numb3r_5ev3n

It's probably a dumb idea at this point to try and reclaim "Redpill" from the right wing shit brigade.

( And yet: )

EDIT: I fixed the image, because holy sheet that was zoomed in. I hate doing this on a mobile phone.

Current Mood:

For work related reasons that I don't want to go into, I'm just absolutely fucking fried.

Other things that make me want to flip tables:

- The Usual Suspects have their drawers in a twist about Matrix: Resurrections and so much of it translates to transphobic dog whistling, mouth-breathing misogynistic bigoted little asswipes slobbering "GET WOKE GO BROKE" through their neckbeards. This is the world's smallest violin playing for all the chuds who are butthurt that their desired White Male Cishet Hot Topic Bro self insert power fantasy turned out to be a diverse queer trans intersectional narrative about the power of love overcoming everything else. If that doesn't float their boat, they can go wack off to the hundreds of other White Male Cishet Self-Insert power fantasies that already exist, and just let us have the Matrix, ok?

I guarandamntee you that if WB were to go ahead and make their own Matrix sequels with JJ Abrams or someone else, the same folks would be throwing their toys out of the pram over those too. I think it's the only way some so-called fans know how to engage anymore. See also: the Star Wars franchise.

- Lindsay Ellis is quitting YouTube because of Twitter trolls who took a massive oversimplification she made comparing Raya to Avatar: The Last Airbender and blew it all out of proportion. All of her stuff is insightful and entertaining, but some of it is downright invaluable. I must have recommended that video about the fascist aesthetic of the First Order from the Star Wars sequels to dozens of people, for example, due to her breakdown of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism essay. Oh well. You win, Twitter Trolls:



and this is why we can't have nice things.

- Fucking Omicron. For the second year in a row I am going to skip my local peer group's New Year's Eve John Wick binge watching party because of this stupid neverending pandemic.

I mean I can binge watch John Wick from here, and I have a new Matrice to rewatch over and over again to get screencaps of a ton of other things I could watch. But I miss being able to do so with my friends.

I think I'm going back into lockdown mode for a while.

Cool things:

I've already seen Matrix: Resurrections four times and counting. And one of the reasons I love it so much is that it feels so much like the Matrix Agents RP that I was a part of back of Livejournal before the Matrix Cult infiltrated and imploded it. I don't want to drop any spoilers for anyone who still plans on watching it, but I found myself wishing I could discuss it with so many people whom I have long since fallen out of contact with, and it makes it kind of bittersweet.

Also: ( Cut for sorta being a spoiler )

I feel so blessed and fortunate that we got another Matrix movie at all, and for it to be what it is feels so much more awesome.

-My immediate family has escaped the rona thus far and are all triple vaxxed at this point.

-I got some cool loot for Christmas.

Happy New Year, everyone. Be safe out there. Get you some KN95s if you can.

CURRENT MOOD:

Lana Wachowski said...

"My dad died, then this friend died, then my mom died. I didn’t really know how to process that kind of grief. I hadn't experienced it that closely ... You know their lives are going to end and yet it was still really hard. My brain has always reached into my imagination and one night, I was crying and I couldn’t sleep, and my brain exploded this whole story. And I couldn’t have my mom and dad, yet suddenly I had Neo and Trinity, arguably the two most important characters in my life. It was immediately comforting to have these two characters alive again, and it’s super simple. You can look at it and say: ‘Okay, these two people die and okay, bring these two people back to life and oh, doesn’t that feel good?’ Yeah, it did! It’s simple, and this is what art does and that's what stories do, they comfort us.

(Read More: Lana Wachowski Reveals Reason for Neo and Trinity’s Resurrection | https://screencrush.com/reason-why-neo-and-trinity-are-alive-matrix-4/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral )

<3

There’s been a feeling in the air this week that I’ve noticed has a lot of my fellow Gen Xers and older Millenial friends on edge, which reminds me of the time immediately post 9/11 or the Dotcom bust. Maybe younger Millenials associate this feeling with the 2008 crash. A feeling that everything changed literally overnight, and things are about to get a lot harder now and maybe never go back to the way they were before. A feeling of everything speeding up, and being unable to keep up or catch up. I have had so many anxiety attacks this week. So many.

I remember the moment that the war in Iraq felt inevitable. Not when George W. Bush actually declared war in 2003, but the moment they announced the results of the 2002 midterm elections. That meant that Bush now had a congressional majority to do whatever he wanted, and he had already been trying to get support to go to war with Iraq at that point. It was commonly suspected from the moment he announced his candidacy that this would be one of his major goals. It was the reason some of my friends in the military sought discharges the moment he took office. (I won’t say “the moment he was elected,” but since the 2000 Florida recount was stopped, I guess we’ll never really know for sure.) But 9/11 was just an excuse. WMDs were just an excuse. “Surely,” I thought at the time, “he’ll be voted out in 2004. He’s most likely not even there legitimately in the first damn place.”

