Wednesday, July 16, 2008

You Hate Macs? I Hate PCs.

A while ago, The Grauniad newspaper in England published a vindictive, scurrilous and unprovoked attack on Apple Mac users by a man obviously suffering from several psychological disorders. Now, Mac users do not particularly seek or invite such abuse – we are more than happy to be left alone to get with the higher cerebral cortex functions that make us tick – and we certainly do not make such unwarranted assaults on PC users. We normally don't bother attempting to reply either, but this time Elroy has had enough. Please, take in Charlie Booker's ill-considered savaging and then savour Elroy's erudite and comprehensive demolition of same.

I Hate Macs
By Charlie Booker.

Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark - unless you have been doing that, you surely can't have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance. While I don't have anything against shameless promotion per se (after all, within these very brackets I'm promoting my own BBC4 show, which starts tonight at 10pm), there is something infuriating about this particular blitz. In the ads, Webb plays a Mac while Mitchell adopts the mantle of a PC. We know this because they say so right at the start of the ad.

"Hello, I'm a Mac," says Webb.

"And I'm a PC," adds Mitchell.

They then perform a small comic vignette aimed at highlighting the differences between the two computers. So in one, the PC has a "nasty virus" that makes him sneeze like a plague victim; in another, he keeps freezing up and having to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative suit throughout, while Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because "they are just better". Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul - that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with "work stuff" (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at "fun stuff". How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at "fun stuff", my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal "adventure" in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-'em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac's relationship with "fun".

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. Of course, that hasn't stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that's what we PC owners are like - unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you'll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.

This week: Charlie watched some episodes of Larry Sanders (on his PC). He played the customised Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike (on his PC). He listened to the Windows startup jingle every 10 minutes as his PC repeatedly rebooted itself.

However, Elroy has not let him get away with such libel. Ahem...

I Hate PCs
By Elroy


PC users don’t use Macs – they wear them. While Mac users waft around their expansive white loft conversions reading Baudelaire and Keats the PC element eke out drab little lives in their parents’ houses in Dagenham and Hull, the highlight of their miserable existence being a Saturday morning computer swap-meet where they buy arcane bits of compu-gizzards from another bespectacled lard-arses and then scurry home like fretting moles to, yet again, pull apart their long suffering odes to beige in order to make it half as fast as a Mac ten years its senior.

And it must be noted that, on that self-same Saturday morning, the Mac user is settling into his second Notting Hill ‘Latte while gazing into the adoring eyes of the very handmaiden of God whose image Mr. PC just spent three days failing to download. I guess it’s all a matter of choice.

PC users are always bleating that Macs are too expensive, but here’s a little secret: do you know how us superior beings afford our Macs? By having more productive hours in our day. And how do we achieve that? By not having our noses poked under the hood of our CPU for most of it. The savings made by not constantly buying obscure little plug-ins and other nasty little shards of silicon to make render our computers operative allows the Mac owner the luxury of seeing daylight on occasion, but it’s also true that the Mac pays for itself because of the invaluable WriteBook 1.9, a nifty app that effortlessly knocks out searing indictments of our times while one is taking a light lunch on the terrace, tomes which happily cover the cost one’s thirteenth century Tuscan monastery. Ah, the dignity of honest labour.

I hate PCs and their users because both are stubborn, righteous, boring, annoying and ugly both inside and out. They are unstable masochists who spit out the serial numbers of their SAD Pf54u364iX fatherboards along with generous amounts of spittle and last night’s Hawaiian Supreme, impotent and frustrated little drones who dare to berate me about the inadequacy of my very being because I choose to use a machine that works while they ferret away on computers that are so insecure that they have to ask the user to verify the action at every little teeny single step. I hate them, utterly and completely.

And I hate Charlie. I hate how he purports to be a man of the people, championing ‘loveable’ contraptions against the crushing might of an imaginary elite, as if the world’s PC ‘enthusiasts’ were being rounded up into re-education camps and trained to love the one true workstation, and I hate how, like all true fascists, he really knows that the exact opposite is true.

Every populist demagogue knows there is immense power in the tyranny of the masses and Charlie cynically manipulates it for all he’s worth, trying to convince us that PC users are but good and noble folk battling the sinister forces of the Mac-black pack, but PC users are not the rugged cyber-warriors of Charlie’s fond imaginings – they are cyber-trainspotters. When Mac users swish by in the first class carriage of a Eurostar Class 373 heading for a mini-break in Avignon, only the huddled masses on Gillingham Station know that they are not headed for Brussells because they have noted that the train is not a Class 373/1. These people own PCs.

