Dear Mr. ProtoArc
May was a really terrible month for computer peripherals for me. Early in the month, one of my terrible pissgoblins who masquerade as cats decided that my beloved Model M keyboard might work really well as a litterbox and, little scientist that he is, decided that right then was time for experimentation. I’m not sure what conclusions he drew from it – little bastard hasn’t published yet and didn’t send me a draft for peer review – but my takeaway from the experience was that I needed to buy myself a new keyboard. After getting home from some truly irritating travel, I replaced my keyboard, and the very same day my new keyboard showed up, my mouse decided it was time to just stop working for no reason. I don’t think cat pee was involved, but no mere man can truly know the ways of the pissgoblins, so who can really tell?
Since having a busted mouse is even worse than having a busted keyboard - Apple laptop keyboards may be bad, but their built-in trackpads are atrocious - I immediately set out to Mr. Amazon’s website to order a new mouse, preferably with overnight shipping. What I intended to do was type “wired mouse” into the searchbar – I have never gotten over my BlackBerry-era loathing of bluetooth and don’t understand why every ding dang thing on the planet needs a damn battery anyway – but what I actually did, to my eternal delight, was typed in “weird mouse.”
Oh, what a glorious rabbithole that opened before me, sir. I’ve been using computers for what feels like longer than I’ve been alive; my first computer ran DOS 2.12 and didn’t even have a mouse, so I remember the days of taking apart ball mouses to clean the desk salsa off the little metal spinny things, trackballs the size of aircraft carriers, the OG Wacom-like penpads that connected by wire to a little black box with dials on it that you had to adjust to change the sensitivity because it changed with like air moisture content and idk static electricity and if you’d eaten pizza the night before, hell, I once even thought I would become a Pointer Industry Disruptor myself and tried to sew tracking bits into a glove.
What all of these glorious, terrible peripherals had in common was that they were, like, pre-Y2K. In my innocence, I somehow came to think that disruption in the computer pointer industry had ended with the scrollwheel. What a feast that mistaken search of Mr. Amazon’s world wide web site provided for me! Computer mice didn’t need to be soulless trackpads or little grey lozenges anymore! Innovation in mice hadn’t died out with people extolling the virtues of the Dvorak keyboard! Huzzah!
With such a glorious smorgasbord of capital-D Disruptive mouse designs spread before me, what else could I do but browse that list of ridiculous-looking mice for hours? Well, okay, more like ten minutes, but you can surely forgive a little bit of hyperbole from me? If you can’t, definitely keep reading, because we’ve barely scratched the hyperbole surface, you’ll want to be keeping an itemized list of my sins before assigning me my requisite Our Fathers. In that ten minutes of searching, I kept coming back to one mouse in particular, Mr. ProtoArc – your EM11 NL Wireless Ergonomic Vertical Mouse.
I can imagine you, sir, deep in your workshop, assembling regular computer mice out of your little clockwork gears and low-power optical lasers. Grease on your cheeks. Sweat on your brow. Squinting into a magnifying glass as you place the sapphires just so in their clockwork cradles. Days with your nose to the grindstone, faithfully copying early-2000s designs laid across your table like a medieval monk laboriously hand duplicating the Book of Kells in all its illuminated glory. I can see you, sir, on the day when it happened, when the inspiration struck. When you threw your tweezers across the room and for the first time in years stretched your hunched back straight and said with pride “Wait! What if the buttons…. Were on the side! Not on the top!”
What could I do, sir, but order one of these mice immediately – with free overnight shipping! As advertised, the package came the next day, and with shaking hands, I ripped open the recyclable packaging and opened the small black box containing the mouse, and…
Look at this thing. Look at it. Sir. Look at it. Look at this ridiculous Thanos-Infinity-Gauntlet looking thing. extreme Derek Zoolander voice “What is this? A mouse for crabs?” This thing looks like it was designed by one of Mr. Lego’s minifigures, for one of Mr. Lego’s minidominatrixes. Hey Mr. ProtoArc – Deleuze and Guattieri called, they’re suing you for copyright infringement, “Mouse is a lobster, a double articulation.” I’ve seen barbecue gloves that look less ridiculous than this. This is what happens when an oven mitt has children with a silpat. Ooh, little grip ribs where your thumbmeats go – For Her Pleasure! This thing rose from the sand of a desert planet and ate Lieutenant Tasha Yar. This thing is so ridiculous looking that it might actually look better painted with Vantablack. It's so absurd I’m actually surprised you can’t draw the Fibonacci spiral on it. If you look at it straight on, it looks like it’s gonna start singing Baby Shark at you. This thing has such a pronounced underbite it should have had to wear headgear 24/7 in middle school. This thing looks like a mid-90s MTV snake sock puppet, it's gonna start singing “I’ve Got Lazer Eyes” once it's done its doot doot, doot doot.
But that’s enough making fun of the looks of this Pontiac Aztek-ass mouse, even though I’m sure it looked better in it’s home in the ocean depths and bloated like a blobfish when you reeled it in. How does it work? Despite looking like a bitumen seep, it does actually move a mouse cursor around a computer screen. Despite looking like something a sick dog left in the front yard, it pairs with bluetooth easily enough. Despite looking like a Cybertruck accessory, it’s comfortable enough in the hand.
All that aside, the real problem with this mouse is something you, sir, in your candlelit workshop under Chesney Wold, should have realized. There’s something in this design that just won’t fly – and I’m not even talking about its lack of wings, propellers, or aerodynamics [rimshot!]. At its most basic, any computer mouse is a device for tracking movement in a two-dimensional field, and any computer mouse needs to do that with precision. In this disruptive design of your, sir, you have, in your wisdom, put the buttons on the left and right sides… which means that when you click a button – especially the thumb buttons – the mouse moves and you are no longer clicking where you clicked. The normal buttons on the right hand side – the left and right click analogues – those are counterbalanced against your thumb, and they don’t move the targeting that much. But the weird thumb buttons? Good luck using the lasso tool in photoshop with those buggers!
The really funny part of this mouse, though, sir, is that you billed it as an “ergonomic” mouse, which made it truly hilarious when my elbow started aching after about an hour of using it. That at least made me stand up and walk away from my computer, which is something that I truly needed – so I got that benefit out of it at least!
With all of this said, sir… I’m not going to say that I didn’t get anything out of this mouse. This mouse made me dream of a better world. See, I’ve been using a lozenge-type mouse for probably thirty years now, and when you do something for that long, you don’t really think about it anymore. You don’t think about the little muscle movements, you don’t think about the mechanics of it. You just go rotely on, because a computer isn’t something “fun” anymore, it’s just a tool to do whatever it is that you do. And anything that shakes that up is kind of a good thing! I thought about what my fingers were doing on the mouse for the first time in years, and it made me imagine a different world. A better world.
In this world I imagined, your “vertical” mouse was the original mouse. We didn’t have lozenge-type mouses in this world. So in this brave new world, we wouldn’t left-click or right-click. What I realized, sir, was that I was clicking the “right” button equivalent, and triggering the scrollwheel, with my middle finger. In that better world, instead of right-clicking buttons, we give those buttons the middle finger. And instead of scrolling a webpage, maybe, just maybe, we spend our days fingering a webpage.
And I think we can all agree that that world is a better one than the one we live in today.
Sincerely,
Alex Parise
