iPad as family computer

Michael Sippey describes the iPad as family device:

It looks like a great machine to travel from the living room to the kitchen to the kids room to the bedroom. We'll search the web on it, read the news on it, the kids will do email on it, play Brushes and Bejeweled on it, and it'll be the perfect complement to the Sunday afternoon TV football ritual. We'll use it to control the music in the house, and do some quick bet-settling during dinner. I'm sure we'll eventually enjoy some multiplayer "board" games on it, or read a book on it, or watch a TV show on it. And the kids will argue with each other over who gets it next. (Dad will.)

With all the initial negative press and poo-pooing of the iPad, this is probably the most positive (and most useful) assessment I've seen so far. I'm seeing a lot of parallels to specific events like board game nights or bedtime reading, or as Sippey describes, to general family activities that are woven together throughout the course of the day.

Phones are too personal (and small) to play this role, and a desktop and laptops are too centralized in a home (i.e., lack versatility) to involve everyone. Perhaps iPad's greatest influence will not be derived from what it does as a personal device but rather how it is used as a personnel device.

"Await Your Reply"

Await Your Reply--the first novel I read on a Kindle (which might be interesting to remember as the years go on and reading changes forever)--is a story of false identity. The book seemed to have no setting, and I'm not sure if that was a byproduct of distraction from reading on a new device, or if Dan Chaon's writing style simply focused the reader on the masked facades that each character created. Either way, it's a fine "Internet Generation" story:

An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity. Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases. Which isn’t necessarily you, of course. You are still an individual human being with a soul and a history, friends and relatives and coworkers who care about you, who can vouch for you: they recognize your face and your voice and your personality, and you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story of yourself that you are telling to yourself.

You wake up and feel fairly happy, happy in that bland, daily way that doesn’t even recognize itself as happiness, moving into the empty hours that probably won’t be anything more than a series of rote actions: showering and pouring coffee into a cup and dressing and turning a key in the ignition and driving down streets that are so familiar you don’t even recall making certain turns and stops, though, yes, you are still present, your mind must have consciously carried out the procedure of braking at the corner and rolling the steering wheel beneath your palms and making a left onto the highway even though there is no memory at all of these actions. Perhaps if you were hypnotized such mundane moments could be retrieved, they are written on some file and stored, unused and useless in some neurological clerk’s back room. Does it matter? You are still you, after all, through all of these hours and days; you are still whole.

Bond will have an iPad

Stephen Fry joined the "congregation at the Church of Apple" for the iPad launch and gives a glowing review:

Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic text books, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.

Phish save Haiti

iPad

The iPad would be much more appealing if it were solely an e-reader (I really love the page-turning aesthetic), rather than a big iPhone or a small laptop. I realize that's hersey in today's world of multi-tasking devices, but I don't want to pay extra for a device that replicates the function of my other devices. Apples products are starting to overlap a little too much (much like the iPod Touch and iPhone) and their versatility is stretching itself thin. It will be interesting to see how potential buyers who own both MacBooks and iPhones respond.

Confessions of an e-book pirate

The Millions interviews an e-book pirate:

3) Just because someone downloads a file, it doesn’t mean they will read it. I realize that buying a book doesn’t mean someone is going to read it either, but clicking a link and paying $10-$30 is very different – many more people will download a book and not read it than buy a book and not read it.

In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers. Realistically and financially, however, I feel the impact of e-piracy is overrated, at least in terms of ebooks.

I'd have to agree with him...one aspect of e-piracy often overlooked is the actual use of the "stolen" material. When you burn a CD--one that you really end up enjoying--you can listen to it thousands of times. You are constantly experiencing the value, artistic purposes, and personal creative reflection of the art. With books, it's more of a one-shot deal (seriously, how many times will I read Infinite Jest over the course of my life?). Now, certainly physical albums and books carry these same connotations--that's just how you engage with them--but I would argue, in a very subjective, experiential way, that stealing an e-book is overrated because we (potentially) invest less time in the stolen material.

