Últimamente observo con cierta incredulidad algo que, si uno se detiene a pensarlo, resulta bastante revelador. En estos meses me he fijado en la cantidad de actividades que se celebran en torno al diseño: eventos, festivales, premios, exposiciones,

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 87, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy It’s Officially Too Hot Now Week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Sabrina Carpenter and Khaby Lame and intimacy coordinators, finally making a dent in Barbarians at the Gate, watching all the Ben Schwartz and Friends I can find on YouTube, planning my days with the new Finalist beta, recklessly installing all the Apple developer betas after WWDC, thoroughly enjoying Dakota Johnson’s current press tour, and trying to clear all my inboxes before I go on parental leave. It’s… going.I also have for you a much-awaited new browser, a surprise update to a great photo editor, a neat trailer for a meh-looking movie, a classic Steve Jobs speech, and much more. Slightly shorter issue this week, sorry; there’s just a lot going on, but I didn’t want to leave y’all hanging entirely. Oh, and: we’ll be off next week, for Juneteenth, vacation, and general summer chaos reasons. We’ll be back in full force after that, though! Let’s get into it.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)The DropDia. I know there are a lot of Arc fans here in the Installerverse, and I know you, like me, will have a lot of feelings about the company’s new and extremely AI-focused browser. Personally, I don’t see leaving Arc anytime soon, but there are some really fascinating ideas (and nice design touches) in Dia already. Snapseed 3.0. I completely forgot Snapseed even existed, and now here’s a really nice update with a bunch of new editing tools and a nice new redesign! As straightforward photo editors go, this is one of the better ones. The new version is only on iOS right now, but I assume it’s heading to Android shortly.“I Tried To Make Something In America.” I was first turned onto the story of the Smarter Scrubber by a great Search Engine episode, and this is a great companion to the story about what it really takes to bring manufacturing back to the US. And why it’s hard to justify.. That link, and the trailer, will only do anything for you if you have a newer iPhone. But even if you don’t care about the movie, the trailer — which actually buzzes in sync with the car’s rumbles and revs — is just really, really cool. Android 16. You can’t get the cool, colorful new look just yet or the desktop mode I am extremely excited about — there’s a lot of good stuff in Android 16 but most of it is coming later. Still, Live Updates look good, and there’s some helpful accessibility stuff, as well.The Infinite Machine Olto. I am such a sucker for any kind of futuristic-looking electric scooter, and this one really hits the sweet spot. Part moped, part e-bike, all Blade Runner vibes. If it wasn’t $3,500, then I would’ve probably ordered one already.The Fujifilm X-E5. I kept wondering why Fujifilm didn’t just make, like, a hundred different great-looking cameras at every imaginable price because everyone wants a camera this cool. Well, here we are! It’s a spin on the X100VI but with interchangeable lenses and a few power-user features. All my photographer friends are going to want this.Call Her Alex. I confess I’m no Call Her Daddy diehard, but I found this two-part doc on Alex Cooper really interesting. Cooper’s story is all about understanding people, the internet, and what it means to feel connected now. It’s all very low-stakes and somehow also existential? It’s only two parts, you should watch it.“Steve Jobs - 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.” For the 20th anniversary of Jobs’ famous (and genuinely fabulous) speech, the Steve Jobs Archive put together a big package of stories, notes, and other materials around the speech. Plus, a newly high-def version of the video. This one’s always worth the 15 minutes.Dune: Awakening. Dune has ascended to the rare territory of “I will check out anything from this franchise, ever, no questions asked.” This game is big on open-world survival and ornithopters, too, so it’s even more my kind of thing. And it’s apparently punishingly difficult in spots.CrowdsourcedHere’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.