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Need eye drops? There’s an unnecessarily complicated machine for that!

Preston Phro Aug 28, 2013
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So let’s say you spend all day staring at a screen–computer screen, TV screen, smartphone screen, Death Star targeting screen. It doesn’t really matter what screen, since they all emit a lot of blue light–which can be hard on your eyes. So, you want to protect your vision, but what do you do? You should get some eye drops!

Unfortunately, as you probably know, getting the eye drops from the bottle into your eyeballs is one of the most difficult tasks in the world. Almost as difficult as getting Comiket attendees to bathe. But have no fear! Omocoro, the Photoshop wizards, are here to save the day with a Pythagorean device!

Pythagorean devices, also called Rube Golderberg machines, are essentially unnecessarily intricate machines designed to do simple tasks, like dropping a safe on a pesky mouse.

The devices are also an integral part of the long-running NHK (like a Japanese version of PBS) TV show PythagoraSwitch. At the end of each show, a Pythagorean device is set off as the theme song plays. The end result of the machine is to display a name card or otherwise spell out the name of the show. Here’s a short compilation video of some of the program’s title sequences.

Which bring us back to Yoppy, our beloved Photoshop master with sore eyes.

DAY 1!

After a few failed attempts at getting the eye drops inside his face, Yoppy had had enough and decided that it was time to make an eye-drop-inserting machine.

▼ Like trying to put smoke in a choke hold.

▼ Yoppy, moments after realizing there’s a fortune to be made in eye-drop-applying machines, and seconds before realizing he knows nothing about making machines.

Though Yoppy may have struck gold, he wasn’t sure how to implement his idea. That meant it was time to get some help! Calling on a maker friend name “mansooon,” Yoppy hoped to exploit…umm…request the engineer’s expertise.

▼ “Please help!” Yoppy begged. “Sure. Whatever,” mansooon quickly replied.
Yoppy then wondered what to do with the chloroform he brought just in case.

▼ If mansooon’s skills are in doubt, here’s an example of one contraption he’s built.
It’s a robot karaage-kun for a robot restaurant. No word on how delicious it is.

With mansooon’s assistance enlisted, Yoppy got to work on his machine! While the engineer was busy putting together the final stage of the contraption–the all-important bottle-squeezer–Yoppy was assembling the larger pieces. Using plastic sleeves as funnels for marbles, marble towers, dominoes, and toys, the Photoshop guru was hard at work.

▼ Yoppy stacked his dominoes carefully. One wrong move could have destroyed the world! Or at least all of his hard work.

▼An exhausted Photoshop wizard considered his life choices in front of a few more pieces of his Pythagorean device.

▼ And Yoppy was back in the game, fighting hard!

▼ Or, maybe not.

After knocking over the dominoes with his shapely booty for the final time, Yoppy collapsed on the floor in a fit of despondency. “No more!” he cried.

“Hey,” he eventually asked a co-worker, “What the hell is with this ‘automatic eye-drop-inserting machine?’ I could put eye-drops in myself, you know? Who’s idea was this anyway?”

Yoppy’s. It was Yoppy’s idea.

“Was it really me?” he asked, sighing.

DAY 2!

A bit of good luck appeared as mansooon arrived with his end of the Pythagorean Device: the eye-drop bottle squeezer. A mechanical device that moved and squeezed, this pink elephant is the final pieces of the puzzle for the eye-drop machine.

▼ And this is also where nightmares are born and raised.

▼ Packing tape! An essential part of any sufficiently complex machine.

▼ Work faster! We want to see if this contraption works!

As mansooon surveyed the elaborate mechanism strung together throughout the room, he had but one thought. “This sure looks troublesome.”

“Shut up!” Yoppy yelled, “We were here until 10 pm last night working on this!”

“But what was the point?” the stick-in-the-mud asked.

“Why are you asking me such a question!?” Yoppy shouted, presumably before knocking over another table of dominoes.

“…why are you getting mad at me?” mansooon surely wondered.

Let ‘er rip!

The moment of truth was upon them! Would the eye-drop-applying Pythagorean device work? Would Yoppy end up with an eye full of medicine? Or would the device explode like a fireworks display? No one knew for sure what to expect…

The device, once started, toppled dominoes, sent marbles rolling, and turned on fans to keep things going. Finally, at the very end, the machine switched on the elephant robot and squeezed out a few eye drops…but onto what??

Check out the video below to find out how it went for Yoppy.

For those of you who cannot watch the video right now, we’ll also post a photo of the final eye drop.

▼ Splat.

Well, it almost worked…

Pretty discouraging, isn’t it? As the eye-drop medicine piled in the corners of his eyes, Yoppy stared at the ceiling, perhaps thinking about all the time he’d wasted over the last two days..

Sorry, Photoshop wizard! Looks like you’ll have to keep struggling with your bottle the old-fashioned way. Or perhaps it’s time for Yoppy to invest in a personal soldier to keep his eyes full of drops…

Sources: Omocoro, Wikipedia