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About 2 years before the COVID-19 pandemic rolled around and shook up every single aspect of society (I will touch on how the hobby was shifted due to the pandemic and how it personally affected my experience in the hobby later), I found myself sitting in front of the laptop screen every single day, either coding away or typing out essays and short stories during the day, and editing my street photography photos at night, on my compact HP laptop scissor keyboard. I loved every bit of the process of creating and being creative, and maybe even more so the interconnectivity of everything helping me take inspiration from literally anywhere and anything within a matter of seconds, walking through digital museums and having free personal tutors, etc. But the more I lean into the workflow I loved, the more I realized that I absolutely hated the raw human process of interacting with the computer. The act of mashing slabs of lifeless flat plastic for extended periods of time for every single task I needed to accomplish did get quite fatiguing, especially since I started picking up more photo commissions and doing more creative writing, on top of having to write more essays while pushing towards one of the big checkpoints of my academic endeavors. Coming back from a long-overdue restful winter break, I decided to look around for a dedicated keyboard to flesh out a more permanent home desk workspace instead of having to curl up in library corners and walking to coffee shops and finding the nearest electrical outlets, and practically setting up camp there for a whole 7 hours at a time (this did not get fixed, by the way, but I’ll get to that in a second).
Having been brought up in the era just after the exponential curve of the consumer market’s dedicated keyboard interest, I’ve grown up typing on my dad and uncle’s nostalgic $3 Dell rubber dome keyboards that I’ve never thought too much about. But having used those extensively at the many libraries that I’d frequented, I decided that I didn’t really want to turn my home workspace into a glorified library corner that I also game and sleep in, so I wanted to to try something new that would make me feel good about directly interacting with productivity. At the time around the 2010s, all the big names in the gaming keyboard scene popped up as “the best keyboards around” (a statement which I didn’t really buy), and office folks around my area were also slowly adopting gaming keyboards as their work boards. Again, I didn’t really think about them much, as I was never too big into the “desktop building” world, and customizing your workspace and/or gaming space (or what have you) had never been my thing. They were cool, sure, but wasn’t in as much of a financial stability to be able to pursue such rabbit holes (funny I thought that 🤦🏻‍♂️).
One day, hanging out in one of my old friends’ apartments and playing guitar, his roommate bought a Razer Blackwidow, and was typing away working on an essay in the background of our scuffed guitar strumming and singing. Naturally a very tactile-sensory oriented person (for 16 years, there weren’t many days I could let pass without giving in and picking up my guitar), I asked to try typing on his keyboard, since I’d never touched a mechanical keyboard before (however you would define it, Thomas covered this gray definition really well in this video), and the clickity clackity sounds it made just naturally fired all the good nerves of my curious brain. There isn’t much that I could describe how it felt to hear the audible mechanical “clack” that could do justice to that strange discovery of mine, but as a student with much anxiety disorder, the quick summary was… “I wish there was this soothing background sound every single time I do work”. It sounds quite stupid to voice it out loud, but for every keystroke I put down, the action of pressing associated with the sound and tactile bottom-out gives me gentle validation that I’m legitimately putting in work towards productivity. And I guess the sounds of typing, no matter if it’s on a laptop keyboard, a rubber dome keyboard, even those iPhone typing tick sounds, I have always found strangely soothing, calming and therapeutic. Touching that very first mechanical keyboard I’d ever come across, that Corsair TKL (that I still have no idea what the model was) with Cherry MX RGB Reds have pushed me over the edge, and I finally made the decision to make the investment for my first every keyboard - the Corsair K70 Fullsize. I quickly realized (it sounds really ridiculous but) there is so much more to typing and interfacing with your everyday computer and workload than I had ever thought to pay attention to.
To be frank, that was quite a long way to go from the highly-customized point of the mechanical keyboard hobby that I am currently at right now, but it was an honest start. Interacting with workload and entertainment felt like a gigantic step up, and I would find every single excuse to type on my keyboard. It was outfitted with - yup, you guessed it - Cherry MX RGB Blues. It was loud, and in my then opinion, proud, and my old roommate probably hated my guts for being the night owl that I was and clickity clacking away amidst his very healthy sleep times.
NOTE: Work in progress, still a work in progress. I am writing this still, if someone happens to see this before I officially publish this…