Back in the late 90s and Early 2000s, before there was a Matrix Sequel or even “The Animatrix” there was just “The Matrix” and what we knew about the world of it from that first movie. It was full of the promise that “anyone” could be have super powers in the Matrix and that all it took was being “shown the way”
Well, I took that idea and ran with it. The Premise [in the RPG] was that a famous former Superman actor had received cutting edge nano-tech treatments for his spinal injury, allowing him to walk again and the tech became widely available to the point that humans commonly had enhancements to their bodies. This led to a singularity of humanity and machine where machine intelligence was born and became independent from human intelligence.
Machines had typically been slaves to humans and humanity (for the most part) wanted that to continue, but the Machines had their own goals, emotions and needs now. They were a new mode of being, purely software in any shell they could imagine. It was wonderful for the new machines, but humanity was envious of the freedom of the machine children and war broke out and “the plot of the Matrix” happened.
I don’t recall where the idea of multiple Matrixes came from, but the premise was that the “real world” in the Movie was less desolate, but that humanity was pushed mostly to “the moon” and the war between Humanity and the Machines had pushed those with the resources to do it to leave earth for the “the moon” and so Humans had to hold orbital launch stations at the poles to allow for resources to be dropped to the core.
Also, “The Matrix” that we saw in the Movie was just “That Matrix” and there were others, some with Magic, Some with Superheroes, Some with Cowboys, the premise being the GM could set the story in a Matrix with rules they could set and give the players different things to do other than “Be Neo”
I ended up scrapping it, especially after the other movies came out, I changed the title to “The Sequence” after the initial code snippet that “turned on” Machine intelligence and left it to lie
I don’t even know what happened to the manuscript at this point, it’s somewhere on a disk.
I did get it printed and bound though, since I had access to the means, along with a book of poems I wrote while working the phones for “Teh Nortons”
Learning to Write
Published by NiteMayr on September 28, 2021Death of the Author
Watching This video again reminded me of an exercise from Creative Writing that was at the time just intolerable and exciting all at once. Peer Reading.
Every day we would be presented with a writing prompt and then given time to create something from it. Being kids, often times these would be gross out sessions or confessionals. Pictures of birds would become poems and pieces of music would become stories.
Some of the class would use this chance to criticize the prompts rather than use the time to create something.
It’s those people that were missing out. Because they became the author and instead of using the time and space given them every day to create something new, they took the chance to snipe and attack at the very thing they were supposed to be inspired by. In a way, they were inspired, but they failed to engage in the very task they were set out. They were asked to create, and instead they took their time to destroy. “They Chose Violence” so to speak.
This image is a good example of one of the prompts, which was a penguin. Some people wrote short stories about lost penguins, some about loneliness. There was a poem about how there was nothing but penguins.
When it came time to discuss the writing that day some of the class seized on the notion that the poem about the lack of other birds was the author talking about the conformist nature of High School (where we were) and Society as a whole. That the Poem was about how a lack of diversity was dangerous. Or that the Poet was embodying a lonely penguin, seeking something more.
They were all wrong about the authors intent. The Author just dashed it off in moments: “Penguins! Everywhere Penguins! No Great Auks, no Eagles, no sparrows. Everywhere I look all I see are Tuxedo Birds. Everywhere, there’s penguins!”
Yeah, it was short and easy to put meaning on. It also was “just as it was” there was no deeper meaning to it. So the class, when faced with the idea that “It just was a complaint about the penguins” got hostile.
They insisted that there was deeper meaning in it, especially given who the author was. I’m told that they thought the author was stoned more than they were sober at this period. Which in itself was amazing, because they were 100% straight-edge.
That’s the thing, we put our own meaning and own message in our media. We hang our own emotions on every hook a piece gives us to do so. So that we can decorate it with meaning for ourselves.