Light form
We’ve talked about flashlight people, and now we will talk about the flashlight. There is truly a flashlight for every season, but in another, more accurate sense, most people just need one flashlight.
I keep a big chungus flashlight in my drawer in case the power goes out and I need a lantern. For the rest of the time, there’s the Lumintop FWAA, which I bought after discovering flashlight people and figuring out what flashlight people like.
I use the FWAA about every day. During the summer, I am using it mostly in order to find ripened produce in the thicket of tomato & pepper leaves that have turned my backyard into a feral jungle. During the winter, I’m using it to light my way home down dark streets, to do home repair, to find lost objects someone dropped. I have lived with the thing.
While I am not a flashlight person, and I have flatly zero aspirations to ever become one, the FWAA was designed by flashlight people specifically for other flashlight people, and so there are a few things about it that are aggravating and baffling. The rest gives me pause about what it means to be a flashlight in a way that is worth some text.
Form & function
First, the size. The FWAA is effectively a perfect size for a flashlight. It is exactly hand sized, such that you can hold it in your palm, rather than pinched between your fingers. The barrel looks great, is smooth in the right spots, is ridged in the right spots. The clip works and never gives. It’s the sort of durable, waterproof object that you can get into a real relationship with, where you can feel excited that you have the opportunity to use it. Oh, it’s too dark under my fridge? Flashlight!, you think. You begin to get excited that you have this tool, this little superpower, a sort of earthbound x-ray vision. This is probably how flashlight people are made.
Flashlight people come to care about the light and little else. How much light does it give off? What temperature is the light? What can you make the light do? I don’t care about most of this. It is nice that you can set the flashlight into a secret sort of mode that allows it to turn on only when you’ve got the button held down. But the FWAA contains an entire operating system that I have not bothered to explore, and have no real desire to. Its “simplified” mode is too simple; its regular mode is a web of confusion.
Ultimately, I want a couple of useful modes, and I want the actual ritualistic experience of using the flashlight to be pleasurable. The FWAA feels deeply pleasurable, but almost by accident. The button is a delight to click. The object feels amazing to hold. It can stand up vertically without falling; due to its clip, it won’t roll off a table. It looks sleek, unlike many flashlights that succumb to “tactical” aesthetics or other over-the-top ruggedizations. One does not need these for most applications. You do not need tactical objects if you raise 2.3 kids in the suburbs, or if you make a quarter-mil working remote for a tech company.
The battery
The battery exists to marshal as much light as humanly possible and scream it into the world. And so with the FWAA, its battery looks like a regular AA, but is in fact some sort of baffling special-case thing, one which you must buy from a specialty store and get shipped ground, because it has federal regulations around it, and it might catch fire if you look at it funny. This is the Happy Fun Ball of batteries. It requires its own storage apparatus. It requires its own charger. If I touch it the wrong way, I will set myself on fire and die. None of this is documented anywhere, and you will probably find yourself buying a couple of batteries that don’t work in this thing, and at least one charger that fails to charge the battery that does work in this thing.
If the FWAA had a USB-C port, this would not be a problem. But that might make it a great deal bigger? And besides, Lumintop is probably (and correctly) assuming that most FWAA customers already have their own battery-charging setups, multiple flashlights, and hence do not care about opening the whole flashlight to charge a battery every so often. So now you are stuck with Happy Fun Ball, and we’d appreciate it if you did not look directly at it, for it may cause retina damage.
The trade
Lumintop have effectively hacked every impulse that I have to not recommend this thing. The software works well enough that I can ignore all of the complexity. The battery works well enough that I can create a routine to successfully charge it.
And my gosh, it is just a wonder to hold, and to use, and to work with and relate to every day. We’ve touched on this idea before in text, with the camera that I spent too much money on. The goal is to find pleasure in use, and if you can settle into a deep focus on that, the user will forgive rough edges or other strong opinionations. What happens, then, if the rough edges get sanded down in future versions?