“I had tried the paper planner in the leather Paper Republic journal but since have moved onto the Remarkable Paper Pro color e-ink device which takes everything you like about paper but makes it editable and color coded. Combine this with a Remarkable planner in PDF format off of Etsy and you are golden.” — Jason“I started reading a manga series from content creator Cory Kenshin called Monsters We Make. So far, I love it. Already preordered Vol. 2.” — Rob“I recently went down the third party controller rabbit hole after my trusty adapted Xbox One controller finally kicked the bucket, and I wanted something I could use across my PC, phone, handheld, Switch, etc. I’ve been playing with the GameSir Cyclone 2 for a few weeks, and it feels really deluxe. The thumbsticks are impossibly smooth and accurate thanks to its TMR joysticks. The face buttons took a second for my brain to adjust to; the short travel distance initially registered as mushy, but once I stopped trying to pound the buttons like I was at the arcade, I found the subtle mechanical click super satisfying.” — Sam“The Apple TV Plus miniseries Long Way Home. It’s Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s fourth Long Way series. This time they are touring some European countries on vintage bikes that they fixed, and it’s such a light-hearted show from two really down to earth humans. Connecting with other people in different cultures and seeing their journey is such a treat!” — Esmael“Podcast recommendation: Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Christianity Today. A deep dive into the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s.” — Drew“Splatoon 3 (the free Switch 2 update) and the new How to Train Your Dragon.” — Aaron“I can’t put Mario Kart World down. When I get tired of the intense Knockout Tour mode I go to Free Roam and try to knock out P-Switch challenges, some of which are really tough! I’m obsessed.” — Dave“Fable, a cool app for finding books with virtual book clubs. It’s the closest to a more cozy online bookstore with more honest reviews. I just wish you could click on the author’s name to see their other books.” — Astrid“This is the Summer Games Fest week (formerly E3, RIP) and there are a TON of game demos to try out on Steam. One that has caught my attention / play time the most is Wildgate. It’s a team based spaceship shooter where ship crews battle and try to escape with a powerful artifact.” — Sean“Battlefront 2 is back for some reason. Still looks great.” — IanSigning offI have long been fascinated by weather forecasting. I recommend Andrew Blum’s book, The Weather Machine, to people all the time, as a way to understand both how we learned to predict the weather and why it’s a literally culture-changing thing to be able to do so. And if you want to make yourself so, so angry, there’s a whole chunk of Michael Lewis’s book, The Fifth Risk, about how a bunch of companies managed to basically privatize forecasts… based on government data. The weather is a huge business, an extremely powerful political force, and even more important to our way of life than we realize. And we’re really good at predicting the weather!I’ve also been hearing for years that weather forecasting is a perfect use for AI. It’s all about vast quantities of historical data, tiny fluctuations in readings, and finding patterns that often don’t want to be found. So, of course, as soon as I read my colleague Justine Calma’s story about a new Google project called Weather Lab, I spent the next hour poking through the data to see how well DeepMind managed to predict and track recent storms. It’s deeply wonky stuff, but it’s cool to see Big Tech trying to figure out Mother Nature — and almost getting it right. Almost.See you next week!See More:

One of the four pillars of good conversation is levity. You needn’t be a comedian, you can but have some funTetra Images, LLC/Alamy Conversation lies at the heart of our relationships – yet many of us find it surprisingly hard to talk to others. We may feel anxious at the thought of making small talk with strangers and struggle to connect with the people who are closest to us. If that sounds familiar, Alison Wood Brooks hopes to help. She is a professor at Harvard Business School, where she teaches an oversubscribed course called “TALK: How to talk gooder in business and life”, and the author of a new book, Talk: The science of conversation and the art of being ourselves. Both offer four key principles for more meaningful exchanges. Conversations are inherently unpredictable, says Wood Brooks, but they follow certain rules – and knowing their architecture makes us more comfortable with what is outside of our control. New Scientist asked her about the best ways to apply this research to our own chats. David Robson: Talking about talking feels quite meta. Do you ever find yourself critiquing your own performance? Alison Wood Brooks: There are so many levels of “meta-ness”. I have often felt like I’m floating over the room, watching conversations unfold, even as I’m involved in them myself. I teach a course at Harvard, and [my students] all get to experience this feeling as well. There can be an uncomfortable period of hypervigilance, but I hope that dissipates over time as they develop better habits. There is a famous quote from Charlie Parker, who was a jazz saxophonist. He said something like, “Practise, practise, practise, and then when you get on stage, let it all go and just wail.” I think that’s my approach