67 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Archives for October 2026

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
AI backlash hits fountain pens, with delightful results.

Write Love Pens, a small pen and stationery shop, had initially used AI-generated images (including one of a pen with two clips on the cap) to advertise surprise boxes that the shop puts together. After getting yelled at on fountain pen Reddit, the shop’s owner apologized, and replaced the AI images with extremely cute amateur drawings.

Three images, all hand-drawn, showing three different sizes of surprise box: select, signature, and reserve. The drawings are obviously amateur, and appealingly quirky.
Write Love Pens
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Here’s a video of Half-Life: Alyx running natively on a Vision Pro.

Take a look. It was “made possible” thanks in part to Valve’s ARM port of the game it made for the Steam Frame and with some help from Claude.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
The story mode for NBA 2K25, a game released in 2024, will be unplayable in January.

As reported by IGN, starting January 1st, 2027, the game’s online modes — which include the MyCAREER mode — won’t work anymore because the servers are being sunset. NBA 2K25 is also being pulled from stores on October 30th, 2K says.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Meta’s smart glasses are getting a couple new audio features starting today.

Audio Balance and Mono Audio, announced at Meta Connect, are rolling out now, 9to5Google reports. It also says a couple of navigation upgrades are now “broadly available as an update in the Meta AI app,” including turn-by-turn Pedestrian Navigation and a feature for sharing your location from your phone with your glasses.

Andrew Webster
Andrew Webster
I wonder who picked up the bill.

Smash Bros. boss Masahiro Sakurai recently posted a photo of a dinner featuring a who’s who of Japanese game design luminaries, including himself. (If you don’t recognize all of the faces, here’s a run-down.) The possibilities for new Smash characters is now nearly endless.

A photo of the following game designers at a dinner table: Ko Takai, Taro Yoko, Toby Fox, Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Goichi Suda, Keiichiro Toyama, Masahiro Sakurai, Jiro Ishii, and Fumito Ueda.
Image: Masahiro Sakurai / X
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Google is going to let you directly edit Markdown files in Docs.

Markdown is a standard text format widely used by Large Language Models (LLMs) to preserve structured content, like tables, headers, and bulleted lists, without the bulk of heavy file formats. Previously, you needed to import and convert Markdown files into a Doc format, which often altered formatting, stripped comments, and fragmented files.

You’ll also be able to preview Markdown files in Drive. The feature starts rolling out today.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Leaked Pixel 12 specs hint at a display upgrade for its next foldable phone.

According to GSMA database listings spotted by OVR Plus, the Pixel 12 Pro Fold appears to have a higher inner display resolution of 2296 x 2404, up from 2076 x 2152 from this year’s model. However, as 9to5Google points out, the aspect ratio suggests Google might not switch the next Pro Fold to a passport-style design.

David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: We hear pitches on the best vibe-coded apps.

Welcome to Bear Lair!* (No, it’s nothing like that other show.) As we continue to explore the world of AI tools and vibe coding, we invited a few enterprising Vergecast fans to share their projects — and we invited The Verge’s Hayden Field to judge them with us. We’ll see what people are working on, and whether any of them will make us fabulously wealthy.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
A Japanese real estate company is building a data center in an underground tunnel.

Mitsui Fudosan is planning the data center, which will consist of more than 10 shipping containers with servers, in the Suma Belt Conveyor in Kobe, Japan, Nikkei Asia reports. The company is also apparently planning more underground data centers.

Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
Just think: You could be playing Halo in a web browser right now.

The video game decompilation movement has done it again. Not only do we have 128 player Halo across Windows, Linux, and Android , you can also just fire it up in a web browser thanks to OpenHaloCE and immediately start campaign or a huge multiplayer match. It’s not just one dev: lots of people made this happen.

1/4
Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Marvel’s launching a new comics app developed with Webtoon on November 16th.

The revamped Marvel Comics app will include archived and current comic books, with new issues arriving as soon as 30 days after their print release. It’s replacing Marvel Unlimited, which will shut down on December 28th, but Marvel says you’ll be able to transfer your library to the new app after it launches.