I am a monument to all your sins. Alt: @HeraldOfRlyeh
The Primordial Sea of Chaos
Joined November 2014
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I have been anonymously yet reliably informed that I tweet like someone far less attractive than I actually am.
I just want you all to hear about this because producing such a response has been one of the secret goals of this account for some years.
One of the weirdest things to come out of Pondsmith's Cyberpunk getting a popularity resurgence is this weird subset of fans who seem intent on looking at it as though it is a much more "hard scifi" example of the genre than it actually is or was ever meant to be.
Like my dudes, you're talking about a franchise where the so called "AI" are far more like lovecraftian outer gods with a thin veneer of technobabble than they are any kind of believable compsci concept, and yet your complaints are about shit like a mech suit and/or magnet powers?
Presented as additional commentary for your edification.
True, and I'd take it a step further by pointing out that the bulk of those inspirations came out of the New Wave movement of science fiction, which was largely defined by authors who treated the science half of science fiction more as a fast and loose narrative device for exploring social/psychological/philosophical implications rather than a strict tether to the hard sciences.
Some of the people complaining would probably have an aneurysm if they tried reading any PKD for example.
Alright, so I haven't addressed the clarifications of that sophont guy and people of like mind for two reasons. The first is that I originally made this thread as an off hand commentary that I didn't expect to get even 1/100th of this traction, and the second is that I don't think the clarification actually changes anything at all as one should be able to easily derive the problem with it from what I've already said.
That said, I DO appreciate being very clear about what one means, so I'll elaborate now, starting with the gravity powers. So, if we're going to ACTUALLY follow a line of realistic implications of technological breakthroughs, lets go ALL THE WAY for the sake of argument. Yes, realistically speaking, the ability to artificially manipulate gravity has massive implications for what is POSSIBLE within the setting. However, it does NOT imply that those consequences would have meaning overnight. R&D, even in reality, is ludicrously costly in time, money and raw resources, so even before we get into other issues, a perfectly valid answer to why Arasaka, Militech or whoever hasn't mass deployed world changing Clarkian Magitech gravity devices is simply just, "well, they haven't YET and it could very well be an enormous amount of time until they get to every logical endpoint you might have concluded is now POSSIBLE."
But to be fair, what already exists in a one off prototype does seem incredibly useful on its own, so why not mass produce that at least? Well, that's the thing. Since we've already established that this is a setting that isn't above fast and loose explanations for fantastical plot points, this is trivially easy to explain by means the setting has already used. The simplest would be that it's just unstable and/or ludicrously expensive, so they just shelved it in favor of more borgs, smart missiles and Netrunner magic. If you wanna go further, I'm partial to assuming whoever headed up the department that made it got backstabbed in the aftermath by a competing department head who wanted funding for their own pet project instead as it would be incredibly fitting with the setting's corporate themes.
Then of course, we can go yet further with this steelman and point out that, yeah, those potential explanations are all well and good, but they're also just assumptions, so why didn't edgerunners actually GIVE us one. Except that's the easiest to answer because of two things. The first is that the provided explanations don't simply work, they are ALREADY day to day business as usual within the setting. The second is that we are talking about a 10 episode anime, not an Andy Weir novel, whose focus was on other parts of the narrative, so expecting such an easily derived conclusion to be given to you in the form of spelled out proverbial boot to the head is just, frankly, quite silly. Thus, you aren't actually being disappointed by the author's craft but by your own miscalibrated expectations.
Finally, for the Talia + Capri magneto powers, things are even simpler. Everything above applies with the addition that EM is profoundly more well understood than gravity, and with the economic and R&D concerns thrown in, you actually could have whichever corporation start marketing pricy magnetic telekinesis implants tomorrow, and it still wouldn't actually be all that earth shattering or out of character for the setting.
Well, that's depressing.
Rest in peace.
Patrick Stewart, 'Star Trek' Captain and 'X-Men' Superhero, Dies at 86 hollywoodreporter.com/movies…
Seems reading history badly is an even older rule because I REALLY don't know what kind of illiterate you or the dude you're posting have to be to read ye olde mythology and think Aries/Mars and Aphrodite/Venus are meant as advice for good anything, let alone good dating.
And with that little rant out of the way, it seems the algorithm is no longer willing to inundate me with nothing but genre fiction and delightful fanartist trends, instead insisting I witness people who should know better spouting incredibly stupid ideas. So...yeah, I'm going to go actually enjoy the weekend or something.
