The Mothership - Ms. Duh Monthly


February, 2006 Edition by Ms. Duh Contributing Columnist Late night, insomnia induced A, B, Cs. A - A is for Apple of course. Our favorite corporation. That company that we complain about when they change some minute detail of the operating system or computer because we feel that it was our right as Mac users to have it exactly the way we want it. And don't forget that righteous indignation and feeling of personal offense when they act like, oh god forbid, a corporation that is out to make money. B - B is for broke. How I've gone broke trying to keep my insatiable Mac lust under control. If I could just be whacked up with 300 cc's of thorazine during major hardware releases, I could have money for, say, shoes or food. C - Betcha thought I'd say C is for Computer. Nope. C is for COOOLLLLLLL. That wonderfully empowering sense of cool that you can buy. Betcha thought you'd never be cool. If I knew in high school that dropping a grand on a computer would make me one of the cool kids, I would have never dyed my hair black, and hung out with theater kids smoking pot in the back of the auditorium. Boy, I coulda had a Mac instead of a tongue stud. D - D is for the Demo. Remember all those wickedly awesome demos Uncle Steve ran during Macworlds? How the Mac would run Photoshop a billion times faster than that poor intel box? How he could effortlessly leaf through 25,000 photos in iphoto with his Mac? How he put together audio and video into a podcast in less than 5 seconds? Of course you could do them too, provided you bought a top of the line Mac with a thousand gigs of ram and pre-cached images, plus spent 8 weeks rehearsing it all. E - E is for Effort. Applause for all those who aren't Steve, that people don't know, who do the building, coding, designing, testing, marketing, and distributing of our favorite little computer. Well placed effort from all these people. I always forget to thank the people who made my computer possible. F - F is for that word I say when I'm trying to unscrew something inside the Mac and the screwdriver slips out of my hand cutting a bloody gash into my palm as it falls onto the motherboard plowing up a bunch of the green stuff and knocking a few of those little metal nubby things off. Actually, F would be for the 15 or so times I repeat this word. G - G is for Gianormous. Just when I thought Macs were getting smaller, the G5 is a gianormous hunk of metal that is one lumbering mother. Just big. And metal. Still haven't warmed up to the design. Although don't let that stop you from paypal-ing me a dollar towards the purchase of this big aluminum behemoth. H - H is for Hypercard. Remember Hypercard? Yeah, I though it was dead too, but apparently it has a thriving little, teeny subculture of folks out there still using Hypercard. I only list it because I am amazed that dinosaurs still roam the earth, and I couldn't think of anything good for H. I - I is for iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iAdNauseum. OH GOOD GOD STOP ALREADY WITH THE I's. The computer industry has been grafting i's onto everything in a vane attempt to inject a little Hip & Hi-tech factor in whatever useless piece of electronic crap they want to foist on a demographic with an increasingly large amount of disposable income. Remember when "e" was the big wart they glued onto the nose of everything? J - J is for John Lasseter, founder and creative guide of Pixar. Pixar, which Steve Jobs CEO'd. Uncle Steve CEOs Apple. Apple makes Macs. I like Macs. Yeah, it's like that 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, or whatever that strange game is called, but I like and admire him and wanted a way to get him on the list. Hey. My list, my choices. Lasseter, from what I've read, operates almost like an anti-Steve CEO. Where Steve is stark and and minimalist, Lasseter is a warm sofa. Where Steve runs hot and cold with his employees, Lasseter is more nurturing and encouraging. Where Steve would be a giant german dominatrix from the 1930s, Lasseter would be Sandra Bullock. K - K is for Kiefer Sutherland. In addition, he has a nice booty. L - L is for LAME. HOW FRIGGIN LAME IS SPOTLIGHT IN TIGER? I mean, really, geeze, it was like an exercise in just how royally you can destroy a simple application like "FIND" and make it the most complicated and hard to use thing in the whole world. And there is no way to get it to really act like the "FIND" we all know and love and could use. M - M is for Microsoft. Thank you Microsoft for setting the baseline of mediocrity where we Mac users can float above. Thank you for being a two-dimensional and monolithic enemy that we all can rail against and feel superior to, and thanks for Steve Balmer who has set the bar for the level of acceptable public sweating so high, many men need no longer fear taking off their sport coats in front of large crowds anymore. N - N is for Netscape. My first browser and one I stuck with till about version 4.5. It has a warm, nostalgic place in my history and was a doorway to a place called internet. A weird, and wonderful place filled with everything you could ever want and a vast and various amount of porno. O - O is for OS X. At first I hated it. Then I hated it a bit less. Then I just loathed it. Then I thought it wasn't some plague sent to destroy me. Then I said it was okay. So I guess O is for Okay. OS X is OK. P - P is for Pagemaker. My first application on my first Mac. Pagemaker 1.4. Oh, the memories. Flock of Seagulls, and Duran Duran. I made $4.50 an hour. My first computer game was Darwin's Dilemma and Zork I. I think I still was a size six. And I had 4 mbs of ram and an external 40 mb hard drive. All for only a couple of grand. Those were the days. Q - Q is for Quark. It will always amaze me that QuarkExpress ever became industry standard. Being from the Pagemaker camp, it was horrible to get used to and the keyword for all Express users was "work-around". But at least we aren't laying out publications in Microsoft Publisher. I think I would have to commit an ugly act of hari kari if Publisher ever got to a level of useability that would warrant a more widespread userbase than retarded monkeys buying it because the box was pretty. R - R is for Ram. You can never be too thin, or too pretty or have too much ram. S - S is for SOON. GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY, I'LL SOON BE DONE WITH THIS LIST. Oh, alright, I'll do a real one. S is for Sneakers. One of my favorite movies. Computers, rogues, and Robert Redford. What more could you want? T - T is for Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. It was stylish, modern, and cost about 80 bazillion dollars more than the comparable Macs that had the same insides, and a beige exterior. OH MY LORD, wasn't it 7 grand or something? Now you can get one on ebay for like a 100 bucks. What cojones for a company that was a minor player at best in the industry at the time and posting million dollar losses. I think even better Macs at the time were 6,000 less. Still, I think I might like to have one - that and a FlowerPower iMac. U - U is for Ubernet.net. One of my FAVORITE FAVORITE FAVORITE online comics. That one, and Player vs. Player. V - V is for, ah... um... well. If you know what V is for, just drop me a line at duh@mac.com. W - W is for Wozniak. The most groovy part of the Mac tradition. I once had the pleasure of anonymously yelling his name as he was coming out of the men's potty at Macworld. Well, he was one of a bunch of people I yelled at coming out of the men's potty at Macworld. X - X is for Xbox, Xtreme etc. and enough already with the Xs. See I's above and substitute X for I and you pretty much get the idea. Even though I am a secretly proud member of Generation X, it still annoys the heck out of me with all this Xtreme this and X-that. Y - Y? Because I love you. Z - Z is for Zork. Zork I, II, and III, Zork Nemesis, and Beyond Zork. Boy did I love that game. Way back when. Text based adventure, where killing was as simple as typing "kill" and the fact that the game could draw a little ASCII map for me as I played was mind blowing. Simply mind blowing.