Welcome
Hello and welcome to Not The Spoon That Bends (NTSTB), a website dedicated to all ideas The Matrix.
My name is Eli Cahn, and I love the arts, film, and The Matrix in particular. I have just begun my fourth year of my Bachelor of Arts in New Media and English. As part of this year, we have a Final Year Project, where I and my classmates must each write 10,000-12,000 words on a topic of our choosing. I have decided to write about The Matrix, as I love it, and I love thinking about it.
Enter this blog. While I have spent a lot of time thinking about The Matrix for my own amusement, I have nothing I can show for it – much less something I can hand in to my supervisor. I will be using this blog to give structure to my thoughts, and put virtual pen to virtual paper and have something to show for all my thinking.
Philosophy of Approach (1,000 words a weekday)
The philosophy of my approach to writing the articles is to aim for quantity over quality. While I won’t be deliberately breaking grammatical rules, making spelling mistakes, or having minor factual errors, neither will I be quadruple checking everything (until, perhaps, later). The idea came from Derek Sivers’s story about a ceramics class in his video about failure. (The story starts 13mins in.) One group of students were told to make one pot all semester – but it had to be the most perfect pot ever, and one group were told to make as many as possible – never mind the quality. The group who made many ended up with superior pots.
The idea of this experiment is to write 1,000 words about The Matrix every weekday. That may be too much, and I am open to adjusting course, but with this as a target I will be approaching 60,000 words by the end of the (12 week) semester. If 80% of those words are awful and unusable, I will still have enough to write my FYP. Another way of phrasing it would be, I need to get through all the bad writing before I can find the rare good writing underneath.
NTSTB
I hope you enjoy reading the blog as much as I enjoy writing it. I don’t have all the answers and I’m learning by writing, so this will be fun. It may be challenging at times, but anything is possible when you realise the truth. What truth? There is no spoon. There is no spoon? Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
Not The Spoon That Bends 