A Quick Report on Abstract Thinkers

People who are abstractly-minded are, generally, very intelligent individuals, not thinking “How do I properly use object XYZ?” but rather “What can I do with object XYZ? Can it do action ABC?” I’ve been thinking about this and why, despite being as smart as I am (or so I’m told, I don’t mean to gloat and I’ll tell why later), I was barely able to maintain a 72% average by the time I graduated high school. My purpose for this article is to, hopefully, explain why that is for individuals with this style of mind.

My first point goes to the question of how these individuals think, and I don’t admit to or deny having a problem, but one day, it was the late afternoon, I was driving through town. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing that day, only that I was in town and probably making everyone who isn’t a fan of Neil Diamond mad. Anyway, I come to a thrift store that was but wasn’t open. The owners were in there, but they weren’t ready to reopen the store. Now, I’m no stranger to a good junk store (some of my best ideas come from those places, admittedly), but as I was leaving, I saw an old HP desktop computer. It was dusty enough to throw any asthmatic person into a hospital and smelled of cigarette smoke. Other than that, it only had minor cosmetic issues, so I asked the owner how much. She replied ten bucks, but since they were-but-weren’t open, I couldn’t pay with my bank card. Shocker. Thankfully, I had some cash on me, so swapping a ten for a computer was possible and, within a moment, I was headed back to my house. I didn’t expect it to work, but after I dug a power cable out of a box, it turned on and was barely used, still running the boulder known as Windows Vista. I have a small home network within my home’s network, partially to ensure that my stuff can all connect to each other and because our modem isn’t exactly nice about keeping addresses between power blinks. A few minutes later, after pulling a drive out of my old excuse-for-a-server and swapping a few things over, I now had a slightly-less-old excuse-for-a-server.

Abstract-minded individuals are always coming up with new ideas like this. They may not have turned their bedroom into a haven for every piece of pre-2010 computer that would fit in it, but the point is still there. Schools, at least in America, were designed in the 1800s. Sure, we have alternatives now, but most opt for public school, despite it’s many shortcomings. While it’s certain that some individuals might flourish in an environment that rewards obedience, repetition, following the rules, and thinking “inside the box”, others, like myself, don’t benefit from learning the exact same basic and/or useless information for over a decade. Sure, it gets more advanced… sometimes. In elementary school, I remember, I was easily the smartest one there, already capable of understanding and comprehending college-level material by the time I was in fourth grade. Middle School (Grades 5-8 for me) left me with increasing boredom through the years, with the exception of sixth-grade history and seventh- and eighth-grade English (Our teacher was promoted, so I was lucky to have him both years). Other than that, it was an environment of “I’m the adult, so I don’t care. I win. Deal with it.”, mind-numbing boredom, and two detention slips (one because a teacher said I “cussed [her] to high hell” and another because I forgot to charge my phone and it pinged due to a low battery), neither of which were deserved. I didn’t swear at a teacher; something was making my hand hurt (I’m guessing it was because I shut the car door on my hand that morning), it flared up, and I screamed through gritted teeth. Nothing was intelligible. The second incident involved the teacher taking my phone, going through it (despite the fact I told her no several times), and giving me a detention slip before sending me to the office to get another detention slip for the same thing.

That’s right, ignore the people who come in high and call in the middle of the class for the one person who avoids everyone. I lost a great deal of time and data over that incident that I’ll never get back.

By the time high school came around, I was starting to become a minor audiophile, including having a music library (though not a normal one by any standards and DEAR GOD, how I hate the n-word). I had an English teacher that failed me on several assignments because I would finish early and be left bored with nothing to do for over an hour, so I would put in my earbuds and start analyzing music, conjuring abstract shapes, ribbons, colors, images, everything in my head; I needed to stimulate myself mentally and I needed it bad. She came over one time, yanked the thing out of my ear and said “I’m giving you a zero on this assignment. Now turn off your music.”. Whenever I think back on that, I find it interesting how, after getting everything on the assignment correct, I still somehow failed. I got a few opinions at the time after being told it made me look bad. Long story short, she somehow managed to not have to answer for that. Bringing up success and failure, I believe that is when it was set in stone that I could no longer gauge the two on an algorithm, only reinforced when I found out I finished her class with one of the lowest passing grades in my whole graduating class.

