🥓Mushroom Bacon, Taco Bell Weddings, and New AI Art
Is that bacon I smell
Hey everyone! How are you this fine Monday?
My weekend was pretty busy - my wife and son went on a trip to visit some family - and I took care of our daughter.
We had a lot of fun - making cookies, walking around town, and playing with her kitchen set.
Just like in our normal breakfast routine - we cook a lot of eggs in the play kitchen.
The weekend only had one bad part - I got lost in the airport parking lot after saying waving goodbye at airport security.
See - we were in a tizzy arriving at the airport - and I completely forgot where we parked. It was like the backrooms - car edition.
It was the most lost I’ve ever been in my life.
20 minutes of pure terror.
So - I’m happy to say I escaped - and I’m writing this newsletter today.
Did you like this season of Westworld? It ended on a pretty insane note - I’m very curious about what direction the final season will take.
How will the maze play out this final season?
OH - before I forget. Moviepass is coming back - and you have until the end of today 8/29 to get on the list.
IDK what it’s gonna be like - but i’m curious to find out. It better not be $50 a month.
Let’s hop in.
🥓 Mushroom Bacon
Ah, the delicious smell of bacon!
What if I told you it was . . . mushroom bacon?
A company called MyForest Foods is growing giant mushroom slabs to create bacon.
The growth process starts in tall silos, not unlike those used to store grain, where a “slurry” of moist wood chips is prepared. They’re transferred to indoor stacks of trays, not unlike those used in vertical farms that grow leafy greens, to act as the substrate the mycelium grows on . . . 12 days after depositing mushroom cells on their wood chip substrate, the mycelia are ready to be “harvested”—they grow in blocks, which are run through slicers to yield strips the same size and shape as bacon. “We sort of trick the mushroom to form these, basically, sheets of mushroom flesh,” Bayer told Axios. “So rather than forming a mushroom, we get a 50-foot-long, 4-foot-wide, 2-inch-thick slab of mushroom meat.” (source)
Mushroom Meat. Now those are two words I would have never combined in my life.
It kinda reminds me of those crazy mickey mouse cucumbers + watermelons that they have at Disney World. The mushrooms are being repurposed to add a new twist - slabs vs shrooms.
Basically - they cut the fungi slabs into bacon-shaped pieces - and add flavor!
The craziest part about it is how fast the slabs grow. 12 days is insane! Given enough scale - and the perfect flavor, I could see this getting pretty popular in the years to come.
With that kind of turnaround - I’d hope that it’s cheaper to produce than normal bacon. In the 6 months it takes for a pig to hit 250 pounds, I imagine you could grow thousands of pounds of mushroom bacon.
CEO Eben Bayer tells Axios. . . . "They've got this umami flavor, which sort of mimics flesh. And all we do is slice it off, slice it into bacon strips, salt it, smoke it, put a little coconut fat on it." (source)
I really want to try these. Hopefully, MyForest Foods sells them online soon!
Check it out at the link.
🌮Taco Bell Weddings
Ready to get married in the Metaverse?
Taco Bell is looking for someone to get married in Decentraland.
Seriously - the rules require getting a marriage license from Utah county, Utah.
If you haven’t heard of Decentraland before, it’s one of the more well respected crypto metaverse platforms - and you can hop in right from your browser.
According to Taco Bell’s site, they want to give you the complete digital online experience - not just a “oh walk down the aisle in our 3D chapel for 20 minutes.”
We’ll host your wedding in Taco Bell’s Metaverse Wedding Chapel. It’s a very real marriage with an unreal virtual ceremony. . . Help customize your wedding: your walk down the aisle, your first dance, your attire, the menu – the possibilities are endless . . . You and your guests will look their digital bests with exclusive NFT wearables in a space so magical, it can't exist IRL. . . We'll not only mint Taco Bell on your wedding certificate, we’ll also send you exclusive Taco Bell wedding swag . . . We will livestream your metaverse wedding, complete with surprise guests, as you exchange your virtual vows. (source)
They have a whole team figuring this out - I’m not sure how many virtual wedding planners there are - but i’m curious how much education is part of their workflow.
