Back in the early-to-mid-90's one of my favorite cartoons for a while was the Care Bears. It was actually the 80's cartoon rerun on the Disney Channel. The series where they formally declared Cheer Bear was a girl by giving her a ponytail and made Grumpy Bear the IT/maintenance guy of Care-A-Lot. What I liked about the series as all the Care-themed technology. Communicators and cars shaped like clouds with heart-shaped buttons and rainbows for antenna and supports. It was as if there was an subset of magical technology, and I used to try to imagine what sort of stuff you could build out of clouds, hearts, and rainbows.

Before that, back before I owned a Nintendo and more so when I finally got one, but had watched people play it at Wal-Mart and seen various episodes of the Super Mario Brothers cartoons, I used to dream about...and there wasn't a term for it then...a sandbox game where you could build cars and forts out of the pipes, koopa shells, blocks, etc. from the Mario games. A game where you could design your own Koopa ship, like the Koopa Kids had in SMB3.

Cartoonish technological clades like those have always intrigued me. I love looking at Jack Kirby's art, because it has such a distinct look to it, so much so that I can almost imagine how it's supposed to work. The black spots, jagged paths, and terminating circles almost feel like a distinct kind of technology. My favorite aspect of the Kids Next Door show and the Fusion Fall game was the Two-by-four Technology. The list goes on.

A couple of years ago, khamon and I went to Atlanta for a Second Life meetup. While we were there, I cajoled him into letting me go by the LEGO store, where you could fill a bucket with parts. While there, I bought a short bucket of 2x2 bricks of the pink and purple variety. It took me a while to have any use for these bricks, so they stayed in the container until late last year when I brought them to work, where I was building a small collection of LEGO, BTR, K'nex bricks, and LEGO-like toys.

As I said, they're all 2x2 bricks, so I mostly use them for filler pieces when I'm bulding something. This means that my rolling blaster canon and super-cycle have the odd pink or purple piece mixed in them. As such, my imagination began to fill in a sort of back story, fueled by love of thematic, fictional technology.

/>Somewhere out there in the universe, there's a galactic company known as PrinsTech. Business-wise they fall somewhere between Apple Computers and Gulfstream Jets. PrinsTech builds technology for princesses, and not just any princesses, but the super-royal ones. Princesses whose kingdoms cover entire planets, multiple colonies, and even extend beyond the barriers of one universe. PrinsTech is the company who builds magic mirrors, pumpkin coaches, pink unicorns, etc. Their proprietary technologies, designed and patented by Farley Godmodder, is top of the line, over-technology that spawned the phrase, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is a trademark of PrinsTech Industries."

Every once in a while, though, these kingdoms get overthrown, princesses go into hiding with their families, and their castles get pillaged. This means that in some rare cases, PrinsTech items can be found on the black market. In rarer cases, these black marketed items will fall into the hands of mad scientists. And while Farley Godmodder's technology is so advanced that completely reverse engineering a lot of it is impossible, it's partially possible.

Some of the bigger items, like the Infinite Chest, can be broken down. You can pull out the power source, which is powerful and compact enough to power a small point singularity cannon. You can wire a magic mirror into a traditional computer network and have it act as the majordomo. And what items can't be broken down, are still useful by themselves.

The PrinsTech Royal Planner, for example, is best described as a Rolodex, Facebook, Wikipedia, Page Six, Kindle mashup. There's actually only one Royal Planner, which exists within a star. The Royal Planners that princesses use are terminals tied into that, and are constantly updated with the latest royal gossip, contact information, political affiliates, etc. When one falls into the hands of any analyst, that analyst never lets go. This is why counter-intelligence photos often show men in business suits or combat fatigues staring into bright, pink hearts. The Royal Planner's technology is so proprietary, the comm channels so secure, that any time any one has tried to figure out how it works, the terminal loses its connection.

When a rebel army or mad scientist gets their hands on anything PrinsTech, it's rare for them to try and take it apart. The ones smart and bold enough to successfully do it, in fact, proudly display such baubles as pink hearts or crystalline flowers on the giant robot behemoths as badges of honor to their PrinsTech piratical prowess.

"Let those in the path of my mechanowarbot tremble at its might, for within it lies the power of a thousand Pretty Precious Ponies!"

I say all this, because I've been thinking, I really need to play around with Squeak again.