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A few months ago -- whilst working at a small computer shop in Oxford -- I was quick to throw some cash at a Razer BlackWidow keyboard¹, which was truly a thing of beauty:

Although Razer's site has a lot of pseudo-scientific flannel (which, along with the "leet pack" they sent me, was almost enough for me to set the thing on fire immediately), there are only three important things that I really enjoyed about this equipment -- so much so that it was almost worth the obscene price:

• It weighs several kilos, and would probably in itself work as a weapon in the event of zombie apocalypse
• It doesn't have a single gimmicky feature (apart, maybe, from the configurable LED...)
• Typing on it sounds like a fucking machine gun

Long story short, the BlackWidow is now in pieces awaiting some soldering love, and I got bored with the terrible cheap backup keyboard I was using instead. So now, rounding out the array of large, LED-festooned black hunks of plastic on my desk is a Sidewinder X6:

Definitely a looker, if you're into a dick-waving aesthetic and excessive backlighting.

Apparently the engineering challenge involved in having both a pointless detachable number-pad and little legs as found on every other keyboard ever was just too great, so the Sidewinder sits flat on the desk (possibly its biggest failing), and I can only assume the hilarious LEDs use too much power for there to be any USB ports, but all-around I'm happy with it so far. In what was genuinely a shocking discovery, the terrible (Windows-only, duh!) software that manages macros and profiles is actually... not that bad! Microsoft seem to finally have nailed writing small utility programs for their own OS; let thunderous golf-claps ensue.

Anyway, further vodka-and-orange tsunamis excepted, I can see this this inhabiting my desk for many happy hours to come, and maybe at my next LAN party I'll have less of an excuse to lose at everything. Good times².