Ok - so since Decentraland doesn’t have these mechanics - you won’t be able to cut the digital cake. You’ll have to slash it with a sword . . .
Though the notes above mentioned a “menu” it doesn’t look like real food is part of the package. Here’s what’s mentioned in the legalese.
“A marriage certificate memento NFT.
Payment for an online Utah County marriage license.
A metaverse wedding ceremony and reception in a Sponsor-designated location/environment on the Decentraland online platform, the details, dates, times, and length of which shall be designated by Sponsor in Sponsor’s sole discretion (the “Metaverse Wedding”).
Logistics advice for the legal wedding to take place via live video link during (or adjacent to) the Metaverse Wedding (the “Legal Wedding”). The Metaverse Wedding and the Legal Wedding are referred to herein as the “Wedding”.
A personal liaison that will help plan logistics and customizations of the Metaverse Wedding.
A custom NFT invitation to the Metaverse Wedding (with limits on the number of guests determined in Sponsor’s sole discretion).
Virtual custom wedding attire
An officiant for the Legal Wedding.” (source)
As far as the legalese goes - it looks like everything included here is VR only. It’s all very interesting - and whoever signs up for this needs to be very very chill about their wedding. Everything in here is up to Taco Bell’s discretion.
Leave those Pinterest boards behind . ..
I wonder how long Taco Bell has been planning this - it looks very much inspired by that VR movie on HBO Max We met in virtual reality.
Hopping on the hype train - so to speak.
Looking to get married soon? Go create a video and sign up!
🤖Dream Studio AI Art
There’s a new AI tool in town, AND IT’S AWESOME.
It’s called Dream Studio, and it’s currently in Beta.
DreamStudio is a new suite of generative media tools engineered to grant everyone the power of limitless imagination and the effortless ease of visual expression through a combination of natural language processing and revolutionary input controls for accelerated creativity. (source)
All you have to do is enter a prompt and click the big “Dream” button.
Here’s what I got for this prompt “Painting of a cthulhu cassette tape with tape tentacles“
Pretty incredible! Compared to Midjourney - a lot of these prompts get pretty actionable results without having to upscale.
Tons of sliders are available to optimize your photos - from number of images, to steps to generate, and different samplers you can choose from.
It’s really fun! I’m pretty tempted to buy some credits after my batch of free ones run out.
What I really appreciate about this software is how easy it is to use and play with. It’s very user friendly - and it saves every image you create so you can look at them later.
Sign up for an account and try it out!
🐙The Land of Random
Let’s get random, shall we?
What is this Gadget
It’s so complex - and I have so many questions.
Fly Pigeon
It feels fake, but I want to believe this is real. It would make mail a joy to get. As one friend said to me - CAN YOU IMAGINE SPAM PIGEONS??
Fundelivered
A fun spin on the “Buy unopened packages” theme. Buy a pack of packages to explore with your date, spouse, or family. A treasure hunt!
Medieval Medicine
A bunch of ancient medieval medicine recipes are about to be publicly available. “The man that will of leechcraft lere / Read on this book and he may hear / Many a medicine both good and true / To heal sores both old and new.”
Bored Button
Be ye Bored? Slam the bored button and go explorin’. It’s an older weird website spinner with a ton of good stuff. No idea if any of them are NSFW, but I’ll give you the possible warning.
Ice Burger
Burger King threw out the cookbook and decided that the world needed a burger with actual ice on it.
The Dead Internet Theory
An excellent deep dive into how the dead internet is going to grow thanks to recent advances in AI tech. Seriously, it’s gonna get scary.
🎵TikToks You Can’t Miss
This is what Prank TikTok should be
DEJA VUUUUUUUUUU - Drift that train
What part of tiktok am I in.
Bro you need to go lie down.
My heart literally LOL’d out loud
🕸️The Land of Web3
I finally got a Feline Fiendz! Among all the various NFT communities I have joined - it’s definitely one of the healthiest I’ve encountered. I’m looking forward to how the project develops over the next year. Could it be one of the NFT projects that make it?
I imagine we’ll begin to see a lot of NFT project founders get in legal trouble - check out this @zachXBT thread on Boneheads.
Ora Labs is trying to be the Google of Blockchain explorers.
That’s all for this week! See you next time.