laptop
today i’m looking at my laptop. it’s covered in a variety of stickers and there’s a lot of history recorded in them.
honestly, i’m not a fan of keeping history around; i don’t mean “delete or trash everything a day after it’s gone” — i like to hold onto things for as long as they’ve held their relevance. but in a habit i picked up from marie kondo, once something has served me in life, i appreciate it one last time and then move on.
i used to hang onto everything. starting from when i was 12, i’d hang onto every text document i wrote or acquired, every picture i downloaded, every project i worked on, every piece of music, everything. when i’d get a new computer or reinstall an OS, i’d collect them all into a folder (usually called “old” or “archive”), and stick in my new, empty documents folder. next time, i’d do the same. up until last year you could go through the onion layers of “old” folders, reaching further and further into my history, right back to when i was 12.
preserving this was an effort, because i’ve had how many new computers, how many reinstalls in the last 15 years? but it felt like something had to do to, like throwing that away would violate a sacred principle i lived my life by. turns out that principle was OCD.
so, this laptop. the cats in the top-left corner were sent to me by my coworker aaron. he’s kind of a Big Deal in the ruby and rails communities, so when he tweeted about sending these to anyone, i DM’d him on slack and was like “omg would you??” and he just mailed me out an envelope full of them. i was ecstatic, so they went straight on my laptop. (there’s one in the front cover of my diary too.) now it’s kind of surreal that we’re “friends” who video call every week.
there’s a variety of work related stickers without much backstory: the four big octocats along the middle line, the vinyl octocat covering the apple logo, the pride octocat. they are what they are. this is a work laptop and it seemed appropriate. same with the git and the datadog (purple woofer up top) stickers.
there’s a bunny sticker on opposite corners. they were from a sticker set i got to give to kairi. there were others but i removed them because of all the negativity they were associated with. but i couldn’t bare to drop the bunnies.
the bottom-right corner is the logo of my favourite band, school food punishment, now disbanded. it came with a limited-edition cd release.
“gender is not binary” is actually from a member of parliament in nsw (!). she sent them and a bunch of other stickers out. that was pretty cool.
idk why i have the slack pride one. whatever. more rainbows on a laptop is always good.
there’s two stickers from github constellation, an event held last november in melbourne where i attended as staff. they were handing those stickers out. one is the octocat “constellation” on the bottom of the laptop. the other was a grim reaper (!?), which i’ve covered with the “invasion day” sticker. i covered it because it was actually really grim: that night was the one i was raped. a bit too much to leave a literal grim reaper sticker from that night on there, y’know? whereas i support indigeneousx on patreon.
“be pawsitive”. cute furry artist put these together. my keys have a little charm of the same design on them.
finally, the bunny girl drinking a milkshake. it’s from a LINE sticker set i used with emma a lot.
there’s a lot i’m ready to move on from with this laptop. it kinda documents the last 2 years of my life, the 2 years i’ve had it. i’m giving it to a friend when my replacement laptop arrives, which is pretty soon.