Madness In My Method

This is exactly why I haven't gotten involved with Minecraft.

Much.

Provided that I don't lose it first.

I have a file full of receipts. Not just any receipts, but big purchases. And by big I mean anything that I would place under the category of furniture. Or computers.

Or lamps.
And alarm clocks.
and my electric razor (and the trimmer as well).
... and my cast iron gum ball machine.

Basically anything that came with a warranty and/or a manual. (Including my Progressive steamer basket)
I have a receipt for when I framed my Howling II movie poster, the Future Kill movie poster (with H.R. Giger art), and the M.C. Escher The Eye print. You know. Back in June of '94.

So the point of this post is that I'm cleaning out the receipt file.
No. Not that kind of cleaning; are you INSANE*?
I'm moving the 1/2 page sized or smaller receipts and manuals to another section of my file drawer because it's full going sideways and not full going length-wise.

*Yes. I was born this mad. Yes, you are still reading me. :)

I would just like to note that my bed, purchased on 4/11/98, still has 4 years left on its 15yr warranty.

I just thought that this completely trivial fact about nothing that I for some reason found funny/cool/weird/worthless enough to share with the rest of you who still believe me to somehow be sane simply had to posted.

I have stuck in my head as an ending to this madhouse of a post a likewise mad woman (Moira Brown from Fallout 3) quipping in her high-pitched overly-happy voice, "Happy Hunting!" This of course has absolutely nothing to do with the receipts in my drawer what-so-ever, unless you count the time I spend looking through the actual booklets and marveling at my own madness method for receipt retention.

EDIT: Because I had to: I still have the instructions for using the Sophist-O-Twist, which look like are these.

This was Tut as of last night and after adding two more colors to him.

Six Colors - Top
Six Colors - Bottom

I think the people that made this put Tut together and then took a snapshot of it to be the cover art that I have to go by for piecing it together. Certain colors are so similar that they are practically indistinguishable in the given sample.

Six Colors - Detail (Sorry it's blurry)

But, all of the major colors that originally had to be divided up into four Tupperware containers for each shape have been added and now fill one container each, minus some areas here and there that I may have missed. I also gave up on the individual pixels and went back after filling in more colors to deal with those tiny things. Speaking of colors, the row at the bottom of this next pic is pretty much done - next p are all of the pretty colors in the second row that I filled in this morning.

Colors

The outline of Tut has been completed.

Outline 1
Outline 2
Outline 3

However, I can't help but think that the cover image lied, and that I am actually creating a pixelated Mona Lisa with a really full set of lips.

The tips of my fingers a so sore and I haven't even put the official first pixel piece on the Tut puzzle yet.

All of the pieces, aside from a few colors that I only have 1 stick each of, have been cut and twisted off of their sticks and are now stored in mini Tupperware containers. Most of them were yanked off while wanking off to the third Presidential debate. The left over sticks were used as trackers for how many guffs both candidates made.

Last night killed my fingers though while putting the connectors onto the four peg boards. Luckily I didn't loose a nail in the process, but I received a couple of scratches while trying to force the suckers into place.

I guess everything is set for the fun part to begin. I have the box full of divided pixels, all 10,400+ of them. I have the cover page that serves as the model. I have the pegboards all set.

This is going to be fun.

Tut Defined - in case you missed it

material: Ministeck
(One site noted that this toy was quite popular in the 1970-1980's, and another person's comment on Flickr was "IT CAME BACK!")

Each ~5" color "stick" (see pics here) holds 42 pieces of this 10,400-piece pixelated puzzle (128x160 pixels). This particular puzzle comes with 258 total sticks in 23 different colors. The pieces have to be separated from the plastic bars that they came on. The pieces are square, rectangular, or l-shaped and represent anywhere from 1 to 4 pixels of space. Each pixel of the puzzle is just under .5 square cm in size (read: exceptionally tiny). They get placed on plastic peg boards (for lack of a better description) until the whole image is filled in.

This is a cross between a jigsaw and a lite-brite/Lego/blocks/Tetris fill-in-the-space game. In fact, many people use the very thin Legos to create similar pixelated images, but the first one I ever came across was this Ministeck puzzle, so that's what I'm sticking with.

Here's a great step-by-step Ministeck of the Gauss bill being created.

EDIT: There is great temptation to use the PicToBrick program to find the correct Ministeck dimensions for creating a Zero Wing mosaic. After all, it's pre-pixelated.

Pixel Pieces of Doom!