The Matrix Reloaded

The lot of us went off to JI’s green card party to celebrate his permanent resident status. The new green cards are pretty bitchin’, microprinted and hologram-embossed like some ultra-rare collectable sports card. The geek in me was impressed, even as the civil libertarian was a bit creeped out.

Around midnight we got a call from our houseguests asking us along to see a late showing of The Matrix Reloaded. A quick synopsis:

A cool fight scene, then some philosophy, then another fight scene, then some more philosophy, then a bit more philosophy, some dancing and sex, more philosophy, fight scene, philosophy, fight scene, philosophy, fight scene, philosophy, fight scene, philosophy, big fight scene, big philosophy, then some more fights and philosophy to finish it off, to be continued next movie.

The fight scenes were way cool, even if we could tell some of them were all CGI. The philosophy was just awful, badly written and tedious.

(  More details, with spoilers  )

William Gibson recently posted a piece on his weblog, a speech he gave at the Directors Guild of America last week. He talks about the future of movies, how computing technology will allow us to casually alter the experience of watching films — programs that can extrapolate the sets into 3D models and give you any viewpoint you want, or morph the characters’ heads into dog heads. It should take considerably less processing power to just wrap the characters’ mouths and voices around new dialog, and then maybe we can get someone competent to rewrite the philosophy for The Matrix Reedited.

Oh, and a preview for the next one is shown after the closing credits.

Pencilly goodness

Been a while since I had an art entry, hasn’t it? I’m trying to spend less time browsing the web and more time drawing.

(  Over 40k, so behind an LJ-cut it goes...  )

Got out an old sketchpad and did some loose pencil drawing, sans reference, just out of my head. Not too bad. Then I had to tear the page out of the (spiral-bound) book to get it to lie flat on the scanner. As I was finishing I realized that I really wanted to be using water-soluble graphite. The aquarelle graphite pencils I’ve got are Progresso brand from Chartpak; the graphite portion is great — rich, satisfying darks, nice blending — but the lacquer they’re covered with gets sticky at room temperature and above, making them almost unusable. Pity I bought a boxful. Time to invest in a competing brand. Possibilities:

• Cretacolor (woodless)
• Berol Karisma (wooded)
• Derwent (wooded)

There may be more. Need to do some browsing at Pearl.