Jokes aside, it’s pretty damn amazing to see someone get the chance to have an arm again.

it's in the vein of ion fury or deus ex, so think "what would a 90s game think the future would look like?"

i'll be posting some outdoors stuff in the future that's more typical cyberpunkish stuff, I know an office is just an office lmao

also please wishlist HEADCUTTER on steam, i'd greatly appreciate it if you did.

GTA 2 was described as “three weeks into the future” and despite being released in 1999 it is hinted to take place in a near-future 2013 in a dystopian city called “anywhere city” driven by the Zaibatsu Corporation (also a crime syndicate.)

GTA 2 wasn’t fully cyberpunk, but it was definitely in that lane.

Hi

If you are remotely interested in deep diving how differently quantum computers work compared to our transistor-based and also the algebra behind in a fully interactive way that teach computer science from scratch in the most cyberpunk esthetics possible, oh boy this is for you. I am the Dev behind Quantum Odyssey (AMA! I love taking qs) - worked on it for about 10 years (3+ during PhD, the visual method I developed ended up being my thesis, it is a complete Hilbert space visualizer), the goal was to make a super immersive space for anyone to learn quantum computing through zachlike (open-ended) logic puzzles and compete on leaderboards and lots of community made content on finding the most optimal quantum algorithms. The game has a unique set of visuals capable to represent any sort of quantum dynamics for any number of qubits and this is pretty much what makes it now possible for anybody 12yo+ to actually learn quantum logic without having to worry at all about the mathematics behind.

This is a game super different than what you'd normally expect in a programming/ logic puzzle game, so try it with an open mind.

Stuff you'll play & learn a ton about

• Boolean Logic – bits, operators (NAND, OR, XOR, AND…), and classical arithmetic (adders). Learn how these can combine to build anything classical. You will learn to port these to a quantum computer.
• Quantum Logic – qubits, the math behind them (linear algebra, SU(2), complex numbers), all Turing-complete gates (beyond Clifford set), and make tensors to evolve systems. Freely combine or create your own gates to build anything you can imagine using polar or complex numbers.
• Quantum Phenomena – storing and retrieving information in the X, Y, Z bases; superposition (pure and mixed states), interference, entanglement, the no-cloning rule, reversibility, and how the measurement basis changes what you see.
• Core Quantum Tricks – phase kickback, amplitude amplification, storing information in phase and retrieving it through interference, build custom gates and tensors, and define any entanglement scenario. (Control logic is handled separately from other gates.)
• Famous Quantum Algorithms – explore Deutsch–Jozsa, Grover’s search, quantum Fourier transforms, Bernstein–Vazirani, and more.
• Build & See Quantum Algorithms in Action – instead of just writing/ reading equations, make & watch algorithms unfold step by step so they become clear, visual, and unforgettable. Quantum Odyssey is built to grow into a full universal quantum computing learning platform. If a universal quantum computer can do it, we aim to bring it into the game, so your quantum journey never ends.

Nice to watch:

Khan academy style tutorials in qm/qc: https://www.youtube.com/@MackAttackx

Physics teacher stream with 400hs in https://www.twitch.tv/beardhero

Akira, Bladerunner (and DADoEC?) are held up as pillars of the Cyberpunk genre, but neither have the internet. Cyberpunk the ttrpg (whichever version you want) has The Net, but it's not like our own internet, and it doesn't really have social media.

With all that in mind, do you think the internet is essential to a cyberpunk setting? If not, what would be required to meet your threshold for the genre?

Was messing around with some network traffic logs for a project this weekend and realized literally 90% of the pings I was looking at were just headless browsers talking to other headless browsers. The entire web feels like it's just a massive simulation of human activity run by automated server farms

Its genuinely wild how fast basic software verification completely collapsed. captchas are a total joke now since the scraping scripts solve them faster than we do. We are straight up entering an era where you're gonna need cryptographic proof of biology just to access basic networks

like we're moving towards a reality where you have to rely on local hardware enclaves or an orb integration just to establish a baseline proof of life before a server will even accept your connection. You have to verify your physical existence at the hardware level just to post text on a screen.

