Years and years ago you tried to register Zagrophyte.com and it was inexplicably unavailable.

Four years ago, you were discussing moving your email away Gmail, and I mentioned you should buy Zagrophyte.com, and setup your own domain. You said you couldn’t, because it was unavailable. I thought that was weird, so I looked, and it was perfectly open. Along with the .net and the .org. I told you about it. You said, paraphrased: “Huh. I might have to look into that, then!”

Yesterday, I was talking about domains again, specifically how I had purchased juxentente.org finally after decades of being too cheap and lazy to bother. You mentioned how your patronym domains have been taken for years. Rosenbaum.com is slightly different than Zagrophyte.com, I grant you, but similar enough to tickle the memory sensors, so I went and looked. And, yep, Zagrophyte.com, .org, and .net were all still available. So I bought the .com.

Happy fake birthday, Travis. If you setup a domain transfer, tell me, and I will give you the transfer code immediately. It is my gift to you, both the first year of registration of this domain, and also the impetus to at least claim it for yourself. If you can’t find the spoons to do a domain transfer, it is my gift to myself, to remind you of this post on your 47.5th birthday. A small price to pay, surely.

A few years ago, my mother-in-law Cynthia gave me an awesome Christmas present: her old SLR, along with her enlarger and development tanks. I originally learned photography from my dad, using his old SR-T 201, and when I got back into it and started shooting film again, I inherited that camera. I also bought my own Minolta SLR: an XD11. Serendipitously, my mother-in-law’s camera was the same brand and mount, an XG1 with a 45mm f/2 lens. I played with the camera a little when I got it, made sure it all still worked, and then carefully put it away into my vault. While I do still enjoy taking pictures on film, most of my work is on digital. I tend to only pull out my analog cameras when I have a specific craving to do something. That’s also why I only have manual focus film cameras; if I want something thinking for me, I have other options for that.

Every now and then I go into the archive and peruse my collection, making sure everything is clean and functional and that I haven’t left a battery in anything anywhere waiting to explode. When I pulled out the XG1’s camera bag in 2024, I found something I hadn’t noticed before: a roll of Kodak Gold 200 tucked away in a side pocket, where Cynthia had left it. It couldn’t have been any less than 25 years old, and certainly not stored in the best conditions. But…it was unexposed. Technically, it could still be usable. I wondered what I could get out of it.

On Christmas Eve 2024 I decided to see. I hauled out the XG1 and decided to put it into full late 1980s mode. Nothing artistic here; I wasn’t sure the images would even come out, after all. Cindy had also given me an Auto Flash 200X, so I strapped that on the camera. I decided to try shooting the film at ISO 50, pushing it a full two stops, and I set the flash accordingly. The 45mm lens I kept between F2.8 and F4 depending on what I was looking at. That seemed ambitious to me at ISO 50, but the flash said it could technically handle it, and the camera’s manual agreed, so off I went.

And then I waited a year to develop the film, which is why I’m writing about it now, after Christmas 2025.

What came out of the roll of film was honestly amazing, at least to me. I hadn’t shot Kodak Gold in decades, and despite being expired for decades, what came out looked like…Kodak Gold. Choosing to shoot with the flash on full blast just like we did in the late 80s gives these pictures a look out of time. Other than clothing, hairstyles, and some smart phones, these could easily have been taken in 1988. As soon as I saw the first scan I couldn’t believe what the greens looked like. Nothing in reality has ever had the same shade of green that exists only in Kodak land. Staring at my Christmas tree on these prints, it looks just like the trees we had as a child. Does it match reality at all? Hell no, but that’s the fun of film sometimes, isn’t it? It’s art.

Also, the 45mm lens is amazing. I may have to use it more often than the 50mm f/1.4 I generally use as my walk-around with these cameras. Something about how these look is pleasing to me in a way I can’t find words for. What a nice surprise.

Take a look for yourselves.

I haven’t done anything time-consuming or stupid in a while on this website, so with my surplus of excitement and zeal coming off the back-to-back concerts, I decided to do something I’d joked about doing in the past but never actually done. A favorite song bracket! Two of them, actually.

Here’s the gist: I’m going to create two Bluesky threads, one for Nine Inch Nails, one for Garbage. I have randomized all of the songs in my music library and created matchups for each band. Every day I will do two songs by each band and pick a winner to advance to the next single-elimination round. I’m sure there will be a longer article at the end of this, but that’s the setup.

I’m going to do my best to evaluate each song honestly. Obviously, this is going to be my personal preference regardless, but what I’m really trying to remove is my historical emotional attachment to each song. Both artists continue to create amazing new work, but I feel like I don’t appreciate it as much as I probably should given the heavy emotional weight of the old and how long it has been with me. This is a time to ignore some of that and maybe appreciate some songs better.

Caveats: I removed all live versions. I removed all remixes. I removed all of the Ghosts albums because otherwise this would take literally forever as opposed to figuratively forever.

The Nine Inch Nails thread: https://bsky.app/profile/juxentente.com/post/3lylb7xb2pk2b

The Garbage thread: https://bsky.app/profile/juxentente.com/post/3lylbdltqkc2b

This should be fun!

Dream (2018 – 2024)

Even sparing almost no expense, I didn’t truly intend for this machine to be the longest-lived of all of my PCs. The plan was always to stick to the five year cycle. It just so happened that a lot of events conspired against ole Dream to keep it in service longer than its intended lifespan, mostly changes in my behavior.

Am I less interested in computers? Absolutely not. I’ve spent more time coding and writing for personal hobbies in the past six years than in the decade prior. I rebuilt and over-engineered my home server last year, something I took pictures from so I could write about it here and never did. Hell, I even bought a laptop again. What I am doing far less often than in 2018 is gaming on my computer, for anything other than my core PC genres of things like Slay the Spire or Crusader Kings. 

During the early part of the pandemic, when there was nothing to do but sit in our house and distract ourselves, Holly and I found the joy in console gaming again. For me, that meant playing games on the couch. For her, that meant watching me play games from the couch. At first this made me feel ridiculous: we watch TV together, sure, but why would you be watching me do something active? But, no, she genuinely enjoys this, apparently. When she actually got COVID I had to stream Persona 5 on Twitch so that she could watch it from the isolation chamber we banished her to. I didn’t switch from being a primarily-console gamer to a primarily-PC one until 2008 or so, when Steam sales really got nuts and I had enough disposable income to afford gaming components that weren’t out of date in a month and half. As much of a change as it was to go back to the couch and controller, it was more of a coming home than anything else.

Instead of fighting it, I leaned into it. In the summer of 2021 we refinished our entire basement, focusing primarily on two new spaces: a gaming room, for board games, and a home theatre. Into the home theatre went a 77” OLED TV and a PlayStation 5. My couch gaming setup was now miles better than my PC gaming setup, and has been since then. It’s really hard to beat that giant OLED.

If my computer wasn’t showing its age in gaming, did that mean I wasn’t worried about or noticing any differences in performance? Well, no. Dream was still my home hub for all of my tinkering, my research, my photography. I shoot less on my X-T2 than I used to—and yes, it’s still an X-T2—, but I spend a lot of time every year doing portrait shoots, travel photography, photo editing, and the like. After 5 years, Lightroom Classic was really starting to slow down, despite still using the same cameras. Part of it was library sizes, part of it was a hardware error I didn’t discover until after I bought a new computer, which you can read about in the Thoughts section below, but mostly it was dozens of paper cuts. On Delight (2013), editing those RAWs meant waiting forever in comparison view while noise reduction calculations were performed. That problem remained solved, but instead, I was waiting forever to generate a few hundred 1:1 previews on import. Not quite the same thing, but noticeable.

What was I actually waiting on? Myself, stalling on making a decision. I could spend an entire article complaining about how Microsoft has been pissing me off lately, advertising features and settings to me I don’t give a shit about, turning on search ads despite me constantly turning them off. I spent a few months getting pop-ups for Minecraft despite all relevant settings being off. Windows 11 is mostly regressions. It’s one of the reasons I got a Mac laptop last year. Windows has been bad before, after all, and I’m platform agnostic. When Windows XP was current, I preferred OS X. When Windows 8 was the newest, I hated both OS X and Windows for a bit, staying on Windows 7 mostly by inertia. Going to the Mac on a desktop wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve ever done. 

