Me: using safe browsing practices and only downloading from trusted sources

My Mom: downloading every toolbar in existence

My Mom: “You broke the computer!”

Early pirating was like playing the lottery.

Will I get the good version of a song or a weird remix?

Will the media play or be some unrecognized format?

What’s making my pc run so slow?

Or in the 90s, finding the Windows directory, “there’s a lot of stuff in here, I bet I can free up a lot of space”

This hurts. I still remember when I rendered our first family PC unbootable. It was a Pentium II 266 with a tiny 3GB HDD running Windows 98, and apparently some sub folder of system32 seemed a good place to start doing some clean up to win back some extra space.

Turns out, it wasn’t.

Now turns have tabled and I’m the stereotypical IT professional who helps out fixing PCs/smartphones

This was me when my dad would use limewire, break the family PC, and blame me because I was playing “those video games”.

This hits young me learning linux and dual booting straight in the feels. I can’t even begin to count the amount of times I totally wrecked the family computer and had to reinstall windows from scratch.