i was initially considering buying a makeup table for the bathroom, and i still might, but i first need to look at getting a mirror over the sink, with some lights. i'm going to have to screw it over a window, so it's a little awkward. i was going to buy a $40 light fixture with four 100 watt replaceable bulbs, then turn it into a plug-in lamp by connecting it to a lamp cord i can plug into the wall, which would cost an extra $25. then, i'd need to buy a $50ish mirror.

it turns out that there's currently a lot of mirrors on the market that essentially do this for you in one step, but they're in an extremely disappointing state, at the moment. first, if i'm going to buy a mirror with built in lights, i need to be able to screw the bulbs in and out and that is instantly going to tripe or quadruple the price. it makes essentially no sense to spend $100 on a disposable mirror with lights, but the alternative is spending $300 on the same thing in order to get screw in lights. second, while essentially all of these mirrors have an operating system installed in them that allows for touch functions in the mirror, the only thing these programmable mirrors can do is turn the lights up and down, which is trivial and useless. a programmable smart mirror should allow the user to zoom in and out like they can on their phone, and to alter the brightness of the reflected image in real time, like you would in a basic photo editing software. i have yet to find anything like that; what i've found are $1000 mirrors that show you the weather in the form of a windows vista gadget and are probably connected directly to cia data centres as intelligence gathering tools (what a perfect surveillance tool, eh?), or that let you stream netflix in the background, like we needed another kind of fucking tv. instead, you have to buy smaller mirrors with built in magnifying levels (2x, 3x, 10x, 20x) on different screens, and no zoom functionality. if you want to zoom in to 5.5x and then out to 3x and then into 10x, on the fly in real time, you're at best needing to find an app for your phone or ipad instead of a smart mirror, but the truth is that such a thing doesn't seem to exist at all.

a smart mirror should be a smart mirror! the future ought to be in smart mirrors with stub versions of android installed in the mirror that allow it to act as a smarter mirror with usable smart mirror functionality, but we're not there yet.

so, i don't know what i'm going to do, yet.