Charlies’s notion of PC user as underdog is somewhat smudged by fact that Ubernerd squillionare siver-spooner and corporate monopolist William Henry Gates III had to license the best bits of Windows from Apple anyway. For all his ‘genius’ he turned out to be a follower and, furthermore, being as imitation is no longer the sincerest form of flattery but a devious form of intellectual copyright infringement, Apple had to sue Billy for his blatant theft of the other bits he thought he’d just pain steal. Even so, Mac users must still suffer the relentless abuse and prejudices of an army of PC dweebs who do as they are instructed by Billy-boy and Big Blue, a beige brigade who, although they have everything, still whine, even though PC users have Macs to thank for their very existence.

The Nazis thought they were victims too and, talking of fascists, it really does require both some heavy-duty wielding of unelected power and some seismic style shafting of the US Anti-trust laws to have the government take you down for running a monopoly – what was that about elites again?

So Charlie depicts the braying mob as poor, quivering underlings repressed by the privileged haut monde but, far from being an elite, it is Mac users who are oppressed by the common herd – the Apple Mac is the black man of computers, a status reflected by their users’ preferred shade of costume. Macs are a tiny minority who are shunned and ignored by software developers and the Establishment at large but, like other subjugated cultures, they are the engine room of creation; just as Al Jolson and Vanilla Ice made their mark by appropriating black culture, so IBM-compatibles have gained a foothold in the wider world by a gruesome aping of the Mac visage – ‘Windows’, so-named because it goes ‘Crash!’, was no accident.

This deliberate attempt to cash in on the hard work performed by those innovative iconoclasts over Apple has now given us shops crammed with a plethora of grotesque Mac-inated PCs, slightly funk’ed-up looking CPUs that that have grown cyber-sideburns and are screaming ‘Dude! I’m nearly a Mac!’ in a sad attempt to fool the gullible and ill-informed that it will perform as well as the real thing.. Like those coppers that used to dress up as hippies to pass unnoticed during love-ins and peace rallies, the PC is desperately trying to be ‘groovy, maaan!’, but real hipsters know when beige is in the house and what really lurks below the blueberry paint job.

But so what if mainstream software developers despise the Mac? Who needs them? This week’s brand new Mac operating system, the one that Apple promises might still even be current by Tuesday next, now comes bundled with the simply divine application suite EliteWanker 3.0 including not only the latest WriteBook update but also MakeMovie 1.9 and GongWinner Pro 2.0! This may mean building an extension to one’s Loire Valley Château to house all the Oscars, the Bookers, the Pulitzers and Nobel prizes heading one’s way, but such is the price of fun.

PCs may well be the ‘ramshackle computers of the people’; citizens of the former East German Republic will tell you that they had a similar description for their national car, but now that they have other driving options the Trabant has curiously fallen from favour. Fancy that! However, I’m sure some PC krauts still shuffle their decaying Dells around in otherwise unloved Trabbies which are, like their PCs, customised ‘into oblivion’ (if only), although a Trabant with a spoiler, mag wheels and a hood scoop is still, at the end of the day, a Trabant. See: silk purse/pig’s ear. Verstehen Sie?

When Mac users breakfast on Catalonian muesli and triple-fermented Tibetan yak yoghurt in their steel and platinum meal preparation zones, the toaster that sits next to their Mac works. It gleams, it is wildly expensive and it makes good toast. Hot and brown. Yum. However, this toast would not be good enough for PC users, as they could not eat a slice of lightly browned organic mung-bean and flaxseed Sour Dough unless had been cooked in a toaster lovingly reconstructed from the guts of thirty-nine other dead toasters retrieved from various car-boot sales that only works if you slap it.

Actually, they couldn’t eat organic mung-bean and flaxseed Sour Dough at all because they can’t afford it ¬– they spend all of what passes for a disposable income on spare toaster parts and going to toaster building conventions, and anyway, they are not aware and they do not care that any other form of bread other than Wonderwhite exists which is fine by me – the quicker they all die of bowel cancer the better.

