I Don't Usually Keep Mice In This Drawer

Started with one innocent computer, ended up with a room full of salvaged hardware running 24/7. That's the Linux gateway drug effect—you think you're just trying a new OS, and suddenly you're hosting 17 services on machines you rescued from dumpsters. The stuffed animals are just witnesses to your descent into terminal madness. They've seen things.

You finally pull the trigger on a shiny new PC after nursing your ancient rig through 8 years of thermal throttling and prayer. Then literally a month later, two major RAM manufacturers collide in a cosmic catastrophe that sends memory prices into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, your new build sits there with its perfectly-timed DDR5 sticks, quietly humming while the rest of the tech world watches RAM prices skyrocket. It's like escaping a burning building and then watching everyone else get trapped inside. You're safe, your wallet is lighter but satisfied, yet you can't help but feel a weird mix of relief and guilt watching your fellow developers struggle to afford 16GB of what used to be reasonably priced memory. Timing is everything in life, and you accidentally nailed it.

The endless cycle of mod addiction strikes again! Your poor computer is basically begging for mercy like an overworked employee on their 12th straight hour. "Just one more mod" is the programmer equivalent of "just one more line of code before bed" – a dangerous lie we tell ourselves right before everything crashes spectacularly. Your PC's cooling fans are probably screaming louder than a junior dev who just pushed to production without testing.

The gaming hardware arms race continues to claim victims. Just when you thought your Nintendo Switch 2 with its fancy 120hz refresh rate and HDR support was the pinnacle of portable gaming, Valve's Steam Deck enters the chat and shatters your reality. It's like bringing a calculator to a math competition only to find your opponent brought a quantum computer. The sheer existential crisis on that man's face says it all—the moment you realize your tech is already obsolete before you've even finished the unboxing video.

Remember when game installers tried to convince you that NVIDIA graphics would transform your blocky LEGO characters into... slightly less blocky LEGO characters? The classic InstallShield wizard showing identical Lego Star Wars screenshots but claiming one has "NVIDIA graphics" is the grandfather of today's RTX memes. The difference is about as noticeable as semicolons in JavaScript - technically there, but who's really checking? Graphics card marketing has been gaslighting gamers since before ray tracing was cool.

When your legacy server keeps crashing but you're out of technical solutions so you install a religious icon as a CPU heatsink. That machine's been running for 7 years straight now, and nobody dares to update it. The icon isn't covering anything important anyway, right? RIGHT? The sacred art of hardware debugging—where divine intervention meets thermal management. Beats having to explain to management why you need a budget for new equipment.