I mean, think about it. Why do all doctors, nurses, anesthetists, surgeons, dentists, and whoever else always give away lollipops? Usually just to children, but not all the time. Now that I think about it, I've actually gotten quite a few of them far after the point I should have been considered "too old for it."
I think they're all stricken with a mental condition. It draws them to the medical field and gives them an unsatisfiable thirst for suckers. It's the only explanation.
See, they really eat most of the suckers themselves. But they need an excuse to have them around, so they give them away.
This reminds me of a funny conversation that occurred a year or two ago. It went like this:
My brother Andy: "What's all this stuff doing on my floor?! Candy?! Where'd it come from?"
Me: "Well, you know what P.T. Barnum said: 'There's a sucker born every minute.' This odds are pretty good one would have eventually ended up on your floor."
It brings up an interesting point, though. If P.T. Barnum was such a genius, why did he believe in something as ludicrous as spontaneous generation? I guess it just goes to show that one of the requirements to being a genius is being crazy.
Obviously, then, I must be moving rapidly along the road to geniushood myself.
Geniuses also do a lot of inventing, and I guess I've got that covered. I have a decent amount of mechanical and electrical knowledge, which I picked up from growing up around Andy.
Still, most of the things I construct are laughably simple.
But this is why they're cool.
Last year (as in late 2006), I needed something weird for a White Elephant gift exchange. I was looking through some random junk I have, and I found an automatic pencil with a spring stuck in the end, where the eraser should have been. I think I had just been messing around with stuff, but it may have had some purpose originally. Anyway, I found out that it could launch stuff pretty well. I started with some new pencils and made them able to shoot nails, just by adding a spring to the inside of it. You'd pull off the back (what you would do to put more leads in it and such), pull the eraser out of it, and stick a nail in (I clipped of the points, and anyway it fired head-first). You could fire it just by pulling the nail back really hard. It shot really well, and still works as a pencil. I don't know what happened to mine, but Seth still has one.
Anyhow, today I decided to make another one. For this one I used a pen, and it works a little differently. Instead of firing nails, it fires rolled up strips of aluminum (taken from the back ends of regular pencils). I think it fires just as well as the first ones. Well, maybe not quite as well, but still pretty nicely. It doesn't work as a pen, either, but that's just because it's out of ink.
Here's a picture of the pen:
If you unscrew the top, you'll see the spring inside:
Here's the things it shoots:
Now, here's a video demonstration. I took it with my camera, which yes, is seriously broken, but does technically work still. I had a problem with background noise (people screaming, etc.), and the only way I could cut it out was by replacing the audio with something else, so I went with this calming OCR Super Mario Bros. mix. And yes, it really was that big of a problem.
Did you miss it? Probably. Well, it basically bounced of the wall, went over my head, and landed on the floor.
Anyway, here's how it's fired, basically:
And that's about it. Later (possibly even today) I may borrow Seth's pen so you can see that one, too. I'll probably also be working on some new stuff.
"See how the animations are so fluid? That's because we did a lot of live motion capture. We actually put some of our friends in hockey suits and kicked them down staircases."
--Raigan Burns, regarding the XBLA version of N+
:::Source= Paul M-unit 19.91 MKII
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