you’re probably ready to hate this company that designs irish pubs abroad, but reconsider
The Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has designed upwards of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the globe
maya.land
Personal website. Webby personsite. Amateur hour round the clock.
Latest posts
fairytale Czech hotel in the mountains
Built in 1899 by the Czech architect Dušan Jurkovič, known as “the poet of timber” for his woodwork, the cottage and hotel are a lively combination of Czech-Slavic heritage and the Art Nouveau style of the time. The fairy tale-esque dining room, in particular, features Art Nouveau chandeliers and frescoes decorated with motifs from local legends. Constructed during a time of strong Austrian and…
talmudology: yes, there are stupid questions
If a baby pigeon is found within 50 cubits of a coop, it is presumed to belong to the owner of that coop. If it is found further away than 50 cubits, it belongs to the finder. Ever keen to push the limits of rabbinic law, Rabbi Yirmiyah asked “if one foot of the pigeon is within the fifty cubits and one foot is outside, to whom does it belong?” This apparently was one question too many. The rabbis…
robert hand, thoughtful about astrology
I’d provide readings in various aspects of medieval astrology. And I’d probably wind up with readings in various modern systems as well. For instance, although I’m not specifically a Jungian astrologer, I think that reading Jung is a very valuable thing to do, because he’s one of the few moderns who thinks like an occultist. So, you can see how that style of reasoning is applied in a modern…
read charles mills on tolkien and race
(the proper DOI link)
scientifica: mono bitmap font tiny-style
I have been pondering what use I could make of a typeface designed to emulate the little pixel text used on tiny, tiny displays or icons. This one kind of looks good enough to use as a code daily driver?? (Don’t quote me, haven’t tested that out yet.)
an internet of dogs (geocities)
On the memorial page to my dog Heloïse that it’s intentional you can’t find from the top level of my website, the MIDI the gramophone plays – rollicking! piano! badly charted if we’re being honest at least as far as the rhythm goes! – is the song I sang to her when she was sick. The page features pixel kitsch that goes far beyond what you see on Lialina’s archives for its being self-conscious and…
it was annoying to refind the text of jenny holzer’s truisms
I walk by a Holzer installation as part of my commute, sometimes stop, pick a maxim for the day. It’s not so different from pulling a Tarot card or finding a line in a reading – except I’m lying, it is, sometimes I find myself irritated by the ideologies I can read there.
nihilism re: attention difficulties
The suspicion that all this is élite anxiety in the face of a democratizing mediascape deepens when you consider what the attentionistas want people to focus on. Generally, it’s fine art, old books, or untrammelled nature—as if they were running a Connecticut boarding school. Above all, they demand patience, the inclination to stick with things that aren’t immediately compelling or comprehensible.…
annie mueller on rituals
Rituals? I can’t stop myself. They’re so good. Absolutely breathtaking. Humanity’s finest work, perhaps. They make no sense. It’s all about beauty, about made-up meaning, about art. Rituals add unnecessary, arbitrary extra requirements to a simple action. Light a candle first. Kneel. Wear a certain outfit. Carry flowers. Make this shape with your hands. Take off your hat, or put it on. Not that…
graphic design for all the in-world advertised brands in mario kart
I think I’ve pointed to Elliott before. This video does itself to the point of absurdity. (Watching it, I found myself pretty sick of heavyweight fonts, somehow, but the graphic elements were largely far better than I’d’ve expected)
optimalism (parody)
This is all done by a Quirky Personal Site Haver (really: don’t miss the main site!) but this subsite is more pointed at a lot of content you’ve surely come across before:
teach the history of history to defend it
In short, science classes pair a description of our best knowledge at the present with a story of discovery of how we came to know what we know now, with the clear implication that this method is how we will continue to discover new things.
better via worse (easy phone tweaks)
If you make your phone interface more annoying to navigate, you use it less.
comment culture: it’s worse than that, even
16 years of commenting has made me zero friends. That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it…
mailchimp has secret rss
As an example, I recently wanted to subscribe to the RawTools newsletter. When I went to their newsletter subscription page, I noticed that their URL looked like this: https://rawtools.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e If you can find a URL from a Mailchimp email campaign in a format like this, you can usually use it to get its respective RSS feed. There are…
idle game: teashop
I’ve pointed to Jillian’s website indirectly before, but go and enjoy this idle game! It’s short, sweet, features cute pixel art, and there’s a neat “night” mechanic where automations turn off.
take the three-question wason test, then come back
There are four cards, a simple rule, and all you’ve got to do is to work out which cards you need to turn over to see if the rule has been broken. That’s got to be easy, right? Well maybe, but the Wason Selection Task, as it is called, is one of the most oft repeated tests of logical reasoning in the world of experimental psychology.
everything is burning (literally)
One of the first material scientists I spoke to about making things that last for thousands of years offered a compelling insight: “Everything is burning, just at different rates.” What he means is that what we perceive as aging is actually oxidisation, like rusting. When we imagine materials that may last for thousands of years, most people think of stone or precious metals like gold – because…
hadn’t read borges’ poetry, already in love with a line from the preface
Poetry is no less a mystery than anything else on earth. One or two felicitous lines can hardly stir our vanity, since they are but gifts of Chance or of the Spirit; only the mistakes belong to us. I hope the reader will discover something worthy of his memory in these pages. In this world of ours beauty is quite common.
I am really tempted by math academy
This is a review of a manifesto associated with a learning program.
animal crossing letter generator sparking typeface epiphanies
The styles that defined Sailor Moon personal shrines and Cardcaptor Sakura LJ icon edits and so forth reached me before Animal Crossing (I was dropped out of college before meeting the latter) and are probably most formative in my sense of what letterforms are unpresuming-appealing, cute-appealing, etc. But I think when it comes to roundedness in letters that’s all AC!
the US auto industry didn’t collapse, just the Detroit one
I don’t know how much we ought to trust this source but I’d definitely believed the included myths without any sources at all, so this may be of interest to others.
bill my books to the CIA
The ILC developed a database of tens of thousands of dissidents living in the Eastern Bloc and carefully targeted the books it sent. Paris became a critical hub where travelers could load up; the Librairie Polonaise, a venerable Polish bookshop, let visitors take several volumes for free on their way home. Its manager sent a bill to the CIA, which by the mid-1980s was covering half of the store’s…
maternal devotion in the velvet spider
Female velvet spiders exhibit a remarkable type of maternal care unique among arachnids. Upon the birth of her brood, the mother spider liquefies her internal organs and regurgitates this material as food. Once her capability to liquefy her insides is exhausted, the young sense this and consume the mother.