Is iTunes making a comment on postmodern society?

And is the fact that the iTunes Store lacks dignity as disturbing as the fact that MS Word has no problem with “newspeak”?

This is actually the second major version of this poster (not counting a dozen minor touch-ups). The original looked down on the platform from a much steeper angle and included a third rocket docked at the third station. The sharp angle didn’t blend well with the sunlit clouds, though; it was actually a little vertigo-inducing, since the tower seemed to be at a crazy angle to the normal of the sky. Gah. Lowering the point of view also allowed me to zoom in more and take advantage of the details available in the models I used.

That detail proved challenging in a different way, though. Poser choked, repeatedly, as I tried to render this. Indeed, it even failed with the Poser 4 render engine. (The superior Firefly engine is much more delicate and prone to run out of memory, but the Poser 4 engine has heretofore been pretty robust.) So I had to cut figures and props to reduce the memory footprint. The biggest savings came from dropping the third ship, which in this view was just blocking line-of-sight anyway. I also added some color, especially to the Aviatrices, because their olive vests were hard to see against the metal of the platform.

1. I drink a lot of Coke.
2. I have catastrophically bad eyesight.

More below the fold.

Right now Coke is running this promotion called MyCokeRewards, wherein every time you buy a Coke product, you get a little 12- or 15-character code, which (when entered into their ridiculous website) adds points to a running total. Eventually you can exchange the points for “free” stuff (it’s not really free — you have to buy the Coke, after all). For example, I downloaded a DRM-encrusted song which was actually a medley of the themes from Pirates of the Caribbean. The prizes are mostly silly but I figure, I drink a lot of Coke (see point #1) anyway, so why not accumulate points and get something back?

Enter point #2. While the codes for 12-packs are printed on the little flap and are easy to read, codes for individual bottles are printed on the individual bottlecaps. For a host of reasons (low light, smudged print, etc.), the bottlecap codes proved impossible for me to read. All told we were talking something like 9 points in a contest where you need something like 3000 to get anything good. On the other hand, I felt entitled to those points, having bought the soda.

So I got out my handy-dandy Vivistar digital camera, threw on “macro” mode, and snapped a shot of each cap. Really. Then during playback I zoomed in and read the codes with ease. Ta-da! Technology to the rescue. This is the sort of unanticipated spin-off effect that drives futurists nuts. No one would predict that owning a digital camera makes participation in Coke give-a-ways easier, and for sure, this benefit didn’t show up on my own pro/con list when considering getting a camera. I wouldn’t have bought it just for this use. But now that I have the camera, a host of unexpected uses have occurred to me, each making my life a tiny bit easier (though none so far afield or as goofy as this one). It’s a lot like “exaptation” in biology

In any event, it’s why I love gadgetry. I love being able to take a device, or several, and get out more than the designers intended. Not as a gotcha-game (“See how much smarter I am than you!”) but as a tiny sliver of creativity, that random thread that keeps the picture interesting.