Nothing I own is stock

I have never owned a piece of technology I left the way it came. I went looking for an exception while writing this. There isn’t one.

It started before I had the skill for it. The earliest evidence is the small CRT television that lived in my childhood bedroom, onto which I wrote my name in yellow colored pencil and got fussed at accordingly. I didn’t have a mod in me yet. I had a name, a surface, and a hunch the two belonged together.

The skill came later, and it came hardest with the Droid. A custom bootloader first, then a firmware that wasn’t Motorola’s, then the thrill of a boot animation that played because I put it there. Somewhere in that phone it leveled up, from writing on a surface to replacing the system underneath it. Every device since has been the same two moves: claim the surface, swap what shipped. I have flashed more firmware than some people have owned phones. Paying for a device has never made it mine. It’s mine the first time I change something the manufacturer would rather I hadn’t.

For years I told myself this was about features. The stock launcher was slow, the keyboard cramped, the watchface ugly. All of that was true. None of it was why. The tell is that I keep doing it to things that are already fine. The Pebble was a perfect little watch and I buried it under faces I wrote anyway. The AL80 came with a working clock and I still spent a night in its HID traffic turning a 17 into a 5. Nobody asked. The device worked fine. I couldn’t.

I don’t quite trust anything I can’t take apart. A device I can’t change is a device that can change on me: a feature pulled in an update, a server switched off, a subscription bolted onto something I already bought. I’ve watched it happen enough times to treat stock as a temporary condition. Fitbit switched off my watch. An update deleted my terminal pet. A vendor decided a 12-hour clock was too much to ask. So the mod is insurance, and I’ve stopped pretending it’s anything nobler.

So I keep a tally, because of course I do. Sixteen devices in active rotation, thirteen of them running something they weren’t sold with, and a backstock of twenty-two more I cannot bring myself to part with: jailbroken Kindles running firmware Amazon never blessed, a Vita on homebrew doing what Sony spent real money to prevent, a graveyard of phones each frozen on the exact custom ROM I loved it on. Nothing gets thrown out. It gets shelved, modded and mothballed, a private museum with one curator and no visiting hours. The phone in my pocket runs a launcher its maker never shipped. The watch shows faces I wrote. The keyboard spins a skull where the vendor wanted a logo. The terminal runs Oh My Posh with a prompt I’ve retuned more times than I’ll admit, and Claude Code’s one-line statusline is three rows of my own now: a stack of little scripts, a layout engine that refuses to reflow, and a bat named Flicker in the corner who changes his face when I commit or push. The laptop is riced to the studs, a Windows theme that looks nothing like Windows, heir to the Winamp skins I ran when a music player was a canvas, sitting over a personality made of scripts, a few of which have tried to brick it. The pattern doesn’t vary: I cannot leave a working thing alone.

And don’t get me started on game mods. That one needs its own post, and probably its own support group. I have opened a game to add a single texture pack and closed it four hours later with a load order two hundred deep, the thing slower to boot than it ran stock, which felt at the time like a fair trade.

You’re reading the largest mod I’ve pulled yet. This site is hand-built, no template, and there’s a resume hiding in the full stop of the domain at the bottom of the page because a plain link felt too obvious. I couldn’t leave the blog stock either. Somewhere there is a version of me who buys a thing, uses it exactly as intended, and gets on with her day. I’ve never met her. I assume she came that way from the factory.