Over the past few years, I’ve developed a peaceful little routine to make up for time spent cooped up inside working on sunny days: after I’ve closed my laptop for the day, I throw my sneakers on, open Pikmin Bloom on my phone, and go for a long walk to clear my head and plant virtual flowers with the 'min.

Pikmin Bloom was released for Android and iOS in 2021 by Pokémon Go developer Niantic and Nintendo as another “go outside and touch grass” app, and I’ve been playing it pretty regularly since then. Only recently, when the app announced some special events for its 2.5-year anniversary, did it occur to me how long I’ve actually stuck with it. There isn’t all that much to Pikmin Bloom, but that’s part of the charm — it’s more of a walking buddy than a full-on game. You accumulate Pikmin, feed them nectar so they’ll grow flowers from their heads, then pick the petals and use those to “plant flowers” when you go on walks (don’t think too hard about the science of that, it’s Pikmin).

Unlike Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom doesn’t require a lot of your attention while you’re walking around, which really appealed to me as someone who likes to stay fully aware of their surroundings while out and about. That, and the promise of being accompanied wherever I go by a horde of quietly singing Pikmin; I just love those weird little guys.

I typically get everything set up before I leave for a walk, making sure I have plenty of petals ready to plant. Then I hit the ‘Start’ button and mostly leave the app alone until I take a break or am done with my walk, checking in only here and there to see if I’ve passed anything of interest. You can send your Pikmin on expeditions to pick up fruit or destroy mushrooms that’ll pop up on your map, but you don’t need to be actively walking to do this, as they’ll be recorded on a list you can revisit later. Once I’m back home, I love seeing how many flowers I planted versus how many steps I took (I still haven’t figured out the ratio), and delegating different missions for my Pikmin to tackle.

There are frequent events that serve as motivation for reaching certain step count goals or planting a particular number of flowers, including some with community involvement. And, there's the prospect of collecting themed Pikmin who wear special decor outfits. Pikmin Bloom is currently teasing some upcoming Cheese Decor Pikmin for next month, and I’m going to work extra hard to try and get them. While the app does have the potential to lure players into in-app purchases, they’re by no means necessary to get the full experience. I’ve managed to make it this far without spending any money at all.

Pikmin Bloom has an AR component similar to Pokémon Go’s, so you can photograph your Pikmin in the real world, but this feature can be pretty glitchy. What’s better than that, in my opinion, are the postcards your Pikmin will sometimes bring back from their travels — they’ve been known to photobomb landmarks in these pictures on occasion. If you have friends in the app, you can send postcards to them too. Pikmin Bloom also has a built-in lifelog, where you can choose a picture from your walk and jot down any notes and feelings from your day. It’s a nice thing to look back on once you’ve racked up a lot of adventures.

I’ve tried out plenty of apps over the years that attempt to gamify physical activity, but I almost always lose interest in them pretty quickly. For all its simplicity, Pikmin Bloom adds just the right amount of reward to a walk without distracting from the actual activity. Plus, there are Pikmin.

It’s officially ice cream season, and if you’ve been wanting to try your hand at making the dessert yourself, Walmart has a deal you might be interested in. The Ninja Creami ice cream maker is $50 off right now, bringing the price down to $149 — the best price we’ve seen for it all year. The Creami is designed for ease of use and gives you control over the texture of the finished product, so you can make ice cream, sorbet, milkshakes and other kinds of frozen treats.

The deal applies to the Ninja Creami model with 5 one-touch progams: Ice Cream, Sorbet, Milkshake, Lite Ice Cream and Mix-in (which lets you toss in embellishments like chocolate chips or nuts). It also comes with two 16oz pints to make and store your ice cream in. The Creami is one of our favorite kitchen gadgets and earned a review score of 90, requiring minimal work on your part to make ice cream with the ingredients of your choice. All you need to do is prep the mixture that will be your base, toss it in the freezer overnight, then pop it in the Creami for processing.

The Ninja Creami won’t take up too much counter space, and most of the parts can go in the dishwasher for an easy cleanup after using it. It operates a bit like a food processor, but uses what the company refers to as a Creamerizer Paddle that has two different types of blades to get a uniform texture. There’s one for shaving the frozen base and another for smoothing it all out. It also has dual drive motors that allow for both a spinning motion and downward pressure to make for a good churn.

