📱Google's Texting War, Eating Leftovers, and Pinterest Shuffles
Pinterest calls to Z
It’s beginning to look a lot like Fall.
No - it’s not really, but every store here thinks Fall is like two weeks away with Halloween decorations beginning to creep into the aisles.
Fam - I just finished mentally processing Summer.
Anywayy - we’re all settled into our new house and are slowly getting used to having a TON of space. I’ve got my L-shaped desk 98 percent set up - I still need to get a power cord and arm for my final monitor.
You see, over the past 6 years, I’ve been collecting monitors, a desktop, a webcam, mice, and other accouterments to create MEGA DESK.
I’ll share a picture soon - but I’ve got 2 monitors on one side for my laptop (3 in total) and two on the other for my desktop.
I’ve also upgraded from a folding chair to an actual desk chair! Quite exciting.
Thanks for providing your feedback on last week’s poll. Most of you picked the “deep dives into weird/obscure topics” choice - so . . . that’s most likely the direction we’ll be going. Time to get random - and weird.
That Tornado Cash ban last week was nuts. It could be the beginning of the war on Crypto Privacy - with coins like Monero or Zcash as the next possible targets.
Here’s a interesting thread on the situation.
Need some vibes to listen to for today’s issue? I discovered this really great track late last week.
📱Google’s Texting War
Google has turned UP THE HEAT in its war with Apple over the cursed green bubble.
To summarize - Google has been a key part of getting carriers on board with a new texting tech called RCS - which allows smart texting with read receipts, better photo sending, and other useful features. It’s awesome!
It works great on Android - with read receipts, typing indications, and all that good stuff.
Apple doesn’t play nice though - and converts all Android text messages to SMS and SMS - creating a broken experience for Android users.
Oh - that picture you sent me last night is a horrible quality - could you IG DM that to me instead.
Oh - don’t put him in the group chat - he has android and will mess up everything. Just tell him the details later.
Google even put together this savage little video to explain things.
It’s a huge market advantage for Apple to keep Android users in the dark - why should they help out “the enemy?” After all, those Android users don’t have to have a poor messaging experience - they can . . . switch to Apple.
Thanks to our friends at Epic Games and their court filings - we even know that Apple has rejected the idea as a competitive disadvantage.
Why create a version of iMessage for Android when it’s a major reason for why people never leave?
As an Android user myself, I’m particularly biased towards social pressure campaigns to get Apple to fix this issue. However - here’s another way of thinking about it. How would you feel if any time you called an Android user - you heard tons of static on the line?
It would get real annoying.
So it is with the cursed green bubbles - they create communication friction and frustration, building tension between friends and family.
I wish they’d switch to Android is just another variation of I wish they’d switch their phone to one that’s more convenient to my needs.
I’d love to see some statistics on whether Android users tend to use Whatsapp/Telegram/IG/Facebook messenger over normal texting. They’re some of the best ways to ensure a frictionless conversation experience.
Check out Google’s campaign for more info.
🍗Eating Leftovers
Here in the West, we live in a time where there’s so much food - it’s no big deal if we throw out the leftovers.
By “no big deal” I mean - no one will probably starve.
At a conceptual level, throwing out the leftovers is food waste, and a waste of hours of time and energy.
Growing the food, shipping the food, stocking the food, selling the food . . . .
The supply infrastructure to get you that side of fries is pretty dang complex - and it’s an awful shame for you to waste it.
I discovered an article called The Secret Life of Leftovers by Nat Watkins in the New Atlantis journal - and it really got me thinking. Here’s one of the quotes that really stuck with me.
I live in a country where 30 to 40 percent of food produced is never eaten, where the average family throws out $1,500 worth of food every year, and where a typical restaurant discards about a half-pound of food per meal. This is an astonishing historical anomaly. In almost any other time and place in human history, someone would look at the very same waste and say, “Looks delicious!” Some of the world’s most common dishes — like chilis, soups, and casseroles — were once common ways of using leftovers. A culture of scarcity created delicious food, often literally out of cultures growing on food: yeasts, molds, and bacteria. We would have no cheese, bread, and beer without them. By contrast, our culture of abundance is also a culture of waste, partly because we have forgotten the ways we used to cook. (source)
It’s quite alarming to think about - especially when you consider the ramifications of all that food waste.
With numbers like 30-40 percent, it’s conceivable that millions of dollars in labor and energy go straight to the landfill each day.
How would you feel as a farmer if you knew your fields went straight to the trash can?
Now, it would be easy to look at all the “factory farming” infrastructure and point the finger - but we cannot do so without pointing one at ourselves as well.
the food system is not solely responsible for our society’s food-waste problem. Production, manufacturing, and distribution account for only about half of all food waste. The rest is from all of us — food tossed in the garbage bin at the consumer level. This translates to 290 pounds per person per year, a fifth of all food produced, equivalent to about one percent of America’s GDP.
So - with a 30 percent food waste - half of that is because “we don’t feel like eating something.”
Big Oof right there.
