NSFW: Tomorrow Calling (1993) is a short film adaptation for television of William Gibson's 1981 short story "The Gernsback Continuum," from the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades (1986), edited by Bruce Sterling, and Gibson's own Burning Chrome (1986) collection. Directed by Tim Leandro, Tomorrow Calling was first shown on Channel 4 in the UK.
Old-school bOING bOING editor Jon Lebkowsky invites everyone to Cyberpunk2017, the Annual EFF/EFF-Austin SXSW Afterparty in Austin, Texas, Saturday, March 11, 2017, from 5pm to 1am! It's free!
Jon writes:
Read the restOur latest EFF/EFF-Austin event takes a cyberpunk perspective on 2017, exploring how our vision of the future has changed over the last forty years of science-fiction made real, and considering this year as a turning point in the way we live our lives and participate in our society, as well as our sense of personal autonomy.
Cyberpunk imagined a world where the average person’s autonomy and privacy is commoditized and exploited by the shadowy machinations of global forces beyond our comprehension. “Information wants to be free,” and when a person’s image, voice, and words all manifest as data, their personal identity is potentially free for the taking.
In a world where dead actors are resurrected as data objects in major motion picture blockbusters, where a billion people’s account data can be stolen by a few rogue hackers, where software can edit video to show a person doing and saying things they never actually did or said, where services are free because users are the product, where truth is secondary to narrative, how can we hope to ensure that privacy and the right to one’s data and representation remains a fundamental, enshrined, and preserved right?
Taking place at The Butterfly Bar/The Vortex on Saturday, March 11th from 5:00pm-1:00am, there will be free drinks for our supporters who register in advance as well as illuminating talks from a variety of speakers including Cory Doctorow, Jon Lebkowsky, David DeMaris, Todd Manning, Jonathan Morgan, Owen McNally, and others.
Julio writes, "Writer and director Christopher Grant Harvey has shot Tears in the Rain, a stunning fan film set in the Blade Runner universe with just a $1,500 budget." Goddamn, that's some badass fanfilm. Read the rest
Cartoonist Maki Naro made this one-page comic for The Nib that compares the world of today with 1990s era Cyberpunk dystopia fiction. Read the rest
Andy Warner says:
A comic by Maki Naro that I edited for the Nib just came out which I thought you'd dig. It's about how we're actually living in a 1990s cyberpunk dystopia.
Fun fact: the hacker character in this strip is based off the "R.U. a Cyberpunk?" article in Mondo 2000, a publication which I think shared early DNA with Boingboing.
J. M. De Cristofaro used an ex-Soviet IVL2-7/5 VFD tube as the core for his Cyberpunk Wristwatch, which adds steampunk notes in the form of a brass "roll cage" around the tube. Read the rest
Gollancz have announced a gorgeous set of new editions of William Gibson's seminal Sprawl books, which began with 1984's Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick award-winning novel Neuromancer, designed by Daniel Brown (previously), using software that created fractals based on 1970s apartment buildings. Read the rest
Science fiction writer/hacker/mathematician Rudy Rucker (previously, a Gold Star Happy Mutant if ever there was one, has reissued five of his classic titles with new forematter and his own paintings on the covers, priced to move at $12 for paperbacks and $2 for DRM-free ebooks: Saucer Wisdom ("brilliantly funny, prescient, and as fully engaging as a coffee-fueled late-night conversation with a slightly manic genius"); Spacetime Donuts ("A plugged-in rebel becomes the incredible shrinking man"); The Sex Sphere ("An alien named Babs and her crew take the form of disembodied sex organs that attach to human hosts"); The Secret of Life ("A coming-of-age science fiction novel, blending realism and the fantastic in a transreal style"); and White Light ("A hipster math prof's journey to Abosolute Infinity...and back"). Read the rest
D10D3 built this "cyberdeck" on a C64c (a modern recreation of the Commmodore 64) with a Raspberry Pi CPU, VGA port, and all the I/O you could ask for (USB/Bluetooth/wifi/Ethernet). Read the rest
Archive.org posted the first issue of Mondo 2000, from 1989. (It says #7 on the cover because the first couple of issues were called High Frontiers, then Reality Hackers.) I loved Mondo 2000, which was edited by R.U, Sirius, and it was a big inspiration for Carla and I to start bOING bOING, the zine. David was also a fan. I wrote a few pieces for it, and many of the contributors later went to work or write for Wired, which unlike Mondo, paid contributors and came out on a regular schedule.
