I love a good desktop PC setup—yeah, I’m creepin’ on you, Battlestations subreddit. Mine is about halfway between “professional” (with wood accents and sound-absorbing panels) and “9 years old” (with toy spaceships and dinosaurs). But a YouTube creator wins the internet for today, creating an amazing and functional aquarium with real fish and other critters, all sitting under his monitors.
The first step is, of course, the tank. Using custom-cut acrylic panels, he made a tank to fit the trapezoidal space, going far behind the monitors to account for the shallow sides. He even elevated it by a few millimeters to make room for routing a wired keyboard and mouse, earning some bonus points from the PC gaming crowd. The whole setup moves up and down with the motorized desk, and even the lights adjust to amber in the evenings to match Windows 11’s built-in eye strain tool.
Actually filling the tank needed some serious expertise and no small amount of artistry, starting with the base layer of soil for the aquatic plants, then sand and rocks to make a “riverbed.” Over a couple of months, the creator added life, including fish, crabs, snails, and cultivated algae, carefully balancing the tiny ecosystem while he watched it underneath his monitors. The end result is a gorgeous, captivating environment just inches away from some nice PC hardware.
Honestly, just give the whole video a watch. I’m blown away by the different and wide-ranging bits of expertise on display. Not only is “tanks for nothin” an expert in all things aquarium, he’s made amazingly good use of the space at his dual-monitor standing desk (enabled by some well-placed VESA monitor arms). He’s also an excellent videographer and editor, where showing off his finished tank and underwater tenants feels like a mini nature documentary.
