Death Stranding’s sequel continues to look absolutely bonkers. The upcoming game — known as Death Stranding 2: On the Beach — got a fresh trailer and a long-awaited release date of June 26th during a presentation at SXSW.

The PlayStation 5 exclusive will cost $69.99 and is available for pre-order starting on March 17th. Those who buy the Digital Deluxe Edition ($79.99) or Collector’s Edition ($229.99) get early access starting on June 24th.

Hideo Kojima presented the 10-minute trailer, which opens on two characters — one is Neil, who is played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli — arguing with each other. Following that, there’s plenty of Sam (Norman Reedus) navigating the wastes with his BB and his cargo, facing bad weather, an avalanche, and the series’ signature horrific monsters. The game has a lot of star power, with the trailer highlighting characters like Fragile (Léa Seydoux), Tarman (George Miller), Higgs (Troy Baker), Tomorrow (Elle Fanning), Dollamn (Fatih Akin), Rainy (Shioli Kutsuna), The President (Alastair Duncan), Lucy (Alissa Jung), Heartman (Nicholas Winding Refn), and Doctor (Debra Wilson).

Near the end, the trailer shows Neil donning a bandana that, as IGN notes, is very reminiscent of Solid Snake, the lead character of Kojima’s famed Metal Gear Solid series. The shot is creepy, with quick flashes showing his face intermittently replaced with a skull.

Kojima also announced “The Strands of Harmony World Tour,” a Death Stranding concert tour that will visit 19 cities and feature the music of Death Stranding, performed by a live orchestra and singers. That begins on November 8th, 2025, in Sydney, Australia.

First announced in 2022, On the Beach is a direct sequel to 2019’s Death Stranding, a game that saw Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima branch out with a new studio. The original’s success led to a director’s cut, multiple ports, and an upcoming live-action film made in partnership with A24.

The studio is also working on a pair of other projects, with the Xbox horror game OD, which stars Sophia Lillis and Hunter Schafer, and an “action espionage” codenamed PHYSINT.

Reports are cropping up today that second-generation Chromecasts and music-streaming Chromecast Audio devices are failing, displaying an error on the device they’re trying to cast from that seems to imply the streamers may no longer be supported, reports 9to5Google.

Text from screenshots of the error posted to Reddit reads, “Untrusted device” and continues, saying the device “couldn’t be verified. This could be caused by outdated device firmware.” Understandably, people are concerned that Google has decided to send the streaming pucks, both quite old now, to the Google graveyard.

As 9to5Google points out, the company hasn’t said it is deprecating the two, as it did for the original Chromecast in 2023. At least one member of the Chromecast community says they have reached out to Google support and were told that the company is aware of the issue and is awaiting a fix. Google didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

Google discontinued the Chromecast line in August last year but said that it was still offering “continued software and security updates to the latest devices.” If we are approaching the end of the line for the two devices being affected today, it would be a small bummer, especially when it comes to the Chromecast Audio. There are better alternatives to it these days, but none, I’d say, with quite as much charm as Google’s little vinyl record-shaped music streamer.

Apple is expected to release its thinnest phone yet later this year with the iPhone 17 Air. Rumors have held that the phone will be thinner than the 6.9mm iPhone 6 was, but recent leaks give us a better idea than we’ve had before of what to expect.

Rumors of the iPhone 17 Air’s dimensions have ranged over the last several months, but a recent one from leaker Ice Universe puts it at just 5.5mm thick, something that Ming-Chi Kuo predicted in January. Another analyst, Jeff Pu, said before that it would be more like 6mm.

But where Kuo said the phone will have a 6.6-inch screen, Ice Universe says it’ll actually be 6.9 inches like the iPhone 17 Pro Max — they say both phones will have the same “length, width, screen size, and bezel” as the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Later, they posted a video showing an apparent render of the device.

On Friday, YouTuber iDeviceHelp posted a video in collaboration with leaker Majin Bu, who published similar-looking renders last month. iDeviceHelp claims to be showing mockups of the standard, Pro Max, and Air models “based on internal documents.” The video lingers on the edge of the phone at moments, and I was immediately struck by how much seeing it reminded me of looking edge-on at the 5.1mm 13-inch M4 iPad Pro, the one Apple device thinner than this is rumored to be.

