What I Learned from the Super Blood Moon

This morning at the unsocial hour of 3:47 am, the Sun, Earth and Moon were arranged in perfection alignment.  The Sun’s rays, distorted and coloured by the Earth’s atmosphere, beamed upon the Moon – itself orbiting close to Earth as the Autumn Equinox approaches – and turned it a glowing red.  This is a fairly rare astronomical happenstance – it last happened in 1982 and won’t happen again until 2048. It’s called the Super Blood Moon.

I hauled myself up at half three in the morning to have a look at it, and I’m glad I did.  Here’s three lessons I learned from seeing the Super Blood Moon:

Getting out of bed is always a good thing.

Actually, I’ve suspected this one for a while and based my writing schedule around it.  If I didn’t have to sleep I wouldn’t – you don’t even realise when you’re asleep that you are asleep.  So there’s very little to take from it besides the obvious physical and mental recharge.  As soon as you’re awake you can appreciate the sleep you’ve had – or, in this morning’s case, didn’t have.  Which is endlessly preferable to not being able to appreciate either.

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Steampunk Record Player: A Modelling Project

Earlier this year I decided to steampunk-ify my trusty record player.  I’d been considering it for a while – ever since I modded a couple of Nerf Guns back in my university days.  Records are pretty old school; it would only make sense to play them on a Victorianate turntable.  Eventually I bit the bullet and dug out my modelling saw.  Here’s how I built my Steampunk Record Player…

The Brief

I knew I could achieve a steampunk look simply by dismantling the record player and painting it brassy colours, but I wanted to add something to the player whilst modding it – I wanted to add some functionality.  For example, when I modded my Nerf Maverick, I added power to its firing mechanism and built in a shoulder chain for ease of use.  I decided to add a speaker to my record player, so that I wouldn’t have to keep thieving my girlfriend’s Logitechs whenever I wanted to play an LP.  Once I’d settled on this idea, it didn’t me long to decide to model the speaker on an old gramophone horn.

Topleft: Nerf Maverick. Bottom left: Nerf Jolt. Right: dismantled Maverick
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