Shakespear’s writings may have been well-revered in his time, but a lot of the between-the-lines information has been lost due to the English Language changing, not to mention I’ve never used any of it.

Most things from Grade 10 on either went in one ear and out the other or (and this became more prevalent as time went on), I would do the assignment, leave class about twenty-minutes in, and take my laptop (or whatever I had that fulfilled the role of “Laptop” at the time) and do my own work. I was put in an arts class at one point (mind you that I had no business in it, especially after I signed up for a BASIC class) and the teacher (somewhere on the other side of the country, likely) wouldn’t communicate with me, said I was working “too slow” and claimed that I threatened him on one assignment; I don’t remember the details, but it was a huge crock of bullshit that left me eating Tylenol like candies when I got home to combat the headache I had.

Anyway, back to the “skipping class” (as it was so eloquently labeled) bit- I went into the library with my laptop, headphones, and connected up my hotspot so I could study what I wanted or let my mind flow how it wanted to.

I wasn’t a cog in a machine, dammit:- I was a person.

Some days, I would write stories (or junk) to see what came of them. Others, I would download old or obscure software (even finding some from the “Glorious” North Korea, and I can’t put that in heavy-enough quotes, here! I’m actually laughing at the irony as I type this, to be a hundred percent honest with you) and pull it apart, see how it worked. Sure, I wasn’t reading Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales, but I was actually learning to do what I wanted to do. It wasn’t about being a replacable part in some machine, it was about doing what I wanted to do with my life. Eventually, I had a world for my writing built, I had workable code on a laptop that came out two years after I was born, I had ideas coming faster than I could get them out (Yes, I had ADHD when I was younger). No idea was a bad idea.

Make a person who’s half horse, from 1999 Soviet Russia, give him bat wings and a circadian rhythm favoring the evening hours, terrifyingly smart, and driving a Yugo of all things (though it was more duct tape than Yugo), and have him be a complete psychopath with no emotion, working toward a doctorate in both Psychology and Psychiatry? Go! No idea’s a bad idea! If you don’t like how it ends up, you can change it!

Download an entire album of music from a North Korean band because it sounds good? Well, if you have a computer and internet access, full speed ahead! Music is music.

You can’t apply rules to how people think, especially if you’re trying to prepare them for life in this day and age. We aren’t dictated by a bell, buzzer, or whistle after we graduate, so we need to know how to deal with those things. We’re not gonna be put in a batch of thirty people at random and given a task. We’re going to be doing so much more.

To the people who had friends (I was more lonely than not), you’ll probably be wondering where they went or how to make new ones. As a non-social person, I can’t really vouch for how this plays out, but I do know that you’re not taught how to do anything practical in school. It’s cool to know that y=mx+b is the formula for a line on a graph, but I haven’t used it since high school.

Ever.

The sad truth is that, well, the school system marks the abstract-minded as failures. As much as I don't want to say, it turns them into failures. As long as the success rate is ≥60%, everything is fine, and it's the student's fault. Abstract minds don’t think and work like that, partially because they don't think “This is X percent correct.”, they make lemonade out of lemons, and that's not to say all that's wrong with that line of thought.

I wouldn't have time to start there, unfortunately.

The abstract mind doesn't follow a set algorithm of correctness, it often builds its own reality and perception, seeing things not as they are, but rather a series of building blocks. Nothing is a bad idea, nothing is junk until it can no longer serve a purpose, everything has more uses than it says, and the practice of labeling an idea as “Bad” or “Wrong” simply doesn't exist in a form where it has enough weight to influence decision and process. The abstract mind doesn't have the concept of “Common Sense” in the same manner that others do, yet they are aware of the same idea. To give a metaphor, a typical mind (one that would succeed in a traditional classroom setting) can be seen as a room that is organized to preexisting rules and stipulations, where the abstract mind, a failure by classroom standards, would look similar to a room that has either no organization whatsoever, is organized in a manner that shows “laziness”, or is organized with things in multiple boxes and shelves alongside empty boxes and shelves, with or without labels.

