Tag: Matrix

  • Matrix Cheat Codes

    At work today a couple of us were jokingly speculating as to what earlier versions of The Matrix would be like—or, more accurately, what we would imagine they’d be like—and I came up with Half-Life. Basically, imagine the Matrix v1 as a first-person shooter.

    Makes perfect sense! All they essentially do in the Matrix is run around fighting, with or without weapons. Matrix Savants (or whatever the hell the people like Morpheus and Trinity are called) have managed to hack the command line and discover some cheat codes. But The One not only knows all the cheat codes, but is also able to change the server environment. Flying? Simply set sv_gravity 0.

  • Traffic

    When I originally wrote the Matrix Name Generator, I always thought in the back of my mind how cool it would be if the thing took off in popularity, but I never really believed that would happen.

    Yesterday, the 9th, traffic on my site jumped from around 1500 hits per day to over 41,000 hits all in one day—I was floored with this jaw-dropping fact this afternoon, when I reviewed the site log files, and disconcertingly noticed that the log file jumped from 1.5 megabytes (for Saturday) to 19.5 megabytes (for Sunday).

    Holy. Shit.

    Nothing—and I mean nothing—has happened like that before. Totally out of the blue. I thought at first I’d been Slashdotted somehow, but when I started reviewing the gargantuan log file, I noticed that it was all for the Matrix Name page.

    Where are they coming from? Three main sources:

    LiveJournal sites. Apparently I’ve been picked up by some sort of LiveJournal community, where everybody is on everybody else’s friend list and is linking to the page. I haven’t been Slashdotted, I’ve been LJ’d!

    Forums. Similar to the LJ sites, people have been posting the link to the page on various forums, and everybody reading that post has followed the link to see what their Matrix Name is.

    Webmail, like Yahoo! Mail and EudoraMail. This tells me that a lot of people have been emailing the link to friends. Likely the same LJ users and forum readers.

    I guess it took a few days for the latest Matrix movie to hit critical mass, and I’m now prevalent enough in the search engines that I’m getting hit, hard. For instance, my page is the number 1 result on Google for “matrix name” and “what is my matrix name“.

    So what do I do? Ride it out, I guess, and hope my bandwidth stays affordable in the meantime. Otherwise, welcome, Matrix name seekers!

  • Matrix Revolutions Trailer

    The theatrical trailer for “The Matrix Revolutions” is online. If you got the bandwidth, I recommend the big version.

  • What’s Your Matrix Name?

    Here’s something that might provide amusement to some of you out there in cyberspace: What’s your Matrix name?

    It’s a fun little program I’ve been hacking together over the last few evenings. If you ever wanted to know what your name in the Matrix would be (and we all know this is highly— highly— important), try it out.

  • The Matrix Rebooted

    Yes indeed, saw The Matrix Reloaded Saturday (the 31st), and my short review is: I liked it a lot. Oddly, though, I’ve been seeing some interesting things about this movie: there’s a large portion of people who were big fans of the first movie that hate this movie. My wife seems to be one of them.

    As we left the theater, she said: “Was the first movie that stupid?”

    Upon further clarification, what she means is that there was too much talking and not enough action (although the action that it does have is great). This seems odd to me, because I remember re-watching The Matrix for the first or second time since I originally saw it, and I was struck by how relatively little action there actually was.

    Anyway.

    So I’m not entirely sure why people hated this movie; I have yet to find a good answer, other than of the “there was too much talking” variety which people mean to be slow for them: too much unnecessary filler between action scenes, the rave scene was too long and pointless, etc. etc. If anyone can give me a good, coherent answer to why you might have hated this movie, drop me a line.

    To each his own, I guess. As I said, I liked it quite a lot. The action was great, and the effects were flawless; as I mentioned in my X2 post, there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be done in movie effects anymore. I enjoyed the story, too, and I think most of it makes sense to me… there’s still a few things I’m mulling over.

    I’m thinking I’ll need to see it again before it leaves the theaters; the effects are that good, and it’s definitely a multi-tiered movie that warrants multiple viewings.