Honestly, I’d probably think I was dissociating first

Why would anyone care about what other people have as desktop wallpaper? I don’t even look at my own wallpaper that much

Always fun when you get a string of good carpentry or gardening tips

Damn, that did not even cross my mind

Idk who Leon is in OP

Leon Trotsky?

I went to some of the actions against this, though they were pretty low key, lib, or naive. I did run some back of the envelope numbers and the gas emitted is more than if every Australian bought two cars and drove them until they weren’t worth repairing. Idk if that figure got used, eviction kinda drop kicked me into not having the time to participate in much

Haha I thought this.

I think it would wear one wide i item wide set of pants, and each leg would have one column

So, this definition encompasses a lot of sci-fi, I think. For instance, the triviality of tech in Star Wars and the low life is definitely present, but it would be a struggle to vibe Star Wars with cyberpunk. You can make an argument that the stories in Star Wars is not about the tech, but as you do that you have away from the original definition.

I think this applies with a lot of “sci-fantasy” settings. Basic workers in 40k can acquire (or involuntarily be gifted) cybernetic implants and this does not change their social position. 40k is not cyberpunk. The stories largely do not focus on a critique of society through the expression of tech that would solve our particular problems. 40k mostly focuses on what would be cool for sword guy to do, and is largely viewed through the auspices of the top of society (players and great heroes).

An experience of a different setting that is definitely cyberpunk despite also being “sci-fantasy” is Shadowrun. People run around hacking mega-corporations computers by fighting their cyber-dragon firewall. But that also doesn’t fit with my above experimental positions of cyberpunk, its much more an aesthetic choice for a heist game. Nothing wrong with that, but I think it hints towards cyberpunk being at least partly an aesthetic definition of cyberpunk.

That’s not the say the thought is without merit. The focus of cyberpunk could be reflected in our own experience of, say, “having a device in our pocket that can trivially access all of human knowledge but I cannot use this to change my position in society”. This is heavily reflected in Black Mirror. The plot that our protagonists have what would be a life changing device if you were the only one to have it, but are just coasting by (if that) is very cyberpunk and very Black Mirror.

I think one could play around with this concept quite a lot with TV shows, which tend to have a wider variety of focus, vibe, etc with the same initial concept. One could imagine a Doctor Who episode that fills a number of cyberpunk definitions, but Doctor Who does not vibe with cyberpunk generally.

I found I couldn’t do it. I have a set of traumas that means I go into a weird fugue state where I massively undercharge by an order of magnitude and take on every liability. I think it’s some sort of rejection dissociation thingy, or like just trying to end the situation as quickly as possible. This meant I had made very little money and promised a lot, and also came to hate my hobby.

Now that I have a job, the stakes are much lower, I get regular pay, and I also pretty much never have to negotiate directly with clients.

It took a really long time to get that job though, given that job searching also requires skills I do not have

I think there’s also a tonal thing. It’s hard to imagine cyberpunk comedy, at least structurally. The cynicism does disclude the matrix and ready player one.

Maybe a list of concepts and if you tick 7 out of 9 boxes it’s cyberpunk. Things like:

• walking around the internet
• sapient robots
• two pistols
• cynicism
• Seattle
• mega-corporations

I think this winds up being “is a hot dog a sandwich” conversation, trying to cram fluffy social concepts into rigid categories, but even more so with art. Two cyberpunk movies will be a lot further apart conceptually than two separate kilograms of steel.

But also at some point you have to sort your vhs tapes and whether a movie goes in “Action” or “Sci-fi” is a pragmatic decision and not a deep philosophical one

Cube and The Purge are really pushing the limits here. I’m also running out of hard drive space

I will watch every movie in this thread. Election promise.

(I feel like there’s a conversation waiting to happen about what really counts as cyberpunk. Codifying genres is hard, robocop never walks around the internet, blade runner has space travel, is space truckers cyberpunk? I think there does have to be a sort of 80s lo fi vibe of some sort, unless it’s a serious modernisation like Black Mirror.

I feel like you could talk about speculative near future technology being used to critique modern society, but theres also something to be said for trench coats and two pistols. Hypothetically Equilibrium would fill both even though its not particularly cyber. Underworld also checks some of these boxes, despite not being cyberpunk to most people, probably because it pulled a lot of visual style from The Matrix, which is a very trad cyberpunk that transcended (as it were) the genre watching audience.

Is Demolition Man cyberpunk? It has spec tech with both low and high society, but very little walking around the internet and the tech only marginally interacts with the story except as a device to get a 1993 cop into the grim dark future of 2032. It’s not very goth either)

I miss doing this. I pretty much stopped inviting people over once some housemates reacted really badly to it

I remember for quite a while, the only thing keeping me going was spite. The worst people in the country wanted me dead (or at least starving in the street), so I had to keep hanging on or they’d win

Gave it a shot this morning, I could see myself missing buses. However, I do really dislike mobile interfaces. My thumb is too wide to reliably click things

Humans like talking about themselves and relating their experiences to those they’re talking to.

I got a graphics card that somehow bricked hard drives. We went through a lot of hard drives before finding out this was the case. I don’t remember specifics

There is mushroom for research

Someone once paid me to poke them with a stick every time I caught them not doing their assignments. Offloading executive functioning onto someone else can work