Wait, what? That's just science fiction, not cyberpunk. You'd need elements (heh) of isolation, loss of humanity, corporate entities taking over the functions of government, etc.
I wish we had names for our conference rooms. We're like "Meet over in the east one. Yeah by the break room. No not upstairs, downstairs." like every time
There are these things called room numbers, ya know.
you know what setting i want to see exploited
paranoia
make a paranoia crpg
itd be good i promise
You could make that work because reloading is basically getting a new clone. It could be meta-amusing.
Unfortunately you can't play Paranoia anymore because nobody gets the cold war jokes and the ominous tone rings like post-ironic communist memeing now, rather than it being a black comedic take on the actual communist police states that existed when the game was written.
um thats why you just explain the communist memeing the same way fallout does as a relic of the anxieties of friend computer's creators while still having plenty of material to work with in regards to police state since u kno FRIEND COMPUTER
Fallout also fails as a theme now. And hand-waving it away as a relic of unfounded anxiety saps a lot of the color from the genre given that it was written against a backdrop of actual police state horrors. Paranoia was dark comedy because people were getting actually shot to death trying to escape East Germany at the time. Now it's bereft fo context.
it's too hopelessly dated and outside the frame of experience of a generation that doesn't remember what happened before German reunification.
Plenty of us like history enough to know about what happened before we were born
context doesn't go away just because you learn about it as history instead of as news
it loses the visceral element though.
There's a big difference in reading about the cold war and doing a project in school in which you learn that if nuclear war happens, you're close enough to the air force base that the bricks in your house will burst into flames as you and everything you love is scoured from the earth.
Part of the thing my company does for new hires is bring in the grandson of the owner to talk about corporate history. He brings a piece of the fence the East German communists put up to divide the town where it was founded, and describes how the border was set up to kill people trying to get to the free side... you can see in the room the difference between listening to a story about a historic awful thing, and listening to a story about a thing you also watched on the news as a kid, and listening to a story about a thing you experienced as an adult.
paranoia is hopelessly dated and imo unplayable as a result. It just wouldn't be the same as when I ran it back in the day.
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Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
What do you reckon is your most notable bridge so far, Landshark
the one that's currently under construction (that i'm constantly fighting with the contractor about) may well be the most notable one of the rest of my career
Ready Player One is a 2011 novel that lifts its setting, premise, and most of its story beats from 1992’s Snow Crash, removes all of the self-awareness, badass action, and philosophical musings on the nature of the relationship between language and technology, replaces them with painfully awkward 80s references, and changes the main character from a samurai pizza deliveryman and freelance hacker to the asshole kid in your friend group who claimed he “didn’t need showers,” vomited onto the page by Ernest Cline. Its bestseller success and Cline’s subsequent 7-figure sale of the screenplay to Steven Spielberg is as close as we can get to objective proof that the meritocracy isn’t working.
I mean, I'm reading it because Spool got it for me and I've never read it, but I am amused that one of the criticisms the author of this piece mounts is that Ready Player One rips off Snow crash, and is phrased in a way that we are supposed to go "yeah, and Snow Crash is good!
Wait, what? That's just science fiction, not cyberpunk. You'd need elements (heh) of isolation, loss of humanity, corporate entities taking over the functions of government, etc.
I mean its loose but you have Zorg right there and the encroaching darkness vs the light.
Dammit people cyberpunk doesn't just mean science fiction. It's a sub genre with its own aesthetic, its own themes and takes place mostly at night, in a light drizzle.
Having a grandiose story is not part of the qualifying criteria, otherwise ruddy Star Trek is cyberpunk.
I think you could easily set a cyberpunk movie in the 5th element, we just don't see that world from the perspective you'd normally see a cyberpunk set from
Megacorps, overcrowding, overpopulation, piles of tech garbage everywhere, etc
In XY systems that homogametic sex is women, and in ZW the homogametic sex is men
So XY makes homo ladies and ZW makes homo men
So choose based on your appropriate juvenile jokes I guess
Wait don't you have this backwards
No, he got it right
Ah yes, he did. I AM SORRY ARCH I WILL NEVER DOUBT U AGAIN
I will continue to doubt Arch. Can't trust a six-legger.
You're right
With their paucity of legs, they will become jealous, and try to steal the legs of the trustworthies
How dare you! A paucity of legs! I'll have you know that we have reduced the number of legs down to the most efficient and blessed number (3!) and have also made room for wings, so that we can become closer to the divine
you
you
bottom feeder
Come and get me, motherfucker
Is it correct that Maine lobsters are more related to crayfish than to pacific/spiny lobsters?
