via: integral naked:

As Ken points out, the first movie is fairly easy to grok: everything in the Matrix is bad, everything outside of the Matrix is good. Everyone inside the Matrix is trapped, everyone outside the Matrix is free, and so on. But twenty minutes into part 2, Reloaded, and the audience discovers that the Oracle is a machine program, at which point most people go: um, what? What had begun as a simple good guy/bad guy movie had just become a complex piece of literature, with different levels of interpretation and a very sophisticated model of reality. Ken suggests that it's not until the last twenty minutes of part 3, Revolutions, that the key to the trilogy is revealed: although—and perhaps because—Neo is physically blind, he sees the machines as luminous, golden light—not quite how the "bad guys" are seen in most movies. And yet Neo is unmistakable in what he says to Trinity: "If you could see them as I see them, they are all made of Light...." Indeed, the machines represent Spirit, but Spirit as alienated and therefore attacking.... Thus, as Ken summarizes a more integral interpretation (that takes into account what is revealed in all three films), Zion represents body (filmed in blue tint), the Matrix represents mind (green tint), and the machines—this is the kicker revealed in part 3—represent spirit (golden tint). For those of you keeping track, this is indeed quite similar to the Great Nest of Being as taught by the world's wisdom traditions, a spectrum of being and consciousness reaching from body to mind to spirit. Borrowing from the wisdom of Christian mysticism, "The flames of Hell are but God's love denied," and so an alienated and dissociated spirit manifests as an army of machines bent on destroying humankind. It is only in the integration of body, mind, and spirit that all three are redeemed and peace returns.

"you know, like, your friends in california? they're... like your friends. they kinda look like people, there's a telephone involved. they have an automobile. but, they're not like your friends back in new york. or boston. or seattle. or atlanta. or texas. as a matter of fact, your friends in LA don't show up when they invite you somewhere. how do they make that work?" – barry sobel

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I would perish in the embrace of his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Each single angel is terrifying. And so I force myself, swallow and hold back the surging call of my dark sobbing. Oh, to whom can we turn for help? Not angels, not humans; and even the knowing animals are aware that we feel little secure and at home in our interpreted world. – Rainer Maria Rilke

check out Rising Phoenix Design and the Blackback Web Theory.

i promise i won’t say “i told you so”.

or, check out ecoIron, with their textual analysis of how a Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year:

As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format. Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background [on a CRT monitor! mjo] will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

via lostfrog: