Today on The Vergecast: Pixel phones, Pixel watches, and Elon.

Hellena Taylor, the voice actress behind Bayonetta, says she didn’t reprise her role in the upcoming Bayonetta 3 because of low pay. She claims that Japanese developer Platinum Games offered just $4,000 for her role as the series’ protagonist:

This is an insult to me. The amount of time I took to work on my talent, and everything that I have given to this game and to the fans. I am asking the fans to boycott this game and instead spend the money that you would have spent on this game donating to charity.

Minecraft developer Mojang revealed a lot of new updates and features at Minecraft Live today, but one of the most significant is the addition of seven new default skins to the base game, offering much greater diversity for new players. Expect to see them start showing up towards the end of November or early December.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the founders of the Gemini cryptocurrency platform, donated a total of over $1 million to Saving Arizona, a Peter Thiel-backed SuperPAC supporting Republican Senate nominee and Bitcoin advocate Blake Masters. According to a filing with the Federal Election Committee, each twin donated $550,000.

The release schedule has been lighter than usual — a bit like a calm before the storm as we get into the holidays — but there’s still some interesting stuff to check out this week. And it covers quite a broad range of styles and genres: She-Hulk just wrapped up its first season, Chainsaw Man started streaming on Crunchyroll, Decision to Leave is now in theaters, and for Elden Ring fans, that game just got a big ol’ update with lots of changes.

I spent hours in The Print Shop as a kid; it truly was a perfect piece of software.

The idea here is that an attacker would tamper with the early results sent via insecure modem, and then no one would trust the final certified results. I’d say that was a fanciful scheme but… well, shit.

“In the current hyperpolarized atmosphere, modems in voting machines are now not only a potential target for cyberattacks, but, perhaps more importantly, information operations seeking to cast doubt on the legitimacy of U.S. elections,” said David Levine, a former election director for Ada County, Idaho.

Verge Score

Not sure how to feel about Meta’s new VR headset and the motion-captured avatar legs revealed this week?

Verge senior reporter Adi Robertson spoke to Tech News Weekly about using the device and everything we learned about Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse plans.

Earlier in the episode, senior news editor Richard Lawler discussed CNN’s NFT shutdown and why people who bought its tokens might be angry about the rug disappearing from underneath their feet.

A woman tweeted to models from the old-school boxes of hair relaxers to “show yourselves,” and... they did!

There’s always been something special about how Twitter can bring people together (when it isn’t splitting them apart) and this recent thread showed why — with no tweet editing required.

Nikola’s founder has been found guilty on three counts of fraud, with prosecutors saying that his lies about “nearly all aspects of the business” drove up the company’s stock price.

The company also posted a video that purportedly showed its semi driving — allegedly, it was actually just rolling down a hill.

Google’s Pixel Watch uses a proprietary strap mounting system that prevents standard straps from attaching to it. But if you happen to buy one of Google’s $79.99 Crafted Leather Bands, you can wedge a strap pin tool between its lugs and pop the strap off Google’s special mount. Then you can fit whatever 20mm strap you want in its place.

Here’s a brown leather strap that I bought for a Samsung watch a couple years ago fitting just fine. I don’t understand why Google isn’t selling a brown strap for the Pixel Watch, so I took matters into my own hands.

It’s very funny to remember this statement after the fabrication of a fake 5G race and Google Fiber announcing this week that it’s launching 5-gig and 8-gig plans.

As always, here’s what The Verge believes: internet access ought to be a public utility whose providers compete aggressively based on speed and capacity. Dumb pipes are the smartest pipes.

So much tech news this week! We dug into all of it, from Meta Connect to our Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch reviews to the never-ending slew of Microsoft announcements. And we all have strong feelings about the whole idea of “enterprise VR.”

In a survey first spotted by ex-Spotify users on Reddit, the company is asking people whether they’d switch back for a $19.99 a month “Platinum” tier that includes HiFi and a bunch of other features. That means, sadly, that whenever HiFi does surface it’s probably going to cost extra.

NASA has live coverage of their return streaming now, in case you’re looking for something to tune into on a Friday afternoon. Splashdown is expected around 4:50PM ET.

Google Meet is rolling out a toggle to automatically zoom in on your face before you start a meeting.

It’s not exactly like Apple’s Center Stage feature because it won’t keep you in the frame if you move around — the auto-centering only happens once — but it also won’t distractingly zoom in and out automatically while you’re trying to have a conversation.

Protestors from the group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting in London today. In related news, here’s a Dutch guy explaining how to pronounce “Vincent Van Gogh.”

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law just wrapped up its first season on Disney Plus, and the show about a fourth wall-breaking character unsurprisingly went in a very meta direction to wrap things up. For more on what worked — and what didn’t — with the final episode, check out this analysis from my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore.

Last month Google showed off its new lock screen widgets for iPhones but wasn’t ready to release them yet.

Now they’re all available, for Search, Chrome, Google Drive, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google News.

But Allison Johnson is focused on just one, and only for one reason: because now one button press can make Google Maps give you the shortest route to a cup of coffee.

Listen: everyone else in the Verge newsroom is going to talk to you today about serious news. I want you to check out. Give in to temptation. Abandon email and business. Give yourself to... the blue ball machine.

We’re one step closer to a password-less future. Passkeys have been on iOS for a little bit, and now they’re coming to Android and Chrome as well (though as a beta, with the stable version coming later this year).

When the new Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate sent its almost-finished Batgirl project into the vault forever, it also yanked other projects intended for straight-to-HBO Max debuts from the schedule.

One of those movies was House Party 3, which is now scheduled for a theatrical release in 2023. You can watch the trailer below (or with less editing on YouTube) and decide how good of an idea that is.

This week Microsoft announced updated versions of the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Studio. But missing from the show were any new members of the Surface Headphones line. The Surface Headphones 2 are now over two years old and have fallen a bit behind the competition, despite still having very clever design features. Chris Welch wonders if Microsoft is quietly pulling out of the market:

Apple’s foray into producing MLB broadcasts has had some pretty spotty moments, so Eddy Cue saying they would only take Sunday Ticket if the company is allowed to have ”great ideas” is pretty strange. The bar is: don’t crash every weekend!

Slack’s video huddles feature, which was announced back in July, just hit our instance today and after two video meetings in it, I’m not sure I ever want to use Zoom again. Of course, there are things Zoom still does better, like letting me record a meeting or handle many more thumbnails on a single window, but the Slack video huddle just feels much more effortless. And the chat is saved as a thread in Slack.

Zoom is at the same time trying to attack Slack from the other direction, by adding chat and other features. But if I had to guess, I’d wager Slack might replace Zoom first.