It’s hard not to also notice the Google Pixel-like camera bar stretching left-to-right on the back of iDeviceHelp’s mockups of the iPhone 17 Air and Pro Max. It’s unclear whether the bar is functional or just Apple trying out some new aesthetic, but I welcome it all the same, if for no other reason than my iPhone 15 Pro is so dang floppy when laying on its back on my desk. iDeviceHelp demonstrated with the 17 Pro Max mockup that the bar seems to help there. But in both cases, the rear cameras themselves still stick up out of the bar, so it may not be perfect. Oh well, maybe next year.

As for the rest of the design, these renders and mockups appear to show it with buttons in all the same places as current iPhones (not counting the iPhone 16E, which lacks the Camera Control button), along with a USB-C port and speaker holes on the bottom. The phone is also expected to have a Dynamic Island and Face ID on the front. We won’t likely know for sure how close the renders are until September, when Apple typically reveals its latest batch of flagship iPhones.

The PS5 version of Forza Horizon 5 will require you to link a Microsoft account to your PlayStation Network account in order to play the game, according to a FAQ on the game’s official website.

The FAQ says that players will be prompted to link the two the first time they load the game. And if you unlink later, you “will be constrained to relinking to only that specific and originally linked” Microsoft account.

The requirement stings given that there’s no cross-platform saving, so the progress you make in the PS5 version isn’t reflected in the Xbox version. It’s the same situation for the Steam version, as the FAQ points out. As the page also notes, Horizon 5 players will need a PlayStation Plus subscription to access the game’s multiplayer feature, and there are “no plans for a disc release.”

When Forza Horizon 5 releases on the PS5 on April 29th, it will be the latest Xbox exclusive to make the leap to Sony’s console, joining games like Sea of Thieves, which also requires you to link a Microsoft account before you can play.

Gamers haven’t been keen on required account linking when Sony has done it in the past. The company actually removed a requirement for you to sign in with your PSN account for some PC versions of some games, including Helldivers 2 and, more recently, God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.

Late last week, Apple delayed its big Siri AI upgrade, and it seems that will take the company’s rumored smart display with it. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter, Apple has postponed the device because it at least partially “relies on the delayed Siri capabilities.”

It’s been rumored for months now that Apple was planning to release a device early this year that would serve as a smart home hub with a display, similar to devices that its main smart home competitors, Amazon and Google, have both offered for years. The device is expected to be the first Apple smart home hub with support for Apple Intelligence. It’s also rumored to run on tvOS and support native Apple apps like Calendar, Notes, and, according to recent rumors, compatibility with Apple’s Messages app.

Apple said last week that its upgraded smart assistant is taking “longer than we thought,” and will be released in the “coming year,” hinting that it may not be an iOS 18 feature as originally promised. The version of Apple Intelligence that we have now doesn’t really offer any smart home features so Apple releasing a smart display that’s wrapped up in the Siri AI upgrade wouldn’t make much sense right now.

Apple’s competitors, at first glance, seem to be forging ahead. Amazon, which has had its own struggles integrating AI into Alexa, has announced it’s finally doing just that with Alexa Plus, starting with its own robust Echo Show smart display lineup that most recently included the addition of the Echo Show 21. Google began its own similar rollout of Gemini in December, though only for some Nest speakers. But in both cases, they’re limited rollouts and not truly in the public sphere quite yet.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 74, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry in advance for my terrible TV taste, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Bybit, Walmart, and sports analytics; devouring the first season of Running Point and the seventh season of Drive to Survive; listening to Scam Inc and Tested; obsessing over my progress in Fantasy Hike; getting the hang of Tiny Wings again; and making a lot of pancakes for a toddler who suddenly won’t eat anything else.

I also have for you a couple of exciting new Apple products, some fun stuff to watch this weekend, the return of a legendary social media platform, and much more. Plus, I’m an idiot. More on that in a minute. Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What are you playing / reading / watching / downloading / building / eating with toast this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

• The new MacBook Air. The M …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Retroid Pocket Mini has an unfixable issue that’s causing certain graphical effects for emulated games not to work properly. Retroid, the China-based company that makes the Pocket Mini, announced on Discord that it will accept returns of the device but only during a limited March 8th to March 14th window — and capped at just 200 returns from owners who live outside of China, as RetroHandhelds reports.

