I got a box of air in the mail yesterday.

Well, not really, but close. I used some online coupon to order some of the forthcoming Movie Transformers figures and apparently most of the Western Hemisphere did at the same time, since I got a weird confirmation email earlier in the week stating “CONGRATULATIONS, YOUR ORDER HAS BEEN SHIPPED”

Below that, under “Items not Shipped” was a list of every single thing I had ordered, begging the question of how an order for products can ship, without the products being shipped themselves. Cut to yesterday, when I got a box in the mail just a bit small to be one, let alone a handful of Deluxes, and opened it to find:

1. One packing list
2. Some of that those plastic pillow things for padding
3. The two “freebie” sigil magnets the stuff was supposed to come with.

The question won’t stop nagging me- Why not just an envelope? Two flat fridge magnets and a packing slip aren’t exactly fragile goods, not big enough by far to justify a carboard box and air-cushioning.

I think someone in that mailroom must be oddly diabolical, or worse still, the company itself hires exclusively psy-ops specialists who know how to create nagging hiccups, ingenious in their simplicity. TO HASBRO, YOU ARE THE TOYS.

Okay, I’m done stealing Shortpacked!’s material. I got a pretty substantial amount of Guardian spriting done at work today, enough to make a mock screenshot or two and come up with a probably over-ambitious menu screen design. Trying to settle on a finished resolution so the sprite look less HUGE as they do at 320×240, so probably something just shy of 640×480 is in order. I think I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve on how to both cut corners and make nicer backgrounds at the same time.