Game development is currently on a race to the bottom. It’s an industry of brutal competition – which creates some of the most innovative ways to bring ideas to the market faster and cheaper.
A new method of using low-poly meshes to generate higher quality facial and character animation is looking to replace standard character modelers and animators.
City of Portland just announced the opening of it’s 10th alternative shelter site – this one provides free parking for RV/campers. It’s located at 10505 N Portland Road. It has 90 tiny home pods and 70 RV parking spaces for individuals living in their RV/campers. It provides free onsite laundry, showers, and food.
Articles:
Want to know how much the unit you’re looking at has gone up in price? Want to know if the rental company that owns where you’re moving likes to raise rents every year, check out RentZed to see the rental history of an address or apartment.
Links:
Before Battlebots, in the 80’s, there was a group called Survival Research Laboratories (wiki). I remember seeing a video clip of them back in the 80’s on an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not hosted by Jack Palance (long before YouTube kids). It showed clips of frightening, dangerous machines that destroyed and ambled around with the most disturbing movements.
The mechanical creations made horrendously loud noises, shot things, exploded, emitted huge flame plumes, electricity, and projectiles. They played disturbing music with screams and dialog from horror movies. The machines had huge metal arms, gears, and blades that smashed and sliced everything as they destroyed each other and everything in their paths.
It was kind of like watching the mechanical version of death metal – or Einstürzende Neubauten. None of it looked safe for the bystanders. Many onlookers appeared to be genuinely afraid. Injuries to the crew and bystanders did occur.
This group was (and is) called Survival Research Laboratories – a mechanical performance art group. They have a YouTube channel and still seem to be doing shows.
Here’s a pseudo-documentary about the group:
Turns out – they’re not gone. I just recently saw this video from Greg E. Leyh at Lightning on Demand who resurrected his old Plasma Cannon.
UFO 50 is a great little collection of 50 old-style computer games of standard genres (platformers, puzzle, adventure, survival horror), but modernized with a bit better mechanics and gameplay. It’s gotten quite popular and some of the games are really good.
I particularly like Night Manor. It has interesting mechanics like a flashlight that follows your cursor and a cursor that wiggles and jiggles in fear when the killer is on the screen. Neat!
A lot of nuclear world firsts happened in New Mexico. The difficulty is that due to the nuclear and secretive nature of the events, they can be hard to visit. It is possible – here’s how.
First, there is all the activities that happened at Los Alamos – a military site that didn’t even exist at first. It has since become Los Alamos National Laboratories – a government research site that continued the early nuclear work. Believe it or not, some of the original buildings are still on the site, and you can even visit them.
Dubbed “Behind the Fence” tours, you can actually visit some of the original buildings in which the first bombs were assembled and tested. You have to be lucky though. You need to be one of the 30 people picked for one of the 6 annual tours.
Next up, there is Trinity site itself – where the first nuclear bomb was detonated. You can visit it twice a year when the site is opened up on the first Saturday in April and third Saturday in October.
When I was a kid, I imagined quicksand would be a much more common daily problem than it has turned out to be. Still, it appears some folks still actually do get stuck – though it is more mud than sand.
— Portland Fire & Rescue (@PDXFire) January 23, 2025
If you’re tired of all the junk while browsing your favorite websites, try going to https://12ft.io and entering the website url. It’ll feed you up a page without all the cruft. It does this for many modern sites by removing all the javascript after the page is rendered.
There’s clear signs that Foxconn is moving iPhone production out of China to India. If true, this could be a huge blow to China.
Two more options for reading the Oregonian for free.
Just like the New York Times, you can access the Oregonian for free via your Multnomah County Library account by using this link:
https://multcolib.org/resource/oregonian-1987-present
If you are given an Oregonian link like this:
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2025/01/portland-teacher-fired-for-insubordination-receives-295000-settlement-from-district.html
You may only get an abbreviated version of the article and be asked to log in. If you want to read the whole thing, add ‘?outputType=amp’ at the end of the url like this:
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2025/01/portland-teacher-fired-for-insubordination-receives-295000-settlement-from-district.html?outputType=amp
And you should see the whole article.