📷Paintball Cameras, Find Random Homes, and Holidome Adventures
home security is wild
Hey friends!
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.
Last week, we celebrated my son’s third birthday with a trip to a little train museum in Lynville, Tennessee, and an epic train cake.
Fun fact - it’s the exact same train cake pan used to make a cake for my third birthday. Also shout out to my incredible wife for the 3-4 hours she spent making this.
Side note about the train - their passenger car at the museum was huge. I’m surprised more people don’t turn them into tiny homes like this one.
Our garden is beginning to show some life now - our beans are up, and some of the other vegetable plants are starting to take root.
We still have to plant strawberries and potatoes - but we found some seeds for sale at Walmart, (Cheaper than Lowes I might add).
Did you get a chance to explore my links from last week? I’ve added a few things in there since last week - so take a look!
I watched a horror movie that a friend of mine was in recently - The Legend of Lake Hollow. It was pretty creepy - and ended with a twist I didn’t quite see coming.
Speaking of cinema - the opening hour or so of the DLC expansion for Cyberpunk was incredible! I just started it the other night. I forgot how much of a grind the sidequests can be - but an hour of action-packed battles? I missed those days. (The tomahawk with a throwable mod is my favorite melee now).
Let’s dive in, shall we?
🔫Paintball Cameras
Did you watch Altered Carbon a few years ago?
Do you remember that fight scene at the hotel with the ceiling miniguns?
Well, a nonlethal version of that might be coming to homes near you.
I remember the early days of Youtube when people would build automated water cannons to protect their yards from dogs/cats.
“Wow” I said “There’s no way we don’t see paintball versions of that in my lifetime.”
A company has decided to create “paintball cameras” for deterring trespassers and other unwanted visitors.
Nothing like an AI paintball camera to scare off the intruders eh?
It’s not just paintballs though . . .
Part supersized arcade game, part Squid Game, PaintCam Eve uses automatic target marking, face recognition and AI-based decision making to identify unfamiliar visitors to your property, day or night.
It then gives an ED-209 style warning to anyone it doesn't know – and if they fail to comply and take off within the time limit, Eve will start firing off paintball pellets that'll mark the intruder for later police identification, while also hurting enough to make it highly likely they'll skedaddle rather than pressing the issue.
If pelting a potential intruder and splattering their clothes isn't quite dramatic enough for your tastes, Eve is very happy to step things up to another level altogether, with the option of frickin' tear gas projectiles. (source)
TEAR GAS????
That’s nuts.
What’s next? Nets, tasers . . . a robotic version of Fred from Scooby Doo with traps.
I’ll be paying attention to this space to see what happens.
Home security is about to escalate to the next level, eh?
Check it out at the link!
🏠Find Random Homes
Zillow is awesome.
For the potential home buyer - it’s a new social media network.
For the current homeowner - it’s a place to daydream.
My favorite place to find crazy homes is Zillow Gone Wild.
People build the coolest / craziest places to live.
There’s a cool website where you can find random homes with the click of a few buttons.
It’s extremely thorough.
It’s fun to click around and see what you can find. I found this (far out of my price range - I like my current home) cool house in Lewisburg, TN.
Or this epic (also out of my price range but sooo many acres) home in Lewisberg, TN.
As opposed to mindlessly scrolling through pages of homes - every click shows you something new and exciting. It puts an intriguing twist on the ole’ “browse homes” experience.
There’s even a fun calculator you can use to figure out how much your potential future home could cost.
Go check it out - and have some fun finding cool homes.
🏠Holidome Adventures
This has to be the craziest hotel I’ve seen in a long time.
It’s a Quality Inn and Suites that apparently is an old Holiday Inn Holidome.
The Holidomes were hotels with giant atriums filled with activities to do - swimming, games, and more. Sounds awesome to me - why don’t we have any of these any more.
People apparently LOVED these places - as evidenced by Reddit threads like this.
Here’s a little trailer.
Back to the video - There’s a massive indoor hall - with a pool, minigolf, giant children’s play area, and arcade games.
I found the hotel mentioned in the TikTok too.
It’s just as cheap as the video describes - I’m seeing $76 bucks a night.
There’s definitely some wear and tear on this ole’ hotel - but as many of the reviews say - I’d be willing to tolerate some of that in exchange for a place where my kids can wear themselves out playing before going to bed.
After reading over 100 reviews - I’d be willing to give it one chance. Looks like a lot of different opinions on this place.
It’s hard to find these things - here’s a video of the atrium from one that was liquidated.
Like - you gotta go hunting pretty hard through old forum threads like this one.
Some of them look like they’re pretty bad hotels now - like this one up the road in Murfreesboro TN.
Stuckeys (believe it or not - the company that makes chocolate and treats) actually has a list of some of them that are still open.
This one got demolished sadly. (beautiful indoor area)
This one is still around - with the indoor arcade and kids area.
This one still has an indoor area with a pool and bar.
…..
It’s a massive rabbit hole, and I don’t think I’m done exploring. I’m hoping to get access to a Facebook group which allegedly has a link to a map of existing ones.
Have fun in the rabbit hole!
🐙The Land of Random
Let’s go into the depths of the internet - together!
Latentscape
Go explore art and vibe. Control a little character and wander around the art. One of the coolest experiments I’ve seen in a long time. Fun fact -the art changes your character if you walk through art.
The Vibes Go Hard
Found this album while cruising Youtube lofi channels. It slaps. (weird samples at times).
Humans Text Adventure
Go on a little text adventure - designed by Tumblr staff no less. A subscriber sent this to me. This is awesome!
68k.news
The most basic HTML renderings of news headlines - that will hopefully work on any computer. Click on a link, and it’ll render it in basic HTML text if it can!
The Great Rabbit World
I want to know MORE about this world. Check out this epic art
Temple OS
Someone forked the Temple OS. Whyyyyyyyyyy
Toonami Aftermath
A toonami stream and live chatroom. There’s a regular schedule of shows and everything. This site is cool!
🥀Walled Garden Finds
Honestly I don’t know how much of any of this is staged but I hope these guys take lots of emergency gear.
Sign me up for wherever they sell this.
I want Lox in a Box. That sounds epic.
Interesting - Is Poetry.Camera becoming real?
🤖AI AHHHHHHHHHHH
The Meta.AI website is up! I look forward to giving this a little test
That’s all for this week! unless you want this crazy AI Lorem Ipsum song