Is beauty really subjective?

I was reading an article which proposes the implementation of “subjective” captchas (pictured on the right) to determine if the user planning input data was a machine or not. It would show a series of pictures where the user would choose a person considered to be “hot” or “not.” While this can be pretty judgemental, it still works as the machines should have a more difficult time analyzing image data like that than simply analyzing strings of text.

Among the people chanting that beauty was ultimately subjective, there was a comment which I found very interesting.

Saying that beauty is “subjective” is kind of a cop-out. It’s usually said by those of us who wish it was true. Just because one out of ten thousand people might find an ugly person remotely attractive doesn’t make that same person “attractive” anymore than a guy with a fat chick fetish makes an obese 800lb woman “skinny.”

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New guitar stuff

The stuff I had Pia buy from the US finally arrived. Which is perfect since I was contemplating on recording some shit once again.

I think I’m beginning to become a Planet Waves whore. The sheer practicality of the stuff they make reminds me of those Japanese inventions for practical living. They don’t look so good, but the concepts are very useful for living. Planet Waves‘ stuff on the other hand do not suffer from that dilemma as their products both have function and form.

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Remembering last Christmas

Thought I would just share these photoshopped pics I did for the marketing of our group’s Christmas party. It would’ve been such a waste to just throw these away – so I’ll use them to test the lightbox grouping method. When viewing with a browser, click on any one of the pictures to engage the lightbox, then it should should tell you whether you can click to an “adjacent” picture when you mouseover to either side of the image.

Don’t be surprised if it breaks once in a while, after modifying the script to accommodate my dynamic Flickr linkbacks, I wouldn’t be surprised if it messes up some functions… I just hope they’re only cosmetic issues – so I can fix them with simple CSS.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

If you haven’t seen this movie… I suggest you get your asses of your computer monitors and watch it. I absolutely loved this movie. In fact, regardless of what other critics may say, I think so far, of the movies I’ve watched this topped my list of “most enjoyable” movies of the first half of 2006.

The way the battle scenes were kinda over-the-top was absolutely brilliant for that type of film. It was like watching a cartoon. Which isn’t surprising since it was a Disney story. But nonetheless, it was so much fun to watch.

The effects of course were great. I didn’t really pay much attention to effects nowadays since as long as what I see seems believable, then I really don’t give a rat’s ass how much effort they put into pulling it off. As one of the effects people of the Lord of the Rings said: “the goal is to not let people think you were using computers, etc.”

The story was interesting enough, and the ending was superb! Seldom have I experienced an excited “whoa” moment when watching an ending. And the clever part is, while it does leave you wanting to see the third installment, it still actually finishes the current movie.

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