Over the past week, the blog-reading public has seen the Wii remote’s accelerometric sensors intercepted and interpreted by a PC, and today the infrared interface has been cracked. Beyond moving a mouse pointer with the remote, though, the implications of this unintended interfacing could be far more profound that Nintendo seems to have anticipated.

The two pillars of the Wii’s interface technology, accelerometry and triangulation, have fallen. Everything is already, less than a month after release, in place for the Wiimote to become a completely usable PC peripheral. A $40 controller and a $20 bluetooth interface are the most anyone theoretically needs to leverage Wii technology—without a Wii.

The next twelve months for Nintendo may be quite unlike anything they had anticipated.

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Wii would like to play.

Oh, so clever. But to label Nintendo’s new television (and, from the unedited length, presumably theatrical) ad as simply smart and entertaining is to miss a larger shift in Nintendo’s branding, perhaps even in the practice of Japanese-American marketing as a whole.

Nintendo, representative of much Japanese pop culture that has flourished in the States, has long imagined Westward. From the beginning, sending an Italian plumber to save a princess, one imprisoned in castles of European inspiration as opposed to ones following domestic style cues, it becomes apparent Shigeru Miyamoto and his creative associates long ago calculated the greater international potential of Westernized, or at least Westernesque franchises.

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In a generally passé attempt at humorous self-deprecation, I have previously given this blog the attemptedly-ironic label of “pointless.” But a pointless blog is an impossible logical construction, as is the idea of a pointless action itself.

Only pure entropic randomness can produce actions without a point. It is impossible for a cogent human to commit a voluntary act without motivation; even if the motivation is unclear to the conscious mind, it is nonetheless driven by something, somewhere, at some time, be it subconscious or consciously suppressed. A random act is motivated by the desire to commit a random act.

An action may be observed externally to have no apparent point. An action which fails in its perceived goal may be called “pointless,” but while the effect can recontextualize the cause, it cannot reach back and actually change the cause.

Thus, the concept of pointlessness, in the context of human action, is flawed. There is no such thing as an action without a point — only an action without an observable one.

This blog, for example.

It was during a mildly depressing trip to MySpace (not that time spent there in general breeds cheerful thoughts) that I decided it was time to sidestep into the raucous, milling crowd and view another “adspace.”

I had previously observed the advertisement for Apple’s “profiles” for the second-generation iPod Nano on MySpace’s front page, and I was once again reminded of them by a “featured profile” banner on my dashboard page. This time, though, I was inspired to curiosity as to what form an Apple-designed MySpace page might take: After all, host and guest here are two are almost polar opposites; Apple on MySpace seems something akin to installing an Eames chair inside a McDonald’s.

I clicked through, and was, for perhaps the first time in months, greeted with the incongruous presence of “design” on MySpace (I was also musicallly admonished by the group The Teddy Bears to “Gather around / Listen to ma champion sound”). “Green iPod Nano” had a variety of marketing materials it offered to share with me, from screensavers, to desktops, to iTunes Store links where I could purchase the aforementioned “champion sounds.”

Then, after a greatly minimized Apple legal notice, came the comments.

Most frequently, obsessive consumerism plus MySpace literary debris resulted in smeary, runny prose like this:

I have a green 1 just like u and im loving it hehehehe but i wanna have all 3 color lol pink and also bblue heheh

Occasionally, among these appeared ones like this, which almost seemed too “good” to be true:

hello iPod nano Green! you rule, and i really want to have you. wanna be my listening buddy? its like nano meets mini!

The formula of standard praise + cutesy, yet marketable personification + astute product line comparisons reads, to me at least, less as genuine Gen-Y and more as clever viral marketer.

Perhaps the most unfortunate commentary on the young consumer mind was related to an implicit disposability of what was once a luxury item:

soooo beautiful… i need to upgrade my first gen black nano. i love this. rock on peace

Remember, once it’s a need instead of a want, it becomes a responsibility.

RockOnPeace!

The loaded-sounding title of this post, rather than engaging the subject of consumer choice and historical precedent, simply refers to my latest independent project, a sixty-second video spot warning of the hidden difficulties consumers face when provided DRM-laden files for their media-purchasing dollar.

As for history, though, there is more. The project might have been slightly easier in the execution had it not been for an unfortunate bit of history between an Adobe product and an Apple product:

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The temptation of creative convenience nearly succeeded in leading me astray, though “astray” may not be appropriate in this context of my recent redesign of no substance. all eloquence.

It had been my hope to stray from what had been, in my opinion, the most overused visual device in contemporary interactive design: Diagonal stripes.

This is not to say that I prejudicially view popularity as overuse.

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As I write this, NPR is playing Blue in Green by Miles Davis. I wasn’t expecting it.

I am fully aware that to praise the piece is the very definition of culturally illiterate redundancy, to add one’s name to the bottom of a celestial comment page stretching from Earth to wherever it is that Miles’ spirit rests, to clumsily rehash that which far more experienced critics have expressed with far greater musical lucidity.

Despite all this, I feel nonetheless irrationally compelled to commit this vain act: For me, Blue in Green is peerless. It ensnares my consciousness more wholly than any other music I know, edging out Gershwin and Goldfrapp alike. Bill Evans’ sleepy piano opening is, in my personally empirical roster of artistic merit, among the crowning creative achievements of the 20th Century, of America, of the western world.

Ok, I’m done.

The time has come for a repurposing of this blog.

You may have already come to the understanding that its title is not universally appropriate to everything I write; occasionally hints of a more focused and meaningful intent do, like a foreign liquid in a pool, enter and subtly diffuse within the posts’ otherwise transparent mass. Perhaps, even, you have sliced all the way down to the title’s true purpose: to leave myself carte blanche to attempt to write meaningful things while holding myself to the least-demanding standard possible, silencing potential critics with the ancient weapon of “well, what did you expect?”

In this spirit, I’m currently in the process of relaunching no substance. all eloquence. with a new design, its own domain, and what I anticipate to be a significantly higher frequency of posts, greater in diversity, yet still devoid of anything of substantial merit.