Cyberpunk2077

2077

100 years after my inception / birth. 

100 a metric measurement. Digitized timecode.

This year: 2017. 

40/60 counterbalance. 

My crew always snided at Cyberpunk 2020 because it was Mad Dog 2020 that horrible cheap candy flavoured alcohol available before alco-pops which young teenage girls wanted to drink so we bought it to get them drunk and we had to drink it too because we were young teenage boys without enough money to buy both candypop and cider. Eventually we ditched the girls, a rite of passage, and bought cider instead at which point a whole more mature level of girls were attracted to us, those who also drank cider and kissed better. Ciderpunk.

We also snided at Cyberpunk2020 because it was Shadowrun without Tolkien and when you can have the Cyberpunk Tolkien  universe why the fuck would you choose not to? Cyberpunk2020 was too much like reality and the reality we knew we were going to be living through as we got older. Fuckthatshit we gamed for fantasy, even with drunk girls, especially with drunk girls. 

With retrospect, the candygirls dropped away and then the cidersluts dropped away and finally the Tolkien creatures dropped away until all we were left with is the gritty realism of Cyberpunk2020 type existence and memories of bitter sweetness. 

We also snided Cyberpunk2020 because its players thought that it owned the genre. For many it did probably define it. They thought they were harder than the Shadowrunners. They learned. 'nuff said. All in the past now and the tribes have united.

 

I was born in 1977. In esoteric symbolism the double-7 forms a Tau cross if you utilize one of the 7's as an upper case gamma symbol from the Greek alphabet. If you study Blavatsky you will know the significance of this key. The 19 being both the first and last which when added make the whole (zero) split into 2, or into two wholes (8 the mobius loop). Alphanumerics. I identified with these symbols because they are my inception code. In a cyberpunk universe where people are catalogued by reference numbers instead of given names. That plus the Chinese year of the Fire Snake being wrapped around the Maat logic of a Tau cross is a powerful symbol to identify me by.

So the arrival of Cyberpunk2077 is the next level of that.

I feel obliged to do this blog because it exists and I have been doing a cyberpunk theme for awhile. Even though it is advertised as a PC game and I'm a mac user. Because in all probability it will be crap if you grew up on 1st-gen cyberpunk roleplaying and learned how powerful imagination is contrasted against the limitations of computer games. 

By now it has become such a cliche, it's candygirl to a post cidergirl hard drugs and dry-out. Zimmergirl. Point being we won't embrace invasive machine tech because somewhere along the way, facing concrete glass and steel street-life of reality for ourselves, we became the life cult. Ye I'm still sniding. IC though, and you have to. Actually I like it a lot. The character sheet shows how nice and simple it is while touching a lot of bases. We simply ditched it for Shadowrun which does the same thing plus. Read THIS LINK and you know everything about Cyberpunk2020 enough to play it without the rulebook.

* I know that snided is not an official word. The past tense of snide. Not an easy one to retro, it is a living word, an active, of the now. Past tense derided has too much connotation of an association with derivation. Man I love how language mutates. How much Islam is going to be in Cyberpunk2077 is my question to the drones. 

80s CyberPunk

What makes it cyberpunk?

With retrospect, cyberpunk changed in the 90s when the promised land chrome of post industrial deiselpunk got clean away from fossil fuels and became solarpunk in the 00’s. This zero generation has optimism and wealth whereas the zero generation it replaced had pessimism and poverty. That is the difference in the millennials and the millennial approach to cyberpunk.

The 80s were street life, the 10s had got rid of that as part of the cohesive corporate cover-up. Making the world a better place through eugenics and extermination. Police state brutality forces whats left of the aging drug, gun and 16-bit cyberdeck generation indoors. Have another nicer day. 

For me the question is:

What makes it 80s cyberpunk?

The cable guts are hanging out of buildings as an add-on to concrete cheaply erected without anticipation of electric taking over so fast. Everywhere has metal starting to rust, fans to vent air around an airless overcrowded maze of hi-rise cells and streets which stink of shit, trash, monoxide fumes and cooking of rodents and fish.

Even the concrete is 4-bit down here. You can caste a person by the functioning of their brainwave rhythms: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. We had to keep up with the kids of the morning growing up on sunshine instead of whiskey, moonshine instead of neon. They have wifi so no cables are needed, our cranial datajack are obsolete and even the backstreet pain-docs are quitting or in jail, regulations caught up hard with the new-wave hardware. They are the Giga-corp generation, byting down on us just like we knew it was coming.

Even they are going to be obsolete when the next wave hits, our grandkids have tetra-tattoo’s skinbedded into their cult so far advanced we become dinosaurs or vampires depending on how far we made it, nothing but memories of what life was in the physical world because now we hide away and build our harmless entertainment behind laser doors or so far out into the reserves there ain’t no electric nor cops anyway, earthships and nature, survival lifestyle far away from the cities which spawned technopunk people.

Those western urban wilderness ain’t the first world no more because city life has also been obsoleted. Just such a pity most people still live there. But we loved it for what it was, it was our time, up above the world riding our youthful drive to be something alive.

So cyberpunk has gone retro, and mutated to cope with how things have turned out. This is the era of solarpunk, a return to natural balance, living with ecology. 3D printers making tools out of mud and in the foreign hi-tech labs there are atomic printers making tools out of protons. Meat grown in vats so it has no mind or central nervous system capable of detecting pleasure or pain. Hybrid designer species for surgical, pleasure and amusement purposes. Not so long before they are given human minds. Clones already a reality.

Cyberpunk of the future is a very different thing to its dirty root origins. After a splash fascination with Victoriana so it could pick up on the age of exploration and enterprise, leather and wood, bakerlite brass and glass, the steampunk movement, it is eventually going to merge into mythpunk were supernature and creatures of dream will walk openly amongst us. Something like Shadowrun promised, the Mayan fifth and sixth ages of “urban ways” and “living myth” respectively will happen.

That’s where I’m going next, through the promise of age into sleep and rebirth. I am going to do it the good old fashioned organic way, bypassing digitally copied minds and the delusion of electronic immortality quite simply because my generation learned the hard way, metal rusts, concrete crumbles, even the new nano-brane materials sold to you as lasting forever will not outlive the immortality of transcendental spirit. Who would want to be trapped in flesh anyway or the cruel coldness of passionless machinery? Forever is only a long time when time is involved, and beyond here - beyond here is the dream and the dreamworlds.

The shaman knew all along. We fused it into electronic tools, the sword in the stone, the fire in the cloud. We made our illusions strong. But that is all they are, distractions and delusions. No cold comfort there when you face the harshness of reality. Cyberpunk was. And something new remains. My generation were before the time of the digital pheonix.