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Looks cool!

So a movie based on a book, that decided to completely ignore the actual book and just borrows a few aspects of it? No thanks. Although it sounds that the first half was entertaining in it’s own way. Maybe it makes for a fine popcorn movie for people who don’t actually know what the plot is ‘supposed’ to be.

I read this soon after it was published, and it left a powerful impression on me.

Early on in the book, it is full of very short sequences, full of crazy edgy new terminology, a glittering description of a world both seriously trashed out yet full of fabulous advanced technology, which was often grafted into the characters themselves. You don’t know what the hell is going on. You don’t know how these different people and scenes might eventually make sense or come together. You gradually piece it together like a detective novel that slowly makes more sense over time.

There is a strong ‘sex, drugs, and violence’ vibe, and it’s clear that intriguing power struggles must be going on behind the scenes. The descriptions of crazy, intense experiences of advanced synthetic drugs is a standout bit of ambience creating weirdness, kind of like the cinematic depiction of the drug ‘slow-mo’ in the recent Judge Dredd movie (the one with Karl Urban).

“The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sand storms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding…”

Eventually it comes together, with ultra-intelligent AI entities playing a strong role in all the intrigue.

To me, the book is a masterpiece of ‘style over substance’. The plot ultimately is not super innovative, but the newness of the setting, and the ultra-cool characters and overall vibe was incredibly satisfying and fresh. Good stuff!

Yeah, it seems that everything is more or less working as intended, in terms of how Fediverse functions. If enough folks post cool stuff, subs and viewers will go up. Not that I’m worried about that. I joined this instance as an experiment in joining a tiny niche instance (and I also like cyberpunk stuff, ever since Nueromancer was a big influence on me back in the day), and I have accounts on a couple of the big ones as well.

I just noticed that e.g. the Cyberpunk community here has 306 subscribers (presumably federation-wide), so that gives me a bit of an estimate

I can only hope that little Draco here can fly into my enemies techno-lair, sneak up to an unguarded terminal, and remote connect me and my nefarious hack, which should disable all other outer defenses of the site. Or at least play fetch. That might be fine as well.

Not an entire work, but I thought the character in the book Mona Lisa Overdrive who had misc brain/nerve damage and created strange robotic sculptures in the rural warehouse he was squatting at, with robot names like ‘the judge’ and ‘the witch’, was super punk. especially the climax of his plot line (no spoilers). It was very analogous to punk musicians creating aggressive anti-authority music in a trashed out garage.

3 1/2 hours seems like a good length for a comprehensive overview of a genre. I personally don’t feel tempted to watch the whole thing right now, but for people who don’t know much about cyberpunk and are just getting into it, it’s probably a fun time.

It might be easy to take the film for granted now, but it’s role in introducing tons of newcomers to anime (including me as a young person) and it’s general raising of the bar for production quality and scope is as significant as the article states. It’s was a major stepping stone, laying the groundwork for the success of Ghost in the Shell in the following decade.

And it probably helped sell a LOT of cool Japanese motorcycles, and bolstered the trend of futuristic motorcycle designs in the years to follow.