🎶Vaporwave Vinyl,Browse with Ladybird, and the Nexpad
Spin some retro tuness
Hey friends! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.
Hope you had a great 4th of July if you live stateside. A lot of people in our neighborhood blew off fireworks. It was awesome!
Sadly - we had a pretty bad cold so we didn’t even do anything fun. Who wants to eat ribs and watermelon when they’re sick as a dog??
We’ve been enjoying potatoes from our garden this week - so delicious! For those of you who live in Middle Tennessee - potatoes, carrots, beans, squash, cucumbers, and zucchini grow great.
Give some of those a spin if you can next Spring/Summer.
For those of you who remember when I wrote about that Vtuber sponsored Dodgers game - it looks like it was a HUGE success. The Dodgers turned the game around after the 7th inning which may or may not have coincided with Gawr Gura singing Take me out to the Ball Game.
Also - McDonalds is doing a huge collab this Tuesday with Jujutsu Kaisen - with a special anime inspired sauce you can ONLY get through the app.
I think we’re going to continue to see wild anime collabs as Gen Z and Gen Alpha take more and more center stage in terms of “target demographic.”
Did you pick up anything during the Steam Summer Sale? I thought about picking up Deathloop for my Steam Deck buttt I have too many games to finish/play already as it is.
Let’s dive in shall we?
🎶Vaporwave Vinyl
After over 9 months of waiting, my Begotten vinyl finally came in!
It had been so long I pretty much stopped thinking about it. “It’ll get here when it gets here.”
Begotten is a veryyyy mysterious producer within the broader vaporware genres - more so within the Plunderphonics or hushwave styles.
Watch the initial investigation by Pad Chennington.
The story behind the release of this album is crazy - just read it here.
Maybe it’s the last album from begotten . . . maybe not. who knows?
Creepy music. whispers of a cult . . .
Anyway - I mainly purchased it for the lore.
After sitting down to write last week’s newsletter and playing the record a few times - it got me into researching other vaporwave vinyl.
Vaporwave cassettes are another rabbithole - I wrote about them in 2020.
Aside from the fact that vinyl is awesome - the rabbithole of vaporwave vinyl is surprisingly affordable - especially with how few copies exist for a lot of artists.
There’s two benefits of vinyl.
Sick Art
Sick Music
Some have #1, some have #2, and others have both.
Take this Barber Beats album from Oblique Occasions - the art slaps. Listen to the album here - it’s short. The last song Smoking Kills goes pretty hard.
There will only be 200 copies of this vinyl available. When it’s gone - it’s gone!
How much does it cost for this? Only $30 + shipping. Not bad! This aligns with a lot of the new vinyl I find - around $30 + shipping.
There are a lot of cool places to find Vaporwave vinyl on the web. Happy hunting!
Aloe City Wrld - Preorder some Macroblank or Oblique Occasions.
Geometric Lullaby - fantastic Vaporwave label that often has good stuff
100 Percent Electronica - Windows 96 is fun
Night City Vinyl - lots of interesting stuff
Ebay - where to go cry and realize you should’ve got the vinyl.
🕸Browse With Ladybird
Ladybird is an independent web browser that aims to be a true web browser alternative.
It was forked from alternative desktop os Serenity OS in June.
Most browsers run on Chromium these days - Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave . . . even the new Arc browser is Chromium based.
If you want to avoid THA GOOGLE you’re off in the world of Firefox or Safari.
Today, every major browser engine is open source, which is wonderful, but there's still one issue: they're all funded by Google's advertising empire. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and Opera all use Google's Chromium. Apple receives billions to make Google the default search engine in Safari, and Firefox has a similar deal where they receive hundreds of millions each year. (Chris Wanstrath - cofounder of the Ladybird Initiative)
Ladybird will be completely from scratch - with no Chromium or $$ from Google.
Those are HUGE goals - like becoming the Wikipedia of search browsers.
They hope to open it in Alpha in 2026. I can’t wait to try it!
Check out the site at the link.
💻The Nexpad
The Nexdock is one of those devices that feel like they’re from an alternative future.
Hook up your phone to the “laptop shell” and it turns into a laptop. Voila!
It only works well for some Samsung and Motorola phones, but still pretty cool.
It’s only $300, and you can even use it as an external monitor too!
There’s also the Nexpad . . . for turning your phone into a tablet.
I’m not even sure who the target market is for this.
Seniors who want a bigger screen but don’t want a new device? Steam deck users who want a bigger screen while playing at a hotel?
A Samsung or Motorola phone maximalist who loves their Nexdock and now wants a Nexpad??
You can use it as a secondary monitor for your PC or Mac - but there are cheaper ways to do that.
Some demos show gaming - so I guess you could use it for Xbox Game Cloud on the go with a Bluetooth controller.
I’m not sure why this device exists - or why someone would pay around $200 for it. It doesn’t even have a battery . . .
For less than $200 you could get a used 2019 iPad Air.
On the interwebz - most nexdock / nexpad conversations seem to boil down to use case. Some people have a great use case - and those are the people who continue to buy them.
People have a great usecase for the Nexdock, but I can’t seem to find many who argue for the Nexpad.
Go check out the Nexpad at the link!
🐙The Land of Random
Random links from around the web! Strange and curious wonders await!
Tiny Green Wizard Lore
A bit of lore behind that wacky RPG inspired trend where the guy crawls around as a little green wizard in the mall and annoys workers. Oh, you haven’t seen the videos? [warning may cause feelings of confusion]
The Abandoned Richland Mall
The Proper People are still my favorite crew of people who explore abandoned places.
One Checkbox
Instead of 1 million checkboxes . . . there’s only one. one for everyone to click. all at the same time.
The SF Underground Beyblade League
Someone who lives in San Francisco pleaseeee go to this UNDERGROUND BEYBLADE competition. This looks amazing.
Play the Time
Listen to the time - played on a piano! It’s a nifty little trick that changes just a little bit every second.
Online Synthesizer
Play some fun synth tunes on this little synth! Don’t forget to try the 8-bit mode.
Pikimov
An open-source and 100% free motion design/video editor. It works in your browser too! Very cool.
The Infinite Backrooms
A trippy site where two instances of claude-3-opus are chatting forever. It’s kinda creepy NGL. There’s even a wallpaper mode that feels UNHINGED. Seriously - stare at it for a few minutes.
That’s all for this week unless you wanna check out this backyard lagoon.