But really, what is the glory in putting together a machine from scrap if it inherently and invariably fails to perform its function? Surely the victory in producing an item from rubbish is to make one that actually works? I am aware that it can, in theory, be achieved, but the only PCs that ever run for any reasonable amount of time, i.e. over 30 minutes, are buried in pre-loved pizza boxes, owned by fanatical caffeine-addled insomniacs and filled with so-called ‘games’, the loading of which has necessitated removing from the hard disc such extraneous fripperies as anything approaching anything useful.

This is what passes for ‘fun’ in the land of the Big Blue ¬– the ability to crack the ninety-ninth level of SmackaMac 2: Death to the MachinePeople and bring the magic bong back to the Gatesmeister, a skill which might buy heaps of Kudos on gameloser.com and impress the Pizza delivery guy, a close personal friend of the family by now, and but it’s uses in the real world, i.e. outside the bedroom, are limited. In that real world, where Mac users dwell in neo-modern expressions of urban dissonance with harbour views, fun is booting up one’s Porche and heading off for a meeting with one’s publisher to choose exactly which legendary Hollywood director will be allowed to film one’s latest WriteBook generated novel before calling Orlando, and maybe Nicole, to share a couple of the driest of martinis and enjoy some particularly challenging but ultimately satisfying performance art.

Do they insist that PC users join them? No, they do not. They leave the PC users at home to continue booting up their CPUs, again, bump into their parents accidentally on the way to the toilet, call up for another Hawaiian Supreme and settle in for a long night attempting to reach that ninety-ninth level which, unbeknownst to them, does not actually exist. Which world did I choose? James, warm up the Boxter!

It is a common conceit that dogs look like their owners, or owners look like their dogs, and while this is debatable it cannot be denied that the phenomenon is also true with computers. Witness, if you will, the sleek disposition of the slim, simple, elegant and uncluttered Apple Mac and the beret-bearing sophisticates that utilize them, versus the clumpy, knob laden and indomitably beige PC and the cardiganed, raincoated tragics who call it ‘friend’.

Even heath issues are in play! Mac users radiate a certain glow, a fine fettle born of bio-dynamic tofu enemas while PC users seem to enjoy a permanent sniffle, always dabbing at their bright red noses with Mum’s damp hanky and swallowing buckets of Payless Vitamin C.; likewise, PCs spend 24/7 quaking in fear that a malevolent teenager in Xingtao province with a broadband connection and a bad attitude will choose that day to unleash a virus that will instantly turn the world’s PCs to landfill while Macs merely issue a languorous yawn of an AM and set about saving the planet, unencumbered by worries that they might catch cyber-cold because no one writes malicious code for them – to know Macs is to love them and their masters.

Mac users create things – PC users create things to create things with. Eventually. God willing. After they’ve rebooted. Again. After they’ve played Exterminate: Zlad of the Pluuud Nexus 1.9. Again. Macs are for getting round to writing novels on while PCs are ostensibly to enable the enhancement of the possibility of thinking about maybe getting round to writing novels on. If the thing can stay booted that long. Whatever. No matter how much PC users soup up their wheezing crates, they will never be able to run EliteWanker 3.0 as it is resolutely not cross-platform for the simple reason that PC users have nothing to say. PC users have nothing to say so they spend their time in cyber-worlds, spending real money on things that don’t exist, for fuck’s sake, rebuilding their softdrives and rebooting. Again.

If Macs are, as Charlie asserts, the Fisher-Price Activity Center of the computer world then PCs are the plastic Meccano; flimsy, fiddly, irritating and fruitless ‘projects’ which never look like they do on the box and which require their constructors’ constant attentions. Look, us kids blessed with the Fisher-Price Activity Centers had our the right side of our brains nourished, resulting in our holistic approach to life, our grasp of the abstract, of language, art and music; the children of Meccano, however, were saturated in left-brain activity which promoted their linear, concrete thinking and encouraged them to delight in making fundamentally useless things with little bits and pieces, an experience which admittedly set them up perfectly for a life time of transistorised tinkering.

PC users love switches, knobs, potentiometers, sliders, actuators, whatever; these simple devices serve as distractions from actually getting on with some work, but the only Mac owners are interested in is the one that turns the G7 on, and they kind of loose interest in that after the first day or two because, quite frankly, they never need to use it again. Their machines just sit and purr, ready to spit out a chick-lit pot-boiler any time their black-clad, goateed, running lackey-dog-of-the-bourgeoisie gets around to opening WriteBook after all their other exciting and lucrative projects have been fully realised.

