Make a PHKL for a friend. Start on a Pokemon laptop soon after, let it languish for a year. Have your site be be seen by Kitty girls everywhere. Have somebody submit it to Slashdot. Have the page be posted on the front page, your site be slashdotted, be thrown off by your provider for generating 30Mb of network traffic in 20 days, find a new provider, and get email from a magazine editor about making a laptop specially for them. Wonder if you still have it in you and go back to that Pokemon laptop.

Hate what you did to the Pokemon Laptop and start over. Things you can use for a YZPL include a broken laptop (Toshiba Libretto 110CT), yellow electrical tape, a plane-hijackers knife, many stickers, figurines, and cards you bought at the Pokemon Center at Rockefeller Plaza on your previous trip to NYC when you thought you really should finish this thing.

Start covering the chassis in yellow electrical tape because you really don't like spraypainting.

After finishing the chassis outside, start taping around the screen and inside. Do not tape over the keyboard, you want it to still look like a laptop. If pieces of tape are too wide and cover the screen, use the sharp knife to cut the tape at the edge of the screen, and pull the now-detached tape on the screen off, while leaving the tape on the border around the screen on. Use fingernail to fold the tiny left over sliver of tape on that border around the edge where the border overlaps the screen for a neater look.. Contrast and marvel how festive the yellow already looks compared to the previous attempt with silver tape and fuzzy stickers, still visible below the keyboard.

Now comes the easy part (yes, the easy part; putting on the tape was the hardest thing, from now on it is all stickers and glue): arrange tons of stickers with purple and red borders around the screen and keyboard. Hate the way they curl up when you close the laptop, but realize they just won't stick well to electrical tape.

Decide the keyboard needs a bit more. Put some stickers on the keys, having them overlap mutiple keys in some cases. With a very sharp knife, cut the sticker to follow the edges of the keys. Lift each key that has a piece of decal off from the keyboard, and use fingernail to smoothe decal on to key, sometimes folding the edge of the decal over the edge of the key. Close laptop and hot glue zipper on laptop so that the teeth of the zipper are free to be zipped open and shut. Do not glue directly on the corner of the laptop, but leave space so zipper can take this corner.

Wrap the front part of the floppy disk drive in yellow electrical tape. After scoring a sparkly group line-up postcard so it wraps properly around the drive, spray some adhesive on the writing side and attach to the drive.

Spray on some adhesive glue on writing side of sparkly group line-up postcard. Attach to outside of laptop. Get it right quickly, spray glue is unforgiving. Glue on plush and plastic figurines in a pleasing pattern, put glitter stickers to the side. Also attach plastic foam figurines to floppy disk drive. Store the unit next to an open window so that dust smudges it and your attempts to clean it ruin the glittery decals. Take to New York to show to editor of magazine together with the real laptop you made for them. Go to Rockefeller Plaza first to get new decals on that very morning before the afternoon you are supposed to hand it in, and find yourself in a tiny hotelroom attaching decals to a laptop and wondering what the hell happened to you that you are now in NYC at 31 years of age putting decals on a laptop instead of being a mutant with super-powers in a ultra-secret government high-tech hideout saving the world from invasions from outer space, like the plan was twenty years ago. Attach new decals anyway. Like them. Be happy and show it off.

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