a pale slim ghost

is Kara Brightwell

weeknotes #8: real things

by Kara Brightwell

i went bouldering

first time in six months; second time since march, twenty-twenty.

everything hurts.

that was sunday.

i uh. i did a v4 grade? which was surprising. there's a large hole in one of my climbing shoes and i bought some replacements, except there are two types of climbing shoes:

  • cute ones
  • ones that fit

and, fuck everything

i made a synthesiser, for my dad

well okay so i made one in december for him for christmas. it was built on stripboard in an altoids tin, and looked like this:

a prototype synth in an altoids tin

it's somewhere in a Hermes depot, or a ditch.

so i started again (this is your strength)

i designed a circuit board for the thing:

three-dee render of a pale slim ghost synthesisers parakeets

and got it printed by a company in Shenzhen. because it turns out you can just, do that. and it's just a bit of soldering, and troubleshooting, and working out the headphone amp you added never would have worked because of something something capacitance something phase inversion. and now it looks like this, which is a real thing, that i made, i can design and make real things:

a real thing

designed and hand built in Nunhead and Greenwich