I <unicode hex code 2665> Lamp
A few years ago I used this Instructable course as the basis to build a floor lamp from iron gas pipes that I had left-over after building some shelving unites for my studio.
In addition to earthing it, as the Ikea lamp that I originally cannibalised lacked it, I also had to cast the base from concrete to make it heavy enough to stabilise the lamp. I’ve always been pretty happy with the result, and it has yet to cause an electrical fire in my studio….
Paper games built for two.
Our recent family holiday to Corfu saw us playing family games most other nights (when we weren’t too exhausted from waterparks), in addition to the classics - Uno (Minecraft version) & Top Trumps (chemical element edition) - my eldest son & I enjoyed playing these two player paper games from Gladden.
They’re free (and there are a few other free downloads on the site), but Gladden also make and sell other products - dungeon crawler games, nutritional trackers - that reconstitute the digital back into physical form, which they refer to as “paper apps”, i.e single use notebooks.
On a not unrelated note, when writing this newsletter I went down the internet rabbit-hole trying to find a grammatically acceptable verb to describe this process (i.e. digital is to digitalise, as analogue is to [insert answer]).
Although the grammatical construction is obvious (analogise/analogize) this has already been taken:
analogize/ analogise / (əˈnæləˌdʒaɪz) /
verb
(intr) to make use of analogy, as in argument; draw comparisons
(tr) to make analogous or reveal analogy in
I’m always curious if these linguistic blindspots have effects and repercussions of which we are unaware.
One of my favourite books of the summer.
I am only slightly embarrassed by the fact that I have kept a record of every book I’ve read and movie I’ve watched for the last 14 years.
That same record shows me that I read (or listened to) a lot of books (30+) over the course of a summer, in which I had a lot of time off and spent a lot of time travelling/in transit.
Amongst them where some great ones, that I may revisit in this newsletter at some point, but one of those that my mind keeps returning to in Heather McGowan’s Schooling - a book that I had not previously heard of and is one of the few things not to have its own wikipedia page.
The book surrounds the first term of a young American girl in an English boarding school, as she comes under the spell of one of the male teachers (or he under hers) as she is haunted by a recollection an accident in her past, which she may or may not have caused, which may or may not have been as fatal as she remembers and may or may not have happened at all.
The strength of the novel however really lies in its prose style, which adopts which I feel compelled to lazily describe as “stream of consciousness”. This is a description on book jackets that is ordinarily guaranteed to make me start a book with a sense of foreboding. I normally find such techniques a) overly cryptic and difficult (I’m looking at you The Sound & The Fury) b) solipsistic and unengaging (most of Philip Roth & all of Beckett) or c) just laborious and unreadable (Molly Bloom’s ramblings in last chapter of Ulysses).
Schooling managed for me to capture that interior monologue in a way that was not only readable but compelling,