Knowing the localization and the interaction of everything with each other would have helped me a lot and certainly saved time.

I guess this is the disconnect. I’ve assembled one, but I don’t feel like assembling one necessarily conveys this. The instructions just tell you which part to attach to which other part. It doesn’t explain why much of it is important or how it functions.

The other difference is that I haven’t upgraded any. I have some MK3S+ printers that I are likely to remain that way since the upgrades are so expensive and the process so laborious.

For personal use, I’m waiting on the CORE One from Printed Solid but it’s only available for education, government, etc at the moment.

I’d actually recommend the opposite. Unless you’re a DIY hobbyist who loves taking everything apart and you don’t want to print immediately upon receiving it, it’s worth it to buy the prebuilt Prusa. There are so many many steps in assembling a MK4S that there are that many steps to get something wrong. Better pay a few hundred extra to get one that has been assembled by a more experienced person. And I say that as a makerspace coordinator who works with a lot of 3D printers.

Assembly teaches you how incredibly complicated the assembly is. I’ve adjusted pre-assembled printers with minor inconvenience. But the first one you put together can take more than the estimated 6-8 hours.

I tried, but I just can’t go back and play Oblivion after playing Skyrim with all the quality of life mods. I’m waiting on the Skyblivion release to revisit it.

My significant other and I still talk about how great the internet was in the 90s. You could be yourself without having to mask. You didn’t have to focus on the visual because uploading a picture either wasn’t feasible or just took too long and too much data. No selfies, just being yourself with people you’d probably never meet, discussing mutual interests, and not having your interactions commoditized or interrupted with ads.

I guess the upside to the vast commercialization and commoditization of every last aspect of the internet is that there’s a lot of greedy dystopian conventions to write about. I’ve got a few cyberpunk stories I’m going to include in an upcoming collection that utilize some examples of that issue.

I haven’t read through these, but it sounds like any number of a few patterns I’ve recognized in some older works might be occurring for you.

The “you had to be there” thing is definitely common. It might be more relevant if you got a lot of physical junk mail like decades past. It might be making clever references to things you’re not familiar with or mimicking a style you haven’t seen because its practitioners are gone.

It’s also possible that it wasn’t all that clever to begin with, but it was good filler at the time when there was far less of the subgenre available. They were fiction magazines rather than a thousand online sources and movies and graphic novels, so standards were lower for many people just wanting more.

For anything that was actually good for its time but didn’t aged well, I’ve noticed that they often suffer from being surpassed by the later works that they inspired or break down barriers for. The practical effects of Star Wars were a lot more impressive in 1977 when you saw cheesy rubbery aliens and blocky cardboard robots in earlier scifi works.

I was referring to the 1994 version.

Have you read the Ghost Rider 2099 comics by Len Kaminski? The art is good too, but Kaminski’s writing and cyberpunk stylings is inspired and inspiring.

It’s a great collection. There’s a good variety of topics and styles and if you don’t like one story, there’s always another. Some of my favorite authors are included like Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, Doctorow, and Stephenson. It’s got a nice breadth to it such that lesser known authors could get included rather than only settling for the more well-known names and reprinted stories you might have already read elsewhere.

I’ve got a story in the Big Book of Cyberpunk called Keep Portland Wired. Here’s the blurb:

In an anarcho-capitalist near-future Portland, the government is extinct, corporations own everything, the poor with no credit score can’t even cross the street safely, and dissident punks race stolen rideable drones in dangerous rooftop competitions. Kal, a member of a local punk collective, finds that she can’t escape her past, no matter how hard she glides over the ruins of Portland’s landmarks.

Ironically, instead of “prescribing against,” it seems like you mean proscribing.

I do play games, but I also work on creative projects and watch shows/movies on my computer. I use Illustrator to create typeface designs, graphic design for laser cutting or stickers, 3D modeling and slicing programs for my 3D printer, Google Docs for writing, coding for Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, et al.

Technically, you could say we’re the ones who set since it’s the Earth’s rotation causing the change.