I like it.  I'm very comfortable with it. I know many people, especially it seems, from around my generation, are obsessed with being a unique person.  Maybe all generations, but its a bit ridiculous sometimes. 

Unique isn't better, or worse, at least not by the nature of being unique or not. 

I'm comfortable that when I do something, out of 360 million americans, or even more so, over 1 billion people in the western world, or 7 billion humans on the planet, there will be a few thousand other people who will do the same thing.

Thats a great thing, because if something is important to me, social change, whatever, there is a great chance I can find "someone" else that will help me do it.  This has never been more so since the internet. 

People who believe in our individuality often try and convince me of the utter lack of significance of my vote, my desires, my decisions.  Then, when society changes, a law passes, companies relent, they tell me it would have happened anyway.   But a law can't be passed, society won't change, unless individuals make the decisions that force change.  The world is both a seething mass of birds that can't be seen but as a large shapeless cloud, but also the individuals who collectively decide to steer the cloud in ways they like.

And EA changes their DRM on Spore, and the world is a slightly better place.  No particular person mattered, just enough people yelling on the internet to make their collective voice heard. 

Is it perfect? No, but now Anna can play with her own spore account with my cdkey of Spore. How cool is that?  I thought she was going to have to buy her own copy.  and its a shared universe,which I think is kinda cool.   

They've answered an irritation of mine, that I thought eventually spore would be unplayable, because the activation servers will eventually be taken down, but they're going to remove the DRM at that time via a patch. 

More needs to be done, but it works...for now.
 

I love tv shows, movies, etc.  I love supporting the companies that interest me.  I don't like being forced into paying multiple times for the same content.  Content is valuable, the format never should be, contrary to format manufacturers. ;)

I gave up my dvd collection with my divorce, only keeping my tv show dvds.  I've been wanting to buy all the movies I really liked, but I've been wary of repurchasing a bunch of DVDs.

Is Bluray the answer?  Maybe.

I've been really thinking what I expect out of the money I intend to spend on movies, and I came up with some bullet points that I want to try and keep in mind when I'm buying content.

So my first requirement is that any content I buy needs to be playable on my computer, my laptop, both my HDTVs, easily, conveniently, and ideally my zune as well.  I shouldn't have to "think" about how to make this happen, once I set things up, it should just work.

This removed bluray from my list, because I don't want to afford 4 bluray players, thats ridiculous. 

They have to be high quality, ideally HD, but DVD quality is fine, just  no SD resolutions please.

So then whats wrong with DVDs?  Well I can't back them up easily, there are crazy menus restricting how I watch them (ever tried to watch stargate seasons 1 through 10 on DVD, x-files 1-9, buffy/angel? gah, hate the clicking on the menus between each episode).  So DVDs were out.

What does that leave? Downloaded Video.

Ok, great, bit torrents it is?  Hold up!  I download crap off bit torrents, not high quality content I want to sink my teeth into.  Or I download things not available to me any other way (Hey, only want to sell your content on Itunes? Then I download it for free until you make it available somewhere else, I have no interest in itunes content).  I don't download content I want to see more of one day for free, I vote with my dollars.

So what service? Not itunes, I hate it, I've refused to install itunes or quicktime, if thats the only way to see the content, then I don't need it.  I bought a bunch of music videos from itunes once upon a time, they increased the resolution 1 week later for the same price and gave me a bunch of crap when I asked for the higher resolution videos.  Plus its horribly restrictive.

I'm using Amazon unbox for now.  The thing I like most about Amazon Unbox is that I buy it from Amazon, I download it via their client, then I can watch it in anything that supports windows DRM, windows media player, zune player (not the zune device, the software), or windows media center.

Windows media center? Yes, which means any windows media center extender, like my xbox 360.    The xbox 360 can browse to network shares and play amazon unbox content too, but windows media center is cooler, and better organized. 

So I was playing with it on my big screen, watching Supernatural Season 3 on my big screen streamed wirelessly from my computer via my xbox, and I realized I want the same thing on my other HDTV in my computer room, that way Anna and I can watch the same show while we're on our computers.

So I looked around, looked at used xboxes, looked at used windows media center extenders, and finally decided the cheapest solution was another xbox 360.  

I was going to buy a replacement Wii, but I decided I'd appreciate the xbox 360 more.  Now I can play games on my computer, watch my downloaded video content on my tv, and if I get bored, Anna and I can switch to playing castle crashers in either the computer room or the living room. :)

I can also watch netflix video instant watch on my big screens too, without a rokio box, so I'm pretty happy with my solution.

My last requests? Please Microsoft, allow us to store our purchased xbox video marketplace content on central pc storage.  Trust your DRM if you must, because otherwise I refuse to buy any of your content.  And second, allow us to transfer the portable windows media files Amazon gives us to our Zunes without needing to strip out our DRM first.  

Next step, a couple terabyte hard drives to store all the video I'm acquiring. :)