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nothing more than to show up at each other’s blog and read the latest posted article, then use the comments section to praise or troll the author. Sometimes a few of us took the trolling a little too far, but for most of us, it was all good fun.
    I turned on the overhead lights in the living room and began taking pictures of everything. When I got to the motherboard, processor still seated in the socket, I paused. I put my phone down and grabbed the board in one hand, the cpu in the other. I gave a slight pull, but it wouldn’t budge. I twisted a little, and a popping noise sounded as the processor came free of the socket. I checked the socket and the processor’s edge where it had been plugged in, but I couldn’t see any damage. I frowned again, something I was starting to worry about, having heard my whole life from Mom that if I did it too much, my face would freeze with that expression on it. I hovered the processor over the socket again, and again I felt the magnetic pull of the two items, and once again the cpu snicked into place within the socket. And once again, a flash of blue briefly lit the cube.
    I put it on the coffee table and took more pictures. When I was done, instead of boxing everything back up, I decided to let my curiosity drift a little further. I started removing the other components from their packaging, setting each item on the coffee table.
    “Oh, Tyler, please don’t do that in here,” my mom said.
    I looked back at her, standing half-in and half-out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.
    “I promise, Mom. I’m only going to take some pictures and then pack it all back up.”
    “Weren’t you just taking pictures?” she asked, cocking her head, trying to catch me in a lie.
    I winked at her. “I was. I still am, thank you. I’m going to put it together real quick and get a few more pics for my blog.”
    “Blog,” she snorted and turned around.
    Mom wasn’t a tech Luddite, but she didn’t really understand the whole blogging thing. I’d tried to explain to her what it was, but she always gave me the same snort. If my father was around, he’d be of no help, asking loudly why I wanted to talk about boogers online. The two of them would get each other going, and within a minute, I could walk away while they were carrying on, laughing sometimes like wild hyenas at their own comedic genius.
    Mom and Dad both were perceptive enough to understand the whole “geek living in Mom’s basement” joke, and had threatened me since puberty that they were going to buy a new house that didn’t have a basement, just so I couldn’t end up living with them until I was forty. It wasn’t like it was a one-sided thing though. I ranked them out as often as possible for being old, being grey, not understanding technology. My favorite was when one of them would ask me to hand them the remote to watch television, and I would lock it with a code.
    Dad went especially crazy, able to turn on the stereo receiver but not the satellite box or the television. The best I’ve ever been able to achieve was one day when he got so pissed he stomped around the house and threw the remote at the wall. When he heard me howling with laughter from the dining room, he hurled one of his slippers at me, which made me laugh even harder. He definitely hadn’t been an athlete in school.
    I kept the motherboard’s manual open in front of me as I opened each component package and pulled the unit out. Normally it took me around an hour, sometimes two, to build a computer from scratch. I’d had plenty of practice at it, having built the three desktop computers in our house, and at least ten more for friends. We weren’t rich by any means, but my parents trusted me enough to build them a great computer for as little money as possible. Neither could live without their news sites, social networking, videos, music, whatever else they’d become accustomed to having access to each day of their lives.
    The hard drive snapped