Contrary to what may be taught and reinforced in the classroom setting, the abstract mind is extremely useful and beneficial in 2022.

What is "Cancel Culture"?

Cancel Culture, better known as cutting toxic people out of your life… There’s a lot of subjectivity in that sentence, even if you don’t think so. Granted, while there are people you do and don’t need to be around (I won’t concede that point), I didn’t require much research to come to the conclusion. Cancel Culture is, at it’s simplest form, removing someone from a group (often times society as a whole), and I’ll be explaining just why it does much more harm than good. Firstly though, using elements from the “Propaganda Universe” is never a good idea.

Cancellation, better known as forcing people from their social homes seems to be taking precedence over “I think X, so I’ll say X.”, primarily by the usage of microaggressions (eg addressing a male/female group as “Guys”, devolving who gets to start a game of chess into an argument about race) and the fact that they exist as a way of backing up one’s argument. I’d also like to take this time to say that going back through decades of documents to find something for the sake of distortion and removal from context. Often times, when we do this, we’re doing it to people of logic, rather than people of emotion. When we remove these people from society and consistently ignore them, it becomes not only survival of the fittest for those canceled, but an erosion of societal progress, quite possibly to result in stagnation.

When I mentioned “Survival of the Fittest” earlier, I don’t mean it in the way that only the strongest people who don’t get killed when getting the crap beat out of them survives. Rather, I’m talking from a standpoint of mental health. Being “Canceled” can result in a number of mental conditions that would, otherwise, likely have never appeared. Depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and actions of self-harming. While I do agree that the Cancelers have the right to set their own boundaries, essentially freezing public opinion of the Canceled in time likely isn’t the way to go. Explaining the general concept of this would involve the creation of a second society (I know I’m sounding like a conspiracist here, but stay with me) where the canceled can live, which does happen on a small scale in some cases, but mostly, this doesn’t happen like this. It normally ends up with the total destruction of one’s life, with the Canceler justifying it with the out-of-context data.

Stagnation of Society as a whole would likely be impeded when capable minds are thrown out. We lose the capability of formulating new ideas to help us, leaving us with only the minds who support canceling anyone who has opposing opinions, facts, or ideas. Reading the reports that I have on the internet has made me come to understand just how terrible of a society that we’ve allowed ourselves to create and fall into: In order to be accepted, you keep your head down and suppress what makes you you. In allowing your ideas, thoughts, and expressions to be known, or even leaving a papertrail, you’re allowing yourself to be canceled. The only way around this would be to somehow read the canceler’s minds so you could prevent going through this process, albeit at the cost of losing your individuality. The idea behind cancel culture is simple: Conform or Leave.

Put simply, I do believe that everyone has the right to set their own boundaries, but the do not have the right to ruin someone else’s life because they want to remove context and distort facts.

One Report of Cancel Culture

A Tale From Small Town, USA

I grew up in a small town, and I'm still living there, though I can guarantee that the majority of my readers would never have guessed. Everyone knows everyone, the local newspaper is only 50¢, and (at the risk of making a bad joke), word spreads faster than COVID-19. As of typing this article, I'm currently at one such byproduct called The Taste of Cherokee, a Veteran’s memorial event that's catered by most (if not all), of the restaurants in the county. One thing I have to say about small-town food is that there's none like it.

Come here on a Sunday after church and prove me wrong, I dare you.

Anyway, I could go on and on about good food, but there's more to the scope of this. In a small town, there's a sense of community... Then there’s the author of this article sitting at the table in the back typing on a phone held together by tape. Kudos if you can call me out by that. Still, you feel like you know everyone, and you know just where everything is and who everyone is. Over the course of a few minutes, I quickly found more people I had interacted with in the past than not.

