Twitter discontinues ad-free articles for Blue subscribers
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter’s getting rid of one of Blue’s best perks: ad-free articles. In a message sent out to publishers and forwarded to The Verge, Twitter says it “made the decision to discontinue Ad-free Articles, effective as of close of business today, October 31, 2022.” The news was first spotted by 9to5Mac.
Twitter included ad-free articles when it rolled out its $4.99 Blue subscription last year. The feature lets subscribers read articles without ads from participating publishers while also giving a portion of Blue’s revenue to those sites. It’s based on the platform Twitter acquired from Scroll, a service that specialized in removing ads from news sites.
But Twitter says eliminating ad-free news should allow it to focus its “resources on...
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Roblox and Parsons School of Design are creating a digital fashion course
Image: Roblox
Parsons School of Design students will soon be able to take a Roblox course as part of their studies.
The class will “explore the intricate relationship between digital and physical fashion set in an immersive future” and teach Parsons students how to create 3D digital fashion using Roblox tools. Though it’s led by Parsons faculty, it’s created in collaboration with the gaming giant, with Roblox representatives in marketing, creative, and education collaborating with Parsons.
Designing and dressing a digital avatar is a huge part of playing Roblox games. In the avatar shop, players can purchase anything from sneakers to designer gowns to outfit their in-game self, sometimes shelling out thousands of real-life dollars to buy digital...
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Amazon Music’s entire library is now free for Prime subscribers
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon is expanding its music offering, opening up its full catalog of 100 million songs in Amazon Music to Prime subscribers at no extra charge. The company is also offering many of its in-house podcasts and a selection of others, ad-free, in the app. You’ll still need a separate subscription if you want Amazon Music to really rival Spotify and Apple Music, but Amazon’s service is becoming a seriously compelling (sort of) free option.
The difference in tiers is all about access. All Prime members will be able to access the entire Amazon Music catalog, but not fully on demand; you can shuffle any artist, album, or playlist, Amazon says, but you can’t just select a song and hit play. For that — and to play songs in higher fidelity or with...
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How to create custom Apple Watch interval workouts
Custom interval workouts are a long overdue feature for Apple Watches. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
While you’ve always been able to customize Apple Watch workouts, the company finally added the ability to create custom interval workouts in watchOS 9. That’s clutch for any athlete itching to set a PR at their next race or just looking to switch up their training routine.
Previously, the only workaround for interval training on the Apple Watch was the segments feature. At any time during an activity, you could double-tap the screen to make note of a significant section of your workout. While handy, it relied on users mentally keeping track of their own intervals. But in watchOS 9, you don’t have to worry about that. The new custom workouts will keep track of all that for you, automatically switching from one interval to the next. You’ll...
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HBO Max appears to confirm January 15th premiere for The Last of Us TV adaptation
Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in HBO’s The Last of Us. | Image: HBO
HBO’s adaption of The Last of Us could premiere on Sunday, January 15th, according to text that’s appeared from HBO Max. Multiple users across Twitter are reporting seeing the date alongside a teaser trailer released for the show, and we’ve verified that the text is still appearing both in the HBO Max app and on its website.
Image: HBO
The January 15th date appears in the HBO Max app.
In the UK, broadcaster Sky has allegedly distributed marketing materials suggesting the show will be broadcast in the country on January 16th. Differences in time zones mean that Sky typically broadcasts HBO’s Sunday shows early in the morning on Monday before repeating them on Monday evenings, hence why the listed date is a day...
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The Case of the Golden Idol is a rewarding series of point-and-click murder mysteries
Great masks. | Image: Color Gray Games
Every time I solved a murder mystery in The Case of the Golden Idol, I actually felt smart.
The Case of the Golden Idoltasks you with solving murder mysteries involving the titular golden idol (which is a small statue). As a longtime Ace Attorney player, I thought I’d be well-equipped to handily sleuth everything out. Golden Idol turned out to be more challenging because you have to solve cases with a lot less information, but cracking a mystery was just as rewarding.
For each case, you’ll be looking at a scene that takes place during or shortly after a murder. The scene itself is a brief section of time, with characters animating on a very short loop. Outside a vague title, you aren’t given any explanation about the case itself or who...
