Phone is ‘American-made’

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. As the phone’s supposed launch continues, we noticed its website may be violating FTC rules. When the Trump phone was first announced last June, it was proudly promised to be […]

Hundreds of prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike
Hundreds of prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike

Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet. But last week, volunteer editors and contributors were alarmed to hear that a small but important team of engineers at the nonprofit that supports it had been laid off. The layoffs didn’t just threaten to sever an important link between the Wikimedia Foundation […]

Adobe’s conversational AI agent is a mediocre design intern
Adobe’s conversational AI agent is a mediocre design intern

AI image tools rarely make me feel like I’m part of the creative process. They are, after all, mostly designed so that people with no design experience can type in a few words and get back a usable result. So I was pleasantly surprised by Adobe’s latest take on an AI image assistant: It’s a […]

Nintendo’s newest WarioWare is a weirdo smartphone app
Nintendo’s newest WarioWare is a weirdo smartphone app

A decade ago, Nintendo made a big splash into the world of mobile gaming with a new Super Mario platformer directed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. But even though the game proved popular, it wasn’t the success the company had hoped for. Over the ensuing years Nintendo has slowly retreated from smartphone gaming, with […]

The line between games and movies keeps getting blurrier
The line between games and movies keeps getting blurrier

The most memorable part of 007 First Light is something that’s typically pretty boring: the tutorial. In many games, you’re forced through a series of tedious lessons in how to play, presented in a way that feels disconnected from the story itself and at a plodding pace. But First Light does something different. Because the […]