The name “Smalltown, USA” can mean a plethora of things. To Little Billy, it can mean the park he and his friends spend all day playing at. To the mother, it means the Sunday Service. To the father, it means the old dirt road he learned to drive on. Put simply, it means something unique to everyone, tomboy and city-dweller alike. No two people have the same definition because no two people have the same experience.

The song America the Beautiful was played, and I can easily pin this as the best analogy. I play the song slowly and with feeling on the piano, pouring my heart and soul into it. The performer, Chad Steed, played it equally as personal on a guitar. Two people, one story, one piece, two experiences.

While I don’t consider myself to be from Smalltown, USA, there's no doubt that it would be certain that I would have met this place in my lifetime, even briefly. It’s a place where there aren’t any big Hollywood stars, it's a place where people are simply people… And that's okay. Smalltown, USA isn't about needing to know everything and being 100% self-sufficient, it’s a place where help is always close by if you need a dollar or a nice place to lay your head at night.
Sometimes in the modern world, we can forget to slow down and sip the coffee. Most of my time off, I'm treating McDonald's like a trendy Big Apple coffee shop, sipping on a good ten-n-ten (You know it’s good coffee if it needs ten cream/ten sugar to fight the stoutness).

Throughout the evening, I had many revelations and, to my own surprise, a few times tears almost surfaced. Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I don’t generally let the waterworks on unless there’s a big reason- then I excuse myself and hope I didn’t make myself a spectacle. As a measure to hopefully get off of this tangent I am now on, the revelation that stood out to me the most was that, as much as I don’t fit the default image (I prefer that term as opposed to the much-more-familiar stereotype), I am from Smalltown, USA.

Now, on a more serious note:-
To my American readers, both at home and abroad, as we remember Veteran’s day this November, and even as we remember the victims of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in a couple of days, we needn’t forget the brave men and women that gave the ultimate sacrifice in order to make possible what we enjoy today. To anyone who served to protect our land at any point in history, it wouldn’t have been possible without you and what you gave.

Therapeutic Fish for Humidifiers

Pets are great, aren’t they? You can have a playful dog, a sneaky cat, a bat that may have attachment issues, and even a peaceful fish. There’s a whole world of choices out there for you! But, say you want a fish, but don’t feel confident in taking care of it. No problem, a fish is rather easy to take care of. Now, say that you already have the space that a fish tank would live occupied with something else… a humidifier, for instance. You’re still alright on the front of wanting a fish! You may have to change your definition a little because little Goldie would be living in a humidifier, and I’m sure none of us would like to breathe the air off of fish water. With that being established, let’s move on.

Fish and humidifiers share a few things with each other. They both rely on water, they both have the potential to make you healthy, and they’re good to have around. Fish, though, have a therapeutic effect on some, especially individuals with some form of anxiety disorder. How, I’m not entirely sure, apart from the possibility that its because some fish in a tank aren’t exactly capable of posing a threat to you or your life… unless you do something that’s just crazy off of the deep end, like try to jump in and swim with them. That likely could’ve gone without saying, but I’m hoping I at least brought a smile to someone’s face with the mental picture of a six-foot-tall person trying to swim in a five-gallon aquarium. Anyway, just because you need a humidifier and don’t have room for an aquarium proper, doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy some of the therapeutic benefits that fish often times bring with them.

Now, back to humidifiers!

As for what I’m getting at, for the sake of argument, I keep an evaporative humidifier in my bedroom. Nothing fancy, just an Equate-branded one from Walmart that I got on the cheap in a somewhat-successful attempt at keeping my hands from cracking after I get home from work, as well as mildly sterilizing the air. Now, with a humidifier, it’s important to make sure the water’s clean, that way you aren’t going through filters absurdly fast or putting all of that gross stuff directly into the air. Minerals too, if you’re in an area with hard water and you opt for a filterless humidifier. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking, Jimmy.

“Sasha,” you say, “You have a filter in your humidifier!”

