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Constantly being plugged into the news grind is mentally exhausting. Sometimes we just need to take a break, unwind, and do something fun. That’s why we’ve built up a collection of distracting time-wasters for when we need a break from being obsessively online. We figured you might enjoy these harmless rabbit holes, mildly addictive browser games , and internet curiosities , too, so we’ve been writing about them when we find them. Can you beat our score in I’m Not a Robot or did you find a gem of an academic paper on motherhood and body horror on Horror Lex ? Tell us in the comments. The goal here isn’t to get engrossed in a game that you’ll lose hundreds of hours to, or become an expert on dialectical materialism. It’s to have a little fun on your lunch break, decompress between emails, or give you an interesting repository of art to dig through on a slow Sunday afternoon. So check back often to see the latest light-h...

Aitana Lopez, AI avatar by creative agency The Clueless. | Image: The Clueless This is The Stepback , a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI confusion, follow Robert Hart . The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here . How it started At first, AI influencers were relatively easy to identify - and to ignore. Aside from the occasional bursts of hype, they didn't seem to change much about the way social media worked. The earliest virtual influencers - Lil Miquela with her blunt fringe and freckles, Imma with her bubblegum pink bob, and Shudu Gram with her flawless complexion - were obviously digital productions. Collaborations … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/ZapFcI8

An AI-generated image of the royal family featuring two Queen Elizabeth IIs. | Image: Meta AI Facebook has long been filled with feeds of clickbait articles. Now, Meta is making its own clickbait articles with AI. The standalone Meta AI app now has a "For You" section that populates a list of clickbait-style stories for you to read. But the topics, images, and text are all AI-generated - and as questionable as you'd expect from AI-created works. The Meta AI app first launched in April 2025 with its focus on a public "Discover" feed that showed AI-generated images and conversations from other users (who frequently seemed unaware that they were being made public). That's all disappeared. The app now has a standard chatbot interface, … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/HU5YFMi

There are a lot of games that remind me of summer - hot days in the backseat with a copy of Dragon Warrior III , cooling off in the basement while grinding Gran Turismo races - but there aren't a lot of games that are actually about summer. That's part of what makes Kabuto Park so charming. It's a game that manages to not only capture the fleeting moments of a childhood summer, but also cram a Pokémon -style adventure into a game that lasts only a few hours. Kabuto Park actually launched last year on PC, but it's available now on both Xbox and the Switch, the latter being probably the ideal platform for it. It takes place over the course of a … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/TaXImbs

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 131, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy last week of productivity before the World Cup starts, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .) This week, I've been reading about the World Cup and peptides and parasocial media , catching up on Clarkson's Farm ahead of the new season, buying literally every single new item in The Verge Shop , watching so so so many BTS concert clips on my social feeds, brainstorming ways to resurrect my old Facebook Portal , testing Spokenly to see if it's the dictation app for me, and ponying … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/tWlDPQK

Just a cute little guy. Never underestimate the power that a cheap tablet holds over a kid under six. The Skylight Buddy is a device with one job: to be a cute little guy that helps your kid track routines and chores. It's $139.99, plus an optional subscription. And to my surprise, even though it offers a pretty limited set of features without the $39-per-year "Plus" features, it actually worked. Skylight recommends the Buddy for kids aged four up to 10. An adult has to set it up, naturally, which you do inside of the Skylight app. From there, you make a profile for your kid and assign it to the Buddy, which is strictly one-kid-per-device. That might be a non-sta … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/ripMNmo