Christians, Sex, and Marriage

Posted on September 1, 2011 by | 3 comments

A few nights ago I sat on a friend’s front porch, nursing my drink and amusedly watching at least one of them smoke a cigar. Our conversation meandered here and there, but eventually struck a notable point when the married one directed at another:

You know, you will probably not have sex on your wedding night. Your wife will be far too tight.

While this was hilarious largely due to the person he was talking to [and his particular stance on women/relationships], it stuck with me because of  the assumptions that were present in the statement.

Firstly, there was the assumption that all of us were Christians [most of us were]. The second assumption was that as Christians  we were saving ourselves for  marriage, and that in turn we were also looking for a spouse that would uphold the same ideals. This happens to be true for me, and it got me thinking about a topic I’ve thought a lot about before.

As a Christian who would like to one day be married, what are my options? Attending a Christian college certainly helps, and the aforementioned question explains why we have the terms “ring by spring” and “getting my MRS.” There’s a pervasive feeling that there’s only so much time to find that special someone, and once you’re out in the real world your search multiplies in difficulty.

There is a culture of Christian young people, and as young people their search for that significant other is constantly manifesting itself. Bible studies for those in high school, colleges and careers groups for those a little bit older, both become hunting grounds for eligible dudes/ladies. A friend of mine, when talking about her church’s young adult group, related that the guys there basically gauged the dateability of every girl there before waiting around for new members.

This reveals a lot about world views, the Christian, and, by reversing this view, the non-Christian. In one there is the expectation to stay pure and for your future spouse to do the same. In the other the assumption is that the person you will marry will have had sexual partners [though hopefully not too many]. The former is plagued by the fear that they may not find the one. The latter suffers the same phobia, yet finds itself with quite a few more options.

I haven’t done the math, so I can’t tell you with complete certainty that Christians are searching more desperately than their peers of alternate beliefs. I can, however, tell you that I can definitely wait a few more years before marriage becomes something I seriously think about. But I can’t speak for anyone else.

3 Comments

Posted in Christianity, sex

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Hurricane Occurs, Media Freaks Out About Itself

Posted on August 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

As Hurricane Irene swept up the east coast, the President issued a warning for 10 states (plus DC and Puerto Rico), people stocked up on fresh water and condoms, and, importantly, vaguely famous country singers tweeted about it.

Another name ruined for at least another year.

But as the storm moved north and decreased in intensity, eventually being downgraded to a tropical storm, grumbling started among people who had spent two hours looking for bread, and New Yorkers especially began saying that the hurricane was gratuitously over-hyped. A New York Times article noted that, unlike the forewarnings, “Windows in skyscrapers did not shatter. Subway tunnels did not flood. Power was not shut off pre-emptively. The water grid did not burst. There were no reported fatalities in the five boroughs. And the rivers flanking Manhattan did not overrun their banks.”

People are generally accepting a better-safe-than-sorry-but-I’m-still-kind-of-annoyed attitude, like the building superintendent who said of NYC’s mayor, “Bloomberg, he did O.K., but he made people crazy and spend a lot of money.”

And there was quite a bit of hype about Irene, mostly in the northern states, where hurricanes are less common and therefore more exciting for meteorologists, like this poor weatherguy who pretends to be buffeted around as people hang out on the boardwalk:

(The worse part is when the anchor says “There are, like, people sightseeing behind you. We can see them.” and he says “That’s because they are hardcore weather-watchers!“)

George Will even had nuggets of wisdom to dispense on the topic, saying “[Journalism] shouldn’t subtract from the nation’s understanding and it certainly shouldn’t contribute to the manufacture of synthetic hysteria that is so much a part of modern life. And I think we may have done so with regard to this tropical storm as it now seems to be.”

New Yorker Editorialist Adam Gopnik called ‘startling’ “the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about.”

Many commentators, like editorialist Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast called out news stations for rabidly covering anything to do with the hurricane while failing to adequately cover the political events in Libya.

