Choose an episode of anime or television series you have on your computer. Make sure you're certain you want that one, you cannot change your mind once you skip this step. DO NOT TELL YOUR FLIST WHAT YOU CHOSE.
Make note of how long the episode is here: 59:59
Ask your flist to choose a time between 00:00 and whatever the length of your episode is. Be specific - e.g. 21:09, 02:42, 36:50. (No guarantees that times more precisely than the second will be respected, but feel free to try!)
Make them an icon using THAT FRAME ONLY no matter what it is. And remember, you can only use that ONE episode you chose previous, even if the person posting isn't familiar with it.
BBC's Top Gear Yesterday, me bro walked into our room and asked me if I had hard disk space. Then he handed me a jump drive* and told me to copy two video files - to wit, two old episodes of Top Gear. (The one with the caravanning and the one with the vans.)
Assuming it was on purpose, The Da Vinci Code is art.
In addition, The Da Vinci Code is successful art in the evocative1 sense, not merely in the financial sense.
It is being criticized for the way it evokes these feelings - its critics say it should not make the reader feel clever in this way, presumably because the reader does not earn feeling clever.
"Hey," my brain said. "What about Myst? It does take a little cleverness to solve those puzzles - isn't feeling clever justified there?"
I'm not going to divert to the obvious moral, here. (I was tempted, mind - any excuse to plug Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit is welcome.) Instead, I think we should consider where this idea of justification of art, in this earned-emotion sense, leads. Is the emotional climax of Terminator 2 justified? What about the excitement and satisfaction of a good game of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Or of a good performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor? Or, on a more abstract note: are we justified in evaluating these works and the reactions they evoke? Or, higher still: are we justified in rejecting such evaluations as unworthy, or unnecessary, or inappropriate?
Comments are open.
1. "Evocative of emotional reactions". Hey, I wanted something short and snappy. ^
Well, I'm not going to pretend that I've secretly cracked Stan Lee's playbook, but I think I see four paramount virtues among those he praises, and absent from those he criticizes. I even think I have them in (mostly) priority order. If I may put words to them ("The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way" and all that), the four virtues are Compassion, Dedication, Humility, and Honor.
Spoilers for Season One below.
Compassion: Stan Lee emphasized this in the very first challenge of the first season of the show – given the choice between completing an arbitrary task as fast as possible and helping someone in need, help the person. Linked to this is being aware of your environment, although the superheroes who merely failed to notice the bystander in need were criticized less than those who noticed and failed to act.
Dedication: I can only point to the second episode of Season One, where Monkey Woman spent nine minutes and forty-three seconds struggling against a pair of attack dogs to finish a challenge, and Cell Phone Girl cried 'Uncle' after four seconds. Though three other contestants finished the challenge (all in under a minute) and four others failed (all in under a minute), it is the former who earns the kudos, and the latter the boot.
Humility: This was at the center of what I consider the worst test of the first season – the "who would you eliminate" challenge. The test stinks because any fool can see what answer you're supposed to give, especially because you have to do so publicly, leaving two of the only contestants brave enough to answer the question honestly – Ty'Veculus and Fat Momma – to face the ax. Still, the importance of humility to Stan Lee is unquestionable – thus the challenge.
(But a point – egregious though the test was, I do believe that Feedback, seemingly the most guileless person on the show, was honest in nominating himself. Then again, it's practically a truism that you can't really tell when someone is lying just by observation.)
Honor: Saying 'honor' is very nearly a copout, but I think it appropriate nevertheless. It says that a superheroes words must be their bonds (something which caught Ty'Veculus in the costume challenge, for example). It says that superheroes must support the traditions of heroism (this caught everyone but Feedback and Fat Momma at the cafe – that superheroes protect their secret identities is all but a dogma of the genre). And it says that superheroes must live up to the ideals of the society (thus Stan Lee's repeated ribbing of Major Victory for doffing parts of his costume, and his stripper past). It is the conservative honor of centuries past, and it's value has only been increased by tempering it with humility and compassion.
Dragnet! A few weeks ago – right after Goshen '06, actually – I walked in on my mother watching an old black-and-white TV show. Dragnet. I, whose closest previous encounter with police procedurals was the 1987 Dragnet movie, was entranced.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
confused
bouncy
excited
geeky
enthralled
amused
devious
ecstatic