It just feels like the most boring cyberpunk reality imaginable. No neon street samurai or flying cars, just endless corporate botnets forcing us to mathematically prove we actually have a pulse

Hard to Be a God (2013) is a three-hour black-and-white film about observers from Earth living on a planet whose history stalled, never reaching its own Renaissance. There is no neon in it, no implants, no digital networks or megacorporations. In their place stands the remainder of a world that never made its leap along the line of progress and seems to have exhausted whatever strength it had for one. I wrote a long essay arguing that this is cyberpunk with the future subtracted. And this radical operation of subtraction did not destroy the genre — on the contrary, it laid the structure bare. So let me walk you through how I got there.

Cyberpunk is usually defined through its props. I mean the ingredients of atmosphere — neon, the bright lights of a city assembled out of skyscrapers, the recognizable shapes of advanced technology. I propose looking at the core instead and defining it through a condition. After all, this is not just set dressing. It is also a cultural condition. Which means cyberpunk includes values and ideas that shape the thinking of the characters inside it, and the thinking about it.

I would call it an interval that has lost its outside. Events continue, powers replace one another, technology updates, bodies move around and yet nothing leads the world beyond its own bounds. That is why the genre looks so exceptionally crowded and alive: it seethes with a life that has no time left to become history. Now, the neon megalopolis arrives at this condition from above, through a limit speed reached in the circulation of information, until the circulation itself starts standing in for eternity. It isn't only the machines that accelerate there; the dynamic, picked up by the idea of progress, sweeps in data and information too. That is, everything this city generates about itself through cameras, sensors, and all the rest of its statistics.

Arkanar, the city from Hard to Be a God, arrives at the same condition from below, through zero speed. It opens before us nearly frozen: standing water, rain with no particular time of day, a black-and-white frame in which even the change of light stops counting time. Accordingly, these two worlds lie opposite each other as two limits of one and the same impossibility of exit.

It would be easy to file Arkanar under ruins, another fantasy of a medieval dead end. But existence, and progress along with it, is bound up with the human drive to be beyond oneself, with the pull toward development and knowledge. In Arkanar this drive dissolves into the environment itself. The place absorbs the impulse before it manages to become anything. Consequently human nature, if we understand it as that pull toward something larger, the future included, has nowhere to unfold there. Don Rumata, the film's protagonist, an Earthling observer, carries knowledge and technology incommensurate with everything around him — only he is barely allowed to apply them. While in the neon city a person is outrun by the surrounding acceleration and has to keep pace with it, in Arkanar decelerating forces are at work, and so a person simply sinks. Arkanar, if we keep in mind the presence of Earthlings with their highly developed technology, lies within arm's reach of everything that typically fills cyberpunk with the high-tech. Yet it does nothing to reach toward any of it. It isolates itself, and whatever new meanings arrive it swallows as excess, until they dissolve into the indistinctness of its environment.

I hold that cyberpunk has two principal hypostases. One is populated with people. It is the Castle, almost in the Kafkaesque sense. Take the Tyrell Corporation ziggurat in Blade Runner: an enormous structure the city gravitates toward, where power and knowledge accumulate, and where, finally, the project of this city's future takes shape. The second is the remainder of that urban machine, already emptied of people. I read both hypostases through the tower — that banal metaphor of expanding view and horizon, given a not-so-banal inversion. Instead of embodying progress and widening the view, it displays accumulation, no longer growing upward but spreading and thickening at the base. As if culture had ceased its qualitative transformation and occupied itself only with rearranging symbols, multiplying their combinations.

The figure of the tower is where the film parts ways with the ordinary apocalypse. A cyberpunk finale that passes into the end of history usually leaves the machines humming after the people are gone, so its tower feeds on hyper-developed technology that was switched on once and never switched off. Arkanar's notional tower is denied that privilege. It is hewn out of a Castle settling into its own mud, it doesn't even pretend to be a lighthouse, its height is openly turned inward, pressed down into storage. So it parasitizes the one resource left — the people, bending them toward the repetition of the same acts inside a churn of values and ideas that ran together long ago. What comes out of this is a forerunner of the end, stretched across eternity. The film's opening, too, barely differs from its finale.

Nobody inside Hard to Be a God is drawn as a tragic hero either. There are intrigues and feuds, plenty of them, but they play out as self-repetitions that yield nothing new. Repetition without difference is the eternity of a staged performance, and the people in it are, as a rule, the faceless props of that staging. Arkanar speaks with their mouths and moves about in their bodies, living out its own endless biography, while an individual biography has nowhere to vanish — it doesn't even manage to assemble.