Fever Ray wins

Fever Ray "accepts" the award for best new dance artist at the P3 Gold Awards in Gothenburg:

"Orphan"

The Internet ruined Orphan's twist for me--I stumbled across a blog post that was well-labeled with SPOILER alerts, but I just couldn't resist. I believe the title of the post was "Don't You Want to Know What the Deal is With the Girl From 'Orphan'?" Of course I did, because the movie looked terrible and I wasn't planning on seeing it anyway. How good could the twist be? Now I wish I would have just rented it, because Orphan is pretty creepy, even when you know the secret the whole time. Let America's obsession with killer children continue.

Interactive CD

One more reason to buy CDs instead of mp3s (via):

Dead Sea Scrolls

When looking at 2,000 year old pieces of paper, you begin to predict (or at least I do) what texts from your time will still be around 2,000 years from now. Chances are, the books on my shelf will not be, nor will much of anything else, for from dust it came and from dust it will return, etc. Physical is physical, and it has a shelf life. There are of course rarities, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which defied physical logic by surviving in readable intact-ness for over 20 centuries in a cave by the saltiest place on earth, only to end up at the Milwaukee Public Museum in 2010 for my Saturday night enjoyment.

But even when our books--and iPods and iPhones and Kindles--disintegrate back into dust, there will be billions upon billions of webpages and digital data--that will theoretically last forever--detailing their introduction into society, how they were used, and when they were finally phased out. The digital will outlast the physical, and there will be very little mystery about how these objects from the past came about and influenced our world. While going through the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, I kept thinking about how much less exciting archeology will become for people as time goes on.

Do you eat it?

An expanded version of the 5-second rule (via):

Spoon - "Transference"

In 2007, Spoon released Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, an album that was received with critical acclaim. Why there was acclaim was beyond me; that album was a poppy sell-out job that seemed to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. I finally chalked it up to a Spoon-can-do-no-wrong phenomenon, and just stopped listening to it. Usually, once a band is able to pull off that trick where every reviewer and fan is sucking at their teet, they never return to prior form. But now, in 2010, Spoon have released Transference, an album that takes Spoon back to what made them a great band to begin with, and Surprise! the reviews are bad, and the public disease of expecting never-ending accessibility and catchy, shitty songs is rearing its ugly symptoms. Those poor people; they've been poisoned, and have forgotten that a bizarre and hip-ly senseless song like "Who Makes Your Money" is why they liked Spoon in the first place.

I haven't forgotten, though, and I'm sure that there are still plenty post-apocalyptic Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga survivors that haven't either. Transference is a damn fine album, one that challenges you a bit and doesn't just show up to be your friend. Like I said, it's made of the stuff that doesn't quite fit into the canon of rock and roll. Opener "Before Destruction" seems half-written and undecided on the major/minor tones of its spine, but nevertheless, it intrigues you as unique, and projects (transference!) all sorts underlying feelings and creativity. These are the kind of fragments of music that Spoon excels at writing, but they still retain the ability to throw out a great "regular" rock song as well ("Written in Reverse"; I would also argue that "Out Go the Lights" is one of the better songs they've produced). Here, they keep that mix of the abnormal and normal, and perhaps save their career in the process. A fine start to 2010.

The self-consuming barbecue pavilion

Caroline O'Donnell has proposed sketches for a project called Bloodline, an isolated grilling structure composed of wooden grilling sticks (grillholz) that would literally consume itself as the summer grilling season progresses into fall.


What's perhaps most interesting is that the pavilion is based upon the designs of "solitude castles" in Germany in the late 1700s. Isolated, hidden rooms were built in these castles to make servants invisible to their masters while they prepared food:

Ingeniously, O'Donnell's proposed site for Bloodline means that our barbecuing hero, standing in front of the grill-window on the southwest-facing side of the pavilion, is the only person in their party who can see that they are actually inside the missing third castle.

In other words, while their friends and family relax in the grounds outside the pavilion, eating sausages they haven't had to prepare, "only the servant (or grill-master) will know the truth," explains O'Donnell, "although they can sneak others in, to share the secret."

In terms of grilling experience, the barbecue pavilion that becomes a secret, personal castle seems second to none. "After that, the sausages are not my responsibility," O'Donnell told me. "There are however custom spaces built into the pavilion on the west side for a fire-extinguisher and a fire-blanket, as well as a big vent on the east side that aligns with the prevailing wind and uses the stack-effect to ventilate the space naturally."

Only the grill master will know the truth...

