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But wait, there's more.

There's just no polite way to say "Buy me things", is there?

Join codebastards, I dare you. Remember, codebastards are us.

I'm baded and jitter. So are these people. (And why not follow the previous, next, or random links?)

Need a band name?

Doug vs. Japanese Snack Foods: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2003-06-13 (11:55)
In which our plucky young hero bounces right up the wall.

This is what passed for fun, back then.

Mind you, I think that superballs are great. They bounce like mad and offer excellent weapon potential and everything is better when it's got super- as a prefix. (Supereverything, in fact, is superbestest of all.) But this "fact sheet" just reminds me that back in the 50s and 60s, you couldn't have any fun at all without the side dish of sales pitch from the technocrat overlords. You are having fun, little boy, only because SCIENCE!!! MAKES!!! FUNNER!!!

Thanks to this document you know that thing you're playing with is not just a superball. It's made of ZECTRON, a "recently discovered compound". ("Yeah, I went out for some milk and bread, and on the way I tripped over this crazy compound!") Compressed with 50,000 pounds of pressure, ZECTRON starts to defy the laws of physics. Its "extremely high" coefficient of friction gives it weird behaviours. All we need is a transporter malfunction and suddenly we're trapped in bad Star Trek Voyager fan fiction.

Most disappointing of all is the disclaimer: "If ball is thrown violently or bounced excessively on rough surfaces, BALL WILL BREAK." I mean, what is the point of the damned thing then? The whole superball deal, the unbreakable contract, is that you whip the thing around and try to bean your best friend! You might as well go around a parking lot and put stickers on every vehicle saying "If car is driven on highway, YOU COULD BE DECAPITATED." Apparently ZECTRON isn't quite exotic enough yet. Would 60,000 pounds of pressure help?

That's not to say that it's all bad, mind you. The superball does still perform as promised (as long as you don't bounce it excessively) and it's cheap. And you just know that if it had been created in the early 90s, nobody would know about it and nobody would care.

Until they relabelled it.

Even a ZECTRON-fueled fun-destroying disclaimer is better than every damn kid in the world hurling Official Harry Potter Quidditch Golden Snitches[tm] at your head.

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