Bengisu Selçuk shares how he created Volumetric ice materials in UE5 for Rift of Souls. https://www.artstation.com/bengs
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Besides the very public failing of the new Ritz-Carlton in downtown Portland facing foreclosure, now ‘Big Pink’ US Bancorp tower is up for sale for a fraction of it’s original value. There’s a reason Portland has the highest commercial vacancy rate in the country; and the internet company that just moved out didn’t hold any punches
After Digital Trends moved out of the U.S. Bancorp Tower in Portland, Ore., the technology publisher didn’t hold back about why it left.
The property, once a premier address in the city, was afflicted with “vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors.” They were “starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas,” according to papers the company filed in a lease-termination lawsuit.
The building, once a cornerstone of the the city, is now joining a long line of other top building being fire-sold at huge losses:
The 42-story tower was recently put up for sale. The building affectionately known as Big Pink because of its pink-hued Spanish granite and pink glazed glass has an asking price of about $70 million, according to brokers. That is more than 80% below what the owners paid for it when it sold for $372 million in 2015.
The forward outlook continues a multi-year DECLINE as companies flee Portland’s livability, homeless, and harshly anti-business taxes and laws
But Portland’s commercial real-estate market shows few signs of recovering from the fallout of the pandemic, rise in homelessness and the state’s botched experiment with drug decriminalization…. Portland’s first-quarter office vacancy rate at 35% was the highest among the 25 largest central business districts in the U.S., according to real-estate firm Colliers.
Update July 2025: Big Pink, one of the premier properties in downtown Portland, just sold for $45 million – that was a decline of 88% since it last sold in 2015 for $372 million.
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Ideal made this toy in 1975 and I have to say I re-enacted that scene of making my sister’s pony tails flip up at a gas station while we were waiting for our mom to fill the car.
I was blown away back in 1996 when Resident Evil came out for the Playstation. It did so well, that the developers started making a follow on. After a period of time, they realized it wasn’t working and abandoned that initial sequel. What happened next, however, turned into a multi-year attempt to find what had been completed.
The story of the collectors trying to find and secure a copy is a … very interesting story in human nature. A copy of the 60% complete version was secured but at a cost to those pursuing it that went far beyond money. Predictably, like many of these pursuits, it turned into a years long search with fakes, name calling, and even lawsuits.
Believe it or not, people have gotten it working and done playthroughs of the acquired game. They even continue to fix bugs.
You can finally see how far the next version would have looked like in these most recent playthroughs:
Terry English made the original armor for the Aliens movie. He still makes them today. The Prop Store recently sold one of those handmade replica Hudson (Bill Paxton) Colonial Marine Armor pieces. Final sale price was £6,300 ($7,950 USD)
PaintCam Eve isn’t your typical home security device. It’s a home security webcam…armed with paintballs to shoot anyone it doesn’t recognize via it’s facial recognition features. No word on how it will handle animals, your delivery guy, or asking everyone coming to a dinner party to send facial recognition info to you. I’m sure I can think of lots of other ways in which this could go wrong.
One more step towards ED-209.
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Global sales of luxury flatlined in 2024 for the first time since 2008 (excluding 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic), according to a recent report by the management consultants Bain & Co. The report’s authors said consumers were prioritizing “experiences over products” in these uncertain times and that the luxury goods market, rather like the art market, is suffering from buyer fatigue.
Big auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s were down for a second year (down 24% and 6% YOY respectively). Sotheby’s has had to lay off 100 of its staff and take a $1B cash-for-equity bailout by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund just to stay afloat.
Both supply and demand for bit-ticket art has slumped. Auction houses had been switching from classical art to luxury goods. Sotheby’s has been offering ‘instant purchase’ of luxury real estate, classic cars, dinosaur fossils, game worn jersey’s, wines, etc as a way to attract new buyers and enticing buyers to spend much more on larger auction items later. As Christie’s was saying, “Luxury and art will merge with each other”.
Even that switch to luxury is falling flat. The super-wealthy in the 30-50 age range have shifted to high end experiences over high end possessions. Luxury markets have entering a downward spiral after a decade of growth – especially in Chinese markets where the very rich appear to be pulling back.
Besides art and luxury, they are now experimenting with curated experiences. They worked with Marriott and Alexander McQueen, winners bid on experiencing where McQueen got his start, five-course meal for tour, private visit to Victoria & Albert Museum and personal photo session with Ann Ray (fashion collaborator).
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Quantum tunneling and other quantum effects are big hurdles to future, smaller chip design. Currently they define the lower limits to what can be designed. But what if we utilize those strange properties instead of fighting them?
MIT Scientists designed new transistors to utilize quantum tunneling and quantum confinement. They achieve quantum tunneling in a way that lets transistors switch on with much less voltage. They also utilize quantum confinement, where the nanowire’s cramped dimensions tweak the properties of the materials.
Combining those effects let the MIT get blazing fast switching times using very little voltage. Testing showed their slope of switching voltage was steeper than conventional silicon’s limits resulting in around 20 times better performance than other tunneling transistors.
Researchers admit there is still a long way to go to make this commercially viable; but it’s the first steps beyond traditional design and into the quantum realm.
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Woof – that was a tough read. Portland continues to suffer since the riots of Covid. In fact, some metrics of decline are increasing in 2025, not stabilizing. It has economists and city officials ringing alarm bells; but few local politicians seem to be able to think of anything besides raising more taxes.
The city has enacted new taxes that has made it the second highest tax rate the in the country. The strong anti-business environment as driven companies out of the city to the point that Portland has the highest commercial vacancy rate of ANY major US city for 2 years in a row. Worse than Southern or even Rust Belt cities. People are fleeting Portland in record numbers. It’s getting to the point that it’s seriously impacting tax revenue and property value/desirability is declining at a record rate. All this while towns just nearby are seeing increases.
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