laptop nom for a long time i would get it confused with/thought it was labtop 070310 ... raze there's nothing like spilling a bit of water on the thing in a moment of absent-minded clumsiness and then having to live without it for a while to reaffirm its usefulness. maybe it's a good thing i damaged it enough to need a replacement keypad; i found out the battery was swelling and might have eventually exploded, causing an electrical fire. "death by laptop" isn't quite the ending i'd choose for myself. 200618 ... raze now it's out of commission again, thanks to the dude who thought it would be a good idea to update the operating system past what a 2012 macbook could reasonably be expected to handle. so i find myself typing this on an eleven-year-old acer that somehow still functions even though a few keys barely work anymore and the s key is nothing but a sluggish switch without a keypad to cover it. funny thing about that s key. it started to go on me seven or eight years ago. after a while i could only get it to work by ripping off the keypad and pressing my finger against the switch beneath it. doing this allowed me to squeeze a few more weeks of life out of the thing. then it stopped working altogether. after that, whenever i had to use this old beast and i needed an s, i had to copy it from an existing file or document and then paste it wherever i wanted it to go. the only way to avoid losing my mind was to copy and paste a lowercase and uppercase s next to each other so i'd have easy access to whichever one was necessary at any given moment. earlier this year the acer started coming out of sleep mode on its own at random times. it would wake me up at night with a string of alert sounds. something kept filling up the field for my login password, as if a ghost was holding its finger down on a single letter and letting it repeat forever. it wouldn't stop until I hit the backspace. this computer's login screen hides the password, so i couldn't tell what was going on. curious, i copied the string of unintelligible characters, pasted the mess into a word document, and saw this: ssssssssssssssssssssssss this happened maybe half a dozen times. then it didn't happen anymore, and the s key just started working again. i guess it wanted to announce its rebirth to me or something. but yeah. lesson learned. don't trust dudes who don't think they need to wear a mask inside their very public computer repair shop. 201104 ... cocoon Its alive! Maybe the computer spirits were trying to say something? 201110 ... raze maybe! i wonder what they're trying to tell me. maybe i'm supposed to be wary of snakes (or the TSA)? 201110 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I also thought it was labtop! (Dissimilation of voicing? Help, help, the linguistics is getting me.) 201218 ... e_o_i The "s" key sounds like a major frustration. (speaking from the lesser annoyance of trying to use shortcut keys to type vowels with accents into a Google doc and discovering it doesn't work there) 201218 ... e_o_i So if I wanted to write "ça ne marche pas, Hélène, à la mode" I'd have to cut and paste a lot. 201218 ... raze it happened again, pulling me from sleep last night with sounds i hadn't heard that laptop make before. for a second i thought it was my macbook dying. i panicked. then i opened the acer and saw: ************************************** another string of invisible sibilance. 220407 ... raze the s key continues to do its thing. now it's the f key that's dead. i know what that's about. it's pretty clever, really — take away my biggest weapon so i can't hurl abuse at you when you piss me off. but i don't give up so easy. i typed a little message to my malfunctioning friend: "uck you." your move, ace. YOUR UCKING MOVE. 220725 what's it to you? who go blather from