Kindle PDFs

I undertook a hefty freelance project this week, one that required a lot of research and a desktop folder full of journal articles in PDF. For fun, I loaded a bunch of them onto my Kindle to see if that would affect how quickly I could read and annotate the articles.

While the page clicking of Kindle was preferable to the stapled-page-turning of a printed document (and the terrible onscreen-scrolling of PDFs) in terms of reading, working with Kindle PDFs is a whole different story. The speed of note-taking is just not there compared to pen scrawls in a margin, the print is too small for scanning purposes, checking references is an utter bitch, and most of all, you can't haphazardly throw the Kindle down on your desk to type something when you get a quick idea.

I wish I would have had a Kindle in grad school, because, like I said, it's fantastic for reading purposes; all those articles I read week in and week out could have been stored in one central location, and I could have just cranked them out one after the other. But for the rigors of work, research and reference, paper documents are still king. And I think they will stay that way for a while. Technology, with all its bells and whistles, can't provide the same affordances that the disposability of cheap, one dimensional paper can offer.

"Seasons in the Sun"

A very joyful, happy, un-grunge-like side of Nirvana (via):

Using Twitter wrongly?

The Awl suggests five things to do with Twitter if you suspect you're doing it wrong:

Take some time out from your bloody lifecasting and lurk around as an amplifier. You know what? You have fun friends, or "friends," probably. (Are Twitter friends "friends"? Sometimes! Sometimes not.) Take a break from putting your "original" "thoughts" on it and just become a (gross word alert) "reTweeter" of things that You Find Of Interest.

I love my records

I do too... (via)

E-book piracy costing billions

According to a recent study by Attributor--a web service monitor for illegally posted content--publishers could be losing out on $3 billion this year due to e-book piracy (the report linked in the text is worth checking out; informative and concise):

Attributor’s Rich Pearson said he was surprised about how bad the piracy problem has become since the company became more involved with book publishing over a year ago. Of the 14 book categories tracked, piracy was most prevalent in the business and investing segment which had an average of 13,000 free downloads per title, the report found. The professional and technical segment was a close second followed by science, and computer and Internet. The average number of free fiction downloads was just over 2,000, the study found. Pearson said he wasn’t surprised to find a “high correlation” between books that are illegally downloaded and subject areas that students are the most interested in. Still, the survey found lots of illegal fiction downloads with Attributor finding 7,951 illegal downloads of Angels and Demons and 1,604 downloads of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In nonfiction, Architect’s Drawings was downloaded 9,715 times.

I'm not surprised about that "high correlation" of student subject matter books, either; my books for my first semester of college cost $588, which is an absolute sin. Had I had access to that kind of technology ten years ago, I would have done the same thing. E-book publishers are just going to have to suck it up and deal with it, just like the music industry does.

Beatles as infographics

Mike Deal Graphic Design is exploring the Beatles through infographics. For example, there are pictograms depicting each album's relative key distribution over the Circle of Fifths:

The synthesiser

Brian Eno on the synthesiser:

One of the important things about the synthesiser was that it came without any baggage. A piano comes with a whole history of music. There are all sorts of cultural conventions built into traditional instruments that tell you where and when that instrument comes from. When you play an instrument that does not have any such historical background you are designing sound basically. You're designing a new instrument. That's what a synthesiser is essentially. It's a constantly unfinished instrument. You finish it when you tweak it, and play around with it, and decide how to use it. You can combine a number of cultural references into one new thing.

This concept of "unfinished" instruments is especially true of electronic music today. Where do you draw the lines of historical development with groups like Autechre or Supersilent? I wonder if those kinds of sounds/instrumentation could eventually have the standard conventions of a grand piano? It seems unlikely, but at the same time, necessary for creative development. I guess we'll know in 500 years when people are dusting off copies of Draft 7.30 for music theory classes.

The Americanization of mental illness

An essay--adopted from Ethan Waters' upcoming book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche--touching upon the many ways in which America is "homogenizing the way the world goes mad":

Even when the underlying science is sound and the intentions altruistic, the export of Western biomedical ideas can have frustrating and unexpected consequences. For the last 50-odd years, Western mental-health professionals have been pushing what they call “mental-health literacy” on the rest of the world. Cultures became more “literate” as they adopted Western biomedical conceptions of diseases like depression and schizophrenia. One study published in The International Journal of Mental Health, for instance, portrayed those who endorsed the statement that “mental illness is an illness like any other” as having a “knowledgeable, benevolent, supportive orientation toward the mentally ill.”