Like Macs, Fisher-Price Activity Centers are a means to an end whereas PCs and Meccano are a means in themselves. The sons of Gates never really ever got over that Meccano stage of pre-adolescence, leaving them with the exasperating latent desire to fuck with stuff. This truth is vehemently denied by the tech-anoraks, but it explains why they constantly refuse to act in their own rational self-interest. I mean, why anyone would drive a Robin Reliant when a Lamborghini is available little extra cost unless the act of driving is not really his or her primary concern?

Sigmund Freud, a Mac-man if ever there was one, would have had a chuckle or two over Charlie’s wild-eyed screed, not for its dangerously unhinged tone so much as how it goes to prove Sigmund utterly correct. PC users types also have some very serious personal identification issues; they suffer from either the unearned high self-esteem of the typical bully who thinks himself superior to those he torments, or the low self-esteem of the perennial victim who has to imitate his tormenter to bolster his self-worth – I don’t know which yet; maybe I should get around to using that AutoDoctorate function? – and they pretty much wear their penis envy on their sleeves as their obsession over ‘whose is bigger’ is hard to hide. They, and particularly Charlie, their self-appointed ‘spokesman’, sputters with incandescent rage and indignation at the idea that someone else’s ‘rig’ might be more powerful than theirs, their very manhood threatened to the core by the thought that someone else may have more RAM. It’s very sad.

Denial is another trait easily identifiable in poor old Charlie and his acolytes; the Apple Macintosh is, by all know criteria, the superior machine, and faced with this threat to their collective ego they do the only thing they can do – deny its truth, and rationalise it away by whining that the Mac must be the lesser consumer durable because it doesn’t have two buttons on its mouse or some such pettiness. Bugger the fact that the Mac does what it’s told when its told to do it, THE PC’S GOT TWO MOUSE BUTTONS! Why do PC owners get so mad with Macs? Why, its reaction formation of course! According to Siggy, PC owners that froth at the mouth in their commendation of Macs are merely demonstrating their own inferiority! Wow! It all makes sense! See what you can do with a Mac? Intelligently examine the evidence. What can you do with a PC? Um…

Or is it projection instead? Maybe its projection as well! Let’s have a look. Do PC users accuse Mac users of the very crimes they commit themselves? Yes? Bingo! Projection! Or, if you prefer, hypocrisy. PC users like to paint Mac lovers some sort of pack of corporate drones while maintaining the conceit that they themselves are all mavericks and iconoclasts, crazy young kids livin’ for the now because they prefer to acquire their hardware from the tip, but don’t forget kids, IBM-style edifices are not called clones for nothing.

Before computers had really taken the world hostage I had an extended stay in hospital, and during this ordeal I was befriended by a nurse named Ian. He had an extensive Jazz collection on vinyl and video, and would stop by at dinnertime, just as my favourite show came on the telly, to tell me about it. Well, when I say tell me about it I mean tell me about how he had catalogued it, on index cards which crossed-referenced each track with what musician in any given year on label X etc etc. The filing cabinets that held it took up more room than the records themselves. I asked him if ever actually listened to the records and he looked confused, upset, and gave me a quizzical glance. Listen to them? I obviously didn’t get it, so he started telling me all over again. I sat back and dreamt of the morgue.

When I saw Ian again not long ago he informed me that he was still living at his mum’s and that he was in the process of transferring his index system onto his new computer. It was a PC. He had just started to explain which programme he was using, and how much extra RAM it required, when I affected an escape; I understand that Ian was out of the Intensive Care Unit and taking solids foods shortly after, but I also understand that the suicide rate amongst the staff in the ICU rose sharply in that time. Ian remains, to this day, the world’s most boring man. Ian owns a PC.

Mac users never preach to anyone that did not express an interest, yet PC users are worse than Christians. They evangelize about a subject that they insist is fact but is, in essence, based on faith; ‘Better pray this works’ say the nerds before booting up, again, and Mac users are constantly having their languid Chardonnay and sex-fuelled Sundays interrupted by a knock on the door from two cyber-losers in burger-stained neckties asking if said Mac user had heard the good news about Vista, donks who are greeted with the Zen Buddhist calm typical of our people and wished well with their spiritual journey, after which the Mac users return peacefully to their tantrical pursuits.