to conversation. Even when you’re hyper-aware of conversation dynamics, you have to remember the true delight of being with another human mind, and never lose the magic of being together. Think ahead, but once you’re talking, let it all go and just wail. Reading your book, I learned that a good way to enliven a conversation is to ask someone why they are passionate about what they do. So, where does your passion for conversation come from? I have two answers to this question. One is professional. Early in my professorship at Harvard, I had been studying emotions by exploring how people talk about their feelings and the balance between what we feel inside and how we express that to others. And I realised I just had this deep, profound interest in figuring out how people talk to each other about everything, not just their feelings. We now have scientific tools that allow us to capture conversations and analyse them at large scale. Natural language processing, machine learning, the advent of AI – all this allows us to take huge swathes of transcript data and process it much more efficiently. Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox. Sign up to newsletter The personal answer is that I’m an identical twin, and I spent my whole life, from the moment I opened my newborn eyes, existing next to a person who’s an exact copy of myself. It was like observing myself at very close range, interacting with the world, interacting with other people. I could see when she said and did things well, and I could try to do that myself. And I saw when her jokes failed, or she stumbled over her words – I tried to avoid those mistakes. It was a very fortunate form of feedback that not a lot of people get. And then, as a twin, you’ve got this person sharing a bedroom, sharing all your clothes, going to all the same parties and playing on the same sports teams, so we were just constantly in conversation with each other. You reached this level of shared reality that is so incredible, and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to help other people get there in their relationships, too. “TALK” cleverly captures your framework for better conversations: topics, asking, levity and kindness. Let’s start at the beginning. How should we decide what to talk about? My first piece of advice is to prepare. Some people do this naturally. They already think about the things that they should talk about with somebody before they see them. They should lean into this habit. Some of my students, however, think it’s crazy. They think preparation will make the conversation seem rigid and forced and overly scripted. But just because you’ve thought ahead about what you might talk about doesn’t mean you have to talk about those things once the conversation is underway. It does mean, however, that you always have an idea waiting for you when you’re not sure what to talk about next. Having just one topic in your back pocket can help you in those anxiety-ridden moments. It makes things more fluent, which is important for establishing a connection. Choosing a topic is not only important at the start of a conversation. We’re constantly making decisions about whether we should stay on one subject, drift to something else or totally shift gears and go somewhere wildly different. Sometimes the topic of conversation is obvious. Even then, knowing when to switch to a new one can be trickyMartin Parr/Magnum Photos What’s your advice when making these decisions? There are three very clear signs that suggest that it’s time to switch topics. The first is longer mutual pauses. The second is more uncomfortable laughter, which we use to fill the space that we would usually fill excitedly with good content. And the third sign is redundancy. Once you start repeating things that have already been said on the topic, it’s a sign that you should move to something else. After an average conversation, most people feel like they’ve covered the right number of topics. But if you ask people after conversations that didn’t go well, they’ll more often say that they didn’t talk about enough things, rather than that they talked about too many things. This suggests that a common mistake is lingering too long on a topic after you’ve squeezed all the juice out of it. The second element of TALK is asking questions. I think a lot of us have heard the advice to ask more questions, yet many people don’t apply it. Why do you think that is? Many years of research have shown that the human mind is remarkably egocentric. Often, we are so focused on our own perspective that we forget to even ask someone else to share what’s in their mind. Another reason is fear. You’re interested in the other person, and you know you should ask them questions, but you’re afraid of being too intrusive, or that you will reveal your own incompetence, because you feel you should know the answer already. What kinds of questions should we be asking – and avoiding? In