sucks

This post is in part a tirade against a specific Lenovo laptop and in part the illumination of a general rule of thumb. Lenovo's Thinkpad x240 is supposed to be a high end, professional laptop and being that it is from the glorious Thinkpad line,Â it is supposed to be a highly reliable machine. I purchased one in FebruaryÂ lastÂ year and it died today. I'll need to send it in for repair and I'm sure they'll fix it but if one pays north of a grand and a half for a laptop, one expects it to not cop out in less than a year. This is not the only problem that I have had with this laptop but it is the one which has pushed me beyond the edge and forced me to write this.

I don't completelyÂ blame Lenovo here. They are merely a symptom of a deeper malaise: the absolute crapness of new technology and how it produces disposable objects which are lacking in quality and durability. It does produce shiny objects withÂ tons of features that nobody needs. It produces objects of desire which send people insane periodicallyÂ andÂ leaves them salivatingÂ as they peruse them in shop windows and on websites. Have you seen their dead fixated eyes as they drool over thatÂ latest and greatest gadget or that expensive dress? What are they purchasing from all that money that they have painstakingly accumulated working too many hours at jobs which completely suck the life out of them? They buy fancy, expensive shitÂ and thenÂ they buy more fancy, expensive shitÂ to go with what they bought earlier and to protect their earlier shit. A good example is a phone. Nobody needs all the features of the modern phone except in case if they expressly desire to turn into walking zombies. But they go to terrible lengths, including signing up years of their life on contracts or paying ridiculous sums of money up front, to buy what are essentially higher meaningless numbers. More pixels, bigger screens, faster processors, more RAM.Â And then they use it all essentially to fire up facebook and share on it the ridiculous selfies they have taken or their mindnumbing photos of food. Nobody needs 3 GB of RAM for photos of food! But there they have it, all that power and all that shiny metal and shiny screen and it all needs to be protected now with a case which must be as nice and fancy as the phone it protects. The phone breaks down in a couple of years because it packed all those extra functionality which nobody needed in the first place but which provided more points of possible failure. And the cycle starts again. More hours at a dead job, more salivation, more desire for higher numbers, a new phone, a new case, a couple of years of life, ad infinitum.

I am writing this on a HP laptop that I bought many years ago for 300 bucks. It has never failed me and has given me absolutely no issues. With this 1 data point, I'd like to extrapolate a bit. All fancy, expensive things suck. They suck because they are fussy and because they are liable to failure in more ways than a simpler alternative is. And they suck at a deeper level. Nobody needs them but everybodyÂ wants them and they sell their life and soul in their eternal pursuit. It's a rotten business inside and out.

Not at all.

Now what is it that makes great characters and a great story? And why is Ayn Rand such an awful writer? I have often wondered why my bile starts boiling at the thought of some writers who are so widely regarded. Ayn Rand is one such writer. The interesting thing is that when I actually read The Fountainhead at the age of 15 I was completely enthralled by it. I was swept away by the character of Howard Roark and saw in him all that was pure about the human spirit and noble about the human struggle. I saw in him what most people see, an inspiring and uncompromising man who was ready to go to any lengths of sufferings to stay pure to his own principles and just like other people I hated the mediocre world which was being an impediment to him in his pursuits of perfection. I saw the world in the black and white colors that Rand wanted from her disciples and I really did believe that pure characters like Roark existed in real life and even if they did not exist, I felt that Roark was an ideal which must be aspired for. What a bunch of bollocks, I have since realized.

I must say that Rand must be admired for the success that her creations have achieved but if one really wants to talk about her on artistic terms, she must be flayed and with vengeance. So what is it that really makes a great character? Â George Carlin, in one of those rare moments of overt sympathy, once said that you can see the universe in everyoneâ€™s eyes if you really look. I really do believe that each one of us is potentially a great character just waiting for our stories to be told by a competent and observant enough storyteller. What makes each of us fascinating has less to do with what we end up saying in conversations but has so much more to do with all that we never mention. What we say and what we feel are tremendously dependent upon a host of factors that would be hard to list. From our general upbringing to specific instances in the past, from the current company that we keep to our economic situations, there is almost an infinite number of factors which go consciously or subconsciously into explaining why we chose to keep quiet when a heated discussion on, say, the Palestinian conflict was going on. We snicker in disapproval and we are smitten with envy, we applaud inwardly and we dismiss with contempt but often we say only those things which would keep the wheels of social interaction in motion. We think about betrayal and we think about the ghastliest of things and we often do not mention all the sentimental love that we feel for the fear of ridicule. Against this background of the tremendous emotional turbulence we try to put up a face which is proper and graceful and strong and self-confident. Some of us are better than others at hiding our imperfections and some are better able to ignore the presence of such imperfections but they are present in all us and those character flaws are precisely the interesting bits in each of us.

Who wants to hear the story of the perfect being? We heard it a few times in the past and they still plague so many of us with their unreasonable ideals. The really great characters, I feel, are the flawed ones and especially those who are confused and contradictory in their flaws because thatâ€™s what people really are like. The great characters differ from boring people in the conviction that they have but they often do not understand the repercussions of acting upon their convictions. They are driven by true passion, just like Howard Roark, but there is none of that pathetic moral high ground in them which Roark seems to suffer from. Unlike Roark, they are not faced with a world whose sole purpose of existence seems to be stopping them from achieving their goals. They live in a world which is merely and appropriately apathetic and which has other characters as â€˜rightâ€™ as them. They lead lives which are unfair to them despite all their best attempts and which often do not even compensate in the last few pages. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, creates easy worlds which appeal to our easy sympathies and automatic ideas. She creates worlds for those who want merely an escape and who are fine with missing all the variety and all the color of real life for the certainties of the simple stories which we have been fed with since time immemorial.

I hate her books so much that I had to rage delete my accounts from Orkut and Facebook because of all the people who had Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead in their favorite books list. Rather than going around the city and bashing kittens to take my anger out, I thought it was just better that I ignored that such people actually existed. There, I think those few lines of irrational anger make me incredibly interesting. Iâ€™m just waiting for a Tolstoy now!

Tag Archive: sucks

Lenovo x240 sucks

How much I admire Ayn Rand