Read the restMondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired magazine.
Cyberpunk pioneer and games-writing treasure Marc Laidlaw writes, "The latest and for now final addition to my Kindle collection is now live. I've never had a collection; I put this one, 400 Boys and 50 More, together myself. It contains basically all my short stories, novelettes and novellas from the last nearly 40 years (except for the Gorlen series)." Read the rest
Marc Laidlaw, the cyberpunk pioneer who went on to serve as writer on some of Valve's greatest video-game titles -- the Half-Life series, Portal -- has just posted his entire backlist to Amazon as $3, DRM-free ebooks, including his debut novel Dad's Nuke (think Fallout, but with religious extremist militants who subsist on "Host on a shingle," this being the cultured recovered foreskin tissue of Jesus Christ on fortified crackers) and Kalifornia, a brilliant and prescient novel about media, cultural disintegration, and celebrity. Read the rest
Archangel is a five-part science fiction comic written by William Gibson and Michael St. John Smith and illustrated by Butch Guice; Issue #1 came out last month and sold out immediately, and IDW has only just got its second printing into stores this week, just ahead of the ship-date for #2, which is due next Wednesday. Read the rest
If you love Ridley Scott's sci-fi masterpiece, Blade Runner, the minutia of film, and nerding out over typography, prepare to have your neck bolts blown. Dave Addey runs Typeset in the Future, a website dedicated to the typographic elements found in sci-fi films. He has previously examined the titling, signage, logotypes, text messaging, and visual displays found in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, and Alien. Here, he turns his typographical attentions to Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic, Blade Runner.
In 5,000 words and hundreds of screen caps, Dave goes through every scrap of textual content seen in the film. What's equally amazing to the point of the piece-- typographic analysis--is how much you learn about every other aspect of the film. This one narrow skew of the movie reveals so many other angles and tangents. Blade Runner is a film I already know too much about and I still learned so much more and had numerous "ah-ha" moments.
Read the restThe first time we meet Deckard, he’s sat in the Los Angeles rain, idly reading a newspaper. The headline of this newspaper is FARMING THE OCEANS, THE MOON AND ANTARCTICA, in what looks like Futura Demi:
Here’s a close-up shot of that newspaper prop, from an on-set photo of Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott:
The subtitle reads WORLD WIDE COMPUTER LINKUP PLANNED, in what looks like Optima Bold. While the idea of a World Wide Computer Linkup might seem passé as we approach 2019, it was still very much unusual in 1982 when Blade Runner was released.
This absolutely gorgeous under-six-minutes short film, called Adam, was rendered by the Unity team, in real-time, to show off the capabilities of the current Unity game engine. Here's what Unity Technologies has to say about the film.
The Unity Demo Team built Adam with beta versions of Unity 5.4 and our upcoming cinematic sequencer tool.
Adam also utilizes an experimental implementation of real-time area lights and makes extensive use of high fidelity physics simulation tool CaronteFX, which you can get from the Unity Asset Store right now.
To make Adam, the Demo Team developed custom tools and features on top of Unity including volumetric fog, a transparency shader and motion blur to cover specific production needs. We’ll make these freely available soon!
Adam runs at 1440p on a GeForce GTX980. Attendees at Unite Europe were able to play with it in real time, and we’ll make a playable available soon so everyone can check it out.
Open it to full-screen, HD, for maximum impact. It is quite impressive. Read the rest
A must-have for the with-it cyberpunk, and it's appropriately hard to get ahold of, being sold only through a Japanese website that uses translation-software-resistant graphics of Japanese text set against an animated background that made mincemeat of all the Japanese-English OCR software I tried it on (I think this is the orders page, but couldn't get more than one word in four out of Google Translate's photo-text converter). Read the rest
