Russian Sledges

1890s Egyptian Revival Watch Fob, Gilt Brass, Purple Crystal, 3.75” Drop, $265

9.75 USD

nani IRO Itsura Textile Jun Kan by Naomi Ito for Kokka

55% linen, 45% cotton

Medium weight canvas with very subtle metallic printing in parts.

1/2 metre (50cm x 110cm wide : 19" x 43" wide)

A full pattern repeat is approximately 100cm. If you would like the whole pattern please order 1 full metre.

For continuous yardage please change the quantity at the checkout.

Parcels are shipped via small packet international airmail from Japan.

Japan Post does not provide tracking numbers for small packet airmail.

A shipping upgrade with a tracking number and insurance can be purchased
for an additional $5. If you would like to upgrade to registered small packet airmail
please let me know.

Thank you very much.

All images © by Naomi Ito from ATELIER to nani IRO & KOKKA co.,ltd

Boston is my natural constituency. You’ve got a lot of overeducated, underemployed people drinking good cocktails. Those people are always fun to talk to.

For hotel guests, Wi-Fi is no longer a luxury like infinity pools, designer toiletries, or complimentary dry cleaning. Business travelers increasingly consider it a necessity, just as important as bottled water. A Hotels.com survey found that hotel guests would overwhelmingly choose free Wi-Fi over any other in-room amenity.

But not all hotels have caught on. Only 64% of hotels worldwide now offer Wi-Fi for free, according to the travel website HotelChatter’s 2013 Wi-Fi report.

And an expensive room in a fancy hotel won’t assure you the perk. In fact, some international chains are offering free Wi-Fi in their cheaper brands, but not their pricier digs. Hilton’s lower-end Garden Inn, as well as its extended stay hotels, offer free Wi-Fi to all guests; as does Starwood’s youth-focused Aloft brand, and the business-travel oriented Courtyard by Marriott. Ace Hotels, Quality Inn, and La Quinta offer it for free.

Those chains have realized Wi-Fi is a necessity for the business traveler or plugged-in millennial served by these cheaper brands, explains Donna Quadri-Felitti, an associate professor at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management. “It’s based on who their segment is,” she tells Quartz. “Courtyard is a brand for the business traveler. Aloft is a select service that focuses on the millennial customer.”

But many of the higher end brands—even within the same companies—are still holding out, and offering free Wi-Fi only to loyalty club members. Intercontinental Hotels Group offers free Wi-Fi to all loyalty club members. And club members at Hyatt, Hilton, and Starwood Hotels get to surf the web for free if they have gold or platinum status.

Marriott recently announced it is offering free basic Wi-Fi at the company’s eight luxury brand hotels, including the JW Marriott, Gaylord Hotels, and the Ritz-Carlton—but only for members of Marriott’s loyalty program, and users still have to pay around $5 to $7 for access to higher-speed internet that works for streaming video (Gold and Platinum loyalty members get it free). (Some have dismissed the move as a PR stunt following the company’s recent $60,000 fine for blocking guests’ Wi-Fi hotspots, but John Wolf, a spokesman for Marriott, tells Quartz that the move was simply a response to customer requests.)

It might seem perverse to refuse customers the free perk they most seek, but there’s actually a pretty simple explanation for it: Luxury hotels charge for Wi-Fi because they can. Those who are traveling for business can expense the $20 daily Wi-Fi fee, or if they’re paying for their own $500 room, $20 extra for Wi-Fi probably won’t break the bank. Budget travelers, on the other hand, are more price-sensitive. And unlike budget airlines that strip down the amenities to bare bones for a cheaper ticket prices, hotels in this sector have found that the promise of free Wi-Fi helps them compete with other hotels.

Of course, nothing is really “free”—the cost of the Wi-Fi is either bundled into the room price or offered a la carte. Wi-Fi can be an expensive proposition for hotels. With more and more users using the internet to share photos and stream video, the consumption of bandwidth adds up, said Quadri-Felitti. Installing the infrastructure for Wi-Fi for a hotel can also be expensive, said Jeremy Rock, founder of the RockIT Group, a company that provides technology services to the hospitality industry: A single cable could cost from $150 to $300, and each floor would need around 10 to 30 cables, he said.

Be that as it may, the tide seems to be turning against the idea of Wi-Fi as “optional.” Like budget hotels, ritzier establishments may well find it’s in their competitive interest to let the internet flow as freely as the complimentary shampoo.

Zeus, the cosmic owl with a galaxy in its eyes.

This adorable Screech Owl is blind and likely has vitreous strands in his eyes causing this stellar effect. He now lives safely in captivity at the Wildlife Learning Center in Los Angeles.

“If you haven’t read any of Pierce’s books, stop reading this article and immediately go get the first book set in the medieval fantasy world of Tortall, “Alanna: The First Adventure.” Imagine Game of Thrones, but if there were several different series set in Westeros and they all had amazing female protagonists, including two lady knights, a WOC demigod who can speak with animals, a spy master, and a slum cop. Oh, and she wrote them ten years before Westeros was even a glimmer in GRRM’s eye.”

