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Friday 16 November 2012

The Apple bandwagon pioneered by an unbelievable asshole

Is that a soup Kitchen on Christmas day? Is it a re-enactment of late 1920s Weimar era depression?
No, it's a bunch of human beings queuing for 2 days to buy a new slab of white plastic that will enable them to tell other white slab owners how amazing and revolutionary the extra 2 inches on the slab is and tell non-slab owning folk how amazing and revolutionary the extra 2 inches on the slab is.
People are like the aroma of herbs and spices at KFC....they make me dry heave and then probably vomit.
I have no problem with people buying Ipads or Apple products, we're a capitalist consumer society, by all means do what you want (within reason, we're not Sodom.) People need phones, and as long as people need Phones, people will buy Apple products, fair enough.
Iphones and Ipads are like the Gibson Les Paul; sure I can see the appeal and all the great features, but I'm perfectly content with my Explorer.
You've got an Iphone? I literally couldn't care any less, and if you act the same then we'll get on fine and dandy.

But if you queue for 2 days to buy a piece of technology that does exactly the same things as your previous piece of technology, albeit it with a slightly larger/smaller screen, then I hate everything encoded in your freedom-less DNA.

If you're willing to pay upwards of £500 for something other devices can do for 1/5th the price, but must pledge allegiance to the brand you've apparently sold your soul to in a mp3 exclusive blood oath, then I hate every hair on your head, and every hair growing beneath your pestilent, ignorant skin.

Steve Jobs was not an 'AMAZING GENIUS'.

Steve Jobs was not the Lenin of devices that popularised the phrase 'LOL'.
Steve Jobs was not somebody for whom the clocks stopped turning and the sky darkened with obsidian clouds of grief when he died.

Steve Jobs was an asshole.



My only regret about holding this is that I can't  flip the bird to you all.

Yes death is sad, that's a given, and I never met the man, so I'll hastily add IN MY OPINION. This isn't a zero conditional, like water boiling at 100 degrees or Sammy Hagar being a far superior singer than David Lee Roth. It's merely my opinion that Steve Jobs was an asshole, and if people are going to obsess over his products and hail false cries of superiority to whichever God they choose to worship (even though the Flying Spaghetti monster uses a Motorola Atrix), they need to do some fucking light reading.


Let's start with something easy, right off the bat. Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and immediately cancelled all of their philanthropic activities. According to various friends he believed that expanding Apple would have been more worthwhile and beneficial to people than giving money to charity.


Fair enough, you've not making enough money (even though you are), just resume it at a later date right?

Except he never did, even in the 2000s when the Iphone became the second biggest selling gadget on the planet, just behind the Rubik's cube. Instead, he helped set up 'PROJECT RED' with Bono, which produced red versions of APPLE devices to give the proceeds to charity. Even then, Apple wasn't donating, customers were, regular folks who weren't part of billion dollar enterprises. When none of your profits are going to charity, it's not charity, it's you pointing at a charity and going 'Hey...you guys should give money to this, but only at the incentive of spreading awareness about our products and company name'.
Here's a completely unrelated paste from Wikipedia about Bill Gates, you know AWFUL BILL GATES, GOD HE SURE IS AWFUL.
As of 2007 Bill Gates and Melinda Gates were the second most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity. They plan to eventually give 95% of their wealth to charity.
WHAT A FUCKING MONSTER. GO BACK TO AUSTRIA HITLER. GO BACK TO THE SEVEN CIRCLES OF EREBUS YOU GRECO-ROMAN BEAST.

The fact is, Jobs sincerely thought that Apple products would 'improve the quality of life'. Because we all know that dialysis machines and cancer research can't compete with the ability to IM somebody a hi def photo of your parted anus.

I was hoping for the ability to store up to 1 million songs....will my life of hell never cease?!

Jobs was the monomaniacal, angry, abusive head of a company seen only in Steven Segal films, or a Chris Brown concert. He apparently fired employees from PIXAR without notice, and when Pamela Kerwin, a pixar employee, politely asked he at least give them two weeks notice, he replied with "Okay, but the notice is retro-active from two weeks ago"



Even this guy would call Steve Jobs a 'massive erection of a human being'

There's having to make cutbacks, and then there's doing it in such a motion of Machiavellian assholery that you appear as nothing more than an utterly repugnant human being. And to do it to PIXAR? Wonderful, delightful, innovative, idea defying PIXAR? He may as well emailed every person who grew up with their movies a JPEG of him teabagging Sully from Monsters Inc.
LESS SHIT LIKE THIS. MORE SCREENS PEOPLE POKE AT.

There's plenty more I could go into, but this blog is really an introduction to articles such as these: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/be-a-jerk-the-worst-business-lesson-from-the-steve-jobs-biography/249136/


Steve Jobs was CEO of a billion dollar industry, he was also a monumental prick.
Those two are not related, and the latter is not excusable because of the former.

If you're going to cry salutations of vigor and wonder to a figure in the media, do some research first.
I have a Motorola phone, it texts, calls people, has apps and can play music. It's what a hip young go-getter could ever need.....and me.
For all I know, Motorola could create their products through energy produced by burning slaves who don't assemble covers fast enough. They might have corporate retreats where they harpoon rare birds and then fight with the corpses. They might buy out orphanages and turn them into bookshops that only stock mills and boon erotica.
But that's not relevant, because I don't act like my phone is a slate of intellect and wonder carved by the Olympians.
I occasionally use it to text poorly auto-corrected nonsense and I shut the fuck up whilst doing it.
If you're 'only apple exclusive' and think Steve Jobs was the last remnant of human decency, then you're an asshole.
If you worship an asshole, you're an asshole.

