I was working on the original Homebrew Steampunk Laptop, trying to correct a minor fault with major surgery. It was stupid late at night, my eyes were well past bleary and approaching Krispy Kreme levels of glazed (substitute Dunkin Donuts if you're Up North -- sorry, I'm stuck in North Carolina), and pads were lifting off of PCBs. Not good.

I had removed a troublesome barrel jack from a USB hub -- it was getting so that it would intermittently let go of its plug a little easily, because the jack and thus the plug were really too small for the current requirements that it was being subjected to. I then had clumsily managed to lift the pad for the center pin of the barrel jack, and -- having traced out the circuit as best I could -- thought I knew which trace to get the coating off of to wire up the positive lead so that it would still operate. Clearly, I should've taken a step or two back and said, hold on, this might be a bad thing at this point to persist onward.

Being given, however, to be more stubborn (and at times, less intelligent) than the proverbial rented mule, that is not what happened. Instead, I very quickly discovered, upon reassembly and subsequent application of power, that I had not been nearly as successful as i'd hoped. I had exceeded the limits of my luck, and the result was a shorted-dead USB hub and a motherboard with a lot less Magic Smoke inside.

Oh, dear.

At this point I was out of religious deities and swear words both (not to mention any hope of proper functionality), so I very wisely set the mess down, sighed and shrugged, and dejectedly signaled my surrender by going off to bed.

The next morning. it occurred to me that, while that particular machine was likely unsalvageable, there was still a way to turn my epic fail into something of a phoenix. I had been idly musing of producing a successor machine from the original, and while I was no longer able to pull substantial parts from the original, that by no means precluded me from making a new machine in some sort of reinterpretation of the image of the deceased.

Being something of a sketch artist, this is approximately where I picked up my pencil and got down to artwork.