breaking form tonight; discussing things with little to no relevance whatsoever

So anyway, the notion that rhythm is a fault of my pattern finding processes which the human brain constantly runs in order to better cope with its environment has begun to etch away at my love of music, and with it, by association, art.
Replacing vague notions of special superiority and utopian ambition is a cynical thrill at the notion that I might yet become a serial killer, and that were I to chop of a number of human beings and either eat them or defile the corpses in some, or even, in a crude irony, use them in some kind of art, I would still stare blankly at the judge as he intoned my sentence mouthing all the while that I have done nothing so terrible.
What's interesting, and perhaps the key feature of this particular moment, is that, unlike depression, I have no morass of self-pity through which I must wade, only a kind of gross inevitability to my thoughts and an utter lack of respect for other people's feelings.

"Dr. Bunny and Mr. Jackass, at your service"

When questioned why,
I might reply,
that where there is none,
I must make some,
and so in creating we,
that we can unmake me,
unhappy together we,
are free from need to cry.

So to get back onto computers...
The fact is that we all need a standard for computing. If there isn't one than the limitless potential I described isn't so limitless anymore. We could make that Mac, sure. But we'd be letting in all the morons. The idiots. It's like letting stupid people into a major that needs smart people.
Macs celebrate incompetence. Users who have no right working on anything but a typewriter harass the makers of computers with inane questions. A computer is not a VCR. It's not a television. It's not a simple thing designed for use by everybody. It's a tool. A tool for entertainment, a tool for business, a tool for research. Communication on an unprecedented scale is possible with a computer. Mac users shit on this potential. They don't even know it's there. I can't think of an example really where potential is so squandered by people. It's really unprecedented. Sure there are Mac users who legitamately know what's up. They have an idea whats going on and they know their system well enough that they can reset stuff or change settings. Hell they may even understand the structure of their system--the way RAM works for instance. But these people are rare.
Anybody could be stupid. Your FAMILY could be stupid. There's no target. No mutual way for people to organize themselves. No absolute test of intelligence, no absolute test of genetics. So people fall back to things that they can easily see; which is why macs are arse-backwardly dumb.

and now I've always really liked fat sacks full of cash money, but...

Now, LiveJournal's commenting system has a maximum character length for comment strings of 4000 characters, and since I spent about 1/2 an hour tapping away at the keyboard for this one, its something on the order of 11,000 characters. Which basically goes a long way towards proving that I have too much time to think on my hands, literally. If your IRC client has to tell you when the date has changed, you're most likely a complete loss to the human race.
Now anyway, in response to my last post I was sent a comment which, while not being inflammatory to me on first reading, that combined with a comment from June, I was prompted to write some sort of a response in an attetmp to get my hackles up, so to speak.
I was trying to post it here, but its got to go here... so without further adieu:

In a way its really quite charming that a comment post which opens with an insult can go on to be a bromide-infused agenda-peddling sermon from someone who, by their tone is probably older than me and thus convinced of their intellectual superiority (with its unique parochial charm only seemingly evident because I haven't experienced this in awhile). My special select group of friends and I are quite used to being the unlucky individuals usually portrayed by Hollywood movie-culture as the only ones who can truly appreciate the finer points of technological expertise.

I always wonder whether by being deliberately inflammatory one attracts idiots who feel that they've been personally slighted by comments, which have no bearing on them. The tone of one's writing can convey more meaning than it actually does, which is why I refuse to accept your interpretation of "my place" in the world, narrow and naive perspective or no.

Given that the "wide world of computing" since the invention of the internet has been the playground-substitute for a normal childhood since its inception, I feel quite justified in pointing out that an understanding of technology goes a long way towards colouring one's attitude in favour of a certain outlook.

By your comments on the democratisation of computing, which I'm well aware has been underway since a damn sight longer than you seem to appreciate (since I doubt that someone over the age of 70 could be bothered engaging me intellectually in a field like this), has been underway since some under appreciated uni student first thought about a better way to make electrical circuits. An evaluation of your tone as critical as the evaluation you gave my less-than-thoughtful post seems to reveal that you consider yourself to be some sort of age-elitist, wronged by the youth of today who have so cruelly shunted you out of the limelight.

Perhaps its possible to get back onto centre stage by flogging a dead horse like the Macintosh UI? Note that I really have no grief against Macintosh technology, what drives my purchasing of computer hardware above all other considerations is simply price. Apple charges like a wounded bull, and that to me makes them unattainable (the fact that for the price I wouldn't want to use it anyway simply makes it laughable). Such "sales innovations" pioneered by Steve Jobs' "insanely great" development philosophy has spawned such useless items as purple iMacs, titanium-shelled powerbooks and the latest "iMac on a stick" conniption fit of a consumer-item. I'm going to bring up here that when iMacs came out I was seized almost instantly by an overwhelming urge to turn one into a glorified sound-system/goldfish bowl, which I could hang from the roof by a tv-swivel.

It was only the price which halted this fantasy. Unlike the way that both price and a re-evaluation of Apple's 'innovations', as well as a big, slow, dumb, user interface held together by a good initial concept and corporate smoke and mirrors. Leave us not bring up OS X and the way in which Apple had to ship before it was completely 'ready' because their projects without firm "this far, no further" deadlines tend to stay in eternal beta (witness many casual Open Source projects that lack management or strong lead developers). I've long felt that a cornerstone of a good UI should include "ease of use" as well as stability, and OS X apparently has neither. Mind you I've never used it, have only seen it briefly; yet I still feel justified in having an ideological objection to it after my brief encounters with it.