the book, I talk about the power of follow-up questions that build on anything that your partner has just said. It shows that you heard them, that you care and that you want to know more. Even one follow-up question can springboard us away from shallow talk into something deeper and more meaningful. There are, however, some bad patterns of question asking, such as “boomerasking”. Michael Yeomans [at Imperial College London] and I have a recent paper about this, and oh my gosh, it’s been such fun to study. It’s a play on the word boomerang: it comes back to the person who threw it. If I ask you what you had for breakfast, and you tell me you had Special K and banana, and then I say, “Well, let me tell you about my breakfast, because, boy, was it delicious” – that’s boomerasking. Sometimes it’s a thinly veiled way of bragging or complaining, but sometimes I think people are genuinely interested to hear from their partner, but then the partner’s answer reminds them so much of their own life that they can’t help but start sharing their perspective. In our research, we have found that this makes your partner feel like you weren’t interested in their perspective, so it seems very insincere. Sharing your own perspective is important. It’s okay at some point to bring the conversation back to yourself. But don’t do it so soon that it makes your partner feel like you didn’t hear their answer or care about it. Research by Alison Wood Brooks includes a recent study on “boomerasking”, a pitfall you should avoid to make conversations flowJanelle Bruno What are the benefits of levity? When we think of conversations that haven’t gone well, we often think of moments of hostility, anger or disagreement, but a quiet killer of conversation is boredom. Levity is the antidote. These small moments of sparkle or fizz can pull us back in and make us feel engaged with each other again. Our research has shown that we give status and respect to people who make us feel good, so much so that in a group of people, a person who can land even one appropriate joke is more likely to be voted as the leader. And the joke doesn’t even need to be very funny! It’s the fact that they were confident enough to try it and competent enough to read the room. Do you have any practical steps that people can apply to generate levity, even if they’re not a natural comedian? Levity is not just about being funny. In fact, aiming to be a comedian is not the right goal. When we watch stand-up on Netflix, comedians have rehearsed those jokes and honed them and practised them for a long time, and they’re delivering them in a monologue to an audience. It’s a completely different task from a live conversation. In real dialogue, what everybody is looking for is to feel engaged, and that doesn’t require particularly funny jokes or elaborate stories. When you see opportunities to make it fun or lighten the mood, that’s what you need to grab. It can come through a change to a new, fresh topic, or calling back to things that you talked about earlier in the conversation or earlier in your relationship. These callbacks – which sometimes do refer to something funny – are such a nice way of showing that you’ve listened and remembered. A levity move could also involve giving sincere compliments to other people. When you think nice things, when you admire someone, make sure you say it out loud. This brings us to the last element of TALK: kindness. Why do we so often fail to be as kind as we would like? Wobbles in kindness often come back to our egocentrism. Research shows that we underestimate how much other people’s perspectives differ from our own, and we forget that we have the tools to ask other people directly in conversation for their perspective. Being a kinder conversationalist is about trying to focus on your partner’s perspective and then figuring what they need and helping them to get it. Finally, what is your number one tip for readers to have a better conversation the next time they speak to someone? Every conversation is surprisingly tricky and complex. When things don’t go perfectly, give yourself and others more grace. There will be trips and stumbles and then a little grace can go very, very far. Topics:

