Recently, The edgeThe review team has made an effort to get rid of some of the old products we have in our office. We donated or threw away some truly prehistoric gadgets. But there was one device that I knew I had to save as soon as I saw it. It was the Razer Firefly, a seven-year-old mouse pad with a glowing RGB light strip around the edge. It was a beautiful fool and extra device, and I knew it was made for me.
I now use the Razer Firefly at my desk in The edgeManhattan office for several weeks. It offers 16.8 million customizable color options. He sits by my side all day, flashing purple, pink, red, yellow, blue and everything in between. “But what does it do? to do?” several people have asked me as they walk by. It’s definitely diddly squat, I tell them. It’s an aesthetic, an atmosphere. But some days, that vibe is everything.
It sure is fun to hate on obnoxious RGB setups. (And I’ve been known to do it myself because I argue that some colored products are really over the top – Asus ROG Strix line, I’m looking at you.)
But every day that I use the Firefly, I warm up more to the idea of a (light) colored setup. For those of us who often work in solitude (either because we are remote or because most of our colleagues are), existence can feel like a bit of a hamster wheel – we work and work and the work goes on, and while we co-workers and friends exist as names and icons living on our screens, there are points where it’s hard to convince ourselves that it’s all going somewhere, that anyone is even listening.
So while I know it can’t be a basement gamer of mine anymore, I’ll continue to allow myself the mouse pad. While the solar cycles and capitalist routines become so instinctive that they feel monotonous, one can never predict what color will appear on the Firefly next.
The office around me may be gray and empty, but the Firefly is bright, happy to be here and very much alive. That LED strip is a sting of pointless fun on a desk full of utensils, and that sting is a reminder that there are small pleasures, there are surprising pleasures, and there is a world beyond these walls.
