Virtual background for online meetings

[mtbc]

It has been suggested that, on some occasions, I should be discreet about from where I am working. This seems easier to achieve if I habitually use virtual backgrounds in Teams, Zoom, etc., giving rise to the awkward choice of what background. Abstractly, I would prefer it not to be overly striking, not requiring comment, and it is fine for it not to be widely recognized. Though, somebody else at work uses a background that frustrates me in seeming to depict the interior of a room from a work of science fiction, either a bigger-budget effort from no earlier than the seventies, or lower-budget a couple of decades later, but I cannot place it, and I am not used to not being able to place such. Someday I may have to ask. Still, that kind of thing may be an option, among others.

Comments

[mindstalk]

I mostly use astronomy or forest photos. Sometimes anime backgrounds (not featuring Cute Girls) or Lawrence Alma-Tadema paintings.

[mtbc]

Ah, I wasn't aware of him. The Egyptian chess players were a surprise.

[mindstalk]

I hadn't seen that one. It's an odd one: chess the game we know is a fair bit younger than ancient Egypt -- but all the pieces in the painting are the same, and the board has 10 rows, so he must have been using 'chess' more like "board game", I think.

But I like high realism art, and classical subjects, and like the idea of him researching cutting edge research of the time for his paintings. Even if half the women look like English beauties. :p

He also started putting Opus numbers on his paintings, serial numbers basically, to make forgery more difficult. Wiki:

"In 1872 Alma-Tadema organised his paintings into an identification system by including an opus number under his signature and assigning his earlier pictures numbers as well. Portrait of my sister, Artje, painted in 1851, is numbered opus I, while two months before his death he completed Preparations in the Coliseum, opus CCCCVIII. Such a system made it more difficult for fakes to be passed off as originals.[16] "

[mtbc]

It's an odd one indeed, nice to get the occasional surprise. And, heh, I had no idea about the serial numbering. (-:

I've also liked the realistic and classical, e.g., stuff by John William Waterhouse.