Every time I go through a breakup, I'm compelled to rewatch the noughties classic High Fidelity, in which OG softboi John Cusack mournfully chronicles a "top 10 list" of his all-time worst breakups, soundtracked by the albums that accompanied them. A sanctuary for a hurting Cusack, this battered boutique becomes a refuge for Chicago's other lost souls, giving its perennially hungover proprietor and a gaggle of local music nerds a place to lick their wounds. It's this kind of DIY community spirit that spills out of the screen as I dive into Wax Heads, a narrative game about managing a struggling record shop. A self-described "cosy-punk life sim", this colourful comic-book-esque caper channels everything great about High Fidelity, as the player learns the ropes during a chaotic first shift at the fictional Repeater Records. As I design posters for a local punk gig between slacking off on a legally distinct knock-off of a Tamagotchi, it's clear that Wax Heads sees the local vinyl shop as a musical mecca, a place where you spin tunes and befriend its weird and wonderful customers.

Sean Cusack, a software engineer at Microsoft and beekeeper on the side, wanted to know if anything besides bees was going into his hives. So he built a tiny photo booth (a sort of bee vestibule) that took pictures whenever something appeared around it. But sorting through thousands of insect portraits proved tedious. Colleagues told him about a new product that the company was working on called Lobe.ai, which allows anybody to train a computer-vision system to recognize objects. Cusack used it to identify his honeybees -- but also to keep an eye out for the dreaded murder hornet.

Sean Cusack has been a backyard beekeeper for 10 years and a tinkerer for longer. That's how he and an entomologist friend got talking about building an early warning system to alert hive owners to potentially catastrophic threats. They envisioned installing a motion-sensor-activated camera at a beehive entrance and using machine learning to remotely identify when invaders like mites or wasps or potentially even the Asian giant hornet were getting in. "A threat like that could kill your hive in a couple of hours, and it'd be game over," Cusack said. "But had you known within 10 minutes of it happening and could get out there and get involved, you could potentially rescue whole colonies."