(puff) In Xanadu, Did Kubilai Khan (puff)

While chemistry was being invented, anaesthesia was also invented, rather by accident – with great effect on art. Priestly was busy discovering oxygen at that time and the scientists of the day were unhindered by concerns about human subjects boards, lawsuits, or comprehension of what they were doing.

Davy’s experimental approach appears to have been to produce bags of various gasses, then he inhaled them to see what they did. Lucky for him, he didn’t manage to get a big lungful of nitrogen or cyanide.

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A Good Technique

Silkscreen ink is cheap! Then all you need is a foam roller and something with a cool texture. If you want to get fancy, you can cut a mask out of cardboard, matboard, ABS plastic, or (other cheap material I love to use) tile-board.

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Things That Delight Me – 3: Photography Apps

I’ve been a fairly serious photographer since about 1993, and even invested the requisite decade in perfecting black and white darkroom printing – just in time for the technology to vanish from commercial use.

Now, you can do amazing photographic things with a smart phone, and there are apps like Snapchat, Hipstamatic, and Prisma to do it. It used to be the thing to sneer at people who’d just grab an image in Photoshop and run some filters on it, but the filters are getting cool! And interesting! But most of all: fun. They’re taking advantage of the massive amount of computing we can carry around in our hand, to do face analysis and then apply the results.

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Soap!

Hot weather is a good time for soap-making. It makes it easy to mix the oils: leave your shea butter and coconut oil on the porch in the sun and they are liquid in 10 minutes. Molds dry quickly in the heat, and the soap doesn’t have any problem gelling – in the winter I have to leave it in the oven overnight (risking a soap volcano!)  Summer soap just sits on the counter overnight and it’s ready to go in the morning.

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