☠️Internet Corpse of Smile Direct, Search For Products, and More Caffeine

Who doesn't love caffeine?

Hey friends! Welcome to this week’s issue of The Land of Random.

Have you finished your Christmas shopping yet?

I still need to do a bit more for my wife . . .

We’ve just finished battling yet (sigh) another sickness in our household. We’ve been sick four times since October. 4 TIMES. *Sigh. . . *

We’ve been watching some of the Christmas classics - like Elf, It’s a Wonderful Life, or Christmas Story.

Still need to go out for Chinese on Christmas one of these years.

Next week will be a bit of a wild one - I suppose ya’ll will be getting the newsletter on Christmas eh? I’ll have to whip up something fun. Weird links to show your family . . . something like that. hmm.

Don’t forget to go check out Tom’s website where you can control his Christmas lights.

(Deee lights does not appear to be up and running this year, sadly)

I finally got around to watching the Dungeons and Dragons movie. It was sooo funny. i honestly didn’t expect so much comedy.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

☠️Smile Directs Internet Corpse

Smile Direct Club is dead.

like mega dead - like - there’s no more customer service or support. please just continue to pay off your account.

Also. LOL on the lifetime guarantee.

Whenever a large company goes belly up - I find a bit of morbid curiosity in wandering through the corpses of their social media accounts.

Was anything shut down? or did the social media people just log out and say “bye!”

Usually - it’s the latter, but on occasion, I do see a “GOODBYEEE” post when a brand dies.

I found out about Smile Direct going out on December 9 - but based on posts i’ve seen, people found out about it on the 8th, and everyone at Smile Direct lost their jobs on the 8th as well.

One weird thing - the zombie job websites are still talking about Smile Direct like it still exists.

like seriously - do a lil Google Search for Smile Direct Jobs.

The last post on Instagram was a reel focusing on last-minute Christmas Stocking Stuffers (what??) like whitening strips. Ironic that the last post is trying to do ecom.

The same post was made on December 7 on Facebook - This appears to be the last public post ever.

I checked TikTok too - and an Influencer post made for the last post there on December 7.

On an older video - someone posted that they just ordered. Lol that’s not possible - unless they went through Amazon.

The saddest post had to be the one on Smile Direct Club Careers

Little did the Costa Rica team know the first week of December was their second to last week of work.

The shutdown was so hard core - there are job postings still on LinkedIn!

Surprisingly enough - the store is still active on Amazon.

Hypothetically - you could buy something - and it might show up.

“In Stock” shows up.

It’s weird stuff. Go check out what’s left of the Smile Direct Club site at the link!

🕵️‍♂️Search For Products

Anytime someone creates a specialized search engine for something - a little conversation like this happens in my brain.

Oh? I wonder how well it would handle my research project for _____

Someone created a search engine for eCommerce products. It’s called “Agora” and claims to have over 25 million products.

I was skeptical - so I decided to do a bit of searching.

A search for “Mens Denim Jackets” gets you a bunch of random stuff - including this listing for a 100LB Bale of them.

Given the randomness of that listing - I tried “bale of clothes” and ended up finding a listing for a literal bale of straw.

What about something more obscure? A search for Winamp spawned a random tshirt.

Brand names do surface - A search for Stone Island will surface Stone Island merch, as does Acronym.

Type in something not as brand name - and you’ll get some seriously random stuff.

This site is like a google shop version of Aliexpress - surfacing the RANDOMEST things that ABSOLUTELY DO NOT RELATE.

Here’s the website if you’d like to take an adventure.

Let me know the craziest thing you find!

🧨More Caffeine

You’ve probably heard the tragic story about the lady who drank the Panera charged lemonade and died.

The Panera death lemonade - as it’s morbidly called now.

Panera never had a big enough warning sign by that darn stuff - I remember drinking my first one when it came out and being surprised at the caffeine content.

390 mg of caffeine in a large. WHATTT???

That’s more caffeine than . . . .any of the caffeine drinks like Monster, Bang, Rockstar, Nos . . .

Honestly, it’s difficult to find an energy drink that has over 300 mg of caffeine.

Caffeine Junkies have been exploring drinks with “the most caffeine” since the early 2000’s.

Here’s an old forum discussion from 2007 on the topic.

It’s said that the old Cocaine energy drink had 1000 mg of caffeine.

Honestly - the most “caffeine buzz” i’ve ever received was the “Death Wish” coffee.

THAT stuff gave me heart palpitations.

Try as i might - I can’t find a single energy drink over 400 mg of caffeine.

Energy drink** Yes I know pre-workout powder and gel goes HARD.

There are old tales about the Wired X505 that had 500 mg of caffeine - but these are often from the old days.

Energy drink brands come and go pretty fast - it can be hard to track down stuff from 5-10 years ago.

These days - it appears everyone “shook hands” at 300 mg of caffeine, and left the caffeine wars up to coffee.

Biohazard has 928 mg of Caffeine PER CUP. (that’s insane).

They say Black Label coffee has over 1500 mg of caffeine - but I can’t find an official source from the website to confirm that.

All I can say is - don’t mess with this stuff unless you have a very high caffeine tolerance - and even then I say “stay away.”

If you’d like to stay up to date on new energy drinks - this blog Caffeine King is regularly updated with interesting drink reviews!

🐙The Land of Random

The Land of Random . . . a place of strange and curious things

Get StickBugged

Lol.

The Floppy Cafe - for Floppy Drives

Trying to write a driver for an auld floppy drive?

If Buying isn’t Owning,Piracy Isn’t Stealing

A bold take, but one that more and more are adopting - thanks to moves like Playstation deleting purchased Discovery shows from user libraries. Hopefully a lot more skull and bones flying will convince the corpos to make the buy button real.

Window Kill

A surreal arcade shooter game set on your Windows home screen. It looks chaotic - but it looks so fun.

Medieval Lofi

Yep - it’s a thing. fr.

Unpluq Your Phone

This is new - a little device that can block all the distracting apps of your choosing. Nifty!

Print That Video

This guy Peter Forrett is building a service to print out videos - like turning a recipe video into a printable asset.

🎶TikToks You Can’t Miss

Taking notes here. You?

Dang - this song goes hard. FOR THE WEATHER CHANNEL

The song slaps, but the video trips.

I’d love to meet someone who does this. Bet they have cool stories.

Remind me to show this to my wife.

🤖AI AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

There we have it fam - a new Replika competitor. We’ll leave that as this week’s singular dystopian AI link.

That’s all for this week! Unless you wanna watch a video about camping in the Mall of America.