Earlier in the week, the outlet says Retroid acknowledged it couldn’t fix the issue, which affects how the screen shows scanline and pixel grid shaders used to give classic emulated games the appearance of being played on the CRT displays they were designed for. The effects can show up as “misplaced scanlines, uneven pixels, or a slightly distorted image,” RetroHandhelds writes.

In this morning’s message, Retroid says carrying out this return campaign is a “large and costly endeavor,” and that it expects “a lot of return requests outside of screen-related issues.” Retroid also mentions it is asking customers to pay to ship their returns, which it promises to reimburse. Finally, the company added that it will offer all Pocket Mini owners “a $10 stackable coupon” for two of its future handhelds.

As Russ from the Retro Game Corps YouTube channel notes in a post on Reddit asking for recommendations to pass along to the company for dealing with the situation, Retroid is in a hard situation as a small company that now faces having to pay for very expensive shipping on returns. But that doesn’t change the fact that many gamers who bought the $199 handheld specifically to play retro games are left with a device whose otherwise impressive display does a bad job with some of the oldest tricks in the emulation book.

Warner Bros. Discovery just released a new trailer for the second (and maybe last) season of The Last of Us, offering an action-packed view of the fraught world Pedro Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and his daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are facing.

Things look bleak for both of them, and the show’s fungal-based zombies don’t seem to have become any less dangerous. The trailer’s centerpiece is a snowy human settlement that, at one point, is assaulted by a zombie horde. There are lots of explosions and at one point, a monstrous zombie being blasted by a flamethrower. There are also brief clips of characters fleeing in the woods and an ominous close-up of a sickle just before a shot of someone being hanged.

Interspersed with shots of them are flashbacks of Joel and Ellie, the latter of whom is intense in shots of her sprinting and firing a handgun or running over the top of an underground train. There are brief clips of other characters, including a man and his daughter who seem to be fleeing something — or someone — in the woods. The trailer closes on Ellie saying to what looks like a guilt-stricken Joel, “You swore.”

The Last of Us season two also stars Jeffrey Wright as Isaac Dixon, Isabela Merced as Dina, and Kaitlyn Dever as Abby. It debuts April 13th on Max.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is still pushing to break up Google, according to a revised proposal filed Friday with federal Judge Amit Mehta. As in its proposal last year, the DOJ says Google should be forced to sell its web browser, Google Chrome, and potentially Android, as punishment for being a monopolist, as Judge Mehta found last year, reports The New York Times.

In its new filing, the DOJ calls Google “an economic goliath” that it says “has denied users of a basic American value—the ability to choose in the marketplace.” To deal with that, “Google must divest the Chrome browser … to provide an opportunity for a new rival to operate a significant gateway to search the internet.” The department also still recommends that Google must change its Android business practices to enable competition or be ordered to sell the operating system. It dropped a suggestion that the company be allowed to sell Android in lieu of making the changes.

Both spin-offs were part of the proposal the DOJ filed last year. But whether it would hold that line under Trump, whom tech companies have plied with money and praise since his election, has been a mystery. The President has stepped back some Biden-era tech regulations on things like AI safety and cryptocurrency, but has also suggested that the threat of regulation can be useful for getting the results he wants.

The department’s proposal eases up in some ways. The DOJ now supports letting Google pay Apple for services unrelated to search. It also no longer calls for Google to drop its AI investments — the Times writes that, instead, the DOJ reccomennds requiring the company to “notify federal and state officials before proceeding with investments in AI.”

Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels told The Verge in an email that the DOJ’s updated proposal goes “miles beyond the Court’s decision, and would harm America’s consumers, economy and national security.” 

Google filed its own proposal that doesn’t include selling Chrome but instead suggests the court place restrictions on the sorts of deals it can make, such as barring it from requiring that a phone maker that licenses Google Play also preinstall other Google software, like the Google Search app or Chrome. As noted by the Times, a hearing on the proposals is scheduled for April.

Update March 9th: Added a statement from Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels.

