Real Life ‘Inspiration’ for a Cyberpunk Game

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In keeping with my "oh cool that could be retrofuture" posts... This is an actual thing and has the DYI listing and instructions (though you will need a 3D printer for the casing and brackets).

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While not very classic cyberpunk, new era punk would do well with a wifi detector in a tic-tac container. Directions are included here.
 
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As a keyboard geek, my enjoyment is ruined by a couple of things - why have the screen open if he's using VR? And that second hand typing- the upper part of the ergodox should be rotatable or something.

I forgive the display. Our computer still runs the screen while the VR is on, so I assume it is just an OS thing. I was thinking about the keys and the hand positions as well. Even for a kitbash, if actually being used in the field you would need to have repositionable key sets.
 
Not everything cyberpunk is dark, grim, and dirty OR retrotech. Sometimes the system still works... where the money flows like the spice... and technology flourishes. After all, the dark and the grim are not so bad unless they are contrasted by the bright, beautiful, and sparkling.

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Little Stories: Helix Bridge – Inspired By DNA

The Helix Bridge is on the Marina Bay in Singapore and runs in parallel to the vehicular Bayfront Bridge. It has a distinctive structure that looks like the double helix structure found in DNA strands. It stands 8.8 meters above the water.

It has a canopy made out of glass and steel mesh which spirals around and around. It has four viewing platforms that cantilever out over the water from the bridge. These provide lookout points for people to enjoy the stunning views of the Singapore city skyline.
 
The post and the Image is here This is not a great post, but it should be mentioned.

Here is behind this current images

"If you went cyberpunk, solarpunk, or modern urban fantasy, these are just cool buildings. They are currently refurbished to hold apartments, shopping, and offices. In a cyberpunk/ solar punk setting, they would be easily resealed and become mini-arcologies. Thus it would be an interesting setting for a set of scenes OR a neighborhood scaled game."

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I have been finding nothing but really cool Fantasy/ Historical images. (Well except a Martian Town, but that is just a little too hopeful to be Cyberpunk.) So I finally found something after three days of searching.

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In a world where an alien's like to trophy hunt for humans cars. Humanity has to paint their cars with dazzle camouflage to confuse the alien rangefinders.
That's the only reason I could come up with for why those cars are painted in zebra stripes.
 
Here is my 'dystopia list', tidbits collected from tech forums and news articles over the last several years.

* Amazon's Ring Doorbell Update Allows Opt Out of All Police Video Requests

* "It's also harder to get a foothold now than it was in the 50s/60s. Manufacturing jobs allowed the less-educated to have a very comfortable middle-class life where they were largely without dire money concerns. That's toast now...either you're a full stack developer/data scientist/doctor, or you're an Uber driver or similar minimum wage job...and it's only going to get worse."

* Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing surveillance tools of their own for years. Known as mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student's devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell phone searches.

* Law enforcement agencies have been focusing their investigative efforts on two main information sources: the telematics system -- the "black box" -- and the infotainment system. The telematics system stores a vehicle's turn-by-turn navigation, speed, acceleration and deceleration information, as well as more granular clues, such as when and where the lights were switched on, the doors were opened, seat belts were put on and airbags were deployed. The infotainment system records recent destinations, call logs, contact lists, text messages, emails, pictures, videos, web histories, voice commands and social media feeds. It can also keep track of the phones that have been connected to the vehicle via USB cable or Bluetooth, as well as all the apps installed on the device. Together, the data allows investigators to reconstruct a vehicle's journey and paint a picture of driver and passenger behavior. In a criminal case, the sequence of doors opening and seat belts being inserted could help show that a suspect had an accomplice.

* "[...]large corporations run a non-stop internal propaganda outfit. There will be a "company home page" on an intranet, filled with articles about how wonderful the directors/senior managers are... there will be articles "show-casing" the latest hot young talent, or people who have "overcome adversity" to be "hugely successful", or who, "saw something wrong and spoke up about it, bringing about positive change" and the intent is for everyone on the payroll to buy in to this idea that "the opportunity is here, ready for you to reach up and take it..." It's Corporate Kool-Aid in its purest form."

*/
Re: did you think censorship would stop with Trump (Score:5, Interesting)
by phoenix321 ( 734987 ) on Thursday January 28, 2021 @08:11AM (#61000856)
It was actually pushed pretty much at the same time as Occupy Wall Street was at its height.

