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Who is Iain Lee?
Iain Lee is a freelance counsellor who loves gaming, particularly retro gaming. You can get more information about Iain by visiting iainleecounselling.com or heading over to patreon.com/iainandKatherine
I am falling down the rabbit hole of watching people on YouTube recapping consoles and old computers, cleaning their cases with toothbrushes, retro brighting yellowing old machine carcasses and overall having a lot of fun bringing these beasts back to life. If I’m honest, I don’t even know what recapping is and the one time I tried to solder something I burnt the thing I was working on and damaged my finger quite badly.
These videos are SO SLOOOOOW. They take ages to get anywhere and they’re presented in a really gentle way. They run contrary to how my brain works. I am a late diagnosis ADHDer. My head can fire off in a million directions all at once. I am fuelled entirely by caffeine and dopamine hits. If something isn’t exciting and isn’t dinging my bell, I’m not interested. That in part explains why I am drawn to faster games. WipEout for me ticks every box – fast, noisy, relentless and colourful.
So why am I currently so obsessed with watching dudes fix 25 -year-old Japanese PCs that literally no one has ever heard of?
Do you remember when ASMR was big? Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It’s basically kids whispering into microphones and gently scrunching newspaper. Some people say they get tingles down their neck and their eyes roll back in their head, kind of like when you’re stroking exactly the right spot on a cat, and they get lost in themselves. I’ve had mixed luck with ASMR. The tingles come every now and then, but it isn’t consistent.
While I certainly don’t get tingles watching someone like Ctrl-Alt-Re