If you, like me, still have your DVD collection hanging around, now is a good time to dust off your DVD player and make sure they haven’t succumbed to disc rot. That’s because many of the discs produced by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (WBHE) between 2006 and 2008 are failing prematurely, the company acknowledged in a statement to JoBlo in an article update this week.

The company gave JoBlo this statement on the matter:

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is aware of potential issues affecting select DVD titles manufactured between 2006 – 2008, and the company has been actively working with consumers to replace defective discs.

Where possible, the defective discs have been replaced with the same title. However, as some of the affected titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired, consumers have been offered an exchange for a title of like-value.

Consumers with affected product can contact the customer support team at [email protected].

Disc rot is not a new phenomenon, but as ArsTechnica notes, properly-cared-for DVDs should be playable for up to 100 years, according to Sony. However, failing WBHE discs have stood out in particular amongst the physical media faithful, who have been posting about the problem for years in forums like DVD Talk and Home Theater Forum.

The above 2021 video from YouTuber Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader that Ars points to suggests disc rot is affecting a broader range of discs, from 2006 to 2009, than WB has acknowledged. As for figuring out which of your discs may have the issue, he says the most reliable way to look for playback problems — DVDs that won’t load at all, freeze while you’re watching the film, or have unplayable special features.

Crusader’s video description links to some Google Docs, one of which is a list he compiled showing what he believes are “known rotted DVD titles” he found reported online, as well as those from his own collection that seem to be affected. The list features discs for popular series like Batman: The Animated Series as well as movies, such as a Stanley Kubrick Director’s Series edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey and all of the Superman films up to Superman Returns.

Another of Crusader’s Google Docs largely pins the faulty DVDs made “roughly from 2006 through 2009” on a Cinram manufacturing plant in Olyphant, Pennsylvania. WB hasn’t substantiated the claim, as Ars notes. Crusader says you can identify discs produced there using codes printed on the inner ring of a disc’s underside.

There are plenty of us who have held onto our physical media as a bulwark against losing access to the films, TV shows, and games we love — something that can happen without notice as platforms are deprecated or distribution licenses dry up. But even maintaining a physical collection isn’t perfect if some manufacturing issue that occurred years earlier can break your discs.

It’s nice to know that even if I hadn’t backed up my DVDs to my home server in the last couple of years, Warner Bros. appears to be doing the right thing and I wouldn’t necessarily lose them. But there’s no guarantee that other companies will do that if their discs start failing in large numbers. It makes a great argument for taking up the digital packrat lifestyle 404 Media wrote about last month, and backing up your physical media early and often.

The biggest Apple news of the week was the announcement of a sky blue MacBook Air and an M3-powered iPad Air; however, in the deals world, it was all about the Apple Watch Series 10. That’s because, right now, Apple’s flagship smartwatch is on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy in its 42mm base configuration with Wi-Fi starting at $299 ($100 off), its lowest price to date. You can also grab it in the larger 46mm variant at Amazon and Best Buy for $329 (also $100 off).

Apple’s latest mainline watch is a pretty minor update of the Series 9, though that’s not to say the iterative changes aren’t welcome. The bigger, wide-angle OLED display makes text more visible from just about every angle, and at a mere 9.7mm thick, it’s noticeably thinner than the Apple Watch Ultra. The latest Series is also outfitted with a larger charging coil inside, which translates into significantly faster charging. In fact, the Series 10 can go from zero to 80 percent in just 30 minutes, which makes its 18-hour battery far less of a concern. 

That said, the more significant updates arguably come in the form of FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection and support for watchOS 11. The former leverages the watch’s accelerometer while you sleep to detect minor wrist movements linked with breathing disturbances, which Apple can use to alert you of either moderate or severe sleep apnea. Support for the latest version of watchOS, meanwhile, means you’ll be able to make use of several training-focused fitness features, smarter widgets, and — my personal favorite — the ability to pause your Activity Rings. After all, recovery days are essential, too.

Read our full Apple Watch Series 10 review.

