In the build-up to The Matrix Reloaded, focus has been pulled away from an equally interesting project, The Animatrix; a series of short anime films created by the Wachowski brothers, and the best anime directors in the world. Several are already available on the website. Here’s what I’ve seen so far (in order of viewing):

• Second Renaissance, Part 1 – A brief history of how the machine and human war came about. Presented in a realistic anime style, this one is interesting in its details, and brutal in its viewpoint.
• Program – By far the best of the bunch. Set in the construct, one rebel fights in feudal Japan. So Matrix plus ninjas. Does it get any better? I think not.
• Detective Story – The weakest of the 5. A detective is hired to trackdown Trinity. It has an interesting film noir style which, despite being interesting, doesn’t really help the story go anywhere. The ending was very weak.
• Final Flight Of Osiris – This one ties directly into the story of the film, so I won’t say anything about plot. It uses CGI rather than traditional anime, but is all the better for it. Truly one of the best looking pieces of animation I’ve seen. The only problem was having to pay to see Dreamcatcher to see it.
• Second Renaissance, Part 2 – A look at the war itself from a historical viewpoint, including the fateful moment that we doomed ourselves by destroying the sky. Bit of a low-key ending.

Like I said, they’re all up for download (except Final Flight Of Osiris) on the The Animatrix website. Get them!

There’s never enough time in the day. I did plan on updating this site properly today, but after picking up the gamecube pad, I ended up playing Zelda: Wind Waker for far too long.

The game is just so engrossing: beautiful graphics, an interesting story, puzzles which infuriate until you realise you’re being an idiot, hundreds of fun little sub-games, treasure hunts, auctions; the list is endless. I spent 2 and a half hours doing stuff which didn’t really contribute to the story, but made great diversions. Windfall island has been well and truly owned.

With exams coming up, how do I avoid visual crack like this? P.S. Gouging my eyes out is not an option.

This was originally going to be an essay on the background of The Matrix (don’t worry, I’ll get round to doing that at some point). But, after I accidently hit the back button in my browser, the entire thing was gone. Disaster!

So, my question is: just how suitable are browsers for working with long pieces of work? Although I don’t have enough time to really look at this (I spent a fair while doing the deleted essay), it seems to be an important issue. How many people have actually lost work because their browsers didn’t remember the state of forms after an accidental page traversal? I know it’s not the first time it’s happened to me. The backspace button seems particularly prone to allowing this: try to remove some characters whilst getting ready to put in upper cases characters, accidently hit shift and ka-put: An essay gone.

There’s not even a decent way of saving text midway through typing. You know “saving”; that basic and obligatory function in every application since the beginning of back-up media. Sure, we could open a text file and cut-and-paste, but that’s too much hassle for real people to do it. Also, it also supposes that we expect a disaster. If we expected disaster, then we’d make sure to backup constantly. Without an easily accessible save function, it’s not natural to do this. State in other media (pen and paper) is automatically saved for us.

Maybe, I’m just angry at having lost hard work, but it does seem like the sort of feature all browsers should have.

After 2 poor support bands and a far-from-capacity crowd, The Cooper Temple Clause were going to have to pull out something special to make it a worthwhile night. While they didn’t fully succeed in making it a fantastic gig, it was fun.

Despite playing too many new songs to begin with (“Promises, Promises” sounding good), they got going when songs from See This Through And Leave started flowing more freely. Best moment was the double-whammy of Film-maker/Been Training Dogs, easing into the last part of the set.

Even though the crowd clearly wanted more, they band didn’t play a very long set (around an hour) and no encore. On that front, they have to be looked down on.

I came across Ryochiji’s interesting new blog-matching site called, surprisingly, BlogMatcher (via mrry). It indexes blogs that ping weblogs.com and finds similarity in links. You, the imaginary user, then come along and give it a blog to find matches for. It then provides you with a list of similar sites.

Most of my BlogMatched sites focus on XHTML and other similar issues; not surprisingly, considering how tired I am of writing that acronym – really need to automate that. There are a few entries on random stuff (Halle Berry, Dreamcatcher, etc) as well.

Also, I hate BlogShares. I started playing a month or two ago for 10-15 minutes a day; slowly amassing money. And then I bought into FSP 1.1. Shares bought at $15.63 have dropped to $0.81, scrubbing $800 from my pockets. DAMMIT! Oh well, I made a grand on another site overnight so karma balanced.

Recently, I’ve been reading about Uberman’s Sleep Schedule – a way of hot-wiring your brain into allowing 2 hours sleep a day. I don’t think I could make it work just now (where could I sleep at university every 4 hours?), but might experiment a bit during the summer.

There was more, but it’s gone for now.