WE’RE OLD.

4 years to be exact.

(you): So what?

(Me): So what!? SO LET’S DANCE!

We will be celebrating our 4th year aniversary on Oct 16th @ Backspace in style, and details will soon follow, but I did want to say that if you could be bothered to attend, you shall be entertained by these rad folks and these awesome peeps. And if you ask really nice like, we might even play games with you.

If you don’t plan on going up to Seattle for PAX this year, it’s okay. Anamanaguchi is going to be doing TWO shows at Ground Kontrol before they hit PAX this year.

Speaking of PAX, we’re going to be closed all weekend, starting September 4th (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), while we take another possibly poorly timed vacation. During the event you will probably be able to find us at the PC Freeplay area throwing down in TF2. But don’t worry, at night we will dream of fixing your computers.  Is it too early too confess to a lie that occurred in the previous sentence? Okay, we will be dreaming about laying more of that hammer down but maybe in Left 4 Dead or some other game.

…because I have been yelling this IRL vent for-fscking-ever now, and the blog-o-tron-o-globe just seems to be picking it up now. Apple? Controlling? WAHT U SAI?

My favorite story to relate on this subject dates back to an era when I worked for a certain Pac NW-based Apple 3rd Party retailer. It was the eve of the release of OS 10.3, which was really when OS X started to shine. The 3rd party store I worked at had just been presented with the somewhat daunting competition of a brand new Apple Store that had opened up just less than 2 miles away. This was in a metro area where there probably were a number of better retail locations, so it already felt a bit Starbucks-esque, opening up right necxt to the local independent coffee shop.

Anyway, since all new Macs need to ship with the current OS once it’s released, when 10.3 was release we were contractually supposed to get what are called flat-packs, which are OS upgrade CDs you could slide into the box just by cutting a little strip of packing tape at the top of the box. Apple was in charge of shipping these out so as to reduce the chances that copies of the OS would get out into the wild before official release day. We had been calling all week asking when we’d get them and the response was always “any day now”.

Release day comes, and our store is stuck with no flat-packs.  So some of us, on our lunch break, hop in my Vanagon and head on down the road to the gleaming new Apple store. Walk in the door and ask:

“Do you guys have the new OS X?”

“Yep.”

How about your current stock of Macs? Do they have it?”

“Yep. The Old OS is installed, but there’s an upgrade disk in the box.”

“Really.”

This store I worked at was the only store that sold Macs in the dark years of the nineties, when, as Neal Stephenson puts it, “(Apple) had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly.” And now that they wanted to get into the retail aspect of things, they were pulling some weak-ass “the check is in the mail” BS, and we had to run around like idiots trying to figure out how to give our customers OS upgrades to an OS we should have had flat-packs for. How long did we have to wait for said flat-packs and look like said idiots?

Two months. Two months when they had them at the Apple Store on the day 10.3 was released.

Apple = Uncaring, Monopolistic Corporation that Makes Good Products (sometimes). Anything else that anyone tries to tell you is selling something.

*Edit* Uncaring is redundant, but this continues to emphasize the mopolistic aspect.