I’m feeling kinda Matrix-y today, so I’ll finally attempt to recreate the essay on the background of the film which was cruelly deleted. I doubt this will be as good as the original (which took about 45 minutes to write), but I want it out of the way. In fact, it’s about a million times shorter and is really just a bunch of links now. For shame.

First up is Reloaded Questions, an article which focusses on the inspiration of the film, and how the sharp philosophy interestingly contrasts the less cerebral kung-fu moments. Keeping a balance between the ideas and the action, the thinking man and the mainstream, is difficult enough but in a sequel of this magnitude it must be damn near impossible.

Next is Tantek’s look at Burning Chrome, William Gibson’s seminal book of cyberpunk short stories. It introduced the concept of an abstract virtual world known as, you guessed it, the matrix. Lots of terminology found in The Matrix originated here and in the remainder of Gibson’s work.

Interestingly, The Matrix starred Keanu Reeves, who also starred in the awful film of Johnny Mnemonic, the first story in Gibson’s Burning Chrome. Gibson defends it as not being the version they shot, and with a writer like that, I believe him.

And that’s it. I did write a lot more originally but fate told me it was not meant to be.

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.