I was never one of those people who had names for my cars, mainly because I never actually owned them – my parents did. I got my first laptop as a graduation present when I finished highschool, and though I never named it at the time, the person I gave it to when I upgraded starting calling it “The Beast” because it weighs something like ten pounds (it also, unlike two of the three laptops that followed it, still works).
I had a nice, big-screened Gateway computer after that, which also went unnammed, though I certainly whispered many and varied terms of endearment over it when it actually managed to store 20 gigs worth of music.
When that one blew up on me, I bought one of those tablet PCs and called it “bird” because of it’s small size (I think it weighed 2lbs).
When that one gave out on me last year or the year before, I bought this new Sony Vaio with the slick looking screen and comfy keyboard. It’s reasonably light, but far from compact, and I’ve got a big wide screen for watching movies and a big keyboard for comfortably typing up a lot of fucking books.
It also just so happened that I was hip-deep in God’s War about that time, and when I had to type in a name for this computer, the first one that popped into my head was the name of GW’s heroine: Nyx.
My ipod, which I got soon after, has the name of Nyx’s female sidekick: Anneke (that’s the little name that shows up next to the drive letter and everything. It always makes me snicker).
If I keep burning through computers like this, I may have to shelve the old shells on the ego shelf with the actual books whose characters I named the hardware after and whose pages were typed on the same machines.
Books and dead laptops filed away on the same shelves feels very Gibson.
