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Latest Animatrix Short Released
martyn s writes "The latest animatrix short, The Second Renaissance, Part 2 is finally out. This short is the continuation of The Second Renaissance Part 1. Taken together, these shorts document how, in the matrix universe, 'Man was the architect of his own demise.'"
And here's the
BitTorrent link.
Just finished watching it, and I'm a smidge disappointed. I thought the first half set up an excellent backstory, but here, it's just "We attacked them, we lost, we're a power source," without any kind of expansion. It feels like this half just ended the story without trying to make any details beyond what we've gleaned from the first movie. Wasn't there a first Matrix that crashed and burned due to the people not able to accept it as reality? Was there any debate at all over how long the Dark Storm would last, unless they had some way to clear it afterwards? When did the AI develop the spidery robots?
While I think the Animatrix project has been pretty damn good, I think this one has fallen way short of expectations.
I dunno, man, I feel like I'm being preached to, again. Like:
Clean out the fridge before you eat something moldy which will make you sick.
Driving an SUV supports terrorism
Ordering french fries supports evil regimes which have WMD
If you don't pick up your room it'll lead to communist world domination.
Technology advances faster than our ability to manage it, eventually it will manage you if you don't watch out.
Some year, first the Matrix 2, then T3... What's the message here? Fear technology? Screw that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think these were the worst shorts of those that I've seen online and in the theaters. The plotline, while interesting, is overly simplistic with the nice, sweet, never-harming robots simply wanting their own state while the cruel, evil humans only want to enslave them. It glosses over issues such as the previous human occupiers of the new robot state, or human sympathizers (geeks?) and the real problems with granting sentient-status to the machines. I realize it's just a short, and that it's told from the perspective on another computer (the Zion archive...?), but I still felt that it was a (very) poor-man's Metropolis. If you did enjoy it, please pick up Metropolis and check it out, you'll probably love it.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
You said it not i. Oh wait, you _thought_ you were talking about me.
There's this thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can't get more out of a system than you put in. You can't even get as much out again, some is always wasted as heat. People have been trying to figure out a way around that law for centuries, and if you think you've found a way, it's 99.999999% certain that you're just not accounting for all the steps.
Yeah, the humans scorched the sky, so what? It doesn't matter that there's no sun in this equation. HUMANS DO NOT PRODUCE ENERGY! We do not even _store_ energy very well!
Sure they grind up the humans to feed other humans, but that is not a self-sustaining cycle! You need some kind of energy input. In the natural world all energy comes from one of two sources, fusion power via the sun, or gravitational compression power via the earth's core. The sun is mostly gone, at least in terms of direct sunlight, although the earth is getting at least some heat through the cloud layer or it would freeze over (it's probably got a much higher greenhouse effect, but the green house effect can't be 100% efficient, so there has to be some input)
So the machine's only natural sources are geothermal power, and fossil fuels and anything else that has sun power stored up. They also have the options of fission and fusion, the later being mentioned in the movie.
They could use those sources of energy to produce more nutrients to keep the humans' "ecosystem" going. However as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, growing food to feed to animals is horribly energy inefficient. The machines could use this energy source directly and get far more out of it than they would eventually be able to extract from the humans that absorbed the nutrients that the machines could grow with the energy.
As for the cows, like i said, even if they went with this INSANE idea of using high level living beings to produce energy, any mammal would do. Sure, the cows are most likely all dead now (except perhaps in Zion, and you're assuming the machiens don't have advanced cloning capabilities) however at the time the machines made this decision there were cows alive!
When fighting the war, why didn't any of the machines say, instead of capturing all these humans, why not just KILL all the humans and round up some of the starving cattle and use them instead? Even if all the cows were dead, they could use dogs, or jackals, or rats, or anything else that could survive off of all the dead animals and humans lying around, which there would have been quite a lot of during the war. Humans were not the only option, and were a really stupid choice unless power is not what the machines are really getting out of them.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
No, that's totally wrong. BitTorrent is a file distribution tool, not a file sharing network. Every posted BitTorrent link is totally independent, and forms its own independent network which does not benefit any other BitTorrent users. So slashdot posting a BitTorrent link of the animatrix doesn't help anyone download Red Hat ISOs. And BitTorrent certainly doesn't give any cash to Slashdot. Have you even seen the BitTorrent website?
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