Let people grow, man.

Was referring to the Animatrix 1st and 2nd Renaissance genius.

Fight Club really hits different when you realize the main character is Tyler Durden

Avatar really hits different when you realize the Navi are just defending themselves.

Indiana Jones really hits different when you realize the bad guys are Nazis.

Jurassic park really hits different when you realize John Hammond ignored all the warnings.

John Wick really hits different when you realize they killed his dog.

Star Wars really hits different when you realize the chosen one bringing balance meant revitalizing the dark side.

... Old men like me don't bother with making points. There's no point.

They don't say that in the first movie.

There's conflicting stories about it so it's hard to verify, but apparently the battery thing was a rewrite.

Apparently originally the people plugged into the matrix were meant to be the very hardware the matrix was run on. As in all their brains together formed a literal neural network that provided the processing power to run the matrix. This is then why knowing it's not real and believing you can do "the impossible" within the matrix can cause you to be able to bend reality. The story goes that executives thought it was too high of a concept for audiences to grasp and demanded the change to the battery explanation to make it simpler to follow.

Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself... /s

My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It's also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.

the trans allegory kicks ass so we can ignore an inconsistency or two

Just a few extra arms needed

Yeah, but what is the blue pill for?

It lights blue.

Big pharma ruined the metaphor by changing the pill colors.

The blue pill was an antidepressant, the red pill was estrogen.

Also the main villian is a man in a suit who constantly deadnames the protagonist. The matrix is real life.

At the time they were red.

It's an allegory for the fact that through their control of the media, the rich can construct whatever reality they want in the minds of the masses.

Sometimes I worry about 40k fans. Like "most times I hear about it."

Why wouldn’t they have made the simulation awesome for everyone? Of course if you make it shitty some people might start to wonder about battery pod life in the cave.

So you choose The Matrix? 🤔

Personally, I wouldn't give AF if it was "fake". Fake is perspective.

A great point, but I wonder if it would have reached that point if cypher had been given relaxation time and good experiences in the construct from the start.

That's the fun part, in that time, cubicles were seen as terrible, dystopian, cheapass things because folks used to have offices, and how much cheaper could it really get than some flimsy modular furniture for you to sit at?

Then the companies gestured to just some tables in a room and said "figure it out, and no assigned seating, so just figure it out each day" to show how cheap and how little regard they have for the employees.

At this rate, I fully expect in the next few years for the next wave in office space optimization:

I’ve worked in open plan offices my entire 20 year career and I yearn for the cheap fabric covered mines.

This was 1999; it was standard.

And then speaks to one girl and promptly falls in love with her.

One person'S terrorist is another's freedom fighter.

You're an odd morpheus.

Morpheus says that line to Neo from within the Matrix. I think he's basically saying to Neo that if he just used words to explain it, Neo would never fully understand or believe it. Aside from his encounter with the agents, Neo has never apparently questioned whether he's actually living in reality or in a simulation.

Keep in mind that this is 1999 when the peak of computer graphics is Quake 3, Unreal Tournament and Crazy Taxi.

The gender binary literally rewrites our perceptions, causing us to perceive nonbinary people as male or female, unless we go through the effort to deprogram ourselves and take agency over our perceptions.

The Matrix wasn't a metaphor.

Red Dwarf did it better though.

I think human beings have evolved to see a fake reality, because true reality is too complex for our minds to process and simplifying it saves on resources.

I think the desire for reality is a trap that will make you vulnerable to all sorts of cognitive biases. I think the rich have learned to use the desire for reality against us. I think the only way to be free is to choose to create our own unreality. I think through mental techniques to reshape our beliefs, we can achieve the power to break out of the capitalist mind prison.

It's mostly the third semester plotline which imo is poorly written because, unlike the matrix, the villain has the power to actually rewrite reality. And yet, when the protagonists turn him good, he doesn't start using his powers for good, fixing injustice, giving everyone (not just the protagonists) the power to shape their own fate... no, he just stops using those powers. The altered world is presented as a 'false reality', like in matrix, even though it's clearly stated that it would eventually become real. It's as if they took the core idea of matrix but forgot the parts that made it work in the original story