Every input below is public and real. Nothing here is scraped from a private page, and no visitor of this site is measured by it.
The three providers’ own public status pages, read every few minutes. Counted over the ones that answer, so a status page we cannot reach is not mistaken for an outage.
Nobody writes a balance patch without them. This only ever subtracts: all three working is the ordinary state of the world and earns nothing, while one of them falling over is a reason the patch is not coming today. Grok is absent because its status page blocks automated readers outright.
Bird sightings in Bellevue Downtown Park, across NE 4th from Valve — this week measured against the park’s own recent average.
Read inverted, and this is the rigorous part: birds are descended from dinosaurs, Yoshi is a dinosaur, and a park that has emptied out means something has frightened them. When the crows go quiet, he is close.
Yoshi’s last-seen timestamp, and every other Valve developer reading threads at the same moment.
A man about to ship a patch checks the forum. A man with no intention of shipping anything also checks the forum. We have elected to interpret the first reading.
When the last update actually landed, and how long the major-patch drought has run.
The clock everything else is measured against. Valve does not open a thread per update — new ones turn up as replies inside a thread named after a patch from weeks earlier — so this reads the posts rather than believing the title.
Which weekday Valve has actually shipped on, counted twice: the whole record, and the last twelve months on their own.
All time · 97Thu 31 · Fri 22 · Tue 15 · Sun 13 · Mon 6 · Wed 6 · Sat 4
Last 12 months · 22Thu 7 · Fri 6 · Tue 3 · Mon 2 · Wed 2 · Sun 1 · Sat 1
Thursday has never stopped being the answer. Saturday has managed four in two years, which we have stopped taking personally.
The AIS position of the Leviathan, converted to distance from Valve HQ.
Gabe does not personally compile the build. But the further that boat is from Bellevue, the further the build is from you.
How busy the restaurants within walking distance of Valve’s door are right now.
Shipping requires food. Of everything on this page, this is the signal we would defend the longest.
Congestion on the roads around HQ, plus the live view of NE 4th.
Cars near the building imply people inside the building. The cameras themselves imply nothing at all; they are there because we could.
Temperature, wind, humidity, pressure and PM2.5 over 10400 NE 4th St.
A pleasant afternoon in Bellevue is a threat to your patch. Rain, smoke and a falling barometer are all reasons to remain indoors, and indoors is where the build is.
Aircraft on approach to Bellevue, with private jets weighted considerably heavier than airliners.
Nobody flies commercial to their own announcement.
Moon phase and which planets are in apparent retrograde, computed on the fly rather than fetched.
Weighted at 0.3, which is 0.3 more than it warrants. Mercury retrograde subtracts from the odds on the grounds that builds break and comms fail, which is at least internally consistent.
Map tiles for the yacht, and Valve’s actual coordinates.
Feeds no term. Corrected our HQ position by 556 metres, which had been quietly wrong for days. © OpenStreetMap contributors.