bombshell or weekend project

For those crafty-natured souls out there, Messy Nessy Chic is really throwing down the gauntlet with the catalogue of Pin-Up Houses that she features. These gorgeous tiny homes (with an even tinier footprint), gazebos and sheds from designer Joshua Woodsman can be assembled in a few hours and starting for just over a thousand dollars. Even plenty of step-by-step blue-prints are on offer for inspiration. Are you up for the challenge?

amphigorey

In the lead up to Halloween (all the more fraught with terrors should we consider the state it’s in without help from the infernal), TYWKIWDBI serves us a ghastly collection of black-humoured wit from Edward Gorey (more on the writer and illustrator here, here and here). Most—if not all of the panels, are highly unsettling: one, an abecedarium, documents (going through the alphabet in order) precocious children meeting their fates in twisted and atrocious ways, and two an appreciation of Gorey’s equally dark limericks. Visit the blog for more unfortunate mayhem, if you dare.

katzenklo

I really appreciated these DIY litter box beautification projects from the always marvellous Nag on the Lake.
I think people sometimes get frustrated with their cats and dismiss them as unhouse-breakable because, not appreciate of their pets’ sensibilities and comfort level. Litter boxes can be hideous looking things that humans may not necessarily want in their living rooms—although these are pretty spiffy, and instead hide them somewhere—usually the laundry room and then wonder why their cat can’t go in that place with the scary, rumbling jabberwocky. As a bonus, here is songwriter Helge Schneider performing “cat toilet.” Ja, das macht die Katze froh!

canting arms

Mental Floss presents an interesting assortment of emblems and symbols on national and territorial flags that tells the lore behind the scampering marten of Croatia, the Phrygian cap (hat on a stick) motif that represented manumission from slavery, and made me think of the aurochs, an extinct wild bull of Europe that’s on many coats-of-arms. I did not know, however, why Bermuda has, seemingly inauspiciously, a shipwreck on their flag and how that near-disaster inspired Shakespeare to pen to The Tempest—and nor did I realise that for its side bar of five intricately woven carpets representing the five chief tribes, the flag of Turkmenistan is considered the most vexillogically complex banner in the world.

all-terrain

This amphibious caravan from the German company Sealander really caught our attention. Not only is it a sleek and stylish trailer to be pulled on a hitch with a complete camping kitchen, bedding and storage, but when the opportunity presents itself, converts to a personal yacht with an outboard motor to punt around a lake. We’ve stayed a quite a few campsites where such a flexible arrangement would have been ideal.  Check out the links above for more details and a full demonstration.

beautifish

From the creator of Sad Dog Diary, Ze Frank (pronounced Zay) takes us to the magical undersea kingdom of the Angler Fish. Watch the whole fascinating nature narration at the link here.

grapheme or no tofu

“Tofu” refers to the frustration that can come up in correspondence when the message—instead of reaching the recipient as intended is rendered as random ASCII characters or blank boxes (or emojis that emote something entirely different) and what prompted the UK’s assault on punctuation in street signage.
We get it often with the umlaut and it nearly raises in me a moral conundrum that I can’t use our proper address, the right sort of quotation marks, etc. as those characters aren’t allowed. In order to virtually eliminate this problem, an internet giant has partnered with the largest type foundry to create a universal font (Noto—it’s called for “no tofu”) that supports over three-hundred thousand unique glyphs, ten times larger than the nearest thing that historians and linguists have presently to a universal typeface. Even as interest drives the underlying architecture to realise the gaps in our orthographic families, without a font that’s visible across different platforms and systems, there’s still no way to portray it and work in that language—like the warnings one sometimes sees, though more rarely, that this article contains Berber or Babylonian script which all browsers may not display. Noto hopes to deliver a font-kingdom that’s not only functional but also capable of coexisting with other scripts and layouts. Of course, what can in the end be typed—no matter how obscure and esoteric, can also be indexed in a search engine and be made more accessible.