I kept waiting on something to happen to make me upgrade. Kenny and I were on the same cycle, so maybe he would give me the push I needed. Only, he died instead. And before he died, he told me to buy a Mac, because he was even more pissed at Microsoft than I was. One of the last things we were talking about, days before he passed, was about how I was pretty sure I was going to buy a Mac Studio, but I was waiting for it to get the M3 Max rather than the M2 Max, as it was already old by then. Hilariously, it’s exactly one year later, and the Studio still only has the M2. 

One thing I was absolutely sure of was that I wanted to reclaim space from my desk, so whatever I built next had to be much smaller. I kicked around the idea of building a new computer in the Fractal Terra case because it’s awesome, but never pulled the trigger. 

Last December I had a chance to test the waters a bit. Instead of upgrading my computer, I decided to finally renovate my home office instead. When we moved into this house in 2013 it had been a nice setup with a single computer for me to work from sometimes, play games from sometimes, and do whatever else. The desks were the same ones I’d had since 2004, which my dad had grabbed for me when his office was replacing them. They were heavy, gigantic, and by the last move literally falling apart and bowing inward. I loved them anyway.

I started working from home more often in 2018. I changed jobs and joined my current company, where my entire team was remote. I couldn’t remote in from my home computer for security reasons, so that mostly meant using my work laptop from the couch. At my office-office, I had a nice standing desk I’d customized for myself, multiple monitors, a Thunderbolt dock, the whole shebang. At home I had a side credenza that was 20 inches deep that I kept a typewriter on. No one wanted to work from that.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: 2020 changed everything. Now I was working from home every single day, obviously. My office-office closed forever. The standing desk I kept there wouldn’t fit in the space I had to use in my home office, not without also replacing my gigantic main desk, so I setup two monitors, an iPad stand, and a compact mechanical keyboard on that tiny little 20-inch credenza. I worked there for four years. 

Every December I end up deliberately burning all of the vacation time I’ve accrued during the year rather than carrying any over. This usually means I have 2-3 weeks off for the month. For 2023, we used this time to renovate not just my office, but the living room as well. We ripped out the carpet and had new hardwood floors installed. I made the hard decision to finally move my ancient desks to the curb—quite literally—and buy not one but two new ones, for a dedicated work space and home space. Two new standing desks, with the only difference being the length. I kept my home one larger, mostly to have somewhere to put my giant desktop tower.

Anyway, to end this tangent, while all of the construction was going on and I was waiting for my desks to actually arrived, I hooked up a temporary home AND work computing station on a folding table. Two Thunderbolt cables, one for my work laptop, and one for my MacBook Air, connected to one docking station. It would be a good test to see if I could live full-time in the Mac environment again rather than merely vacation there.

Honestly? It went great. Did I miss some things? Absolutely. But I also got to experience how nice some things were that I never noticed while dipping in and out. Peter introduced me and Kenny to the Advent of Code puzzles that December, so I was spending hours a day coding in VS Code on my Mac, making myself stretch my wings and learn Python because my primary languages at work were both Windows-centric. It was a great stress test. 

Those puzzles were the very last things I talked to Kenny about, for hours each day until he mysteriously went silent. When I went through his things at his house for his family, I found his desk covered in graph paper from manually mapping out some of the solutions. I had to stop doing them after that, until this year. But I digress, again.

Once everything was finished in the offices I hooked up my old PC and went back to normal, other than trying a brief stint of switching back and forth between the Air and Dream with a KVM. Waiting for Apple to release the M3 Mac Studio update. Which, of course, never happened, as stated above. But something else DID happen: Trump won the election, and suddenly I wanted to upgrade sooner rather than later not only because Dream was getting real old now, but also because tariffs are a dumb idea he’s apparently fully committed to, meaning literally anything I might buy was about to get 30% more expensive. Oh, also, Apple released the M4 Mac Mini. But that’s the next section, which we’re finally arriving at. Let’s finish up Dream in the traditional style of our people.

SPECIFICATIONS

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.7GHz / 4.3 GHz Boost (Pinnacle Ridge)
• Asus X470 motherboard
• 32GB of RAM (G.Skill Trident Z)
• EVGA 11GB GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC
• Samsung 970 Evo 1TB M.2 NVME SSD
• Western Digital 2TB M.2 SATA SSD

MEMORIES

• The Wraith Prism cooler from the build pictures didn’t last very long. I installed a giant NH-D15 that I got as a gift from Holly’s grandmother, of all people, and built a custom fan curve so that Dream was completely silent. Unless I was batch-editing a bunch of RAW files in Lightroom, when the fans would spin up to a nice deep hum.
• The 1080 Ti is the best value graphics card in the history of gaming. I finally got the 2160P monitor mentioned in in the built article when I re-did my office. Yes, the 1080 can’t do raytracing, but it can still run everything at 60FPS with decent settings even now so long as you’re at 1440P or lower, and the games I’ve actually been playing were fine at 2160P, including Resident Evil 8. 
• Overclocking was back! Kind of! I had to apply a slight voltage boost to get my RAM to where I wanted it, and it was stable there for 6 years without issue.
• In 2020 I removed the spinning hard drive and put in a 2TB SATA SSD to replace it. I removed both drive cages from the case at the same time, meaning I now had more empty air in there than components.
• My really long run of not having any components fail me finally came to an end, and I didn’t even know it until after the replacement was here! It was that damn SATA SSD of all things, if you can believe it. Writes and reads to recent data remained full speed, but data that was written a few years ago slowed to a crawl due to a bug in the controller. No data was lost, but it mean that moving data off of the machine and onto the new one took approximately forever. I had a hint of this when I was reorganizing the music library in the summer of 2024, but I thought it was Windows being weird. 
• Lightroom’s recent slowness? Definitely related to that SATA SSD, at least when I was editing older files.
• The headphone port on the case broke, too, or so I thought. Eadweard ran through my office and tripped over my headset cord, after which I could never speak on Discord without sounding like static or a robot ever again. I had to order a USB dongle to replace it. Only it didn’t actually break; as I was putting the drive cages back into the case for long-term storage, I found a tiny little ribbon cable that had been pulled out of the front audio ports. I put it back in and everything worked again. Whoops.
• Windows 11, feh.
• In the Delight (2013) era, I lucked in to upgrading to one of the rare LG BluRay drives that can rip 4K UltraHD discs. And since I rip every single disc we get to our Plex server, that drive is moving to its third straight computer.
• The invoice total was in the old article, but I’ll repeat it here for fun: $2,337.15. Most expensive component: the 1080 Ti at $649.99.

Delight (2024)

Delight is back! I hadn’t reused a name before, but most people I know either don’t name their computers or name them the same thing every single time, so I’m in good company. I didn’t feel like coming up with a new naming scheme yet, which left me with Desire, Death, and Destiny as choices when I bought my MacBook last year. Desire almost fit, as did Destiny, as I’m finally moving to the Mac platform. Death I refuse to use until I’m at least 85. I reused Delirium for the laptop instead. Once I did that, it only made sense to pair up Delight with it again. Two sides of the same coin, after all.

I’m a fan of cool hardware. Realizing that my fanless MacBook Air was faster at everything that wasn’t gaming than my gaming PC…that was eye-opening. I knew the numbers were there, I put them in the article I wrote about getting the laptop after all, but actually experiencing it was something else. The M4 Pro is even more ridiculous than the M2. I was expecting Lightroom to run twice as fast, maybe; it’s over six times faster! I don’t have to wait for preview renders on import, even. Everything is instant.

And it’s itty bitty! It’s a Mac Mini that’s actually small! The M4 Pro version is an absolute monster in CPU performance, as stated, and the integrated GPU matches my old 1080 Ti in raw graphics performance. And, not that I’m planning on it, but it was cheap enough that should I want to, I wouldn’t feel bad about upgrading sooner rather than later – although now that I have it, the Mac Studio seems gigantic. The boys were not, in fact, old enough to help me build this one, but they are old enough to want hand me downs from me now. Alfie is using my “HPL-5” laptop to play Minecraft Java edition and read Wikis. Eadweard wants one, too. I think my new treadmill for upgrades won’t be gaming, or keeping up with Kenny, it’ll be rewarding myself with new shiny objects by pretending I’m doing it for the boys.

