When I was a kid there was a funky, late-70's mall in downtown PDX called "The Galleria", in a converted department store.
The Galleria had an equally funky logo that I always liked as a kid — but also always made me feel a little weird.
The logo reminded me of other visuals surrounding my childhood, like the 7-Up signs at the corner store, or the "Pinball Number Count" sequence on Sesame Street (one-two-three four five!)
Eventually The Galleria closed, and later it became a Target, and the logo was history.
One day, fairly recently, I was talking to my parents about this lost logo and how it made me feel. And my dad goes down to the basement, brings this piece of paper up, and hands it to me.
Yeah. Turns out, my parents designed The Galleria logo.
Let's take a quick moment to appreciate the "eraser tool" in this "source file".
Then: this year, they began remodeling The Galleria AGAIN, as the headquarters for a local architecture firm. I was reading the news and there was an image.
And what's did I see on the wall behind the reception desk render?
Look closely. Everything old is new again.
(Epigloue: after switching from Rubylith and Letraset, to a Tektronix puck-based mainframe I loved as a kid, to a Macintosh, my folks still do design after all these years. There's a few hours left in a Kickstarter for a Portland puzzle they're making: kickstarter.com/projects/nance… )
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The snacks have piled up! The Frito-Lay strike has ended! So, forgive me: I'm gonna destroy your feed this Sunday with all #new products I've found this year. Go!
• Pillsbury Soft Baked Cookies 🤨*
• KitKat Thins 😀
• Hawaiian Kettle Way Out Wasabi 🙂
*they're kinda gritty
• Pop Chips Grain-Free Cajun Heat 😁
• Pop Chips Corn Chips Perfectly Salted 😕
• Tim's Cascade Special Batch Cajun 🙂
• Poppables Southwest Ranch 🙂 #new
• First, COVID. Masks weren't needed if vaccinated. Three of us are very lucky to be, but Violet is too young so she kept her mask on and we masked indoors with her. Seeing nearly zero masks freaked me out big time! Soon, it felt 100% normal? 😵💫
• It's an AMAZING time to go with very little waiting. Why?
✅ Reservations only. No walk-ups.
✅ No FastPass. Just smooth-flowing standby lines. 😍
✅ Virtual queues for the biggest rides. Easily got "in line" at 7AM.
✅ No APs, limited capacity.
I hope some of this stays.
• This was my first time on Rise of the Resistance. I was going in spoiler-free (at great effort which was worth it), so I'll just say as a dark ride fan I was a physical electric vibration the whole ride. Imagineering at their peak.
A moment of appreciation for some peak 90’s industrial design.
First, the LJN VideoArt. The angled, dockable controller is so good. The plastic slider to select your color is so good. The blue cord is so good. The system itself not so good. But great work, designers.
Second, and this is maybe as good as it gets: the View-Master Interactive Vision, which overlaid on your VCR and even downloaded rudimentary games from VHS tapes.
What can I say. It’s a work of art that belongs in a 90’s museum. The controller alone. My god.
The dots actually serve a purpose: they have vent slits in them to passively cool the insides. And that green square is the power button — just slide it down.
Friends… have we solved a theme park mystery? Do we now know What Happened To Rosita?
Ok, let me back up.
In Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, José drops this infamous line, and it has haunted me, and many others, forever.
Let's be honest. This "joke" makes no sense. After naming a bunch of fancy birds, José blurts out "I wonder what happened to Rosita?"
I often wondered if learning the meaning of the joke would make me cringe (a bit like José's accent). It didn't add up. It was clearly SOMETHING.
Imagineering answered the question in their own way by expanding the Tiki Room into the new "Tangaroa Terrace". Besides being a wonderful place to eat a Bao (the perfect theme park food), it added a new outdoor animatronic: Rosita!
Also, trivia: these two logos are similar… because Fry's was a spin-off of Fry's!
"The [original] store billed itself as 'The One-Stop Shop for the Silicon Valley Professional', as one could buy both electronics and groceries (computer chips and potato chips) at the same time."