MAN TECH: Wicked Lasers

 

The package I received consisted of:

-         The laser

-         A “Master Guide,” which is really just a much manlier way of saying “instruction manual”

-         A sleek-looking magnetic box for holding the laser

-         A small, wooden box holding about a half-dozen prisms

-         The gayest pair of safety goggles I’ve ever seen in my entire life

-         A holder for the gayest pair of safety goggles I’ve ever seen in my entire life

Essentially, when you get one of these bad boys in the mail it feels much more dramatic than a simple, “Hey, I bought a pen laser and now it’s here.”  The safety goggles make you worried you could blind yourself, the presence of the prisms seem to hold infinite possibilities, and the cryptically-titled “Master Guide” makes it seem as if you’re inheriting some futuristic weapon.

Both visually and scientifically, a Wicked Laser is about as close as you can get to a lightsaber in the real world. Its beam is so powerful that it’s warm to the touch, and can cut through plastic. Granted, it takes about a minute and a half to cut through something like, say, black electrical tape, but still -- regardless of how long it may take, we’re still talking about a beam of concentrated light strong enough to burn dark fabrics and cut holes in trash bags.

I say it can do all this shit because I personally tried; once you idly fire the beam at a wall and see how goddamn bright the thing is, your subconscious destructive instincts kick in and tell you: “Let’s see what we can destroy with this thing.” For about three hours, I ran around my home burning electrical tape, old black t-shirts, matches, and plastic Tupperware containers. While my destructive capabilities really never extended beyond mild disfigurement of household objects, I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a twinge of pyromaniacal glee every time I successfully defaced a dark-colored object with nothing but the pen laser.

As said earlier, the beam is really, really damn bright. I make fun of how dorky the safety goggles look (they’re huge, plastic things colored bright red; they look like something out of a crappy 80’s sci-fi flick), but they truly do come in useful assuming you actually care about your eyesight. Shooting the laser at something relatively close to your face -- say, within three or four feet of your eyes -- will make you feel like you’re staring into the sun. The actual beam of light isn’t so bright and isn’t that visible during the daytime, but the point it makes glows like a damned star. You literally can’t look directly at it for too long, or you’ll hurt your eyes. It’s also so powerful that it can function as something of an uber-flashlight: I closed the door to my room and shut off all the lights, then tried to look around using a regular, battery-powered flashlight. The results weren’t that spectacular: I could look at a relatively small area with intense brightness and clarity. With the laser, however, I could shoot the beam directly into my ceiling, and literally the entire room was bathed in a moderately bright, green light. The point of the laser is so powerful that when I shot it at the ceiling, it almost acted like a half-burnt-out lightbulb, lighting up the entire room. The flashlight lit a small area very brightly; the laser lit a huge area with moderate brightness. The thing is strong.

The beam’s intense strength is sort of a double-edged sword, but in a totally manly way: on the one hand, it’s dangerous enough that it can temporarily blind people and can eventually cause eye damage if used irresponsibly, but on the other hand, it’s dangerous enough that it can temporarily blind people and can eventually cause eye damage if used irresponsibly. The damned military attaches bigger, more powerful versions of the laser I received to assault rifles for night operations: not just because they allow for more precise aiming, but because shining the laser in someone’s face will completely obscure their vision for a good half a minute or so. In other words, it’s awesome.

Now that I have a Wicked Laser, I don’t think I’ll need to buy a can of Mace or a taser; if anyone tries to mug me, I’ll just shoot them in the eyes with the laser and run as they stumble around, literally blinded by the light. Granted, if I aim incorrectly or they choose to shut their eyes the entire laser is pretty useless as a self-defense weapon, but still: using the laser, I feel like I could somehow protect myself with it. That’s not something you can say about most non-bladed items whose size doesn’t exceed that of a Sharpie’s.

By far the coolest -- and most risky -- use of the Wicked Laser takes place during the nighttime. Once the sun goes down, you can not only see the Laser’s beam in its entirety, but you really get a feel for just how far the damn thing goes -- over fifty miles. Standing in my backyard, I fired the laser at a mountain about twenty miles away…and hit it. From the intense beam originating from the laser, I saw an unbroken line of light moving twenty miles into the distance, before finally ending with a bright point of light on the mountain’s side. I tried again, and hit a palm tree about thirty miles away. I’m not sure if the beam can actually travel fifty miles, because I honestly ran out of distant objects to judge it against; I pointed the laser at everything I could see from my backyard, and the laser reached every last piece of the landscape.

Standing in my backyard, connecting myself to hilariously distant structures just by pressing a button, I felt goddamned powerful. You get a sense of scope when you use the laser, as you can follow its beam from origin to target; you really get a sense for how close or far away things are, and doing so makes you feel like a huge badass. I shot my laser into the night sky, and I couldn’t see where it disappeared – to suddenly having that degree of control over my immediate environment was to suddenly feel an immense, balls-droppingly, testosterone-pumpingly, chest-hair-growingly awesome power of the like I’ve yet to experience before or since. I could imagine people sitting in their backyards, looking into the night sky, focusing on a thin beam of intense green light darting across the dark landscape. I could imagine them looking on in awe.

I could imagine them calling the cops, too.

That’s the real catch-22 of the Wicked Laser’s awesomeness: it’s the most fun at night when you can dominate the darkness using a beam of light, but that’s also the time when people are most likely to get really paranoid about seeing that beam. To be honest, I don’t blame them: if I saw someone shining a bright green laser around my area, I’d think there was a (hilariously unsubtle) sniper in the area looking to cap a few fools. You’ve really gotta be careful not to point it too close to peoples’ homes or automobiles, unless you want to terrify a bunch of innocent citizens into phoning their local police precinct. Playing with the laser at night is really an exercise in restraining yourself, which, once you see how far the laser goes and how bright it is, is the exact last thing you’ll want to do.

They’re not the cheapest things in the world, granted, but our friend Andrew from wickedlasers.com gave us a promo code which knocks 15% off any order. Just type “dv15” (without the quotes) into the promo code box, and you’ll get the discount.

All in all, I’m loving this damned thing. The Wicked Laser is really only useful for purely aesthetic stuff, but oh, how impressive those aesthetics are. It makes me think of a quote from Superbad: “It’s like having two cocks. If one of your cocks could kill someone.” Except place “kill someone” with “melt rubber, light matches, and be seen from twenty miles away in the motherfucking dark.”