More deals and discounts of note

• New and eligible returning subscribers who sign up before March 31st can get four months of Disney Bundle Duo Basic for just $2.99 a month, which equates to about $32 in savings. The twofer of a deal provides access to both Hulu and Disney Plus (with ads), though keep in mind the plan will auto-renew at its usual price of $10.99 a month at the end of the promotion window. Still, even if you decide not to renew your subscription, that’s plenty of time to check out Disney’s new Daredevil series and catch up on Andor before the second season arrives on April 22nd.
• Now through March 16th, you can grab a refurbished Xgimi MoGo 2 Pro on sale at eBay for about $207 when you use promo code STARTFRESH, which knocks nearly $400 off the MSRP. The Android TV projector isn’t as compact as the nifty Aurzen Zip we reviewed last month, though it’s still a reasonable size, with good picture quality and sound. You can also run the all-in-one projector via a USB-C power bank and, unlike the Zip, cast Netflix from your phone thanks to built-in Chromecast support. Read our review.
• Belkin’s 2-in-1 Magnetic Charging Travel Pad — which kind of functions like a Qi2-certified successor to Apple’s ill-fated MagSafe Duo — is currently down to $60.99 ($59 off) at Best Buy, which is easily the lowest price we’ve seen. The fabric-wrapped charger can supply up to 15W of power to any MagSafe-equipped iPhone while simultaneously charging either an Apple Watch or a pair of AirPods; the square pads also conveniently fold into a stack when you need to head out, making it great for travel.

Suikoden is a game that I’ve been meaning to play for years. A highly regarded roleplaying game from the original PlayStation era, it’s renowned for its sprawling storyline and huge cast of playable characters. That also makes it pretty intimidating, and I’ve had a copy sitting on my PS Vita just waiting for when I might have the free time to finally dig in. After all that waiting, I’m now playing a new remastered collection that includes the first two games in the series instead. And it made me realize that, for the past several months, my personal gaming time has been dominated by classic, turn-based RPGs — an experience that has really made clear the genre’s realm of possibilities.

It started with the excellent new version of Dragon Quest 3, which launched last November. That game was the equivalent of video game comfort food: an exceedingly straightforward fantasy adventure that has been spruced up with gorgeous visuals, a lush orchestral soundtrack, and some very welcome quality of life tweaks. Soon after that, Mistwalker released an updated version of Fantasian. It’s technically not an old game — it originally debuted on Apple Arcade in 2021 — but it has t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Free time is a rare thing — which is all the more reason to make sure you’re downtime isn’t going to waste. To help out, we’ve put together this list of our favorite games, TV shows, and movies from 2025. It’s a space designed to make the process of finding something to play or watch as easy as possible, as we share recommendations for things that are streaming, in theaters, or available on all manner of gaming devices.

It’s also a collection that will grow over time, as we keep adding our favorites throughout the year. (And if that’s not enough, you can also check out our running list of our current favorite indie games.) So keep checking back, and make good use of that precious time.

• Mickey 17 is a big middle finger to space-obsessed strongmen
• Split Fiction doesn’t need to be original when the co-op play is this good
• Monster Hunter Wilds thrives on spectacle

• Avowed makes the wait for the next Elder Scrolls much easier
• Citizen Sleeper 2 is the good kind of stressful
• Mythic Quest season 4 switches things up with a new work-life balance
• Castlevania: Nocturne’s second season is another soft-spoken knockout
• Severance season 2 somehow gets even weirder, wilder, and darker

MainFrames is a perfect example of a game with a clever idea that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

In the new indie platformer, you play as an adorable floppy disk that traverses computer desktops. The aesthetic is ridiculously charming: the many characters sprinkled throughout the game are so dang cute, and the levels are filled with application windows and desktop icons that serve as bouncing pads or gears to change things in the levels. Everything is overlaid on pixelated landscape computer backgrounds that differ between worlds. And it’s all backed by a catchy chiptune soundtrack that really sells the vibe.

It’s a great premise, and MainFrames takes the idea one step further by regularly letting you manipulate computer windows by clicking or dragging them like you would with an actual mouse. So, for example, if you can’t reach a far-off ledge, you might be able to hop onto a computer window with a platform and drag that window over to the ledge so you can reach it. You’ll also “select” certain windows to activate functions like flipping gravity.