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Google’s new shopping features can help you snag good deals
Illustration: The Verge
Google’s rolling out a handful of new shopping features that should make it easier to find good deals directly from search. When you search for a product, Google will now surface results with coupon codes that you can copy and paste during checkout.
Any products with a coupon available will have a new “Special Offer” badge in the top-left corner of their thumbnail. Google previously only labeled products when they were on sale or when their price dropped, but this new badge makes it more obvious when coupons are available. The search giant’s launching this feature on desktop and mobile within the “coming weeks.”
Image: Google
You can copy and paste coupon codes directly from Search.
In addition to adding...
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Disney Plus subscribers are getting first dibs at new Marvel and Star Wars merchandise
Image: Disney
Having a Disney Plus subscription isn’t just about entertainment anymore: customers will now get first dibs on Disney merchandise before it’s made available to the general public. Today, the company announced “a limited test” in the United States that will grant Disney Plus subscribers exclusive access to a curated mix of holiday merch from Star Wars, Black Panther, Frozen, and more.
The window of exclusivity begins today and will last for seven days. After that, anyone will be able to purchase the merchandise — though a few Frozen and Lightyear items will remain available only to Disney Plus subscribers even after the test ends.
You’ll be able to access the collection directly from the web, and Disney is also adding QR codes to a...
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Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter now has a new owner (yes, I know you knew, but it does bear repeating), and the social network (not to mention most other media outlets that follow popular culture and tech) is awash in speculation of what Elon Musk will do with it. Some Twitter users are declaring that they plan to find an alternative rather than stick around and find out — and some have already left.
So if you want to continue following social networking but no longer want to deal with Twitter, where do you go? We’ve looked around and found several possible alternatives. Most don’t have the size and scale of Twitter, and it’s hard to say if any of them will attract enough followers to give it a run for its money. Some of them ape the real-time feed of Twitter,...
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YouTube’s Primetime Channels bring streaming movies and TV into the YouTube app
Primetime Channels are like any other channel in YouTube — just a little fancier. | Image: YouTube
Streaming services are coming to YouTube. The company is rolling out a new feature called Primetime Channels that will bring shows and movies from more than 30 services directly into the YouTube interface. It’s a big bet for YouTube that it can be the cable bundle of the future and that its unparalleled audience will make streaming services buy into the idea.
YouTube has signed up 35 partners for the launch, from big-name streaming services like Paramount Plus and Epix to niche offerings like The Great Courses and Magnolia Selects. (Another service, NBA League Pass, is coming soon.) Each one will operate essentially like any other YouTube channel, with a curated homepage and a bunch of videos. Those videos will show up in the Movies and...
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You now have to pay to use Pantone colors in Adobe products
Pantone Color Books now require a paid subscription for Adobe products, with even old PSD files now displaying black in place of used Pantone colors. | Image: Adobe
Last week, Adobe removed support for free Pantone colors across its Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator Creative Cloud applications. PSD files that contained Pantone spot colors now display unwanted black in their place, forcing creatives who need access to the industry-standard color books to pay for a plugin subscription (via Kotaku).
“As we had shared in June, Pantone decided to change its business model. Some of the Pantone Color Books that are pre-loaded in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were phased-out from future software updates in August 2022,” said Erin Di Leva, Public Relations Manager for Adobe in a statement to The Verge. “To access the complete set of Pantone Color Books, Pantone now requires customers to...
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Sony’s new PlayStation Plus subscriptions are off to a rocky start
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The number of people subscribing to Sony’s PlayStation Plus fell from 47.3 million to 45.4 million this quarter, the company announced in its latest earnings release. It’s the subscription service’s third quarterly decline in a row, and comes despite Sony launching a revamped subscription lineup between May and June this year including new tiers that offer inclusive access to hundreds of games to download and stream.
However, while subscriber numbers were down, revenue from “Network Services,” which includes earnings from PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Network advertising revenue, and the now-discontinued PlayStation Now, has increased from 100 billion yen to 117 billion yen (around $679 million to $794 million), year-over-year. These...
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Two more executives are leaving Apple
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Two more executives are reportedly on their way out from Apple. According to Bloomberg, vice president of online retail Anna Matthiasson is leaving the company, and Chief Information Officer Mary Demby is retiring.
