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?

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:

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