I’ve been having computer problems lately, and after some investigation, I’ve determined it was the capacitors in my old motherboard exploding and leaking goofy orange stuff all over the place to blame. After some investigation and lots of making stuff up, here’s what probably happened.

Some country or something hires a ninja to steal a formula for making capacitors.

The ninja escapes.

A mad scientist/businessman type uses the stolen formula to make truckloads of these capacitors.

The main character from Half-Life does some research and finds out that the formula used in millions of these capacitors in thousands of computers around the world isn’t any good and they’ll all explode and go crazy at some indefinite point in the future.

My caps explode.

In conclusion, having roommates with spare motherboards (and cameraphones with really good cameras) is way better than bad motherboards.

Edit: massive non-macro-lens closeup of real motherboard: 150k JPG, 1280x960