The entire essay is absolutely fascinating, and I can't wait to read the book. It's incredible (and frightening) to think of Western biomedical diagnostics catching on in other countries as quickly as Coca-Cola, especially when you consider the way we recklessly medicate patients and prescribe drugs these days.

Pink Freud

Cost of Kindle

David Wertheimer recently did a little cost analysis on reading the New York Times on paper versus on Kindle:

I began to seriously wonder, should I buy a Kindle and switch to electronic delivery? I did a little cost assessment and realized my newspaper is a very expensive habit. The Times, to its credit, gives daily subscribers a break: our papers cost us $11.70 a week (at the newsstand it'd be $17). Factoring in the Monday and Wednesday purchases, and assuming we remember to stop it when we go on vacation, 50 weeks of the New York Times in print costs us $785 a year.

Compare that with the Kindle, which costs $259 for the small version—the pocket-sized, and therefore commute-friendly, one—and $13.99 for a monthly subscription to the Times. After one year, I'll have spent $427, and I'd have a shiny gadget to boot. Heck, we could get a second one for Amy, and after 14 months, our spend would be tied, $910.60 for print versus $909.72 digitally.

Assuming he just buys one, that's a huge savings. In tough economic times, why wouldn't a newspaper addict jump at those savings (and like he mentions, get an awesome techy device in the process).

This could be one of those underlying factors that eventually will shoot even more arrows into the heart of print. Print is definitely going the way of the dodo already, but I think what holds a lot of people back--and thus, keeps print in print--is the "scary" price of buying a new gadget, investing in two mediums just for the sake of having both, etc. E-books in general are not yet well known for their investment quality, and depending how you utilize them, what you get back in monetary value is still a crap shoot. There is always a lot of talk and debate about how e-books change reading habits and twist the context of reading, so the intellectual value and feedback is there, but maybe pricing, economy, and even environmental economics should be just as heavily considered in the e-book debate.

Wertheimer acknowledges toward the end of his post that "the piece of the future that he was willfully neglecting has suddenly come into sharp relief" and the "horizon just got a lot closer." For all those still on the fence--including myself, a little bit--perhaps that future also creeps closer.

First-person Tetris

Ever wonder what happens when YOU are the Tetris? Nausea, that's what.

"Phish: The Biography"

Phish: The Biography is certainly not the first biography written about the band, nor will it be the last, considering they are still a touring band (I'd like to read one complete biography someday, but when there is money to be made, there is money to be made, I guess), but what strikes me most about this current biography is the stark contrast of the late nineties period in comparison to how that era was percived only ten years ago. Bittersweet Motel depicted that era--especially 1997; my favorite Phish year--as nothing but sick funk-jamming and good times had by all. And it was; it was a period that saw a significant shift from the full-throttle jamming of the early 90s to something wildly creative and exploratory.

But in Parke Puterbaugh's text, it's depicted as the tipping point where things went terribly wrong:

In some ways, Phish and their audience were moving in different directions. Phish had simplified and toned down their style of playing; the words "sparse" and "ambient" were often heard in conversation with the group members in 1997 and 1998. At the same time, much of the younger and wilder audience longed to be hosed by music and dosed by drugs as intensely as possible. But the buildup and crescendos, the displays of speed and virtuosity, weren't forthcoming from Phish as routinely in the late nineties. Between the abbreviated domestic tour schedules and escapes to Europe in 1997 and 1998, coupled with the turn to more low-key textural jamming and bass-driven "cow funk," one might infer that Phish was on some level endeavoring to tame the crowd scene.

I think that's some interesting hindsight, most of which I don't agree with. It's one thing to address a period of time where the root of drug problems may have kicked in, but to infer that Phish was in some way playing down to the crowd to keep things under control is a fairly ludicrous statement, given how highly those tours have been held in Phish chronology. They were simply different styles of shows compared to earlier years, and fans tended to side with one or the other. This kind of personal reaction might be due to bias, but at the same time I don't believe that Phish has ever played for anyone but themselves (and I don't mean that in a negative sense).

