So, you probably donât care, but your rant about computers all sucking came up as âin my orbitâ because I follow a lot of computer science blogs. The people tumblr is most likely to show your anti Computer Scientist rant to, is computer scientists.
Yeah I was pretty cranky when I wrote that. My quest to read everything Andrew Hussie ever wrote dumped me into a 1700 word article of his where he kvetches about Apple and a trip to Macworld in 2006. The first half is maybe the most infantile, exhausting, shitty thing he ever wrote. Worse than the HIC/Hitler thing, worse than Stoner Lou, worse than the racist chicken - itâs just one part boring to one part childish. It wasnât until I was talking to @rahkshirockâ about it that I realized he was throwing an honest-to-god Karkat tantrum for a thousand words, ripping Apple to shreds in really lazy and strangely hostile ways. (Podcasts. He goes on and on about how horrible the very idea of a podcast is. Itâs almost comically petulant.)So I got so sick of his shit and I vented about it to Tumblr then went back to the article. At which point he had, of course, calmed the fuck down and the second half makes some really good and valuable critiques about problems Apple actually had/has - but that first section was so specious and exhausting I just kind of lost it.Iâve been bitter about computers ever since my university days. There are, broadly speaking, two types of CS students: those who graduate knowing nothing about computers save that the devil machines are not to be trusted, and those who graduated knowing everything about computers and who feel that they (the student) should be worshipped because they posses the secret digital mysteries that lesser mortals are not gifted enough to be able to comprehend. (Itâs a neurodevelopmental disorder that falls under a diagnostic umbrella called STEM-Up-Their-Ass Syndromes. It kills tens of thousands of promising personalities every year, and there is currently no cure.)The former type tends to live off the grid in shacks on mountains and occasionally posts some fragment of code via phone phreaking that is an incredible thing of beauty and will improve society as a whole, or else they, like Jonathan Gillette, know that computer literacy is the only way civilization can save itself from predatory tech companies and they do their best to teach some crumb of their wisdom to the common people before they go mad from the strain of oracular vision and vanish from the mortal plain. (Jonathan Gillette is the only reason I can get anything to run under wine. Though I retain essentially zero working knowledge of Ruby I feel his spirit forever at my back urging me onwards to at least try so as not to disappoint my pet ham).The other kind of CS student is among the worst specimens of humanity this side of Peter Thiel: they retain a deep sense of resentment because they were oppressed for their religious beliefs (Early-Day Conservative Weeabooism) in high school, think having a natural facility with math places them highly in a caste system of their own fevered imaginings, and are forbidden by their religion from applying deodorant because mortification of the flesh is a way to show their devotion to their churchâs martyred founder. (A guy called Kevin Johnson, a COBOL programmer who preached his gospel unto Usenet from his parentâs basement in Plano, Texas and was taken from this world in 1993 when a large Bubblegum Crisis poster fell upon him and pinned him to the ground, where he subsequently drowned in a puddle of Crystal Pepsi - although, according to traditional âCweeabooâ beliefs, before his mortal body perished his true essence was freed from its sweat-slick shell by the Incorrupt And Perfectly Rational Pneuma of Bertrand Russell and stored in the Russian/Spanish subtitles on a bootleg betamax of the finale to Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. The day this bootleg is rediscovered and played the rivers will run with ramune, the air across America will buzz with the sound of Tanna japonensis, and Anime Will Finally Be Good Again. (A splinter-sect of Cweeaboo, known as Conservadox Weeabooism, believes that it was not an Macross bootleg but a pristine laserdisc of volume 5 of The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, and that on its discovery the rivers will run red with Jolt.))These CS students are almost universally white, cis-male, in need of a remedial course on fundamental hygiene tips, and think Deadpool is straight.If this sounds like a grossly unfair stereotype you are correct and I would normally never stoop to saying something so nonsensical, but in university I had courses in the Computer Science building and I encountered these people every single day. It was really rather incredible from a sociological standpoint: âoh my goodness how can you possibly exist as a real legal adult quick point me to the TV show you escaped from and Iâll help you return.â But, no, there they were in the flesh, with thirty more waiting in the wings - they had some psychic power that told then if you had watched an anime at least once and they would pounce while you waited for class to start in order to interrogate you and ensure you had The Right Beliefs About The Choicest Waifus. They were in constant competition with the economics students for âconversation I am most willing to chew my own arm off in order to escapeâ and are a good reason why I advocate for Misdemeanor Douchebaggery statues in institutions of higher learning across the continent.The first type of CS student will help you with your tech problems, never shame you for your hardware or the hows and whys of why you own it, will listen to your woes, and survived their CS program without murdering their fellow students - which probably qualifies them for sainthood. They often, but not exclusively, identify as female, tend to have a wicked sense of humour, and can usually debone and serve a sexist male like a Wimbledon Champion in under fifteen seconds.There is also supposedly a third kind of CS student, the so-called âordinary personâ who is said to have graduated without making an ass of themselves at a party, runs the servers at their local insurance company, lives in a suburb, and finds The Big Bang Theory funny. I have never met such a person and have come to believe they are a myth created by car companies as the ideal buyer persona for mid-range sedans.Anyways since university I have approached computers and their advocates with great suspicion and mistrust. The last decade of rising technocratic malevolence has really only proven the correctness of my position: youâd have thought that weebs would have known better than to not only build a soulless android but also allow it to attend Harvard, but the Objectifying Women protocols were so wearingly on-brand that the apocalyptic hubris of the Zuckerborg Project isnât all that surprising.Anyways, computers suck, and anyone who wants to make you feel inferior for using one kind of computer over another kind of computer is the sort of person who will try and convince you that thereâs a meaningful moral distinction between Gatorade and Powerade. Also Andrew Hussie has, or at least had, a bee up his ass about podcasts that made him sound like an iPod-fixated Alex Jones and his rant on the subject is very hard to sit through.This probably didnât answer your question, if you had a question, but Iâm sure it created a lot of questions, which is all you can really expect from me.