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iOS 18 may inject a little more fun into the iPhone experience. In the Power On newsletter this week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that AI-generated emoji will be among the new features Apple shows off at WWDC next month. As if the current emoji library weren’t overwhelming enough, Gurman writes that the company “is developing software that can create custom emojis on the fly, based on what users are texting.” I, for one, cannot wait to see the cursed creations that are sure to come out of that one.

Apple is also reportedly making it so iPhone users will have more customization options for their apps and home screen, like the ability to change the color of app icons and arrange things more freely, rather than being locked into the grid layout. The latter especially would be a pretty big change for Apple, but surely a welcome one for any users who have been itching to get more creative with their home screen designs. Of course, these are still rumors, so don’t take any of it as set in stone.

There’s been a ton of talk about Apple’s AI plans in the leadup to its annual developers conference, which kicks off on June 10, but rather than debut anything too flashy at this stage, Gurman suggests Apple will stick to practical applications for the technology. Apple is expected to announce a partnership with OpenAI and, according to Gurman, may give an AI boost to things like Safari searches, Siri, photo retouching and voice memo transcriptions. The company may also introduce smart recaps for notifications, web pages and more.

Ah, Flappy Bird. It’s been a long time since I last gave any thought to the game-turned-cultural-phenomenon that briefly had us all in a chokehold a decade ago. At least, that was the case until this morning, when I stumbled upon a Reddit post announcing a Flappy Bird tribute for the Playdate and, without a moment’s hesitation, sideloaded it onto my device. Now here I am, absolutely hooked on this maddening little game once again. And, using the crank to control that silly little bird, it's even harder this time around. FlappyBird by Chibisuke is free and available to download for Playdate on itch.io. You’re welcome... or, I’m sorry.

FlappyBird is just like the OG game, but in grayscale. You can play using the up button on the D-pad, the ‘A’ button or the crank to guide the bird between the pipes, but I’ve been going with the latter for the extra challenge it adds. It also just feels like a perfect use of the crank, and I like making the most of the Playdate’s funky design whenever I can. There are other games inspired by Flappy Bird that you can get for the Playdate, like Cranky Bird and Flappybalt, but Chibisuke’s FlappyBird is a direct clone of Dong Nguyen’s infamous side-scroller. 

It’s definitely one way to get your heart rate up on a Sunday afternoon. Just, please do not ask me about my high score, I… don’t want to talk about it.

Elon Musk told investors this month that his startup xAI is planning to build a supercomputer by the fall of 2025 that would power a future, smarter iteration of its Grok chatbot, The Information reports. This supercomputer, which Musk reportedly referred to as a “gigafactory of compute,” would rely on tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs and cost billions of dollars to build. Musk has previously said the third version of Grok will require at least 100,000 of the chips — a fivefold increase over the 20,000 GPUs said to be in use for training Grok 2.0.

According to The Information, Musk also told investors in the presentation that the planned GPU cluster would be at least four times the size of anything used today by xAI competitors. Grok is currently in version 1.5, which was released in April, and is now touted to process visual information like photographs and diagrams as well as text. X earlier this month started rolling out AI-generated news summaries powered by Grok for premium users.

Resident Evil 6 has sold surprisingly well on the Nintendo Switch since it was ported to the console in 2019, despite it being almost universally panned by fans of the series. As spotted by Nintendo Life, RE6 just got added to Capcom’s Platinum Titles list, meaning it’s crossed the threshold of one million units sold. It sits at number 117 on the list, with a million downloads for the Switch (but not any other platforms).

RE6 stands out as a convoluted action game next to the titles that came before it, marking a dramatic shift away from survival horror. It has a lot going on, but not so much of the things people actually love about Resident Evil games. It’s gained some defenders over the years, though, I’ll give it that. Capcom brought Resident Evil 6 to the Switch in October 2019 and bundled it with RE4 and RE5 in the Resident Evil Triple Pack that was released around the same time, which surely helped its sales. 

Is it blasphemous to call a survival horror game “cozy”? Maybe so, but while thinking back on my playthrough of Crow Country, the word popped into my mind more than a few times.