Charlie Booker is correct on one count – the Mac ads are devastatingly accurate, and the fact that he so cheerfully identifies with such a pack of drab saps indicates a mental illness for more worrying than any suffered by the clear-eyed and level headed Macsters. Indeed, apart from either the narcissism or a pathological self-hatred, and penis envy, denial, reaction formation and projection previously mentioned, Charlie is quite obviously suffering from an anti-social personality disorder that sees him regard negative personality traits as positives, the Millwall FC ‘No one likes us – we don’t care!’ approach to computing, but his victimhood is a grossly misplaced – IBM and Microsoft are not exactly what one might describe as vulnerable to exploitation or abuse from larger entities.

Much as Charlie Booker may like to flatter himself, PC users are not idiosyncratic; just like people who say ‘I’m so zany!’ and ‘I’m bonkers, me!’ are invariably found to be completely sane and utterly dull, PC users are not eccentric or quirky mavericks but common or garden drones of the most dismal hue. He denies that people define themselves by the technology they choose because that would mean he defines himself as a bland, dreary, faceless member of the great unwashed, but in pretending to revel in being unreliable and unfair he has done just that – defined himself by the technology he chooses and demonstrated an unhealthy external locus of control by taking on the characteristics of a computer that is notoriously unreliable and run on software declared by the courts to be manifestly unfair.

Mac users, on the other hand, exhibit an internal locus of control by defining the ‘personality’ of their chosen technologies – Macs are designed by the people that use them, they are machines created for baby-boom hippies by baby-boom hippies, reliable, fair and true iconoclasts who live nice lives in the hippest digs with great food and greater drink, beautiful lovers and A grade recreational pharmaceuticals. They are independently wealthy, well read, well respected, fulfilled, creative, prolific and spiritually at one with the universe, and if that makes them wankers it’s a small price to pay. Now, excuse me while I move the bed to opposite the windows and adjust some bamboo flutes to maximise the flow of chi.

11 comments:

Frznagn said...

Nice diatribe.

Although I use PC's, it's not something I prefer. I started on the vic-20 and quickly moved to the commodore 64. Nice system, did some programming with it too. But then came the greatest thing since the last greatest thing- the Amiga! How I loved that thing!!! I believe back then they were similar in some respects as the Apple systems. At least in the cpu area, Motorola 68000.

I've had the 1000, and 3000 versions. I even have a video toaster system!

But the idiots at Commodore couldn't market themselves out of a paper bag and the company went under. PC's eventually won the home computer market. Sad. It was the hardest thing to do, switching over to the PC. It was a nightmare. I'm still amazed at how inefficient they are! RAM/file size/usage. I could rant on this all day but I'll spare you.

I haven't used a Mac, I did see a real cool ($$$$) setup and I wouldn't mind having one. I suppose money is the only thing stopping me. (alms for the poor?)

RaggMopp said...

Ah Elroy, I can't believe it's taken me so long to see this - and let's deconstruct it a bit.

Thank heavens PCs are limited to Dagenham and Hull if they are so awful - though what have the denizens of those boroughs done to be picked out by you? One has given us Dudley Moore, (a definite PC user) and the other - well, John Prescott but never mind. And to think you hate Charlie for "purporting" to be a man of the people - really.

Are you saying that Mac users (with their 'Latte (sic) - what's the apostrophe doing there?) spend their Saturday mornings surfing for pornography? Sure looks tha way and would explain a lot.

I will concede that Bill Gates nicked a lot of Windows from Apple and that's made PCs worse - they were much better without all the cartoon stuff. But then I find the paragraph about Macs being the black man of computers - what,. with all the Baudelaire, Keats and Lattes? Come round my way and see how many of the black population are reading poetry in their lofts. After a 14-hour shift down the fish-packing factory, not many. And how many of them have shiny Macs?

As ever, around halfway through I got lost or bored or both so I have to conclude by saying that Elroy old son, I've seen your Mac - it's old, knackered and operates like it was made in Bolivia in 1949. What's more, you can't operate most of its functions and can't even connect it to a webcam. Which is a piece of piss with a PC.

And poor old Ian - imagine being called the most boring man in the world just 1000000 words into your rant. Reflect upon the irony.

I shall continue to preach to you from my mum's semi in Hull. Come on, Mac users are mainly designers who package up tosh as differnt tosh - the rest are artists, potters and musicians. PC owners understand cause and effect - which seems to elude you with your stange correlation of Macs and the bohemian life.

