What with the gift giving season fast approaching, I thought it prudent to mention this delicious site I just found via my Google Alerts: Dr Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators and Other Marvelous Contraptions! Just what everyone wants I know — a $700 raygun! Wow! (And yes, the category should have scare quotes around “toys.”) From that [&hellip
Author Archive
Reality Gaming
Ah, another reality gaming endeavor! I keep hearing about these over the last five-ten years it seems, but not much after they actually take place. Text messages to your phone for a treasure hunt. I saw an interesting “choose your own adventure” recently (prolly Boing Boing or Gizmodo) that involved small text snippets painted on [&hellip
The iTouch
An early review of the iTouch via BoingBoing. So close to my holy grail of everything box. There’s this cyberpunk concept of the everything box that’s really just a mashup of all the electronics you need soldered, welded, spliced and esp duct-taped together, but it’s everything you need right there. Your rig. Well sure, the [&hellip
Dystopian Lit
Guardian has a list of the Top 10 Dystopia Novels (found via BoingBoing) for teens composed by author Gemma Malley, who has a dystopian novel out. The tie-in for posting here of course: dystopian predictions being a large part of the cyberpunk genre. Her list is commendable if a bit too literary for my tastes, but [&hellip
The Age of Steampunk
Found via BoingBoing, an article in The Boston Globe with a gallery of steampunk objects. An interesting observation is part of the article wherein it talks about the preservation of objects, taking modern day appliances and rendering them as steampunk items to increase the desire to save them, to make them museum pieces. Interesting. I [&hellip
Top 15 Great Science Fiction Books
And the Shadowrunning tie-in … Neuromancer at No. 10! An interesting site all-in-all, but this specific post was a pretty good one for, as one commentor says, recognizing that scifi started before 1980. No Jules Verne, but some early stuff I hadn’t read. And then the comments are the real fun part! All the pleas for [&hellip
All The World’s Indeed a Stage …
Well, “Spook Country” I hear has a rock star protagonist. Rock stars have appeared in a few cyberpunk stories, one of them actually on my list of “Book I’ve Never Finished.” But a modern day concert a cyberpunk bloggable event? Oh hell ya! Especially if it’s RUSH. CONCERT SPOILERS BELOW I should note, just in [&hellip
A Fistful of Steampunk!
Interesting site, A Fistful of Games, has a write-up of playing a steampunk board game, or a modified rule set of another game to encompass steampunk elements. Or something. OK. I didn’t really read it all the way through, but I intend to. So I’m bloggin it here to remind me! Anywho — we’ve really [&hellip
What is Cyberpunk?
Well, far be it from me to offer a definitive definition, but I know it when I read it. It’s usually near-future distopian literature with some cybernetics and some punks (ie hackers). Virtual Reality, the net, feature large in most cyberpunk. To put it in movie terms, Blade Runner, not Star Wars. Brasil, in which [&hellip