From the jump, there's no question about Crow Country’s PlayStation 1 influences, which its creators at SFB Games have been upfront about: it is very intentionally the creepy-cute child of Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Final Fantasy VII. The game, which was released on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox X/S on May 9, just about checks all the boxes for survival horror, but it takes a gentler approach to the genre, making it feel more like a test of mental endurance against some all-consuming bleakness than a constant fight for your life. (A Hard Mode, however, is apparently on the way).

You play as Mara Forest, who must painstakingly make her way through an abandoned amusement park in the year 1990 to find its elusive and evidently corrupt owner, Edward Crow. Resources, like ammo and health kits, must be scavenged. Skinless monstrosities may emerge from the shadows at any turn to grab at you and puzzles of varying complexity promise to stall your progress. There is an ensemble of characters who — including the protagonist — each seem to have questionable motives.

It’s a familiar formula paired with a familiar style of character design paired with a familiar unsettling atmosphere, yet Crow Country manages not to feel like it’s being propped up by nods to its predecessors. With more of an emphasis on mood and mystery than violence (and some humor sprinkled throughout), it’s just unique enough to stand on its own as a distinct work. The entire experience has this air of reflectiveness to it, and I think the developers describe it perfectly in their own synopsis of what Crow Country offers: “a beautiful, uncanny blend of tension and tranquility.”

The nostalgia did indeed hit me like a truck as I took my cautious first steps around the eponymous Crow Country theme park as Mara. Naturally, she walks at a snail’s pace and comes to a full stop whenever firing a weapon. Her running speed is fine, though, and you have 360-degree control of the camera angle, so it doesn’t weigh you down entirely with PS1-era limitations (a blessing).

I was prepared to be frustrated for the duration of the game by the stop-to-shoot bit, but I got over it once I realized the monsters are also slow as hell. Well, most of them. You can run right by them in almost every situation if you want to. That made killing a choice rather than a necessity, and immediately dialed down the sense of urgency I’d gone into my first enemy encounter with. This is not at all a bad thing. With the stakes lowered, I treated those fleshy monstrosities like target practice and picked them off mostly for the fun of it. That, along with the gradual realization that there weren’t going to be jumpscares every 5 seconds, sucked me into a much cozier experience than I was expecting.

Without anxiety fueling my every decision, I was able to take my time to pick through all the nooks and crannies of the amusement park, making sure to stop and read every notebook or piece of paper and examine every object on the ground or hanging on the walls. I could focus completely on the puzzles before me, some of which were really challenging. I even had to bust out a pen and paper at one point. It also wasn’t very difficult to stay stocked up on necessities like ammunition, health kits and poison antidotes, which could be found randomly all over the park and at vending machines, where they’d sometimes regenerate so I could return for more later.

The soundtrack by Ockeroid (which just got its own separate digital release) is eerily soothing, and helped to create an atmosphere that fully engrossed me. Crow Country’s save mechanism leans fully into the game’s contemplative ambiance, too: you can find respite at different sources of fire, which Mara will stare into before reciting a wistful thought about hope and dread in the face of uncertainty. I played Crow Country on a Steam Deck, snuggled up with my cats on a gray, stormy day, and I can’t think of a better way to take it all in.

SFB Games

In typical survival horror form, the environment gets increasingly hostile as you advance in the game; creatures start showing up in heavier numbers, a faster one joins the mix, it starts raining, it gets darker, someone shoots at you from the shadows. But any real heaviness in Crow County is balanced by just the right amount of playfulness. The characters are often so unserious, going back and forth with irreverent dialogue. And you cannot ignore the goofy crow-themed objects that are all over the place — you rely on some of them for resources and insight.

Initially, Crow Country hints that there’s more to Mara than we’re being told but makes no explanation as to who she is or why she’s really in this abandoned theme park. Nor does it explain early on why that park is filled with writhing abominations and conspicuously prevalent references to the number 2106. Those mysteries served to hook me, and keep me progressing deeper as things unfolded. The ending tied everything together in a way that felt really satisfying.

It’s short but not too short, taking in the ballpark of 5 to 10 hours to complete depending how thorough (or slow to figure out puzzles) you are, and has a lot of replay value. This game is full of secrets that aren’t vital to the plot but can make your life a little easier — there is even a map showing you where they are, if you can find it — and these add another layer of challenge to the overall scavenger hunt. The upcoming Hard Mode could also make revisiting it even more interesting. The game currently gives you the option to play in Survival Horror mode (the version I played), or Exploration Mode, in which “you will not be attacked.”

