This isn’t the original, but I took the photo and cleaned it up a bit:

That’s interesting! It definitely has some of the visuals often associated with solarpunk (I’m not really a fan of the sleek plastic metropolis look personally, I much prefer solarpunk to be punk and emphasize stuff like creative reuse, but the visual art in the genre is lousy with this stuff and the game makers executed it well from what the trailer shows). I think there’s still room for this to be cyberpunk depending on how real or widely available this area is - if it’s some company park or an enclave of the rich, and wealth disparity still exists, I could see it being cyberpunk in content if not aesthetics at least. It does look very cool, thanks for sharing it!

One of the things I really like about the 40k universe is the incredible scope of the setting. You really can tell just about any story and it fits somewhere in the setting.

I don’t actually know much about necromunda, though I used to love the art and articles about it as a kid. I’m hoping someone else will kick in some recommendations

Make things and fix things. I already do a lot of projects in my free time - I write science fiction, I paint, I photobash art, I do woodworking, furniture restoration, metalworking, repair ewaste to give away, and grow plants. I’d just do a lot more of all that with a bit less life stress around work. If that’s not enough, I’ve been looking at volunteering with the recycling center, and I’d love to go for more hikes with family (currently I only get out on weekends and that’s unfortunately rare, especially with everyone’s conflicting schedules and levels of energy).

When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger is a kind of complicated recommendation for this. It features I think the most trans characters I’ve ever seen in one book, the main character’s girlfriend and most of their acquaintances are trans, and the story treats them decently as people with jobs and lives outside of that part of their identity. The problem, if it is one, is that they’re all sex workers. I can’t remember any trans character in the book who isn’t. This fits the story decently as they’re all living in the Budayeen, the entertainment and criminal quarter of an unnamed Middle-Eastern city, the only place where they, and small-time criminals like the protagonist, can exist with a minimum of hassle. But there’s some complicated history and pop-cupture entanglements around being trans and being a sex worker (and the limited other roles historically available to them) which might change how audiences read this forty years later. I honestly have no idea. I quite liked the book, it’s weird in places (for other reasons) but that’s what I read cyberpunk for, and it has a bunch of awesome cyberpunk concepts, a unique setting, and some creative misuses of technology.

The Murderbot books feature a pretty diverse spread of characters, gay, nonbinary, and also people in polyamorous relationships, though that stuff usually doesn’t impact the main plot. Murderbot itself is about as asexual as it’s possible to get which probably explains that a bit. Their tone isn’t super cyberpunk but the themes and concepts very much are.

I think the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic or Burning Chrome has a pair of guards, one of whom is trans, but it’s clearly been awhile since I read it. Gibson’s Sprawl books all had a kind of fascination with extending cosmetic surgery past sex and race, identity being as changeable as hairstyle, so it comes up in passing occasionally.

I don’t know why I needed you to point this out, but I appreciate it!

If I remember right that’s actually the bad guy’s gun and it fires bullets that chase you! (At approximately the speed a human can run). Its silly and great and if I was remaking it for a modern setting, it’d be some kind of launcher/targeter for tiny suicide drones.

The book is excellent and the audiobook narrated by Paul Giamatti is so good it ruined the text for me - I couldn’t do the voices as well in my head as he could. First and only time that’s happened.

Whichever form you take, the book is very worth reading

This is the most elaborate photobash I’ve ever seen. Huge scope but the details fit together so carefully. The layout and colors are excellent

That makes a lot of sense!

Oh man, I had this on my list of cyberpunk animes to watch every since it was mentioned on the post about Streets of Fire influencing cyberpunk. I got my SO and the friend we watch TV with every week to watch the first episode with me.

They refuse to watch the rest. It’s amazing and really bad and I have to know what happens next. (At least it’s given me some bargaining power since I can always offer it as a condition when we’re negotiating the next show to watch).

It’s just baffling all around - when the girl the main character likes is gonna hook up with another guy he uses the mech to explode through the wall and grab her and carry her off like fuckin king kong, and somehow that’s okay? They discover that all of the world is just their city, a simulation on a spaceship so the plot shifts to them deciding to use the rest of the spaceship for filming a low budget movie? He’s on the run from the military and escapes into the computer core, so the lead guy is like, don’t shoot in there, use your beam swords (or something like that) and all the mechs suddenly draw light sabers.