And of course, there have been deaths and significant losses in states all along the coast. Just because New York City didn’t collapse doesn’t mean that Irene wasn’t a significant disaster, and every time a columnist starts to talk about “sensationalism”, they are quickly reminded of this fact. But this just adds to the media’s kind of embarrassingly transparent public introspection that seems to be common now after significant unplanned events.

And just for fun, here’s that video of that reporter reporting while getting covered in sea gunk:

Leave a comment

Posted in media, television

Tagged , , , , , , ,

From Puppetry to Pod Races

Posted on August 25, 2011 by | 1 comment

I love alliteration. It’s short, it’s snappy, and it has a lot of mental sticking power. I’ve used it in the title of my interview with the Batgirl of San Diego, and when I named my self-indulgent essay comparing StarCraft and Barbara Kingsolver’s literature. This time around, I find it appropriate to utilize this literary technique in bringing attention to Star Wars.

It’s not news to the movie fan or the Star Wars fanatic that there have been quite a few changes made in the rereleases of the classic films, old content packaged in a new format. A few of the alterations seem pretty logical [the Rebels’ computers are looking pretty dated when compared to the holograms of the prequel trilogy], while others are downright upsetting [replacing Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen in the Jedi ghost scene]. With Blu-ray being the new format on the block, a new change has been announced for the rerelease of The Phantom Menace.

Episode I can be remembered as the last of the Star Wars films to feature the diminutive Master Yoda using puppetry. There are no backflips or lightsabre fights with bearded Sith lords that nobody likes, just a short green alien with a penchant for reversing the order of his sentences, sitting down. After The Phantom Menace CGI was used to render the Jedi Grand Master.

On the left, Yoda as he appeared in 2009. On the right, Yoda on Blu-ray.

While this alteration causes the first of the prequels to fit in with the following two films, what it loses is a bit of its connection with the original trilogy. Yoda was voiced by Frank Oz, but he was also controlled by the man, who acted as a puppeteer for the first four films. While he’s certainly more expressive, he lacks a lot of the signature movements that once characterized him.

But what does this say about film? Green screens are being used more than ever before, forcing actors to show fear, confusion, and even awe while standing in front of immense emerald sheets. While technology has been moving ever forward in delivering realistic CGI, it’s apparent that it still has a way to go.

Consider the animatronic dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Created in the early 90s,  it featured creatures that looked real because they were. They had actual size and weight and texture and you could have touched them if you were there. Compare Neytiri from James Cameron’s Avatar with Ron Perlman as Hellboy from the eponymous film. The difference from the left to the right is that of computer generated imagery to simple prosthetics and makeup.

In an age when CGI seems to be taking over it’s always a pleasant surprise to see the more traditional techniques, be they puppetry or prosthetics, to help suspend the audience’s disbelief. When Hollywood’s pumping out real-world-meets-animated-characters films like The Smurfs, we can all thank God for Jason Segel.

1 Comment

Posted in art, film

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Decemberists, Infinite Jest, and Michael Schur Unite (and there was much rejoicing)

Posted on August 22, 2011 by | Leave a comment

The Decemberist’s latest music video (for Calamity Song, from their most recent album The King is Dead) portrayed a scene from David Foster Wallace’s mammoth novel Infinite Jest, and the probability that somewhere within 100 yards of you a humanities major is freaking out increased by about 600%.

And this is awesome not only because 1) The Decemberists are awesome and 2) Infinite Jest is awesome, both of which reasons would be plenty justification for awesomeness, but it’s awesome because Infinite Jest is so huge and complicated and a-linear and full of bizarre details that it seems only slightly short of a miracle than anyone would even be able to succesfully portray in film just one scene from the novel, and yet Michael Schur (known for writing for SNL, The Office, and Parks and Recreation) managed to have the scene play out almost exactly as I imagined it – which I understand is a hideously biased judgement but I really only have my own imagination to go by, and perhaps the fact that film adaptations of writing almost never do that for me bolster the impressiveness of my statement.

