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I saw Harry Potter 4 this weekend, except this post isn’t going to be about the movie, which was excellent. Truly excellent. Loved every minute, even if Daniel Radcliffe (by now a truly decent actor) mispronounced the word “accio” (which really doesn’t bother me, and if someone else complains about it, my only answer will be, “but did you enjoy the movie?”), I felt everything really came together wonderfully, and all the important stuff from the book was there. (keyword: Important. If there’s something you found missing, ask yourself, what would you have them remove from the film so they could put your little moment in?)

This post is, in fact, going to be about an entirely different series: The Matrix. Yes, i haven’t forgotten about it. A friend of mine was saying at the end of the movie that Harry Potter contained an overt and obvious reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. No. No, no, no. See, when things grow light at the end of a movie, it’s a scenemaker, a trick the filmmaker is playing on you. It’s a tried-and-true method of making the movie end with the audience slightly happier, and make them likelier to report having enjoyed the film, to have the sky reflect the feelings of the characters. Darkness, shadows throughout the film. The maze filled with fog for confusion, concern. The light of the cup, hope. The darkness of the graveyard, the setting of a graveyard, and no stars to be seen, hope abandoned. Diggory’s dead, rain. The worst is over, sunshine. I would say it’s slightly misleading. The worst is definately not over. But it is for now.

Now see, the actual Allegory of the Cave goes a little something like this: Imagine there are people in a cave, chained to one wall, staring at another wall. The entrance to the cave is far above and away, where they can’t see it. They’re forced to look only at the opposing wall, upon which are shadow figures cast by flamelight. These shadows are all the people know, and so they have learned to love the shadows, and the reflected light of the fire. Now imagine that one such person escapes the chains, climbs up and out of the cave, and sees the sky. Once he has done so, he knows the truth of their existence, and then must return to the cave, to tell others. Many will rebuke him, and tell him he is making up stories, because they know nothing other than flame and shadows. But there are a few who will follow him, and leave the cave, see the sky–and then they, too, must return for others.

This is the Matrix. This is the Cave. This is an allegory for philosophers and their importance. This is why I loved the Matrix and disliked its successors. Now, the successors didn’t quite abandon the idea of taking their ideas from classic literature; they turned the whole story into the epic of Beowulf, but managed to include the parts of the story without the message of the story. I’ll expound on this later. For now, I think I’m going to drink the rest of my Jones Cream Soda, and play some video games.

by the way, did I mention I loved HP4?

I think i’m quite possibly the happiest i’ve ever been with any site, ever. And this one’s MINE!

Recent updates (we’re talking this week):

• Music can be played inline. This is thanks to the beautiful little fileplayer I installed.
• I now have a brand new gallery up for art, photos, funny stuff, and of course G-Men if I get around to making it.
• The style of the website’s changed a lot, and I’ve even tweaked it some that you can’t see, but will become nifty in the future ^^
• I fixed the comments on the website
• I added a livejournal script to the site so that when I update here, my old livejournal gets updated simultaneously. The effort is to make it (1) easier for them so that they’ll actually read what i write, since if it’s beyond a click away, most people won’t bother (and I don’t blame them), and (2) because I didn’t want to abandon the old thing, but I don’t want to write anything twice either, and I’d rather write on the site.

This makes me happy. Very happy. Now all I want is a fictionpress-style somethingerother to deal with chaptered story and unchaptered poetry entries. I suppose that doesn’t entirely need to be integrated, a page would do. I’ll figure it out.

-Adrian

Before you murder me, hear me out.

So here’s my issue. We all know that .rm files are just about the worst thing that ever happened, ever. Real Media… can only be possibly described using this image:

I’ll list the reasons why it was stupid:

• The files were slow to load.
• The only way to read them was to install a program that was buggy
• For a time, it seemed everyone was encoding their files in this crappy crappy media format

Now, I hate Ogg Vorbis because it’s in its baby steps stage. It’s a little nicer since you can install a buggy decoder into any non-buggy reader you like and turn the whole thing into a mess, rather than just downloading and installing a mess, but still I hate it when people encode their sound files in .ogg format.

This is because I happen to be a corporate whore, and actually like the dressed up apple players. Not that I like proprietary formats much either. Here’s my point: Everyone has .mp3 capability. Everyone. My frigging pocketPC has .mp3 capability, and it’s some 3 years old, running one of the worst operating systems Microsoft has ever put out, and that’s saying something.

But Adrian, .ogg files have much better sound quality than .mp3’s!

I don’t buy that for a second. Sure, if you compare 48kb/s mp3’s to 128kb/s ogg files, yes. But everything deals with a compression ratio. You try playing an mp3 and an ogg file of about 96kb/s and see if you can tell the difference. Better yet, try both at a 256kb/s ratio and music off a cd and see if you can tell the difference.

If you want better sound quality, go get vynil, don’t plague the internet with your half-baked audio encoding format.

Oh yeah, Gallery is up with a single piece of artwork, “Tiny Dancer”, a picture I drew for some friends of mine. As you can see, i’m pretty much set. One thing remains: a chapter/story/poetry fictionpress-style writing interface. And the skin could use some sprucing up.