So, I watched the new Edgerunners. Personally, I thought it was completely fantastic. Really very different from the first one, but I was saying that that's what they SHOULD do since the first time I heard about it.
Unfortunately, of course, a good deal of the discussion I've seen abkut it is extremely tedious and seems to be people who want to sound like intellectual media critics while mostly just throwing in words they don't actually understand the meaning of ('pacing' anyone?) and struggling to convey that it didn't hit them as hard emotionally as the first one. And that last is a fair thing to convey, but fucking hell just honestly say that. It didn't hit me as hard from that specific angle either, and frankly I think it's foolish to expect it to. The first one was pretty much tailor made to have doing that as its highest focus while this one, like I said, was clearly going for a different angle.
Point being, my simple "should you watch" evaluation is that if you want to relive the experience of watching the first one, you'll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you like the setting in general and are interested by a more ensemble cast take looking at different kinds of lives from what the first one looked at, I think it's easily just as worth your time as the first one.
The IXian🥃🧭 retweeted
Why did the Malfoid phenomenon catch fire?
I think it speaks to what people yearn for, and how modern entertainment failed so badly to meet them.
Harry Potter was one of the pillars of the monoculture era. Up until the early 2000s, just about everyone could be counted on to consume the same media—Harry Potter being among them. That means there was already a huge pre-made audience for the coming of Malfoid.
Malfoid rested on a deceptively simple premise: what if Draco Malfoy were female?
That single change had profound ripple effects across the narrative. It unlocked countless story opportunities. It highlighted and deepened the themes of the series. It reignited discussions of the original work. In addition, being a social media phenomenon, it gave fans the feeling of participating in the act of creation.
Beyond that, the implications spoke to the true, the good and the beautiful.
Draco Malfoy was just the guy who happened to get in Harry Potter's way sometimes. Malfoid carried the spark of romance, and from romance came mythopoeia.
The Chosen One and the Noble. The Boy Who Lived and the Death Eater's Daughter. The redemption of Houses Malfoy and Slytherin, and the union with Houses Potter and Gryffindor. The triumph of love over evil, at the beginning of the story and at its end.
Stories like these speak to every soul. And in Malfoid, with social media and AI, these stories can come to life, at the hands of those who have loved the IP, and have come to love it again.
Now think about what modern entertainment does.
These days you see endless reboots, sequels and spin-offs of popular media. There was a huge pre-existing audience, and Big Entertainment works tirelessly to recapture them.
Then they made their changes.
DIE. Censorship. Culture war nonsense.
These changes served no purpose but politics. Instead of deepening the original and building upon it, they sawed off the branches upon which they sat.
They sacrificed the greatness of the original works on the altar of Current Year, and offered to the capricious gods of woke a hollow skinsuit.
Then they expect you to swallow it and smile.
HP fans loved their world. From this love they created the canon of Malfoid, to redeem again their world with love.
Big Entertainment hates the works they have inherited. They will shove that hate down your throat and demand that you bend the knee for this privilege.
What have we learned from this?
People want the familiar. They also want the novel, framed against the familiar. In the novelty they seek the sacred, that which is timeless and universal, that which refreshes and enlarges the spirit.
Nostalgia for its own sake will not ignite a hundred hearts, nor busk a thousand ships to war.
You who would rejuvenate the culture, you who would call yourself an artist, learn well!
Right, so Twitter is annoying, but the greater algorithms beyond Twitter itself have informed me of this whole Malfoid meme going around, and so I have again graced you all with my presence in order to point out that it is kino. Or peak. Or whatever the hip term is these days.
Thank you for reading this Public Service Announcement.
Because that aesthetic, alongside aethetically similar terms like alt/punk/emo/etc had a very prominent presence in 90s through 2000s culture, which is pretty much the most recent generational period that almost everyone agrees was quite nice to live in. In fact, it's that to such an extreme even some people who weren't even born yet act nostalgic for the period.
So in short, it's literally sexual nostalgia.
This is the hardest I've laughed at a piece of Limbus art since the one of Dante burying his face in Garion's chair.
The problem here is actually that you think excess abstraction layers are a source of insight rather than a source of making up bullshit.
Whether women are still on more abstraction layers given this correction is left as an exercise for the reader.
