The Matrix, a self-reflective progeny no less alert than Lucas' first Star Wars, was culled from equal parts THX-1138 and Tron. Both films (Tron and THX) shared unique cybernetic ratios of digital journeys far before the dominance of the PC and are brilliantly contrasted in chroma styles, hues, dialogue nuances and physicality versus 'virtual' or software avatar'd beings. What they shared was more crucial, both failed to make their budgets back, both posed anonymous guards with long poles, both involved escaping speeding bikes, and pivotally, both films lack a coherent and sustained crescendo. Flynn merely did what Neo does, he jumps without fear, but with little build-up to get an audience to root. Tron is the almost-masterpiece, and is perhaps the most informed animated film of the 80's. Lisberger and company take the Disney tower hostage for a late summer in 1982 and alter the rules by cutting away before morphs and tweens finish, pretending as if these glistening lights in transition are normal everyday happenings, subtley they advanced the craft of the virtually exotic.  Now forced to eat its own children (The Matrixes) made at other studios (Warner Bros), Disney has crafted the Tron reboot as a 'legacy' film with falsely iconic hacker Flynn and child now dealing with a more complex INNER. The strains of adding credibility shows in Legacy's design choices, what was hallucinatory as digital is now solid, credible. As a film forced to compete somewhat with its spawn, Legacy now has to make note of The Matrix's possibilities, and since the rules in Tron:Legacy cannot change: it's much easier to suggest them visually (note the furniture overlapping). Tron's Bally-Midway arcade game outgrossed the film 10:1.

below, taking it too literally, too early: tron: LEG-acy

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

In the 1990's, a sharp thinking, Brooksley Born was on the shortlist for Attorney General, but Clinton thought she wasn't riveting enough so he instead offered her the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. This obscure commission was the pulpit from which Born would issue a prediction that unregulated markets would eventually implode. Her logic, though basic, almost unassailable, brought her notoriety. As she decided derivatives needed oversight, eventually she would come up against Clinton's "working group," Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and then in congressional hearings, Phil Gramm. Eventually she would resign, and the first warning of things to come, the collapse of Long Term Market Capital in 1998, would be swept under the rug as an anomaly.

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

Ex-con K.C. White's last work in prison at Federal Correctional Facility Butner Medium, N.C.

"Alterations in the Game had a major impact on the functioning of the entire commune. Although it is true that in many ways the Game's brutal honesty upheld for a long time the highest standards of morality, when it became difficult for members to disagree with Chuck Dederich and other leaders in game formats a significant part of Synanon's system of checks and balances was lost."

http://econsultancy.com/blog/5423-paperchase-plagiarises-independent-artist-and-twitter-erupts

Since 1977, UT Austin has hosted The Maya Meetings, a four day annual workshop of epigraphic research, where teams and individual students and professors descend upon the Mesoamerican Center and pour over their year of research and offer papers and discussions of what decipherment has occurred. Of course the workshop has overlapped with the SXSW festival, allowing the participants to study the Maya by day and absorb the cutting edge of music film and recently interactive by night. This year, however, the meetings have been moved to Casa Herrera in Antigua, Guatemala, a sister facility of the Mesoamerican Center and will then alternate between there and Austin to ensure the linguistic distances between glyph and word are drawn closer together.

See you in Antigua!