Over the course of the game, you’ll take on progressively more difficult platforming puzzles that require precisely t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 arrives, likely this July, it could be a pretty decent upgrade over the Z Flip 5 I own. It’ll reportedly have a slightly bigger battery than the Flip 6, which had a slightly bigger one than the Flip 5, plus a much bigger outer screen.

Unfortunately, I can’t wait a few more months. After a year and a half with a Flip, I’ve reached my breaking point.

To be clear, my phone never cracked. My folding Flip never even sprouted a green line of doom along its crease. The factory screen protector did begin to peel, but $30 and a trip to uBreakiFix made that problem go away. 

No, the end came for my Flip when it stopped lasting the day and started waking me up at night. The battery is constantly dying faster than it should, and ever since the last big software update, the sleep and do-not-disturb modes no longer block notification sounds. I can’t figure out either one, and the Flip’s unique benefits no longer feel good enough for me to deal with them anymore. 

On battery: I’ve seen this phone reach the 80 percent mark by 9 in the morning, and threaten to die by 9PM. I practically don’t even use the phone when I’m at work, and yet now I fee …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta may have caved on their content moderation policies for the sake of “free speech”, but there’s a world of other Big Tech companies out there – and more social media platforms for conservatives to de-censor. On Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet, the parent company of Google, demanding documents that show whether YouTube removed content at the request of the Biden-Harris administration – acting, in his words, as “a direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime.”

Although Republican party hardliners have long argued that Big Tech tilts algorithms and content moderation policies against their social media content, the overall right-wing momentum against Big Tech has further accelerated since 2021 after Donald Trump was removed from Twitter (now X) after January 6th. Jordan, who became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, has wielded his platform and subpoena powers to dig into the databanks of Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple among others, believing that they singled out conservative social media accounts on the behest of the Biden administration’s Department of Justice and engaged in unlawful suppression of free speech. 

So far, their attempts have notched one notable success: last May, the committee published a report claiming that Biden had repeatedly coerced Meta into removing content from their platforms.   “Following this oversight, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, admitted that it was wrong to bow to the Biden-Harris Administration’s demands, publicly committed to restoring free speech on its platforms, and reformed its policies,” Jordan wrote in the letter accompanying the Alphabet subpoena. “Alphabet, to our knowledge, has not similarly disavowed the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to censor speech.”

“We’ll continue to show the committee how we enforce our policies independently, rooted in our commitment to free expression,” Google spokesperson Jose Castañeda told The Verge in response to a request for comment. 

Reddit’s automatic moderation tool is flagging the word “Luigi” as potentially violent — even when the content isn’t.

Earlier this week, a moderator from r/popculture saw Reddit’s AutoModerator system flag a post about the video game Luigi’s Mansion 3 because it included the word “Luigi,” giving them instructions to “check for violence.”

A Reddit spokesperson, who requested that The Verge not use their name due to the sensitive subject matter, said there is no “sitewide filter for the word ‘Luigi’ or expectation that users stop talking about Luigi Mangione,” the person who prosecutors accuse of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.

But Reddit does appear to be flagging comments that mention “Luigi” in some cases, even those unrelated to Mangione — just not in the way that it first appeared to be. The Reddit spokesperson said that because r/popculture had recently fallen down to a single moderator, automod features kicked in, including a way to filter for “keywords that could — but don’t necessarily — indicate violating content.” The remaining moderator of r/popculture told The Verge that the mod team didn’t add “Luigi” to the list of keywords, Reddit did.

The r/popculture moderator posted about the Luigi issue to the r/FreeLuigi subreddit, a grassroots community where people discuss the Mangione case. The subreddit has strict rules in place to avoid violating Reddit’s moderation rules, like referring to Mangione’s by his initials and a blanket ban on content that calls for or endorses violence. But the moderators still fear that Reddit will decide to shut it down — even if they don’t run afoul of the platform’s rules.

Meanwhile, r/popculture — which has over 125,000 members — is closing down due to issues that the remaining moderator pins on Reddit. The moderator who posted about the “Luigi” issue announced last night they were shutting down the entire community “due to Reddit admins being complete fucking morons.” In the post, the moderator says that another member of the team was suspended and that Reddit has been unhelpful in trying to resolve the suspension.

