After the requisite battles and explosions, you gotta love any review that sums over half the movie in six words. I disagree with a lot of what he’s saying, but it’s a good read nonetheless. I fixed that weird CSS that was making the comments light grey on white, sorry about that. Don’t expect too much from this website, it’s a first draft. 😉

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!

Free at last, free at last. I took my last final and now I am done with school for at least a couple of months. Now it’s time to dive back into projects I have been neglecting due to school. I have been very much looking forward to this summer.

Thanks to a Craig’s List posting I got in at the last minute to see L’Auberge Espagno with Josh. I was excited that Audrey Tatou of Amélie fame would be in it, but like the posting said her role was relatively minor. Overall I enjoyed the film a lot, it had some really novel things in it and some great moments. The characters fluency with so many languages made me wish for a similar fluency in at least one other language.

Last Friday I saw X-Men 2, I just forgot to post about it. I went in with very low expectations as I thought the first movie was really mediocre. This was about a thousand times better. If you’re in to that sort of thing, go check it out. It was also neat because it was the first movie I’d seen in months.

It feels strange talking about to movies from very different genres right next to each other, they were both good, but in very different ways. Of course movies will never be the same when the new Matrix comes out in 9 days. Is it over-hyped? Not at all.

Katie—one of the first people to ever link to this site, who I met at a H-Town gathering months ago, and who I was lucky enough to spend some time with at SxSW, but who unfortunately I haven’t seen in a while—had a dream in which Jane and I were in a fight and everyone there (including Christine) won’t talk to each other except through their blogs. (I bet the trackbacks were flying.) We’re mere feet away from each other, but no one speaks a word. (A situation not unlike some HWUG meetings.) I know how even the most bizarre dreams can sometimes echo in real life, so to avoid any distress, a public apology is in order.

Jane, you seemed like a perfectly nice person when we met so if we’re fighting it’s probably because of something stupid I did, which is not at all unheard of. I am sincerely sorry for my actions and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive and forget. Hope to see you again next year at SxSW. —Matt

If only teachers graded like people on eBay rated. “A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++”

“Nothing like a bunch of coursework deadlines to focus the mind on alternative activities” — Simon Willison.

Truer words have never been spoken.

Heading out of town for Easter. See you Monday!

Yes it should have happened yesterday, but there was always the chance that a absolutely brilliant submission would come in under the wire of the deadline and blow all the others away, and I didn’t want to kill that chance. That was the theory at least anyway. Anyway it’s closed, though if you visit it there is some new content.

Now of course comes the task of picking which categories are the best. Rather than make it a long and arduous personal cross, I think a party of some sort is in order. (Hmmm, tagline: “Mixing metaphors since…”) Thoughts?

I just finished registering for all my classes and I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out. I don’t have an amazing Monday–Thursday schedule like I did this semester, but the classes should be quite good. Here’s what I ended up with:

• 3332: Philosophy of Language
• 1336: U.S. and Texas Constitutions and Politics — Introduction to the constitutions and politics of the United States and Texas, emphasizing constitutional structure, federalism, separation of powers, limited government, public opinion, elections, and civil liberties. Taught by A. Little, who I had this semester for Politics of the Greek Theatre and was great.
• 3310: Introduction to Political Theory — Recurring themes and problems in the study of politics; draws upon classical and modern works. Taught by the inimitable R. Lence, who is a very colorful character and a fantastic teacher.
• 3319: Politics of Social Policy — Public policy initiatives in areas of civil rights, welfare, education, human resources, and housing, including criteria for evaluating proper impact. Taught by R. Lineberry, who I haven’t had yet but is one of the “theorists” of the Political Science department.
• Jazz Band and Lab — Haven’t finalized all this yet because I haven’t heard back from the director about the times.

You’ll notice there are no economics classes there. This is more a result of the classes I’ve taken than a result of changing interests. I still love economics, in fact I’m going to be interning at the Dallas Fed this summer, but the classes and department seem mediocre. Moreover I’ve been wooed by the Political Science department, as my educational experience with their professors and classes have been outstanding.

In further changes for next semester I’ve decided I’m going to start a notes blog. What I really need is some sort of rich-text document management system, but I can make the blogging paradigm fit my needs. Classes can become categories; everything will be searchable, dated, archived, accessible from anywhere, and support various meta-data. What I’ve been doing so far is a combination of text files and folders, and frankly it’s weak. I haven’t decided yet rather I’m going to make it public or not, but even if I do it probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me.

Becca aka Teknoferit aka “the Intern” knows me way too well, and anticipates my thoughts before I think them. I spent a month working with her almost every day, and she has come closer to organizing me than any girl has before or since. Go check out her new site.

Rebecca Lammons is also the ghost editor of this site, going behind my posts and making the half incoherent coherent and leaving fully incoherent alone mostly. (Uhh…) She has some awesome photography in her gallery, and if you look closely you can actually spot a few pictures of yours truly.

Well all the “cool” cities have had these things forever now, Houston is finally catching up. Hat tip: Leia.

I just noticed that an hour is gone! Okay, now I really need to hurry up and get things done. This has been an incredibly productive weekend, but you’ll have to wait a few days to see all the reasons why. 🙂

That was nice. Pictures up.

Well I’ve spent most of my day taking care of cat mishaps, spring cleaning, and over here, and now it’s time to spring from my cave into the world, and a birthday party tonight is the perfect excuse. I’m supposed to be providing some music, so I better go so I won’t be late(r than I already am).