🖼️The Lost Beauty of Phone Calls, the Next Light Phone, and Bin Hunting
Miss chatting on the phone?
Hey friends! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.
Our garden has been going quite well - the watermelon plant - which you might remember, my three-year-old daughter yanked it from our garden, thinking it was a weed - we replanted it and it survived - has its first little watermelon. Hurrah!
We’ve enjoyed a few tomatoes and a hot banana pepper.
Also, we now have a hummingbird that regularly visits our little wildflower patch!
I need to research Tennessee native wildflowers and determine where I can buy seeds. Maybe something like this.
I’m quite excited to begin the Twisted Metal show this week - and I’ve been enjoying the Zom100 anime!
I also recently learned that there’s a reality show about hunting folklore monsters. I’ve never really watched reality tv BUT I might make an exception . . . .
Let’s dive on in, shall we?
📱The Beauty of Phone Calls
When was the last time you talked on the phone?
I don’t mean a short call, or a doctors appt confirmation - I mean a real phone call with a friend.
We store dozens, if not HUNDREDS of contacts in our phone, but when was the last time we talked to any of them?
I have a pretty long commute to work - so I often call family/different friends on the way home.
It’s fun to chat about different hobbies/life stuff with friends - old and new.
I know Discord has certainly infiltrated a good bit of this or various game chats - but SMS/DM’s just aren’t the same as a good old-fashioned phone call.
I was thinking about this earlier this week as I thought about an AI startup called “Pi, your personal AI.”
It’s different than say AI GF/BF startups like Replika - it’s more of just a friend that you talk to.
Chat about interests, technology . . .
The UI/UX is super minimalist - stripped down to just typing back and forth.
The interesting part is that you can chat with the AI using a phone-style interface.
You talk - it talks back - it’s “intelligent” enough that the conversation can be rather interesting.
There’s only a slight delay in its response - so it feels fairly normal.
I think it’s only a matter of time until a percentage of the population is chatting with such AIs in the car.
Isn’t it weird? We text/snap/dm our friends all the time, but we rarely call them. We don’t want to “inconvenience” anyone, after all.
I don’t want to bother my friends - so lemme just chat with the old ai friend. Maybe it has learned some new things about my aeroponics hobby.
On the flip side - there’s Dialup - where you can chat with random people at your leisure - if you prefer the spontaneity of phone calls.
So - what’ll it be this week? you gonna try calling a few friends to catch up?
You could try the 8-minute challenge!
Go check out Pi Ai at the link.
🔎 The Next Light Phone
I’ve delved deep into the world of smartphone alternatives - and the Light Phone/Light Phone 2 have always stood out as strong contenders.
Here’s a few more to check out if you’re interested.
And the Wisephone.
NOW - meet the Ord Phone.
All the alt phones tend to focus on removing us from the “bad parts” of our smartphone addiction (endless scroll, social media gamification, our brains turning into mush, etc) while keeping all the necessities.
In today's digital world, we're at risk of losing the essence of what life truly is. We are so entangled in the web of digital platforms, constantly scrolling, constantly connected, that we forget to stop and live. We forget that life exists beyond our screens. We've allowed our smartphones to smartly outlive us. (source)
Just like the Light or Wisephone, the features are minimal (no apps, just calls, camera, notes, etc)- BUT there are two key differences. Ordphone has . . .
Spotify
Podcasts
THOSE are the features that none of the other “alt phones” have.
I suspect there are many people who can survive just fine without social apps or Youtube - but music?
That’s a much more difficult question. Not many people are willing to deal with ye olde mp3s anymore. We’d all rather just stream.
The Ord Phone is the first smartphone alternative I could see myself using - just for the Spotify integration alone.
Go check it out at the link!
📦 Bin Hunting
Have you ever been to a Bin Hunt or Gimme a 5 store?
Usually, it’s a store that sells Amazon returns - typically at “one size fits all” prices.
$5 Mondays - that kind of thing.
Doesn’t matter what you found - be it an iPad or a spatula - it’s still only $5.
Everything is usually haphazardly strewn in giant tables or . . . bins.
Essentially - they’re modern-day treasure hunts - or at least the charade of a treasure hunt.
Charade - I say after reading about such places on Reddit.
I just discovered that we have one here in Columbia, Tennessee - and I’ve been twice in the past few weeks.
So far - I’ve found a nice leather-bound journal for $1, and a hardbound edition of Batman:Damned for $5.
As far as the actual bins - I haven’t seen anything that I wanted, but that’s because there’s one test I gotta pass.
I need to get there 30 minutes before it opens, so I can be one of the first in line to examine the inventory. Maybe, i can find some good stuff . . .
If you’re interested in going FULL THRIFT and just buying your own pallets - websites like America’s Thrift Supply could work!
🐙 The Land of Random
Dive Dive Dive into the random!
Orb Farm
Create your own 8bit digital aquatic ecoystem - right in your very own goldfish bowl. Fastforwarding to see what happens to your ecosystem is very fun!
Killed By Meta
The graveyard of Facebook’s digital ecosystem continues to growwwww and growwwww.
Archive if You Care
If you really really really like something - BACK IT UP. There’s no guarantee it’ll still exist in a year - or 10 years.
Tarantino Lofi
This is a really good lofi mix - top tier vibes NGL.
Every Breaking Bad Frame
The bots that people set up on Twitter - this one is crazy. They uploaded every single frame from Breaking Bad - 2 every 30 minutes, from the first season to the last.
Blow up Your Thoughts
With this delightful little website - write your thoughts, then blow them up. Kaboom!
RSS Bridge
Create or find RSS feeds for your feed reader! It’s a very good website to add to your bookmark collection.
🤖 AI AAAAHHHHHHH
The Animate Diff is a very powerful AI Gif tool - here’s some examples and here’s the Google Collab notebook.
A list of 50 types of photography to experiment with for prompts.
A really thorough ChatGPT prompt I need to try
🎵 TikToks You Can’t Miss
Do you return the shopping cart? Also - feels like cartnarc philosophy LOL
A - Cyberpunk Life Sim Game?
How have I never heard of Umamusume.
Sometimes you no longer fear the dark.
Now that’s some brilliant immersion
That’s all for this week! See you next time.