I missed a couple secrets on my first playthrough, so my main goals for the next run are to find the rest of those and hit 100 percent of the achievements. I’m also curious to find out how different choices in my interactions with other characters could affect how the story plays out. In the end, I found myself moved by Crow Country for reasons that had almost nothing to do with nostalgia.

The first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule still hasn’t launched more than two weeks after its originally scheduled liftoff date, and as of right now, there’s no telling when it will. In a statement emailed to members of the press late on Tuesday, NASA announced it was calling off the launch attempt set for May 25. Starliner’s maiden crew mission has already been rescheduled multiple times, but in this instance, NASA hasn’t set a new launch date. “NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward,” the agency said in its statement, per SpaceNews.

The first attempt at the beginning of the month was scrubbed due to the discovery of a faulty oxygen relief valve on the ULA Atlas V rocket carrying Starliner. Engineers replaced the valve and Starliner was slated to fly later that week, but that attempt was postponed, too. On May 14, NASA revealed that engineers were working to resolve a helium leak in the spacecraft’s propulsion system. In an update a few days later, NASA said the leak was “stable and would not pose a risk at that level during the flight.” A new targeted launch date was set at that time and ultimately rescheduled once more, but it seems the problems are ongoing.

“The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy,” the agency said in the latest update, according to SpaceNews. “There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed.” Delays have defined Starliner’s development up until this point, but since two astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — will be on board for this mission, the stakes are especially high; now isn't the time to start cutting corners.

The new 13-inch M4 iPad Pro is really, really thin. That’s inevitably going to make certain aspects of repairing the device even more difficult, which iFixit confirmed in a teardown published this weekend. But it does shine in one area — when it comes to replacing the battery, Apple made some seriously helpful changes.

“For the first time in an iPad Pro, we’re able to remove the battery immediately after removing the screen,” Teardown Tech Shahram Mokhtari wrote in a blog post. Mokhtari notes that “immediately is relative,” as there are still some screws and brackets to remove before the battery can be taken out, and the video documenting the process shows it takes a bit of work to get to the pull tabs beneath the batteries, but the new setup still shaves hours off the process compared to earlier models.

“The fact that you can remove the battery without having to remove every major component inside this device is still a huge win for repairability,” Mokhtari says in the video. “It’s a massive improvement over the previous generation.” Everything else, on the other hand, is going to be pretty tricky to repair without causing damage. “From the daughterboard to the speakers and coax cables, we found a whole bunch of stuff that’s glued down because there just isn’t enough space for screws.”

And, the teardown shows the new Apple Pencil Pro is a repairability nightmare. Mokhtari — who got cut by the Pencil while trying to get to its insides — called it “a disposable piece of crap once the battery dies.”

OpenAI reportedly made exiting employees choose between keeping their vested equity and being able to speak out against the company. According to Vox, which viewed the document in question, employees could “lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars” if they didn’t sign a nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreement, thanks to a provision in the off-boarding papers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed in a tweet on Saturday evening that such a provision did exist, but said “we have never clawed back anyone's vested equity, nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement (or don't agree to a non-disparagement agreement).”

An OpenAI spokesperson echoed this in a statement to Vox, and Altman said the company “was already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork over the past month or so.” But as Vox notes in its report, at least one former OpenAI employee has spoken publicly about sacrificing equity by declining to sign an NDA upon leaving. Daniel Kokotajlo recently posted on an online forum that this decision led to the loss of equity likely amounting to “about 85 percent of my family's net worth at least.”

In Altman’s response, the CEO apologized and said he was “embarrassed” after finding out about the provision, which he claims he was previously unaware of. “[T]here was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs; although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication,” he wrote on X. “this is on me and one of the few times i've been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have [sic].” In addition to acknowledging that the company is changing the exit paperwork, Altman went on to say, “[I]f any former employee who signed one of those old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we'll fix that too.”

All of this comes after two more high-profile resignations from OpenAI this week. OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced on Wednesday that he was leaving the company, and was followed soon after by Jan Leike, who was a team leader on OpenAI’s now-dissolved “Superalignment” AI safety team.