iEgoism

Ok. We’ve all seen the slew of Macintosh ads featuring Justin Long and John Hodgeman. We try to fast forward through them on our Tivos, but, well, shit happens. And I love John Hodgeman. Alas, he has gone over to the dark side. I digress…

In opening up this week’s New Yorker, the pages immediately flipped open to a Mac ad, cleverly made of paper stiffer than the rest of the magazine complete with a little fold-out brochure. This annoyed me for two reasons. One: it makes the magazine a trifle hard to fold over and stick in my bag, and Two: I fucking hate Mac advertising.

“PCs are for the stuff we have to do, like pie charts and spreadsheets. Macs are for the stuff we want to do, like photos, music and movies.”

(I’ll let the grammatical context of this ad slide for now, though I believe they’re missing a few key verbs)

I have a PC. I don’t believe I have ever made a pie chart or a spreadsheet. I might have made a spreadsheet at work once or twice, and to be honest, I think it was on a Mac.

I recently had to write a discussion response for my Persuasion and Compliance Gaining class (don’t ask; it fills a requirement), in which I detailed a marketing campaign that used contrast or social comparison in an effort to persuade consumers. I used Macintosh’s marketing campaign as an example of this. They have taken the idea of the Mac versus PC “persona” to a literal level; they don’t even show their product in the advertisement anymore, it is simply two actors attempting to embody a brand of computer, from an Apple-biased standpoint. The initial Long/Hodgeman commercial revolves around the concept that Macs are, stated simply, “better.” This, of course, is entirely subjective to whoever is buying the product; it depends on what you are looking for. In Mac’s case, it often depends on how you want to look .

In some ways, it is an effective campaign, at least to reinforce Apple’s already loyal Mac customers. But one has to wonder, does insulting the competition really sway them to change brand loyalty? Listing off possible faults in PCs may not necessarily be the best way at winning over that demographic of computer users. Whether or not it is ethical is also subject to opinion. I personally don’t like this type of advertising; companies who ascribe this sort of egoistic approach to advertising generally turn me off (I can’t say that makes me more inclined to, say, Microsoft, or Dell, but I can’t think offhand of a similar marketing campaign on their part, but then I try not to watch commercials and believe that advertising is the bane of American society. Well, that and religion. But that’s a whole other blog entry).

You are not your computer. If you were, you'd be better at binary.

Most of the demons are asleep now...They look so innocent, it’s hard to believe that just a few hours ago they were raping and torturing us.

i'm in the middle of midterms. hence my lacking text.

related: Jack Handey's My First Day in Hell

Baby...did you forget to take your meds?

what constitutes "good writing" is entirely subjective. if you ask me, i write devastatingly good letters to exboyfriends and particularly awful research papers that lack discernible theses. my grades would suggest otherwise; every time i am certain i've turned in the most god-awful piece of crap term paper, i get an A on it (oh happy day!)and from a difficult professor at that.

conversely, every time i am certain that i have missed at least half of the questions on a science or math exam, i am indeed correct. without exaggeration.

this is why i have tremendous respect for doctors. and think that they're crazy.

unrelated, the new Placebo album is really good. *NOTE* since i have have gotten an inordinate amount of google hits for this header, let me help you out. The song is called Meds by Placebo. it's on their new album. aptly titled, Meds. go figure.

and i am inept at grocery shopping. among other things.

(and perhaps i'm just going blind, but did the new iTunes interface make all the icons smaller? is that what they call an improvement?)

Progression, I swear (Round two).

I’ve had interesting things to say; they now elude me. It’s the drugs. I’m sorry. It’s like being stuck in bullet mode in Word. Man I hate that. Where was I…oh yes.

What I learned this week:

It is difficult to run gracefully with coffee. The only thing I miss about Dunkin Donuts coffee: lids with a convenient sippy-cup tab. (If there’s a name for this, it is lost on me. if you don't have a clue what i'm talking about, you probably live in the NW)

Drunken pumpkin carving is awesome. Just be sure to buy plenty of band-aids.

House of Leaves, though terribly interesting, is not the most portable of novels. Thanks Mike.

The Dresden Dolls are the best band ever. Have you ever heard an analytical cover of Bon Jovi’s Livin on a Prayer? The lyrics are a bit contradicting.

Lance and Matt aren’t gay. "I think people see pictures and they think we're these overgrown frat guys," says Armstrong. "We all have buds, we all take guy trips.” Do we? Do we all take guy trips?

Tom Tykwer is my hero.

Jimmy Dean is destroying America one Pancake & Sausage on a stick at a time. Curiously, only in the Southeast.

Progression, I swear (Round one).

In an attempt to instill some semblance of routine and actual, oh I don’t know, effort in my life, I have decided to begin a weekly “themed” piece concerning things that I have learned each week. Why? Because it’s a proven fact (the proof of which I shall subsequently google in an attempt to back up. I’m nothing if not credible) that people love lists. Of things. Grocery lists, for example; I bet you’ve never seen a grocery paragraph. A grocery haiku? I think not.

Donald Trump isn’t gay. And has really bad taste. We knew this.

George Eads in my hero. Yet somehow, he inspired very few adjectives when I was writing his bio earlier this week.

Broken Halo gets me drunk.

That shape in the foreground of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors is a distorted skull. And I totally have a crush on my 16th century English drama professor.

Eighth graders are now apparently required to take molecular biology (and posting death threats against Bush on your Myspace profile is a bad idea).

Babies are the new Glock (side note: the Glock E-Tool is not, as it might sound, a web browser).

NyQuil’s website has a sleep aptitude test, which I flunked, even though I drink NyQuil every night in order to fall asleep (I’m the reason they card for it in Oregon). Ironic, no? “You are a "walking zombie" and unproductive.” Yup. That’s me.

it's hard out here for a hooker.

you wouldn't think it would be hard to find white ruffled panties...

"This is not the comedy we intended to do when the week began..."

In navigating my brother’s social circle this weekend, (which as it turns out puts both a damper on my “game” as well as his; let me state here for the record how generous I was in sharing my female friends with him in high school. Moving on…) I was asked the ever popular small-talk question of, “What do you do?” Though I am often inclined to offer up the self-aggrandizing, “Oh I do nothing” reply, I instead responded with the truth, that I write freelance biographies for an entertainment website. To which my friend replied, “You can get paid for that?”

Yes. If the United States Postal Service doesn't misplace your paycheck for over a month, you can.

Spartans!

Frank Miller's 300.

I read the comic when I was working in the story department at Regency four years ago. It's about freakin time.

ADDENDUM: i received a couple of comments regarding the music in this trailer; if you're awesome, you know that it's Nine Inch Nails (Just Like You Imagined. off The Fragile. great album) if you didn't know that, well now you do.

i am personally susceptible to any marketing campaign/trailer/movie that incorporates NIN into their soundtrack. see Man on Fire (which might be the only case of cleverly woven in Linda Rondstadt i've ever witnessed as well).

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Then one day Holly swallowed all the pills in the house.

Portland State University recently conducted a survey of how kids, aged 8-18, perceive mental illness.

"Results show that youth expect that a child with depression or ADHD is more likely than a classmate with asthma to be socially shunned...Youth on the surveys indicated that if they thought they had depression, they would most likely talk to a friend, talk to their parents and pray."

pray?