I don’t hate Apple.  I hate the Cult of Apple.  Of course, zealotry in all its forms is annoying, but Apple actually weaves it into its marketing and image.  I didn’t know “smugness” could test so well.  Apple competes with PCs, but other competitors–Coke and Pepsi, Marvel and DC, PlayStation and XBox–I don’t see a complete condescension to the consumers who prefer one over the other.  Sure, there was the Pepsi Challenge, but Pepsi didn’t go out, show someone drinking a coke, and then vomiting.  Of course, that’s down to personal preference whereas technology can be scientifically measured and analyzed to achieve objective results.

But Apple marketing isn’t about science.  It’s about making sure its users seem cool. Which is why the iPad is a “magical and revolutionary” device.  While I’ve had no problem making fun of that slogan, I’ve held off on commenting on the machine itself until I actually tried it out.  I played with one a few weeks ago at Best Buy.  My conclusion: it’s a very neat toy.  To call it a giant iPod Touch is pretty much on the money.  And that’s fine.  I’m planning to buy the new model of the iPod Touch whenever it comes out later this year.  But I think Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing put it best when he said of the iPad: “Incumbents make bad revolutionaries.”

Then I saw this e-mail exchange Apple CEO Steve Jobs had with a writer of Valleywag.  Yes, I’ll give a little golf clap for Jobs having the time to personally respond to someone who called him out on his bullshit marketing.  But for a guy who’s worth billions of dollars, his arguments were…baffling.  I’ve highlighted the part I understand, which is about freedom, or rather, how Jobs interprets that word.

Alright, so let’s pause right here before I get to the point where Jobs completely undoes himself.  For starters, I’m fascinated by this world Jobs lives in where every PC is vulnerable to programs that steal your date and trash your battery.  It’s slightly indicative of the Apple mindset: computers are locked systems and if you get a locked system that isn’t ours, you’re screwed.  Except PCs aren’t locked.  There are plenty of smart, computer savvy people out there and they don’t use Macs.  They use PCs…running Linux (or some other OS that isn’t Windows).  I know it’s easier to generalize and say all PC users run a Microsoft operating system and are totally helpless (…without the “freedom” Apple can provide).  And hey, I run Microsoft and I like it.  I’m comfortable with it and if I just exercise a modicum of caution when using the Internet, then I’m going to be okay.

But it’s the “freedom from porn” line that gets me.  Steve Jobs (and by proxy Apple Computers) have declared that you must be protected from pornography.  The Internet has it and it’s gonna get you. You’re just going to be happily browsing along, finding a new recipe for lemon pound cake, and then BAM!  You’ll have a giant dick in your face.  It could happen to YOU.

Except, I’m an adult.  I’m also an adult who, again, knows how to surf smart.  But you know what?  Apparently, this wasn’t for my benefit.  Apple is thinking of the children.

So now we’ve come to a really strange argument: Apple thinks it can raise your children better than you.  You’re too stupid to protect your child from porn, porn that will irrevocably ruin a child’s life, and unless you let Apple provide you “freedom” from porn, you’re a bad parent.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how condescension can become outright creepy.  But this next part is where I wondered how Mr. Jobs became so rich and powerful when he manages to undo his argument about freedom within the span of about an hour:

That about sums it up.  Jobs is right that people don’t have to publish on the iPad.  And he’s also right that if you want to take advantage of a market they provide, you have to compromise and make technological concessions.  But let us not pretend that the iPad or any Apple product is about “freedom”.  It’s about Apple choosing what the right thing is for its users because those users don’t know any better. So Apple will take them by the hand and show them right from wrong.

That’s the attitude I hate.  Just spare me.  You can sell your fun products without pretending that you’re the offspring of Gandalf and Che Guevara, and you will save the world from itself as you dictate the laws of technology from up on high.

Over the past several months, I’ve been redesigning the page where I list all my movie reviews.  Hopefully, you’ll now find it easier to navigate and more pleasing to the eye.  I hope you like it.  If you don’t, keep it to yourself because otherwise you’ll hurt my feelings and I’ll have to go cry in the shower, which has the best acoustics for man-sobbing.

