“When I first saw a picture of the ↑Boomslang in an advertisement, I immediately fell for its aesthetics,” I wrote in 2004, when I first attempted a case study in cultural appropriation of peripheral computer hardware, called ↵the taming of the boomslang. Not everybody around me shared my appreciation of the aesthetics of this legendary gamer mouse—when a close friend of mine first saw my Boomslang, she said: “This resembles more a rat than a mouse.” Anyway, Razer went on producing peripheral hardware, I stuck with their product line and later got my ↵new snake, which I am using till today. ↑The Surgeon ↑likes those mouses as well—but then he is affiliated with the ↑Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL). Which leads us to my next point: The CPL favours Razer’s Barracuda sound system (↑headset and ↑matching soundcard), and the new keyboard called ↑Tarantula. Sooner or later I will need a new keyboard, so I started to hunt down the Tarantula—aesthetics and design being the materialized form of a set of cultural ideas, inducing according ambience and feeling, I thought. All very well, until I found ↑the above picture in ↑a french forum thread. Now, this guy definitely displays a laid-back, relaxed, and downright cool stance and approach towards his peripheral computer hardware.
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