What’s on your desk, Joanna Nelius?

Joanna Nelius is simply a fresh addition to The Verge’s staff, having joined us a small over a period ago to become our fresh laptop reviewer. But while she’s been reviewing laptops, desktops, and PC hardware for her full career, she is besides going to study on broadband and education. “I’m peculiarly excited to start reporting on the second two,” she says, “because that’s what I utilized to cover erstwhile I wrote for Gizmodo and ended up falling in love with those beats.”

In fact, Joanna’s background is in creative writing, literature, and teaching. “But with the current chaos surrounding generative AI,” she explains, “and the push for more tech courses, including digital media literacy in cash-strapped schools, it feels like I’m in the right place at the right time.” She is besides working on a memoir and respective short stories.

Here, Joanna discusses her usage of today’s technology, her fondness for yesterday’s, and how her family’s past has influenced her present.

Downstairs and off the main hallway, where most of the another rooms are located. My partner and I decided to decision in together recently, and we settled here due to the fact that it had adequate space for us to each have our own office. We both work from home, are in and out of meetings all the time, and do creative work that requires quite a few focus, so separate workspaces were on our list of requirements before we even started looking at places.

All of the furniture in my office came from my old place. I insisted on keeping my surviving area couch due to the fact that it wasn’t cheap, but I besides truly wanted an office space that felt akin to any of my college and grad school professors’ offices. Theirs were cozy and filled with the odor of old books, worn leather furniture, and photocopied reading packets. I’m getting nostalgic just reasoning about them.

I love antiques, things that scream early 20th century, especially if they feel like they could have come from a school. Mine is simply a three-piece from planet Market, and it’s about as utilitarian as you can get for a work desk: heavy, thick wood for the surface, and painted, somewhat distressed metallic for the storage. I’m glad I opted for 1 side to have open shelves alternatively of 2 sets of drawers, though. Like quite a few early 20th-century furniture, the drawers don’t have tracks, so it’s just metallic rubbing on metallic and doesn’t always sound large — but I love this desk and don’t see myself getting free of it anytime soon, if ever.

My swivel chair is besides from planet Market, and I bought it at the same time as the desk (years ago, and both are now discontinued). There were another colour choices, but I went with this 1 due to the fact that I thought it fit the best into the vibe I was trying to create.

In retrospect, I should have gone with a darker color. No substance how frequently I take a scrub brush to my chair, I can’t make it look like fresh again. It was besides a lot more comfortable erstwhile I first bought it, but after respective years of distant work, I can sometimes feel a spring poking me in the butt. I most likely should buy a fresh one, but overall, it’s truly been the most comfortable swivel chair I’ve owned.

It’s besides forced me to have good sitting posture, which is crucial erstwhile you sit at a computer all day! You’d think high-backed office chairs would do that for me, but I’m much shorter than the average person, so all they’ve done for me is give me neck and shoulder pain to complain about.

Speaking of aches and pains — my partner gave me his Logitech MX Master 3 mouse due to the fact that the gaming mouse I was utilizing before (and the 3 gaming mice before that) started giving me wrist pains. My pinky would lock up sometimes, too.

I don’t have any of those issues with the MX Master 3. It’s ergonomically designed to keep your wrist in a natural position, and even though it’s specified a tiny adjustment compared to how my wrist is positioned with a standard gaming mouse, it was adequate to completely get free of the pain. Now, I usage this mouse for everything, even gaming.

My keyboard is the Nuphy Air75 V2 with low profile keys and the company’s own Cowberry linear mechanical switches. I can see why Nuphy named this circumstantial mechanical keyboard line “Air,” due to the fact that it does feel like you are typing on air. The keys require small actuation force, and they make a pleasant and light thunk sound erstwhile they bottom out — even the spacebar, which has any of the best key stabilizers I’ve always seen on a keyboard. I’ve utilized besides many mechanical keyboards with wobbly, pingy spacebars.

The keyboard’s translucent panel goes hard on the ’90s vibes, too, and makes me nostalgic for the green VTech cordless home telephone I had in advanced school. Should this keyboard always give me the same wrist problems as gaming mice, I will cry. It’s the best keyboard I’ve always used.

It might look like there are 3 displays on my desk, but the 2 small displays are part of a dual-screen laptop, the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i. My main device utilized to be a gaming desktop that I built, paired with the same Gigabyte M28U display and another monitor, but after reviewing GPUs and CPUs plus laptops for so many years, all that hardware overwhelmed my workspace. I tried just utilizing 1 monitor for a while, but it wasn’t as convenient for managing multiple windows. My workflow broke.

Then, Lenovo came out with its Yoga Book 9i, which solved both my space and workflow issues instantly. The dual display was 1 reason and the Thunderbolt 4 ports were another. Since they support the DisplayPort protocol, I only needed a $10 adapter to connect my M28U monitor to my laptop.

