Media Diary Day 3

Hm. The media diary is getting pretty dull here. Perhaps a daily frequency is overkill. What do I have for ya today? More Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. So I’ve already mentioned that. One thing I like: there’s a title screen for each episode, and on that screen, the episode is labeled either ‘stand alone episode’ or ‘complex episode’, the latter being what we might call a mythology episode. It’s very user-friendly; I’d love it if Fringe had this. There’s always a tension between these two types of episodes, with the standalones favoured by the networks and first-time viewers, and the mythology episodes – the ones that serve the show’s overall story – the choice of faithful viewers and in most cases, the writers. I vastly prefer mythology episodes and don’t much like shows like CSI that are mostly standalones. However, the Ghost in the Shell stand alone episodes are really quite good. They really don’t fuck around with exposition, instead sometimes a character basically ‘briefs’ the audience as to what case they’re following. Then the rest of the ep follows a thriller structure, with a chase or infiltration, and the reveal at the end having to do with a technological possibility you hadn’t imagined before, like the tank whose creator downloaded his brain into it; or the Che Guevara-alike surviving assassination attempts with multiple clones.

I played no games. I read a bit of my book, which is Matter by Iain M. Banks. It’s killing it. His scifi books are swashbuckling space operas; their only ‘flaw’ in the past were that they could take hundreds of pages to get going. This one starts with a couple of battles and keeps the pace up. So far, anyway.