The Verge’s favorite guilty pleasures – The Verge

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I am a drone pilot. That’s what I tell myself every time I purchase a new drone. And maybe six times a year, it’s vaguely true. I love flying and I love drones, but I definitely did not need to purchase the $449 DJI Mini 2. When I sold my DJI Mavic Pro, just a couple years after buying that one to upgrade a Phantom 3 Pro I never used, I told myself I would wait. Of course I didn’t listen.

Like I told my friend Vjeran Pavic, who is an actual photographer and videographer and reviews drones like a pro, I feel kind of naked without one now. Who knows when there might be something amazing happening in my neighborhood and I can just toss a drone up in the air for a look? (Never mind that I’ll undoubtedly have to spend half an hour recharging batteries and possibly updating firmware and databases first.) I totally clocked those kids launching illegal fireworks in my neighborhood this summer, and it reminded me of fond memories reading Harriet the Spy growing up. I’m not sure if it was that, or flying through the fireworks that really made me smile. Either way, the drone is now back in the drawer where it’s been sitting for months. While it’s hard to explain why, I’m so glad it’s there. —Sean Hollister, senior reports editor

Look, there’s an evergreen joke about people who like The Sims but only pick it up every few months to aggressively play it for about a week before forgetting it exists again. I am not one of those people. I am a very avid Sims 4 player and I refuse to hide that any longer. I create intricate storylines for all of my characters and I challenge myself to become a better virtual interior decorator with each new house I build. It helps that new features have recently been added like Scenarios, predetermined sticky situations your Sims can find themselves in, and Kits, which add small batches of new items without needing to buy a full expansion pack (although, I do already own plenty of the expansion packs).

I discovered the first version of the game in the early 2000s at my babysitter’s house as a child, and I’ve been a lost cause ever since. I’ve followed the series through most of the iterations on multiple consoles. This means I can confidently say that The Sims 2 on the PC is still the best version of the game. I also follow TikTok creators who create Sims content to share in the gallery, like ThatSimsChick, who builds beautiful homes and styles them with the eye of a professional. Perhaps one day I’ll be good enough to share my own creations (and abominations) in the gallery, too. Until then, I’m gonna keep logging an embarrassing amount of hours of gameplay a week. — Kaitlin Hatton, senior e-commerce social media manager

As a number of my colleagues likely remember, just a few weeks ago in our team Slack channel, I vociferously criticized buying a $100-plus coffee mug that did nothing other than keep your coffee (or tea, or hot cocoa, or whatever liquid you like to drink hot) at the exact temperature you set it to. Perhaps this was a case of a schoolyard bully negging the kid they have a crush on to hide their true feelings, because I’ve been coveting one of those fancy Ember mugs for years.

And when Best Buy put its exclusive blue color of the Ember Mug V2 on sale for Black Friday, I finally bit. Reader, this mug is fantastic. It keeps my coffee hot no matter how long I take to consume it, I never have to bother with microwaving a room temperature mug, and I can even tweak its settings depending on what I’m drinking out of it (coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, usually). I even get the joy of occasionally updating the firmware on my coffee mug, a sentence that would have made no sense to anyone just a few years ago.

To be clear, this is a completely frivolous product that nobody actually needs. It makes a mildly annoying thing slightly less annoying and its drawbacks (cost, can’t put it in the dishwasher, did I mention the cost?) probably outweigh those benefits for most people. It’s a little embarrassing how much I like it, which is why it’s a perfect guilty pleasure. I enjoy it, I feel a little awkward about it, and I’d like to never speak of it again. — Dan Seifert, deputy editor

I have a close friend who for years tried to convert me to pen collecting. But while I loved the fountain pens she bought me for birthdays, I was constantly inking up my fingers and smearing the pages, and I just couldn’t get the hang of writing with them.

Then she bought me the Monteverde One Touch Engage pen, which uses fountain pen ink in a roller-ball format — in other words, it uses ink like a fountain pen but writes like a ballpoint. At first, I was doubtful: it was larger than most pens I used and felt a little awkward in my hand. But it definitely grew on me; when I use it, the ink flows so smoothly and beautifully that I feel like another Jane Austen, sitting at a desk and penning some clever 19th-century prose. You can fill the pen with ink from a bottle or use disposable cartridges. (I use the latter; refilling pens was something I also never got the hang of.) The model my friend gave me has rose-gold accents and a stylus on the top so I can also use it with a touch device. The current model lacks the stylus but is, I’m sure, still a cool pen. — Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor

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