Look up Google Trends and pinpoint the exact moment this term took off wildly. So either racism suddenly exploded in prevalence at the very moment the people came to Wall Street OR the prevalence remained as before but Wall Street pushed a distraction.

Look at any pictures from the OWS protests and who went there. This was a group as diverse as any group can ever get, and they were strongly united in their goals and demands.

And then came the black and white wars and suddenly, people split along racial lines and cannot agree on anything, and it took more than a decade before The People landed the next blow on Wall Street. And it took less than 24 HOURS until The People were ALL painted with the broad brush for that. Because it is now RACIST to fight against domination and immoral trade practices by hedge fonds, banks, billion-dollar bailouts by the taxpayers to the ultra-rich.

"Divide and conquer" as a strategy is alive as ever, and with a diverse population, it is as easy as ever to break them apart and attack each other rather than the group that truly oppresses them. Wall Street rules everything and anything in the Western world. A huge chunk of all the oppression, inequality, cruelty and man-made pain of the entire world originates from that little building in Lower Manhattan. 50, 500, 5 MILLION jobs lost in a single instant for a 3% profit increase do not generate as much regulatory and state attention as SEVEN investors losing a few billion in a crazy scheme from their hedge fonds. That's right. This fund has 7 (seven) investors. All those billions lost are the private wealth of 7 individuals. The entire thing has 32 employees, managing the wealth of 7 people to the tune of umteen Billions, with a capital B. They can lose 99% of everything they ever owned and be still richer than 99% of everyone else. And you watch how quickly that leads to attention from the state, regulatory action, SEC intervention and yes, most likely some arrests.

And then compare it to anything else in the last 50 years. Then you know who rules the planet.

"Racism". Sheesh. The 1% need the "racism" or everyone would sweep them away by midday tomorrow.
/*

* Ebook DRM has gotten more restrictive over the years. It is common for textbooks to now require a constant and uninterrupted Internet connection and load only a discrete number of pages at a time.

* Let's just be real here, that section of the DMCA has just allowed software developers to essentially lock up the whole world behind software with the intent to turn the entire planet into a permanent renting class. The thing is, they say you won't own anything and you'll love it, but like... they're not saying that about Bezos or anyone else. They will still happily own everything, and just make you pay money to access the things you use. Company towns and company stores are on their way back, and the only way to fight this bullshit is unionization.

* They're killing the PC as an open platform, this has been going on for 23+ years in the gaming industry by killing off local exe's. They want to lock down the PC and turn it into locked down consumer appliance with no file/program access eventually in the bid to kill piracy.

* A fully vertically integrated form of company scrip that they issue to their investors, employees and customers to create not just a walled garden, but a walled garden where every path has a toll booth that takes only their coin. The elephant in the room that no venture investor in these projects wants to talk about is that creating private money, just like in the wildcat banking era, is a license to print money by creating markets for these coins/notes with massive position and information asymmetries baked into the design.

* Walgreens and other retailers replaced some fridge and freezer doors with iPad-like screens, reports CNN. The screens, which were developed by the startup Cooler Screens, use a system of motion sensors and cameras to display what's inside the doors — as well as product information, prices, deals and, most appealing to brands, paid advertisements. The tech provides stores with an additional revenue stream and a way to modernize the shopping experience.

* Amazon will block and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining to labor unions, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Intercept. An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon's working conditions, like "slave labor," "prison," and "plantation," as well as "restrooms" -- presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.

*/
The data broker will be able to correlate the data across sites just fine. They are buying from all the sites. The sites just have to give them all your data.

Option 1: Correlate based on 'anonymized' data

It's very easy to identify a unique set of users by random data gleamed from the browser.
1. Site pushes you javascript. The javascript generates some data and sends it back to the site. The site adds some extra metadata and generates a fingerprint.
2. Site sells that data to a data broker.
3. Data broker aggregates all the data across all sites.
4. Data broker takes all the fingerprints that look the same and puts them into buckets.
5. Data broker refines the buckets with any additional labeled site-specific non-anonymized metadata provided by sites, such as your email address, username, real name, mailing address, credit card number, etc.
6. Data broker ends up with extremely accurate profiles of users across sites.

Option 2: Ask the site to identify you.

1. Site collects data about you.
2. Site sells your data to data broker. They tell your name, email address, etc etc in plaintext.
3. Data broker aggregates all the data from all the sites.
4. Data broker knows exactly what sites you visit.

No cookies required for _any_ of that. And all that's been possible since the web was invented.
/*

* BMW Starts Selling Heated Seat Subscriptions for $18 a Month -- the latest example of the company's adoption of microtransactions for high-end car features.

* MGM Television's upcoming reality show Ring Nation will feature former NSA employee and comedian Wanda Sykes presenting humorous surveillance footage captured from Ring doorbell cameras.
 
Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing surveillance tools of their own for years. Known as mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student's devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell phone searches.
My son, who is 12 and has expressed only moderate interest in computers, gleefully told me
how he had a way to shutdown all the plugins on his school managed chrome book. I asked him how and he shows me a YouTube channel which has some JavaScript in the description and the video gives instructions on how to use it. Then he cuts and pastes it and makes a bookmark out of it and then clicks it and it start prompting him to shut down plugins.

as we are going through the code (I’m a computer person) and talking about the dangers of malware (the code is fine), he then shows me a two page list of proxies that he has access to to bypass school restrictions. I ask him if he has other friends who are doing this, he says yes and they share stuff over a Google doc so they don’t get seen sending email. He has also removed a magnet form his chrome book so it doesn’t shutdown when it closes, for reasons that I forget.

so, what I’m saying, other than a parental pride moment, is that the kids are alright and are naturally built to fight against The Man. they are punk sort of by default, maybe, and cyber is their thing.

Also, we are going to be spending some quality time learning about security and doing a home lab. Time to teach him python.
 
I find it surreal that the TV series adaptation of William Gibson's The Peripheral is going to be on...Amazon Prime, of all places.

Edit: to be fair, I've bought several of his books from Amazon.
 
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Is there any cyberpunk that isn't depressing and dystopian?
depending on how you view it. The Punk part is supposed to be about fighting against the Man. it's supposed to be about self sufficiency and not buying into everything they say. This can be inspirational in it's own way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopepunk is close to this.

Fundamentally, punk is characterized by going against society, so society ends up having to be bad for you to sympathize with the protagonist. This makes it hard to be other than depressing and dystopian, sort of by definition.
 
Random Cyberpunk (And if you are my character, this is also their cyberdeck (every band should have a tech/ runner) )

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So putting the last four posts together, the obviously answer is Jem and Holograms...

If you spin it right, Jem is a cyberpunk show. There is corporate intrigue... with some of it being fatal. You have a corporate AI who is trying to create the most outrageous and popular media show. She recruits people to help her in the meat world. The AI uses holographic and other technology to augment her agents. She uses them to defeat the punks and faux-punks (after all you have to sell out some to make big time) and corporate bands. She takes steps (and guides the choices of venues and songs) to make sure that her products are more outrageous and better than other media corps, so the music public will like her products (and spend money appropriately). She helps her agents defeat other corporate shenanigans. They specifically defeat other media companies that "are less than talented or fair". The AI will make sure that their company will be successful (and it will be safe) - its current goals. Who knows what goals it will have in the future? (To make the most fascinating political agent. To manipulate public and political corps/ groups to ensure her agent is in place. To ensure that her agent will successfully enact certain laws (probably to ensure AI security). After all, after a career as Jem, Jessica could easily be persuaded to "do good" for the people because Synergy has never steered her wrong before. )

And who knows, maybe Jessica and Synergy really want "Good" for everyone as well.


Additional note: I wonder if Synergy worked on getting rights to owning the fashions she designed and the girls owned, to increase the revenue stream.


Is there any cyberpunk that isn't depressing and dystopian?

Well, here you go.
 
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FYI there is an SR5 book called Better than Bad that goes into this. Fighting for what is morally right and not necessarily about the nuyen. Of course, the fact that the boom had to be made says somehting about how far Shadowrun has strayed from its rocker and tribesman roots.

I have sworn that my next cyberpunk game will be this style.
 
depending on how you view it. The Punk part is supposed to be about fighting against the Man. it's supposed to be about self sufficiency and not buying into everything they say. This can be inspirational in it's own way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopepunk is close to this.

Fundamentally, punk is characterized by going against society, so society ends up having to be bad for you to sympathize with the protagonist. This makes it hard to be other than depressing and dystopian, sort of by definition.
There's also SolarPunk.
 
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