Ready Player One is a 2011 novel that lifts its setting, premise, and most of its story beats from 1992’s Snow Crash, removes all of the self-awareness, badass action, and philosophical musings on the nature of the relationship between language and technology, replaces them with painfully awkward 80s references, and changes the main character from a samurai pizza deliveryman and freelance hacker to the asshole kid in your friend group who claimed he “didn’t need showers,” vomited onto the page by Ernest Cline. Its bestseller success and Cline’s subsequent 7-figure sale of the screenplay to Steven Spielberg is as close as we can get to objective proof that the meritocracy isn’t working.
I mean, I'm reading it because Spool got it for me and I've never read it, but I am amused that one of the criticisms the author of this piece mounts is that Ready Player One rips off Snow crash, and is phrased in a way that we are supposed to go "yeah, and Snow Crash is good!
Dammit people cyberpunk doesn't just mean science fiction. It's a sub genre with its own aesthetic, its own themes and takes place mostly at night, in a light drizzle.
Having a grandiose story is not part of the qualifying criteria, otherwise ruddy Star Trek is cyberpunk.
Yeah, I'd say that cyberpunk is often *not* grandiose. There might be some overall grand plot but I feel like the focus is often more on small heists or the struggles of a couple of people trying to make it/survive.
Wait, what? That's just science fiction, not cyberpunk. You'd need elements (heh) of isolation, loss of humanity, corporate entities taking over the functions of government, etc.
I mean its loose but you have Zorg right there and the encroaching darkness vs the light.
Terminator 1 is cyberpunk. As is Matrix. so....
A cyberpunk story wouldn't have encroaching darkness vs. the light. It would just be darkness and shades of grey, tinted with artificial neon lights. I wouldn't call The Fifth Element cyberpunk at any rate. It's space opera.
I guess I should in theory give ready player one a chance but every excerpt I've read has made my brain start bleeding
I dunno if I would be able to power through it if every excerpt I've read has been illustrative of the whole thing
It seems like Joseph Campbell + some guy reading TV Tropes to you
I think people give it too much shit. It's just massively popular and that has created a backlash against it.
It's just like The Dresden Files or those trashy Forgotten Realms books that were being written in the 90s, it just doesn't pretend to be anything but what it is. It is absolutely just a bunch of '80s references in a book wrapped in a young adult adventure story. It's not trying to be anything else, and yes it is written poorly.
But despite all of that, I managed to enjoy it.
you have now named Ready Player One, Dresden Files, Forgotten Realms novels, and Transformers films--all absolutely things that are bad enough that people shouldn't waste their time on them, even if they're looking for silly pulpy fun
And yet, enough people have bought all of those things to turn them into massive successes.
What do you reckon is your most notable bridge so far, Landshark
the one that's currently under construction (that i'm constantly fighting with the contractor about) may well be the most notable one of the rest of my career
Dammit people cyberpunk doesn't just mean science fiction. It's a sub genre with its own aesthetic, its own themes and takes place mostly at night, in a light drizzle.
Having a grandiose story is not part of the qualifying criteria, otherwise ruddy Star Trek is cyberpunk.
"We have to hack the gibson, chummer. Kirk out."
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Captain Ultralow resolution pictures of birdsRegistered Userregular
Dammit people cyberpunk doesn't just mean science fiction. It's a sub genre with its own aesthetic, its own themes and takes place mostly at night, in a light drizzle.
Having a grandiose story is not part of the qualifying criteria, otherwise ruddy Star Trek is cyberpunk.
I think you could easily set a cyberpunk movie in the 5th element, we just don't see that world from the perspective you'd normally see a cyberpunk set from
Megacorps, overcrowding, overpopulation, piles of tech garbage everywhere, etc
yeah, but just having a setting in which cyberpunk could occur, does not make it cyberpunk at all
man I remember being a young kid and wondering if the contrails in the sky were missiles and this was the end. That shit was real for us.
Well we're all much more knowledgeable these days and know that the contrails are actually part of a program to subdue the population with mind controlling chemicals.
What do you reckon is your most notable bridge so far, Landshark
the one that's currently under construction (that i'm constantly fighting with the contractor about) may well be the most notable one of the rest of my career
Dammit people cyberpunk doesn't just mean science fiction. It's a sub genre with its own aesthetic, its own themes and takes place mostly at night, in a light drizzle.
Having a grandiose story is not part of the qualifying criteria, otherwise ruddy Star Trek is cyberpunk.
The Fifth Element is not, unless I have been grievously misinformed about the definition of the term, 'cyberpunk'. It is a startling contrast to the atmosphere, mood and preoccupations of cyberpunk.
I would say all the stuff in the first third or so is pretty cyberpunk. Tight looming streets and flying cars and having to put your hands on the designated police circles in your home and say you're a human and not a meat popsicle.
Wait, what? That's just science fiction, not cyberpunk. You'd need elements (heh) of isolation, loss of humanity, corporate entities taking over the functions of government, etc.
I mean its loose but you have Zorg right there and the encroaching darkness vs the light.