And you, Jimmy, would be right! See, using a filter-based humidifier (Evaporative, for instance) doesn’t make you immune from having issues from filthy/hard water being the source of your humidification. The minerals and chemicals in water, as well as oils from occasionally-curious fingers, can cause the filter to turn color, develop a crust, and other gross-looking things. Now, from my experience, these aren’t severe, as during a four-week life of each filter I use, the last week is spent with it flipped upside down to alleviate this. I’ve never noticed anything negative as far as my own personal health is concerned, but it is annoying that I have to do this to keep effective humidification from the device. Where do fish play into this? Great question!

You see, there are products on Amazon, as well as in some stores (probably), where you put them in any container of water and they clean it. How effective this is is up for debate. At the time of writing this, I only clicked the purchase button an hour ago, so I’ll have to wait until Tuesday before they get here. Still, with cleaner water should come longer lasting life from the filter. Another positive to this is that they even look like cute fishes! Sure, they’re not the kind you’d get from the pet store, but they’re fish nonetheless, and can have the same therapeutic and calming effect as an aquarium could provide you with, and at only a fraction of the cost! Thanks to the idea of this, I can have both clean moist air and have a cute fish that I don’t have to worry about what would happen, should I happen to neglect it.

What's Your Perception?

Note the screw holder in this article’s picture. The reason it looks like a pill organizer was because it came from the pharmacy aisle of Walmart, but that’s just a side affect of being broad-minded is you have a perception that asks “What can object XYZ do?” instead of the traditional “Where can I find object ABC?”. More on that below.

Just from looking at the variables, it’s obvious that object XYZ (a pill organizer in this example) can easily stand in place for object ABC (a screw holder). In fact, the only reason it’s a pill organizer in the first place is because it came from the pharmacy section of the store, much the same way that a 97¢ pencil case from the Back to School section (or even a shoebox, if you’re into that kind of thing) can be a computer case (if you have a board small enough, of course). The thing I’m getting at today is perception and how it affects our daily lives.

I can already feel the thoughts I may be getting from the query I’m about to present, but I’ll do it anyway to make a point, if nothing else. We have smartphones that can play music, surf the internet, take pictures, among other things. Apple even (to my knowledge as of writing this) has an iPhone without the phone called, eloquently, the iPod. But say you don’t have so many hundred dollars to spend on a phone without the phone, or you don’t wanna get into Apple’s ecosystem. I can relate, kinda. Anyway, it’s 2021, and smartphones as we generally think of them have been a thing since around 2007 or thereabouts, so there’s no doubt you have one lying around in a drawer, collecting dust or something. It’s probably running Android 2 to Android 5 and likely doesn’t have ultrafast 4G/LTE, maybe only having the older and slower 3G, which is acceptable for what I’m about to present. Say you’re like a certain writer we all know who doesn’t always prefer to take the easy way to do things. You’d rather not use the same device that you make calls on as your primary camera/dictaphone/music player/etc. Now is when you’ll wanna see if that old thing still works. I’ll wait if you want to go look for it.

Found it? Good! Let’s continue!

Being a smartphone, it likely has a camera app on it, a music app on it, and a voice recorder app. There’s also the possibility of it taking a microSD card (likely maxing out at 32 or 64 GB, suiting our needs quite nicely) and plugging into your computer via a micro USB cable. Chances are, it’ll still work with your modern computer, especially if it’s one of those really old ones that show up as an SD card reader. From here, it’s all a matter of what you want. Need a device that has all of your library of several thousand songs for those long days when you just don’t wanna be bothered? Just dump all of your music into the “MUSIC” folder and plug a pair of headphones in. Now you’re jamming to your favorite songs by Neil Diamond, Air Supply, and Guns ‘n Roses! The device, miraculously, doesn’t need to connect to YouTube, and thus, the Internet, to buffer the songs to your device, alongside those pesky ads that mess up your train of thought. The reason? Your old phone’s music app is pulling the music straight from the files you just copied onto it, so all you need is to charge your battery! Or, say you’re waiting on that little voice recorder from China that still has a few months left in shipping? No problem, your old phone has that covered as well! Just pop in a micro SD card and use the voice recorder app. You can even download one from the app store and use it offline if your phone didn’t come with one preinstalled… It’ll work just as well for recording speech and notes. Miraculous, isn’t it? And, while that old camera may not be high-enough-quality to discern every single hair on your face from a mile away, I’m sure that if you keep the lens clean and be steady, you can get just as great of a picture from the ancient device. Or, you could be a company that doesn’t want to go through the trouble of installing a switchboard. You can download an app called “Talkie” from Google Play, connect the aging phone to a wireless network with other devices using the same app, and have, in theory, something even better than the standard. With this method, individuals can exchange files in the app just as easy as if they were texting each other. You can’t lose this way, not to mention it’s a whole lot cheaper.