But then he wasn’t voted out – though he secured the Presidency very narrowly, and at the time there was a lot of evidence to suspect massive voter suppression was partially to blame, which of course has never been investigated as thoroughly as it should have been. Yesterday, it struck me that it’s very easy to understand in hindsight how I ended up getting sucked into a cult. Nothing made sense during that time. All of the information was pointing in one direction, and yet as a nation we were going in another direction. We had a President whose entire administration operated under a fog of possible illegitimacy, who’d seized massive powers for himself and his administration via the Patriot Act, and who took us to war under pretenses that were not just probably false, but patently, verifiably false. And he was allowed to just do it, get away with it, and then he was re-(s)elected and enabled to keep on doing it as if the false narrative were absolutely true. George W. Bush was just allowed to ram through whatever he wanted.

And we learned that everything we had been told as dissenters – that we would be persecuted, targeted for our dissent, that the state would try and shut us down – was false. Instead, we were just ignored. Like no dissent even existed or registered. And somehow, that was worse. Because when the state is reacting to dissenters, that means it perceives dissent as a threat. Bush’s state just pretended we weren’t even there. Joining a cult was my brain’s attempt to check out from all of this, because at the time it just couldn’t handle it. It was “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” It was “if reality is really that malleable, then maybe we can make our version the true version if we just believe hard enough.” As Philip K. Dick once said – “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” But powerful people can appear to make it go away for a long time, proportionate to how much power they possess. (Or as a wise Frenchman once said, “Choice is an illusion, created between those with power and those without.”)

And “real reality” didn’t even return after Obama was elected, because there was no accountability for any of the misrule which happened on Bush’s watch. We were just told we had to “move forward as a nation,” and the right wing propaganda machine still controlled the narrative after all that time. The Occupy movement was a cry, a scream, for accountability. The media painted the entire event as a Millennial tantrum with no actual goal or purpose, instead of a legitimate movement joined by protesters of all ages, races, and demographics in an attempt to demand accountability from the state.

Judging from that, it’s not hard to understand why many Occupiers ended up becoming accelerationists. Recent events have made the Trump administration seem more like a rehash of the Bush years, but worse than ever. (Hey wait – a Matrix sequel is being made, MCR is reuniting, and people are trying to resurrect Tripp pants. Maybe it is 2003 again!) People criticized Obama for being “Bush lite,” and for valid reasons in some cases. The Patriot act remained in place, and American imperialism in the Middle East continued apace. But he didn’t start a needless war with Iran. Instead, he helped to negotiate the Iran Nuclear Deal, which of course Trump pulled us out of the moment he could, since his whole reason for wanting to be President in the first place is his bitter resentment of Obama’s achievements. Full stop.

Basically, what I am getting at with all of this, is that there have been so many moments over the past two decades where things seemed to get a lot worse very quickly, and there was never a return to the way things had been before things suddenly got so much harder. And it feels like it just happened again. I’m not in danger of checking out this time. I know that those of us here at the ground level, so to speak, don’t have the ability to suspend reality and its effects as much. But my brain is still attempting to check out.

This time, it’s manifesting as if my executive dysfunction has suddenly gotten a whole lot worse. Because my executive dysfunction has gotten a whole lot worse. I’m forgetting things. I’m losing my train of thought constantly. I’m zoning out a lot during the day. My anxiety is through the roof. Trump’s supporters didn’t even know who Qasem Soleimani even was before last weekend. None of us did. Now they’re trying to make him into enemy #1. Trump and his people have been looking for a reason to commit acts of aggression against Iran for a while.

Yesterday, it was suggested that Trump had Soleimani killed to appease several senators who would be taking part in his impeachment trial. If so, doesn’t this seem to be yet another example of corruption to add to Trump’s ever-expanding list of acts of corruption? I’m not saying that Soleimani was a nice guy. I’m saying that Trump’s purported reasons for assassinating him were sketchy and in bad faith. A good friend said something this week, like “Trump and his cronies are rushing so quickly to ram through everything they want because they know that they won the lottery using a fake ticket, and they know those winnings could disappear at any moment.” I’ve been praying for reality to reassert itself. To snap back. I’m not sure what will happen or who will be affected when, or if it does. I just know that we can’t keep on like this. Not for another four years.

A good time was had by all. It was The Matrix. What's interesting is seeing all the people on Reddit and the Matrix Discord who never got a chance to see it in the theater during its original run weigh in.