I guess I can’t pretend I “built” this one, obviously, but I did more than zero. I bought an OWC Mercury Pro enclosure for my BluRay drive to toss that drive in, so that I could keep on ripping movies to the Plex server. Apple’s pricing on memory and storage upgrades are insane. There’s nothing you can do about the memory, but for storage I went with only as much built-in as I was sure wouldn’t ever be a problem, and then bought a 4TB drive for an external Thunderbolt 4 enclosure, also from OWC. This is under the desk so it’s more-or-less invisible. Technically Thunderbolt 4 is about half the speed of my actual drive, but it’s still faster than the fastest SSD in Dream, and I can get a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure when they exist, because the Mac has Thunderbolt 5.

This article is already 3,000 words long. You don’t need to know more, really, do you? Let’s get to the specifications and the thoughts.

Specifications 

• M4 Pro Mac Mini – A3239
• Apple M4 Pro 14C @ 4.52Ghz
• 20 Core Apple GPU Family 9
• 48GB Unified Memory
• 1TB Apple SSD
• 4TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD
• 10Gbps Ethernet

Thoughts

• If you look in the picture above, you’ll see an Apple Magic Keyboard. I own multiple mechanical keyboards, and will probably get a Mac layout one to match this system soon, but I wanted to try the TouchID bits for a while. I never hated scissor switches like regular rubber domes either. It’s…fine…but won’t be forever.
• I also bought a Magic Trackpad. That’s not going anywhere. It’s great to be able to use gestures and “mouse” with both hands.
• As far as an actual mouse goes, the Magic Mouse is the worst mouse I’ve ever used. Holly is on her second one. I’m keeping my Logitech G305 for now. Also, mouse support in macOS is pure garbage, just like the Magic Mouse – I had to use LinearMouse to fix acceleration and pointer movement. You can tell, from how good the Magic Trackpad is and how well they work with the operating system, that almost everyone uses laptops by default nowadays. 
• Also in that setup above: dual, identical, Dell U2723QEs. They’re color-calibrated, and even though I don’t need the ethernet ports or the device switching in each one, I am using a lot of the hub ports.
• Same old speakers from 2008. I need to upgrade those. I listen to music through the Sonos system, so it’s not pressing.
• Invoice total: $2,109 for the Mac Mini. For the monitors, the extra SSD, the two OWC enclosures, the smaller Sabrent 10gbps enclosure I got for using Dream’s old SSDs as shuttle drives, I paid…$0. I paid for it all with multiple years of Nectar rewards points from work that I dumped into Amazon.
• Okay, even I think that’s a cop-out, and I use these articles partially for my own record keeping. The accessories came to $968.89.
• Windows isn’t over for me. I use Windows 11 at work all day, and my home server runs Windows 11 as well. I’m hoping Microsoft gets back on track. I’ve swapped before, I’ll swap again.

I emphasize the time when I started writing this above because I’m sure it is going to take me time to work through this. This will almost certainly be a living document; with three decades of stories to remember, how could it not be? It’s 2023 in the present where I am writing. It will be 2024 when anyone reads this. That’s fine, though. His obituary is out there. It’s right here, and you should read it.¹ This is my eulogy of Kenny, not the only one. No one is waiting for me to write this. 

Like any true eulogy, I should start with who Kenny was. These are the sections everyone skips for someone they don’t know, because they mostly contain the same things. Does that matter, when they’re true? If someone cares enough about you to write a eulogy, to think about you after you’re gone, of course you were kind, you were generous, you were loved. That’s no reason to not write it! Eulogies are for the living. Kenny’s never going to read this. But those he left behind, they need to know, they need to never doubt that he was loved, that he will be remembered, that he was appreciated. He leaves behind an army of parents, siblings, and friends who will never doubt that, who will never forget him. He will live on in all of us. 

So who else was he? 

Kenny was the kindest of us all. He was the truest introvert I have ever met. He hated strangers with a passion, but he’d drive 500 miles to visit his ever-growing family without a thought. His friends trapped him in a cabin, every year, for days, with children he wasn’t related to and spouses he had no choice in selecting, and it was one of his favorite weeks of the year, second only to Thanksgiving and Christmas. He was nice to everyone involved. Then he’d retreat to his house and not emerge for weeks, to recover.

He was the most infuriating of all of us, too. Only my own grandmother was more stubborn than him; a level of bullheadedness that I, the third most stubborn person I know, can only aspire to. Once, the natural gas company messed up his bill and shut off his service. Rather than talk to them and deal with it, he went without hot water or heat at this apartment. For three years. Luckily we live in Georgia, but…damn. He fixed his car door with a rope for six months when the latch broke. The water main to his house sprung a leak in 2019; it wasn’t fixed when he died, in 2023. Because he couldn’t afford it? No, of course not. He just didn’t want to fix it. So he turned the water on at the street every time he needed to fill the toilets or take a shower. Once he was done, right back off.

Why, truly? I’ll never know, because I don’t think he ever knew. Kenny was a unique soul. I’m going to miss his curmudgeon side as much as anything else, because who else will I ever meet who will DO stuff like that? The next time it takes me eighteen months to replace two screws in a banister, something I absolutely have never done, I know he’ll be watching over me, the patron saint of Our Perpetual Maybe Tomorrow.

He loved games, he loved computers, he loved technology of all kinds. Technology was probably his true passion, because like all passions he loved and hated it in equal measure. A man of few words who mostly liked responding to what others were saying, on multiple occasions Kenny launched into hours long rants about the mandatory printer drivers included in operating systems. For over twenty years. He would recompile his own linux kernel, from scratch, to remove mentions of libraries he didn’t like.

All of us in his core group of friends work with computers in some fashion, most of us are even programmers, but Kenny was a goddamn savant.²

One of the very last things we were doing together was working on Advent of Code 2023. Scott was doing it in TypeScript, Peter in F#, and Kenny and I were working in Python. As the worst programmer among the four of us, I appreciated that Kenny (the kindest one!) would praise how readable my solutions were, then drop a convoluted regular expression monstrosity that none of the rest of us could even understand. Don’t take my word for it, take Peter’s too:

All of us have our niches, but I truly think Kenny could have done whatever he wanted. That he often wanted to do nothing at all was infuriating, but, again: that’s Kenny. I’m going to miss getting frustrated with him as much as I’m going to miss anything else.

Gods, I loved that man.

Maybe I should write about what he meant to me, too. I first met Kenny in 1995, although we did not truly become close until 1997. In 1998 he moved to Pennsylvania from Georgia; I visited him up there that summer. It would be expected for us to grow apart, given that distance and our young ages, and for a time we did. We spoke a few times a year for the rest of high school. Then, in college, we started playing games online together again. In 2002, we founded this website (the Jux Entente) together.

In 2005, he moved back to Georgia. It didn’t take; he left again. But he came back for good in 2007. In 2011, I offered him a job; he took it. in 2013, Kenny was the best man at my wedding. In 2016 he bought a house in my neighborhood. 

After such a long time together, the hardest parts of this are the things I know I’ll never get to share with him again. Despite living in close physical proximity, the vast majority of our friendship was online. Kenny was private to a fault, and rarely wanted to go out and do something. But we talked online constantly. Ever since he left us, I keep finding articles I want to share with him, news, games, videos. Who do I share those with now? Kenny, did you know someone did the entire Advent of Code on a Commodore 64? Did you know Alfie’s really enjoying Pokemon Y and OmegaRuby on his “new” 3DS that I was worried about? And, hey, did you know Awesome Games Done Quick starts in two weeks? No one else is going to watch that with me, you know.

We played so many games together. One of the blessings, or the curses, of the streaming era is that I have hundreds of hours of recordings of us “hanging out” online. There are games that I played with no one else BUT him. Crusader Kings. Splatoon! Mario Kart? Mario Party?

How many stories can I share without getting boring? I want to write so many.

If any of his siblings are reading this, I’m pretty sure Kenny and I have now retired undefeated in Mario Party against the lot of you. Whenever I was in PA and Peach (Kenny) and Daisy (me) were on the same team, we were unstoppable. Kenny always found a way to get at least two extra stars in the end-game awards. Once, Peter had a video game competition bracket at his Halloween party. Kenny and I were paired against each other in one of the N64 Mario Party mini-games, a jumping rope one. That competition went on for about five times longer than anyone expected and despite not being the actual final game, was the emotional finale of the whole event. Kenny, of course, eventually beat me.

We were evenly matched in Mario Kart. Once, flying to Boston, we played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe the entire flight. He beat me in every single race. On the way back, we did the same…only, I beat him in every single race. But I wasn’t playing fair: I decided to start playing Mario Kart like it was a racing game, not Mario Kart. I just didn’t want to lose anymore, okay? 