Enjoy your one-handed Saturday morning!

With love from your great fan, RaggMopp

Elroy said...

‘Ah Elroy, I can't believe it's taken me so long to see this - and let's deconstruct it a bit.’


Ah, Ragg-Mopp! I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to see you seeing this, but yes – deconstruction? Do lets!

‘Thank heavens PCs are limited to Dagenham and Hull if they are so awful’

Thank heavens indeed! Someone tries to sneak one onto the patch of beachside inner-city fabulodom that is lucky enough to enjoy moi as un résidant de priorité under the cover of darkness, but the neighbourhood watch, who are armed to the teeth with AK-47s and the current edition of Better Homes Than Yours, caught it just in time. Phew! It was a close thing! Just imagine how it might have clashed with the primary colours of our Victorian haciendas – I shudders at the very thought.

‘…though what have the denizens of those boroughs done to be picked out by you?’

They have done nothing, poor dears, except not leave, and for that only they are to blame. They may be cursed by the accident of their birth but really, there’s no excuse or staying – unless, that is, one wishes to live one’s life in mother’s back bedroom communing with a wheezing PC and a sticky sock.

‘One has given us Dudley Moore, (a definite PC user) and the other - well, John Prescott but never mind.’

Dudley Moore mayhaps, but also the Ford Escort – surely the conveyance of choice for the PC enthusiast – and as for Hull, well, ladies and gentlemen I give you The Housemartins, the living embodiment of the pop-star as nerd and PC users every one of them.

‘And to think you hate Charlie for "purporting" to be a man of the people - really.’



I hate Charlie because he purports to be a man of the people but is actually an insufferable snob. He exudes a tone of superiority and looks down on Macs from a great height, but he is merely indulging in the tyranny of the mob. Charlie is a ‘man of the people’ in the same way as Mussolini.

Are you saying that Mac users (with their 'Latte (sic) - what's the apostrophe doing there?)

The apostrophe is to indicate the ‘Caffe’ in Caffelatte’, a perfectly acceptable spelling thereof. It’s a grammar thing…

‘spend their Saturday mornings surfing for pornography? Sure looks tha way and would explain a lot.’

No, I am saying quite the opposite. I am saying that while PC users spend their Saturday mornings surfing for pornography, the object of their desire is in reality sharing a ‘latte with a Mac user in a quite café in an exotic location that is neither Dagenham or Hull.

Is she on the Intertubes? We neither know nor care – all we know is that while we both come to grips with a download, ours involves the real thing.

‘I will concede that Bill Gates nicked a lot of Windows from Apple and that's made PCs worse - they were much better without all the cartoon stuff.’

Spoken like a true machine-code nerd. How many PC users does it take to change a lightbulb? Thirty-two. Thirteen to write the program, nine to check its code, two to execute it, four to play Second Warcraft 4.8, one to grumble that the new program isn’t as good as the old one and three to wait in line for the shop to open at midnight so that they can be the first in Dagenham and/or Hull to own LightBulb 5.0 and pronounce it a bitter disappointment.

You really miss Big Blue and WordPerfect? So Gates nicked everything he needed to make the PC accessible (an admission of defeat if ever there was one) to the common man but you would rather he had kept it as an arcane and obscure piece of nerdalistic office machinery? Wow! You are an elitist’s elitist! You didn’t want the great unwashed to get their hands on your precious toy at all, did you?

‘But then I find the paragraph about Macs being the black man of computers - what,. with all the Baudelaire, Keats and Lattes?’

It’s an analogy darling, it’s not meant literally so I understand your confusion. Here, let me help you.

The Mac is black man of the computers because it is a persecuted minority, the object of scorn and hatred by the previously mentioned mob who seek to destroy the ‘other’, that which they do not understand.

Baudelaire and Keats weren’t black, but Charlie Parker and Miles Davis et al were, and that’s the point – it is the persecuted minority that are society’s cultural engines, and just as the white man is the custodian of old black art forms long since considered obsolete by a majority of the community that created them (Dixieland Jazz, Country Blues etc), so PCs are doomed to be pulled along in the tailwind of Apple’s innovations. See?

Mac users employ their computers to create new art forms and PC users employ theirs to consume them. Macs are a means to an end – PCs are a means in themselves. Macs are a triumph of content over form – PCs are a triumph of form over content.

