Senior Reporter
Adi Robertson has been covering the intersection of technology, culture, and policy at The Verge since 2011. Her work includes writing about DIY biohacking, survival horror games, virtual and augmented reality, online free expression, and the history of computing. She also makes very short video games. You have probably seen her in a VR headset.
I’ve been playing the Junji Ito-influenced horror RPG periodically since the Early Access launch in 2020, and I’m incredibly excited to try the full game! It’ll be available on PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 and 5.
If you’re taking pictures of today’s apocalyptic fire-tinted sky on the US East Coast, you might notice the colors are far more normal than the ones your eyes see. Ian Bogost wrote a deep dive on what that means back in 2020:
The un-oranged images were caused by one of the most basic features of digital cameras, their ability to infer what color is in an image based on the lighting conditions in which it is taken. Like the people looking up at it, the software never expected the sky to be bathed in orange.
[The Atlantic]
I am incredibly susceptible to agonizing over critiques of my creative work. Congrats to Zach Gage (designer of Spelltower and Really Bad Chess) for hitting on a pretty clever way to get the relevant criticism with a layer of distance... and still luxuriate in fully human praise.
I got a request for a more readable PDF version of The Electric Sea, a Sudowrite-generated story about hacking, artistic sellouts, and a floating domed city run by an AI. (Fair warning, it’s not great!) So for anybody else who’d rather not navigate 12 Tumblr posts, I’m posting the manuscript here too, minus the prompts and notes in those posts. I also had Sudowrite suggest a nom de plume for itself — say hello to Elodie Paradox, the pulp sci-fi answer to Aidan Marchine.
[The Verge]
Apple’s WWDC State of the Union is giving us more details about how developers can work with visionOS. That includes confirmation that Unity apps are supposed to run easily on the Vision Pro — including alongside other, non-Unity apps.
I’m still waiting for the Verge ground team’s impressions of the new Apple Vision Pro and visionOS — but seriously, I’m glad those name rumors were wrong.
EU specialists are touring San Francisco performing “stress tests” of enforcement for the upcoming Digital Services Act, and Twitter is on the roster:
A team of roughly five to 10 digital specialists from the EU plan to put Twitter, and possibly other companies, through their content-policing paces during a visit to San Francisco in late June, Thierry Breton, the bloc’s commissioner for the internal market, said in an interview.
The test is voluntary, he said, and Twitter has agreed to be subjected to it. It won’t carry any fines or other enforcement consequences. It will offer companies a dry run for how the EU’s Digital Services Act, or DSA, will be enforced.
Elon Musk pulled Twitter out of a voluntary anti-disinformation program, but he’s promised to follow the EU’s rules... if Twitter’s skeleton crew can follow through.