Terminator 1 is cyberpunk. As is Matrix. so....
A cyberpunk story wouldn't have encroaching darkness vs. the light. It would just be darkness and shades of grey, tinted with artificial neon lights. I wouldn't call The Fifth Element cyberpunk at any rate. It's space opera.
Its both really. But eh. Cyberpunk is sci fi dystopia. Which fits into the 5th element world just fine. It has elements but not distinctly in it so yeah whatever. I agree.
every office building in the greater seattle area has Adams, Baker, Rainier, and St Helens conference rooms
it's like
a law
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
What do you reckon is your most notable bridge so far, Landshark
the one that's currently under construction (that i'm constantly fighting with the contractor about) may well be the most notable one of the rest of my career
man I remember being a young kid and wondering if the contrails in the sky were missiles and this was the end. That shit was real for us.
I don't think you need to have been born prior to the collapse of the soviet union (to be clear, I was, but I was very small, so) in order to feel and enjoy soviet themes.
The police state/paranoia/disappearance/bureaucracy themes in Master and Margarita are visceral and horribly chilling even if you didn't live it
And then having read and internalize that, you can go on to feel the resonance in other works that are maybe less well-written but still draw on those feelings
In general, you don't have to have personally experienced the themes, events, or settings in a work or game in order to be profoundly affected and moved by them, or in order to feel like they are relevant to you
credeiki on
Steam, LoL: credeiki
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Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
we're gonna blow up the existing bridge with dynamite
gonna be so cool
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
i'm not sure what isn't appealing about it aside from those genre tropes. it's good for the same reason that dystopian fiction is good.
Okay but I don’t generally care for dystopian fiction, really.
is this because you think it's bad or because you'd rather not read/watch doom and gloom when there's plenty of doom and gloom oppressing us in our actual lives
Both?
There’s something about cyberpunk that seems to glorify the squalor and misery of its setting, and if I’m being honest a lot of it is marred by growing up watching the generation only a little older than me caught up in entertainment where maladjusted antiheroes with shitty goatees and black trenchcoats fought ninja robots in dingy gutters . . . because it looked cool. So much of nerd culture during my tween years seemed like this, and it felt try-hard and hilariously oblivious and not a little tied to the same solipsistic assholes that would later coelesce into the festering clot of the internet’s nice guy/fedora/incel/neckbeard neighborhood.
I know I joke about being the oldest millennial, but while barely true, I identify as such because I identify with millennials and their lives and culture far more than I do GenX. I like bright, poppy, optimistic, inclusive shit. I like media that brings people together over shared interests and common goals. I like to laugh and smile and promote that in others. I like goofy shit. I don’t want to think about all the creative ways shit can get bleak; I want to celebrate all the ways we can do good with a genuine goddamn smile on my face.
Re: glorification, I guess you could say that, but only in the same way that high fantasy glorifies monarchy and war, or how Star Trek glorifies war or military rule, or how murder mysteries glorify serial killers, and so on. These are all genuine issues and potentially troubling, but also they're easily ignored because they're not usually the main thrust of the genre, and better examples of those genres fundamentally question those assumptions.
The 80s/90s grimdark aesthetic definitely shares a lot with cyberpunk aesthetics, at least the traditional ones, and it's easy to see how you could look at a cyberpunk setting and feel the same eye-roll as you would looking at e.g. Spawn or other silly things. But a well-built setting generally earns that aesthetic and atmosphere far more so, and their stories are also about what human joy and community looks like even in that kind of grim, filthy megacity. Cyberpunk cities are a testament to the total failure of sterilized corporate facades and the inability to repress or contain the liveliness and humanity of their inhabitants, even with horribly overbearing technology and political power (or they're more pessimistic and dystopian and are warning us about how those precious things can be destroyed).
I mean, your reaction is totally understandable, especially as a reaction to the aesthetic, but cyberpunk's appeal to a lot of people is exactly how people thrive even in these (totally plausible) grim conditions. Interestingly, the characters rarely tend to be miserable--they're often hedonists, but not depressives; their pleasure-seeking is activism and rebellion, and their activism/rebellion is itself a joy to them.
Evil Multifarious on
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BeNarwhalThe Work Left UnfinishedRegistered Userregular
What do you reckon is your most notable bridge so far, Landshark
the one that's currently under construction (that i'm constantly fighting with the contractor about) may well be the most notable one of the rest of my career
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There are these things called room numbers, ya know.
it loses the visceral element though.
There's a big difference in reading about the cold war and doing a project in school in which you learn that if nuclear war happens, you're close enough to the air force base that the bricks in your house will burst into flames as you and everything you love is scoured from the earth.