It besides came with a keyboard, folio case and stand, a stylus, and a mouse, so on the days I teach interactive fiction to teenagers, I just pack all that up and go. I’m not being hyperbolic erstwhile I say this laptop truly changed my workflow for the better.

It is simply a Vectrex! I first learned about this portable all-in-one gaming console strategy about 10 years ago, so I tracked 1 down on eBay and was delighted that it inactive worked perfectly.

The old PC is simply a 1994 IBM ValuePoint 433DX/D I besides found on eBay. It’s almost identical to my first PC: the first PC I always played games on and the first PC that taught me how to type. Mine didn’t have dual processors like this one, though. Unfortunately, it doesn’t completely boot up at the moment. It turns on, the hard drive spins, but I’m worried I did something to it erstwhile I replaced the CMOS battery. I’m glad I at least have it, though. It reminds me of my dad, so I like keeping it in my office.

Some of those I late bought at a retro game store close my house, but 3-D Ultra Minigolf utilized to be my dad’s. We played that together all the time erstwhile I was a kid. I’d sit to his right so it was easier for me to scope the mouse, and we’d take turns putting our golf balls around ocean floors and another intricate Putt-Putt obstacle courses. At 1 point, my dad started figuring out how to get holes in 1 by aiming the ball at anything but the hole, and he taught me how to do it.

SimCoaster is another 1 from my childhood, but it was originally my brother’s. We frequently played it together, him focusing on building and layout, and me on the economics of moving a cartoon-like subject park.

It’s a household heirloom! After my granny was done serving in the WAVES during WWII, she moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, and that Remington 12 was 1 of the things she brought with her. It was originally her sister’s, who acquired it from the lace mill where they worked at the time. I don’t know the exact circumstances that allowed her to take it, but if I had to guess, the company was upgrading their typewriters from the Remington 12 to electrical IBMs and needed to get free of the old machines.

From there, it sat in my aunt and uncle’s retention (or rather, their garage), and erstwhile my granny passed away, my aunt gave it to me, along with an full plastic bag of unopened inked ribbon boxes. The ribbon that was already installed in the typewriter inactive had any ink left in it, even after being in retention for decades, although I had to press the keys down with a crucial amount of force to get the letters to show up. But all part of it is inactive in working order, save for a couple letter levers that don’t completely fold back down after you press their corresponding keys.

Yes, of my ancestors. (They are reprints that were made in the 1970s, not originals, unfortunately. I have no thought what happened to those.) The 2 on the right are of my granny’s household in the early 1920s, taken a fewer years after the adults in the photograph immigrated from the Czech Republic, erstwhile it was inactive Czechoslovakia. My granny is the oldest kid in both of those photos, around 3 years old. Her younger sister is to the right of her in the photograph with the full family. The baby is my great-uncle, and then there’s my great-grandmother, her brother in the middle, and then her husband on the right.

The old-timey photograph on the left is of my Italian great-grandparents, taken around the same time, after they had immigrated from Naples to Brooklyn. I have no thought who the baby is in the photograph above that. My aunt has no idea, either. It was among my granny’s things in retention erstwhile she passed, so we presume it’s 1 of our ancestors — possibly 1 of the great-great-uncles since he’s dressed like a small WWI soldier. 1 day I’ll figure it out.

Only the black-and-white 1 in the mediate and the cel animation sheet on the right. (I do love Friday the 13th, though!) The cel is an first from the animated Beetlejuice series. I found it at a collectibles store close old town Vegas, within walking distance from (if I’m remembering correctly) the 4 Queens with a generous large Lebowski slot device that funded my buying trip.

The black-and-white scenery photograph is 1 of my great-uncle’s first prints. In college, I was heavy active in black-and-white movie photography, from developing the negatives myself to making my own prints. I spent more time in a dark area than I did in my dorm room. But I knew very small about my great-uncle back then, beyond that he was a photographer at any point during his life. I only met the man erstwhile once I was a kid, and the only thing I remember about him was that he was grumpy, and he and my grandma didn’t seem to get along.

Some years after I graduated college, my great-uncle passed away, and to my surprise, that first print showed up in the mail. My grandma did talk to her sister-in-law on a regular basis and mentioned me getting into photography, due to the fact that my great-aunt was not only insistent on giving it to me but besides took the chance to tell me about his career as a photographer.

The man was a Guggenheim fellow. He taught postgraduate seminars and photographed ancient coins for the American Numismatic Society. His work was published in books alongside the work of insignificant White and Ansel Adams. I’m not certain if the MoMA inactive keeps any of his first prints in its collection, but his work was part of its collection back erstwhile my great-aunt sent me that print.

At that point in my life, I was the only 1 in my household (and much of my extended family) who did anything creative, so I felt like I didn’t belong. But learning all of that about my great-uncle changed everything. It was the encouragement I needed to keep pursuing a career as a writer. I most likely wouldn’t be writing this if it weren’t for that photograph.

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge