SPOILERS. I think I may need to make a new category for this. After reading Kottke’s thoughts and following the subsequent discussion, I was amazed at the level of ignorance on what normally is an insightful forum. I’m going to try and pull together a couple of my thoughts on all the discussion I have seen so far, though it really warrants a new site, something I’ll have to do in my copious free time.

It’s probably better to completely ignore the philosophy in the Matrix than to look at it superficially. It’s not light stuff, and offhand comments that just confuse people do more harm than good. A good place to start would be Philosophy and the Matrix, which I’ve deep-linked partly thanks to the movie’s awful website. (You would think that with all the millions floating around they could hire a decent web developer.) There are some excellent essays there, but to really appreciate it I think you need familiarity with the original works of Kierkegaard, Hume, Baudrillard, the Bible, Plato, Hok, Descartes, and probably more than those that I missed. Can you criticize what you don’t understand? Yes, but not from a philosophical point of view. It’s like reading T. S. Eliot without knowing Dante; you may appreciate some of the words but you miss the deeper meaning. There are so many levels of allusions that you get a lot more out of it. I admit that every time I have seen Reloaded (three times now) I pick up something new.

For example: As the Nebuchadnezzar explodes, Morpheus (Greek god of dreams, son of god of sleep) says something to the effect of “I had dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me.” Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian king in the Book of Daniel, has troubling dreams (2:2) that deny him sleep and orders all the wise men killed when they can’t tell him what his dream was. Morpheus goes further, let’s look at Ovid’s Metamorphoses

King Sleep was father of a thousand sons —
indeed a tribe — and of them all, the one
he chose was Morpheus, who had such skill
in miming any human form at will.

Is Morpheus, as an instrument of the Oracle, and possibly the Architect, simply the one chosen by the Architect (who as the creator of the world that keeps humankind in a state of perpetual hallucination would be a good parallel to Hypnos) to lead the One (anagram: Neo) to the “garbage collection” that is the reinitializing of the Matrix? It’s obvious that a lot of thought went into the creating of the story of the Matrix, and seeing it merely as an action film with sketchy CGI or a Christian allegory or a product of the internet boom mentality doesn’t really do it justice.

All that from one line, and yet you have reviews that devote half their ranting to the experience of going to the movie rather than going to the movie itself. You have people who built the first Matrix up so much in their minds that anything less than a total orgasmic experience is a complete let down. You have the otherwise brilliant Anil Dash saying that Bane/Smith at the end is Cypher, who as everyone knows died in the first movie.

Intelligent discourse on the movie is really lacking; a couple of things should happen in the blogoshpere.

• There should be a FAQ everyone should read before posting about the Matrix.
• There needs to be a single place we can all trackback, so that some meaningful cross-blog conversation can happen, and the discussion is aggregated in an easy-to-follow manner.
• People should watch the movie again, preferably at an afternoon matinee where the reality of the movie-going experience doesn’t keep you unpleasantly grounded in your surroundings.
• Most of the Matrix fan sites I’ve seen, like the movie site itself, are amateurish. At the least a tasteful design would be appreciated. Leave the media (pictures, clips, etc.) out to keep bandwidth costs down, and just offer insight to the movie. A wiki would be a nice, allowing everyone to lend their individual interpretation and respond in kind, but that model works so badly for all but the geekiest audiences that I think a “letter to the editor” setup might work better.
• I’m sure there’s more that could be done, any suggestions? Is some of this already out there?

“Their daily utterances, even on topics they know nothing about, are generating high traffic from search engine queries.” — Search Results Clogged by Blogs, Joanna Glasner. At least most bloggers admit when they know nothing about their subject, unlike say, journalists.

Those of you who know what the Red Button is, and those who are curious, should come to today’s meeting of the Red Button Fan Club at Tropioca at 12:30. The Creator of the button will be in attendance.

If you would like to see the new Matrix with me and a few others tomorrow, here’s what you do.

1. Go to Fandango.
2. Enter your Houston zip code. (77035 works for me.)
3. Choose the 10:20 showing at “Edwards Houston Marq*e 23 & IMAX.”
4. Buy tickets.
5. Call, email, or comment, and I’ll tell you where we’re meeting up and such.

I can’t wait. In others news Tantek recommended a number of books to me (some of which he’s posted about) and I’ve started it out with Neuromance and I haven’t been able to put it down. Finishing it tonight. Thanks for the recommendations! (To the certain person who has seen Reloaded already, shhhhhhhh.)

Many thanks to Mr Zeldman for sharing the random image script I put together. (Twice in about a week, I’m starting to blush.) Shortly afterwords Charles Dietlein (who also has one) dropped an email suggesting that I seed the random number picker for users of old PHP distributions. Done, and thank you for the heads up. I still believe that letting the web server do the grunt work is the most elegant method available.

I have received several questions asking how the individual images may be cached but it still “rotates” on every reload. Well, it’s all in HTTP. The response from the PHP script is never cached because it sends a 302 Temporary Redirect header, which by specification should not be cached by the browser or caching servers. The images themselves, once served, are just like any other static file, and they are server with Etags and Last-Modified headers that allows a browser to check later if anything has changed. If the browser receives a 304 Not Changed header in response, it knows it can go on its merry way and return the image from cache. There you have it.

I had to go back and edit this post because I was dropping in and out of the editorial we. What you read really influences how you write.

Wanted to send out happy birthday wishes to Mike, who is working with me on WordPress. He has been coming up with some great stuff lately, and even though we’re an ocean apart it’s great fun to work with him. Thanks Mike!