Ever increasing sales volumes driven my innovations at Apple need to be re-evaluated on a level which discounts any marketing pitch Jobs is going to spit at the public in idiot-speak containing such gems as 'bounces' and how fast you as a regular home user can share pron-ahem; browse the internet. Leave us not forget that misguided Apple fanatics are responsible in many Australian schools for having a computer to student ratio of 1:25 instead of 1:4, simply because of the price. How horrible! You cry; no, that's simply good salesmanship on Apple's behalf.

Now given that short treatise, I'm not going to deny that the way Apple stole and marketed Xerox's technology in the early 1980's was masterful as well as incredibly successful, but since then all they've really done is been relegated to a slightly more specialist market of fanatics, bemused by the superior hardware technology powering the latest Macintosh, or people who for some strange (unenlightened) reason require Macintosh hardware in order to run various business applications. Innovations are only really revolutionary in a marketplace if they perform a specific function, which proves to be so useful that it is copied across the board. Apple's "design is law" production model has served them well for selling products to a certain cross-section of society, but the way in which design is not an integral part of a computer has been consistently demonstrated in that people WILL buy un-ergonomic pieces of crap as long as its cheaper. Market share shows this case in point. Market share also proves that Apple has had very little to do (in the time-scale being referenced here) with the price war which helped to make computers an affordable thing for many young people in the 1980's.

Its so very ungratifying to see that many people still view the 'hard yards' that they've done in order to acquire their computer knowledge are being put to task by the people who come after they have paved the way and consequently made it easy for the 'newbie' kids. In this way it irritates me immensely that a vast majority of Mac users take their machine and knowledge for granted. It's a Mac, so by definition it'll work better and faster, so they could care less about exactly how it does work.

Now to iterate a certain point I made back at the beginning about agenda-peddling, and naivety in general. People who lash out at statements shouted out into the sea of information generally lack a sense of perspective, or feel themselves in some way "above all that" and thusly entitled to comment on how any narrative which gives a virtual finger to their perception of events lacks perspective. As well as being comical, its also untrue. While its unrealistic not to expect negative feedback, its also a requirement of my worldview that I expect any negative feedback to be academic disagreement. Which is nice, and doesn't happen.

Given a blinkered existence it is possible to assume that everything outside of the US is pretty much the same as America by another name, which in the case of international politics after New York's tragedy on Sept. 11th 2001 was the case, but is entirely different in terms of bandwidth. Australia does NOT have a significant broadband market, nor does it have a technological market large enough to drive prices down to levels where any new product is affordable to the general public (and by the general public I mean ME, despite my obvious sense of 'other' to 99% of the populace). Inexpensive fat pipes transporting data locally here are a fantasy of the future telecommunications market, international links of that nature being just a 'pipe dream' (if you'll excuse the pun).

Given that I do in fact make a living off computers, its especially idiotic to assume that I should be grateful for the opportunity to perform a job, which I hate in order to buy shit, I don't need. Now my life isn't exactly Fight Club at the moment, but I doubt that in what could possibly have been my last incarnation, I would have been praising the invention of looms which in essence provided me with employment in the textile industry. It's a job like any other, and as soon as you start doing something for money it takes on a cloak of evil that cannot be dispelled, however much you loved the activity before you started doing it for money. No wonder BOFH is so popular.

Its not a matter of ignorance through non-awareness of the proper state of the world, nor even deliberate ignorance of the way things should be. Its more a matter of peddling my own agenda. Ego trips notwithstanding (this is my journal), this is more about being so convinced that the way I perceive things is the correct way that I feel compelled to tell everyone about it, either in a way of railing at the world about how things are irritating to the point that I get six degrees of slashdot, or trying to convince the populace at large about the futility of things like: "We are Windows of Borg; Speed is irrelevant, reliability is futile. Your memory and disk space will be assimilated." It really gets under my skin when its assumed that because my language is biased and slanted, that obviously analysis using the terribly complex system of hyperbolic topological quantum tessellation mechanisms seems at first glance like I've got no idea where 'its at'. So as far as ego-tripping for no real purpose goes, I cite that there's a lot of value to be gleaned from recognising writing which is geared to perpetuate a specific attitude. By the standards of this attempt at rebuttal from a half-arsed analysis, by attacking me for attacking Macintosh, a supposed 'underdog' in the hostile world of computing (without paying any attention to the underlying corporate world which controls this), intrinsic support for Apple is implied. The moral of this story is never to underestimate the stupidity of others. A corollary to that would include that you shouldn't be too sure about your own stupidity either.

Everything in life is done largely because the alternative sucks. So, at the initial point of history, some fuckface recognized that knowledge tends to democratise... So the only thing to do was to confine it to the priests, the elite, the rest resigned to serve cause if the rebel heard the truth they'd organize against power privileged wealth.... It didn't occur to you, perhaps, that its exactly the same today? In this situation?

Its not small, mean or unnecessarily cruel to pick on Apple and users of their fine computing products simply because its easy. Perfection can't be attained, only aspired to. One can't aspire to perfection without criticism, and the sad aspect of this is that nobody can stand criticism. I know I can't, but if I provided enough context for my journal entries that I didn't invite harsh invectives in the form of comments, then realised that the justifications we use to appease ourselves are often much worse than the justifications we'd dare use to appease others. Such as the 'other' which I defined by making my previous post, which would be all those Mac-users to whom I should most likely apologise.

An appreciation of the sort of pointless evidenced in most of this highly reactionary piece can only be completely achieved by doing something akin to calculating pi to a million digits without any recognisable reason, nor a means to easily reproduce the results for any other foreseeable purpose.

I'm not going to archive posts or any other nonsense, to provide the context I was whinging so much about before, this is just an attempt at writing something or other... and as case in point, I sign off with this...

"Graphic designers are mac-using, cafe latte-sipping, trend-whoring motherfuckers."
Tardinha - Graphic Designer