Quite possibly the holy grail of robotics is the anthroform robot, a robot which is bipedal in configuration, just like a human or other great ape. As it turns out, it's very tricky to build such a robot without it being too heavy or having power requirements that are unreasonable in the extreme (which only exacerbates the former problem). The first real success in this field was Honda's ASIMO in the year 2000.ev, which most recently uses a lithium-ion power cell that permits one hour of continuous runtime for the robot. ASIMO is also, if you've ever seen a …
I find it increasingly difficult these days to shake the feeling that the cyberpunk dystopia our world is becoming is shaping up to be more and more like Shadowrun. Ever since 2012 (which turned out to be a slightly less tumultous year than Terrence McKenna had always preached) things have become more and more surreal and disturbing (in a David Cronenberg and not a David Lynch kind of way). The Snowden/NSA scandal continues to bring truly frightening information to light, and the first thing that comes to mind is that ECHO MIRAGE exists as a real thing which is …
Older denizens of the Net probably remember the name Gareth Branwyn. His name and visage were well known amongst people who were active in what came to be known as the cyberculture of the late 1980's and early 1990's, that weird mish-mash of hacker culture, people who identified as cyberpunks, psychedelic culture, rave culture, and other tiny social groups so far out on the fringe that they never really coalesced but instead moved in the cracks and fissues left in the wake of those other groups. Most of us remember two major projects he worked on at the time, the …
Earlier this month Lyssa and I took the daughter of a good friend of ours to her first concert at the 9:30 Club in downtown DC. We decided that we wanted her first concert to be a memorable one, so we took her to see VNV Nation when their latest tour took them through our nation's capital. So, one evening, we hit up a local restaurant for dinner and then headed downtown, a remarkably short jaunt these days since the move.
Shortly after arriving I ran into Mike and Tara, two old friends of mine from a previous trip …
In the past couple of weeks it's become something of a fad to post about the genre of cyberpunk becoming somewhat passe'. We now live in the twenty-first century, where much of the fiction that my generation grew up reading was ostensibly set. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. We don't really have food pills, either, but the nutrient and protein shakes that you can buy in the cold case of just about every convenience store these days (or the frankly awful tasting energy drinks that are popular with the younger set) aren't that far off. We do have …
For many years, body armor that was fashionable as well as protective was a trope of cyberpunk sci-fi. The ever-present black leather jacket lined with kevlar, dusters and drovers coats with trauma plates stitched into them, and even capes and cloaks which could turn bullets or the blade of a knife graced the pages of many a well-thumbed paperback book. Now it would seem that fashion designers have taken inspiration from these stories and helped make body armor, or at least the appearance thereof fashionable. It would seem that some subcultures have taken body armor as a fashion statement of …
Yesterday afternoon while backstroking around in the Olympic-sized swimming pool of RSS feeds that is my Google Reader account I stumbled across a link in the blog Cyberpunk Review to an album recorded and released by Colin Timothy Gagnon called Cyberpunk. Feeling curious because their recommendations are more hit than miss, I downloaded the album from Colin's website (it's free, though if you enjoy it there is a Paypal donation link to show Colin some love), decompressed it into my .mp3 collection, and gave it a listen this afternoon. If you're expecting industrial music or something along the lines of …
The Cruxshadows have just released a music video for the song Immortal in their infrequent podcast, and I think it’s well worth the time to watch it even if you’re not a fan. While the Cruxshadows don’t seem to have gotten much videoplay (you’ll have to get a copy of Shadowbox to catch most of them, or you can just search Youtube), they do tell a good story with their videography. They’re working the black op angle again but with a decidedly transhumanist (or perhaps technomagickal) twist – the use of augmented reality overlays in the …
A couple of years ago, I don't remember exactly when or how, I stumbled across an unusual podcast called Tales From the Afternow from Rant Media. I suppose that it's more accurate to call it an audio drama rather than an audiobook because it's not talk radio as we usually think of it, nor is it a performance of a novel. The world described in these stories is a bleak one set on a post-nuclear war, post hyper-corporatization Earth in which licenses are required to read or write, languages and information are considered dangerous weapons, and even Time itself is …
