Holy fucking ugly !
“I wanted a beautiful computer and couldn’t find one, so I made my own”
Mmmm…
Whoa there old-timer!
Oh my God. I thought at first that @rei was being mean, but after wading through a million words of pretentious bullshit, you get this hot garbage:
A QWERTY keyboard.
A remnant of 19th century Midwestern American typewriters, and that is his chosen interface to leap the gap betwixt human and machine.
How banal.
He doesn’t even state how many vacuum tubes or transistors his Mythic uses for calculations or word processing! Never mind the quality of those pieces, why, perhaps he doesn’t even perform the glassblowing of the tubes himself!
At least he is authentic in his inauthenticity.
That was the 1st image. I kept scrolling, thinking, well that must be a scrapped early prototype.
I’ll take entitled family-wealthy young Gen Z twatwaffles for $500, Alex.
For someone so concerned with aesthetics his website design… well, yeah.
The soul shudders at the mere thought! True artisans use Dvorak keyboards with only the finest of mechanical keys. Preferably made of ivory from an African elephant, but for those on a budget, mother of pearl keys are also a tasteful option.
Even more insulting is that he starts with stuff like this as his inspiration:
I realized that the craftsmen of yore had elevated weaponry, a category of merely utilitarian objects, into some of the most exquisite things I had ever seen. They had taken objects of ubiquitous, vital importance in their respective eras and made them beautiful. My initial aesthetic shock was quickly replaced by jealousy — no one was lifting the most centrally important functional objects in our lives into the domain of beauty. The practice of these long-gone artisans had disappeared.
Like, WTF, dude.
but
As to my first conclusion about beauty, the necessity of craftsman manufacturing, I did well. I carved the body of Mythic I by the strength of my hands alone. As to the second conclusion, the necessity of ornament, I did not do so well. For all my research and polemical thought, I ran out of time for this prototype.
The ornate swords, guns he waxes nostalgic about for the euro-centric colonial era of yore, are all playthings of rich folks. Not some worthy tools of self made men.
Needs more holes in the monitor.
What a fucking ape. ahh yes I too wish to go back to days of rape and violence “This is related to why man became stunted with the dawn of agriculture. We traded a life limited by the occasional violent struggle over bountiful surplus for a more predictable life limited by grinding labor after barely sufficient nutrition.”
That looks like someone’s idea of an executive word processor from the 60s.
To be fair, there is a serious body of scholarship that interrogates the idea that the agricultural revolution and the transition from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers was a completely benign and beneficial transformation. That literature however isn’t trying to glorify the pre-agricultural world, rather it is instead pointing out the trade-offs we made becoming urbanized, and the long-term costs of what ultimately became wage labor.
This twatweasel however is not operating at that level. I doubt he would actually understand much of the academic literature about any of the things about which he prattles endlessly.
And yes, fugly. Though my biggest WTF? was the “since 2019” comment. I mean, I teach college students. I deal every day with folks whose first reaction to any date before yesterday is to think of it as being lost in the mists of time. My students, though, are smart enough to know the reality of their situation and their inexperience when they actually have to write stuff or communicate with fossils like me.
Not much of a trade-off for me since I wouldn’t be alive without medical treatments that are impossible for hunter-gatherers. Probably none of us would be.
I’m not sure why everyone seems so angry about the wooden computer kid, but maybe he should have studied industrial design instead of software engineering, just to gain a bit of perspective.
Oh, I’m not disagreeing with you there; I have zero interest in hunting or gathering. And I don’t think it’s the odd design aesthetic that pushes buttons. It’s the pretentiousness that gets people. But, in the grand scheme of things, yeah, it’s hardly worth getting worked up over. I think most folks are just enjoying poking holes in a bag of hot air.
Surely Keegan McNamara is a satirist.