As anyone that knows me knows, I have shitty posture. I always have. I’m not entirely sure why, but as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve always been hunched over like someone just punched me in the stomach.

I’ve been noticing lately that it’s starting to get worse.

I think that part of the problem is that I spend several hours a day hunched over a computer. To make matters worse, Both my laptop and my desktop are prematurely aging me. My laptop’s screen is about eight inches below my head, so it’s not uncommon for me to realize that I’m hunched in front of it like Golem. My desktop’s monitor is at a good height, but my monitor is crapping out on me – text is incredibly blurry and images are slowly getting darker and darker, and it can’t be good for my eyes.

I’m planning on buying a new monitor for my desktop when 2010 rolls around and I can play games again, but I can fix my laptop now with a new stand. I thought that I’d seen some cool ones online, so I thought I’d try to make one out of cardboard. At first, I went looking for a good design on the Internet, which is normally a great place to find crap like that. In this case, I came up empty, however – I found designs, but I didn’t really like any of them. I’m sure they worked, but they just weren’t doing it for me. Here’s what I managed to scrounge up online:

Trash

Garbage

Refuse.

I mean, none of them are TOO terrible, but I think they all look kind of bulky or flimsy, or, in some cases, both. I needed something that looked a little bit less like it was assembled by a second grader.

So I grabbed a cardboard box, a razor blade and some masking tape. I took a few measurements, cut some crap out and taped it all together. It’s not quite as cool as I was hoping for, but this is what I ended up coming up with:

BAM

POW.

It’s actually not that cool looking, now that I look at it. It definitely needs some more work, too – some of the parts are a little loose, because they’re only attached with masking tape, and right now I just have pen caps in the front legs holding the laptop in place. I think it turned out pretty well for a first try, though. Here are a few pictures of it holding my laptop:

Not too terrible, right? Like I said, the design needs some work, but I think that if I make another model with slightly sturdier joints and a little less masking tape, it’ll look pretty decent. Maybe I can even figure out a way to make it all lock together without a bunch of tape. Either way, even with this crappy design, I’m happier with the look of this than I was with the look of any of the models that I found online. Does anyone have any suggestions that they think would improve the design? Lemme know.

Anyway, that’s my little project that I’ve been working on. Now, if I could just figure out how to make a desktop monitor out of cardboard that’s not so god damn blurry. If anyone has a design for that, let me know.