SPECIAL BULLETIN: A list of things I want to cover in the near future

Hi, all!

I just wanted to take some time out of the Life Millennium schedule and simply make a list of topics I want to cover in the foreseeable future. Just a little something to get off my chest before I begin work on Millennium sometime in early/mid May. (I have been doing a lot of stuff, which means..schedule slip!)

1. The Matrix--I'm probably not going to go into Reloaded, Revolutions, and the Supplemental Material in any great detail. I want to focus on two things: first, The Matrix was, in a way, the first "cerebral" action movie (to my knowledge, at any rate) and also how it too The Blair Witch Project's use of the Internet as viral marketing a step further. I do know that message boards, AIM, etc. played a role in whipping up hype for The Matrix.

2. The shift from 2D to 3D gaming--More the way in which gaming's "Big Three" icons--Pac-Man, Mario, and Sonic the Hedgehog--ushered in the 3D era at the tail-end of the century. Pac-Man World and Sonic Adventure are definitely Millennium Artifacts.

3. The restored edition of Yellow Submarine--Absolutely important to the millennium, this was the first wave of a Beatles revival. As far as I can remember, it was more about raising awareness of the "restoration" movement than it was about the Beatles. Shortly after Submarine was re-released, The Beatles 1 came out: all their #1 hits, restored and sparkling, just in time for a new century. (Actually, the main draw of Yellow was that it now had the previously lost "Hey, Bulldog!" sequence. The song appeared on the original soundtrack but was left off the US cut of the movie...until 1999.)

4. Neon Genesis Evangelion--Broadcast in 1995, EVA takes place in 2015...this year, actually. It's mainly interesting because it continues the themes I'll get to in Millennium. Where Millennium's world concerns itself with the anxieties of a big change, in Evangelion's world those anxieties have putrefied, and everything's kind of hollow and atrophied. Still, more on that later...

Plus all the myriad books and articles I can get my hands on and review.