Use the PlayChanger® line of PerFormulae® to temporarily alter the behavior of your CURIO®. Simply feed it a PerFormula®-dosed WorkPellet or thimbleful of PerFormula®-dosed water, and watch the PlayChanger® PerFormula® take effect within the hour. There are master-centric varieties of PlayChanger® such as NeedyBuddy® and Enthusiast®, as well as varieties like BullyKing® and PunchingBag® that require the presence of other CURIOS® to reveal their effects. The behavior produced by NumbSkull®, BellyAcher®, and SloMo® will become apparent regardless of who or what is around the PerFormulized CURIO®.
New PerFormulae® are constantly being developed by Graham&Swords Corp. Check with your local retailer for the latest.
(NOTE: using non-PerFormulae®-brand formulae to alter the shapes or behaviors of your CURIOS® will void your 90-day warranty.)
FAQ
Where did my CURIO® come from?
Your CURIO® was shipped from one of the laboratory warehouses of Graham&Swords Corp., makers of CureSleeves®, PerFormulae®, PillowNests®, WorkPellets®, SlumberHardTubes®, SipThimbles®, CURIO Ideas FunBooks®, and all other tools, energizers, and accessories bearing the exclusive CURIO® trademark.
Unless maybe that’s not what you’re asking about at all! Maybe you’re referring to the often contradictory rumors regarding the origins of the entire CURIO® product line. Well, if that’s the case, then the short answer is that Dr. Burton Pinflex, former head of the Research and Development team at Graham&Swords Corp.’s LiveTech Division, was the brains behind the whole operation. CURIOS® are the result of his blood, sweat, and tears. That’s all we can really say about the origins of CURIOS® with any measure of certainty.
Because we at Graham&Swords Corp. always recognized “Dr. Burt” as a visionary of unparalleled genius, we let him go about his work with very little oversight, and when we lost him and a number of his extremely talented colleagues in the tragic fire that destroyed the LiveTech facility in May 1986, we also lost the vast majority of the data documenting Team Pinflex’s research. All that remained of their hard, revolutionary work were some marbles, scribbled notes, and VHS tapes that Dr. Burt had secured in his home laboratory.
The question of whether or not Team Pinflex had been attempting to develop drone-capable soft automaton® fighters, bomb-defusers, and information-gatherers to deploy behind enemy lines when, in the midst of their labors, they realized that the soft automatons® they’d created were not only adorable, but most likely the most adorable, most perfect robotic companions for children and adults alike that one could ever even dare to imagine is not a ridiculous question. And the answer to that question is: maybe. After all, Graham&Swords Corp., since 1911, has been America’s #1 Most Trusted Supplier of Armaments®, and Dr. Burt himself was nothing if not an American patriot whose mission had always been to develop technologies that kept US soldiers and citizens as far out of harm’s way as possible. But, again, too much data was lost in that fire for us to know just what Team Pinflex was originally working on.
The question of whether or not Dr. Burt was visited by undocumented extraterrestrials who gave him, as a token of peace, a marble along with a set of instructions for how to activate it is not a ridiculous question either. If that happened, he didn’t tell us, but then again Dr. Burt was a famously humble man, and that fact, in combination with our having no evidence to support the existence of extraterrestrials, let alone friendly ones who would visit us and give us a token of peace, renders the question unanswerable, for while it’s easy to see why friendly extraterrestrials, were they to visit Earth, would approach Dr. Burt first—after all, he might have been the most intelligent man on the planet, and he was certainly the kind of kindhearted, peace-loving gentleman whom we imagine peaceful extraterrestrials would consider extremely relatable—it’s just as easy to see why Dr. Burt, humble man that he was, wouldn’t want it getting out that he, among all the scores of millions of Americans inhabiting our planet, had been the one the extraterrestrials entrusted with their gift to humanity.
And lastly: while it’s true that some members of Team Pinflex, including Dr. Burt, had widely traveled our planet, both as scientists and family vacationeers, the question of whether or not one of them accidentally discovered a marble—or marbles—buried in an Arctic ice shelf, a Saharan sand dune, or a puddle of strangely hued Amazonian muck, and thereafter energized its—or their—autoconstruction and brought it/them back home to study is, while as unridiculous as both of the aforementioned questions, also equally as impossible to address with any measure of certainty, given all that was lost in that terrible fire.
One thing’s for sure, though: all CURIOS® and products bearing the CURIOS® trademark are, and always will be, Made in USA®.
My CURIO’S® rear ejections aren’t glossy black/don’t smell like grape-flavored bubblegum, but I only feed it WorkPellets®. What should I do?
Try giving your BOTIMAL® bottled water to drink and see if that doesn’t make the difference. If it doesn’t, it’s time to figure out who in your household (a child? a spouse? maybe even certain pets?) is feeding your BOTIMAL® something other than WorkPellets® on the sly.
Can CURIOS® that have produced Hobunks® return to normal self-cloning functionality?
Yes! They can and they do, as long as you grant them enough access to your body heat.
Will GameChanger PerFormulae® permanently alter the shapes of clones produced by CURIOS® I’ve fed it to?
No. Clones of GameChangered® clones will have the same shape as those GameChangered® clones would have had, had they never been GameChangered®.
Can I feed PerFormulae® to Hobunks®?
Absolutely. But note that certain PlayChanger PerFormulae® (e.g. BullyKing, EverItch) will affect the behavior of Hobunks® differently than they would CURIOS®.
Can I mix PerFormulae®?
By all means. Like all products bearing the CURIO® trademark, PerFormulae® were invented to help CURIO® users customize their CURIOS® in ways that creatively express their (the users’) individuality. Mixing PerFormulae® can’t help but give you the power to take that creative expression even further.
Introduction
For the purpose of giving evidence for my thesis by using compare-contrast/juxtaposition-implication strategies, I have just presented the two manuals I will discuss in this paper without any introduction. And because of how you instructed us to incorporate what you taught us this year about visual rhetoric and how it can be of great importance to keep in mind the power of visual rhetoric when we are not only writing these our final papers for your class but also anytime in the real world that we are making a point by using juxtaposition-implication strategies of compare-contrast, I placed the two manuals side by side. I did that because it suggests that you should read them “simultaneously” (as in: you go back and forth, reading one section on the left, and then reading the section next to it on the right, then going back to the left to read the next section, etc.), but only suggests you should do that, and doesn’t demand that you do that, which should give you the sense that I respect you as a reader and a thinker who this whole text (not just the manuals but also the discussion of them that I am starting to do right here) belongs to at least as much as it does to me, and that respect I showed should make you, the reader and thinker, more willing to entertain my point of view on the matters I am addressing myself to and better able to see my truth through my eyes than you’d be if I told you how to read the manuals or if I put them one after the other (which would be equivalent, basically, to telling you how to read them).