When Subcultures Collide: Macs & Kansas City

Here in Kansas City it's not so tough being a Mac user, as there are plenty of major chains that sell Macs or peripherals for them (Microcenter and until recently, Circuit City), a large, healthy MUG (featured on Apple's site, no less) and many third-party suppliers and repair facilities (dumpster-diving has been fun since I moved out here). There's only one real drawback of living in Kansas City and being a Mac user: the rampant art faggotry, pseudo-creativity, and nerdario emo fags associated with Macintosh computing!

Yes, sadly, Kansas City is a hotbed for the so-called art and emo communities. You know the kind. Thick, silly glasses, mussed, tussled hair, ill-fitting cardigans, sweaters, dirty jeans and corduroys, and faded T-shirts purposefully purchased for the obscure entity it advertises on it. They're everywhere, these emo idiots, and they've infiltrated the Macintosh community through their affiliation with art.

Talking to one of these jerks is as exciting as digging up your dead grandmother and trying to get her to converse with you (though as hard as it would be staring at the fetid, rotting corpse of a loved one, I'd probably rather do that than spend any time with one of these whining, pierced, star-tattooed morons). They are usually brain-dead to begin with and share a common brain with each other. If art and emo fags sharing a brain is anything like allowing multiple log-ins on a Linux server, you know the drag-and-lag I'm talking about: roughly as fast as fat 4-way amputee quadriplegic in a marathon, and about as sharp as a beach ball.

As easy as the Mac is to use, hardware- and software-wise, these people make it look like Apple has asked them to interface with the thing using assembler. With their eyes shut and using only their tongues to type on the keyboard. Inquiring as to what version of Mac OS they're running usually results in only being able to tell if it's either Mac OS X or not: the old one, or the new one, is about all you'll get. Hoping one of these sub-human poseurs knows anything about their Macs is hoping for too much. I swear to God these people bought their Macs to be different and not because they actually needed a computer that worked right.

Yeah, maybe Macs are computers for people who don't use computers. But dammit, man, if you're going to own a tool, be able to use it and maintain it. I've seen some of these idiots on high-speed connections that are 4 or 5 OS updates behind. My favorite are the clueless slags who run 9.0 on their Mac and refuse to upgrade to X for whatever reason and haven't even touched 9.1 or 9.2. I mean, if you refuse to move up to X, at least be running the latest Mac OS 9 update that you can.

Kansas City's a great place, don't get me wrong. But the art community here, as well as the emo scene, make being a Mac user a little embarrassing. Maybe it's just me, since I moved from an area that wasn't so saturated with subculture shittiness and gayness, but I am having a harder and harder time being the proud underdog Mac user with these vegan indy-rock retards standing in my corner.

Will I abandon the Mac because of them? No. The Mac experience is finally growing my leaps and bounds again after half a decade of holding pattern. But I will start kicking ass and taking names the next time I see some slobbering, giggling emo retardo talking about his new iBook or Power Mac G4 louder than necessary, letting people know how different he is.

And that's a promise.

Quartz Extreme Requirements

OK, you assholes, one last time — try to get this one simple fact through your thick Steve-washed braincases: MAC OS 10.2 DOES not REQUIRE 32 MEGS OF VIDEO MEMORY TO USE QUARTZ EXTREME.

Every time there's new Apple hardware released, or some new rumor or tidbit regarding Mac OS 10.2, AKA Jaguar, there always seems to be at least one idiot who posts something uninformed yet totally rude and arrogant like "ah, [new hardware], outdated before it's even released." This makes my blood boil.

So what is it that you people think exactly? That upon installing Jaguar on a Power Mac G3 it'll reboot into text mode blinking "PLEASE UPGRADE VIDEO HARDWARE: INSUFFICIENT RAM TO DISPLAY MAC OS X?" Come on people, please. We know Apple's playing the "planned obsolescence" game now but that's a bit fucking ridiculous.

If there's not 16 megs of RAM, regular Quartz will run. If there's 16 megs of RAM, Quartz Extreme will run. And if there's more than 16 megs of RAM, it'll run really nice. GET THIS THROUGH YOUR FUCKING SKULLS. Mac OS 10.2 will run on any system that Mac OS 10.1 will run on. Jesus fucking Christ, I run 10.1 on my stock Power Mac 8600/300 with no video card!!! You people really need to wake up.

To said idiots, morons, and imbeciles (which the Mac world seems full of nowadays, thanks to the Apple's fruit campaign bringing over loads of PC lusers), I'd like to shout a resounding FUCK YOU and link you to Apple's Mac OS 10.2 spec page so that, on the off chance that you can read, you'll see that Quartz Extreme doesn't require 32 megs of RAM, it just prefers it over 16 megs of RAM (which is the actual base requirement).

I hope this little rant helped get the message across about Jaguar's actual graphics requirements. I need to go lay down before I have some sort of blowout. I can feel my heart pounding in my head at 180 beats a minute.

Say Hello to iHub

I've got to hand it to Apple. They've improved iPhoto without falling backward. I just wonder where this is all going, what with all of the iApps and simplification of the operating system.

One really has to wonder if, in the future, Apple's digital hub idea is going to end up making a Mac a super-appliance while sacrificing the traditional empowerment one has oer their system. This has always been a complaint of PC and UNIX people, that Mac keeps the user well away from tweaking the system, and it looks to be coming true.

Imagine a Mac that you boot up into one giant panel — think Mac OS 9's Panel/At Ease interface. On this panel one would have options to browse the web, edit a movie, play music, burn a CD, chat, alter photos, etc. All good things, to be sure, and all things we can do now. But imagine this being it! The Mac would not allow installation of programs, or moving or deleting files. It would be a de facto all-in-one box, a dumbed-down PC that only allowe the user to work on projects and not really interact with the file system in any meaningful way.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you the iHub. A connectivity and productivity kiosk that foregoes the overly-complex features of a regular PC. All the software you'll ever need comes pre-installed, updates to applications happen in the background without need for user intervention, and file management ends at the open/save dialog box. A built-in resource use analyzer alerts the user when they might want to clean up the hard drive (a single button does so, invoking a wizard that walks asks the user what to clean up), add more RAM (time to add memory! Please take your iHub to a local Apple-certified dealer), or a myriad of other tasks which most users ignore under the current user-driven OS interfaces of today.

I'd think long and hard about Apple's directions toward the digital hub. iChat, iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail.app: might all be the value-added end of a Mac now, but eventually they will be the only thing running on the Mac besides the OS.

Say goodbye to Mac OS and say hello to iHub.