🏆 Discover Niche Sites, A Chat with Cary Steiner, and Joue Play

let's go on a hunt!

Hey friends! Welcome to the latest edition of The Land of Random

It’s been a crazy week at my household - both kids got some sort of awful stomach bug.

Fortunately - my wife and I seem to have escaped the sickness . . .

Did you see that Silent Hill Ascension trailer? It’s supposed to be some sort of interactive streaming horror game.

Unlike other games in the horror movie/game genre (The Quarry) this one you’ll have to tune into live each day.

I’m curious to see how this will work in real-time? or perhaps a viewing window each day?

Fortnite has “real-time” events - so there’s certainly a precedent for the idea . . .

I’ll be keeping an eye out for this one.

Our garden is doing quite well - everything is growing smoothly! It’s beginning to get quite warm here in Tennessee.

The long hot eternal summer is nearly here . . .

I’ve got another Aliexpress shipment on the way, so I will be able to do a review here in June.

I am on the lookout for another interview! Want to discuss some randomness? Feel free to reply to the newsletter and let me know.

Let’s hop on in!

💻Discover Niche Sites

I was sent a really really interesting link this week by the creator of a search engine project.

It’s called DDNS - and it allows you to search websites with dynamic DNS.

Among the underworlds of the Internet that tend to be little explored are websites that use Dynamic DNS (known by the acronym DDNS). Dynamic DNS is basically used to associate a variable IP address to a domain name on the Internet dynamically. Instead of having a fixed, static IP address for a domain name, Dynamic DNS allows the IP address to be updated automatically whenever it changes . . . Given the nature of the DDNS service, it is possible to find everything from blogs that are only published in subdomains of these services, to IoT device dashboards, weather stations software, amateur radio programs, pre-production systems, etc. (source)

So basically . . . a website for internet treasure hunting!

Thanks to SEO - it’s hard to use Google to find cool stuff - so I heavily rely on “Dorking,” Reddit, and other sites to find stuff.

With DDNS - I felt like I was exploring an old Geocities archive.

Perhaps the most amazing thing to me is that a surprising amount of these websites are still updates.

This super minimalist tech blog - a personal journal of sorts.

This Japanese Blog - which has interesting updates about the authors experimentation with Stable Diffusion and other software. You can even find pictures and music that the author has created and shared!

Dynu - An anonymous textboard that still has quite a lot of users - I didn’t see anything eggregiously offensive on here, but as with all “anon” sites, tread with caution.

Railway Enthusiast Links - An interesting list of links dealing with railways, including a old blog with a forum where the last post was from March! Much of this is in German.

Ready to start hunting for cool sites?

Check out DDNS at the link!

If you find anything cool - let me know!

🎤A Chat with Cary Steiner

I was delighted the other week to chat with fellow substacker

C.L. Steiner

, author of I’m not Complaining. We chatted about all sorts of fun things - from pizza to AI, writing, internet exploration, and more!

There’s a few links that Cary mentions in the interview that I’ll link here for your convenience.

Arkadium - a fun game website for when you’ve got a few minutes

Jazz Online - Lots of epic Jaz MP3’s!

🎹Joue Play

Joue Play is one of the coolest Midi controllers I’ve seen since Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 and OP-z.

Rather than being just one kind of tool (drumpad, keyboard) - it has different panels you can swap in and out depending on what you’re creating.

My ears perked up at that - one of the things that I love most about the OP-1 was just how compact and easy to carry it was. Joule offers that same kind of convenience, but with more possibilities!

There’s five pads available - and I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep making more.

Here - you got to listen to a song.

In the video Senbei swaps in and out of “pads” in order to enrich his loops - it’s simply mesmerizing to watch.

There’s a Joule Play app you can use to learn and customize the settings of your device, and even create an entire track within the app.

It also integrates with DAWS like Ableton or FL Studio.

Your setup for playing can be as simple as the Joue Play and an iPad - a recipe for simplicity.

I found this one demo that demos a bunch of the features.

Go check it out at the link!

🐙The Land of Random

Into the random we dive! dive! dive!

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You Miss the Old DVD screensaver

Now you can enjoy it in your browser!

Nyan Cat Genre Style

Maybe you’ve already seen this, but it’s a classic internet oldie.

Sand Tetris

The Tetris you know and love, but with SAND!

Atly - The Reddit of Maps?

Ah yes, map social media - tried many times, but only met with modicums of success. Maybe Atly will be the one! Looks neat, for sure.

Kanboard

An opensource kanban tool for simple task management. You can self host it too!

Dive into Ditherpunk

A wonderful deep dive into the world of ditherpunk art

Find the Invisible Cow

Cow cow cow cow COW COW COW!

🎶TikToks You Can’t Miss

oooh is this AI generated slideshow military horror?

Hahahahahahahaha dark techno is awesome.

Indeed this was my life.

Best ad I’ve seen in a long while

There’s urbex and then there’s THIS

I would rather NOT lol.

🤖AI AHHHHHHHHHHH

Taking a picture, without taking a picture? Neat.

Hahahaha I finally figured out what people are using to make those AI videos. Now you know too.

Styledrop - Using images to recreate an image in any style - text to text, and image to image.

That’s all for this week! See you next time.