"Oversteps"

Out March 23...

China hacks Google

There is something absolutely surreal about this Google Blog post, which details their response to recent cyber attack by Chinese dissidents. What interesting times we live in, when global policy and human rights intersect and interact at the level of megabytes and pixels.

Costanza's Frogger record beaten

Seinfeld writers made up George Costanza's high score in "The Frogger" episode (860,630 points), but someone has actually now beaten that score in real life:

Interestingly enough, famed game record organization Twin Galaxies has been waiting for someone to beat the impressive "Costanza Score" for over four years now, and today it was announced that Pat Laffaye of Westport, CT has done just that with an impressive score of 896,980 points.

"Brothersport"

Costumed children being pursued by a St. Bernard:

Cell phones protect against Alzheimer's

A study involving mice indicates that talking on your cell phone all day at an early age helps prevent Alzheimer's:

[The study] involved 96 mice, most of which had been genetically altered to develop beta-amyloid plaques in their brains, which are a marker of Alzheimer's disease, as they aged. The rest of the mice were non-demented. All the mice were exposed to the electro-magnetic field generated by a standard phone for two one-hour periods each day for seven to nine months. Their cages were arranged at the same distance around a centrally located antenna generating the phone signal.

The researchers, led by Professor Gary Arendash, said that if the phone exposure was started when the Alzheimer's mice were young adults, before signs of memory impairment were apparent, their cognitive ability was protected.

Arendash also previously authored a paper claiming that coffee could protect against Alzheimer's. Get your children iPhones and bring them to Starbucks, every day.

"Llama"

Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem cover Phish's "Llama" (via):

First Kindle musings

Santa ushered in my first era of e-book reading this year with a Kindle, and I have many thoughts on how that is changing the context of reading. First and foremost is the dramatic change in the pacing of reading. Not in the sense that my reading speed has increased or decreased, but that the fractions of time in between reading--i.e., page turning--significantly change the pace of storyline. With no *pages* to turn, reading loses the smooth page-to-page transitions that one encounters when completely absorbed in a book. Rather, there are now page clicks that give a sense of timing, rather than continuity. That timing needs to be learned, and Kindle challenges you to do so at the risk of losing the continuity of the story. This is fascinating because we don't need to learn to use books and turn pages. With Kindle, reading almost becomes a multi-tasking event with your thumbs and mind, which ultimately, I think could become valuable in the long run. I don't exactly know how yet, though.

The Flaming Lips - "Dark Side of the Moon"

It's rare that I download music from iTunes, and even rarer that I read iTunes reviewer comments before purchasing music from iTunes. Those people are the bottom feeders of the Internet, only a genus or two above people who comment on youtube videos. Their only online purpose is to waste millions of key strokes en route to terrible, senseless and juvenile words. This probably has a lot to do with why I purchased The Flaming Lips' cover album of Dark Side of the Moon--the iTune "critics" were bashing it in a seething comment pool of half-wit clauses and emoticons, and I couldn't bring myself to agree with their poorly thought-out cautions.

Part of me, however, does agree with them. I mean, seriously, if there has ever been an album that 1) shouldn't be covered anymore and 2) shouldn't have ever been covered in the first place, it's Dark Side of the Moon. It's one of the greatest, most unique pieces of art in the history of music, and every band--I'm especially looking at you, Phish--has to cover it "in its entirety" and not even come close to paying it the homage it deserves. When I first heard the Lips were doing this, I scoffed. But as I said before, I wasn't about to align myself with the iTunes cretins, so I downloaded it anyway, simply out of spite.

It's actually not that bad. At the very least, it attempts to reinvent DSOTM, rather than replicate it (for example, coughing instead of clock-ticking during the brooding intro of "Time," and those ridiculous synthy munchkin voices on "Money"). Pink Floyd and The Flaming Lips both inhabit different universes, so it's a little bit like solar system jumping. The Flaming Lips' version is more of a space march--much like last year's Embryonic--whereas Pink Floyd created a space odyssey. The former is worth listening to if you're into The Flaming Lips at this point in their career, the later is just worth listening to all the time.

Tea time

From the portfolio of Fred Perrot:

phthal

This web page--titled phthal--is actually pretty close to what I imagined David Foster Wallace's samizdat to be like. I watched this for a good two minutes before looking away, which is an eternity in Internet time (via).

