the-shrike.net

This has been an interesting viewing for this rainy evening.
It’s just 15minutes long, and I think it’s worth watching, very clever.

2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky

If you’re interested, the relevant discussion on reddit is here.

(Source: Here)

It seems that the rights for the production of a Live-Action movie of that all time masterpiece (and one of my all time favourite) in manga/anime/science-fiction that is Ghost in the Shell have been sold to DreamWorks and that the designated director will be Stephen Spielberg.

A R G H!
That has been my first reaction to the news, and apparently I’m not the only one being worried around.

It’s not just the always present fear of the fan-base to see its sacred and favourite passion torn away by someone who doesn’t have a clue what he/she/it is dealing with, and not even only the reasonable and pratically proven rules that a 2 hours Hollywood movie won’t be able to express nothing even remotely close to the complexity required by something like GITS. I mean, I loved Jackson’s work on the Lord Of The Ring, but nevertheless, I felt some pain in seeing how badly the transposition was from the book, and we’re talking about something I regard as a miracle: I was expecting far worse. Maybe Peter Jackson had the right ideas, maybe he was lucky, maybe he simply found himself inspired enough to give his maximum, and still the result was great but somehow disappointing for “us” fun, and rightly so, I believe.
Now take Spielberg, the present one not the E.T or Schindler’s List or Amistad one, but the producer/director who destroied A.I and raped War of the Worlds and Minority Report… it’s a nightmare coming true for any GITS fan out there. Just like knowing that except for a miracle (and I’d call a cancellation of the live-action project one) your favourite creature is going to be tortured and eventually killed in a way only Hollywood is known to do, and we all are aware of how much Hollywood-ian Spielberg is, especially lately. We’ve seen this happening before with japanese productions taken to the big-screen by the USA industry, we’re going to see it with Dragonball (again: unless the usual miracle) and I really fear not even Maj. Kusanagi could escape safely this time.

There are things that should never be included in a “let's make a movie to pile up some cash“-list, certainly GITS is one of them.
Nothing is listed on IMDB yet, let’s hope this is going to remain on someone’s desk forever!

I am not dead.
I actually feel quite ashamed but my latest blogging-self, and even if apologizing here is more or less like apologizing to a mirror, I feel like doing it.
It is strange, it’s just a period when writing a blog post, even if I have quite some ideas, it’s not something that seems to be able to find any place in my days. I think this could be because I’m actually writing something else, a sort of literary experiment (definitely a first time for me) eXalted related for my friend back in Italy, and this is actually consuming all the flow of my thoughts out of my mind into the keyboard. It may sound strange, but I’ve never been anything close to a writing person, and the fact that I’m trying to concentrate on the slow (and most of the time painful) process of producing something like that could well be the cause of my lack of energy for the every-once-in-a-while blogging activity.
Nevertheless, I felt that necglecting this experiment would be a great loss, as the-shrike.net is still my attempt to put a foot in the blogosphere out there, so I decided to try find some time for it.
It’s not a real restart, but… we’ll see.

Anyway, what better way to give some boost to this blog than to screw completly my WordPress 2.1 installation, mess around at 2am on a Saturday night to install WordPress 2.5 and change to a new (yes, I’m going more and more minimalistic :p) theme? Nothing like the pleasure of hacking CSS style file in the middle of the night before crushing to bed at 3:15am, right?

In some way, I was kind of missing writing here.
Let’s see if I’m somehow able to start babbling again.