I bought some new lights. I wanted to backlight some books. The lights arrived Monday, hurled onto the porch from the delivery man’s truck-mounted trebuchet, for he feared my ice labyrinth (a yard of ice and snow, and a driveway still buried until yesterday.
Last night, I finally had a chance to open them. Two small LED lamps connected to one power cable. Lots of pretty colors. Looked great on the promotional website. The video and the inexpensive price sold me.
I opened the box, found the two lights and four different mounts. I also found this booklet.
And, look, light booklet copywriter, I’m glad you have that job. Those gigs aren’t easy to come by, but you should be proud of the work you did throughout. This is important, though: we’re not going on a journey. You’re going to backlight some books.
I spent some time sliding them between the bookcase that holds the Gloms and the wall. It didn’t work quite the way I wanted to. But the lights are fun. You can run them from an app, use standard schemes or develop your own, set a timer, and so on. They’re just the wrong size. But I’ve also got colorful corner laps, slender little things that stand 58 inches tall. So I took apart the frames, slid those behind the Gloms and, ya know, it mostly works. The new lights are now going behind other books. (I have a lot of books, I wonder if I need more lights.) And the look now mostly works! So I have one large bookshelf backlit. I have the top of another backlit. And my old 1930s radio is backlit.
The idea is to make it all the backdrop for video meetings. But as I tinker with the light settings and the exact locations, this could be the beginning of a nice evening setup.
I had an epiphany about the snow today.
I’m going to miss it. We have a sandy soil, but this is just a wet, spongy ground right now. And the grass is, well, brown, as you’d expect.
I found a bowl of candy at the office today. I wonder how long that’ll last. I have two colleagues that have a playful feud about peanut M&Ms and when I saw this, I thought of those guys. One of them is wrong. Peanut M&Ms are just fine. I enjoyed the peanut butter ones today.
It was a nice treat before class. In Rituals and Traditions, we broke the class into groups again. They’ve got group work to do and so group work we began. The group work is now picking up speed. I’m excited to see what they do.
I was also excited to screen this documentary in my Criticism class. I asked them all to jot down the name and impressions they had of all of the people we meet. There’s about eight of them in here.
Then we talked about all of those people. The documentary is about video game addiction. I selected this one because it is a bit shorter, but also because we could do this exercise. We could discuss the different points of view — the guy trying to overcome his problem and help others, his mother, two psychologists, a Facebook executive and a few others — and consider all of the ways that each are talking about the issue.
This could be a media effects conversation, and I pointed that out. We considered the different ways the people came about their ideas in a field of important research that is really only just getting underway. Finally, it is a study in expertise, source credibility, perspective, and authoritative voice.
I was pleased with that. And I was sure to sum it up in the right tone of voice so it sounded, you know, authoritative.
I should have set up some dramatic lighting for precisely that moment in the classroom, too. Maybe next time.