The two women held important roles at Apple; Matthiasson was in charge of Apple’s online store, and Demby managed the tech that ran that store, as well as Apple’s services and manufacturing. Bloomberg reports that Karen Rasmussen will now be in charge of online retail, but says it’s unclear who will be replacing Demby. Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on the executives leaving.
Demby and Matthiasson are just the latest in a string of higher-ups leaving the company in recent weeks. Evans...
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The best Black Friday deals you can already get at Target
Right now, you can save on the Apple Watch Series 7 and other cool tech as part of Target’s ongoing Black Friday sale. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The holiday shopping season has begun and several retailers, including Target, have already kicked off some spectacular Black Friday deals in the lead-up to the annual shopping event. Some of the steepest discounts we’re currently seeing extend to noise-canceling earbuds like Sony’s WF-1000XM4 (now $179.99) and Apple’s second-gen AirPods (now $89.99), as well as TVs like Sony’s 55-inch Frame (now $999.99) and gaming mice like the Logitech G502 Hero (now $34.99).
Here, we’ve collected some of the best discounts you can find at Target, many of which will be available through the week of Thanksgiving and price-matched elsewhere. Target also intends to roll out new deals every Sunday so we’ll be updating this page on a weekly basis as new...
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Elon Musk is the CEO of Twitter
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Even though Musk tweeted on Sunday morning that he has “no idea” who the CEO of Twitter is, a signed document he just filed with the SEC removes all doubt.
It’s Elon Musk.
My title is Chief Twit right there in the bio. No idea who the CEO is.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2022
This public confirmation is part of the 13th (and presumably final) amendment to a document he filed for the first time way back on April 4th.
At that time, it was a late-arriving notification that Musk had acquired more than 9 percent of Twitter’s available shares over the course of several months.
Now, this is what the 13th iteration (referring to Musk as the “Reporting Person”) says:
This Schedule 13D amends the Schedule 13D initially filed by Elon...
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Twitter verification is the line between order and chaos
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Elon Musk wants Twitter to make money, and apparently, the first place he’s looking is its power users. Over the weekend, we learned that Musk plans to charge $20 per month for a Twitter verification badge, an update that might be rolled out next month. It’s a change that fits with Musk’s plans to make Twitter’s premium subscription service more valuable for its most active users. But verification serves a central trust-building role for Twitter — and Musk’s proposal could erode that trust just as the platform threatens to spiral out of control.
Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On one hand, Twitter is like a...
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The Meta Quest 2’s passthrough button melts away, just like reality
Double-tapping the side of the Quest 2 triggers passthrough mode, letting you see what’s happening around you. | GIF by Owen Grove / The Verge
Virtual reality is for checking out. The wider the field of vision and the less light peeking in, the better. But as VR becomes more mainstream, there needs to be a way to quickly check back in with reality. A safe word, so to speak, to pull you out of VR, whether you’re feeling overwhelmed by a game or if you want to feel more present.
That’s exactly what the passthrough button offers on Meta’s Quest and Quest 2. It’s both a safety tool, as well as a practical one to let you see what’s going on outside of the headset without having to struggle to take it off. After firmly double-tapping either side of the headset where the straps attach to it, a view of your room — albeit a pixelated, monochromatic feed as seen through a handful of...
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A24 and Bryan Fuller are bringing a Friday the 13th ‘expanded prequel’ series to Peacock
Jason Voorhees’ iconic hockey mask. | Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s been 13 years since Warner Bros.’ last Friday the 13th slasher feature hit theaters, made a bunch of money, and then never led to the sequel many fans expected would follow soon after. Though we may never know what might have come from a sequel to that 2009 film, Bryan Fuller has an idea or two about what Jason Voorhees has been up to in the distant past that’s set to be explored in a new “expanded prequel” series for Peacock.
Peacock announced today that Fuller has signed on to write, showrun, and executive produce Crystal Lake, a new Friday the 13th series from A24.
In a press release about the new show, Fuller reminisced about how he first became familiar with the Friday the 13th franchise as a kid while reading an issue of F...
