There are, out there (here), evenings that simply don’t look like they’ll ever end.
They just keep going on and on again, without bringing you anything if not bad news (from home in this case…) and a general sense of uneasiness and frustration.
You start thinking about going to bed very early for your standards, especially counting you’ve a day off tomorrow and so no real reason not to enjoy the night you so much love, but the hot weather and/or the noisy neighbors still going on with their barbecue dissuade you from the idea of crashing on your pillow, and so…
…and so you end up living this awkward evening, helping yourself with loud music in your ears (Tool in this case) and you try to lose yourself in the vast and placid sea that can be the Internet.
Then, exactly when you were thinking again of switching everything off, you stumble upon a piece of great art, in the form of a video, and you end up grinning like a fool exactly like the title of the post you got the link from was suggesting.
The amount of incredibly moving stories of victims, rescuers, volunteers is simply shocking at the moment. I have been collecting newspapers of all the stories, and telling them in the form of comic strips. I hope these stories could show the UK readers the love, warmth and courage of the Chinese people, also the sad and cruel reality of the horrible 5.12 Earthquake.
This series of comic will make you cry… it sure made me cry. Those illustrations are moving, and the stories told just tear you apart.
Something sure worth reading and sharing.
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.
Ok, I’m a magazine addicted, we all know that.
Basically I’m able to jump a full meal if I’m out, starving but with just 5£ left and a magazine I like out with the new monthly issue still to be bought: consider it incredible, but I’ll avoid buying a sandwich and I’ll enter WHSmith instead :p
I read a lot of things in various formats: blogs, websites, books, magazines, webzines, fanzines, newsgroups, forums… whatever there’s around with words on/in it, it’s something I like to take a peak at, but while half of the things listed before come free as in beer, books and magazines are expenses that actually have an impact on my daily life. Not a huge one, but I actually restrain myself from visiting amazon too often (at my looking too long and never shortening wishlist makes me sad :p) and I usually cross the street when I come across a Waterstone shop or a WHSmith one… but it’s not always something I can resist. And when this happens, my bank account is not happy!
Anyway, my magazine addiction has a new item to list now. In addition to Scientific American, NewScientist, Airliner World and Prospect Magazine I’ve (finally) given up and I started buying Wired. My geek side is in giggling and enjoying every single word, might as well become my favourite reading of all the time.
The problem is: will I ever be able to get more geekier that I am now? ;)
I’ve had my Shiraz wine as an aperitif.
I’ve had my Carlsberg to go with the sausages and the salad.
I’ve got my Earl Grey for the rest of the evening.
I’ve got Deep Purple.
I’m fine. Well, I’m better than I was a couple of days ago.
The dinner has been a nice one, easy and fast to cook, but so enjoyable and nice that it is sure helping me feeling better (and full :p) right now, but what I think it’s really making the difference, is that I know that tommorrow I’ll take service again, after about 10 days at home (between OFFs and STANDBYs).
It’s quite strange to realize (in fact) once again how much I’m addicted to the job I do, and how much this is part of my nature now. When I am stuck on the ground, for whatever reason it is, I kind of suffer, it’s just uncomfortable for me not to fly. The point is most of the time I don’t see what I do as a job, I simply do it because I like to do it, which I think is kind of lucky situation to be in, when doing something that you like is actually earning you money to buy your food and pay for the roof you’ve over your head :p
The point is: I’ve a lot of addiction, really a lot. A large number of them are not exactly listable here [;)] but sure their common trait is that they make me spend money, not earning anything in return in the form of currency. Yes, they give me satisfaction and good pleasure, sometimes, but having my actualy real job listed among them is a kind of big luck. That’s why, probably, I’ve not thought too much about moving from Italy to UK to continue being a Cabin Crew, being what I like to be.
I don’t know exactly why I’m writing it here, actually this is probably the most personal post I’ve ever made here on the-shrike.net, but tonight I felt like doing it, and here it is.
I’ll be flying to Paris tomorrow afternoon, so enjoy your week-end in this side of Europe (and the world) while I’ll be flying over Siberia to Tokyo at 38000 feet… and semi & improperly quoting one of the character from one of my most favourite series ever:
Magnitude: 6.7
Date-Time: Monday, July 16, 2007 at 10:13:27 AM
Location: 37.584°N, 138.378°E
Region: NEAR THE WEST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances: 246 km (153 miles) NNW (331°) from TOKYO, Japan
Well it’s a long story, I haven’t been updating since ages, but in my life things have been moving definitely too quickly to keep the pace recently. Anyway, I’m in training with JAL and I’m in Tokyo, experiencing my first real thypoon and a pretty well-done earthquake.
I am still alive, and I’ll try to start writing again… or at least to find the time to update a little bit more often ;)
Tomorrow is the day.
I’ve a one-way-only flight from Milan Malpensa to London Heathrow, I’m definitely moving to London. I suppose is in order to pretend not to be scared to death, and to put on a mask of pure excitment for the big occasion, so I won’t spend the rest of the post writing about all the troubles I’m about to put myself in :p
The training is going to start on the 5th of June, so I will have about 4 free days to start exploring the city and to go on on my search for a place where to live. That’s definitely something that sounds exciting, isn’t it?
We’ll see there, then.
This is probably going to be my last post for a while (not that I am writing much in the last time… I’m very busy lately, as you can figure out) and my last post from my desk in Milan (Italy) for probably even longer.
Why not to try and see if there’s someone reading me, after all?
Dear Lazyweb, I will be moving to the United Kingdom (London) by the end of May, and while I have, for now, a temporary accomodation, if anyone out there has any advices on a possible cheap rent in the Heathrow (West London, Middlesex, whatever…) zone, or a room to share with a soon to be Japan Airlines flight attendant, that would be just great! So, in the case, drop me an e-mail.
Worth a try, isn’t it? Thanks in advance.
Holding the contract in my hands is exciting and nevertheless pretty scary!
Shot the one who says that the search for a job is an easy task.
Shot the one who says that sending curricula vitae (gosh, my high school latin’s teacher would have been proud of me, still remembering plurals of the neutral second declination :p) and filling applications is not tiring.
I end my days sick of all the e-mails sent and the applications completed, having left foot marks of my passage on almost every Airline website existing in the Matrix Internet, and still not knowing what I’m going to do in my near future.
Being unemployed is not a nice feeling, not at all!
My days are boring, that’s why I have pretty nothing to blog about.
Let’s hope things are going to change soon, I’m starting to feel frustration rising inside me, and that is not good.
Being 27 is fun, even when you don’t have a proper (at least in the common meaning of the term…) birthday to celebrate.
But let’s say it’s even funnier when your neighbour/friends get the right idea for a fantastic gift, and happen to walk through your door hanging a big red box that seems to weight quite a lot. And it’s (finally) definitely amazing when you open it to realize that it’s full of 27 different varieties of beer (in bottle and tin), one for each of the year you’re old.
A great gift indeed, which reminds me of my sister’s one for my 26th birthday, even if this one is definitely huger. What I really need now are some money to buy me a set of proper glasses to taste all that beer… this reminds me I am still without a job ¬_¬
Anyway: good 1st of March and a good non-birthday to everyone out there!
(the picture is even the living proof that the 3.2MP camera of my N73 rocks, and that this mobile even works as a USB mass-storage device under Linux without a flaw. Amazing! But that’s another story.)
It has been a hell of a month (and half).
Well, actually, not so bad in a negative way: just full of things to do. And it is not over, yet.
My training contract with Livingston ended 3 days ago, I’m then both officially grounded and unemployed, jobless for the first time since 2001. It’s not a pleasurable feeling, checking my bank account evey 5 minutes knowing that it will only get little and little in the next (I hope not for long) future. Yes, I’m looking, frenetically moving my eyes from one airline’s website to another, still with the strong will to leave Italy to keep working as a Flight Attendant.
One more step here (the National Aviation Authority exam to certify me as a F/A on the 19th of February) and then I’ll try to build my life… possibly somewhere else.
On the geek side, things went the same: messy and convulsion as always.
The wordpress update from 2.0.4 to 2.1 let me down without a working PHP installation on my server, it took a while to figure out the problem (I experimented with NanoBlogger in the meanwhile) but as you may (or may not) be checking now, everything got resolved (thanks to my hosting help-desk too). Now WP 2.1 is working flawlessly, fast and stable since a couple of days, and everything seems to have been back to normal by now.
On a more personal side, after about 5 years I left down Fluxbox as a Window Manager in favor of the quite minimalistic dwm. Quite a shock at first, but actually the most productive, flexible, and exciting experience I’ve ever had with a WM. It rocks! Belial is undergoing its first huge working-on/reinstall, in order to customize a very light and fast Gentoo installation on it, and as you may imagine: this is pure fun. The X60s is an incredible machine, and the more I work on it, the more I love it.
Well, it’s pretty everything as a summary of my last month and half… more will follow, I feel like I have a gap to fill after my absence from blogging lately.
