First, we wanted to know why someone would look at all the options on the market and decide to do all the extra steps to build their own. “My drive to do different builds is usually based out of some sort of need, either just a perceived need or an actual need. My monitor mounted custom-loop came from when my wife wanted an iMac (and needless to say, I'm not a fan of macs...)

Most of all, when it comes to building a custom PC for most people, I'd say it's the need to maximize the performance compared to the price. The aesthetics come in second I think. Sometimes the drive can just be a complicated idea that you want to see if it's even possible to pull off.”

Even though it looks complicated, the folks at BHB Mods wanted to encourage people to not be scared of building a computer. As long as you aren’t using a pizza box as a case, you should be ok. “Building your own PC is very simple, it's essentially "adult-lego-building". There's so many guides on YouTube and google to follow and these days there's hardly any risks at all and it's very easy. You end up getting the PC you want, usually a great deal cheaper than buying a pre-built PC. That along with all the customizations available in retail stores these days makes it a lot easier to doing your own good looking custom build than it used to be. 🙂”

The ‘[messed up] looking computers' Twitter page posts PC and PC-related images of setups and equipment that is thoroughly bizarre looking. Managed by the same people as ‘[messed up] looking cars’ and ‘[messed up] looking foods’ this account has reached over 200 thousand followers since May of 2022. 

Evidently, morbid curiosity of cursed items extends past technology and into everyday items. There is some psychology behind this. Some research suggests that we humans can actually enjoy a sort of “benign masochism” like enjoying spicy food or riding a roller coaster. Now, looking at weird images is hardly as stimulating as a roller coaster, but the mechanism is similar. Once we remove the idea that this activity is harmful, we are just left with a sort of psychological excitement that is quite enjoyable. 

I would bet that some of you viewed these images and wondered “what were they thinking?” Well, this feeling is actually also a strong motivator for this sort of content. Let’s face it, curiosity isn’t just limited to cats, we absolutely want to know about new things all the time. These creations absolutely scratch that “novelty” itch. Psychologists Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y. Hayden found that humans just enjoy seeing things that are still understandable, like a computer, combined with something we don’t expect. This interaction of familiar-yet-strange is very stimulating for our brains, since we feel like we can actually figure out how or why this happened.