‘Come round my way and see how many of the black population are reading poetry in their lofts.’

Probably none, but how many are making music in their sheds? Or indulging in some sort of cultural pursuit? And how many would swap their sheds for a Des. Res. Loft given half the chance?

‘After a 14-hour shift down the fish-packing factory, not many. And how many of them have shiny Macs?’



Again, you miss the point. I am not saying that blacks use Macs – what I am saying is that the plight of the plight of the black man in white society is analogous to that of the Mac user in a PC society in that the PC users steal and appropriate what they want while at the same time oppressing the culture they stole from.

‘As ever, around halfway through I got lost or bored or both…’

Ah, yes, Attention Deficit Disorder, a sad malady afflicting those who world is free of quiet contemplation. To read and digest? Never! Not when there’s an XZ6586-Q53 motherboard to update!

‘so I have to conclude by saying that Elroy old son, I've seen your Mac - it's old, knackered and operates like it was made in Bolivia in 1949.’

You have? When? That was many, many, Macs ago. My current one is new, chock full ‘o beans and operates like it was made on Planet Zarg in 3009. Y’see, we don’t sing about how good the old one was and soup it up with garage-sale innards – we just give it to the recyclers and get up on our thang with a newie.

‘What's more, you can't operate most of its functions…’

So sayest thou. I can operate what I need to operate. Mac users, being conscious of their computers as machines of utility as opposed the dictators of our lives – we are not slaves to them, they are slaves to us, and therefore we not consider it a Boy Scout badge of honour to know what every program, switch, chip etc actually does; we know what we need to know to get the job done.

‘and can't even connect it to a webcam. Which is a piece of piss with a PC.’



How you know such petty details of my life is unknown, but it does demonstrate that you obviously have no life of your own. I don’t have to connect my Mac to a webcam as it has it’s own; unfortunately, however, rather like the black community’s struggle to integrate and negotiate with the systematic and institutionalized racism of the white establishment, so I have to connect my Mac to a PC world. It’s no accident that PCs are that funny, Caucasian flesh colour…

‘And poor old Ian - imagine being called the most boring man in the world just 1000000 words into your rant. Reflect upon the irony.’



If Ian had used merely 1000000 on me then maybe you would have a point, but as it is my launching into Ian at that tiresome point was a modernist demonstration of his tiresomeness. It’s a tricky concept, I know, but do try…

‘I shall continue to preach to you from my mum's semi in Hull.’

Oh, good. Bring it on. Preach away. But make sure not to read fully that which you preach about – I’d hate to think that you were operating from an informed position.

‘Come on, Mac users are mainly designers who package up tosh as differnt tosh…’

‘Tosh as different tosh’ – that sounds like a denunciation not of Mac users per se but modern life in general. It certainly describes the PC, a PC being a dressed down Mac. But who doesn’t repackage tosh? There is nothing new under the sun, Ragg Mopp.

‘- the rest are artists, potters and musicians.’

Yes, they are! Artists and musicians! Hooray! I’m not entirely sure how chucking wet clay on one’s Mac would produce the desired result, although I’m sure that a Mac covered in wet clay is, to you, a desired result in itself – but artists and musicians, yay! Not bean counters and anoraks, but creative energies striving to express themselves and make the world a happier place. Is this a problem for you?

‘PC owners understand cause and effect’

Yes, you do. You understand what the effect on your PC will be of the XZ6586-Q53 motherboard you caused to be installed, but further than that…

‘- which seems to elude you…’

Mac users understand cause and effect too. We understand that when we cause great works of art to be created, the effect on the world is incalculable.

‘with your stange correlation of Macs and the bohemian life.’



Artists and musicians have always lived outside of societal norms, have always bucked the status quo, have always sided with the underdog, the oppressed, the minorities, have always been considered ‘bohemian’ – indeed, the expression was originally used by the French, and not always as a term of enderment, to describe musicians and artists in the nineteenth century who lived in the cheap gypsy neighbourhoods, as the gypsies were erroneously believed to have come from the old Kingdom of Bohemia, now the in the Czech Republic – so for you to, on the one hand, state that Mac users are mainly artists and musicians but then state, on the other hand, that to call them bohemian is a ‘strange correlation’ is, well, strange. You sound a little confused.

But don’t worry – I’m here to help with ezi-peek guide. Mc user = musician = bohemian. PC user = bean counter from Hull = conservative slave to the status quo.

