It was 2001.

I’ll surrender and take my PC to a shop over my dead body. When my dad’s lease on his office ran out, he didn’t extend it. He finished the basement and built a home office there himself with help from the family, hiring outside contractors only for the wiring and pipefitting and stuff like that, and he paved the new walkways to the basement office himself and put in a koi pond by the steps. Later, when he got a motorcycle and wanted to protect it from the elements, he built a garage himself, because that’s what men do. Men do not give up before exhausting their options and just schlepping it to Microcenter. If I ever gave up, I’d foist it on my BIL which is kind of awkward right now because my sister and I just went a month without talking and to say anything more would be oversharing, but Mother’s Day is a great day to reach out if you’re ever on the outs with a friend or relative with kids.

But anyway, and I am blazed, I apologize in advance, but this is my PC through thick and thin. I carefully considered all the parts myself – did my research, as Aaron Rodgers would say – bought them, assembled it perfectly just for something on the motherboard short and fry a couple of parts. This is my second-ever build, which is the one where you go balls out with a silly budget after a utilitarian first build, the most important aspect of which was that it turned on and worked. The third build is one where you make a better-suited computer on half the budget of the second. Now my glorious second build is a disaster. I could find only three of the six fan connectors and one of the lights doesn’t work because a pin got bent in two different places. Airflow is going to be terrible. I bought quality parts to be futureproof, too, so basically I’m just going to get this build in working order and, as long as it works, that’s all I care about. Sometime in the indefinite furure I’ll buy a new case and cooler and totally redo and clean up the wiring. Basically have a fresh new, functional case that you can just hook the motherboard up to. But for now I’ll just be grateful when it works. And Twentymans never ask for help in an amusingly involved project. Never, ever, ever.