He taught me to play Dance Dance Revolution. I eventually learned to cheat and beat him every time by picking only fast songs, because I was in better shape than him and could do them on HEAVY MODE until he was exhausted. Kenny eventually learned to cheat and pick the slowest songs possible because my timing would slowly accelerate on complicated steps if the beat was too slow. I took me a decade to learn how to stop doing that.

In Jackbox games, he was always Keno. One time, someone else made their name Kenny. At various points in the past ten years, we have had Jackbox Party Pack games with lobbies containing Kenny, NotKenny, Actual Kenny, Keno, Kenny2…I think our record was six Kennys in the same lobby. It might take a year or two, but I doubt that joke dies with you, sir. In your memory we shall continue. 

Kenny taught me how to play disc golf in 2006. I beat him for the first time, ever, in 2022. That year we played once a week. It was his new year’s resolution to himself: he wanted to get out of the house more. I told him if he really wanted to do it, I would hold him to it and make sure it happened. Kenny stuck to it. We played 54 rounds of disc golf in 2022. Travis and Peter joined in with us. It was awesome. 

I’m sure we’ll keep playing sometimes, Travis, Peter, and me. But we’ll always be thinking about who isn’t there with us, won’t we? The last round we played before he died, Kenny actually didn’t make it out to meet us. He said he wasn’t feeling well. 

I think about that, now. It’s hard not to. 

He loved board games, too. We played Magic the Gathering together. Once, he got so mad at the Game of Thrones board game I thought he was going to break the board in half with his nerf sword. And Kenny was always, always, the Cylon. If you know, you know.

Most of all I’m going to miss the connection we had while playing games of any kind. After decades of doing this, we didn’t have to communicate to each other about what we were going to do. We already knew. Do you know how easy it is to play League of Legends when you already know where your support is going to be without asking? Do you know how much I still laugh about the time we broke Ben’s brain playing Cranium, because the prompt was Oprah, and we all wrote down “BEES!” as our number one response? He’s probably still pissed about that, but we got all of the points. 

Whenever his social energy would run out, Kenny would disappear for a bit. Sometimes he’d go dark for day, sometimes a week. I understood; I’m also an introvert. I always told him, warned him, that if I hadn’t heard from him in a week I was going to bother him by checking on him, just to make sure he was still alive. He laughed and agreed with me. Three or four times I had to go over to his house and ring the bell. He’d open the door and glare, or maybe smile, depending on why he wasn’t talking, but he’d always open the door and acknowledge me.

This time he didn’t open the door, because he couldn’t. 

As a writer, I wanted to make that the start of this eulogy. What a hook! But as a human being, as friend, that’s not fair to who Kenny was, or who he was to me. Although…he would have fucking loved that joke.³

Perhaps the hardest thing Kenny ever had to do was give a speech in front of over a hundred people he didn’t know, at all. And it was my fault he had to do it: he was the best man at my wedding. He never complained, not once, but it’s hard to think of anything he would have liked to do less than that. I can’t remember everything that he said, but I can remember how it made me feel. It was a great speech.

If Kenny’s ghost is hanging around somewhere, watching us all deal with his absence, I have to think that somewhere around the third time I had to go back into his empty house in the two days after I found him, looking for his immediately-required valuables, or picking up clothes for his family so he could be buried in them, I have to think he was chuckling a little bit about the payback. He did have a dark sense of humor.

Perhaps I’m only telling myself this for my own sanity, to make up for having to find him that way, but I think he would have wanted it to be me. If he had known he was going to die, and Kenny had had the chance to ask someone to be the one to find out…he wouldn’t have wanted it to be his family. He wouldn’t want to do that to him. He would have asked one of us. He would have asked me, I think. I hope.

I have apologized to the air each time I’ve gone back into the house. It felt wrong not to. I took in his mail yesterday. I let him know I was going to look through the rest of the house to make sure everything was still where either he, or I, left it. It was. Out of the corner of my eye was I walked through his living room I saw, on one of the glass display shelves, the three groomsman gifts he’d received from being in weddings over the years. The first one, from Travis, one from me, and one from Peter. I’m glad he always knew he was important to us; I’m glad to know we were important to him, too. 

And now, here at the end, it’s 2024. Tomorrow I’m flying up to Pennsylvania again to visit you, but this time, it’s for your funeral. You’re going to be buried, Kenny, and have a gravestone and everything. 

It feels like a thousand years ago now that you bought that stupid Openmoko Neo FreeRunner open source smart phone, the one that literally never worked. How many different Linux kernels did you install on that thing, three? Four? At one point, after months of work, you managed to get it to make very poor quality phone calls. When you finally gave up on it, this device that no one else on the planet would have ever purchased in the first place, I told you that I was going to make sure you were buried with it, because nothing else could encapsulate the experience of Kenny as much as that thing. The FreeRunner was the platonic ideal of something only you could love, and tolerate. It was everything we loved about you, too. I never thought I’d have to follow through on that threat.

I found it, when I dropped off your mail. I apologized for opening the bin it was in, but I remembered you showing me where you kept all of your old phones and tablets once, and I thought it might still be in there. And it was. I didn’t take it with me, though. I left it in your house. Maybe one of your siblings has memories of that thing, the same way I do. I wouldn’t want to take it from them. But if they don’t, Kenny, I promise you this: I’m going to get that thing from your house. You’re going to be buried so far from me, but with that FreeRunner in my possession, I’ll have the excuse I need to visit your grave again some day, when I’m ready. And I’m going to leave that stupid thing there, so you can have it again. You might need it.

I know we still need you. Maybe you could call us, sometime. You’ll have all the time in the world to get it working, now. 

1. I took the photo used for his obituary. He asked me for a headshot while we were getting dressed for Peter’s wedding. He liked it. Now I know his family did, too. ︎
2. Should you swear in a eulogy? Perhaps not, but he would have wanted me to keep that in, so I will.  ︎
3. And there’s that profanity again! Kenny would have loved it, I promise. ︎

The TV that died was the first TV I ever bought for myself, rather than inherited from my parents. It was 27″, but more importantly, it had a feature that was critically important to me at that exact point in time: two component video ports. In the brief period after TVs stopped being complete garbage but before HDTV (and then HDMI) were a thing, there was no way to get a sharper, more colorful picture than component video. Finally having the TV of my then-dreams created another problem for me: there were three devices that I wanted to hook up using component, and still only two ports. A component video switchbox? Not a thing in any real sense in 2001. One of my devices would have to suffer.

My choices:

• The Nintendo GameCube? Hell no, this was, graphically, the best-looking of my devices. It had to be hooked up with component. Hilariously, it is because of this decision that I still own one of the most valuable things in my gaming collection.
• My progressive-scan DVD player? Surely you jest.
• My PlayStation 2? Well…hmm. If anything, component would make the jaggies look worse, wouldn’t it?

And thus my PlayStation 2 was connected to the TV with S-Video, and all was well in the world.

Decades passed.

The TV passed.

Here I am, converting S-Video to HDMI, for some reason. That’s a great choice for my SNES, my N64, and my PSX, but my PS2? My poor, innocent PS2? Yesterday, I hooked it up again to play through Persona 3 FES (for the first time!). Last night, I finally ordered PS2 component cables. Today, they are here.

The end.

I am a technology enthusiast. I read enthusiast websites, with names in Latin. I build my own desktop computers. I used to work in data centers. Cool hardware has always interested me most of all. It doesn’t have to be the fastest, or the most efficient, but it does have to have that certain something. Remember those Sun UltraSPARC Niagara processors, the ones made specifically for web servers? That kind of weird.

One thing to know about Windows laptops for the entirety of the 1990s and early 2000s: they were all bad. Someone somewhere is thinking of rebuttal involving a ThinkPad with a keyboard that unfolded like origami, but no. Terrible. Also, they ran really slow versions of the same old x86 processors I used everywhere else. Where’s the fun in that? What I wanted was something that ran a really slow version of a more different processor, one that was arguably worse in almost every way, but that was neat.

I’d used Apple IIs at school since second grade or so, maybe even earlier. My cousins Steven and Jeff owned one. I made family newsletters in their little publishing program on it. I’d touched a Mac or two in computer labs in college. But in 2002, I bought my first very own Apple product, with my very own money. Mostly my money, anyway; I had to finance part of it, because I was in college, and stereotypes are real. I was, I am, a desktop person, but I wanted a laptop anyway. A toy to go with my real computer. In the grand tradition of my post about my history with desktop computers from five whole years ago, it’s time to talk about my laptops. A disjointed history, by comparison. And then, towards the end, let’s talk about that glacier again.

