🌹Glowie Petunias, Free Sourdough Starter, and MicroHaus
No - not THOSE Glowies
Hey friends!
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.
Hope you had a good Valentine’s Day with your loved ones!
I somehow accidentally guessed the correct amount of Hershey’s Kisses in a jar at work, and now have like . . . 230ish of them.
…
Did you hear that Samsung might be planning to release a triple-folding phone this year?
FINALLY - Westworld draws closer with each day . . .
Love the show. criminally underrated.
I mean c’mon - OpenAI released the sora text-to-video technical report + demos that are deep into the uncanny valley.
On the random side of things - check out this really avante-garde G-STAR poncho.
Cool fit for when the robots take over. (lol?)
Let’s dive in, shall we?
🌹Glowie Petunias
Noooo don’t worry - we’re not talking about those glowies.
We’re talking about real glowing petunias.
A company called Light Bio has engineered glowing petunias.
Here - check out the video.
They look alien, otherworldly, and COOOL.
Discover the allure of the Firefly Petunia. A beautiful plant by day, it unveils mesmerizing luminescence after dusk . . . The Firefly Petunia emits a soft glow similar to moonlight. It can be grown in pots, baskets, or gardens, quickly attaining about 8 to 10 inches in size with abundant white flowers. This plant is easy to care for, thriving without needing special conditions or treatments. (source)
They cost $29 a plant, and a little over $20 for shipping.
Expensive - but it glows. IT GLOWS and IT GROWS.
I’d definitely try to grow them in a pot, and study everything I can about Petunias to keep them alive.
I’m telling ya’ - I’ll be a petunia expert to keep these alive as many years as i can.
I’ll go to World Petunia Days if I need to.
If $50ish is too expensive for ya - Glowing mushrooms are much cheaper.
I’ll let you know if I end up getting one. They say they’ll be available in limited quantities, so I bet they’ll sell out soon as more people find out about them!
Check out Light.bio at the link!
🍞Free Sourdough Starter
My wife has been making sourdough bread for several months now - and it’s one of the highlights of my week when she makes a new loaf.
Fun fact: the starter came from an extinct restaurant we had here - a surviving remnant, if you will.
There’s a starter called the “Oregon Trail Starter” that’s been kept alive since the 1800’s by the Griffith family.
One of the family members - Carl Griffith - shared his history.
.All I know is that it started west in 1847 from Missouri. I would guess with the family of Dr. John Savage as one of his daughters (my great grandmother) was the cook. It came on west and settled near Salem Or. Doc. Savage’s daughter met and married my great grand father on the trail and they had 10 children. It was passed on to me though my parents when they passed away. I am 76 years old so that was some time ago. I first learned to use the starter in a basque sheep camp when I was 10 years old as we were setting up a homestead on the Steens Mountains in southeastern Oregon. A campfire has no oven, so the bread was baked in a Dutch Oven in a hole in the ground in which we had built a fire, placed the oven, scraped in the coals from around the rim, and covered with dirt for several hours. (Carl’s Brochure)
Carl started giving his sourdough starters - but passed away at age 80 back in 2000.
However
He and a group of other sourdough fans were part of an ancient Usenet group.
The 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Preservation Society was created after the owner of the starter, Carl Griffith, died in early 2000. The starter had a reputation of having a good flavor, good raising strength, and stability, which is highly valued in sourdough starts. We were all participants in the old 1990s Usenet group rec.food.sourdough . . . Carl gave his dried starter to anyone who sent him a self addressed and stamped envelope and the number of requests he got were small and manageable. . . When Carl died, our founder, Dick Adams, did not want to let such a good starter disappear. He asked for members of the rec.food.sourdough group to form the society in keeping with the old pioneer tradition of giving good sourdough starts to anyone who wanted it. About a dozen of us who had Carl’s starter joined. . . There are two or three active members: the Grower and the Keeper of the Mailbox. The remaining members are charged with keeping the starter in good health in case something happened and a replacement were ever needed. We have been sending the starter to anyone who asks for it ever since. (source)
You can get the starter - for free - in the mail -to this day.
It’s an incredible story - one that the community has kept alive for OVER 24 YEARS.
I might order one myself.
Check it out at the site!
🏡MicroHaus
Just as AI has been rapidly scaling - tiny homes have been changing a lot too over the past few years.
A company called Haus has created micro-homes that come fully equipped with everything you need! Just look at this insane benefit stack for the microhaus.
100% furnished and equipped, ready-to-go
Energy-Efficient Autonomous Smart House
plug’n’play electricity, water & sewage hook-ups
Battery-packed for black-outs
Remote controlled smart home
Advanced HEPA air quality control
99.9% antibacterial and antivirus protection
No building permit required
Portable and transportable
It’s quite literally a drag-and-drop house. All you have to do is plug in a few cables, and you’re good to go!
It looks really slick too. Check this thing out.
It’s beautiful! It’s also really small too - so it could fit in a normal backyard.
Here’s an in-depth tour of the mOne model.
Of course, Haus makes the rentability quite prominent on their website.
For example - the microhaus Lite costs around 94K with delivery.
Renting it out at $80 a night could get you a full return in around 59 months (based on this calculator).
Honestly, It’d be fun to have one of these as a guest house - or maybe live in the two bedroom version after the kids move out. (It has “standard zombie protection”).
Go check out Haus at the link!
🐙The Land of Random
Into the wild world of the web we delve!
Watch Some 80’s Commercials
The vibes are immaculate, fam. I want 10 hours of this as a radio station with vaporwave music.
Stop Deleting Movies
An excellent argument for why deleting and destroying movies (like Coyote vs Acme) to save millions in taxes - is wrong.
Beauty in Chaos
Another super mysterious “clicky” website. I only got about 10 pages in - so not sure if any nsfl/nsfw content. It’s very fascinating. Quite a lot of work went into this.
Cryostasis is back
A 700 page ebook was not on my 2024 bingo card.
The Windows XP Whopper
Japan literally gets all the fun things, for real. When Windows 7 came out, Burger King made a whopper with 7 patties!
Mood
This Pinterest style clone (built by verse) will show you related images to any image you click on. It’s really fun - the more you click on, the more you realize how deep the rabbit hole goes. Save this to your inspirational website folder!
Yarharr!
Funimation is shutting down - and taking lots of digital copies of films with it. Turns out the whole “yes you can keep the digital download version forever” marketing lingo was indeed, a lie. What’s that? more pirate ships out on the high seas? indeed.
🎶TikToks You Can’t Miss
I will soon be changing this section to “Cool walled garden stuff you can’t miss.” I find a lot of stuff off TikTok now.
We live in a post-meme humor world for real.
Huh. This is why I’d never buy a really old home
Don’t be the last one to leave anon. That’s how you get trapped.
Bro is wardriving white hat style
🤖AI AHHHHHHHH
Would not be surprised if an AI political party spun up
In a few years when AI music is much better, I’d love one of these
A fascinating meme and conversation about the ramifications of huge AI context windows.
That’s all for this week fam!
Unless you wanna check out this alleged OpenAI mega prompt