Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Whitney Reynolds, and by day I work for a very nice social impact non-profit that I prefer not to name, because by night (and all other times, actually) I am a shitposter on twitter. The "work" I "do" is something I tend to describe to people I meet at bars as "computer stuff," which probably leads people to believe I code or do IT or something, which is fine by me, because I rarely want to use the words "content management systems" in a social setting. But I'm the guy at my job who knows how all the shit works. And outside of that, I'm a guy who posts pictures of their cat, dumb jokes, and soup recipes online.
What hardware do you use?
Just kidding! OR AM I. Somewhere in my cabinets I have a work laptop I'm supposed to be using, but its screen is too small and my desk is too small to have two computers, so I just do all of my business on an ASUS TUF Gaming F17 gaming laptop. It is not actually any good for hardcore gaming because I don't have enough RAM, but it does have a keyboard that gently cycles through the colors of the rainbow. "I'll turn that off soon but it's pretty funny that it does that," I said to myself a year ago when I got this machine, and I have absolutely not turned it off. Why would I? My keyboard pulses through colors. I think I'm going to make it pulse through them slower right now. Ahhh. That's better. Recently the bluetooth and the webcam both started to eat shit for reasons I can't explain and I've had to buy things to plug into USB to make it work. I would not say I would recommend this computer.
I do my shitposting via this machine and a Samsung Galaxy S20, which I recently entirely paid off after two years. The storage space (it took me three solid minutes to remember an alternative to "hard drive" because saying "my phone's hard drive" would make me sound insane) is almost entirely full of cat photos and videos, and a lot of very stupid mobile games that I am addicted to.
I do not have a traditional "desk" because I have nowhere in my apartment, where I have primarily worked from home for five years, to "put it." What I have is one of those coffee tables with a lift up top, and a couch where my cat can sit next to me in a soft bed. It's very important to the setup for me to be able to reach out and touch my cat at any time. The laptop above is on a riser, to slightly prevent my agonies.
And what software?
Windows 10, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox. Slack and Discord as well, and for my side hustle of a Patreon where I post soup recipes, the recipe app Paprika. Vital to my life as a poster is TweetDeck, and the very important extension Better TweetDeck, which makes TweetDeck, the only reasonable way to view Twitter on a computer, better.
What would be your dream setup?
The above but with a more comfortable couch to sit on. I have had this couch for like 9 years and it is suffering from the weight of my ass. I've put a foam dog bed under the cushion. Actually two of them, and it only helps so much. Couches are so expensive.