Part of the thing my company does for new hires is bring in the grandson of the owner to talk about corporate history. He brings a piece of the fence the East German communists put up to divide the town where it was founded, and describes how the border was set up to kill people trying to get to the free side... you can see in the room the difference between listening to a story about a historic awful thing, and listening to a story about a thing you also watched on the news as a kid, and listening to a story about a thing you experienced as an adult.
paranoia is hopelessly dated and imo unplayable as a result. It just wouldn't be the same as when I ran it back in the day.
the one that's currently under construction (that i'm constantly fighting with the contractor about) may well be the most notable one of the rest of my career
http://www.i74riverbridge.com/
it's got its own fkin website!
I don't even have a website!
I mean, I'm reading it because Spool got it for me and I've never read it, but I am amused that one of the criticisms the author of this piece mounts is that Ready Player One rips off Snow crash, and is phrased in a way that we are supposed to go "yeah, and Snow Crash is good!
But, and I'm sorry Spool
Snow Crash
is bad
I mean its loose but you have Zorg right there and the encroaching darkness vs the light.
Terminator 1 is cyberpunk. As is Matrix. so....
you're a monster
Having a grandiose story is not part of the qualifying criteria, otherwise ruddy Star Trek is cyberpunk.
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Megacorps, overcrowding, overpopulation, piles of tech garbage everywhere, etc
Hacking? X
Loose wires everywhere? X
Leather trench coats? X
It is rather silly, isn't it.
I am not even giving the more ridiculous names just to be safe, but honor is one of the least laughable.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Is it correct that Maine lobsters are more related to crayfish than to pacific/spiny lobsters?
you're also wrong and I hope you enjoy it anyway!
those are not the elements of cyberpunk!
Yeah, I'd say that cyberpunk is often *not* grandiose. There might be some overall grand plot but I feel like the focus is often more on small heists or the struggles of a couple of people trying to make it/survive.
And yet, enough people have bought all of those things to turn them into massive successes.
one of your conference rooms is names 'pensi" isn't it.
Is that the one where you had to actually go down to the jobsite to clear the air with some of the guys?
That IS a pretty cool looking bridge, props on that! Very respectable bridge-building, Sir Shark.
"We have to hack the gibson, chummer. Kirk out."
LotR is my favorite cyberpunk story.
yeah, but just having a setting in which cyberpunk could occur, does not make it cyberpunk at all
Well we're all much more knowledgeable these days and know that the contrails are actually part of a program to subdue the population with mind controlling chemicals.
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His bridge is blocked by my university filter. Hm.
I would say all the stuff in the first third or so is pretty cyberpunk. Tight looming streets and flying cars and having to put your hands on the designated police circles in your home and say you're a human and not a meat popsicle.
But yeah, it's more just 'Sci-fi' I guess.
Its both really. But eh. Cyberpunk is sci fi dystopia. Which fits into the 5th element world just fine. It has elements but not distinctly in it so yeah whatever. I agree.
it's like
a law
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
yup that was the one
I don't think you need to have been born prior to the collapse of the soviet union (to be clear, I was, but I was very small, so) in order to feel and enjoy soviet themes.
The police state/paranoia/disappearance/bureaucracy themes in Master and Margarita are visceral and horribly chilling even if you didn't live it
And then having read and internalize that, you can go on to feel the resonance in other works that are maybe less well-written but still draw on those feelings
In general, you don't have to have personally experienced the themes, events, or settings in a work or game in order to be profoundly affected and moved by them, or in order to feel like they are relevant to you
gonna be so cool
Re: glorification, I guess you could say that, but only in the same way that high fantasy glorifies monarchy and war, or how Star Trek glorifies war or military rule, or how murder mysteries glorify serial killers, and so on. These are all genuine issues and potentially troubling, but also they're easily ignored because they're not usually the main thrust of the genre, and better examples of those genres fundamentally question those assumptions.
The 80s/90s grimdark aesthetic definitely shares a lot with cyberpunk aesthetics, at least the traditional ones, and it's easy to see how you could look at a cyberpunk setting and feel the same eye-roll as you would looking at e.g. Spawn or other silly things. But a well-built setting generally earns that aesthetic and atmosphere far more so, and their stories are also about what human joy and community looks like even in that kind of grim, filthy megacity. Cyberpunk cities are a testament to the total failure of sterilized corporate facades and the inability to repress or contain the liveliness and humanity of their inhabitants, even with horribly overbearing technology and political power (or they're more pessimistic and dystopian and are warning us about how those precious things can be destroyed).
I mean, your reaction is totally understandable, especially as a reaction to the aesthetic, but cyberpunk's appeal to a lot of people is exactly how people thrive even in these (totally plausible) grim conditions. Interestingly, the characters rarely tend to be miserable--they're often hedonists, but not depressives; their pleasure-seeking is activism and rebellion, and their activism/rebellion is itself a joy to them.
It is notably yonic, which is impressive for a bridge.
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jesus christ
You have to tell us the other ones now