jeweled platypus

 

saturday, august 26, 2006
Real frogs and turtles for a day

I went to the Academy of Sciences today because I like natural history museums. This one is much more kid-friendly than the Santa Barbara one, making it somewhat less Britta-friendly, but I liked it anyway. There were lots of interesting little creatures on display.

pretty poison

My favorite animals are the ones I remember from playing Amazon Trail II. I somehow learned a lot from that game, both while “exploring the rainforest” and “fishing” — I’m sure I could still identify pixelly macaws, termites, coral snakes, howler monkeys, taro root, etc. I learned the silhouettes of dozens of small and giant fishes as I caught them for my food. And now, I like this frog not only because it looks awesome, but because it was part of a mini-game inside an old CD-ROM I played until it got too scratched to work.

cute and wrinkly

I like turtles because they’re easy to make out of clay. But looking at real ones makes me realize that my little handmade ones are very stylized, and quite lame compared to these guys. This long-necked one was amazingly cute, as was the pancake turtle next door. My picture doesn’t capture its sweet wrinkles and joints and hands, or how it darts around with this head inches away from its body, poking in and out of leaves and gravel.

comments (2)
monday, august 21, 2006
When your boyfriend is an engineer

The other day, I came back from lunch and there was a note on my desk:

danger helvetica

Mysterious.

Update 8/21/06 01:12. And because every blog needs more mirror pictures:

me in san francisco

comments (9)
wednesday, august 09, 2006
This would be better with pictures

Many of my favorite foods run the spectrum from deep purplish red to almost black: jamaica, chicha morada, red bean buns, bing cherries, plums, blackberries, dried figs. These colors are most often associated with red wine, but somehow that doesn’t make my list of favorite foods. Neither do beets, for that matter.

I decided to like purple in middle school, enough to choose a lavender backpack that I hated a few weeks later and painted dark blue. I chose muddy burgundies and maroons (look familiar?) as favorite colors during high school. Now I work in a building full of dark purple, just enough so you know at any moment that this is corporate identity — in a good way. Max doesn’t really see the color purple, which I find endlessly interesting.

There is a book about mauve that I need to read.

comments (2)
thursday, august 03, 2006
Things noticed in San Francisco

on the bus

“Do not smoke, eat, drink, litter, or disturb other Muni passengers.”

on a bus stop ad

Gravity affects liquid differently in this ad.

in the garden of a shop

I think that Buddha is wearing Mardi Gras beads.

on the pavement

These curb street names are neat but sometimes a bit off.

comments (2)
*

I’m Britta Gustafson.


Popular posts

Fold a paper icosahedron

My handmade map of California

How the internet feels like a city

Blade Runner in San Francisco

Learning to see telephone poles

How UCSB joined ARPAnet

What is a book?


a little pixelly man, upside-down