Things

Spoonflower fabric gorgeousness

In Things on 20 May 2010 with no comments

While I’ve known about Spoon­flower’s fab­ric print­ing ser­vice for a while, I’ve never used it because I’ve never felt like I had any ideas worth print­ing. But until this week, the real bene­fit of it had never really sunk into my head– you can buy other people’s designs, too. And why wouldn’t you, when they are as beau­ti­ful as those by tro­is­mi­ettes?

Admit­tedly, the reason you wouldn’t, and the reason I haven’t so far is because I just gave all of my money to the won­der­ful Fab­ric­shoppe, but this will be my next pur­chase, along­side some of Heidi Kenney’s fruit and veg. See­ing as I fell in love with the Paper­chase Food Friends range just that second too late to actu­ally buy any, that fab­ric is the next best thing.

Window tax

In Things, language on 13 February 2010 with Comments Off

To be filed under “things I didn’t know about that I prob­ably should’ve and that answer so many ques­tions: win­dow tax.

From wiki­pe­dia:

Prop­er­ties with between ten and twenty win­dows paid a total of four shil­lings, and those above twenty win­dows paid eight shil­lings.  The num­ber of win­dows that incurred tax was changed to seven in 1766 and eight in 1825. The flat-rate tax was changed to a vari­able rate, depend­ent on the prop­erty value, in 1778. People who were ineligible for church or poor rates, for reas­ons of poverty, were exempt from the win­dow tax.  Win­dow tax was rel­at­ively unin­trus­ive and easy to assess. The big­ger the house, the more win­dows it was likely to have, and the more tax the occu­pants would pay. Nev­er­the­less, the tax was unpop­u­lar, because it was seen by some as a tax on “light and air”.

The tax was imposed in Scot­land in the 1780s, instantly explain­ing (almost) all of the build­ings in Edin­burgh with bricked-up windows.

Addi­tion­ally, the tax is con­sidered to be a pos­sible ori­gin of the phrase “day­light rob­bery”, though this remains unproven.

Bed Head After-Party

In Design, Odd, Things on 28 January 2009 tagged Design, hair, packaging with Comments Off

I have a pack­aging thing. I love pack­aging design. This comes in espe­cially handy to pass time when doing some­thing I really don’t love, like hav­ing my hair cut. All that sit­ting still and not fid­get­ing and mak­ing small talk about Christ­mas (come on, people, it was a month ago. Try harder.) and hav­ing to sit in front of a mir­ror for an age when, for the most part, I’m vam­piric about mirrors.

A big chunk of hairdresser income comes from selling over­priced hair product, and over­priced hair product gen­er­ally has bril­liant pack­aging in order to make people like me buy some over­priced hair product they won’t use but will gaze at lov­ingly.  Depend­ing on the tar­get mar­ket,  pack­aging ranges from classy to fun to, err… this:

… oh come on, it’s not just me, is it? Is it?

Sadistics

In Things on 19 December 2008 tagged statistics, university, xkcd with Comments Off

With apo­lo­gies to XKCD…

As of this even­ing, the semester is over. I’ve never wanted any­thing more in my life.

Right now, I’m not convinced you can have any…

In Things, Websites on 3 December 2008 tagged graphjam, uni with Comments Off

Wall-e screenplay

In Things, Websites on 25 November 2008 tagged film, link, screenplay, wall-e with Comments Off

I’m not much of a film fan, mostly because they require a con­cen­tra­tion span of longer than six seconds. But, hav­ing just watched Wall-e for the second time yes­ter­day, I can con­fid­ently declare it to be my favour­ite film. Yep, it even beats Dot and the Kangaroo.

Should you not yet have the Wall-e DVD, which was released yes­ter­day in the UK and which I’m not lend­ing you because my need to stroke the cover and giggle is greater than any need you may have, you can make do with read­ing the screen­play.