1.) The school saw no problem admitting it into the science fair.

2.) She correctly notes that you cannot get AIDS from fucking a horse.

3.) They gave her a medal for this project.

34 more amazing science fair projects

That is a valid (albeit highly cynical and narrow-minded) viewpoint.

Of course, I like to view Twitter as a tool.  It can be used for mundane ramblings, but it can also be used for promotion of one’s content, important stories, and as a quick way of sharing ideas.  I also like that it’s almost a challenge and encourages the brevity of wit.

And as to the point about it being narcisstic and mundane, I would like to point out that we have always been the stars of our own lives and just as we would accept narration in a book or a film, we shouldn’t disdain ourselves so heavily that we think our lives aren’t worth mentioning.  In a weird way, I think the Internet encourages all of us to scream our voices due to its high population.  We need the world to know we existed even if it was only in a minor fashion. Does this encourage us to remain comfortable in uneventful lives by inflating the banal into the adventurous?  Perhaps.  But it could also function as a means of realization and spur people on to actual adventures.  Like most things, it all depends on the user.

Some cynics may find such explanations laughable.  We can tell people that they’re not that interesting and that we don’t care that they’re having a ham sandwich but who is forced to read or use Twitter?  Why should anyone’s private hobby, as long as it doesn’t actively cause harm to another, get under your skin?

“It’s part of the downfall of society!” you cry.  You know, we’ve made it through public executions and using black people as property.  I think we’ll survive microblogging.

What I want to survive is inferior microblogging.  MySpace is to Facebook as Twitter is to whatever’s next and I want whatever’s next to be now.  Here’s a list of ten obvious features that Twitter could easily implement and so far they’ve managed to do about one and a half.  Is auto-fill that difficult?  Embedded links are just impossible?  I understand that there’s a consideration to be able to use it via your phone but sometimes you don’t get to do everything through your phone.  It sucks but it happens.

And I know there are desktop clients that have some of these features but it’s why should I have to download software when Twitter should have done all this crap yesterday.  I’m not looking for a massive overhaul–I’m looking for obvious features that they won’t implement either due to lack of funds (which is hard to believe given the amount of capital they’ve received and attention they currently hold) or due to lack of expertise.   Or maybe they’re just too busy fighting with the goddamned Fail-whale and micro issues to actually make the service better and are simply struggling to make it function.  They’ve come up with a good idea and they’re failing at the execution.  And that means someone’s going to take their idea and do it better and I’m waiting for that site to not only come along but for everyone on Twitter to pack up their shit and move to the better site.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to occasionally bitch about it in 140 characters or less.

I could be like the best Twitter user ever.  I could command wit and insight in 140 characters or less.  Collider could become the biggest movie website on the Internet and I will never even have a third of Wheaton’s follower.  The only way I can see myself becoming as popular as Wil Wheaton is if I kill Wil Wheaton.  And that’s not to say that his followers would be like, “Wheaton is dead!  All hail the new king!” What I’m saying is like you’ll see the news reports saying “Film journalist kills Star Trek: TNG-star/Stand By Me-star/Geek Overlord Wil Whedon” and they’ll ask, “Why’d you do it, Matt?”  And I’ll say, “Have you seen the first season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation?” and we’ll all have a good chuckle before remembering that I just murdered a guy.  So really, I can’t become as famous as Wheaton but I can become as infamous as that woman who murdered Selena but now with social networking and morbid curiosity.

You can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/MattGoldberg but we’ll never best Wheaton.

Today I went in for a job interview (a real one!*) and the interviewers both said they had read my blog and and enjoyed it!  I don’t know if that’s enough to hire me (that would be totally awesome if it were), but it did help boost my writing self-esteem.  Lately I’ve felt like I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump.  I’ve been turning in a steady stream of articles for Collider but I felt they were lacking the pop I was once providing.  I wasn’t playing with words like I used to or including fun asides.  It was rote analysis of movie news with not enough of the snark that I was hired to write in the first place.  And I love writing snark.  How many people get paid to be snarky?  Thankfully, not many.  But I’m one of them!

