Movie-watching for slightly obsessive people

By Britta Gustafson

Many years ago, I spent hours after school reading The Easter Egg Archive, a compilation of hidden details (“easter eggs”) in movies and software, placed by the creators as in-jokes for their friends and other people who pay close attention. OK, there wasn’t a whole lot else on the Web back then, or maybe I just didn’t know how to find anything else. But now, there are lots and lots of websites about obsessive movie and TV details, and many of them are more exciting than finding out that you can play pinball in an ancient version of Word.
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Scans of old things people have tried to forget

By Britta Gustafson

I really like going to antique stores (aka junk shops) to poke around and learn about weird old stuff that people used to actually make and buy and put in their houses — strange toys, obscure books, odd-shaped mugs, etc. It makes new items in Kmart seem a little dull, like that any interesting parts have been streamlined out by now. This is silly because 40 years from now, people will probably look at a fashionable lamp from 2008 and giggle. Good collections of old pictures serve as a similar kind of entertaining American history lesson.
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There’s more to paper than little cranes

By Britta Gustafson

Today’s topic is… paper art! A few months ago, a friend and I put together instructions for making a fancy paper icosahedron and that got me interested in paper art in general. It applies endless amounts of skill and creativity to something mundane, and the results are often geometric in a nice handmade way.
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A few reworkings of bits of metal and plastic

By Britta Gustafson

Here are a few ways that people have misused computer hardware for the purposes of entertainment. I like projects where people play around with boring components, make something new out of them, and show off the results. The following examples consist of pairs of repurposed hard drives, artsy keyboards, and edible circuit boards. (more…)

Where the rainbow gets complicated

By Britta Gustafson

On Monday I talked about different kinds of insect art: creepy-crawly and odd but good. Today I have a bunch of links about a few aspects of color vision that I think are cool: How many colors can people see and distinguish between? What happens if you have eyes that see colors differently from normal? What alternate ways are there to think about color? (more…)

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