In the future, life between the digital and physical world has been blurred. The boundary of technology and humanity has been stretched beyond imagination with lives being led in both the electronic and physical worlds. With the melding of man and machine – a new cybernetic level of existence is being created – An existence that continues to redefine mankind.
I finished episode 26 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex today.
Gits: SAC is one of those series that is perfect from beginning to end. Its the kind of series that you watch several times to fully enjoy everything it has to offer. It is simultaneously comical and dark. The team of Shirow Masamune, Yoshiki Sakurai, and Kenji Kamiyama provide a wonderful vision for this version of the GitS universe.
It complements the GitS movies well (although, both exist in different universes and are alternate realities of Shirow’s manga). The introduction of the child-like Tachikoma robots (“Sentient Tanks”) was a great idea, and I wish they had appeared in the other two universes. They make you question what is human consciousness (“Ghost”), and they make you question what is real or not.
Hell, the entire series makes you question what is real.
I don’t get people sometimes. You try to help them, and all they do is bitch about it and threaten to do something in return. I wonder if these people ever realize that people like me are only trying to help them; case in point, someone on an IRC network (who and where I am not saying) has a very insecure script on their client that has a ‘!page’ trigger to send a message to their pager.
This trigger, of course, is something normal people would only allow trusted users to use. Instead, it is available for everyone to use; unfortunately, I don’t think he realized this could be abused by anyone who didn’t like him. I said that it probably should be fixed before someone does abuse it, and instead of it being fixed, I got a kickban from the IRC channel said user resides in for being a troublemaker.
How does telling someone of a bug in their script equate to being a troublemaker? For normal people, it doesn’t; in fact, helping someone fix a security hole in something before it is used is a good thing. But not all people are normal, and a large number of these people (who are out of touch with the reality of the situation) would rather blame those who found it instead.
I find it depressing there is no way to help these people, and I would hate to see how these people act in real life situations. Its also depressing to realize I probably wasn’t the first person to find this security bug and warn him about it and get punished for it.