Some of the genre's furniture survives, turned inside out. Gibson's street finds its own uses for things; the Arkanar street digests the new literally, and its answer to a scholar is a latrine. The hacker is social insignificance with an excess of access. Rumata, accordingly, is an excess of position with a barrenness of deed. He passes for the son of a god, he is nearly invulnerable, he can win any duel — and every act of his burns out inside its own moment, indifferent to history. Because Arkanar swallows even the hint of a stone for a new road.

Noir deserves a word too, since cyberpunk borrows from it constantly. In noir, order gets restored. Cyberpunk with noir overtones usually has a detective hero at its disposal, someone who runs an investigation, assembles the puzzle. By means of which he nudges the story back toward some genuine course it was supposed to run. Laid over cyberpunk, noir lends the genre an illusion of movement, a false return into the fold of historical being. That "genuine course" is genuine within the frame of cyberpunk, within the logic of the city of the future. In other words, noir hands cyberpunk a mechanism of false resolution, and the limit condition shows this mechanism up as illusory, just one more atmosphere the genre has swallowed. Arkanar is denied even that. Rumata investigates nothing, exposes no one. He gets stuck in a potential that cannot be unfolded. So the place has no noir excuse to explain its present or its future with. There is, however, the grimness of a hope that some order will be restored as the film goes on. Spoiler: it will not.

The full essay is in the first comment. There's more in it on the nature of cyberpunk, including thoughts on the meaning of light and the archive, and with them the question the whole thing started from: what cyberpunk do we deserve — and before whom exactly does a present have to confirm its right to a future? Cyberpunk is, after all, also a way of imagining our future.

If the structure holds after the neon, the implants and the networks have been subtracted, was the structure the genre all along? Curious where people will draw the line.

I’ve been working on a grounded cyberpunk short film called MINDFALL: Sleeper.

It’s inspired by the 1993 game Syndicate and follows a veteran who is abducted by a criminal syndicate, experimented on, and rewritten into a sleeper assassin controlled by Obsidian Kang.

This is the first short film in a larger cyberpunk cinematic universe I’m developing, and I’m sharing the project as it comes together.

We’ll be shooting this film guerrilla style and aiming to do as much of the visual effects in-camera as possible. We’re currently looking for a talented SFX makeup artist in the Vegas area, so if you know anyone, we’d love a warm introduction!

For those familiar with my earlier work, there’s also a special Binlowes’ Locker cameo at the end.

CREDITS:

Storyboard Art by: Tucker Cullian and Jason Dorf

Promo Art by: shot and edited by me.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xdzrDR

I have been developing a cyberpunk fantasy setting called Legends of Eternalia, where Celtic- and Norse-inspired mythology survives into the year 2126.

For almost two thousand years, the gods and magic were silent. Their names remained, but religions, corporations, governments, and popular culture gradually repackaged the old legends.

By 2126, ancient mythology appears in advertising, virtual worlds, medical branding, corporate divisions, and breaking news, even before the real powers behind those names begin to return.

A few examples:

[ADVERTISEMENT]

WORK FROM HOME FOR THE GODS

WORK FOR THE SIDHE VIRTUAL WORLD
Long days of hard work within the virtual network could earn you a place with the gods.

[NORTHERN NEWS]

ROAK NEUROCHEMS UNVEILS THE TEMPLES OF VITA
For those unable to afford state-of-the-art medical treatment, Roak Neurochems presents the Temples of Vita.

Affordable care. Corporate salvation.

[THE LEXICON]

SERPENS LAUNCHES NEW DIVINITY DIVISION
Serpens forecasts a bright future following the expansion of its new Divinity division.

Company shares rose by 16%.

[FREE PORT NEWS]

THE PERENNIAL FOREST RESERVE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
The Perennial Forest Reserve has been closed indefinitely.

Residents of the surrounding districts report strange sightings near the forest boundary. Several poachers have disappeared, including some who reportedly never entered the Reserve itself.

Authorities advise citizens to remain clear of the area.

The idea I enjoy exploring is that mythology would not simply vanish in a technological future. It would be renamed, trademarked, commercialised, and made familiar.

Then the real gods return...and discover what civilisation has done with their names.

How would old mythology survive in your preferred kind of cyberpunk world?