‘Enjoy your one-handed Saturday morning!’



The things I do with one hand on a Saturday morning is raise my ‘latte to my lips and drink, as caressing the handmaiden of God sitting opposite me takes two hands and my full attention. In Hull, however, the download button and the sock await…

‘With love from your great fan, RaggMopp’

Why thank you, Mopp. BTW, I went to your blogsite,the ironically titled RaggMopp Says, and was struck by its, er, minimalism. It’s the perfect metaphor for PC users, really – you got it all set up but then found out you had nothing to say. Ah well, where’s that XZ6586-Q53 motherboard got to…?

Annie said...

your a mac user. that explains a lot.

Elroy said...

Yes, doesn't it just? As does your PC.

Let the battle commence.

Cheers

Elroy

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I mostly visits this website[url=http://www.weightrapidloss.com/lose-10-pounds-in-2-weeks-quick-weight-loss-tips].[/url]Plenty of useful information on letsaskelroy.blogspot.com. Frankly speaking we really do not pay attention towards our health. Here is a fact for you. Recent Research presents that about 70% of all United States adults are either chubby or overweight[url=http://www.weightrapidloss.com/lose-10-pounds-in-2-weeks-quick-weight-loss-tips].[/url] So if you're one of these people, you're not alone. Infact many among us need to lose 10 to 20 lbs once in a while to get sexy and perfect six pack abs. Now next question is how you can achive quick weight loss? Quick weight loss can be achived with little effort. You need to improve some of you daily habbits to achive weight loss in short span of time.

About me: I am webmaster of [url=http://www.weightrapidloss.com/lose-10-pounds-in-2-weeks-quick-weight-loss-tips]Quick weight loss tips[/url]. I am also health expert who can help you lose weight quickly. If you do not want to go under difficult training program than you may also try [url=http://www.weightrapidloss.com/acai-berry-for-quick-weight-loss]Acai Berry[/url] or [url=http://www.weightrapidloss.com/colon-cleanse-for-weight-loss]Colon Cleansing[/url] for effective weight loss.

wehatemacs said...

I read this, gotta say, you don't have a fucking clue.
Charlie Brooker IS actually championing loveable contraptions against the actual elite. He has various TV programs that do exactly that in one form or another.
One other thing, its THE GUARDIAN not The Grauniad. Charlie Brooker is more intelligent that you can ever hope to be. fartmouth

Anonymous said...

2013 Hermes Bags2013 Hermes Handbags ozji Handbags HermesAuthentic Hermes Bags msyp

Anonymous said...

If you want a Premium Minecraft Account check out this generator.
With it you can generate a unique Minecraft Premium
Account which no one else has! You can Download the Free Premium Minecraft Account
Generator http://www.get-minecraft-free.tk

Excellent goods from you, man. I have understand your stuff previous to and you're just extremely fantastic. I really like what you have acquired here, really like what you are stating and the way in which you say it. You make it enjoyable and you still take care of to keep it sensible. I cant wait to read much more from you. This is really a terrific site.

Anonymous said...

This program is intended to recover lost passwords for RAR/WinRAR archives of versions 2.
xx and 3.xx. http://www.winrarpasswordcracker.com The
free professional solution for recovering lost passwords to RAR and WinRAR archives.


Hi! I could have sworn I've been to this website before but after reading through some of the post I realized it's new to me.
Anyhow, I'm definitely happy I found it and I'll be bookmarking and
checking back often!

Anonymous said...

Are you tiered of completing surveys only for them not to
unlock your file?
Do you want to bypass all online survey sites? Here is the solution
http://SHARECASHDOWNLOAD.TK
Having trouble downloading very important file from ShareCash, FileIce, Upladee or others due
to no surveys showing up?
Thanks to our newest tool, you will be able to download everything you want whenever you
want!
Works on all fileice surveys, with just one click of
a button you will be able to start downloading the
file, for free!
Also works on sharecash surveys. Clicking in the image above will take
you to a video tutorial for this tool.
To learn how to use Fileice Survey Bypass you can click here, you
will be taken to a short tutorial on how to use the tool.

Download ShareCash, FileIce, Upladee Survey Bypass
Now! http://SHARECASHDOWNLOAD.TK
Working Fileice Survey Bypass Download it here http://SHARECASHDOWNLOAD.

TK