opit

So the ideal social network (from an investor’s point of view) is one that presents itself as being free-to-use, is highly addictive, uses you as bait to trap your friends, tracks you everywhere you go on the internet, sells your personal information to the highest bidder, and is impossible to opt out of.

Sounds like a cross between your friendly neighbourhood heroin pusher, Amway, and a really creepy stalker, doesn’t it?

Essentially, this kind of “hacking” is all about trying to make the best of:

— something that is handed to you without your necessarily asking for it,

— and designed by someone else for someone else’s benefit.

But electric kilns have the reputation of producing mediocre work and it certainly can be easily done. Here’s how: First choose a commercial glaze because it looks nice in their literature or on their test tiles. Now don’t get me wrong — there are some very attractive commercial glazes out there. There are also some terrible ones. But that is not my point here. My point is that with a commercial glaze you don’t know what to do when something changes or goes wrong.

Suppose, for example, you change clay bodies and the glaze you are using crazes on the new body (or even worse, shivers). What do you do? You don’t know the composition so you have no idea how you might modify the glaze to fix the problem without changing its aesthetics.

you’ll soon find yourself on the other side of the mysterious time portal, enclosed in a concrete stairwell and surrounded by original Nazi-era signage bearing strange phrases like “Männer Abort”.

“It means Men’s Toilet,” explains Dominic, our affable, jocular guide, in near-perfect English. “The Nazis were not keen on using the French word toilette, nor the Anglo-American word WC, for obvious reasons. There was no German word, aside from Scheisse-Haus, which would have been too long to put on the walls. So they dug up this strange, archaic word, Abort”.