For my fellow Ghost in the Shell fans: I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those...NYAN!

For my fellow Ghost in the Shell fans: I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those...NYAN!, a photo by thepetecom on Flickr.

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those cute, fuzzy cats,
asleep on a cool anime pillow."

This is my older cat Ecks, asleep on my custom Laughing Man throw pillow. :)

Pic taken by my lovely wife :)

We flow willingly through the transactional circuitry of the wealth economy like ghosts, optimistic and eerily cheerful, encountering one another through the hierarchical commodity affinity groups we call our peers, people who consume the same things we do, and have the same purchased identity and “lifestyle” we do.

We flow willingly through the transactional circuitry of the wealth economy like ghosts, optimistic and eerily cheerful, encountering one another through the hierarchical commodity affinity groups we call our peers, people who consume the same things we do, and have the same purchased identity and “lifestyle” we do.

Joe Bageant: The Iron Cheer of Empire

Echoes of Ghost in the Shell - read the whole thing.

(via rainbowhill)

Noam Chomsky refers to this concept as “the bewildered heard.”  They idea that we are so focused on our individuality that we are completely cut off from each other as humans and only care about the surface.  It’s something I see happening all the time.

But my favorite part of the essay is this:

But you won’t hear anyone complaining. America doesn’t like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness.

I feel this pressure all. the. time.

I get it from everyone I know. I get it from my wife. I get it from myself. No one like someone who challenges things.

On a side note: Rule number one on getting me to read something: compare it to Ghost in the Shell. ^_^

GHOST IN THE SHELL PICS AND KNOWTHIS UPDATES

Hey, check it out - if you're like me, and I know we all are, you like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - the Ghost In The Shell TV series slowly being released on DVD in Japan. If you haven't seen this show yet, I highly recommend learning Japanese and moving to Japan so you can buy a region 2 DVD player, buy GITS SAC DVDs and then watch these shows because downloading the series off of the Internet would be wroooong...

If you can't wait to do that, just hit reload a few times to see the cover images here at ThePete.Com change through a series of 17 different Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex images. COOL!

AND as usual, a bucket-load of updates at KnowTHIS - CHECK 'EM OUT!!




UPDATE 1/10/05 (1.5 years later!): Sorry, I've taken all of my GITS SAC pictures down, however, a GREAT source for them would be the GITS SAC gallery at AnimeGalleries.net. They've got hundreds of pics there from GITS SAC and MANY other anime. (No, I don't get kickbacks!)

OH yeah and the KnowThis page is long gone. All of it's entries have been imported into this blog, however, so if you came here looking for news stories covered by ThePete (me), feel free to use the search engine toward the top of the right hand column. Thanks for stopping by!