A few people have suggested that, since Star is a student at MIT, she could not possibly have been 'stupid' enough to fail to anticipate the reaction she was going to get. Therefore, it's her fault for deliberately provoking the hostilities.

Having dated someone from MIT, I can assure you it's quite possible to be a complete moron and still attend that particular school.

So is it fiber optic, or is it plasma? Pick a side!!!

Seconding the thought that the pattern comes from a, you know, mold, and that it should be anyhting but random.

I shoot a lot of photography and use a lot of Photoshop. I'm going to say that this is definitely an optical illusion caused by the flattening of persective that you get when shooting extremely long telephoto. If you zoom in and pay close attention to the focus of Tiger's shirt, you will see that this sharpness is maintained all the way around the contour, which would not be the case if a blurry image was composited over the sharp one (the whole basis for this in front/behind/in front brouhaha) unless significant tweaking had been done by our hypothetical Photoshopper.

I'd even posit that Occam's Razor suppports the 'real' proposition over the 'fake' one. The 'fake' case isn't the simple case. Not only would this have to be Photoshopped, but it would have to be Photoshopped in an detailed yet ass-backwards way that involves a lot more weirdnesses and effort than a simple perspective illusion captured by chance, which happens all the time. It's a lot less likely that a Photoshopper would go to such great lengths to a) create such a blah image b) use multiple layers to put objects both in front of and behind other objects c) carefully edit the tangental areas to preserve the appearance of correct focus of each, even though they look like they're supposed to be the other way around d) recreate a portion of a larger, readily available image that looks exactly the same except but without the strong optical illusion, because you can see their feet.

You can't just say "It's faked" and claim Occam because you used only two words. You have to recreate all the steps needed to reproduce that fake result, and compare that to "a weird combination of perspective and alignment captured by chance with a single shutter press".

@ #56 zebulon:

ACTUALLY it's a Circle Jerks lyric... as played by the Circle Jerks... in their roles as a nightclub band in Repo Man. And on the soundtrack.

What??? Diablo/Diablo II's page is empty? They're not even listed under 'Major' PCG Games?

Having written a ton of the random level generator for D2, I am somewhat incensed.

I've recently been shooting pictures of my own Japanese toy monsters. What the heck, Coop... trying to steal my thunder? I'll have to finish documenting them all, now! :)

http://flickr.com/photos/pkmousie/sets/72157603708009400/

Enjoy!