The scene fromt the book, by the way, was brilliantly and kind of impressively chosen too – it shows the students at a tennis academy playing Eschaton, which is a ludicrously complicated game involving a mentally-projected map of the world on a tennis court, socks and tshirts representing different strategic targets, tennis balls (lobbed by each country) representing nuclear bombs, and insane algorithms (that David Foster Wallace all but teaches you in the book) to determine the damage and population loss of each hit. Colin Meloy sitting in the place of Michael Pemulis, one of the main characters of the book, with his characteristic sailor’s hat, is weirdly perfect. Schur’s attention to details from the novel made the video, I think, bringing yelps of excitement from readers of the book seeing a scene from possibly the most bizarre and un-movie-able piece of fiction they’ve read portrayed (almost) perfectly on film, but also allowing people who haven’t read the book to still understand what’s going on.

So, in summary, props to The Decemberists for being awesome, postmortem props to David Foster Wallace for being brilliant, and mad props to Michael Schur for creating a visual reality out of a piece of something as abstract and wonderful as Infinite Jest.

Leave a comment

Posted in film, literature, music, writing

Tagged , , , , , ,

Why I Disagree With Dota 2

Posted on August 18, 2011 by | 7 comments

Gamers everywhere were rejoicing yesterday as Valve released the first official footage of their newest game, DotA 2, made more special by the fact that the footage was from a livestream of the first DotA 2 tournament ever.

To back up a little, DotA, or Defence of the Ancients, is a custom game mode for the Blizzard-made RTS WarCraft III. Although many mods of the game exist, there are none that can compare to the popularity that DotA has with the gaming community. Influential to the point that it has spawned its own genre of video game,1 and been the inspiration for the similar titles League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth, DotA has actually become a  feature at worldwide tournaments, including the Asian World Cyber Games. To say that this is just another mod is an immense understatement.

For a bit of background on Valve, they have been the brilliant minds that havebrought us titles such as Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal. For the most part these are all games that are saturated with narrative and feature inventive, innovative gameplay. Valve has long been seen as a company that deeply cares for its fans, their constant release of new content for the [now free to play]2  shooter Team Fortress 2 being a prime example.

On October 13th of last year, Valve announced that they were creating DotA 2. IceFrog, a modder who maintained and developed the original game was hired by the company in 2009 and has since been working on the sequel.

That last word is one of my first issues with the game. The very usage of the name “DotA” with the addition of the “2” seems to state that this is yet another sequel to another already-owned property, such as Half-Life 2. This could not be further from the truth. While IceFrog did help a great deal in furthering the game, as a mod it belongs to the community that helped create it, the hundreds of men and women who suggested heroes or contributed icons or penned lore for the heroes they loved playing as. The name, of course, was chosen simply for familiarity, which brings me to my next point.

In order to ease players into the transition from the WarCraft III mod to the new and improved DotA 2 Valve needed more than just a title. According to Game Informer:3

DotA-Allstars‘ roster of 100+ heroes is being brought over in its entirety. The single map games take place on is functionally identical to the one that you can download for free today in the Warcraft III mod. Items, skills, and upgrade paths are unchanged. Some hero skills work slightly better due to being freed from the now-ancient Warcraft III engine, but Dota 2 will be instantly familiar to any DotA player.

Along with the heroes being brought over were their models. Since the world editor in Warcraft III only allowed for so much customization, unit models from the game itself were used in DotA. Instantly recognizable after years of playing the mod, Valve chose to make their heroes look as close to their blockier counterparts as possible.

To the left is an example of the icons used for the heroes, the ones on the left from DotA and the ones on the right from DotA 2.

The first, Prophet [known as Nature’s Prophet in Dota 2], features the same beard and horns, as well as facial tattoos. What was even more disconcerting, however, was the name of the image file for the latter, “furion_lg.png.” Furion is the name of the original hero, and is actually taken from a character in WarCraft III itself.

The second is known by Dazzle in both games, and clearly depicts a troll-ish kind of creature with a skull face tattoo. The colouration is extremely similar.

