https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-244-fine-art-and-meat-cleavers/

That’s kinda what I was thinking, yeah.

That’s interesting - this is the first I’m hearing of them doing that to jets.

This isn’t the original, but I took the photo and cleaned it up a bit:

That’s interesting! It definitely has some of the visuals often associated with solarpunk (I’m not really a fan of the sleek plastic metropolis look personally, I much prefer solarpunk to be punk and emphasize stuff like creative reuse, but the visual art in the genre is lousy with this stuff and the game makers executed it well from what the trailer shows). I think there’s still room for this to be cyberpunk depending on how real or widely available this area is - if it’s some company park or an enclave of the rich, and wealth disparity still exists, I could see it being cyberpunk in content if not aesthetics at least. It does look very cool, thanks for sharing it!

One of the things I really like about the 40k universe is the incredible scope of the setting. You really can tell just about any story and it fits somewhere in the setting.

I don’t actually know much about necromunda, though I used to love the art and articles about it as a kid. I’m hoping someone else will kick in some recommendations

I’d never really thought about the fact that museums doing photogrammetry to preserve artifacts could link up with the folks who 3D print their own Warhammer figures, but here we are

When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger is a kind of complicated recommendation for this. It features I think the most trans characters I’ve ever seen in one book, the main character’s girlfriend and most of their acquaintances are trans, and the story treats them decently as people with jobs and lives outside of that part of their identity. The problem, if it is one, is that they’re all sex workers. I can’t remember any trans character in the book who isn’t. This fits the story decently as they’re all living in the Budayeen, the entertainment and criminal quarter of an unnamed Middle-Eastern city, the only place where they, and small-time criminals like the protagonist, can exist with a minimum of hassle. But there’s some complicated history and pop-cupture entanglements around being trans and being a sex worker (and the limited other roles historically available to them) which might change how audiences read this forty years later. I honestly have no idea. I quite liked the book, it’s weird in places (for other reasons) but that’s what I read cyberpunk for, and it has a bunch of awesome cyberpunk concepts, a unique setting, and some creative misuses of technology.

The Murderbot books feature a pretty diverse spread of characters, gay, nonbinary, and also people in polyamorous relationships, though that stuff usually doesn’t impact the main plot. Murderbot itself is about as asexual as it’s possible to get which probably explains that a bit. Their tone isn’t super cyberpunk but the themes and concepts very much are.

I think the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic or Burning Chrome has a pair of guards, one of whom is trans, but it’s clearly been awhile since I read it. Gibson’s Sprawl books all had a kind of fascination with extending cosmetic surgery past sex and race, identity being as changeable as hairstyle, so it comes up in passing occasionally.

Just wanted to say I really like this idea, especially as mixed with local mesh networks. I agree with the point about storage, and mostly I’m just really looking forward to reading about some of these services, and seeing what this could look like in the future.

Good luck!

And the ones from trigun

I don’t know why I needed you to point this out, but I appreciate it!

If I remember right that’s actually the bad guy’s gun and it fires bullets that chase you! (At approximately the speed a human can run). Its silly and great and if I was remaking it for a modern setting, it’d be some kind of launcher/targeter for tiny suicide drones.

The book is excellent and the audiobook narrated by Paul Giamatti is so good it ruined the text for me - I couldn’t do the voices as well in my head as he could. First and only time that’s happened.

Whichever form you take, the book is very worth reading

I’m so glad! If I find another train scene to do I’ll I’ll be sure to share it here

The solarpunk genre in general might have some good stuff for you - my favorite so far is Murder in the Tool Library, but the Terraformers might be closer to what you’re looking for.

I don’t know how fancy that one is but I’ve pulled at least five working MacBooks from corporate ewaste. All were out of their absurdly-short OS support but Linux Mint (and I’m assuming a bunch of other distros) run great on them. I’ve handed all of them off since reinstalling but I liked the hardware enough to use one as a writing computer until someone needed it.

My landlord exactly. Dude hires people to spray the yard every year because God forbid ants try to approach the building. I’ve tried convincing him not to but he wasn’t having it. I talked to my neighbor and it turns out the guy used to edge the lawn with scissors. Luckily my neighbor is way more agreeable and we’re redoing his lawn more in line with the picture

I love this old art - it has so much character. It kinda reminds me of Paranoia cover art. Similar vintage I suppose

That’s really interesting to me - Can I ask if you enjoy the work? Or if it gives you a sense of purpose or a sense of being part of something bigger?

Personally, I work at a job I don’t really enjoy but which I’m good at, and which gives me enough time to work on the stuff I care about (from creative projects to fixing furniture and computers to give away). My hobbies are cheap but I’m saving to try and conserve land, and I suppose even if most of my money wasn’t earmarked for that, I’d still work the job because we need health insurance and money to survive emergencies (although I think I’d do more donations per year rather than saving it for one big project).

I derive most of my sense of purpose from the projects, from helping out in my community, and from the conservation stuff. If the need for work vanished somehow, I’d still work on all that other stuff, I think I’d either focus on it more or I’d take on additional volunteer tasks.

I’m not against currency existing, or people getting paid for their labor. I am against things like medical care being locked away behind a paywall, and the threat of things like homelessness, deprivation of medical care, crushing debt, starvation/freezing, being used to crudgel people into working those unpleasant jobs (often more than one, often with no benefits).

I think in a better society people will still want more than basic survival, and if society needs someone to do unpleasant tasks, it’ll still need to make doing those tasks worthwhile.

And to tie it back to the comment I was replying to, I’m skeptical that those unpleasant jobs are enriching the lives of the people doing them, or providing challenges that make them happy when they wouldn’t have otherwise been.