Before the internet could be properly imbedded in our dreams archetype-ally, Mark Stefik edited a 1997 book that treated the Global Information Structure (aka Internet) as an inevitability of our mythic-knowledge-structures, like mandalas. Strange, I don't remember dreaming about anything like the internet before it appeared. A weird volume that overuses positivity so ruthlessly, you might think it's propaganda. The link below is the full book preview (the full book minus some pages). Begins with Vannevar Bush's prophetic essay on the I-way.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/internet-dreams-archetypes-myths-and-metaphors/oclc/60140991/viewport

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://ask.metafilter.com/111950/Is-my-husband-trying-to-kill-me

"About a month ago I could have potentially died from carbon monoxide poising. My husband usually leaves for work before I do. We live in a small single level home and the master bedroom is very close to the attached garage. This particular morning he pulled his car out of the garage to warm it up. As he was getting ready to leave he grabbed some cash from my purse as he went out the front door and must have hit the autostart on my keychain which started my car. The door to the garage from the house was open (which was not uncommon since if it didn't latch all the way it opens). About a half hour after he left I had just gotten out of the shower and thought I smelled exhaust. I went to the garage door and to my horror saw the car running. I immediately called my husband and he told me to open all the windows, go sit right at one of the
windows and he'd be right home (he was very comforting and always seems to handle problems so well). He came home and we figured out what must have happened. I felt ok so we didn't go to the hospital."

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?"

Son of Jean Painleve

Resolutely simplistic, seemingly complex, Hurt Locker bears the mark of all mediocre films, most of its tensions disappear on second viewing, some of them dissolve even during their first. Its logic messy and unconvincing, Bigelow has many choices but seems to milk any distortion she can while sacrificing intelligent sequencing. Early on a butcher detonates an IED after the targeted technician has come closest to the killzone, he's already on his way out when it detonates, the purpose here is to array the tensions in layers yet it destroys the pure logic of the bomb's purpose. Bigelow couches everything, it's her first pop-out, the butcher holds his cellphone-bomb-remote artificially and in plain sight, needlessly calling attention from the support troops. Meetings between unknowns are milked for every second of tension possible, 'you guys are wired tight' is the understatement of the film, James' taxi encounter seems to go on for years, the initial seconds of the encounter with mercenary Brits are elongated like a blind date intro.  'Improvs' like the use of a smoke flare to reduce visibility on a tight street are met with hysteria from Sanborn, the film seems to create drama out of operatic fear. You'd wonder if the bomb unit had any sense of cool. The support team loses its lunch at every possible turn, grating audience nerves needlessly, and surely Iraq vets in the audience leave the film rolling eyes: who are these whiners?  Without the perceptive distortions we share with Renner's central character, all cheap gotchas that usually are tools of the horror film, the film is merely a stylized, largely static war drama with a component fate: the tension of defusing catastrophic bombs. Interspersed between the wooden Green Zone/base therapy-'letting steam-off' scenery is the paranoia of cultural confusion and divided languages. The technical nightmares of urban warfare in a city only temporarily conquered are never fully realized though: the plot has to depart the city to duel with ultra-long lenses where its one Iraq-conflict-signature-jarhead-moment, the sniper exchange and outcome, falls this side of flat. She can't decide if the film is a document of what seems real or is it all too surreal?  For all the supposed technical charms of Bigelow's macho bravo eye, it still feels more transvestite than transcendant. Moments like the boy's reappearance and the confused home invasion have contrivances that weigh sentimental rather than paint the film with radical shifts in wartime paradox. Generals, medics, buddies, even cameos like Fiennes and Pearce are modulated into a gruff anyspeak.  Its mediocrity rises full pitch as the film ends with his child's jack-in-the-box routine, a metaphor so leaden, Bigelow may as well be saying: do you get it? The way she displays data is glaring, his box of denatured devices, what is being left in the transitions, nothing. Fear? Do we really obtain a sense of the streets?  Culture is still awaiting this war's watershed flick: the Deer Hunter-Apocalypse Now-Full Metal Jacket lens. Where plot is only a decoy to obtain the visual epic.

2004: A man kills his wife and stepson, leaves behind certain disturbing things, among them a suicide note and this undeciphered page

2006: The note finds its way to a cryptographer.

The link to the story, without a decryption.

Himpele and Casteneda's lowfi doc is of the angry young men genre, as anti-positivist romanticists, they see the blind westerners, drawn hypnotically towards a clearly marked equinox/solstice, as locusts and the poor trammelled indigenous Itza-as-Maya as the holy. Clear class lines are delineated as 'Mexican' capitalists replace the local vendors of Chichen Itza, a prime, eldest centrally located Post-Classic Maya polity, whose stature grows as years approach a perceived time vortex named in our calendar as 2012. What you are looking at is vibrant proof that myth replaces knowledge as cash structures are focused, Himpele and Casteneda seem to miss this and instead dress their talents as post-modernists and can't compete with the real processes in place now. They're too insensitive to the outsiders and much too sensitive to the true locals. Should be seen.

was to have his reviled song "In The Mood" played at his funeral.