A mouse is one of the most used parts of your setup, and you shouldn't be using a piece of shit plastic shaped to destroy your hand.
In all my years of computing, the worst thing was using my mouse. I developed really bad carpal tunnel which made it sometimes unbearable to use my computer, and back as a teenager too! I shouldn't be experiencing fatigue that early on and I knew something needed to be done. At that time I had one of those piece of shit $60 gaming mice with all the keypads and lights and nasty plastic that absorbed all the gunk off your hand.
I went online and grabbed the absolute cheapest vertical mouse I could find, a $20 Anker mouse. I didn't care about my research telling me you'll suck at whatever games and that it takes forever to get used to, those are problems worth getting over. Sure enough, this helped a ton and almost immediately fixed my pain! And as you can see this isn't no half ass vertical mouse, you absolutely have to cup your hand around it. Its a very different sensation, and yeah I lost a lot of accuracy for the first month but you get over it! Bare minimum if you're using any sort of mouse PLEASE just grab the tallest vertical mouse you can find.
But I didn't stop there. I ran that for about 2 years I think and it was very healing, but this other type of mouse really kept eating away at me, it was so intruiging.
Introducing the trackball mouse, or what I think should be the baseline standard mouse. The upgrade if you've never felt it is immediate. There's no way to move the mouse, its a paperweight- and the trackball does everything. Just like with the vertical mouse it has its own learning curve, but I think its actually superior for gaming too! The precision you can get with your thumb is unreal and I don't nearly need to do as much mouse-speed adjustment as I used to in games. The pain is nonexistant too! Of course if you have joint pain in your thumb don't use it, go with a vertical mouse, but otherwise get on this asap!
It also obviously removes the need to readjust your hand when you move too far. Repositioning your thumb is so much faster and easier, and unlike a regular mouse, if you know you're gonna make a manouver that requires a thumb realignment, you can just flick the trackball and have it continue spinning while you readjust! Super useful in FPS games. Its also super fun just flicking it as fast as you can and watch the sensors freak out.
The only downsides are that you have to clean the inside every once and a while, like maybe weekly. Your hand gunk gets trapped on the rollers so slowly your ball will get slower and slower until its unbearable to move. Even when you fully clean it the dropoff in speed from like the first hour is noticable too just from sheer amounts of hand oil. Its a fast clean though you either get like a brush or a paper towel and wipe it for 2 seconds with the ball removed.
My mouse in particular though isn't my endgoal, as you can see above its not very vertical so I still get some wrist pain depending on how I hold it, just wasn't in my budget yet. Trackball mice are also so uncool that there's like 0 color variations. Endgoal is I wanna have some damn tan/beige!
Actually the super super end goal is just to get one of those ergo split keyboards with a trackball built in, and then have my current setup for games I can't easily rebind too or something. Shits too expensive though we need to make these things the standard!!!
Comments
