The Cockeyed Cat

So, around a week ago I ordered the Invisible Shield for my new 5-hours-used PSP slim.  At first this seemed like a good idea; I owned one of the cheesy Darth Vader ones for a while until smashing it, LCD-first, into. . . . Er, I don’t remember, but it has something to do with veal parmesan and heavy bathroom doors and sudden urges to knock doors open with my shoulders/feet like a sensible person.

Anyway.  It arrived early this afternoon, in an inconspicuously beautiful red/black/yellow/puke a damn hideous conflation of paper, tape, plastic, and tangible evil.  I would have thrown it away or something, but the evil wasn’t tangible enough for me to sense.  It looked simple; I just peel the protector off the paper, spray its poisonous adhesive side with liquid poison activator like a tongueless man using a post stamp, and apply it like so, except for the part where there are 5 pieces of the stamp, and all of them are 0.22 mm wide and shaped like a moose, and stuck to each others’ double-sided adhesive, and you have to fit them all together exactly or the sick robot overlords who instituted this policy will kick your cat, raid your fridge, and take all your overpriced electronics away, ’cause you’re going to work in the plutonium mines on chiron beta prime. Or something like that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  So I opened the box, and I read the instructions, and I took out the pieces of the protector, and I get out the bottle of poison activator, and pour it on my lap.  It turns out that it is both the activator of the poisonous adhesive and poisonous in itself, or maybe I’m just a wimp, because it made awful rashes not unlike the aftermath of smallpox mixed with a thousand killer space bee stings and hives.  Bad hives, mind you.

But I would soldier on.  According to the intertubes from googol, water is the active ingredient in poisonous poison activator, and so the poison is all filler, and so I had nothing to fear unless I’m afraid of inactive ingredients. Those words can be misleading, but that’s a story for another time.  So I refilled the bottle, and I figured out that it has a cap and I wasn’t supposed to be able to pour it.  To cut a moderately long story down to a readable length, the process of actually putting on the invisible shield is as follows:

1. Set the piece of flimsy (like an overhead slide) plastic protector in your hand, sticky-side-up.

2. Detach your fingers from it.

3. Repeat #2 a few times until you work your way out of it, like ditching a sticky booger.

4. Fumble for the sprayer thing, since you misplaced it in your blind, genetically-bound booger flicking rage.  Once you do that, use exactly the right amount of whatever’s inside to lube up the sticker.

5. QUICK!  You have 30 seconds to put it on like a huge, invisible, double-sided sticker before it sticks in place.

6. Do that and make sure there aren’t any air bubbles.

7. Uh, oh.  (A/an) (air bubble/piece of hair/bit of water/speck of dust/spore of tangible evil) made it under there and you didn’t squeegee it out in time.  Peel it off and repeat from step 1.

8. There is no step 8.  Repeat steps 1-7 until you kill yourself or come to an uneasy truce with the bit of evil underneath your plastic, until your perfectionist psychosis bubbles to the surface when someone comments on it in college and you go on a shooting rampage/spiritual journey/trip to a psychologist.  The piece of evil wriggles free and travels back to the invisible shield factory to begin the cycle again.

I’m in the “uneasy truce” stage, but I’m not sure if it’s evil or dust or an air bubble and don’t know if it matters.  Anyone have advice on this?

Weird.  I woke up at 11:00 today and immediately proceeded to sneeze once every ten seconds for around an hour.  Of course, this meant that nothing at all got done (yes, there’s important stuff to do from 11:00 AM-12:00 PM) during that time, and one hour and seven pill-swallowing attempts later, everyone  was already gone off on their strange lunch-themed mission.

This’d be bad, except that I also discovered Jonathon Coulton’s awesome website. Awesome because it has links to buy all of his awesome music; I found the site looking for the author (it’s him) of the awesome song, Still Alive, from the free (with audiosurf demo) Orange Box soundtrack.  It’s awesome geek rock, and all of it can be gotten in FLAC/mp3 format on his site for $1 apiece or cheaper in bulk, or for free through torrents (though he’s supposedly still at the “mooch off friends/beg on street corners” stage of music-songwriting as a profession, so that should make you kind of guilty).

Oh, also: Anyone know if the phat PSP batteries from Dealextreme are decent (that is, nonexplosive)?  I bought one to install CFW, then just hardmodded my own battery during the eight weeks of shipping time.  It’d be nice to have a space 1800 mAh battery which already works with time machine, but something about the $10.50 price tag and many non-brand-specific testimonials on gameFAQs makes me suspicious.

Yeah.  True story.    Now that this post’s title is covered, I have bigger, stranger news: I’m apparently going to fold 1000 paper cranes.  No, I don’t know why; that’ll come later.  Right now they’re all going in a corner of my bedroom.

I guess I’ll post a crappy, cell-phone picture of said area whenever I decide to update for my one or zero readers.  Hopefully this post isn’t the only one if you’re checking the site in 2xxx or whatever year you imagine when you hear “the future” . . .  Look at me, still talking when the- <AARON WAS SHOT FOR HALF-ASSED PORTAL REFERENCE>