Go away

How to build the most useless machine ever (via):

"Avatar"

Avatar was the Dances with Wolves of the Web 2.0 generation. That's not a slight, because I enjoyed Dances with Wolves as much as the next guy. It's just that the story lines were bizarrely similar: man goes to far off land, tames wild beast, earns trust of tribe, joins said tribe, mates with tribal woman, vanquishes evil doers, earthly spirituality everywhere.

What makes Avatar much more generationally appropriate, of course, is the idea of real identity becoming false identity through the crises of character and emotion. Aside from the obvious otherworldly upgrades, the movie is not too far off from real life. Online portals and social networks dominate the landscapes of our living rooms nowadays, to the point that some people lose touch with the real world and the social existence around them. Why be human when you can be nine feet tall and blue?

When my mind wasn't being blown by Avatar's insane visuals, I was thinking about how well this movie inserts itself into our current social mindset. Becoming someone else no longer requires just stepping over the river to where the Tatanka roam; now, the physical is stripped away completely.

How to train an aging brain

Researchers are looking into new ways to improve adult learning:

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, [Dr. Kathleen Taylor] says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

This critical approach to learning makes sense, but is it really new? To me, it follows the natural progression of learning that one utilizes when entering middle age: assimilating the facts you accumulated over your life into meaningful observations and analysis. Moreover, any adult who uses the Internet--which is pretty much all of them nowadays--is constantly challenged by a framework of knowledge they did not have when growing up, and are thus re-learning how to integrate loads of information into their pre-existing conceptions of critical thinking. For this generation, simple Web-browsing provides the ultimate relief from stagnant neuroplasticity.

Netherlandish Proverbs

Would have been better had it been soundtracked by Fleet Foxes--who used the famous Flemish proverb-laden painting as the cover art for their fantastic 2008 self-titled release--instead of this awful song, but still an interesting art-into-modern-context effort (via):

The endurance of Twitter

David Carr argues that Twitter is here to stay (via):

The expressive limits of a kind of narrative developed from text messages, with less space to digress or explain than this sentence, has significant upsides. The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.

There are certainly downsides to less detail in communication, but detail does not run parallel to the needs and wants of the information age. Now, the priority is on the vector that leads to the information; detail is for a later time in the generation of nano-second attention spans. Carefully crafted bursts of information can save time, energy, and mounds of frustration that often occur in endless pools of data. Why wouldn't that sort of efficiency last?

Value of liquids

Makes donating blood seem not all that special (via):

"Terminator: Salvation"

When a movie franchise stretches over an arc of 25 years like Terminator has, there is bound to be a difference in the thinking and aesthetics that go into the production of the films. Each movie represents a different iteration--in most cases, a technological iteration--that either pushes the franchise forward into new and exciting territory, or cripples it by abandoning the classic foundation it was built on. The jump from Terminator to Judgment Day was an example of the former: new technology was infused and created an epic film that perfectly built upon the first.

If you pretend that Rise of the Machines never happened and skip directly to Salvation, the technology doesn't make that jump (even though it was produced in 1992, Judgment Day set the bar high). In fact, Salvation seemed to intentionally replicate Judgment Day--including a final scene involving terminators chasing humans through metallic staircases in a steamy abandoned factory that ultimately involves liquid magma as a resolution--and didn't bring any new ideas to the infinite possibilities of a post-nuclear world. What Salvation should have done is focus on the human condition within the technology, much like The Dark Knight did with the Batman franchise. Sam Worthington's character touched upon this aspect, but it seemed more gimmick than anything, and the more I think about it, didn't make any sense within the context of the movies that preceded it.

Phish - 12/31/09 (American Airlines Arena)

Set I: AC/DC Bag, 46 Days, Water in the Sky, Bathtub Gin, Punch You in the Eye, The Moma Dance, Guyute, Swept Away, Demand, Seven Below, Lawn Boy, Julius

Set II: Rock and Roll, Piper, Simple, Theme from the Bottom, Shine a Light, Ghost, NO2, Suzy Greenberg

Set III: Party Time, Auld Lang Syne, Down with Disease, Fluffhead, Joy, The Squirming Coil, You Enjoy Myself

Encore: Blue Moon, Loving Cup