Totally agree. That’s also why I dislike any cyberpunk story that has a revolution/rebellion in it. Any attempt to actually change/fix the system goes against the cyberpunk themes of how futile that is. Cyberpunk stories are about trying to survive with the hand you’ve been dealt, not enacting societal change.

I guess I’m willing to accept space in cyberpunk as long as it’s dirty and broken down and not military-based. For example, I think the belters in The Expanse series could be the basis for a cyberpunk story. The Expanse isn’t cyberpunk, but I think you could easily tell a cyberpunk story in that world.

Interesting, I would’ve said Aliens was less cyberpunk due to the military being the main characters. The first Alien is the only one that centers around a group of nobodies, which I think makes it more of a candidate to be cyberpunk.

So even though they don’t particularly like or trust the corporation, the fact that they’re employees of a major corporation is enough for you to say no? That’s an interesting distinction. So if they owned their own ship and were hired as mercs by the corporation to pick up some unknown artifact would you consider it cyberpunk?

The income doesn’t prove its worth, but it does give me an idea of how well-known the movie is. So I figure most people probably haven’t heard of this one.

Ha, thanks! You definitely remember more of Lain than I do. 😁

I’m not disagreeing with you, this is simply me probing for more details.

Why do you think social media makes Lain more relevant? I thought Lain focused more on the wonder and magic of what The Internet could mean for humanity, rather than the social problems that can arise from actual internet usage. They definitely touch on someone portraying a different personality online compared to the real world (which is absolutely relevant regarding social media) but I thought that was more a function of Lain’s deteriorating mental state than a cautionary aspect of The Wired. Granted, it’s been a while since I’ve watched Lain, so I could be misremembering.

Totally agree. Texhnolyze isn’t as slow as Lain, but it is extremely depressing. I thought it was going to be about how sweet cybernetic limbs could be but instead it was more about the trauma of having limbs amputated. Definitely a good anime, but it wasn’t what I was expecting (or what I wanted it to be).

Personally, I always watch anime with subtitles. I never do dubs, even when they’re well-made. So I’m not really the right person to ask regarding this particular dub.

Yes, Hulu and Crunchyroll both have sub and dub versions of the anime.

While I do think it’d be funny to retrofit a movie to suddenly be scifi/cyberpunk, I think this is just another case of the budget being too small to do anything effectively.

Although now you’ve got me thinking about how much of the plot in this movie would need to change if you removed all mention of androids…

I agree there are some minor changes they could make that would tip it into the “cyberpunk” category for me. For example, if the aliens were all members of a single corporation (as opposed to integrating with society) then it’d have a stronger “corporations with too much control” theme and might be considered cyberpunk. Or, if you take out aliens entirely and this is other humans doing the exact same thing, I’d consider it cyberpunk.

On a related issue, have you got any good book recommendations for cyberpunk that features other members of the Alphabet Mafia?

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of many. The best recommendation I can give would probably be the classic cyberpunk novel Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott. It was written in 1994 and being lesbian in the 90s is a major theme. But I haven’t actually read it myself, I’m just aware of it.

I can’t think of any other specific novels where being gay is actually a theme or a major plot-point and not just something mentioned in passing. I mean, in Necrotech, the main character is trying to find her girlfriend but since the whole story is about the shenanigans she gets caught up in on that journey, you could replace the word “girlfriend” with “best friend” and it wouldn’t change a single thing in the story. In fact, I think that character may actually be bi; that’s how little it impacts the plot, I don’t even remember.

Cool! I’m looking forward to this game. The same company made a Terminator game a couple years ago and I really enjoyed that one.

That’s fair, and I agree. But I still wonder what type of person subscribes to this Lemmy community. Are they deep cyberpunk nerds who are here for the philosophical explorations on humanity’s relationship with technology, or do they just like to see cyborg parts on scantily clad women? The r/cyberpunk community on reddit definitely preferred the latter but I suspect anyone who finds this community on Lemmy is probably the former.

Either way is fine, I’m not going to gatekeep our subscribers, but that’s why I wanted to clarify that this is more of a “what does it mean to be human” anime than a “check out these neon lights” anime.

Also, it’s crazy to see how much of the film was actually green-screen and cgi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJ_THGj72U

It stopped in some random place and it’s been a couple years since the last update. I don’t know anything about the author though so I have no idea if they have plans on returning to it or not.

Also, Zero Punctuation (a video game reviewer notorious for being overly harsh) had a positive review of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdI98aZ1xYc

This is all second-hand knowledge (I’m not involved with nor personally know anyone involved) but I also had an account on dataterm.digital so I at least saw part of it. One thing I saw was the admin made a post on the local community saying he would be de-federating from one of the NSFW instances because dataterm.digital was hosted in Germany and he wasn’t sure of the legality of the content under German laws. Seems like a perfectly fair thing to do in my opinion. But, for whatever reason, a bunch of people from totally unrelated instances started flooding that post with horrible content that he had to moderate away. I don’t know why someone unrelated to dataterm.digital or that NSFW instance would have any stake in the issue, but there were a bunch of toxic comments.

I don’t think this was the worst thing that happened to the instance, but I do believe it was the last straw. The admin was so irritated by the whole thing that he just outright deleted the entire dataterm.digital VM without any warning and is basically done with Lemmy now. I personally don’t blame him in any way, but I would’ve at least liked a heads-up that he was doing this. I only know about it because I found his mastodon post shortly after he deleted the VM.

The people behind dataterm.digital also run the mastodon instance corteximplant.com and a couple other fediverse applications like pixelfed and misskey, but I don’t think they’re coming back to Lemmy.