our school is haunted

“You can be anything, this time around” - Timothy Leary

As its Chinese title, Kingdom of Hackers, implies, The Matrix has always been partly about finding one’s community. It’s a superhero film, but also carries a theme of overcoming alienation, not unlike another 90s speculative-fiction (and latently queer) film, Todd Haynes' Safe.

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I got to see the late-night, penumbral lunar eclipse last Sunday.

I was looking out my bedroom window, at around four in the morning (I usually sleep between 4-11AM), while sitting in my computer chair. The moon was mostly hidden behind the clouds, and very dim, so I didn't expect anything much to happen. But something about it called my attention, and I opened the blinds, then pulled them up for a better look. The cloud cover was thinning, and the light was changing dramatically; for a minute or two, it was extremely bright, then the moon dimmed in a way that was not-cloud, leaving a strip of darkness. Along the edges on both sides of the strip, there were glowing sections of cloud, giving the effect of a dark road in the sky with lit-up borders.

I didn't know it would be so impressive! It's easy to see why lunar eclipses have been linked with magic.

I love this video. I found it somewhere back in the mid-oughties, on the animation site Catsuka, and rewatch it every so often.

Directed by Koji Morimoto; some of you might recognize his style from his segment of The Animatrix.

Refreshingly different!



Tele is my favorite, but all the tracks have grown on me.

(ETA: still thinking about this!)

I'm going to have to be careful if I don't want to include excessive backstory. And then Peter Chung argues, pretty convincingly IMO, that all backstory is irrelevant:

"...art's function is to exercise the mind's capacity to find meaning. Meaning is not something innate in the world. It exists only because there are conscious minds alive which are eager to create it. I'm not talking about something esoteric and rare. This is the most basic, most universal trait of being human.

The point is that: don't focus on the fictional events themselves. Focus instead on how your mind is working to find meaning in those events. You can discard the fictional events. The workings of your mind is a fact. Your mind's capacity to find meaning is what makes you human. The question of which fictional character ended up loving/ killing/ sacrificing themselves for which other fictional character is just the stimulus intended to trigger your mind's workings. The experience of art is the appreciation of becoming aware of your own mind's capacity for creativity, empathy and insight. Focusing on the fiction is enjoyable, but it's escapism.

If you remember from the Monican Spies interview- "backstory is a trap". Informing the viewer of the (Aeon Flux) movie that the story takes place 400 years in the future, that there are X number of people alive, etc. are a distraction, because viewers will try to cling on to these made-up bits as if they mean something. They mean nothing. Such information takes away, it does not add."

The laziest travel blog ever comes to a close!

( Todoroki Valley, Nikko, and the last leg of the trip )

My Internet has been randomly cutting in and out for the last few weeks. It finally stopped when I changed the position of our router; it had been on the floor, underneath a desk. Once I placed it on top of the desk, everything started working properly. Maybe that's because it has a direct line of travel from the desk to the living room window to the window of my room? The router was in my room when we had DSL, and maybe that's why I never experienced this problem before.

( but now, there are pictures )