Pericula

This thing you see to your left is the miraculous Japanese invention: the pericula: tiny stickers of you and your friends that you decorate on a computer. This particular one is decorated by yours truly yesterday at a goodbye lunch with my 3 best teacher-friends from school. In every video arcade or mall there is an area of pericula machines. The machine is a large rectangle with 2 booths: one large one in which you pose and take your pictures, and one smaller one, where you decorate the photos on the computer. There are usually different booths with different themes. The booth's theme this photo was made in was "pretty pink". There are a daunting number of options when making pericula. You can have the booth take your photo from below, above, or straight ahead. You can pick background curtains that drop down behind you, and choose whether you want the photos to appear as cutouts or plain; ash, sepia, contrast, or normal, etc. It takes about 6-8 photos of you. Then comes the really hard part: decorating. You just want to cry with all the options they give you, and the worst part is that you only have 3 minutes with a clicking countdown clock to decorate each of your 8 photos. You have an electric pen and about 7 menus. Each menu contains different themes in different categories. Example, a frames themes, with different frames you can put around the photo, contains another menu with backgrounds so you can change the background design, or overlay designs, or insert shapes behind the photo. Another category is writing, with billions of different styles and colors. you can write yourself or write with their cute pre-designed alphabets, kanji, or kata. you can insert entire pre-written cute sentences and phrases. You can pick from different designs that flow out of your pen in chains on the photo, like sparkles or bubbles. You can pick many different pictures likes you see in the above photo and just insert them randomly. Plus you can change the size and color options on almost everything. Yes, thoroughly daunting. Don't get me wrong, it's super-duper fun! As good as karaoke? No way. But second best.

I've always got the feeling that no matter how many I make, I will never discover all the secrets of the Pericula.