The Reddit spokesperson said that the r/popculture moderator was suspended for approving content containing direct calls for violence, “including images celebrating [the Donald Trump rally shooter] and content calling to assassinate the president.” An r/popculture moderator denied this happened, and said the content in question was a photo of the shooter that did not celebrate him. The Reddit spokesperson notes that the automod features are temporary for r/popculture and that moderators can still approve the content for posting.

The “Luigi” issue comes the same week as Reddit’s new crackdown on banned content. Earlier this week, the company announced it would warn users who upvote content that is banned on the platform. The policy applies to users who upvote such content several times in “a certain timeframe,” Reddit says in a post, and the company will begin with enforcing the rule on violent content. The spokesperson says that at this time nobody has been suspended under the new rule.

The biggest YouTuber in the world is looking beyond videos to build a multibillion-dollar empire. 

For the last several months, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has been talking with investors about raising $200 million in a funding round that would value his holding company, Beast Industries, at more than $5 billion. An investor pitch deck I’ve obtained gives an unprecedented look at the fast-growing, money-losing business of MrBeast and his future plans. (Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw first reported that MrBeast is raising money last week.)

To justify that eye-popping valuation of at least $5 billion, investors are betting that the future of MrBeast’s business will be selling physical products, not making videos. Beast Industries and its roughly 500 employees see future revenue growth coming from a series of consumer packaged goods (CPG). Revenue from the company’s chocolate brand, Feastables, matched the core video business in 2024 and is expected to exceed it this year. 

Meanwhile, Beast Industries has never been profitable and doesn’t expect to be anytime soon. The company lost roughly $200 million over the last few years alone. Investors are planning to buy tens of millio …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The well-deserved hat trick that director Bong Joon Ho pulled off at the Oscars in 2020 with Parasite all but ensured that studios would fight tooth and nail to back his next cinematic project. It was always going to be difficult for Bong to top what he accomplished with Parasite — a shapeshifting masterpiece of storytelling that spoke to the the meticulousness of his creative process — but it was hard not to look forward to his follow-up after such a powerful tale.

Though Mickey 17 bears many of the narrative and stylistic hallmarks Bong has become known for, the film is shakier than much of his previous work. There is an intentional (but not always effective) sweatiness to some of the dark comedy’s lead performances that takes some of the bite out of its social commentary. But considering the cartoonishly unhinged political climate we’re all living through right now, Mickey 17 also feels like a film that’s meeting the moment and articulating what’s on many of our minds.

Adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey 7, Mickey 17 tells the story of Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a kind simpleton of a man whose iffy business dealings force him to run for his lif …

Read the full story at The Verge.

AliveCor has suffered another setback in its long-running patent case against Apple. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has upheld a decision that the medical device maker’s EKG patents are not actually patentable. As a result, the Apple Watch won’t face a second import ban from the International Trade Commission (ITC).

This back and forth between AliveCor and Apple began in 2021. AliveCor went to the ITC claiming Apple had infringed on its EKG patents. The ITC ruled in AliveCor’s favor, recommending an import ban that would’ve prevented the sale of Apple Watches with the EKG feature in the US. However, it didn’t immediately go into effect because the Patent Trial and Appeal Board also ruled that the three patents in question weren’t valid. For the import ban to go forward, AliveCor would’ve had to win its appeal of the PTAB decision — which it didn’t.

“We are deeply disappointed by the Court’s decisions this morning and that the Court did not review the available secondary considerations, which the ITC found to be persuasive in their finding of validity,” says Sanjay Voleti, AliveCor’s chief business officer. “We will continue to explore all available legal options, including potential appeals, to defend our position that our patents are valid and that Apple infringed our intellectual property rights.”

“We thank the Federal Circuit for its careful consideration in this case. Apple’s teams have worked tirelessly over many years to develop industry-leading health, wellness and safety features that meaningfully impact users’ lives, and we intend to stay on this path,” Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz tells The Verge.

AliveCor used the same legal strategy as Masimo, another medical device maker. However, Masimo was successful in its bid to get an ITC import ban against the Apple Watch. The main difference is Masimo’s patents were over the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor, not its EKG tech. To get around the ITC import ban, Apple now disables the blood oxygen sensor in Apple Watches newly sold in the US.