Japhy Riddle in a hackaday article tries to re-create the look of old CRT sub-pixels – the individual red, green, blue phosphors that make up a single pixel. His approach is to basically fake it with Photoshop, but old systems like the Apple II, debayering, and even modern text anti-aliasing actually use some of these techniques.
Finders Keepers runs the yearlong hidden glass float events on the central Oregon coast and just released its 2025 schedule Tuesday, detailing its 16 special drops over the course of the year, in addition to its daily drops on Lincoln City beaches.
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Steam has published the list of 100 most played games (by peak concurrent player count) of 2024. Also shown are the top sellers, new releases, steam deck, played with controller, and VR categories. Linked at the bottom are the previous years winners as well.
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The best description I have heard of Portland when I got here in the late 90’s was that it was a city full of shipwrecks and refugees – where people wash up on it’s shores with few prospects and sketchy pasts. Portland is nothing if not a strange place. You’ll find odd things posted on poles all over town. Every now and again, someone will dig into one of these to find out what they’re about. The Willamette Valley Dream Survey is one of those. Long story short: the most recent branch of this that showed up in Utah revolves around a doomsday prediction on Sept 5th, 2020.
Nexpo did a little over-dramatic dig into the phenomenon by going so far to buy a burner phone and calling them. He also digs into a local 2600-like hacker group called Futel (he pronounces it wrong, it’s pronounce Few-tell – like ‘futile’ as a play on words about telephone monopolies and other alt-conspiracy type plays on words). that converts old payphones into free (likely VOIP) phones.
Valve’s Year In Review for Steam revealed that only 15% of Steam players spent their time on games released in 2024. 47% of players devoted their time to games from the past 1-7 years (or “recent favorites”), and 37% played titles from eight or more years ago (“classics”).
That 15% is a significant increase over the 9% of playtime spent in 2023 on new games released that year (though it’s down on the 17% of time folks spent in new games in 2022). So 2024 has actually seen a bit of a bounce back from last year.
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Want to maximize your time off in 2025? Take these 12 additional days as vacation days and get the maximum number of long weekends!
Contiki also has a calendar calculator to help you out (If you squint enough. Time to hire a better graphic designer). Enter a dummy email address since it displays it, not emails it to you.
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ADP, the payroll company, has shared the lowest and highest median salaries by state. They used the wages and salaries of almost 10 million employees over 12 months to collect their data.
The results? Oregon is 48th – essentially tied with Arkansas and below Nevada as having the worst pay in the country.
| Rank | State | Average annual salary |
| 48 | Oregon | $50,100 |
| 49 | Arkansas | $50,000 |
| 50 | Mississippi | $46,000 |
| 51 | New Mexico | $40,200 |
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The housing shortage in Portland seems to be improving – until you look at why. It’s not because Portland (with some of the most housing unfriendly policies in the country) is building more houses (they are a little bit) but because people are leaving.
What is happening in San Francisco—and in Portland, to a lesser extent—is that the housing shortage is temporarily improving, not because of the construction of new housing but because people are moving away to cheaper places.
In a case study on San Francisco, the Up for Growth report noted an issue that a report from the Common Sense Institute Oregon highlighted earlier this week.
“Household formation in these areas significantly decreased. Driven in no small part by the high cost of housing, households that could have formed in these communities formed somewhere else instead
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Oasis is a free to play online Minecraft clone built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched – a company that designs custom silicon to demonstrate hardware optimized transformer-based AI algorithms.
Minecraft clones aren’t anything new, but Oasis is. That’s because nobody programmed it. It is completely AI generated rendering – just like the realtime AI generated Doom clone I wrote about earlier. Everything is generated via realtime AI rendering via transformer based network trained to generate minecraft-like output. No gameplay was programmed.
Like a lot of generative AI, it has a tendency to hallucinate when you look at things you have looked at before (textures will change, blur, etc). It certainly won’t be replacing minecraft anytime soon, but these kinds of projects show how one might use AI to do proof-of-concept work.
Go play it for free yourself at oasis.decart.ai
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Ian MacLarty made this strange game that plays with your perception. Free here: https://ianmaclarty.itch.io/catacombs-of-solaris