The big secret has been revealed…

As I said in one of my previous posts, Presenting…, there was a thing I really wanted to write about but couldn’t, lest I spoiled a surprise.

The clues you were given (and their meanings) are:

– 12… the year 2012, a couple of years back I had decided to boycott Christmas (from now only c-word) and I do New Years presents instead so I don’t spoil the festive season for my flatmates
– coffee… refers to mugs, the presents were mugs, this was inspired by the move to the new flat, and the need for mugs (the need was resolved when we finished the move and now we are flooded with mugs)
– McGonagall… poems, the mugs are all decorated with illustrated poems referring to the shenanigans, strange obsessions and perversions of their owners
– baked goods… the mugs with their poems and pictures have been baked in the oven and are now also dishwasher friendly, or so they say!

Here are the pictures of them (with poems transcribed and explained) which I took using my brand new iPhone app Photosynth, they are not great but they are a strange sort of panorama, if you ask me. Maybe I’ll take better ones later.

“Oh Dave!” (A very common sigh when it comes to Dave, we were even considering rewording the famous Beatles song Hey Jude to Oh Dave, it worked fantastically) the most splendid of nights (Refers at the same time to Dave’s ICON role playing costume and his ability to misspell just about anything)
we all sigh often, in frustration.
Maybe video gaming (Recent episode of Dave’s hermitting period with his Star Wars game) and tights (Again, ICON and Dave’s “tunic” that didn’t quite cover his butt)
lead to premature dave-ulation. (Term adopted into our vocabulary after several incidents of  Dave counting his chickens before they’d hatched,… or didn’t hatch.)

Hide your socks, (Refers ro Claire’s and Philipp’s sock-stealing shenanigans) onions and fondue pot (onions and cheese, the deadly gas combination for Claire)
till zombies attack! (Coz shit happens…)
For  Claire, whether you need it or not,
uses biological weapons. (Again the gas, I couldn’t help but drawing a dart next to the gun in reference to Despicable Me’s dartgun/fartgun confusion, also we do call Claire dartgun!)

A ginger girl with a broken tail??? (Helle suffers from being ginger, also she recently broke her tailbone and had to walk around with a bum bagel!)
Sounds like a cruel joke yet it’s true! (It is!!!)
Helle likes her veg with a bit of snail. (She is vegetarian but curiously enough occasionally eats snails.)
An eye for an eye, a shoe for a shoe. (There’s an old deal that she has to throw out one of her gigillion pairs of shoes if she wants to get a new one.)

My personal favourite:
Felipe! Don’t give up on meat (Refers to Philipp’s vegetarian spells, the last one of which lasted a few months!)
for hummus,  broccoli and mango. (The famous hummus and broccoli incident where Philipp food poisoned himself)
For sausage is the truest treat
for a man who likes to fango. (Refers to a dubious sexual practice of Philipp and Benji’s called fango, its indescribable, undrawable, most likely involves a sausage or two, has many stages and involves Philipp bending over and Benji standing behind him.)

 

He stalks around in a wookie suit (Referring to Benji’s jewy hairiness)
and hot air comes out of his pores, (…and how he’s always warm, emitting heat)
for the big lump of hair on his head (The jewfro, duh!)
Benji sometimes walks into doors. (The Slovakian door incident, when Benji jumped into a revolving glass door and almost broke his schnoz.)

Whiski’s one, and possibly better photos, to come in the next few days so keep checking!!!

The QR…

I am now a self-employed architect / artist in the cruel world of recession, I have finally registered with the HM Revenue Office and am waiting for them to get back to me with a cool taxpayer’s number.

As such I need a cool way of advertising my stuff and I was thinking of ordering a stamp with a logo of my very own. Originally I wanted a stamp for things that I have crafted myself but then a friend Benji gave me a lightbulb and I decided to make it a more global one.
We then spent a day researching QR codes and photoshopping my kitten Whiski into one.

The result:

Why do I think this is absolutely amazing?
Today everyone (but me) walks around with smartphones. If QR codes are not that omnipresent yet it’s only a matter of time. Already most people can read them if they know that that’s what they are supposed to do.
The code itself is very generic. Without a reader, its just a bunch of black and white pixels, four + squares and nothing else but I find the design very attractive. Achromatic, random but not random at all. It can go unnoticed or stand out depending on how you use it.
With the reader it turns into a very unique code that stores specific information. It can lead you to a website, provide contact information, events, texts, etc.

You might wonder why a kitten would be a good logo for an architect, well, it’s not… but unless you know Whiski in person, the picture is just a generic cat… Kat McNabb maybe?
I don’t have a good enough justification but I think it secretly adds a personal touch to an otherwise unspecific barcode. Something to identify it by even without a reader, if you know where to look…

Now I think I need to create one with more information, one I will be perfectly happy using years from now…

Maybe like this one: