#Where's my cyberpunk transhumanism?

[astolentoetag]

Scrolling through Facebook memories and find one from '06 about asking people what they remember about me. Most commenters I remembered who they are but one I do not. Nor do I know if I met them in highschool or college. Their comment was just about how I confused the English teacher with weird questions. That unfortunately does not narrow it down. That does not narrow it down at all.

To further muddle things they seemed to either already have or be in the process of transitioning and I can't tell which direction because they're pretty androgynous. I have no clue who this person is and I feel exceptionally guilty for forgetting someone after asking them what they remembered about me even if it's nearly two decades later.

Brains suck. I want a hard drive with 8k uhd timestamped recordings in chronically order. And spark notes for every month.

#yes I was that strange kid in school who just wasn't looking at the same world as everyone else #I don't like asking typical questions #how would you show affection if you were a cat? #undiagnosed kid #undiagnosed adult #health insurance is bullshit #how many books do you flit between at a time? #what's your random collection? #Where's my cyberpunk transhumanism? #if you were a wild dog would you trust people? why or why not? #if you play with my hair and tell me I'm pretty I'll probably do what you want trust or not. #why remember good things when you can remember trauma? #cats are awesome #fucking love dogs #we do not deserve dogs

[menacingmetal]

Yknow when some trans ppl realise they're trans they start to feel confident in clothing of their assigned gender when they didn't at all b4. That would be me if i was a robot

#i was thinking abt gender nothing body and what could possibly achieve that bc even as a human i still would feel uncomfortable with it #but if i was a robot i wouldnt mind being cunty like id even like to be a robot with curves #metal talks #or more like #metals cursed thoughts #ugh just wanna be a robot #im literally trying to sleep and this is where my mind goes #TRANSHUMANISM OF THE ROBOT VARIETY IF ONLY U WERE REAL why cant cyberpunk be real i hate flesh i want to be strength and certainty of steel

[obsidiangx]

cyberpunk at its core is about speculative dystopia. fantastical developments that should benefit society but exist in a system fundamentally designed to beat people down. alluring transhumanism imprisoned by money, class, and other axes of oppression. it's about the real world issue of new and exciting technology corrupted by the world that produces it.

armored core stands out against the common war stories in mecha. it's about gig workers risking their lives thanklessly to kill poor people just to survive and get ahead. even while the entire system around them crumbles

dorohedoro is a story about a stratified society where incredible magic that could be shared to benefit others is used in petty arguments and 'experiments' on those treated as subhuman. it's about how hierarchy creates struggle for everyone, but the blood and tears always runs down to the bottom.

i do love the basic cyberpunk aesthetic. the edgerunners kind, the blade runner kind, like ghost in the shell and gunnm. sci-fi, cybernetics, robots and cities are dear to me. but when you put on the skin of a dystopian genre without knowing what the bones look like, you make something that isn't just bad. it's insulting.

i live here. i know how it goes. the robot dogs are cops and my smartphone was obsolete when i bought it. the air quality is garbage and my health is a mess because my government treats corporations more like people than me, even though we can magically cure or prevent almost any ailment. there are more vacant houses than homeless people. it's theft to take food out of the garbage.

cyberpunk is a city full of vacant buildings and streets full of poor people. it's a raspberry pi duct taped to a cybernetic arm to intercept advertisements before they reach your brain. it's a gig economy that forces you to work overtime just to get paid enough to eat. isn't it frustrating? isn't it frustrating that we have to live like this? flying cars, body augments, virtual reality, and we still live like this.

#cyberpunk #armored core #dorohedoro #gunnm #edgerunners #gits #blade runner

[simon-roy]

The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).

All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?

OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!

Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.

Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!

Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.

As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.

At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:

This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.

As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).

But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.

Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...

I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...

My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:

THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...

THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.

But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.

THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!

#sciencefiction #science fiction #book recommendations #jack vance #larry niven #jerry pournelle #simon roy #griz grobus #charles stross #dragon masters #william gibson #bruce sterling

[invested-in-your-future]

How do you plan of handling Yang's disability?

Oh boy, where to begin?

I think to start, it's important to remember just how fetishized the idea of "prosthetic/cybernetic limbs" is overall. And not just in stuff like the cyberpunk genre, but even going as far back as major wars and the need to trivialize soldier injuries. If you can "fix them back up" - it's alright, right?

It's pretty common to treat prosthetics as "superpower". Cyberpunk genre is filled with cool prosthetic gun arms and the like, which is part of the genre, I get that. And there's interesting way somewhere in there about exploring concept of transhumanism.

But when it comes to trauma - it is not a "superpower" or "upgrade".

There aren't many ways to "win" at writing a prosthetic arm storyline.

It's why, when V4 was coming up, I did not want the show to give her one. And not just because very few fictional characters go through something like that and NOT use this trope.

In a lot of ways, "writing a prosthetic" can turn the story away from "writing about a character who lost an arm" and into "writing AROUND them losing an arm" - so the the characters in the story (and thus writers) and the audience don't have to "deal with it".

The writer doesn't have to think about all the small details when setting a scene, like "now how would this character open a door" or even stuff like "can this character stumble or fall and how writing that would work". Let alone anything with action because the mind will ALWAYS jump over the fact that there's only one, for example, arm.

I remember imagining a lot of mistakes a show could make and RT walked right into most of them - pretending everything was normal, hiding her prosthetic arm (in the story or marketing) behind clothing, NEVER mentioning it at all, nor dealing with experience and trauma that a loss like that causes (because, as RT people put it, "It would be boring"). They even blew past my lowest expectations by literally having a sexual predator character compare PTSD to fear of MICE.

There are so many ways to mess up that it's genuinely scary. The arm is this "ultra-special-magic one-of-a-kind" thing? Pitfall. The prosthetic is an upgrade that allows a person to do something better than before? Pitfall. The story becomes more about the prosthetic than the character's experiences of using a prosthetic? Pitfall. Even the commonly used trope of "oh wow, this prosthetic is JUST like the real thing" IS a pitfall (if you are writing a prosthetic that is exactly like the real thing, then you are effectively writing around it and are just doing "it magically grew back" trope but with more words).

And that's before even getting into stuff like psychological effects such an experience causes or even less thought about physiological ones like phantom pain (if it's written as psychological effect? That's another insta-failure - the pain is an actual physical sensation tied to how the nervous system functions - people just LOVE throwing it together with psychological effects because it's the least researched part of such trauma and by doing so partake in little bit of ableism by implying people IMAGINED it)

It might sound counterproductive, but adding at least a somewhat accurate portrayal of the difficulties and differences of using a prosthetic IS important - the worst thing one can do, IMO, is to erase the trauma by pretending it's "fixed" or "normal" now.

Trauma doesn't make you LESS of a person (unlike how people at RT seem to think). And neither does using or not using prosthetics (unlike how people at RT seem to think)

Now, mind you, I am not going to go - "nobody should ever write prosthetics into the story". Escapist fiction is fine, and empowering stories are fine, but what's important is to think about how it fits - maybe the setting requires it? Maybe characters are going through the idea of using it as part of dealing with what happened?

The key question is always WHY. Why does Yang need one? Is it part of her internal struggle? Is it something she is coerced into by people around her? Does she feel like she needs something like that to "appear normal to people who would otherwise have a problem with her"? (Expectations of society overall are a pretty decent angle to go about writing something like this) Why do prosthetics exist in the story? Are they there just to be cool or the presence in the narrative is used as part of some wider theme?

I am TRYING to write her as someone who has to live with what happened. If there's a prosthetic, then it's an additional tool, but NOT a solution to her problems. The issue with Yang is that she WANTS a quick solution, in part wanting to buy into the illusion of "normalcy". She is also someone easily frustrated when that simply is not working as intended. She does not handle change well, she does not handle self-introspection well and she does not handle being forced to actually do any sort of soul-searching well. Because its always easier to invest into routine, escaping into sense of repetition rather than to take a look inside.

Just like Ruby longs for simple explanations to complex moral dilemmas, Yang wants quick solutions to complex issues.

So, if anything. she is not just going to plop a prosthetic arm in, hide it under her clothes and forget about it.

#rwby #rwde #yang xiao long

[fierceawakening]

I know I do be going off in the tags of that post. But no no no you're absolutely right of about the accidental trans allegory presented by the Phyrexians. But the idea of it actually goes a lot deeper & is something a lot of people are getting because lets face it people take in media at a surface level most of the time. (New) Phyrexians at their core are rife with themes that fit into the "transhumanism" genre. & as an AVID lover of Sci-fi, Horror & Cyberpunk genres & as a trans dude, I can soundly say that a lot of modern takes on transhumanisim (usually in these genres) are a lot of times accidentally (& sometimes intentionally) a trans allegory.

The Phyrexians DELIGHT my trans ass to no end.

WotC likely did not MEAN for it but boy oh boy will I take my trans allegory crumbs where I can get them.

Absolutely!

I’m not just enby but also disabled and have implants. I have very complicated feelings about this, but it ABSOLUTELY informs my perspective on the idea that bodies altered through surgery are mutilated, lesser, or fundamentally impure.

This IS my body. This has BEEN my body for longer than the one I grew has been. What does it mean that I was no longer physically “pure” before I even hit adulthood?

There’s no pristine original and defiled copy. There’s me then and there’s me now.

ANY notion of purity, whether it’s religious “purity culture” or cis or nondisabled people’s notion of undefiled bodies, is a trap. One that demonizes people at worst and pities and condescends to them at best.

As long as people keep doing this over and over and not seeing their mistake, ESPECIALLY as long as they keep doing it in the name of politics that *will never* stop reducing to real world fascism…

…I’ll be over here wearing “Monster” on my name tag and asking people what the hell makes them so scared.

Gay as in happy, sure.

ALSO Phyrexian as in fuck you.

[tatoleee]

(Kaoru from The Gene of AI)

I started watching The Gene of AI on a lark because the premise reminded me somewhat of Detroit: Beyond Human. It's sci-fi, mentions advanced AI, and there's a philosophical transhumanism element, so that falls into my interests somewhere, but totally didn't expect it to approach gender at all. Consider me pleasantly surprised and my interest peaked.

During Episode 2, Risa, Hikaru's assistant, returns to the office to find him giving his friend Kaoru an examination. Due to her obvious interest in him and the fact he's touching Kaoru's chest, this flusters and annoys Risa prompting her to ask him about their relationship later in the episode. Hikaru mentions they are former coworkers, and showing her a picture, Risa is surprised to see Kaoru presenting male. When asked about their gender, Hikaru says if questioned Kaoru would probably say they are neither and muses they are trying to move past these concepts. Also, I am referring to Kaoru using They/Them pronouns because Hikaru does the same and I don't believe it's stated for certain anywhere, at least so far. If this changes, I will update this.

In this world, life has evolved to where humans exist alongside human/machine hybrids with advanced AI. The core story follows Hikaru, a doctor treating the latter, and his exploits. Kaoru is a side character introduced early as his friend still working at the mysterious lab apparently overseeing or otherwise involved with the larger AI happenings of the world. Even though this type of setting is perfect for explorations of gender, you rarely see it. This has always frustrated me about these types of stories. If there was any setting perfect for exploring something like this it's futuristic, sci-fi, and/or cyberpunk worlds. It's infuriating to me there are fantastical universes with interplanetary travel, robots that are basically artificial humans, and even space magic, but gender identity and transitioning between it is never even approached. Though, I suppose that's a rant for another day.

Anyway, I’m not familiar with the source material, so I can’t say one way or the other if it will come up again or be handled respectfully and meaningfully, but I’m hopeful. If I find out it doesn't, I will update this post.

During their initial interaction with Risa, Kaoru mentions body modifications and how their appearance wasn’t always the same. Knowing about their situation, rewatching this interaction holds new meaning. Clearly Kaoru is happier presenting female, describing it as fun, and likes the attention their attractiveness gets from other men. They are happier. While I don’t know the intention of the creators, this reads as joy found after transitioning into their true self. It makes me smile to see things like this in the media I consume.

Of course, I’m worried this will turn into a tragedy or something else equally horrible, but time will tell (or I can go read the manga, I guess). Here’s hoping this isn’t the case. Given how these topics are usually handled, perhaps it’s best if it’s never mentioned again, but I feel so horrible saying that. It's just I worry about again enjoying a piece of media showing a tiny breadcrumb of anything queer only to have it ruined later. Having a clearly Queer series end with the main characters not only surviving but marrying and finding happiness last season may have ruined me. Or perhaps it wasn’t my being ruined, but it proved to me I shouldn’t settle for less. There are queer stories out there. It would be nice if more of them found their way into popular media though without the negative baggage typically forced on them.

Will continue watching this to see where it goes. Also, the queer series I mentioned above was Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. Go watch it, just be warned, if you have abandonment issues like me the end of Episode 17 may traumatize you, but the overall end is worth it.

#the gene of ai #ai no idenshi #kaoru #trans #non binary #lgbtqia #queer #transgender character

[junebugwriter]

Transition II

I am officially on estrogen.

What a fucking revelation. What a strange turn of events my life has taken. I was minding my own business, drifting aimless through my life... okay, that's a bit of an overstatement. I had direction. I was working, I was doing my PhD, I was getting things done -- and then boom, I realize for the first time in 35 years, I am not a man. I am a woman. And then I derailed for months, until I could get back to a place where I could function normally, and now 8 months later, I'm on fucking hormones.

WTF. I'm going to hack my biology with science! I am going to become the cybernetic future bitch that I always wished I could be!

I got into Ph.D. work focusing first and foremost on transhumanist philosophy. That was what really got me into this life track. I played games like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid, games that really interrogate the cyberpunk present/future and the role of technology and the human body. I read tons of Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov and watched movies and tv shows that questioned the nature of humanity in a world where technology begins to affect every aspect of our everyday lives. I wondered about the nature of the soul, and how tech develops and enhances the human body, and how the body and soul are not two things but one and the same, a unity that cannot be broken. That turned into a focus on disability advocacy, because disabled people wrestle with their embodied existence in a radical and evocative way, and shifted my focus. But I never lost my passion for transhumanism.

And now, I will be one. In understanding that I am transgender, that the very identity that belongs to me is in a transitional state, that to live up to the identity that I know myself to have I will have to transition from one presentation to another, to the extent that I will change my very biology in order to do so... that's a reality more powerful than anything I have ever accomplished before. This isn't theory for me, not anymore. And transhumanist scholars--the big-name ones, guys like Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil--have no fucking clue. They're focused on AI, how we'll achieve superintelligence, or how we'll be romantic partners with robots when the real people on the front lines of the transhumanist vanguard are TRANS PEOPLE. We are using technology to enhance our lives, along with our bodies! Ask any trans person. They'll say that they'd rather die than detransition, because that's how much it means to live in a way that aligns with our identities.

So I'm on estrogen now, because that's the best path towards becoming the person I've always known I was, to living in a world in the way that I choose, to enhance my life through the tools at my disposal. I will become the cyborg trans girl I've always wanted to be.

#transition #transgender #lgbtqia #pride #transhumanism #technology #academia #blog #personal #lgbtq+ pride #theology #philosophy #estrogen #hormones #hrt #hormone replacement treatment

[jeff-from-marketing]

Oh hey this blog exists!

So Paizo just introduced a new ruling for Pathfinder 2e that allows players to effectively completely decouple stat bonuses from ancestries, letting players do whatever. Personally I think this is a great change for a variety of reasons, but this has brought up an argument that doesn’t sit right with me. Never has.

In short, it’s the argument of “stop bringing real world politics into my games!”

I understand where this is coming from, the world is a scary place sometimes and it’s nice to have a space to escape it all entirely. Though unfortunately this argument is often used by those who simply aren’t the greatest kind of people, and often have some level of bigotry or general bias against certain groups of people. But I’m not here to talk about that, not now at least.

No, what I want to talk about is the idea that media just simply should not have any form of politics in it what-so-ever. Now ignoring the fact that this stifles out so much potential for storytelling for a moment, you cannot have media without politics. Well, you can, but you’re probably playing Solitaire. And I’m sure there’s some cultural context there that I’m unaware of that someone could bring up and prove me wrong on that front. 

See, the thing is: art and media are made by people. People have political views on things. People will often put those views into their work, most often subconsciously without fully realising, but also sometimes very much intentionally. People tend to create (and go to) media that aligns with their own ideologies. You’re not going to find someone that’s gay producing media that puts something like conversion therapy in a positive light for example. The thing is, media never became political, nor did it ever stop being political. People just don’t want politics that don’t align with their own politics being involved.

To rattle off a few examples (and probably preach to the choir a little)

Lancer, an RPG that heavily condemns capitalism, the concept of “infinite growth,” war, etc. But also heavily promotes full autonomy of your body, being allowed to do whatever you’d like with it. Including becoming a catgirl. This is canon.

Cyberpunk, both the genre and the Mike Pondsmith setting. I shouldn’t even have to elaborate on this, but it’s absolutely an indictment on capitalism and rampant consumerism, as well as being a warning as to what happens when corporations and the rich get too much power. Not to mention topics of transhumanism and the sense of self.

Star Trek, again I should not have to elaborate on this one. From the very beginning it’s been absolutely filled to the brim with politics covering so many different topics.

His Dark Materials, absolutely contains commentary against organised religion.

Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Rising, hell the former is all about espionage for fuck’s sake, and the latter has the main antagonist being a US senator who wants to Make America Great Again through war profiteering, and is again absolutely a statement on the military industrial complex.

Dungeons & Dragons, has one hell of a loaded political history if you look into it (satanic panic, anyone?) to say nothing of more recent controversies.

Fallout, do people really think the saying “War. War never changes.” is just there to sound cool? Seriously, not even going to question the world coming to an end through nuclear war? No?

Baldur’s Gate 3, has a whole thing involving an encampment of druids and tiefling refugees seeking asylum. 

Divinity: Original Sin 2, once again going against organised religion.

The Witcher, I should really only need to bring up the elves to make my point here, but there’s a lot more than just that.

I’m going to stop there for the safety of my own sanity, but hopefully you get the idea. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but even just this small list spans roughly 60 years, I probably could go a lot further back if I took the effort to do so. Media didn’t suddenly start becoming political, and media won’t stop being political. Because all media is political. To truly think that should not be the case, is to say we should not have art.

[pixeltheydm]

Hi, I'm Pixel

I'm a 28 year old trans woman, professional game master, and TTRPG game creator living in Sydney, Australia!

I've been around Tumblr for... dear god, way too long, doing other things with other names, and now I'm here. Why? Every other hellsite is broken, or empty, or just not fun to be on as a professional.

While I don't promise to be particularly active at this URL, I figure it'd be nice to have a presence here on Tumblr so I can tell you about who I am, what my games are, and what I'm up to!

My favourite game systems are:

Eclipse Phase (with a particular love of second edition)

Call of Cthulhu (7th edition)

Dead Belt (the solo RPG for space cowboys)

Pathfinder (second edition)

Dungeons & Dragons (primarily a 5th edition GM)

Eclipse Phase is a clear favourite for me though. You can tell because I have a sideblog where I publish short stories about my OCs, called @transhuman-tales!

As for the games I make, I'm particularly proud of CYBERCRACK: Soy Runners, my whacked-out game of cyberpunk fantasies. It uses my own flavoured d6 die pool system, and the Quick 'n' Dirty quickstart edition is available here.

Anyway, that's who I am!

#ttrpg community #about me #pixeltheydm

[translationandbetrayals]

Mamoru Oshii: the mind behind three masterpieces.

Fine, let’s talk about this guy. I recently watched both Angel’s Egg (1985) and Jin Roh (1999) afterwards, and I liked them a lot. Then I realized that both films had been made (directed the first, wrote the second) by the same guy who directed Ghost In The Shell (1995) !! Incredible.

Oshii was born in 1951, in Ōta. He studied at Tokyo Keizai University, and has been in the industrie since 1977. He directed the first OVA project to be released !! The science fiction miniseries ‘Dallos’ (1983), which tells the story of the people of the moon, who discover an ancient alien structure. That alone is something truly important for the anime industry, the OVAs would be a format that would change the way in which anime could be viewed and consumed, and also giving much more freedom to its creators in storytelling. Maybe that’s why Angel’s Egg is given so much credit for. When it was released, it truly gave him an infinite amount of recognition for years to come. It is considered one of the greatest animes in all time. But let’s wait a minute to explain why, and let’s continue in our story…

After 10 years of filmmaking, including the OVA series Patlabor (1988) and his incursions in live action films with The Red Spectacles (1987) and Talking Head (1992); he got to make one of the most influential anime films ever: Ghost In The Shell (maybe more for my generation? Or for the cyberpunk lovers I guess), an adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga, and one of the reasons of why I’m here in this course. After that, in 1999 (the year I was born), he directed Jin Roh, the last one of the Kerberos Trilogy (which includes The Red Spectacles too).

So, we got to the point when I can talk about this films. You know, I haven’t watched every anime he has done, and some of them I just knew about, but here I am, to get to know them, and watch them when I got the time. I want to talk briefly about what I consider are his themes that are followed through this specifical three works: Angel’s Egg, Ghost In The Shell and Jin Roh, since they are the ones that I have watched. I find it really interesting that since Angel’s Egg we can see some of the most dense existential dreads that we got to witness in anime. This movie is showing us an allegoric depiction of life after death, of meeting our extinction, and not knowing what we can do about it. It’s certainly referencing through beatiful metaphors (like the shadows of the fishes, the dead armies) the drop of the atomic bomb, an event that got humanity to meet the face of what apocalypse looked like, like never before in our recent history. There is an scene where one of the characters (the male one, who moves along with a crosslike weapon) retells the story of Noah’s ark, creating a reflexion about the uncertainty and impending doom that is felt when discovering something that is far beyond human comprehension. He decides to kill all hopes. I’m not spoiling you any more details jj

Then we got Ghost in The Shell, an exploration on what we call human, and again, an existential crossroad where our protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi, a quintessential cyborg cop, faces an AI that is hacking human consciousness, using people to trascend itself and becoming something else. Here we got one of the greatest scenes in all anime, which is a silent ship, coursing a river through the city buildings, and Motoko watching some other “version” of herself (another cyborg with the same body as her) through a glass, and not knowing how to feel about it. The music in this scene is beatiful, I mean it’s so iconic, like ritual chants begging to the new gods of the cyberpunk for mercy, or to get us into this new transhuman world. Well of course it has amazingly animated action scenes near the end, like the scene in wich she has to fight with a flying tank (?), but it’s the end dialogue between her and the AI that has got us in love with it, and with anime in general. In a final act for liberation (and with some sexual innuendos here and there) Motoko and the other get fusioned, creating a new being virtually invencible and far more powerful than before, in the body of a child Motoko. Also, her mate Batou is cool af, and also super cute, like he takes care of some basset hounds (same dogs Mamoru has) and is clearly in love with Motoko, she just isn’t human anymore, I’m sorry buddy.

Finally, we have Jin Roh, a story about a soldier (some ultra heavy metal cop in an atompunk gear like wtf such a cool design) who can’t shoot a girl in a terrorist attack, she gets blown up, he feels guilty about it. If you blink it you miss it, but it’s settled in an alternative Japan where, well, Germany won the Second World War, so Japan is now a fascist state, with brutal police repression to its inhabitants. It’s the fifties, so you can expect a noir type story with some mentally tormented detective and the classic femme fatale that gets him into madness. It delivers. Here, our protagonist Fuse gets in love with a woman who is really resemblant of the girl he just saw die. She’s a terrorist too. With some complicated political intricacies here in there, and some beatiful dream sequences (ok the wolf scene is really gory but so good it got me shivers !!), the film delivers an excellent psichological thriller which is, again, more about the mind that it is about the action. But the world building is GOD.

And we could extrapolate that to all his works, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, I mean, Angel’s Egg creates a world that we never get to know much about, that we are shown to be meeting its end, and it does in a beatifully animated way, like really, and the colors, the art direction, it’s really captivating to the eye and to the mind, and it themes get all in your mind for days. Same with Ghost In The Shell, a pivotal point in cyberpunk storytelling, that got an american remake with Scarlett Johanson that I really like too ! (you are free to hate me.) Finally, with Jin Roh we got a change in the directing seat, but we can see his trace in all the animation style and the tone of the story, where we can only get an ambivalent ending, with a heavy pessimistic touch to it.

We can only say that the mind of this director has got into ours, through his work, which is really important to anime, and also, pure works of art.

Jorge Leiva

#Anime #Manga #Japan #personalstory #essay #Sci-Fi #submission

[arealhumanipromiseu]

To my noexistant readers, here is what I'm working on (all titles are subject, and likely, to change)

True alchemy

World I'm building for anthology type stories. Has the premis of people being able to alter atomic structure through mental equations. Ideas around folly and hubris. Body horor and nuclear fallout abound.

K1D

Cyberpunk found family. Transhumanism elements, perspective character is a recently born Android who has some of the most emotionally (and physically) damaged role models.

Stuffed up supers

Posted about them before. Superpowers that dont suit the people who have them. Love the charicters and world im building, no idea what to do with them. Working on each if their (mostly)tragic bacstories first to see if any ideas form.

magicae ex machina

Wild mage and steampunk technician work on teleportation for a corupt government. Betrayal! Secrets! Drama! (Has my hands down favourite charicters to write but I already have a spreadsheet reference of political relations and the background is a lot)

Well sh*t Sherlock

Current hyperfixation. Mystery where the protagonist knows she's in a story. Notices deathflags around her mentor and wants to solve the murder before it can happen. No Sherlock is not a character, I just think that title is funny.

#writing #writeblr

[valenshawke]

Weekly Writing Report - October 28, 2022

Okay, so I missed last week because I actually had stuff going on that weekend and met up with one of my less-than-a-handful of friends in the area. And work. Fuck work. Am I right?

That said, the theme this week is! As plans will go, plans will go awry.

That quote, brought to you by retired pro-wrestler Magnum TA (Terry Allen) who was likely to have a run with the NWA World Heavyweight Title in the mid 80s but crashed his Porsche into a telephone pole. Nothing that drastic or awful. Rather, my initial plan of writing a thousand words to one of fic got completely altered.

Clare-and-Miata-Meet: You know what I did? I FINALLY MADE THE FUCKING OUTLINE! And without the pressure of writing it well and the confidence boost in seeing how much I actually HAVE accomplished, I feel better about getting this draft done. One of the issues I was having was I never felt like I had enough actual drama. There were things I had referencing Clare fearing and, while I have to rely on witness narrator almost, I’m now able to put in places or have Miata make comments that play into one of Clare’s worries. The other is to have conflict between Clare and Miata that is more parental in nature. I came up with a scene that now directly references another scene in a different fic. Lastly, one of the things I have problems with the working draft is I do not reference Teresa enough. The outline now has more references to Teresa and ideas on how to integrate thoughts about her in the main draft. Honestly? I probably DID write a thousand words to the outline. Well, let’s see. Closer to 2500 words. So I made a word count for both weeks! I’m still dealing with a bit of writer's block but at least I have a scene order and how things have to progress so it’s just a matter of staring and working on scenarios.

As for the rest. No real progress. The lack of work on the “original” works is bothersome, but I don't know. If I’m confident with the above, I am honestly terrified here. I think what happened is when I watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (good series), in the first 5 minutes I was going, “Okay, there's Blade Runner, Total Recall, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Robocop, Psycho-Pass, Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix, and Neuromancer.” I cannot help but look at either ideas (Transhumanism or the Vampire story) and think they are pathetically derivative and I keep on remembering where I saw a certain idea and it’s like… is there anything compelling here? I truly do not know. Yeah, yeah suck it up and just write the outlines. Actually, I probably need to do more with the Transhumanism story and do some world-building concurrently. 

So ends this week’s report.

#Val's writing tag #Val's Weekly Writing Report

[hum2020philip]

Simulation Transhumanism

In April of 2003 Philosophy Quarterly published a Nick Bostrom article where he argues, is reality actually a computer simulation. The idea while modern has its precursors. Some quite old like the ancient Hindu concept of Maya. Maya, from the Sanskrit माया, situates that all of reality is an illusion, a magic trick, but most people will be more familiar with the 1999 summer blockbuster The Matrix directed by the Wachowski brothers. My photo set explores the Simulation with photographs taken within a video game called Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 explores an idea adjacent to the simulation called Transhumanism. Transhumanism, while huge in scope, is predicated on the idea of surpassing human limitations with technological innovations like cybernetic prosthetics, neuron implants, and even downloading your soul into a microchip and uploading your consciousness into a new body at will. All this is possible in the Simulation.

It starts with a granularity. It’s just points of cascading points which merge and form into a vague pixelation. It’s almost amorphous, but then clarity. The familiar but vague shape of man begins to appear. The data congeals and the resolution increases and something like photorealistic reality emerges. An upload bar appears showing a soul being partially cast into the simulation.

The image of man as we know him shines forth. He is dejected and slumped. The landscape is an industrial wastescape of smog and iron, a ruined civilization because man could never imagine himself in paradise. Still there is a hierarchy of haves and have nots denoted in luxury motor vehicles. The scene glitches and narrows, but then we look down upon a the endless city of simulation.

1. Dejected man. 2. Uploading Soul. 3. Luxury. 4.Wastescape. 5. City of Simulation. 6. City of Simulation Glitch. 7. The Cast of Man. 8. The Form in Formless Numbers. 9. Johnny

[cyberpunk-2077-confessions]

Confession #248 :

One of my gripes with Cyberpunk 2077 is that transhumanism is an accepted thing and nobody cares about having implants. I'd rather see people for and against implants and sacrificing your humanity. A lot of other media in the cyberpunk genre has this. It would amke the game much more interesting. I know about the tabletop origin of the game which kinda thematizes this stuff better with the humanity stat after getting an implant. This is why it even baffles me more that V after a full body conversion isn't going into cyberpsychosis. Even Shadowrun has a mechanic where cybernetics have an impact on your gameplay. Why are the people of Night City and the world in general so okay with this stuff? I'd love to see more cnflict regarding the "what makes you human" thing.

#cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2077 confession #cp 2077 #transhumanism #cyberpunk #shadowrun #it all about how far you can push your body until cyberpsychosis #but nothing about whay makes you human #which is a BIG theme in the cyberpunk genre - Mod W

[azusawrites]

ISLE OF LAMENTATION THOUGHTS

This has been on my mind ever since the reveal of the Jupiter Conglomerate and its excessive amount of technologization, but I'm very curious to see if they go for a cyberpunk/futuristic look all the way, while also blending in elements of Ancient Greece.

I'm mostly considering this because Hercules (1997) had a very interesting mix of mythologies - both old and new. By this, I mean that the story they portray takes heavy reference from other franchises, like Superman and Star Wars, by having a farm boy discover his true origins and that the simple life he's been living until now isn't his "true" purpose. But these particular modern myths in turn also take heavy reference from the myth of Hercules and other Greek heroes themselves, which is something that Scott Jeffrey points out in his The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human where he states that the inspiration for such forms and bodies was mostly an echo that persisted since the dawn of humanity, perfected by the popularity of people like Charles Atlas. Hercules starts off as a skinny, unremarkable child who ends up bulking up and achieving success as a direct consequence of that, which is pretty much the exact story of Captain America in concept.

Hercules does also redirect its focus later on stories relating to the rise of athletes, taking an interesting stance on their commercialization before it eventually refocuses on its mythological origins. But that journey is an important part of "mythology" in that sense, as Roland Barthes said. Though his view of myths was extremely critical, seeing them as merely a means of 'perverting' the signifier, by attributing a second significance to it, it's interesting to note that he saw them as twisting concepts and such. I think Hercules does that as well - replacing the original story with an 'updated, modern' one in the popular consciousness and switching from ancient heroes to sports' stars and superhero-inspired heroes.

Why I wanted to point this out is because TWST seems to take a similar approach to updating the myths. The presence of a global conglomerate already shifts our understanding of power from something immaterial and conceptual to something more material. In the age of commercialism, money sets the stage and is the one true measure by which to exert control. That they made such an update makes sense.

Idia's fascination with mass media and the like is also a nice nod towards the emptiness of consumerism and how it provides little value in terms of personal growth, but a quick escape into a virtual reality that starts to influence his perspective on the real world too. Identity is established through 'branding' or in this case, exaggerated interest in hyper-specific subjects and that leaves room for a lot of interpretation, I think.

It elevates the symbolism of Greek gods to the rich and affluent level of a conglomerate whose control over the masses is just as vaguely direct as in the myths. S.T.Y.X. functioning as a type of containment agency in the sense of regulating magical disasters just proves the precise level of control that they have over the population. So, I'm curious to see just how far TWST might go with this possible theme.

Clearly, this is all speculation on my part and Yana might not have intended for any of this, but I find it interesting that the text lends itself to such a reading.

#meta #idia shroud #twst spoilers #ignihyde #twisted wonderland #twist #twisute #twst