And I realized what it is about the film that has made it unwatchable to me over the past few years - the emphasis on the special effects during fight scenes, and the fact that when you get down to it, the Matrix was intended to showcase those special effects.

The fact that many movies get made specifically in order to showcase either computer generated or practical special effects is a phenomenon I've been aware of for a while. The Matrix pioneered "bullet time" (which in MxO terms is referred to as "hyper" everything - hyperspeed, hyperjump, etc.) The camera is slowed down to show all the action - because if you were watching everything in realtime, fights would be happening too quickly for the human eye to follow. There would be a flurry of movement, someone keels over unconscious or dead, the end. The fight is over. Think of the under/over cranking in the film Jacob's Ladder, (an effect which was overused in horror films the same way that bullet time was overused after The Matrix, and which is Uncanny Valleying as heck when done *right*) and you get the idea.

It's one of those situations where, if you know the ending, all the suspense is taken away, and you're just watching several fight scenes meant to showcase special effects strung together between scenes of exposition and dialogue - which after a while (for me anyway) started to detract from the philosophical messages being conveyed, instead of dovetailing with them if that makes sense. It's that knowing how to be faster and stronger due to an understanding of the system is what is supposed to translate into actually being faster and stronger.

Contrast this with, say, Sense8: where you have the Sensates kicking ass when they have to, but also just living their lives and trying to unravel the conspiracy/mystery they've found themselves in. It is those slice of life moments and the Sense8 group's interactions and relationships with each other that really makes that series what it is. I know a whole series is way different, and has to be structured differently, from a standalone film. This is why I wish we had gotten a Matrix series instead of sequels, really.

Awakened folks in The Matrix (I hesitate to use "Redpills" now, even though dammit, a bunch of Neo Nazis and Incels do NOT get to claim that word) can do what they do (hyperspeed, hyperjump, etc) because their understanding of how the system works allows them to break the laws of physics like using cheats in a video game.

What attracted me about the sequels, particularly Reloaded (still my favorite film in the franchise so far!) is the lore. The history. The understanding that things are suddenly a lot more complicated than "beat the machines and end the war." To me, this overshadowed the fight scenes/special effects scenes enough to keep me interested after several viewings.

In the beginning, it was the philosophical message of the film, and how the characters applied that philosophy practically to bend physical laws within the simulation, that fueled my passion for this franchise. In the end, it was the idea that while there are several groups competing for power, survival (or both) in an unjust hierarchy meant to enforce systems of control, we are all in it together and our fates are ultimately intertwined.

current mood:

 OK, so I was able to watch it with no problems in the ensuing months and first three years or so after Everything Went Down. 

Then around 2009-2010 when I started trying to actually deal with shit, it got harder.

My last real effort was in 2012, when my roommate Ghost got the Ultimate Box Set. 

Then this week.

And I want them to be different. Like, I want it to happen differently this time. 

In the fall of 2006, when the psycho circus had finally left town and things were starting to settle, I started a fanfic where things did happen differently Because Shenanigans, due to the fact that the entire timeline that The Matrix had occured in had become a Tangent Universe (ala Donnie Darko) that wouldn't resolve itself, so the League of Temporal Adventurers from Michael Moorcock's Multiverse ended up having to involve themselves. This ended up in a divergent timeline, which split off from the original where everything happened like the films, like in the Star Trek reboot movies. Jerry Cornelius is the Anomaly of his timeline in the Moorcock books (with his brother Frank being the Virus.) He and Smith ended up in a bromance for the ages. I never finished it, but it basically turned into a Buddy Cop Movie where Smith and The English Assassin teamed up to take on the System. Keanu could do it...except then it would just be John Wick, with an English accent.

I'm not sure that this is exactly what I want to happen either, now.

Ghost has told me that the sequels didn't even happen as the Wachowski Starship even originally planned them, and that a lot of the decisions which were made later, which the fans hated, happened due to executive meddling. I heard a rumor that the sequels were originally supposed to be one film that was split into two, and a lot of the pacing issues in Revolutions that people complained about came from padding it out into an entire third film. I'm not sure how much truth there is to this -  but I'm not sure what more could be done to Reloaded from a filmmaking standpoint. That's a whole movie with a beginning, a middle, and an end...just not The End. And for years I thought it was superior even to the original film, because we get to see intrigue. We get to see Machine Culture. The Matrix and the Machine world aren't just a giant monolithic organization. There are cracks in the facade of unity and Singularity. I wish I'd had a chance to play the MMO - but by the time I had a job that would let me pay for rent and highspeed internet at the same time, it had ended. 

ETA: Well, there's this: a fanedit which combines the sequels and the video games into one movie.