I had a habit of nicking his clothes – I wore his suit jacket as a coat and his threadbare checked shirt as nightclothes. I felt great in them, like a chip off the old block

I loved Dad’s old suede jacket. He’d had it for as long as I could remember, an artefact from his more rock’n’roll days, and it had been worn into buttery softness. When the lining finally disintegrated, and the suede thinned to imminent oblivion, he decided to retire it. But I couldn’t bear to see it go.

I tried it on and felt great – like a chip off the old block. It wasn’t at all heavy and the softness extended to the buttons that were covered in matching suede material. Sure, it had a patina of London grime and smelled of Old Holborn tobacco, but I thought it was cool. I was about 13 and couldn’t afford to buy a suede jacket in a million years, so I claimed it as my own, and set about bringing it back to life, like the singing mending mice in Bagpuss.

Double Fine’s latest is a whimsical action-adventure that takes inspiration from real-life biology as much as cult fantasy movies from the 1980s

Keeper is staking a bold claim to be the oddest game ever published by Microsoft. The setting is weird: an iridescent, far-future imagining of New England where organic and non-organic matter mingle in strange, alchemical ways. And the characters are undeniably quirky: one is a bird called Twig whose beak is made from driftwood. Strangest of all: you play as a lighthouse that has inexplicably become animate, sprouting tiny, spindly little legs to carry its wibbling, wobbling body.

In the sea of action-hero young men and, to a lesser degree, women, the lighthouse stands out as an unlikely star. Creative lead Lee Petty is a little fuzzy on the details of how it came to be. Rather, he talks about the creation of the protagonist as he does the broader action-adventure experience: as if it rose out of his subconscious. Despite the ostensible absurdity, Petty believes there is a certain intuition about it. “You have a light, and light has a very strong connection with life,” he says. “You can imagine the verbs for the player, and the actions, puzzles, mechanics that fall out of that.”

At its best, the internet can be a space where people share stories and ideas. But the line between inspiration and theft can easily become blurred

Last month, I wrote an article about being adopted by a British couple during the era of China’s one-child policy. Three days after the story ran in a national newspaper, my phone buzzed with a flurry of messages from a friend who had sent me a TikTok post by an influencer telling her life story to camera. Twenty seconds into her video, my jaw plummeted. She had recited entire sections of my article, word for word, to her 20,000 followers. She didn’t even have the courtesy to give me a credit.

When I wrote that piece, the idea of exposing personal details of my life to scrutiny or criticism was terrifying. Even so, it felt right to share this story in the hope that others might find comfort if they too had had similar experiences. What I wasn’t expecting was for someone to take my words and claim them as their own.

The best modern formulations reflect light, mattify shine and give skin a smooth finish

I am rabidly defensive of face powder. “Powder is ageing” is one of those enduring beauty cliches that’s not necessarily true – especially now, when powders are often talc-free, softly blurring in finish, and frequently contain moisturising ingredients.

Powder is essential in keeping wet formulations such as foundation on your face, and if the appearance of skin ageing bothers you, then the right pressed powder is your ally.

Localised rises in temperature caused by land clearance cause 28,330 heat-related deaths a year, researchers find

Deforestation has killed more than half a million people in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related illness, a study has found.

Land clearance is raising the temperature in the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because it reduces shade, diminishes rainfall and increases the risk of fire, the authors of the paper found.