It’s been reliable through all these years and you’re not attached to it at all? Buy a used Macbook Air or a Yoga, let the big beast live on a desk.

It doesn’t look damaged to me, see if Apple will fix it under warranty and keep the hookers and blackjack to yourself.

Rice can absorb humidity in the air or water that its submersed in, its not strong enough to “suck”.

The brightness may behave like that if your using it in the dark, it should figure out what you want and stop fighting you eventually. Did you put tape on the webcam? That could cause it. This may not be the laptop for you if you’re broke. You should be able to get 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage in a Windows laptop for around $550. If you do buy an external hard drive, make sure its an SSD, no spinning hard drives, they will eat your pictures.