So - what’s the solution? Well, dumpster diving behind grocery stores is certainly an option.
My most enriching discovery has been the low-lying community of food-liberating urbanists. There’s a growing category of influencers on TikTok and Instagram sharing cheap grocery “hacks” for accessing the food-waste market, such as how to ask local vendors for their unsold products for cents on the dollar . . .I’ve also joined a small but growing community of resourceful city dwellers who have collected thousands of dollars of fresh cheese, lettuce, bread, frozen meals, energy bars, and fresh nuts — free of charge. How? We dumpster-dive. That’s right, you saw it coming. (source)
Well, after reading that I was like - TIME TO FIND SOME EXAMPLES
Here’s a IG account example of what looks to be a casual dumpster diver
Here’s a career dumpster diver IG account
A TikTok Account - with a lot of creative uses
Here’s another TikTok account to peruse, and another
Another solution is to get more savvy about the food that we currently have in our homes - and start with our own food waste. How can we be more creative? What can we create with it that we will eat and enjoy?
Recognizing food as a valuable resource encourages creativity in the kitchen and fosters a wider repertoire of cooking skills — an investment that ultimately pays for itself with a lifetime of better, faster, more resourceful cooking. (source)
I encourage you to read the article in its entirety. It’s delightful, and will encourage some deep practical thinking I guarantee you haven’t encountered in a while.
📌Pinterest Shuffles
Pinterest is experimenting with a mood board app - which I interpret as their take on the doomed Facebook e.gg site.
I will never forgive you Facebook for shutting e.gg down. You could’ve reinvented Geocities and delighted the internet but you straight-up said NAH.
Currently the app is in invite only mode - so I went to work on Twitter - finding someone who’d be willing to share a code with me. I lucked out. :)
Here’s a video I found on Twitter to give you a taste of what what it looks like.
The UI/UX is very TikTokesque - so figuring out what to do is relatively straightforward.
Like a mini Photoshop or Canva - you just add images, text, and drawings until you’re satisfied with your creation.
Shuffles has a unique competitive advantage over ALL other moodboard apps in that you can use images directly from Pinterest’s vastttt catalogue of uploaded images. Others rely on unsplash or Giphy, or your downloads.
Just search whatever you’d like in the search bar - and pull up Pinterest content to use.
The in app vector tool to cut out images (like pulling a sun out of a cartoon landscape) is pretty good - and there’s a tool you can use to edit whatever you cut out if you can’t quite get it perfect.
Here’s one I made
I was going for some kind of cyberpunk matrixy vibe, and it worked relatively well I think - without having to use photoshop or anything.
As you can see - you can like, comment, write a description, reuse it, send it to others - and see all the images that were used to create it.
That’s how it connects back to Pinterest - You can click on any of them to open in Pinterest and save to your own boards.
Nifty, right? It’s a double incentive to keep using Pinterest - as the images you find in other people’s moodboards can be saved to your own Pinterest. It’s like TikTok or Instagram content discovery - but with a much more usable twist. If I like something - I can easily save it - or find the original URL.
I hope Pinterest decides to keep this around - it’s a delightful way to explore content and be creative!
Get on the waitlist at the link! I have a few more invites left - feel free to email me at landofrandommedia@gmail.com and I’ll share one with you.
🐙The Land of Random
In the distance . . . I hear the sound of randomness.
Along Video
Idk who needs to hear this but pleaseeeeeeee stop remaking TikTok. It’s not worthwhile anymore. I will say that this looks pretty interesting - and may be able to carve out a niche in the way that Byte did.
Monzo Growth
A fantastic deep dive into how the neobank Monzo grew in the early days.
Dancing Baby Cat
it Dances. It cute. Replay.
Vidlii
Someone made a 2005 Youtube Clone, and SOMEHOW people still upload videos to it. No, it makes no sense to me either. I didn’t see anything NSFW/NSFL but explore at your own discretion.
Lofi Llama
Time to relax and crank up the lofi . . .
Lumina Desk
If you don’t have enough monitors, get a desk with a programmable screen! Could be cool for Spotify!
Noot Noot Madness
I guarantee you haven’t seen this many versions of the Noot Noot meme
🎵TikToks You Can’t Miss
Neon Genesis Evangelion is a great anime but is it this good????
I will check this out on VRchat someday but I refuse to spend more than 5 minutes
Yeah - that is a bad idea my friend. You might get spirited away
🕸️The Land of Web3
This week I’m not shouting out a particular NFT - i’m shouting out Rainbow.me, the best (IMHO) crypto wallet on the block. When it comes to UI/UX, the entire cypto industry has struggled to create products that are easy for people to use. Rainbow.me is a fantastic Eth + Polygon wallet for showcasing nfts, swapping tokens, and sending crypto to friends - and it’s all in very easy to use UI/UX. Check it out!
Revoke.cash is a fantastic Ethereum solution for revoking allowances in your wallet.
Send your friends an NFT to their wallet, email, or phone number - I think an ETH Rick Roll would be funny . . .
A very true NFT Tweet
That’s all for this week friends!