Imagine that

Not too long ago I discovered two photo apps on the Play Store: Glitch Lab and Mirror Lab. They’re both photo-editing tools, but unlike other apps that help you enhance your photos, these two let you distort them and make some amazingly cool designs. Even using the free versions the sky’s the limit.

What’s really cool about them is you can play with anything. Take a simple piece of aluminum foil and crinkle it up and take a picture. Open it in one of the apps and you’re on your way. It doesn’t matter what your original photo is, color or black, flash on or off, you can turn them into wild abstracts, or if you’re really good, into something else altogether.

With the exception of a backgammon game that’s sort of fun (even though I’m fairly certain it cheats) and a Sudoku game that I got rid of because it punishes you by making you watch an ad when you make a wrong move so I spent more times watching ads than solving the puzzle, I’ve never been able to find a game for my phone or tablet that kept me interested, but I do enjoy these. You can use them as a time waster, or let them challenge your creativity. If you try either one of them I’d hope you’d come back here and leave me a link so I can look at what you made.

These two pictures aren’t really kaleidoscopes, but they’re kind of kaleidoscopic maybe?

Slightly off topic, but for what it’s worth, I once had a really nice telescope, but everywhere I brought it, and trust me, I brought it a lot of places, regardless of how I carried it or held it or moved it or transported it, the darn thing kept bumping into stuff. Turns out I had a collideascope.