Work | Why 'Ye olde shoppe' is wrong. Sort of.

So, you just opened a shop selling the usual combination of distressed pottery, unbalanced fantasy swords, and badly painted plastic knights. What better name than 'Ye olde shoppe'? After all, in pre-1066 times in Britain, people surely said, 'Darling, I'm just off the ye shop.' Wrong! Well, first of all, they would have said deorling instead of 'darling,' but this post isn't about Old English, but about the y in 'ye olde somethinge.'

Play | Creating a 19th century daguerreotype photograph

In this post I will give a short introduction to daguerreotype photography and show how I recreated that characteristic look to produce this totally smashing 'daguerreotype' of me:

Work | Selected quotes from historical emigrant letters

When you search through approximately 5,000 historical letters from Irish emigrants for linguistic features you are bound to stumble upon some interesting quotes. In fact, I keep a separate document where I save anything worthwhile. This is actually one of the reasons I started this blog. I am really looking for spelling variation which reveals phonological features of Irish English, but these are the experiences and thoughts of real people and, even though some historical works have been written based on some of these letters, I wanted to share some of their jokes, observations, and heart aches with you.

Play | Iron Throne

Today, winter is coming once again! (That means a new season of Game of Thrones for those of you who live under rocks.) Which is perfect timing to show a making-of of something I created featuring yours truly on the Iron Throne. As I made it last winter, I couldn't quite remember all the steps, so this is less detailed than other design posts I've done but shows the main bits of work.