🥤Pepsiman, Simulate the Web, and the Kale/Crack Phones

The web isn't real

David Nichols

Apr 08, 2024

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

Did you see any good April Fools’ content?

It’s another lovely week here in Tennessee - our flowers are blooming quite nicely.

(Tulips are awesome. I’m holding back from going ham on a website like this).

NEED. LOTS. OF. BULBS.

Also - the book The Black Tulip is amazing.

AND - AND - We finally started planting our garden.

Have you watched Upload yet? It’s HILARIOUS. The premise is that people can upload themselves to a digital afterlife, and this poor guy ends up in his digital afterlife quite prematurely under suspicious circumstances.

Part comedy - part mystery - and part scifi.

There’s an absolute deluge of Lovecraftian content going around - like this new upcoming shooter Decadent.

No more zombies or vampires - now it’s cosmic horror.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

🥤Pepsiman

Once upon a time - Pepsi did something crazy.

They made a videogame for PS1 - with a theme song that still slaps.

You see - Pepsi got unhinged.

They made a faceless buff dude . . . like a humanoid can of Pepsi.

As usual, Pepsiman is/was a product of Japanese’s Pepsi division.

All the fun stuff is made in Japan :(

The Pepsiman commercials are TRIPPY.

The amount of Pepsi advertising in this game is incredible. It’s like one giant ad.

Gameplay-wise, Pepsiman is comparatively simple to grasp. It’s an on-rails runner akin to something like Temple Run – Pepsiman is always on the move, and the player must react to whatever comes their way. You’ve a simple move set – you can move from side to side, sprint, jump, and slide, and the objective is simply to make it to the end of the level before the timer runs out, or before you run out of lives. You add to your score, or you pick up extra lives, by picking up some of the 100 cans of Pepsi scattered around the level. There are occasionally gimmicks, like a bin on your head inverting the controls, but that’s largely it. (source)

Here, watch some gameplay. Skip to minute six to watch Pepsiman escape a giant rolling can of . . . you guessed it . . . Pepsi.

Hypothetically, in Minecraft, you can emulate the game at websites like this one.

Hopefully, Pepsiman returns someday!

💻Simulate The Web

Do you hear the drums in the deep?

The Balrog is on his way . . .

AI images, comments, and books are scary but how about the actual web being simulated?

Yep. That’s the idea behind websim.ai

Type in any address - and it starts generating a website.

For example - I typed in “thelandofrandom.substack.com” and it gave me this

The styles and renderings are basic, but it works. It makes up everything as it goes along.

It takes whatever you type in - and runs with it.

Reload pages - and it generates a whole new world. Click hyperlinks - and whole new pages are built.

The Ai seems to have knowledge of some things from the internet - so typing in discord or Twitter will get you crazy websites that are reminiscent of the real thing.

Here’s a hallucinated discord chat.

The fact that this works so well in beta is mind boggling. I imagine once the creator adds integrations with image generation, video, voice, ai agents who will talk to you . . it’ll be the trippiest thing on the internet.

Explore an internet that doesn’t exist.

Like this vaporwave text generator

or this hallucination of substack

or PONG YOU CAN ACTUALLY PLAY.

Don’t get me started on duckhunt

or a weird live chatroom hallucination

WHAT IS THIS

WHATTT

Ok - the more complex you make the url, the crazier it gets - like this one about Zombies.

my attempt to simulate Pacman failed

Go check it out!

Simulate the Web

🥬Kale/Crack Phones

It’s been one week of trying the Kale/Crack phone experiment

Here’s a link to Trung Phan’s article if you’re interested.

Essentially - you keep one phone for serotonin, and one phone for dopamine.

One phone has all the dopamine apps (CRACK phone) like Instagram or TikTok, and the other has just the basics (KALE phone).

I tried my own spin on the idea (using my old One Plus 7 Pro. great phone - bad battery life after a few years) with the following parameters.

KALE PHONE - Pixel 6 Pro - I kept messaging, email, banking, all that stuff. The only “scroll away” app I kept was my RSS feed app Inoreader. I don’t count this as time wasting, as all links scrolled are for the point of writing this newsletter.

CRACK PHONE - One Plus 7 Pro - I put Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, and Twitter on this phone. Wifi only. (no sim card).

One phone out - In order as to not look like a psychopath, I’d only keep out one phone at a time. Fortunately, I use Pushbullet pretty regularly, so if necessary - i can respond to messages on the “Crack phone.”

Thoughts so far:

I spend a lot less time on social media now - now I spend maybe 20 minutes a day checking the socials and mindlessly browsing. I’ll be keeping this experiment going for a while longer!

The physical act of having to go get the other phone is extraordinarily annoying.

And - It forces you to acknowledge that “yes I am literally going to get this phone to watch stuff on social media.”

Curious?

Give it a try! Let me know what you think.