I have no problem with Apple products, or people who use them. I have a problem with a culture so distracted by unnecessary 'convenience' and product recognition, they unwittingly sing the praises of a man who should have known, and acted, better.

Tuesday 6 November 2012

An experiment in writing.

So it's national novel writing month or NANOWRIMO as it has been labelled by people who like acronyms but just can't commit to that ole' one-letter-representing-each-word style (NNWM. Ooh, look at that, I feel like that...famous gay artist. The one who was 'revolutionary' and stuff. He had the paintings of soup...and Marilyn monroe. I've honestly forgotten his name, it'll come to me I hope.)

Anyway, this blog isn't about NNWM, but how I write these blogs. You see, I'm rather haphazard with these. It takes me a couple of days to do one that's about 500 words long merely out of repeating writers block, hatred for everything my hands create like an end of novel Victor Frankenstein spitting regret and insurmountable rage towards a sentence fragment based horror of his own creation. I can't just...sit and hammer something out, I come back to it like a forgetful Dad not fit to look after a child.
That's why I'm writing all of this in a stream of conscious style monologue, no breaks or pauses, merely consecutive typing until I reach what I hope is some tuft of a satisfying conclusion (Unlike LOST, or some other pop culture reference. I mean seriously, more unanswered questions than Alex Reid doing a Year 10 SAT exam about colours.)
It's rather interesting to see this barebones, storyboard esque approach to writing, the only editing being the incorrect spelling of words or minor adjustments to sentence structure such as adding 'ands' or 'the's.'. It's also why there's a 20-ish word tirade about Andy Warhol up there, a man whose name I just remembered after I wrote the word 'tuft', it's also why some metaphors and similes and all that jazz aren't up to my usual standard, because normally I have a skeleton which I'll then edit with something far more eloquent (I immediately regret using that word), witty and of higher quality. For example, I have no Idea if Alex Reid is colourblind, that was merely the first set of refugees that crossed the border from 'Idea dictatorship' into my people's republic of 'funny similies'.
It's not been that hard to just sit and type stuff out, but its' a lot less refined than I'd like (clearly) and it doesn't really have any coherent thread or overall message, but again that's more due to the context than the pace at which I am writing, so I'm just complaining at the wind really, like a bitter old man, being all...bitter and...shit.
See, I'm not deleting words, nor amending them, you're getting everything raw and poorly formed and full of colloquialisms that for some reason I am typing, such as 'like' and whatnot. That's how dedicated I am to the cause. Although I did just delete a comma and replace it with a full stop just now, but that's more to enable you to read this easily (as opposed to that fucking awful sentence preceding this set of brackets, which in itself is tedious to read).

I'm sure if Hemmingway or Sylvia Plath wrote something like this it'd be hailed as a fucking goldmine of the creative process (I don't know if Plath wrote prose actually, so, again, that example may fail as an....example. Christ this is like how I talk to women, jarring, jabbering, and with all the progressive appeal of a sandwich full of thumbtacks, acid and contempt. On a side note, I think I got that thumbtacks reference from an episode of  The Simpsons, I probably did, that'd be something I'd change in the Edit.
Is the Simpsons really relevant anymore? It's flogging a dead horse to say the quality has dipped more severely than a bouncy castle now infested with cockroaches and switchblade wielding gang members, and there's no overall story arc of plot progress with a show like Community or Breaking Bad, so just get rid of it already and let us enjoy the current ratio of good/bad episodes before that margin (more like MARGE-IN, hhur hur) is ruined, and it'll be a dolorous sense of nostalgia when we say "Remember when the Simpsons was enjoyable, and not overwrought, sometimes cringeworthy and often pointless"? I reckon as it stands, I can watch a random episode and 6/10ths of the time, it'll be a stone cold classic (Stone cold? I would never use that idiom, fucking hell. FUCKING HELL I SAY)

Also Family Guy, stop shoving sentimental, sanctimonious and depressing story points into your episodes (Cancer, abortion, rape?) Really? You know, those plot points that ultimately converge at the end of the episode with some made for tv string music in the background and Lois/Brian making a serious heartfelt plea to another character. It is jarring, embarrasing and a horrible juxtaposition to the 5 minutes prior that consisted of jokes insinuating an 80s cartoon character is gay or a character soiled themselves. Nobody wants that, you have nothing to try and prove to yourself. People know WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE. Barn Door, Horse, Bolt.
People watch you for a quick 20 minutes of fast paced humour and idiosyncratic jokes, do not garnish it in preachy subtext or lifetime TV style plot points, it's patronising, pandering, and actually more offensive than any other content in the show itself.
South Park CAN do this, because it can successfully balance both serious and funny without the addition of the former being jarring and taking you out of the episode.
American Dad is clearly superior to Family Guy anyway.

Oh, ain't that Grand, I just wrote about something without stopping, brilliant. I HAVE THE POWER and all that progressive free-form danish Jazz. Even so, I'd edit it ruthlessly like a literature based Bond Villain if it were any other blog entry.

I don't really know how to finish this, which is kind of ironic and something I hoped I wouldn't have to put and now I hate myself and want to punch my larynx with all the vigour and malice of a Celtic woad warrior being offended about his long hair that stands as a symbol to tribal custom.
Hey that's as good a place as any, hope you enjoyed this experiment.
I did.
Kind of.
Maybe.
Maybe Not.
I'm outta here (Aladdin reference.)