Sure, you may have to wait a bit longer for it to start, and the screen may not be big enough to use comfortably for every little thing, but an old phone or other handheld can still serve a multitude of purposes, so long as it’s in working order and has the right software.

But away from technology, the bigger issue that I’m trying to get at is that our perception shapes the decisions we make, whether ill-informed or otherwise. A pill organizer is a pill organizer, a pencil box is a pencil box, and an old phone is an old phone, but these items can be so much more with a little bit of creative thinking. Sure, there could be better alternatives, and there probably are, but often times, we regard things as useless, old, worn out, obsolete, and they probably are, but they’re still incredibly versatile and useful, given that they had a chance to prove themselves and their worth. By saying that, I may have just made the market for old phones in peoples’ sock drawers soar, but there’s a potential for everything. I should know this, I drive a Scion from 2008 that still starts and use a PC from that same year as a server and main desktop at the moment. Sure, they can’t do everything a modern equivalent can, but they can still fulfill a purpose, even if it takes a bit of thought.

So, the next time you go to upgrade or replace something, before you go to chuck it in the trash box, just think, “What can this thing still do?”.

A Little Light or A Lada Light?

No, the title isn’t misspelled (if any of my readers are from the Russian Federation or the former-USSR, you’ll probably get the pun). It’ll play in later. What I’m getting at, though, is that we’re now officially in the age of LED lighting for our houses, and you can go and buy LED bulbs of all styles on the cheap! No matter what you decide to run them in, you don’t have to worry about the fixture not being able to safely accommodate the wattage of the bulb, even for the new 75-Watt bulbs! Okay, they’re only about nine watts, but they’re labeled as 75-Watt Equivalent (meaning that they give off the same amount of light that a traditional bulb would take 75 watts to produce in only a fraction of that energy), so that’s the term I’ll be using. Besides, the only bulbs I’m gonna be talking about are LEDs. Yes, the little one is an LED too. When I said you can get them in any style, I meant it.

The two pictures that fail to do the scene justice paired with this paragraph are (in the respective order from top to bottom): the white, 75-We bulb and the not-an-incandescent 25-We bulb. Neither uses more than nine actual watts, so I don’t have to worry about ruining my desk lamp or burning my house by getting a bulb rated for too many watts, but what I do have to worry about is whether or not I’m actually able to see what I’m doing. I’ll admit, I had originally bought the 75-We bulb for my lamp when I got it, but quickly found that it was more useful for… keeping me awake rather than providing a soft illumination over my laptop table. Cue a few months later when my father asks me if I want a two-pack of LED bulbs (one was missing, but that’ll come up later). He said that he didn’t like them because of the glare (I haven’t noticed any yet, but these are two different scenarios) and asked if I wanted the pack. Me being me and not wanting to make a trip to Walmart for just one thing, I decided to take the pack, especially after seeing it was a 25-We bulb (the incandescent theme of the bulb was an added bonus for me) and immediately swap it out with the too-bright LED from my lamp. Well, now I had an extra bulb that was too bright for something that wasn’t a whole room.