MacSheba (2002 – 2004)

My entire first year of college, I carried paper notebooks to class, like some kind of animal. You couldn’t even properly get distracted with one of those. You had to doodle, or write short fiction, or something. Not everyone was so afflicted; I have distinct memories of the two kids I saw taking notes on honest-to-god PDAs; one of them used graffiti, the other folded out a keyboard and attached it to his Palm Tungsten T. A wild time to be young and pretending to pay attention.

It’s easy to understand why I wanted a laptop, but I can’t pretend it wasn’t still a toy. I took it to class, yes, and I took notes on it, but I wrote all my papers at home, on my desktop PC. I spent most of my time on IRC and AIM on my desktop still, too. Guess where I played games? That’s right, on my consoles! But also on my desktop. Most students who used a laptop for college had that as their only computer, but not me. I had two. That’s not to say that MacSheba wasn’t my little buddy, my home away from home, and I loved them for what they were. And if you’re curious about the name, my main computer at the time’s name was: Sheba. That’s it with the CRT on the messy desk in the picture up there.

iBook G3s came in 12″ and 14″ models. I picked the small one because it had to go into a backpack. For the time, it was svelte. Battery life was amazing too: 3, maybe even 4 hours! It was slow as hell, even from the beginning, but you expected that. It was an iBook, running MacOS X, what did you really expect? Once you opened even one program, the genie effect for minimizing windows had frame stutter. I booted it into OS9 once or twice just because I could, but that wasn’t anything anyone should ever do for real. Classic MacOS was a thing of nightmares even when new. I’m not going to lie and pretend I didn’t look upon all of the students who could afford PowerBooks with jealous rage, although that didn’t really start until the 12″ came out a few months later.

Why so few years in the scale above? Was it too slow? Was I forced to upgrade? Alas, no: the logic board demons killed it. I’ll explain more when we get to the next laptop.

Specifications

• 12.1″ iBook G3 Dual USB (“Snow”) – A1005
• PowerPC G3 800MHz (750CX)
• 256MB of RAM
• 32MB ATI Radeon 7500
• 30GB 4200RPM hard drive

Memories

• Seriously, that fucking 12″ PowerBook. Goddammit. 
• This is the laptop that went with me to Italy. Because laptop power supplies weren’t universal multi-voltage back then, I had to take a transformer with me. If I used the laptop too much, that thing would get hotter than the surface of the sun and stop working until I let it cool down. Wild west computing!
  • The above made no sense to me in retrospect, so I looked it up, and apparently it was a dual-voltage power supply. I was today-years-old when I learned that. I didn’t need that transformer after all. I swear to god younger me checked for the voltage on the power brick before buying the thing, and yet, here we are.
• I never once plugged anything into the FireWire 400 port. Not one single time.
• Speaking of battery life, I once got the battery to beyond its rated 5 hours on an airplane by leaving the lid just barely open, turning the screen off, and using the thing as a giant MP3 player. There was no way to override the hardware sleep function if I’d closed the lid all of the way. The person sitting next to me on the plane was very confused.
  • If you’re wondering why anyone would do that, please remember that an iPod cost $399 at the time. $663 equivalent in 2023. I made $9 an hour as a reference librarian, and that was considered a fancy-lad hourly rate for part-time work.
• Speaking of money: The list price of this laptop was $1299. I upgraded the RAM, but also got an education discount, which would have evened everything out. Today that would be $2160.
  • Add $79 2002 dollars for the AirPort card, which I had to add myself by popping open the keyboard. A different time.
• I wrote my first book on this thing. The book was terrible, but it started the long trend of me doing all of my long-form writing in a comfy pretzel position somewhere with a laptop. I’ve written several other, less terrible, novels since, the same way. It’s weird, but I guess you can’t question the creative process. If it works it works.
• The iTunes store launched when I had this thing. My friends were jealous I got to try it out. Yes, really.
• Although I used it daily, much more than OS X, I truly hated Windows XP. Jaguar may look quaint and full of Aqua-isms in retrospect, but XP was hideous even in the Silver theme. 
• I had no fucking idea what I was doing in bash other than the very basics. I still managed to use a terminal-based IRC client.

Shebintosh (2005-2010)

In the fall of 2004, my iBook G3 died in the middle of class one day. The screen went fuzzy, then turned itself off. It was a known defect with those models, and Apple had an extended repair program. I took it in to the Apple store, they took possession from me, packed it into a little DHL box, and off it went to get a new motherboard.

I never saw it again.

The full saga was detailed here, on this very website, when it happened. The writing in those old articles isn’t exactly to the standard I would set now, so feel free to not read the whole thing. The short version is that DHL lost the laptop in shipping, and Apple had to replace the entire system. The replacement was the then-current equivalent model, an iBook G4. The process was easy, at least. They opened with what happened and what they were going to give me. I countered with: yes but I upgraded the RAM on the old one, and I paid extra for the AirPort card. The guy on the phone started to say that the new models came with all of those features, paused, audibly sighed, and doubled the RAM on the new iBook.

Only two years had passed, but there was no comparison in performance between the two laptops. Shebintosh was wicked fast. In the old post above, I said it should be at least twice as fast. Looking at historical benchmarks, it looks like that was mostly true. Geekbench 2 scores were 630 for the G4 versus 379 for the G3. But I didn’t need benchmarks: the new laptop could play World of Warcraft! I could browse the internet without beach balling! GarageBand existed!

Shebintosh got me through the rest of college, and then all of graduate school. When I got a job, I used it when I traveled. I did Windows programming in .Net, from Denver, in the year of our lord 2008, by remoting in to my work desktop over Hamachi VPN from a PowerPC Mac. 

Nothing lasts forever, of course. It wasn’t the fact that the web browsers weren’t being updated anymore. It wasn’t the fact that Windows was so much better than the old version of MacOS I was running, although it was. I kept using it regardless, because it was my toy, it could still watch YouTube and do basic browsing. Heck, I read comic books in .CBZ on it all the way through 2010.

Then the hard drive started grinding. Sometimes it wouldn’t boot at all. Sometimes it would boot, but make an awful noise. Sometimes it was completely fine. It was time. I shut down Shebintosh, put it in the closet, and…

And the dates above are a complete lie. The end wasn’t in 2010. Shebintosh is still here. Every few years I pull down the bin it’s in, boot it up, and see what happens. It may not be the first time, but eventually, it always comes back, even if it starts off sounding like this.

The battery still holds a charge. It might only last an hour, but it’s a 19-year-old battery! Some day it won’t, I know this. And if the hard drive is what kills it, I’ll spend hours ripping the hard drive out and swapping in an SD card or an SSD, and life will go on, as will my iBook G4. MacSheba died young, a mere babe; Shebintosh is the methuselah of my computing life.

Specifications

• 12.1″ iBook G4 – A1054
• PowerPC G4 1.2GHz (7447A)
• 512MB of RAM
• 32MB ATI Radeon 9200
• 30GB 4200RPM hard drive

Memories

• Later upgraded to 768MB of RAM. Once I started working in IT, free ancient laptop RAM flowed like water. I could not notice a difference, but memory is memory.
• This computer served-as-my government-in-exile while my actual desktop PC was non-functional three times. Three!
• One of those times I had to write a 30-page thesis chapter using NeoOffice, because for some reason my old copy of Office X wasn’t working with Endnote. And then I had to do manual end notes. That was the last straw for me before asking for money to buy a new computer.
• This wasn’t the origin of my friends complaining about me getting inexplicable free stuff, that was when my desktop computer got struck by lightning, but this was the trope codifier for it. A fine tradition that continues to this very day. As I write this article, I have a year-old 2U server arriving any hour now.
• Diablo II also ran great.
• As fast as it felt at first, by 2008 it was showing its age. That’s how computers worked back then, especially laptops. That doesn’t really happen anymore. You can use a five-year-old phone now and not care.
• I distinctly remember playing endless hours of Kongregate tower defense games in my apartment bedroom early into the morning with terrible Nick at Nite reruns on the TV. I must have re-watched all of Roseanne twice in the summer of 2007. In retrospect, it should have been more obvious to me that I was burning out of graduate school. Any chance I got to turn my brain off, I did. And Shebintosh was there.
• Cost to me: $0. Adjust that for inflation why don’t you?
• Somewhere in here I became a computer professional. Still sucked at bash though. Never fixed that.

