Art

Zoom Escaper lets you sabotage your own meetings with audio problems, crying babies, and more

Had enough Zoom meetings? Can’t bear another soul-numbing day of sitting on video calls, the only distraction your rapidly aging face, pinned in one corner of the screen like a dying bug? Well, if so, then boy do we have the app for you. Meet Zoom Escaper: a free web widget that lets you add… Read more

The best games you can play right now on Xbox Game Pass

(Pocket-lint) – Xbox Game Pass has been a huge change to the way we pay for games over the last couple of years – it’s the ace in Microsoft’s sleeve, and can be absolutely astounding value if you want to play through loads of great games. What is Xbox Game Pass, what games do you… Read more

A secretive metaverse creator bought the $69 million Beeple NFT

MetaKovan, the pseudonymous founder of MetaPurse, is the buyer behind the $69 million winning bid for a Beeple NFT at Christie’s yesterday. It was the third-highest sale price ever for a work from a living artist. “When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat,” MetaKovan said in… Read more

Stream it yourself

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Here’s what it’s like to craft live on stream PmsProxy, a partnered Twitch streamer who has 147,000 followers, was tired. Tired of streaming Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and of streaming herself playing games more generally — something she’d been doing nearly every day for around six years. “I… Read more

Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million

Until October, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist known as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100. Today, an NFT of his work sold for $69 million at Christie’s. The sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists,” according to the auction house. The record-smashing NFT sale… Read more

The art of upcycling old sneakers into high-fashion corsets

Modern fashion is fraught with wasted product, so some designers are thinking about ways to transform these unwanted goods into artistic pieces meant for the runway. One of those is FRISKMEGOOD™, a futuristic brand that creates upcycled high fashion and editorial pieces out of used or deadstock sneakers and other secondhand finds. Owner and designer… Read more

Meze Audio celebrates 10 years with limited-edition Empyrean Headphones

Boutique headphone manufacturer Meze Audio is marking a decade of operation by releasing a limited run of their flagship Empyrean over-ear headphones. The new Art Gallery Empyrean Phoenix headphones will be restricted to just 100 products worldwide, each with a unique serial number and CNC sculpted aluminium chassis, and hand-painted with a flame-inspired red and… Read more

A former pro is helping figure skating look more authentic than ever

On TV, ice skating often looks like a sport stuck in time. Cameras aren’t hanging from wires above the action or placed close to the ice for a dynamic look at skaters zipping by. Instead, a few stationary cameras planted around a rink flip from one view to the next when a better angle is… Read more

Waymo is disclosing more autonomous vehicle data for research purposes

Waymo is publicizing more data from its autonomous vehicles, which it says is for the benefit of the research community. Building on the trove of data it released in 2019, the Alphabet company is calling this latest batch “the largest interactive dataset yet released for research into behavior prediction and motion forecasting for autonomous driving.”… Read more

The plus-size knitters who are solving an inclusivity problem

Fifteen years since first learning to knit, Petrina Hicks has only ever made sweaters for other people. There was one cardigan attempt back in 2015, but they had to make so many modifications that the end product was frumpy and ill-fitting. Hicks didn’t have the luxury to be picky: the cardigan was the only sweater… Read more

Making fanfiction beautiful enough for a bookshelf

The only thing more beautiful than the red cloth stretched across the cover of Sarah Lesure’s handcrafted book is the swirling font filling up the pages inside. Each page is meticulously crafted to feel luxurious, like an expensive tome tucked on a back shelf in a little book shop. Lesure spends hours making sure each… Read more

Case Mod World Series 2020 Winners Showcase Cyberpunk Mantis Blade PC, A ‘Floating’ Tower

Home News (Image credit: AK Mod) When times get tough, modders get modding, and 2020 was no different. Today, the winners of Cooler Master’s Case Mod World Series 2020 modding contest receive their crowns, rewarding some of the most remarkable mods created in a challenging year. The 2020 contest saw 90 entries from enthusiasts across… Read more

Rescuing discarded fabric for designer bow ties

Nisha Blackwell is CEO of Knotzland, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes bow ties from upcycled textile waste. Giving wasted material a new life Nisha Blackwell remembers wearing a lot of hand-me-down clothes as a kid and sorting through things to try on with her mother and grandmother. Thrifting was just a thing everyone did, long… Read more

OpenAI’s state-of-the-art machine vision AI is fooled by handwritten notes

Researchers from machine learning lab OpenAI have discovered that their state-of-the-art computer vision system can be defeated by tools no more sophisticated than a pen and a pad. As illustrated in the image above, simply writing down the name of an object and sticking it on another can be enough to trick the software into… Read more

Hades almost starred its worst character

In Hades, the legendary Greek hero who killed the Minotaur, Theseus, is a pain in the ass. He’s a bossfight, a blowhard who treats each encounter like an overproduced wrestling match. Zagreus, the cool, collected prince of the Underworld, may have good reason to want to leave, but in Theseus’ eyes, he’ll never amount to… Read more