- Tamora Pierce On The Reason Her Brilliant Books Haven’t Been Brought To The Screen (Yet) | The Mary Sue | tamorapierce

Uber CEO (seemingly in both senses) Travis Kalanick now says his fellow executive's suggestion that Uber might oppo research and try to smear a critical female journalist was a "terrible" idea. Yes, I would say that is probably right.

Separate from the details of this incident, it's been quite a while since I've seen what is by any measure an amazingly successful startup manage to generate this much negative publicity based fairly narrowly on the behavior of its top executives.

Read More →

digitalnz-dpla:

GIF IT UP entry from the Othmeralia Othmer LIbrary in Philadelphia, PA. Source material courtesy the Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth. The Othmeralia Othmer Library writes:

Our library’s Tumblr blog is called Othmeralia (http://othmeralia.tumblr.com/ ). To celebrate the 100th anniversary of World War One we along with other great Philadelphia based organizations are participating in a project called Home Before the Leaves Fall (http://www.wwionline.org/). These gifs which were created using WWI enlistment and propaganda posters hit on the themes of WWI and animals. One thing we know at Othmeralia is that our followers love animal gifs as much as they do the history of chemistry!

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 License.

gabbysilang:

Emily Blunt and Cate Blanchett, photographed by Peter Lindbergh for IWC Schaffhausen, 2014.

yoooo why is zhou xun chopped out of these?

whoa whoa whoa what the fuck! Y’all literally chopped the woman of color out of this? Fuck y’all.

The violent disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college in Guerrero state has caused a political earthquake the likes of which Mexico has not seen in generations — perhaps even since the revolution of 1910.

David Blankenhorn, reply by Edmund White

To the Editors:

In his review of recent books on the campaign for marriage equality, Edmund Wilson makes misleading statements about my testimony in California’s Prop 8 case. First, he writes that my testimony “lost steam when he had to admit that his degree from Warwick University was granted not for his study of marriage or families, but of nineteenth-century cabinetmakers.” That’s an odd way to put it! I never stated or tried to pretend otherwise, and my academic career (such as it was) was part of the court and public record from the beginning.

bedlamsbard:

The difference between learning a modern language and an ancient language is that in first year French you learn “Where is the bathroom?” and “How do I get to the train station?” and in first year Attic Greek or Latin you learn “I have judged you worthy of death” and “The tyrant had everyone in the city killed.”

Twitter cleverly applies #Gamergate rhetoric to literature

Sometimes I see code like this:

if {
    …stuff…
} else {
    …other stuff…
}

That’s pretty much a-okay with me.

Pretty much. Until I want to comment-out the else block. There’s no way to do a line-wise selection and hit cmd-/ (when it works) and comment out just the else block.

Update 3:15 pm: Dan McTough reminds me that there is a way to do this. My objection is that it’s more difficult and requires more paying-attention. It’s easier to go to the start of a block and select to the end — it requires almost no thought.

Also: many people like } else { on the ground that it makes it easier to notice the else. Okay.

An anonymous reader writes Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph. That's well over twice as fast as the fastest U.S. train can manage, and that only manages 240kph on small sections of its route. The Japanese Shinkansen is now running over 7 times times as fast as the average U.S. express passenger train. 500kph is moving towards the average speed of an airliner. Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

@SomeChrisTweets via thisisnthappiness.com

megan-is-a-doll:

Hwaaaaaa

BUN BUNS. 

Yes, I needed this today.

palaeoplushies:

Another one of those books I couldn’t leave behind. Here we have “A History of the Earth and Animated Nature Volume II” by Oliver Goldsmith, published by Blackie and Son, 1853. This one has been re-bound and sadly there was no matching Volume I, which must’ve included mammals.

design-is-fine:

Koloman Moser, desk and armchair, 1903. Vienna, Austria. Via V&A

This desk with its disappearing chair was based on earlier models, like early 19th century French desks in the Empire style or German ones in the solid and homely Biedermeier style.The chair was usually attached and released by mechanical means. In this example Moser decided that a large brass handle inserted into the back of the chair would perform the task equally well. V&A

storyoftheviper:

Concerning “Functions of the Brain.”
from
William James - Principles of Psychology, pub. 1890

ooksaidthelibrarian:

n29_w1150 (by BioDivLibrary)

Look how cute they are!! There are swatches of the fabrics on the envelope. Check them out online here.  Right now we only have black and white + different sizes and laces, but if all goes according to plan, we’ll have a whole range of colors plus the supplies outside of the kits! Woohoo! Remember to specify your wire size at checkout. There’s a chart provided on the item page to help you choose.

Here is the large white kit made into a Marlborough:

They have everything you need except the pattern. Which kit is your favorite?