The Verge·Sunday, December 28, 2025

The Verge - Sunday, December 28, 2025

10 stories~15 min

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Stories Covered

You need to read the subversive cosmic horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom

Things that HP Lovecraft was good at: Creating a mythos. Building atmosphere. Things that HP Lovecraft was bad at: Writing dialog. Creating compelling characters. Not being a racist. As a fan of horror in general, I can't pretend that Lovecraft isn't an important touchstone. But the man's blatant racism is also impossible to ignore, especially since it often finds its way onto the pages of his stories. One of the most notorious is The Horror at Red Hook, which follows Detective Thomas Malone as

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The terrible Nintendo controller that helped make VR happen

The Nintendo Power Glove was not good. It's important that you know that. The Power Glove was ambitious, impressive, even important - one of the very first mainstream devices that let you control a game using your body instead of just your thumbs - but it was not good. In some ways, its not-good-ness is a key part of the story. The Power Glove showed up in the late 1980s, at a complicated time for the gaming industry, when Nintendo was a hugely powerful force for the future of fun. But the Power

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Ubisoft shuts down ‘Rainbow Six Siege’ servers following hack

Yesterday, Ubisoft confirmed that Rainbow Six Siege had been compromised and that it had shut down the game's servers and marketplace while it resolved the issue. The hackers managed to gain control over a significant chunk of the game's systems, including the ability to ban and unban users, sending custom messages to ban ticker, unlocking all in-game items, and granting every player 2 billion R6 Credits and Renown. Ubisoft sells R6 credits in its store, pricing 15,000 of them at $99.99. That m

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The best PS5 games from 2025

In this new era of console… inclusivity? driven by Sony and mostly Microsoft bringing their exclusives to other platforms, it's getting harder to highlight games that make a singular console shine. Indeed, the top-performing games year after year on both PlayStation and Xbox are multiplatform releases, and often the best games of the year, like 2025 GOTY winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, similarly launch on most everything. (Once again, like in all things, Nintendo is the exception.) But while

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Two new wireless Samsung speakers for 2026 lean into aesthetics

For years, Samsung has made products that try to camouflage what they are by displaying works of art. The Frame TV is the most famous example, but the company also released the Music Frame, a speaker disguised as a picture frame, at last year's CES. Now, instead of hiding a speaker with a piece of art, Samsung worked with designer Erwan Bouroullec to make a speaker into a piece of art. According to Samsung, the Music Studio line of speakers, debuting at CES 2026, draw inspiration from the "timel

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Sam Altman is hiring someone to worry about the dangers of AI

ISO corporate scapegoat. OpenAI is hiring a Head of Preparedness. Or, in other words, someone whose primary job is to think about all the ways AI could go horribly, horribly wrong. In a post on X, Sam Altman announced the position by acknowledging that the rapid improvement of AI models poses "some real challenges." The post goes on to specifically call out the potential impact on people's mental health and the dangers of AI-powered cybersecurity weapons. The job listing says the person in th

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Pixel 10 phones and Switch 2 games round out this week’s best deals

Google’s Pixel 10 phones are some of the best Android phones on the market. If you’re taking it easy during the slow, in-between week between Christmas and New Year’s, now’s a good time to catch up on deals you might’ve missed. Many of our favorite discounts from the past week are still hanging around, making this an especially convenient moment to shop. Whether you’re eyeing a new phone, gearing up for travel, or just looking to treat yourself before the year wraps up, we’re seeing notable pr

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8 great games for your Steam Deck from 2025

I played a lot of games on my Steam Deck this year. It seemed like there was a never-ending list of incredible indie games to try - The Verge wrote about a lot of them! - and many worked brilliantly on Valve's handheld gaming PC. Some bigger games made a splash on Steam Deck, too, and while they may not look as good as on a beefy PC, I'm usually happy to deal with that simply because I can play them on the couch or out of the house. If you're unwrapping a Steam Deck for the holidays this year, o

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Trump’s war on offshore wind faces another lawsuit

Dominion Energy, an offshore wind developer and utility serving Virginia's "data center alley," filed suit against the Trump administration this week over its decision to pause federal leases for large offshore wind projects. The move puts a sudden stop to five wind farms already under construction, including Dominion's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. The complaint Dominion filed Tuesday alleges that a stop work order that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) issued Monday is un

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Rodeo is an app for making plans with friends you already have

There are plenty of dating apps out there and apps that turn your chaos of work obligations into easily actionable lists. There is also a growing number of apps that help you make new friends. The pitch for Rodeo is a bit different in that it uses AI to help you schedule activities with your existing friends. The company was started by a pair of former Hinge execs who felt it was more difficult than it should be to make plans with friends. Parenting, work, 37 different group chats - all of this

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