A really nice kitchen knife. I use it daily and it makes cooking so much more fun, which translates into eating less junk food and take out, saving a ton of money and being more healthy.

Vasectomy.

By far the best purchase I have ever made for myself. Seriously.

I went back to college at 30. That set me up for a career I actually enjoyed and a wage that was double the dead end job I had at the time.

A computer when I was still a kid. I wouldn’t be the quant and maths PhD I am today without it, that shit literally shaped my life.

I just kept messing around with it when I was 7 years old. I learned to write .bat files and create DOS bootable floppy drives for my games at that age (you needed to play around with Soundblaster drivers and DOS extenders at the time). Then at the same age I quickly discovered BASIC thanks to the fact that MS-DOS used to include QBasic. Then learned some basic assembly using MS-DOS’s included DEBUG tool. Then my father got me floppy disks with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ on them and then I learned that shit again just by fucking around and looking at the examples, all at the age 7~8.

I coded like a monkey but I still coded and at a very early age I already knew what people usually learn first in university computer science classes.

By the age of 14 I already knew how to write my own minimal bootloader in assembly and a basic 32-bits kernel in C. (then later on math ironically won me over, so ended up formally pursuing applied math with a tiny bit of computer science because I just didn’t need it and the whole exposure to programming at a very young age helped me a lot)

All of that was just thanks to the little spark I got when I first got that Pentium MMX computer.

I adopted a defective lizard from a breeder for a 20$ fee. This particular defect often results in culling the animal, as it is often too expensive and time-consuming to care for. Because of this, not much is known about its care.

I now am one of the most prominent “experts” on caring for this particular subset of creature. Though no one but the most experienced keepers should own one, I am still happy to give information to folks who may have to care for one, either from rescue or purchasing one before knowing exactly what they’re getting into.

Aside from being able to give advice on keeping these creatures alive, that’s not all the value: the real value is my stupid lizard. I got him literally just a couple of weeks before the pandemic & lockdowns started. He’s an absolute angel who has brought me so much joy in my darkest times. He’s sweet, gentle, goofy, and is a wonderful companion animal. He now has complete freedom in the front of my home (when he’s not in his vivarium) with his own heatlamp, ramp, and a view of the road where he love watching all the cars go by.

I love my stupid lizard. ❤️