Showing posts with label cyberpunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyberpunk. Show all posts

Jan 5, 2024

Chaindude and the happiest AI-CANISTER in the world

 


What is the CHAINDUDE listening to?

Why is the AI-CANISTER so happy?

Is it real or artificial happiness?

What is it looking at?

What does it contain?

Are those tattoos or static interference on his arms?

Is he, in fact, being electrocuted at this very moment?

Is it a chain or a cord?

Is he, in fact, actually a bass player looking for an amplifier?

Is he sweaty or just badly shaded?

Stay tuned* to find out!








(* I won't repeat the footnote joke, you'll just have to go look for it yourself)

Aug 15, 2021

Mechanized Ex-Baron von Spindelknochen

 

The von Spindelknochen were a strange bunch. Their favourite type of punishment were beheading (so much that they built a special type of chop-off-and-then-roll-to-a-special-moat-outside-the-castle device to speed things up, known as the Head Chopper, and then they had that problem with the necromancer that kept reanimate the skulls for her army and...but that's another story).

Where was I? Oh the von Spindelknochen, yes, strange bunch. They became even stranger when they had a visitor from the future - another von Spindelknochen it turned out, only too late, as you will see - that told all about how to prolong one's life.

Because, the visitor said, you don't really want to live through these medieval times. These dark ages.

The what now, the von Spindelknochen said.

This, the visitor said. The dark ages. Cold castles, diseases, wars, primitive ways of living. The most advanced thing you'll ever encounter in your entire life is a spoon.

A what now, the von Spindelknochen replied, because the only kitchen utensils they used were knifes since you could chop things off with those, and chopping off things were something the von Spindelknochen really liked.

Exactly! the visitor exclaimed. Five hundred years from now, humanity will travel across the planet through the skies, cutting clouds in half in large metallic, birdlike machines. Don't you want to experience that? Fast forward another five hundred years and humanity is no longer living on this planet, but on Mars, Venus - even Jupiter! And where I'm from, we've even escaped death itself.

Off with his head, the von Spindelknochen ordered, and within the second the visitor's head painted a blood red elliptic path through the air - and landed perfectly on a metallic disc - much like a tray - with small legs all round, that the visitor had brought with him apparently without anyone noticing.

The small tray started running, but the von Spindelknochen soon caught up with it (it wasn't awfully fast).

Oh the irony, the visitor's head managed to say just before the von Spindelknochen tore it off the tray and threw it out the window (and it was actually reanimated a couple of years later by that same necromancer and...but that's another story).

The tray

The tray keeps any head placed on it alive and fully functioning. It's a mechanized, Keep Aliver™-tray (with the optional Spider Legs module attached).

It was ironically invented (in the future), manufactured (in the future and also in the past after the first von Spindelknochen miraculously managed to reverse engineer it) and overly overused by the von Spindelknochen, who made a tradition - at their death beds - to chop off their own head and keep it alive on one of these discs.

The disc doesn't stop ageing though, something the first generations of von Spindelknochen learned the hard way. Though still alive, they more look like a bunch of tree stumps nowadays.

Aug 9, 2020

Cyborg no stranger than milk teeth







It's the future.

Biomechatronics are nothing new. Everyone's got one or several body parts replaced by more or less operational, mechanical, computerized parts. It's nothing new. Nobody cares.

In fact, what if the human body was expected to break down in one way or another? An eye stops functioning, a knee cap dissolves, maybe your nose falls off after sneezing too hard? And the solution to that was to just go to the doctor and have it replaced with biomechatronics; computerized prosthetic implants.

What if it was as expected as loosing your milk teeth? If you meet someone and they tell you they never lost their milk teeth you'd probably raise an eyebrow.

Things I can think of that makes this gameable:
  • Who's paying for these computerized implants that everyone's expected to get?
    • The government? (Hello Sweden)
      • Not top-of-the-line implants, but "good enough"
    • Private practice?
      • Lots of options, for every price category
        • "You could get it cheaper if you accept this harmless metrics collector from GoodCorp™ to be installed as well - you can definitely trust them!"
  • What's the public view on people that hasn't broken down all that much?
    • Not at all?? Are these considered mutants? Aliens?
  • How much of the human can be replaced?
    • "All we got left of grandpa is his soul. We uploaded it to this BrainPod™ last year, and sold the implants as scrap. It's very convenient, we get to choose when the speakers should be turned on!"

 
(Let me end this post by saying all this is expected to happen in a GAME CONTEXT, using IMAGINATION. It's all MADE UP. Just to be clear.)

Dec 8, 2014

Cyberpunk city generator (sort of), part 1

While reading up on the tragic background story of Bubble Bobble the other day, I found myself all of a sudden staring at old circuit boards.

Don't they look like futuristic cities from above? Warehouses, monorails, parks (synthetic, but hey, at least I got a sheep to care for)...

Look at this for instance (from Wikipedia):


This is what I see:


(...and everything between is just streets, LCD-thugs, and beambikers, of course).

Or this rail yard for lightbeamed monorail trains (also from Wikipedia):



To find more circuit boards/cyberpunk cities, just google "pcb arcade" (I added "arcade" because I wanted the boards to look old and/or have more of those big black thingies. Yes, I am aware they do have a technical name, but for now let's just call them thingies).

In part 2 I'll add a bunch of tables to generate LCD-thugs, beambikers, corporations to trust your life with, etc.

Oct 15, 2013

80s one page dungeon


KEY

Entering a room: roll on room table, and so on:

  1. Empty
  2. Low on battery Robo-Robo-Rat
  3. Self-aware Hercules monitor
  4. Waste pool; static leakage from MTV
  5. A sad 404-page
  6. Horny laser-beams
  7. Fear-droids
  8. Low-res versions of the players
  9. Pocket calculator that talks through its LCD-display
  10. Programmable Ray-Guns (bullets are sub-routines)