Keyser is, as any regular reader of the Lair could tell, a pretty laid-back kind of Pannonian. When it comes to, say, atheism, Keyser’s got nothing against believers and has no interest in proselytizing them. Unlike a lot of committed atheists. For instance, Keyser has a New Yorker friend who’s a militant atheist and once taught at Texas A&M. He got all indignant that he found hate messages smeared on his office door and had his tires slashed. Now, Keyser has no sympathy, of course, with such acts, but he had to comment to his friend, “What do you expect? That’s what happens if you go to Rome and call the pope a filthy old sodomite.” Keyser wouldn’t want to be in College Station TX in the first place, but if he was, he certainly wouldn’t be a founding member of the “Jesus is for Jerks” club on campus.
Anyway, the same is true of computers. Keyser’s used a Mac for more than twenty years and can’t abide PC’s. He gets a sort of perverse enjoyment out of watching those “Your operating system sux and only a moron would like it” threads you come across occasionally on the interwebz. Keyser hasn’t got the least interest in converting PC users to the virtues of Mac or of castigating them for their foolish choices. If people want to believe in Jehovah or Bill Gates, well, that’s their affair.
But, to be frank, he totally doesn’t get the whole “Yeah, my PC could beat the shit out of your wussy Mac any day!” side of the argument. Because, let’s face it, anything running on a Windows platform is a piece of junk, no? Keyser’s particularly puzzled by the “I’ve got to fixed the damned thing all the time, and that’s ’cause I’m a real man, unlike you sissy Mac users.” And Keyser came across exactly that in a thread about the iPhone this morning:
The Mac is a computer for people who dont know anything about computers. It looks good, has a nice screen, and does the standard gambit of things people do with a computer — except allow you to upgrade. Bought a new game and need better graphics performance? Well, with a PC, you hit up Tiger direct and you have a new GPU in 3 days. With a Mac, you hit up the apple store and order a new computer.
What? A “real” computer user needs to be able to fuck around with the inside of the thing? This argument has always seemed to Keyser to be tantamount to saying that you can’t be a real driver unless you know how to take apart an internal combustion engine, and furthermore my car is better than yours because I’m always having to hoist it up on cinderblocks to fuck around with the carburetor just to get the thing to work right. Well, Keyser doesn’t know about you, but he has no desire to screw around with the oily insides of his car, and all he wants is that it should go fast when he pushes the accelerator, slow down when he pushes the brake, and turn from one side to the other according to the motions of the steering wheel. And the Mac does that admirably.
But if you want to fuck around under the hood of your PC all the time and that makes you feel superior, then go with God.
Posted November 2, 2009 by Keyser Söze under Computer Repair, Conversion, God, Miracles of Modern Technology, What'll They Think of Next?, Witchcraft
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:21 am
People who use PCs get to be quite good with computers because they have to be… they are regularly breaking down or getting viruses, and the computers and programs for PCs rarely come with free tech support like Apple products do. It shouldn’t be a point of pride that they know what’s going on inside the machine, it just shows how embarrassingly bad their computer is (and what poor consumer choices they make).
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:29 am
Keyser’s point exactly! (And Keyser, being such an ecumenical soul, won’t point out the relevance of this observation to the theistically minded….)