I honestly don’t know what to do with this information, which comes via The Washington Post. This is just one guy’s opinion, but it seems like an awfullot of ants. Like God accidentally maxed out the ant-slider or spilled a bag of “Oops! All ants!” into the biosphere during Creation. What I need is a lie down and to not think about the millions — sorry, 20 quadrillion — of ants out there.

9to5Google reports that the Bluetooth/Wi-Fi model of the Pixel Watch will start at $349.99, after having previously reported the cellular model will cost $399.99. That puts them above Samsung’s $279.99 Galaxy Watch 5 and closer to what Apple charges (starting at $399 for the Series 8). We’ll know for sure come October 6th.

Kim Masters has a good piece on Warner Brothers Discovery looking for a new DC studio chief, with rampant speculation that the endgame is Comcast buying the whole thing in 2024 to beef up Peacock.

Many top industry execs are so convinced a deal will happen that some are pre-mourning an event that may never happen. “People feel like it’s Comcast for sure,” says the head of one company. “It’s going to be so depressing to lose another major studio [after Disney bought Fox]. And Warners was the Tiffany studio.”

In my article about Apple dropping the physical SIM on the iPhone 14, I said it was “probably fine” for people on major US carriers. I also mentioned that my iPhone 11 had a physical Verizon SIM and an eSIM from a carrier in the Netherlands. This weekend I upgraded to an iPhone 14 Pro. The Verizon SIM transferred without a hitch. The other one? Not so much. Guess it’s time to admit to myself that I’m never moving back to Amsterdam.

Rolling Stone interviewed five women involved in the several sexual harassment lawsuits against the automaker.

Hearing them describe how they were treated, and how Tesla failed to defend them (and sometimes actively punished them) is difficult.

The official Nielsen numbers aren’t in, but a memo from Amazon’s Jay Marine says the game was “the most watched night of primetime in the U.S. in the history of Prime Video” and he expects the company exceeded the 12.5 million viewers it promised advertisers.

Amazon can’t go five minutes without pushing an unverifiable and unquantifiable statistic, so Marine also claimed the game was “the biggest three hours for U.S. Prime sign ups ever in the history of Amazon — including Prime Day, Cyber Monday and Black Friday.” Truly the emptiest of data points from the people who run Next Gen Stats Powered By AWS.

Carriers are all doing huge deals on iPhone 14 models, but if you just want to buy a phone outright, a discounted iPhone 13 Pro might be the best bang-for-the-buck around.

This Girl Does Not Exist promises “everything you will see in this game” is created by an AI. Except... based on everything I’ve read, that includes none of the game mechanics or interface design! It’s an interesting experiment in artificially generated images and audio, but AI-generated gameplay is a uniquely weird and difficult problem. That said, I’m fascinated by the growing move toward an aesthetics of AI — and this project sits square in that zone.

I continue to think they’re the best thing about the new iOS, and the MacStories folks rounded up a huge number of widgets you can try now. They range from pointless and delightful to totally instantly essential — Link Hub, which just opens any link you want, is particularly great.

The Vergecast is doing a special miniseries for the next three Mondays on the future of music. This week I spoke with music reporter and podcaster Charlie Harding about how the future of music could sound very familiar.

Countless people have discussed the travails of Rick and Morty fandom. But Corbin Smith goes beyond the simple claims that obnoxious fans are just watching the show wrong, delving into the inherent difficulty of writing a character with terrible qualities who’s still undeniably cool to watch. A bonus: he lays out the precise take on Rorschach from Watchmen that I’ve always wanted to read.

South Korean authorities have requested that Interpol tell international authorities to arrest Do Kwon, the co-founder of the company behind the Terra/Luna cryptocurrency debacle, The Financial Times reports. Kwon tweeted this weekend that he is not on the run, actually, and authorities are just mad that he tweeted that their size is not size. Posters gonna post, I guess.

Loved this meaty essay about trends in consumerism, what we mean by “culture,” and how DTC brands led to a new understanding of community and identity. “In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths,” writes Toby Shorin. “The authenticity-driven culture of ironic detachment, so present in the early 2000s, has given way to a moment where people are genuinely open to being influenced, open to sincerely participating, even if it’s cringe.”

–Figma CEO Dylan Field, in the unenviable position of having to reflect on an old tweet.

Field tweeted last year that Figma’s goal “is to be Figma not Adobe.” Fast forward to today and... Figma is going to be part of Adobe! My colleague Jay Peters spoke with the two companies’ leaders about what the merger means for designers everywhere.

Steam Deck prototypes aren’t the only thing to see at the Tokyo Game Show, as one Redditor noticed (via PC Gamer) that the still-unreleased official dock is holding up display units.

That’s also relevant because Steam Decks are being delivered more rapidly than expected. Valve just announced it’s cleared the reservations in the Q3 bucket a couple of weeks ahead of schedule and is starting in on reservations slated for Q4.