My bathroom has, very clearly, four light sockets in this fixture. Bulb №3 was missing for quite a while, assuming it was ever put in, so I used the spare bulb (picture №2 in this paragraph) for that and voila! I can finally stop getting bothered by that one empty socket! Of course, weeks later when I would eventually come to write this article, I’d swap it out for the 25-We bulb (picture №1 in the paragraph) for the sole purpose of making another point… it’s possible to have a room inadequately lighted for a task. I’m sure the older generation is well-aware of eyestrain caused by dimly-lit rooms. Regardless, I did it anyway and swapped the bright bulb out for the desk lamp bulb (if only for a few moments). Already, it was obvious that I made the right move by matching up the bulbs. Neither fixture or socket was at risk of damage, and I was not at risk of becoming a me-shaped lump of charcoal. Anyway, because I tend to want to keep things matched (Every LED bulb I put in my Maw Maw’s house, I always

, apart from the chandelier, used the same 75-We bulbs for consistency’s sake), I had two options: the first was to leave the 25-We bulb in my desk lamp and the four 75-We bulbs in the bathroom or I could go to Walmart for three more 25-We bulbs for the bathroom and end up with a bathroom that’s nearly too dim to use and a desk lamp too bright to be productive.

Much like in other situations, the simplest answer is often times the correct or best answer. If you're looking for a humidifier, the best type is evaporative! If you're looking to light an area, larger areas need more watts of light! If you're looking for a television, you can probably do with a traditional flat screen instead of a Smart TV. Generally, adding details to things only complicates the entire situation, often times to a needless degree.

A few of the current projects I am working on (Cherokee Post Herald Original)

This article was originally published in the 07 April 2021 edition of the Cherokee Post Herald.

I started cleaning out a few things the other day to rearrange a room:- I’ll save you the anticipation because I can’t arrange anything for anything. What I did find, though, was a number of things that I have, for one reason or another, just stopped using. Old laptops, flash drives, a floppy drive and floppy disks, the list goes on.

The design of the room, and you’ll see how this plays in here if you follow along, the design of the room called for some technology to use. Now, the nicest computer that I pulled out of the room was an old Lenovo laptop that, quite frankly, overheats and didn’t seem to have the resources that it should have for use as a daily-driver. Among the technology in said room was also an old Dell that used to belong to my grandfather that had such a small amount of processing power that was... comical... to say the least. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it crashed when I tried opening a small document. Anyway, I started thinking: Most of what I use on a daily basis is starting to age, some things better than others, so what if I could squeeze some extra life out of these old clunkers?

So, after cleaning out that room, my what-I-call-madness kicked in, and I did just that.

It took a little bit of digging to figure out exactly what I needed to do, but eventually I was able to find something that worked for me and whatever it was I was working with.

The first thing I did after I had room was work with the Dell; the weakest system I have that can still connect to a network. Knowing that there’s no real way I could use this for any real amount of work directly, and thinking how I use an old and crappy netbook for a backup internet connection, I figured that it would happily live as a file server, and I could have a bit of fun with it too. To make a long story short, I have a file server running what is functionally equivalent to Windows 95.

The hard part in that whole scenario was tracking down the libraries I needed to get the thing to work, but now that it’s rebuilt with a new SSD, I can happily say that it runs 24/7 with the exception of power outages and a monthly upgrade.

My second major project was actually the laptop I’m typing this article on right now, the aforementioned Lenovo. Because it has a considerably higher amount of power and resources in general, this was a much easier project in both time and ideas. Sure, I could set it on a table and have it collecting dust while it gets treated like a server, but it still has a lot of potential, assuming I’m willing to cut a few corners. Some of my closest friends know that I’m a Linux junkie, and that I often can get the same performance and usability out of a decade-or-more-old piece of technology, so I simply threw a copy of my software of choice (Arch Linux, better known as “Not for the faint-of-heart”), used a lightweight desktop and gave it a bit of a paint job so it feels much like a copy of the all-too-familiar Windows XP. I could go on and on with the things I’ve been able to repurpose or scrap for parts, but we don’t have time for that in this article, sadly. The room ended up being a success (so far, as I haven’t finished it), and so far, along with being a bit of a throwback stylistically, it’s provided a number of things a great place to not only call home, but also a way to show that, no matter how old and apparently useless, they can always serve a purpose someway, somehow.