frandroid

From the height of our 20th floor apartment, in spite of the new condo tower they're building right in front of me, I can see the CN Tower when I lean to my left. If you didn't know, the CN tower has changed its lighting: instead of projectors on the ground beaming white light on it, it is now covered with a ton of LEDs.

What would have been a sensible thing to do would have been to use the LEDs just to replace the ground lighting with white LEDs and save a lot of electricity. Instead, they installed a programmable, multicoloured matrix that allows for complex lighting. Now, this would be interesting if:
1) LED lights were available in an interesting palette of colours, and
2) these guys knew what they were doing.

Of course, LED technology is still limited, and you get these weird, cold colours. If you have paid any attention to the new LED christmas lighting, esp. side by side with the traditional incandescent technology, you will have noticed that LED lighting, while potentially brighter, is also much colder. Some people like this, but I find it atrocious. White LEDs are actually kinda grey, and the blue LEDs remind me of cold metal, which is not something I associate with the holiday season (except for "yes, sticking your tongue on the freezing shovel is a good idea!"). I mean, I love the 90% energy consumption decrease, and have replaced my own "festive" lightbulbs with LEDs. But they are somewhat lacking anyway.

So, they stuck probably a million LEDs or something on the CN Tower, and what do they do with them? Most of the time, the tower is a pink shade of red. It makes the tower look like a space outpost on Star Trek: TNG on an episode where the SFX team was having its Christmas party and they let the interns take care of the work. I mean, the CN Tower already looks like spacecraft, but this lighting makes matters worse. It looks like a giant popsicle. Now, do you want your city's nightscape to be dominated by a giant popsicle? The SkydomeRogers Centre has already started being illuminated by an awful set of colours, but that building is hidden from me by another apartment tower, so it doesn't irritate me as often as the CN Tower does.

So, that was the situation so far. But as I bid F good night on the stroke of midnight, I actually looked outside, and the tower was throbbing with red and green light. It was spectacularly ugly. It looked like a sea anemone, but anemones actually look good: this was nasty. The light show came back on around 1am, so I guess it happens every hour. I wish it was some sort of ride at the CNE or something, and that it would go next week. But we're stuck with this thing now. Check it out, tell me that you aren't stunned...