How wiring solar panels is a bit like having a party. A cartoon from a splendid girl called Sylvie, who has lots more pictures on youtookthatwell.com

Following on from my recent blog on the true costs of taking the train Vs flying, this is a brilliant stitch by Hannah Henderson - one of many pieces from the Railway Adventure, a creative campaign from Climate Rush and the Crafters Collective.

This is part of a really important campaign to make our Fares Fair, which you can sign now. Britain has some of the most expensive train fares in the world and they keep going up, despite government promises to bring them down. As we all try to improve our environmental footprints, we need to be able to afford the alternatives to cars and flights.

Take it and run

My friend Richard Watkins is a lovely gentleman who sketches out some of his thoughts onto paper. These sketches, known as Pen Paper Pause, are snippets of interesting ideas, concepts and ponderings about the world around us.

Lately he has embarked on another project, called Take it and Run. The idea is to take one of his pictures and run with it - remix it - do something new with it. And the contributions to this project have been amazing. It is such a pleasure to watch friends get creative and make stuff. 

Being a fan of anything with the word ‘remix’ in it, I was glad to join in and choose this drawing, that has the words:

I want to fall in love with someone like you.
But not you.

I carried around those words for a few weeks and for some reason I kept thinking of dating websites, which are, in some ways, quite peculiar places. In our quests for companionship, dating websites are quickly becoming a standard tool to have in the mix. Apparently, they are the largest segment of “paid content” on the web other than pornography. Right now, millions of people are sitting at a desk, shopping for love. With each click of a profile, there is a glimmer of hope. “I want to fall in love with that person…”. 

So without further ado, allow me to introduce The Soul Sampler: an ultra-compact, multi-touch audio love machine, giving you exclusive access to 15 real-life dating profiles. Not only that, it creates that atmosphere for love with a set of programmable beats, basslines, keys and effects for your remixing pleasure. 

The video below, made by my dear friend Tom, shows the making of The Soul Sampler (rrp: £2,999) and a schematic of it’s workings are presented after:

A climate art exhibition, visible from space. Perhaps extraterrestrials will see it and help us out, we sure could use it. 

An nice afternoon at Handmade & Bound, an independent fair with affordable, handmade artists’ books, comics and zines.

Playing with plasticine is a good way to spend an afternoon. When I was young, my dad would sometimes bring home a video camera he borrowed from work. I would set up a mini-studio and do stop-start animation with plasticine. It was amazing. Having a little reminisce, I made this with friends Tom and Will in the park one afternoon.

We also made this video that same day.