Warhorse/Tleilax

My laptop, which I've had for less than a year and a half, pulled some weird shit on me today: the enter, spacebar, and backspace keys all suddenly stopped working. Since I have a numerical keypad, the enter and backspace keys can be compensated for, but there's no making up for a missing spacebar. Sure, there's the online keyboard that Ubuntu provides, but that shit sucks.

Enter Tleilax, my old Thinkpad T410. This tireless motherfucker was my daily driver for almost a whole decade of personal computing. I got it in 2011: it was the first computer I'd ever bought, after 30 years of family computers and hand-me-downs. Over the course of 9.5 years, I wrote a novel on it, translated a bunch of shit, accumulated a ton of good music (and deleted at least as much, alas), learned how to use Ubuntu (albeit at a purely luser level), plastered the case in archaeologically valuable layers of stickers, learned the value of mechanical keys (still not sure these are old-school mechanical, but compared to the chiclet trash on modern Thinkpads, it might as well be an IBM keyboard from 1990), and generally had a blast. Its busted corners are held together with gaffer tape. Several fingertips' worth of dead skin cells are encrusted on the keys. Memory chips are still recovering from relentless sessions of Hotline Miami. There are probably interesting textfile fragments and other things loitering in the file system.

Tleilax continues to be a warhorse. It doesn't run for shit on battery power, it can't handle websites made after 2015, it lags even on terminal applications, and it weighs a comparative ton, but goddamn, am I glad to have it around. Keep your old hardware, folks: not only will it save your ass when your ass needs saving, you might be doing a solid for a future generation, too. And odds are the speakers will be a lot better than your current machine. That's the case with this Thinkpad for sure.

Hail Tleilax. Hail old computers. Hail continuity with the past without sacrificing the future. Hail reuse.


Tleilax Resurrection: The Soundtrack (all taken from the Tleilax hard drive)

Mc Lars/YTCracker - The Digital Gangster LP
Perturbator - Sexualizer EP
NY Vice - Smooth Steering
Redbait - Cages
Dieter Geisler + Randy Reynolds - Ultraness
Kitty - D.A.I.S.Y. rage
Bretwaldas of Heathen Doom - Bones In the Ground
Devin Viber - Glitchhikers OST
Crom - Hot Sumerian Nights
Bloodstar - Chorus
Jessie Frye - Kiss Me In the Rain
Pet UFO - My Name is Esther Cohen
Wheels Within Wheels - Wheels Within Wheels/Merkaba split