Anyway, if anyone ever tells you that keeping a blog may be detrimental to your job prospects, feel free to use this instance as anecdotal evidence.  You will surely win the argument.

*At some point I’ll have to chronicle how CareerBuilder led me into a den of thieves.

However, it seems to slightly dodge one important issue. While Cody seems to be retaliating against the obvious jealousy of the “Film_Fan78″ variety of internet fanboys, she doesn’t seem to really go into the amount of sexism she’s facing and then kicking in the face with one of her patented kung-fu kicks.

Sexism, for those that are wondering, is NOT disagreeing with women or even disliking a woman. I feel like I have to clarify this point because our news media and political campaigns seem to fail on daily basis on the definition of “sexism”. Here’s a very simple test for determining sexism: if the circumstances were the same except the subject in question was a man and not a woman, how would you react?

And the truth with Diablo Cody is that she would be the new geek god. If Juno had been written by a man and from the perspective of Bleeker’s character, Juno would probably be hailed as one of the current crop of classic geek films and fanboys would be drooling at her next projects rather than leaving us mature people to do the heavy lifting and get excited for Jennifer’s Body and The United States of Tara.

But there is a flip-side to this article and it’s going to be odd because I’m criticising a criticism of a person’s critics.  We are truly through the looking glass.

Sometimes, you just have to let your critics go.  Her entire article, for me, is the very reason, you don’t respond to the haters.  Even if they were legitimate critics (and I have no doubt that there are about half of them with the words “sophmore slump” already macro’d into their Microsoft Word simply because God forbid anyone be as successful as Cody on their debut film), you have to let them go.

I once received an e-mail from a gentleman who was upset about my negative review of his independent film.  It was a straight-to-DVD film, I reviewed it for one of the sites I was working for at the time, and thought that was the end of it.  But this gentleman felt the need to seek me out and explain how hard he had worked and that I was reviewing a bastardization of his vision, and so on and so forth.

And I simply explained to him and as I will explain to Ms. Cody right now, don’t waste your breath.  The way you rise above your critics is by leaving them behind.  You can accept their criticism, study it, use it, or discard it, but if you engage it, then you’re lending it credence.  Cody is clearly a million times more successful than those who try to diminish her accomplishments, but this isn’t a case of throwing one good punch against a schoolyard bully and he’ll leave you alone.  This is one of those instances where she should have written all this out and then never published it, not for her privacy but so that it doesn’t give the pricks the satisfaction of knowing they got under her skin.

Cody just needs to keep doing her thing and eventually the haters will shut up because success speaks for itself.  I’m greatly looking forward to Cody’s upcoming projects and hope that she’ll remain above the fray in the future since she’s already above most of us already.

But where and how can I possibly marry off my adolescent daughter without coming off as incredibly creepy in this godless age we live in? Well, I guess modernity isn’t totally awful because with the advent of the Internet, I can marry off my underage daughter to anyone in the United States! Thanks, Internet!

MarryOurDaughter.com is unreal. Seriously, I keep looking for the “Gotcha!” and part of the site where they say “Of course this isn’t real! That would be fucking terrible!” But it is nowhere to be found. What is to be found, is the testimonials section, which contains glorious customer satisfaction such as this:

“At first we were worried that Janine was too young to get married, but then her new husband bought her a house and a car and jewelry and the money we got let us buy a house for ourselves. Getting out of the trailer park at our age was the best thing that ever happened to us, and it’s all thanks to Marry Our Daughter!”

That can’t be real. People in trailer parks don’t have access to the Internet, right? And how do they decide on the price? Who the fuck are these people? Of course, the site could only ever appeal to the richest of pedophiles. Also, none of these girls go for more than $100,000. I guess none of their parents were willing to dream the impossible dream that their daughter may be worth more than a luxury car. And you gotta feel bad for the girls who don’t even make it past $10,000.

I think I’m headed to jail just looking at this site. Look at the hidden keywords at the bottom of the page (Ctrl+A, scroll down, turn stomach).