Frozen Transparency

In my eternal travels on the Internet, I eventually stumbled upon this blog entry, or more accurately, to the YouTube video that it talks about. I think it’s interesting to watch. Art History people, of course, will have orgasms. As for myself, I found it more apt to compare the early painted portraits to pictures like this one or this one, which are probably not as touched-up as paintings were (due to the nature of photography), but still indicate to a large extent our idea of beauty. The thing to notice in the transition from the Mona Lisa to a picture of Jessica Alba is the change in the level of sexuality—or rather, how it is expressed. The Mona Lisa has cleavage, but Jessica Alba has her (zip-up) shirt wide open. Standards change over time. Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it isn’t. I’m not sure we’ve had a good enough dialogue as a culture to figure out which it is in this case. I have recently been reading a fair amount of Jennifer Roback Morse. Does it show?

You know, for how much we are theoretically not a Judeo-Christian nation, and how much Christmas is pushed out of the public sphere, there are an awful lot of people celebrating today. People packed the stores (especially toy and grocery) to prepare for a normal, everyday Tuesday. Or perhaps it was the Winter Solstice (from our perspective) that happened three days prior.

No matter.

Merry Christmas to all of you. And to those of you who do not celebrate Christmas (either the secular or the religious observance), then I wish you a calm and wonderful day. Perhaps one day there shall be peace across the Earth.

Having recently graduated from college and gotten a steady job to start my career, my discretionary income has changed dramatically. Being someone who considers himself a gamer, and who likes to stay in touch with “gamer culture”, I decided to take the plunge: I bought an Xbox 360. I picked up the Premium edition, if that matters to people. However, if you own an Xbox, there is a series of games that you “must get” and generally “make the console worth owning”: the Halo now-trilogy. Six years in the making, with a lot of press in the interim. Yet, if you read most of the discussion of the series, it’s about each individual game. The reviews of Halo 3 talked about the story of Halo 3. What it seems is as though lots of people were forgetting that this was a trilogy, and should be considered as such. For my part, I decided to play through the three games in a row, as a trilogy and complete story, instead of looking at them really individually. I had played a bit of multiplayer in Halo and Halo 2, and started the campaign of Halo several times, but never got very far. I was untainted, largely unspoiled on the storyline. A fresh look, as it were. I have since completed the trilogy, and my conclusion is as follows:

(more…)