new macbook

I have a shiny new macbook pro. I simply do too much w/ film anymore to keep working with my horrid pc. I still use pcs, but I'll be moving a lot of what I do to the mac. It's beautiful; you really must imagine (and feel) the shiny metal casing, which brings up the rhetoric of the macbook pro, acronymically "mbp," which surely alludes to something powerful and lovely at the same time because those apple marketing teams are busy bonding while doing dangerous extreme sports together as they develop fancy & fabulous words to describe your computer and all of the personally gratifying identifications that come from owning, working with, & thinking about it (i'm being fairly serious & not simply going for critique). This issue of how the mbp and other apple products are represented compels me to simply note that you can purchase a "suit" for your mbp, and I think that's terribly funny (i only bought a "sleeve").

You know the mbp, supershiny & modern & suggestive of ease and simplicity (and there is truth in it, but it's still a move). And on clever rhetorical moves, is there any round of ads more entertaining than the mac vs. pc ads featuring John Hodgman, who is known for his appearances on The Daily Show but should be lavished with loving kisses for his book The Areas of My Expertise, imaged to resemble a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap? (it's bizarre to put a question mark so far from the question, but i'll ramble on and try to be correct, and i think that's actually correct, which is bizarre). That mac, played by Justin Long is famous, too; I remember him fondly from Dodgeball.

Interestingly, while the mac vs. pc ads are effective, I find myself so sympathetic to poor pc that I almost want to hang in there w/ him, but in the end, the logic is clear. I recently manifested with greater personal clarity the superiority of the mac when I was preparing to spend a day w/ faculty at Old Dominion University. I was to lead a 5 hour workshop on multimodality, so naturally I had lots of little films and powerpoints and links to follow & whatnot. When I tried loading up my Toshiba laptop to run everything, it was like attempting to move against a hideous Southwestern monsoon wind (of which i know a disturbing bit because of my 3 years living in Phoenix, AZ).

I wonder if it's like when you stop smoking (if you've stopped smoking) & you become evangelical about it and drive everyone around you mad. So I'll move on, although I want to note also that since getting my mbp, I have to admit to a sense of compulsion to create this blog. It's as though if you claim to work in new media (i'm not sure i claim it; i will say i'm a filmmaker and a rhetorician and a teacher of writing and someone who likes thinking about images), well, that you must create a blog. It's not true, I realize it, and as I said in my first post, it is for me probably a bad idea. I need to focus on my 2-book project (both on film discourses in r/c . . . 1. history . . . 2. production, especially in the present). It's my summer project because I can't seem to land a job that affords me enough time to work on my writing (but wait, you say, stop blogging and start writing !? . . .). We'll see.