Interregnum (2010-2018)

At this point in my life, I could afford to buy a MacBook to replace my iBook when it died. So why didn’t I? I can think of three reasons.

Reason the first: I didn’t want one. It’s not like I was suddenly without a computer, right? For over two years, the primary use of the iBook was watching YouTube videos in bed. That’s not something worth buying an entire laptop for.

Reason the second: I didn’t need one. I wasn’t traveling that often. I wasn’t going to school. And, in case you have somehow forgotten: take a quick look at those dates above. Smartphones ruined the appeal of budget laptops.

Reason the third: I didn’t like MacOS anymore. Vista had come out, then Windows 7, and I honestly preferred both over the then-current iterations of MacOS. The current MacBooks didn’t have cool hardware either. They were regular-old Intel laptops. Good ones, for sure, but nothing special.

When a laptop aged out of the work fleet, I’d grab it. If I needed to travel for work, I’d take one of the good ones from our loaners. They were always Dells, they were never special, and by the time I took them home they were incredibly decrepit. I remember nothing of them. I think I went through two, but perhaps it was three. Hard to say.

Specifications

Who cares?

Memories

• One of the Dells I used to watch a lot of Channel Fireball MTG draft videos to drift off to sleep. Never forget the Lorthos draft.

HPL-5 (2019 – Present)

I remember what I said to our representative at Zones when I ordered this laptop. I’m going to put it in a quote block, so it looks more epic.

I need five of your most generic laptop that isn’t terrible. They will be used for PowerPoint and web browsing. Make sure they have SSDs.

Graeme K. Hefner, 2017

As you might guess from the name, this was the fifth of those five. For almost all of 2017 and 2018, it lived in a drawer in my office at work, reserved for when the Technology Operations department needed a laptop. It traveled with me, it ran some seminars. This was supposed to be its entire life.

In 2018, my former company was purchased by a larger one. They replaced all of our equipment, including those five generic laptops. HPL-5 came home with me. I hadn’t bothered to take home a crappy laptop at home for years, and I’d just finished building a new gaming PC, so I had no inkling that HPL-5 might have a more interesting life to come. I was planning on tossing it into another drawer to gather dust. 

Instead: a love affair.

HPL-5 is a piece of garbage, and I loved it for it. I’ll let this Facebook post I made in the height of the pandemic speak for itself:

I wrote two novels on this laptop. I played tons of hours of Slay the Spire. Despite it being a giant 15″ slab of plastic, I’ve taken it on more vacations than all of the other laptops above combined. Romantic weekends with my wife, visiting family, Disney World, multiple weeks at the beach: HPL-5 was there. Sometimes because I was writing or revising one of those novels. Sometimes because I wanted to play Slay the Spire and goof off on the internet. Sometimes just because. I felt like I finally understood why people like laptops. All it took was a Windows laptop that I didn’t care about even a little, and an opportunity to use it for what it wanted to be.

I haven’t officially retired it, yet. It still works perfectly. It’s sitting there at the end of the couch I’m writing this from, right now, powered off, waiting for the next job. I’m planning on it having a long slow life of leisure somewhere on the counter, being the family homework laptop for Alfie and Eadweard. Let them love you, HPL-5. I’m sorry I never gave you a name, but the name you had was perfect for you.

But if HPL-5 still works perfectly, why replace it at all?

Well…

Specifications

• HP ProBook 450 G4
• Intel Core i5-7200U 2.5GHz / 2.7GHz Turbo (Kaby Lake)
• 16GB of RAM
• Intel HD Graphics 620
• 256GB SanDisk SD8SN8U SSD

Memories

• This thing is so big the keyboard has an actual number pad attached.
  • The printing on the key caps is so bad that no two keys are aligned exactly the same. The letters in the word Backspace wiggle up and down like a worm.
• I absolutely covered this thing in stickers, as you can see in the pictures. My favorite is a little dog sticker from a Cracker Jack box that Alfie gave me before I left for New Bern, North Carolina, ahead of the 2020 election. I was staying with my friend Billy Todd for a few days so that we could observe the various polling locations in case anything went awry. It was the height of the pandemic, and Alfie said the sticker would keep me safe. He also drew me a picture of my favorite things: pizza, ‘the drink in the cans’ (Coke Zero), and ‘the card game with monsters’ (Slay the Spire). I still have that picture, somewhere. It lived in my car until I traded it in. You can see the well-worn little dog sticker in the next picture in this article.
• The viewing angle on this screen is so narrow it reminds me of a rear-projection TV from the 90s. And since it’s a 15″ screen, it’s almost impossible to have all of it looking “correct” at any given point in time. Luckily I used it for text.
• The novels I wrote on this laptop were way better than the one I wrote on that iBook G3.
  • Shout out to Scrivener!
• I used this as a streaming box quite a few times. Most memorably, when Alfie wanted to stream himself playing Animal Crossing to “everyone.” Again, the pandemic. I did put that picture above.

The Glacier

Scroll all the way back to the top of this post, and you’ll see me describe my iBook G3 as the first Apple product I personally owned. This is about laptops, a sequel to an essay I wrote five years ago about desktop computers, and not at all about other consumer electronics, but let’s admit to the obvious: Apple hasn’t been named Apple Computer in a long time. Apple makes other things.

My second Apple product? An iPod mini. To this day, I will contend it was the first good iPod. The click wheel was an amazing change, and still my favorite way to ever interact with a music player. I eventually replaced it with a larger iPod 5.5. And then smart phones happened, and I stopped carrying my iPod with me every day because I put the music on my phone, and streaming started…

I went from Blackberry phones to Android. I disliked iOS immensely in the early days. Apple had the sexy hardware, but it wasn’t until iOS 7 that the glacier started to move. It is so tempting to flow this article directly into talking about the history of my smart phones, and my tablets, but I’m going to do the only thing I can to stop myself, and use a numbered list to describe how I fell all of the way back into the Apple ecosystem. Because the Apple walled garden is the glacier.

1. I got a retina iPad mini in 2013. I always start with the small ones.
2. Next, an iPhone 6S in 2015. Android departed my life. It has not returned.
3. I washed my running headphones in 2019. I ordered second-generation AirPods to try, because the wire was starting to bother me while I was running. I have never been as wrong about a product as I was about the AirPods. Before I got them, I didn’t understand the point. After: I could never go back.
   1. In 2019, I still saw most people running with wired headphones. In 2023, I can’t remember the last time I was out for a run and saw anyone using anything other than wireless earbuds of some kind.
4. At Christmas in 2019, the Apple Watch finally went below $200. I thought the Watch was ugly, but I’d been running again for a year, and I hadn’t had a fitness tracker since 2015 or so. I wanted to see if I would use one again. I bought a Series 3.
   1. By the way, the watches are ugly, but you can accessorize with the bands. The always-on screen helps some, too.
5. I’d been with Roku since they were Netflix-only boxes. Over time I’ve had occasion to try everything else, from Fire sticks, to AndroidGoogleTVs, etc, but Rokus were the best. AppleTV was basically unusable for a long time because the Siri remote was pure garbage. Apple happened to revise the AppleTV 4K right when we were renovating our basement in 2021, and it had a new, proper remote. So I bought one to go down there. It’s great.

Delirium

Let’s talk about an Apple product I don’t like: the iPad Pro. I have one! It’s not a very good tablet, because it’s too big. If you want to use any of the “Pro” parts of it that don’t involve the pencil, which I also have, you have to use the keyboard cover, which I also also have. With the keyboard, it takes up as much space as a laptop, for a worse typing experience, and worse everything else. 

But I like toys, and I like cool hardware. And what does Apple have now? The coolest laptop hardware in the world. The last generations of Intel MacBooks were goddamn terrible. Scorching hot and slow Intel CPUs, the butterfly keyboard, the TouchBar: all of it was bad. Now the TouchBar is gone, Intel is gone, and the keyboard is fixed. What replaced the Intel chips are some absolutely insane ARM-based processors based on the work Apple did with the iPhone and iPad for over a decade. And I wanted one.

As soon as the M1 came out in late 2020, I knew I was in trouble. I was using HPL-5 for hours a day, curled up somewhere comfortable, editing the novel I wrote at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. I told myself I would get one when I finished revisions. I put it off. 

I finished the book and didn’t buy one, so I moved my goalposts. When I sold the book, I said. I wrote a second book instead. I put it off further.