The third, called Storm Spirit by both, gets only slightly more original. Instead of portraying a humanoid panda DotA 2 instead changes the character to a human, albeit wearing extremely similar garb.

Valve has always been a company that pumped out solid, original content, and watching the tournament replays of this game made me deeply upset. The Anti-Mage attacks just as he always did with long, curved blades on each hand, Leshrac gallops swiftly forward on all fours, torso rocking back rhythmically as usual.

I could point out countless similarities, especially to character design that has always been distinctly Blizzard’s, but I won’t. The fact of the matter is that the easiest way to familiarize a gamer with something new is to show them exactly what they’ve seen before. A muscular red orc with a topknot hefting an immense axe remains exactly that, even with sleeker graphics.

DotA 2 is a game that has a very large number of players waiting to get their hands on it. The genre is only growing more and more popular, and Valve has found a way to successfully cash in on that market. It’s just a shame that this was the way that they chose to do it.

1. See? There’s even a Wikipedia page on it! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_genre>

2. Seriously, no strings attached. <http://www.tf2.com/freetoplay/>

3.  Source to this and much of the other facts in this post: <http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/10/13/dota-2-announced-details.aspx>

7 Comments

Posted in art, design, video games

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ai Weiwei and the inevitable human rights movement in China

Posted on August 15, 2011 by | 2 comments

Ai Weiwei: sunflower seed enthusiast, among other things

So Ai Weiwei has been in the news recently because he spoke for the first time about the details of his 3 month detention. “Who the heck is Ai Weiwei?”, you ask? LET ME TELL YOU.

Arrest
Some background: Ai is sort of a politically active artist (or artistic political activist) who’s famous for speaking against the People’s Republic of China, specifically its inhibition of free speech and cover-ups of police brutality and general nastiness towards anyone who complains about anything the government’s doing. The People’s Republic of China demolished Ai’s studio earlier this year and arrested him on April 3rd (just as he was getting ready to fly to Hong Kong) for the kind of horrifyingly vague reason given that he had “other business” to attend to. One of Ai’s anonymous associates was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “[Ai] told me that when he was taken from the airport, the police told him: ‘You always give us trouble, now it’s time for us to give you trouble.’”

Later the People’s Republic of China rather unconvincingly changed the charge on Ai to tax evasion.

Artwork

Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”

Most everyone else, however, figures that the reason has something more to do with his vocal political activism, both on his Twitter account and in his artwork, like the photo triptych of him breaking a Han Dynasty urn, or Grass Mud Horse Covering the Middle, which doesn’t seem terribly political until you find out that the title, in the original language, sounds something like “F*** your mother, Chinese Communist Party.”

Ai Weiwei, "Grass Mud Horse Covering the Middle", the title of which sounds like "F*** your mother, Chinese Communist Party" in Chinese

The Growing Human Rights Movement in China
Ai Weiwei is just the most media-visible figure in a large network of grass-roots human rights activists in China, one that can only continue to grow. And every effort the People’s Republic of China makes to cover up a situation or detain an inconveniently vocal activist creates a chain reaction of others publicly calling for that person’s release and bringing more, not less, attention to protestors: Zhao Lianhai, who spent time in prison after he organised a group seeking compensation for families of children who died or became ill due to tainted baby formula, was shortly detained after calling for Ai’s release; this drew more attention to Zhao and his claim that he was force-fed through the nose while on a hunger strike. Wang Lihong, an activist who draws attention to and investigates instances of suspected government injustice, was arrested in March and faces prison time for “creating a disturbance“; her case is in turn receiving public attention largely because Ai Weiwei is calling for her release.

It’s kind of nerve-wracking to watch but it seems sort of inevitable that as China becomes more prevalent in the international economy, it will become harder for the Chinese government to censor communication across the internet, and the human rights movement will become something impossible for the government stifle.

Things are going to get serious, is what I’m trying to say, and the human rights movement in China is going to be getting a lot of attention in the next decade.

2 Comments

Posted in art, Asia, politics

Tagged , , , , , , ,