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Netflix is acquiring cozy game developer Spry Fox
A screenshot from Cozy Grove_._ | Image: Spry Fox
Netflix is acquiring Spry Fox, the indie developer of “cozy” games like Cozy Grove and Alphabear, Netflix announced on Monday. The acquisition means that Spry Fox will become Netflix’s sixth in-house gaming studio.
For Spry Fox, the acquisition won’t mean any changes for now. The studio’s current games will remain available for download “in their current forms on their current platforms,” co-founder and CEO David Edery said in a post on Spry Fox’s blog, and the studio is already working on making Cozy Grove 2 and “a larger, non-violent MMO.” Thanks to the acquisition, “we can stop stressing about how our games generate profit on our games and instead focus exclusively on making them as enjoyable and fulfilling to our players as...
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Elon Musk might resurrect Vine
Do it for the Vine. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Elon Musk is looking into the Twitter archives for ways to improve his newly acquired social network. His team has told engineers at the company to look at Vine’s code to figure out how much work it would take to revive it, according to a current employee who spoke to The Verge on the condition of anonymity, as they’re not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
Axios first reported the news, saying that the reboot could be ready by the end of the year. That’s an aggressive timeframe to revive a five-year-old app, especially given this tweet from former Twitter product director Sara Beykpour that some of Vine’s code is over 10 years old. But that seems to be a pattern with Musk; this weekend, Twitter employees were told they’d have...
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Tenoch Huerta hopes Wakanda Forever helps Latin Americans embrace their roots
Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever_._ | Image: Marvel Studios
The way Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Talocan bears little resemblance to the Atlantis of Marvel’s comic books is one of the most intriguing things about the movie and its central villain: the sea-dwelling antiheroic King Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta. Namor’s short shorts, winged feet, and intense hatred of the surface world are all still important parts of his character that Wakanda Forever spotlights with a tale about how he’s moved to lead Talocan to war.
But what Huerta was most moved by as he stepped up to the challenge of bringing Namor to the MCU is how Wakanda Forever’s story and its conceptualization of Talocan are celebrations of Latin American identity with a distinct focus on its shared Indigenous and African roots.
U...
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Tritium and DC-America are building a coast-to-coast EV fast charging network
DC-America EV stations with Tritium DC fast chargers are built on a skid platform, requiring little digging on-site. | Image: Tritium
Tritium and DC-America are partnering to build a nationwide EV fast charging network and have qualified for federal funding to make it happen (via Electrek).
The two companies are linking their tech to build easily deployable charging solutions, where Tritium provides the chargers and DC-America provides the station infrastructure.
DC-America will place all the components on a skid, meaning that the station will require minimal digging and will be easy to deploy and transport
“By eliminating the majority of underground conduits and wiring, we are speeding up deployments by greatly reducing the onsite construction as well as reducing installation costs,” said DC-America president Nathan Bowen in an email to Electrek.
The systems will...
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The Hummer EV e-bike is just as over the top and ridiculous as the electric truck it’s based on
The Hummer EV e-bike was inevitable. | Image: Recon
GMC joined forces with the world’s largest supplier of e-bikes for law enforcement to produce an over-the-top, dual-motor, fat tire electric bike to complement its equally over-the-top, dual-motor, fat tire Hummer EV truck. It’s the latest sign that automakers are trying to seize on the popularity of e-bikes to help promote the shift to electric vehicles.
The Hummer EV all-wheel drive e-bike (as it’s referred to in its press release) features twin 750W hub motors with a peak output of 2,400W, a 48-volt / 17 amp-hour LG-made battery (with an option to upgrade to a 21Ah version) and will be available to purchase either online at gmcebike.com or at GMC dealerships for the price of $3,999. (A little expensive for an e-bike, but...
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Slack is rolling out typing indicators for threads
This tiny new feature has already improved my daily work. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Slack is now rolling out typing indicators in threads, and they’ve already dramatically improved my Slack experience.
At The Verge, we use threads a lot. We’re constantly sharing interesting and potentially newsworthy stuff we find around the web, and we use threads to help corral conversations about links or topics into one zone. At any given time, there might be a lot of people talking in one thread, especially with everything going on right now. But because typing indicators used to appear in the main channel even if someone was typing in a thread, it could be hard to tell who might be workshopping a witty one-liner for the thread or drafting something new for the channel.
These new in-thread typing indicators handily fix that. The...
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