In the end, it was carrying around the iPad Pro and the HP laptop at the same time that finally broke me. The laptop? Huge. The iPad Pro? Also huge. The iPad benefits from being in the ecosystem with my phone and everything else. The laptop benefits from being in the ecosystem with my desktop and everything else. What if I could replace them both with one device, that was actually smaller *than either one of them*? The invasive thought snuck back into my brain.

Dream, the five-year-old gaming PC that I built with money being no object, is technically due to be replaced this year. I have no desire to replace it. I haven’t been doing much PC gaming lately, at least not high-end PC gaming, because we built a new home theatre in 2021 and I shoved a PS5 in it. Most of my gaming time is after work, after dinner, with my wife curled up by my side watching me. And it’s great. I’m sure I’ll build a high-end gaming PC again soon-ish, but it won’t be this year. But I still wanted something new…and I hadn’t bought a new laptop in over 20 years…and the M2 was super sexy, and Apple had a ton of refurbished ones in their store now…

I bought one, of course. I’ve written this entire blog post on it, pulling the pictures from my various services and desktop machines. This blog post was a trojan horse to help me get everything configured here exactly as I want it. It mostly worked, although I did have to write a seven-step Shortcut to replace ShareX for screenshots.

Hardware-wise, it’s mostly faster than my gaming PC. Sure, it’s five years newer, but it’s also fanless and ridiculously light and thin. Geekbench 6 isn’t necessarily the best benchmark in the world, but as a point of comparison, I ran it while writing this article, on all three machines. These are the results:

• Single-Core CPU:
  • Dream: 1242
  • HPL-5: 1058
  • Delirium: 2599
• Multi-Core CPU:
  • Dream: 6788
  • HPL-5: 2120
  • Delirium: 9828
• OpenCL GPU compute:
  • Dream: 54702
  • HPL-5: 4889 (lol)
  • Delirium: 27628

That 1080Ti still doing work keeping Dream in the mix somewhere, I guess!

Much like the USS Excelsior, this is the great experiment. If I get a Mac, and go all-in on the ecosystem, how much will I like it? Windows is never going anywhere in my life. It’s integral to my career, and I genuinely like it. But maybe I’ll slide into MacOS for personal use, finally. Or maybe I’ll bounce off it again, and that’s also okay. It’s a toy. A cool toy.

Specifications

• M2 MacBook Air (Midnight) – A2681
• Apple M2 8C @ 3.49GHz
• 10 Core Apple M2 GPU
• 24GB of RAM
• 2TB SSD

Thoughts

• I bought it from the refurbished store. I’ve had excellent luck with Apple refurbished products lately. When it arrived, it had 1 (one) battery cycle on it. Visually brand new.
• Because the refurbished store doesn’t have a configurator, I did not realize until after the fact that I purchased the literal maximum specification of this machine. I would have been perfectly fine with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of disk space, but, after all, I only buy a laptop every twenty years. I wanted more.
• Purchase price: $2,249. I used an Apple Card promo to get $75 back on my purchase, and got an additional 3% off for using an Apple Card in the first place. 
• Windows 11 isn’t supported on HPL-5. Yes, this did factor in to my decision to replace it, but barely.
• I used the Delirium name for my work PC for a long time. I’m re-using it here, because I set the rules, and I decided that that’s okay. My work machines are GUIDs now.
• I still can’t use bash that well, but I am great in PowerShell. I used Homebrew to install PowerShell. I open Terminal.app in PowerShell. Fight me.
• Holly and I have a big trip coming up. Part of me wanted to wait until after the trip, because money. Part of me was swayed by Kenny’s argument of “Do you want a MacBook that hasn’t been to Europe?”
  • And now I don’t have to carry that iPad Pro to Germany and Austria!
• A refurbished 14″ MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of SSD would have been only $250 more and much more powerful than even this machine, with an absolutely fantastic screen. From a deal perspective, that should have been a no-brainer. But after looking at them in person several times, the MBP was noticeably chunkier and heavier, and I didn’t need the extra power. If I wanted a desktop replacement and not an iPad replacement, I would definitely have gone that route.
  • MacBook Pro is still a stupid name though. It’s been 17 years and PowerBook is still better. You kept iMac around, no reason you couldn’t have kept that, Apple.

1. I’m too lazy to wait 30 days to do this. I’m doing it all at once.
2. I have over 16 years of song statistics since the last time my music library was reset. Obviously that doesn’t include listens in the wild, on the radio (remember radio?), Pandora, Spotify, randomly asking Alexa for it, or what have you…but it is a significant data set.

With those things in mind, I’m going to sort my entire music library by play count, and I’m going to solve these questions as objectively as possible. I think this approach will actually create more interesting answers than if I did this the traditional way, because it will make me put things in these categories I never would otherwise.

Also: No repeats. A song being picked once disqualifies it for later.

1 – A song you like with a color in the title. La Roux – Colourless Colour

There’s a good chance that you could consider that one cheating, since it only extremely vaguely has a color in the title. I think it qualifies. If you don’t, there’s another track with only two fewer plays as of this writing in my library, that I have known and loved for far longer: Soundgarden – Fell On Black Days.

2 – A song you like with a number in the title. Madonna – 4 Minutes

That thing in the intro about the play counts forcing me to pick things I never would otherwise? Here’s one. I obviously like this song, but without the data to back it up, I never would have considered it my favorite number-based anthem.

3 – A song that reminds you of summertime. Queens of the Stone Age – Feel Good Hit of the Summer

This one, on the other hand, I couldn’t have planned better if I’d tried.

4 – A song that reminds you of someone you’d rather forget. Staind – It’s Been Awhile

Since I’m not a teenager, this one was nearly impossible to answer by any metric. Eventually I had to scroll down to a song I’ve played a total of only 21 times, the last of which was over six years ago. But it counts? I think? A song I want to forget, for a person who is irrelevant to me in all measures now.

5 – A song that needs to be played out loud. David Guetta – Turn Me On

No shame. Blast this fucker.

6 – A song that makes you want to dance. Queens of the Stone Age – Broken Box

7 – A song to drive to. Stone Temple Pilots – Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart

8 – A song about drugs or alcohol. The Crystal Method – Trip Like I Do

What songs aren’t about drugs or alcohol, really? This is a nebulous one, because I had to either keep scrolling until I found a song that was unequivocally about drugs and/or alcohol, or I had to accept the first song with a reference to drugs or alcohol in it. Neither felt ideal.

I went with the latter and skipped approximately a billion songs.

9 – A song that makes you happy. Kate Nash – Pumpkin Soup

Also no shame. I love this song. And Kate Nash. Y’all motherfuckers need to listen to more Kate Nash.

10 – A song that makes you sad: Alice in Chains – Brother

Complicated one. I’m not sure if this makes me sad or just melancholy, but it definitely qualifies.

11 – A song you never get tired of: Queens of the Stone Age – The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret

Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone.

12 – A song from your preteen years. Nirvana – Breed

No cheating on this one. I wasn’t going to merely pick the first song on the list that technically came out when I was a pre-teen. Oh no, it had to be something I was actually listening to then.

This worked out shockingly well for me.

13 – A song from the year you were born. Duran Duran – The Reflex

First: thank the gods that the Plex database stores release year so I could query on it.

Second: This also worked out very well for me.

Yeah, Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All album also came out in 1983, and Seek & Destroy was literally the next song down in the play charts, but even though Metallica is a much more important band to me personally overall…Duran Duran deserves to represent 1983 more than they do. No hating.

14 – A song you’d love to be played at your wedding. April March – Chick Habit

Since I am married, I’m going with songs that actually were played at my wedding. Like some of the above. And this one.

15 – A song you like that’s a cover by another artist. Stone Temple Pilots – Dancing Days

This is the best version of this song don’t @ me.

16 – A song that’s a classic favorite. Blondie – Call Me

Classic is a rough definition. This is one I can apply it to without caveats. It feels weird describing 90s songs as “classics” to me yet, despite the fact I know that they are by any reasonable definition.

17 – A song you’d sing a duet with someone on karaoke. Rihanna – If I Never See Your Face Again

One caveat: I’m Rihanna. Fuck Adam Levine.

Also, you may think this song is a joke answer, but as of this writing, it’s literally the fifth most-played song in my entire library:

The other tracks are blurred to protect any surprises that may be coming further down this list. The play counts are blurred to protect myself.

18 – A song you like from the 70s. Jim Croce – You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

I’m not sure anyone is more surprised that this is the one that came up than me, to be honest.

