While we’re not there yet, the coming rise of the tablet-PC, seen at both CES, and poised to be the next “big idea” from apple (with some announcement coming soon), it seems to be moving us one-giant-step closer to that vision.

Having already purchased an iPhone last year I’m a little nervous at how locked-down this generation of digital “devices” seems poised to become, sacrificing utility and innovation for corporate control, and wrapping everything in poorly understood ideas of corporate “ownership” of ideas at the expense of individual ownership.

That said, I think that these larger formats are going to do wonders for ubiquitous media and communication. And clearly, after we move our traditional media onto these platforms it will change the way we interact with them.

To get some idea of what that might mean, take a look at this concept video for a digital-device based magazine:

Nothing too deep here, and a little bit of wishful thinking on both their parts, but it’s worth the  read when you consider the impact these two men have had on the effects industry.

The experience of creating a soulful performance is through the eyes: knowing how to rig eyes, how to light for eyes, get the reflections and refractions in the eyes. Of course, we had big-eyed characters, which we did on purpose. We couldn’t accomplish the character we’re doing in Avatar through any kind of makeup means. That’s been explored for 30 years of Star Trek and Star Wars. But I think the thing I hope that the media can convey to audiences is that this is an actor-driven process.

The ideas are simple, but the video itself is profound in a way I can’t quite put it into words.

Anyone else want to take a shot at it?

Here’s an example of the babbling hysteria contained within:

So that now, sixty four years after the Holocaust, the Nazi disdain for the book has become the feel-good Hi-Tech campaign to rid the world of books in place of massive easily controlled centralized repositories of book texts downloadable on little hand-held devices and from which a text can be dissapeared with the click of a mouse: in Nazi terms, a dream come true.

If you think that’s silly and hyperbolic, read the rest of it. I was no great fan of the Kindle when it launched, but there’s no reason to this rant beyond the formula of claiming that if you can find any twisted way to equate something modern to something the Nazis did it must therefore be the same. It’s silly and childlike, and it’s the kind of thing that destroys our ability to reason our way into the future.

And while we Xers aren’t as young as we used to be, it confuses me a bit to see a generation of re-creators beginning to become afflicted with conservative* attitudes as we age. Not that I thought we were better than that, exactly, but it seems a bit hypocritical to say the least.

What seems to lie at the core of this idea is the belief that the natives of the new new future (the one that will live on after us) have been afflicted with problems that are uniquely terrible, and can ultimately only be solved by not doing them, or doing things the way they used to be done, otherwise they will turn out wrong. And this is because (in no particular order) the internet, music, dating, sex, and politics are somehow worse due to the technologies that have fallen into the hands of these new young savages, and we figured it out and they haven’t yet, which means that they’re doing it wrong in a way that will harm them as humans and ruin everything forever.

I naturally tend to doubt that given the arc of human history. Like it or not, the very nature of society is that if enough of you are doing the same thing then you’re doing it right. (With the notable exception of sex, because even though everyone is doing basically the same thing, it’s really doing it at all that’s totally unacceptable.)

As we age, and accumulate a history, the past starts to looks better. Not only is our hindsight 20/20, but it is endlessly mineable. It is our museum of thought, where we can walk around an old idea until we find a perspective that we like, and then tell everyone that our viewpoint is the one true vision of the way things were, and the way it ought to be.

It’s an aspect of human nature that I find that to be a bit sad, honestly. To me the future remains exciting even if less and less of it is going to be my future. I’m not against the ideas of channeling our new technologies and giving them a philosophical spin, but this instinct to magnify the problems with the new and put them into doomsday scenarios is always a bit puzzling to me, as if somehow one of the goals of life is dodging the apocalypse.

As I say when that I use when try and sell me on their version of doomsday:
The problem with the apocalypse is that there’s no precedent for it.

* In this case I mean it in the truest sense of the word: that things should remain as they are, or recently were.

The limited budget show’s in places, as does the rough transition comic book dialog and pacing can sometimes have when going to live action. That’s something we may see again later this week when Watchmen launches. But overall it’s a fun ride, and definitely worth the price, which is free.

There’s a new episode every day for the next week, so why not join the ride? I’d love to hear what people think of it.

But, over the last few decades, there’s been a revolution of sorts. Visiting the dentist has always been a about removing chronic pain in the long term by allowing for extreme discomfort in the short term. But until modern times the crude methods of “repair” meant that each operation left you a little uglier and more broken than when you entered. Every surgery gave you a fresh gap in your teeth from an extraction, or a metal filling where once there was shiny white enamel.

In modern dentistry the result is usually an improvement over the initial state. Starting with crowns and braces, and adding purely cosmetic elements like “professional whitening” dentistry has not only been about replacing short-term discomfort with long term improvement, it actually gives you an improved interface for eating, talking, and smiling.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a kid anymore, but I hear a lot less nervousness and complaining from people about going to the dentist these days. Sure, it’s still an unpleasant experience, but it seems to have become a game where the player can actually walk out feeling like a winner.

If you haven’t been following along, the “copy protection” that was implemented on the product doesn’t allow more than one user to play the game, and won’t let you install the game more than three times before you have to start calling up EA and asking for permission to reinstall a game that you bought.

While they may be well within their rights to do that, it’s also a clearly a swipe aimed at limiting the games function for legitimate users, and not about stopping people from playing the game without paying for it. DRM mostly inconveniences legitimate users most of the time, so to go to the next level and do that intentionally is mind boggling. At the end of the day they’re saying that their solution to a world where everyone can easily copy everything is to let you own nothing at all.

With negative comments being deleted by Amazon, it’s becoming a high profile street battle over one of the most hyped games of the year. Although looking through the ratings it’s clear that there’s some thinking going into the comments beyond a  simple “DRM sucks” response. And you don’t have to have more than a passing understanding of how social media works on the web to know that any attempt to shut it down through brute force are only going to give the issue more attention.

While arguments can be made about the effectiveness of this kind of protest, at the end of the day EA is attempting to use a Shock Doctrine tactic of limiting the user experience under the umbrella of piracy.  And that’s a damn shame, because on some level the product itself already has a lot of organic anti-piracy features built into it. There’s a great deal of shared user content, and it would be easy enough to simply lock out the pirates from getting the tastiest morsels of gameplay, turning the copied product into a hobbled demo that leaves the pirates on the outside looking in.

EA has claimed that long-term they’re thinking of Spore as a platform that will allow for other gamers. But the whole idea of the platform model is getting the software into the hands of the players, and then charging them for a variety of experiences. Giving someone a razor and telling them they’ll need to beg for permission to use more blades after the first three is absolutely not the way to make that model work.

Between this and Target:Women, it’s nice to see viral content from Current TV starting to show up on the web.