Summer Game Fest, that is. The now-regular E3 substitute kicks off very soon; the main event starts at 3PM ET, with a pre-show 30 minutes before. You can watch it right here — and follow along with our stream for the latest news.

Plus, we grabbed Marques Brownlee and our friends from the Waveform podcast to talk about all their favorite stuff, too. Grocery lists came up too often, and we’re very sorry about that. Plus, a long debate about whether the Vision Pro is any good — and how much it matters.

It hasn’t even been a full year since we saw Baby Colin Robinson grow back into an adult energy vampire, but What We Do In the Shadows is set to make its season five return to FX on July 13th.

Turns out he wasn’t faking it during the WWDC keynote. From John Gruber’s live The Talk Show:

That’s pretty much what Spotify is doing here. I saw this ad for the company’s subscription-based Soundtrap after opening the Mac app this morning.

Amid layoffs and a “realignment” of its podcasts business, you get the sense that Spotify is growing desperate to make money any way it can.

Very curious what the click through on this looks like. Maybe someone out there needed one last push to become the next Jack Antonoff. Or, more likely, they just wanted to hear their Daily Mix.

The Verge snapped some photos of the apocalyptic scene in the Big Apple yesterday — from amber skies to desolate streets. To stay updated, you can follow the EPA’s air quality monitoring tool AirNow. Its forecast for Thursday is still bad — not quite a Code Maroon (hopefully) but a Code Red for “unhealthy” air.

Yesterday I took Dyson’s air-purifying headphones out for a stroll in the wildfire smoke apocalypse to see what they would tell me. You can see my initial reaction in the video below and... I certainly didn’t expect to see the live tracking tell me the air was fine!

The Zone only live tracks nitrogen dioxide and wildfire air is made up of much more, but I’m writing up a post that goes into all this in more depth, so stay tuned for that as well.

While most of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s creatives were seasoned professionals, Preston Mutanga, the genius behind the movie’s brief foray into a stop-motion world full of Lego characters, is a Canadian teen — the same who recreated the movie’s trailer:

“We found out that it was a 14-year-old kid who made it and we were like, ‘This looks incredibly sophisticated for a nonadult, nonprofessional to have made,” [Across the Spider-Verse writer/producer Chris] Miller said on a video call. “It blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world.”

This video pulling back the curtain on the shark-infested waters of the creator ecosystem is so good, and so revealing. One thing I try not to take for granted here at The Verge is that we are built on decades of ethics policies and snooty journalism arguments about background policies and so on — most independent creators just get thrown into the deep end, and the machine preys on it.

From October 8th, cryptocurrency ads in the UK will have to be clearer about the risks to customers. That could mean telling them they should be “prepared to lose all the money [they] invest,” The Guardian notes. Bonuses for referring friends will also be banned, and a cooling-off period introduced for first time investors under the new rules from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.

It will be possible to use 1Password passkeys in iOS 17 thanks to a new API Apple revealed at WWDC. I really hope this feature is available the same day iOS 17 launches this fall — I’m ready for the passkey revolution.

That’s the takeaway from an internal memo sent today that I’ve seen. Take this section:

“We know that a number of people moved to fully remote work for many good reasons, as we all adjusted to the pandemic. For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community. Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”

The email also reminds employees that they should be coming into the office three days a week if they aren’t already designated as remote, and that managers can factor their absences into performance reviews. Meta recently issued a similar notice on coming into the office to its workers.

You can watch it on the WVFRM YouTube channel or listen to it in the Vergecast and Waveform podcast feeds. I’m not going to spoil the winner, but I will say that Nilay, David, and Dan holds their own against some tough competition.

Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality headset (yes, it’s VR) runs on “visionOS.” But if you dig into the developer sessions at WWDC, you’ll notice “xrOS” on various slides and named videos. It was the rumored name and also probably the internal name for the operating system. And now it gets to have a legacy.