Mads

Nothing Doing no. 25

Resurrections feels like the Wachowskis had a gun to their head to make a new Matrix (or else Warner would do it themselves) and so they made a movie about that.

It's kind of a mess but I keep coming back to the bit where they talk about how the Matrix will take every personal story, every original thought, every rebellion, and steal it, twist it, sanitize it, hollow it out and use it against you. I can see how everything from the corporate mass produced plastic V for Vendetta masks to the sickening inversion of "taking the red pill" would make a creator cynical about the loss of control that comes with the business of mass market media.

In the end, no idea or action can be saved from the Matrix, but it's the bond between people that is too powerful to be coopted (without absolutely blowing up in the machines' faces). They can take everything about who we are, but they can never take who we are.

I feel an easily overlooked part of The Matrix is the misery of The Modern Workplace. Watching the original 1999 vision of this, Neo is trapped in an environment of drab suits and bare cubicles, a very Office Space/Dilbert era of "aw shucks i have a regular paycheck, health insurance, and a 401k but what a bland environment to be in!"

Resurrections shows us the contemporary life making video games (wow so cool and creatively rewarding right!!) in a colorful, casual office (foosball??? at work????) with hip young fashionable diverse coworkers, and says don't be fooled. They've changed the paint color but they are still sucking the life out of you. Your boss lost the tie but he is still The Man.

it used to be so fucking easy to get your name immortalized in computer science dude. dijkstra's algorithm and the fisher-yates shuffle are literally just the first thing i would try

ME: i need to write a shuffler i know there's an algorithm for it i wonder if it does anything special

FISHER AND/OR YATES: have you tried randomly swapping items in the array

ME:

Atari is looking out for us and giving tips on how best to deal farm snakes.
Page 14 of Electronic Fun With Computers and Games Vol. 1 No. 5 March 1983 (600DPI)