Who even is the military? They dress and act like a conventional earth military during the coup but apparently they’ve been fighting the spaceship for control - do they answer to anyone? They don’t appear to be from this level, they’re fighting their way upwards(?). And they know there’s another ship they need to fight soon, so they’ve wisely decided to shoot their own ship up first so the enemy can’t, I guess?

It’s a trip and I really should pick it up again.

Or Escape from New York but with some money instead of a president

I completely did. He did an excellent job chewing on all the scenery. It’s a legit cast - if they’d had some imagination in the sets and a budget for decent props it could have been awesome

Thanks for letting me know about this community!

I’m not sure if Runaway (1984) counts as cyberpunk but I think it could. It’s like the one film I’d actually like to see remade.

The premise is solid, it follows a police unit dedicated to wrangling or disabling runaway robots as they come to realize that their most recent robotic troublemakers aren’t just running amok from glitches but have been deliberately sabotaged in order to conduct a series of murders.

I really like that the runaway squad isn’t treated as glamorous work. The closest fit I can think of would be Animal Control. Not something to earn the envy and respect of beat cops, perhaps. I think that does a good job of setting the scope of the film and nicely illustrating that the protagonists are both in over their heads, and still the only ones qualified to unravel this mystery.

And the film gets a few other things very right - their ‘floaters’ are a downright prescient prediction of modern consumer drones, right down to how they’re used. The digitized records, voice synthesis, and other predictions of the future are pretty solid. I like the gear and precautions they take to mask and insulate themselves. The bad guy’s prototype gun that shoots rounds that chase people is actually a fun concept, might work well as a flavor of tiny suicide drones since it seemed to move at about running pace anyways.

It’s mostly let down by the setting, sets, and limitations of the props/technology.

All these predictions of the future where robots are everywhere bounce hard off the boringly 1980s daytime aesthetics and the tiny robots. It’s not trying to be the future, really, or it’s not trying very hard. The robots especially are kind of disappointing. They’re… cute, and Tom Selleck tries really hard to look intimidated by two-foot-tall robots on little roller skate wheels in several tense scenes but there’s only so much he can do.

I think with some modern cyberpunk aesthetics, some updated understanding of technology, and some more elaborate robot designs/malfunction scenarios, it could be a really good flick. Maybe borrow the creepy android from Megan for the scene where the robot housekeeper has killed its family and the protagonist has to sneak in to save the crying baby before the robot goes after it, and you’d have something really tense. (The current version has Tom Selleck sneaking around a dark house, trying to outsmart a boxy little two foot cube holding a gun).

I suppose I’ve described a Bad Metal movie. You know, I think I’d like someone to fund that instead please. Or at least finish the books.

It’s a lot of fun! And with how small the electronics are these days, there’s tons of space for a second purpose (storage, mini fridge, etc). It can also be done for very cheap (around $50), if you have the time and space to store up some materials.

I’m used to finding that when someone tries to convince leftists that voting is pointless they turn out to have a post history full of awful stuff, so there’s a kind of instinctive distrust when I see it here. I know you are all acting in good faith and I’m here to learn so after one of the first anti-voting threads on anarchism I’ve kept quiet and watched to see what I’m missing. I don’t want to brigade a community I’m pretty clearly not part of. There’s a lot of anarchism that appeals to me, and I don’t disagree with a recent argument that choosing between one genocide and two is a crappy choice. But I also can’t shake the thought that one genocide is less than two. And if a vote is all it takes to make such a huge difference (for the second group), I can take the time. It won’t be my only action that year. Maybe I’m not fully compatible with anarchism - I’m not a great fit for most systems I guess, but I’m happy to work with pretty much anyone when it comes to human rights and ecological stuff. I also think I agree with Povoq and the others, we may learn important lessons from actively moderating a contentious space like this.

I love this old art - it has so much character. It kinda reminds me of Paranoia cover art. Similar vintage I suppose

Very cool!!

Hi, it’s been awhile since you asked, but if you’re still interested, I set up that blog on the instance’s movim platform where I’m posting all my IRL projects, making stuff, fixing stuff, cooking, etc. Thanks for getting me thinking about this, it’s really nice to have one place where all my projects are organized together, and where the posts are backed up off corporate internet. Plus movim is quite nice (everyone using lemmy from slrpnk.net has one) and add free.

https://movim.slrpnk.net/blog/jacobcoffinwrites%40slrpnk.net

Right now it’s got all my old projects (I updated a few posts as I went) but I’m working on write ups for a few new ones. Thanks!