🍌Play Fruit Music, Rent a Garden, and the Solarpunk Manifesto

Ready to get a green thumb?

Aug 30, 2021

Hey friends! Are you ready for your dose of the random this week?

Last week we discussed ye olde Geocities. Remember that one fun site I shared? I found the guy who created it on Twitter and he was soo excited that I randomly found his site. I need to do some more archaeology in there . . .

David Douglas Stuart @bigkamo

@land_ofrandom Wow! Thanks! I’d found a couple of pages in the Wayback Machine, but never the entire site. I’ve got the most recent version on a hard drive in storage in Australia. How did you actually find and surface this?!?!

I’ve rediscovered my 2016 obsession with Electro Swing. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through that phase, but here’s a fantastic playlist.

Of course, no mention of Electro Swing is complete WITHOUT this classic, classic video.

I think Electro Swing is due for a revival - TikTok style, don’t you think?

Anyway, in other news It’s absolutely insane how large the volume on the NFT platform Opensea has grown. 1 Billion dollars last week? That’s insane.

Pictures of rocks are being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s nuts.

Are there nft nuts yet? If not, dibs.

There’s even lofi music vibes for sale.

Wild Stuff!

Let’s get started shall we?

🍌Play Fruit Music

Have you ever wanted to play music on fruit?

Behold - the great concert of pineapples.

Ok - now that you’ve hopefully watched at least a few seconds of that pineapple jam - here’s the magic behind the curtain.

Check. It. Out.

The Playtron is a fascinating device for creating music. Basically, it’s a circuit board that you can hook up to 16 objects (fruit, books, jelly) via alligator clips.

Then you just hook it up to your desktop, to a synth, and BOOM - You can crank out beautiful music by bonking strawberries.

Check out this sick beat.

This would be a fantastic way to experiment with music, show very young kids the joy of music - the uses are endless.

Could you imagine playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on Twinkies?? That’s definitely a viral TikTok idea. Heck. That’s a whole account.

Check out the Playtron at the link!

Playtron

👩‍🌾Rent A Garden

I’m always amazed at the verticals that are popping up in the rent economy. You can rent a car, house, and attic from other people - which are the things I can only think of off the top of my head.

Well, now you can rent someone’s garden - or rent out your own.

It’s so awesome I don’t know where to start. There’s many people who want to garden but don’t have the space. There’s people with empty backyards who need additional income.

In my childhood, we did a TON of gardening. We grew beans, tomatoes, squash, green peppers and more! Unfortunately, my experience was the exception - not the norm. Many people in cities and suburubs never have the ability to grow a garden - except maybe that basil plant on the windowsill.

We’re about 5 - 10 years away from a world in which vertical wall farming is easy and affordable to implement.

Woah. Big Brain Idea. What if startups arose to rent your walls for gardening purposes? and you get a cut for maintaining? OOOOOH.

This is a fantastic and easy way for people to get into gardening who otherwise don’t have the space to do so. Here in America, it feels like “green space” becomes more and more of a joke with every new development. Want a garden? Well - you barely have a backyard so good luck.

Currently a lot of the userbase seems to be in Britain, but I did find one person renting in the US - for pretty cheap too!

It’s a bit wild - but with a rake you could easily get this up and running in a few days. Each garden description mentions the facilities that come with the garden too - which is a great perk. Can you imagine taking your own water to a garden you pay to grow? OOF.

Go check out Allotme at the link!

Allotme

🌞The Solarpunk Manifesto

I guess I’m on a bit of a plant related kick today, but while we’re at it, let’s chat about the Solarpunk manifesto.

Do you know it?

Here’s the crucial beginning of the manifesto.

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings. Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share. Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there. (Source)

Essentially Solarpunk is a cultural movement to ask a optimistic question of the future - “What does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” It’s a dream of the future in which good things have happened to the Earth.

It’s not necessarily a utopian vision of the future, but it’s an optimistic one. At the very least - it’s a vision that’s exactly the opposite of Cyberpunk or Altered Carbon . . . or even Wall-E for that matter.

Here’s an art example. Just look at all that wonderful green space amidst the city.

Or this futuristic city nestled into a green environment. You see - it combines the future and the green.

Really cool, right?

Here’s some more of the core tenents of the Solarpunk Manifesto.

We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.
Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

At the moment, Solarpunk is a relatively new punk movement so it doesn’t have movies like the Steampunk or Cyberpunk genres.

Hopefully we’ll get to see some mainstream content soon!

Check out the Solarpunk Manifesto at the link.

Solarpunk Manifesto

🐙The Land of Random

All those random links you wanted

Colors.Lol

These wildly descriptive color pallettes will have you seeing colors in a whole new way.

Pediculous Strong Pink?

Forgive Me Father

This retro looking Bioshock feeling 3D - 2D old school FPS looks absolutely NUTS.

Password Jazz

What if your passwords sounded good?

wut

Paintball Robot

Control a robot that shoots paintballs at a empty wall. When it’s late at night, you can control the robot quite easily. It’s a bit surreal to be honest.

Paintball Robot time?

Watch Big Brother Back

Ever wanted to know what those Senators are trading stocks in? Now you can!

Senate Stock Watch

Vertical Desktop

I guess we’ve reached the point where TikTok is so crucial that a Chromebook desktop with a vertical screen sounds like a good idea. I personally think it would make a fantastic kitchen desktop.

HP Chromebase