19 – A song that makes you think about life. Christopher Tin – Baba Yetu

How to answer this one. Most of the music at the top of my charts reflects on my life in some way, I’m sure, but not my current situation. Is there a song that makes me think about life as a whole? My scroll wheel and I set out on a mission to find out. I almost picked Rock is Dead because rock is dead and I think about that a lot, but it seemed like cheating. So I kept scrolling.

And then there it was, with 108 play count at press time. The perfect answer.

20 – A song that has many meanings to you. Nirvana – The Man Who Sold The World

I wasn’t even sure how I could possibly answer this one until I hit this song in the list. It has unique associations across multiple eras of my life. It counts.

21 – A song you like with a person’s name in the title. Panic! at the Disco – The Ballad of Mona Lisa

This song is a banger.

22 – A song that moves you forward. Queens of the Stone Age – If Only

I’m interpreting “moves you forward” as “gets you really hyped up”, and picked accordingly.

23 – A song that you think everybody should listen to. Timbaland – Carry Out

Oh man this one was EASY. This song is so terrible it wraps around to good, back to terrible, back to good, back to terrible, and over and over again like five damn times. And the video is amazingly terribly awful badgood too. It’s pure fucking garbage. I love it. Please read the lyrics. They’re amazing. Do you like it well done? Because I do it well. I could have filled this entire list with nothing but 00s Timbaland facial expressions and it would have been fine.

24 – A song by a band you wish were still together. The Donnas – Love You ‘Till It Hurts

It was tempting to make this the highest-rated song by a band that’s broken up and be done with it, but that would have been Cobra Starship, and honestly…I think we got enough Cobra Starship in the world. As to how Cobra Starship could be the answer to this question and not already appeared above…eh keep reading. So then I thought, which of these bands could actually have created additional good music if they were still together? That list became weird. Let’s look at the eliminated ones:

1. Cobra Starship. I think they were done.
2. Stone Temple Pilots. More than done.
3. The Cataracs. Not a band.

And then…ah we found one!

Yeah, I’d buy a new Donnas album sight unseen.

25 – A song you like by an artist no longer living. Stone Temple Pilots – Big Bang Baby

There’s so many to choose from here, including so many songs that are already picked above, that this could have been almost anything.

26 – A song that makes you want to fall in love. Garbage – My Lover’s Box

G36: Yo dawgs imma need an assist here. I can’t just keep scrolling until I get to a song that reminds me of Holly, that doesn’t seem like it’s in the spirit of the thing.

G16: On it.

G26: Yeah we got this.

G36: Cool thanks. Just let me know what you come up with and ship it up when you spot it okay.

G16 + G26: Done.

27 – A song that breaks your heart. Akira Yamaoka – Your Rain (RAGE MIX)

G36: Hey guys come back!

G16: All you buddy.

G26: We outta here babe.

How can this possibly break my heart, you ask? I truly considered scrolling down until I found an epic breakup song somewhere, but then I saw this, and thought…nope, it works. Silent Hill was either my favorite or second favorite video game series of all time, and it’s dead forever. I fucking love DDR, but no one cares about it anymore either. The games, the music…a time we’ll never get back. But what a good time it was while we were there. Thanks Konami.

28 – A song by an artist whose voice you love. (tie) Florence + The Machine – Howl | Garbage – Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)

I’m not choosing between these when they have the same play count. Florence Welch and Shirley Manson can battle it out somewhere else. Florence is probably the technical winner, but Shirley will always have my heart.

29 – A song you remember from your childhood. Fleetwood Mac – Little Lies

Welp.

30 – A song that reminds you of yourself. Nine Inch Nails – Capital G

Damn right.

Honorable Mention (Day 31): Cobra Starship – You Make Me Feel…

For obvious reasons, most of the top songs by total play count in my music library got picked somewhere in this list. Strangely enough though, there was a song in the top five of total play count that never really went anywhere it felt like, and if you’d asked me before I looked at the statistics how often I played that song, I never would have even guessed it would be in the top five. So here’s to you, honorable mention song, which I apparently listen to constantly but have no emotional attachment to.

At this point it’s a cliche for everyone to complain about how large their gaming backlog is because of Steam sales and Humble Bundles and god knows what else, so this year I’ve decided to do something about mine. So here it is: Before I will let myself buy any new games this year, no matter how cheap they might be, I must clear out at least seven things from my backlog. Seven won’t make much a dent in the seven thousand things I’ve got sitting there, but it’s more than zero, so it’s a start.

Now, I’m not going to grind these games out if it turns out I hate them or anything. I’m only committing to giving them a honest try. If I do hate one so much I have to put it down, though, I feel like I should at least have to review it for Jux to explain why, as a way of honoring this challenge.

The Games

1. The Last of Us Remastered. This was the only game I really wanted to try on the PS3. We’ve had a PS4 for a few months now, and I’ve literally never powered it up after I hooked it up the the TV, because it’s Holly’s system. I still bought this game on sale for $5. It’s time to get around to it.
2. Tomb Raider. I bought this back in 2013 when Steam sales still had daily deals. I played it for two hours and got distracted by something shinier.
3. This War of Mine. This one I grabbed last year, and I have no strong reason for it to be here, other than it looked interesting.
4. Resident Evil Remake (PC). One of my favorites in one of my favorite old series. I bought this because it was cheap and left it sitting there until I felt like getting into Resident Evil again, and between playing 7 (the first good one in over a decade) and the remake of 2 coming out, it feels like it’s finally time.
5. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Holly got this one and it looked fun. It’s on here because it’s the only Switch game we own that I haven’t played even a minute of. Speaking of Switch games…
6. Octo Expansion. I loved this, while I was playing it. I also love Splatoon 2. A bunch of other stuff came out and I ended up never beating the Octo Expansion. Time to go back and finish it. And, finally:
7. Something on my RetroPie. I have this whole system sitting there full of my retro games, and I haven’t touched it in forever. Even if I just sit down and beat Punch-Out!!! again for old time’s sake, I need to do something. I was in the middle of a Final Fantasy 3/6 playthrough when Eadweard was born, so I may pick that back up.

So the Dream build has been complete for almost two weeks now. After writing about my full history of PC builds up to this point, I thought I would update with just a few thoughts on this build as they’re fresh in my mind. And also share a few pictures. Who knows, fifteen years from now, I might need this article to remind me of what I did when I update that monolith article again.

First thought:

Building a new PC takes a lot longer when you’re planning to reuse the case. It’s the first time since 2005 I’ve re-used a case, so everything took a bit longer than expected.

Second thought:

Yep, I still hate LEDs. I thought I would be okay with having RGB LEDs all over the place because they would be hidden within my sound-dampening case, but alas, I can see the light from the LEDs shining out of the vents on the back onto the wall, and it is very slowly driving me crazy.

I did set them all to be a matching color (white), and I can turn most of them off, but the Wraith Prism demands to be lit up at least slightly. Luckily, that will be taken care of, because of the…

Third thing!

My return to AMD is also going to herald my return to aftermarket coolers, it seems. The Wraith Prism is perfectly fine, but I spent more time tinkering with it than anything else in any build in the past decade.

I used stock Intel coolers for my last two builds because they were good enough if you weren’t overclocking (or, in the Conroe era, even if you were), and Intel chipset motherboards handled them perfectly well as far as ramping up fan speeds and noise levels.

That’s not the case with the Wraith Prism, I’m afraid. It’s a better cooler than any of those Intel ones, but it can get pretty damn loud at the higher RPMs. Luckily, since it is a good cooler, you shouldn’t have to spend much time up there, right?

Except for how aggressive the default fan profiles are, at least on my motherboard. Even on the default “quiet” setting, once the temperature started to creep up it would go from a perfectly acceptable quiet 1,500 RPM to 2,500 RPM instantly as soon as the temperature started to creep up. And cycle between the two. Even at 2,500 RPM it wasn’t loud, exactly, at least not in the case I have, but the instant cycles between the two were annoying me.

Luckily, I’m back to where I like to tinker with these things again, after taking most of a decade off to tinker with server farms instead, and so I set about making my own fan profiles. Now I have both the CPU cooler and the case fans set to low idle until the temperatures start to climb, and then they slowly spin up, with a long ramp-up speed time. It’s perfect, and it sounds like I want it to.

But since I feel like tinkering I’m not going to leave well enough alone anyway, so I plan to slap a giant Noctua cooler on there soon enough. I just need to figure out which one. Maybe I’ll actually update again when I do!