Growing up steeped in the aggressive gender stereotypes of the 1990s was a real trip for most queer millennials, but I think gamers had it especially hard. Almost all video game characters were hypermasculine military men, unrealistically curvaceous fantasy women wearing barely enough armour to cover their nipples, or cartoon animals. Most of these characters catered exclusively to straight teenage boys (or, I guess, furries); overt queer representation in games was pretty much nonexistent until the mid 2010s. Before that, we had to take what we could get. And what I had was Link, from The Legend of Zelda.Link. Composite: Guardian Design; Zuma Press/AlamyLink is a boy, but he didn’t really look like one. He wore a green tunic and a serious expression under a mop of blond hair. He is the adventurous, mostly silent hero of the Zelda games, unassuming and often vulnerable, but also resourceful, daring and handy with a sword. In most of the early Zelda games, he is a kid of about 10, but even when he grew into a teenager in 1998’s Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, he didn’t become a furious lump of muscle. He stayed androgynous, in his tunic and tights. As a kid, I would dress up like him for Halloween, carefully centre-parting my blond fringe. Link may officially be a boy, but for me he has always been a non-binary icon.As time has gone on and game graphics have evolved, Link has stayed somewhat gender-ambiguous. Gay guys and gender-fluid types alike appreciate his ageless twink energy. And given the total lack of thought that most game developers gave to players who weren’t straight and male, I felt vindicated when I found out that this was intentional. In 2016, the Zelda series’ producer Eiji Aonuma told Time magazine that the development team had experimented a little with Link’s gender presentation over the years, but that he felt that the character’s androgyny was part of who he was.“[Even] back during the Ocarina of Time days, I wanted Link to be gender neutral,” he said. “I wanted the player to think: ‘Maybe Link is a boy or a girl.’ If you saw Link as a guy, he’d have more of a feminine touch. Or vice versa … I’ve always thought that for either female or male players, I wanted them to be able to relate to Link.”As it turns out, Link appeals perhaps most of all to those of us somewhere in between. In 2023, the tech blog io9 spoke to many transgender and non-binary people who saw something of themselves in Link: he has acquired a reputation as an egg-cracker, a fictional character who prompts a realisation about your own gender identity.Despite their outdated reputation as a pursuit for adolescent boys, video games have always been playgrounds for gender experimentation and expression. There are legions of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people who first started exploring their identity with customisable game characters in World of Warcraft, or gender-swapping themselves in The Sims – the digital equivalent of dressing up. Video games are the closest you can come to stepping into a new body for a bit and seeing how it feels.It is no surprise to me that a lot of queer people are drawn to video games. A 2024 survey by GLAAD found that 17% of gamers identify as LGBTQ+, a huge number compared with the general population. It may be because people who play games skew younger – 40 and below – but I also think it’s because gender is all about play. What fun it is to mess with the rules, subvert people’s expectations and create your own character. It is as empowering as any world-saving quest.

The biggest American film of the year so far, perhaps a little surprisingly, is A Minecraft Movie, the highly meme-able comedy based on the hugely popular series of Minecraft video games.So far, the film, directed by Jared Hess, has grossed over $950 million in theaters worldwide, nearly $150 million more than its closest competition. (That would be Lilo & Stitch.) With little else to prove in theaters, the movie is now headed to streaming, and will premiere on Max (soon to be HBO Max again) in one week.In the film, a former video game champion (Jason Momoa) and a troubled teenager (Sebastian Hansen) discover a magical object that leads them into the Minecraft world. There, they meet — who else? — Steve, played by Jack Black. The human heroes need to team up to save this strange, blocky universe from the evil Malgosha, a piglin from the fiery Nether realm.Warner Bros.Warner Bros.loading...The film’s quirky sense of humor and highly quotable dialogue (like “Chicken jockey!” and “I ... am Steve!”) helped A Minecraft Movie go viral even before it had hit theaters. Huge crowds of young teens flocked to the theater (something they don’t do all that often anymore, sadly) to scream the lines back at the screen, copying a trend they’d seen on TikTok. I witnessed it first-hand and, since I don’t use TikTok, I was totally baffled. (I’m so old.)Kids got so rowdy at some screenings that police had to be called to settle things down. (Warner Bros. later help special screenings where screaming back the screen was encouraged.) Now that Minecraft will be on Max, you can yell “Flint and steel!” to your heart’s content without having to worry about getting arrested (unless your neighbors are real narcs). Chicken jockeys ... start your, uh, chickens.A Minecraft Movie debuts on Max on June 20.Get our free mobile appThe 10 Worst TV Game Shows of All TimeFrom boring to overcomplicated to just plain offensive, we've plumbed the depths of the last few decades of reality game show television to bring you the worst of the worst.Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky