Nacarbac [any]

It’s an old one, but Roadside Picnic and its loose movie adaptation STALKER are both very good. Not quite a “true” post-apoc as it’d be today, in that The Zone is a small place in a “normal” world that the protagonists choose to enter, but they certainly confront the ending of “what came before” through an Event of sudden and total alienation.

The Earth Abides is also good, a very early story about the aftermath of a superplague. Life goes on, and humans remain human.

Yeah, Station Eleven is good. Just the backdrop of “traveling storyteller caravan that has a regular circuit of villages who support them” being a thing that can exist is such a dramatically optimistic (realistic, even) view of humanity compared to the norm.

And “parts” also includes whatever salvage piles they have, to see if they can rig up a compete thingumabob.

It just became a way of admitting to their being all talk, but that being good actually. Not even incremental material change, just incremental change in the “discourse”, which will (if you’re a good voter) lead to it.

Storywise, Keanu Reeves fucked it up. Playing it again after getting bored, for the Phantom Liberty expansion, I liked his character a lot more - while it barely ever tries to do more than a surface-level “I hate corpos because they’re mean and not cool, which is why I’m mean and cool”, it’s not like he’s actually wrong.

But having him there surely took away vast amounts of care from everything else - the really easy example being how Jackie, the starting Best Bud, is totally sidelined by wanting him out of the way for More Keanu.

But what they do with More Keanu is mostly just More Bitter Quips with V slowly going from “you’re literally the biggest loser in history, you fucking nuked Arasaka and it did nothing” to “hmm, interesting” - while Jackie’s dream was a nihilistic heroic fantasy, it’s one that actually could change into something pretty cool over the game, and unlike V he has an actual personality and sense of the world, which is vital to cyberpunk. Even JC Denton had something of a soul, and his flatness and distance were deliberate things done to him by his childhood and training - he could carry a conversation and be the one saying the most interesting part of it.

Phantom Liberty is a big step up in writing and delivery, and it even manages to give V some vague ideology… alas not particularly good ones.

The ending was kinda neat, albeit totally stupid. Killer end credits song. Would have been a great movie (since it’s basically Escape from Night City), and they used Idris Elba with much more restraint. Needed a Snake Plisken cameo.

One of the Comedy Bang Bang regulars does a good Werner Herzog.

Veteran of the Posting Wars is another classic.

The nitty-gritty of Shadowrun’s version is actually pretty good - it’s not actually the soul that is harmed by augmentation, it’s “the ability of the soul to recognise its material-plane anchor”. Thus most purely restorative things like cloned limbs or corrective surgery, and such don’t have an Essence cost (or it’s minimal), as there’s no sudden disjoint - the astral form was always that way, or organically changes at a rate it can follow.

Essence loss has no real effect on characters IIRC (some effects on getting magic to work on you, maybe a bit of social stuff but with the same “probably the social phenomena of being a walking killing machine, and forgetting to turn off your Wired Reflexes in public” rather than soul damage), until the point that your astral form no longer recognises your body and falls off. This isn’t presented morally, it’s just a metaphysical phenomenon that can be understood in-setting and therefore addressed.

Advanced tech and magic was slowly beginning to understand how to create augmentations that respected this - geneware, symbiotes, nanotech, to begin with - and had even begun to work on a way to restore that connection (via using the Metahuman Vampiric Virus, which is capable of Essence restoration somehow).

The only real EEEEVIL cyberpsychosis was from the Cyberzombies, a crude and classically corporate black project on “we wanna make supersoldiers but they die if we stuff too many guns in their skull” where they “solve” the problem by getting Blood Mages to staple their dissolving astral form back into their should-be-corpse and add Forced Memory Stimulators to try and constantly trick them into thinking they’re alive in between killing sprees. It’s pretty fucked.

But I stopped caring about keeping up with Shadowrun with 4E (because of the embezzlement from writers, and subsequent scab takeover of the setting), so who knows how they present it nowadays…

I have vague memories as a teenager reading The Night’s Dawn books under the desk at school, getting really embarrassed by the multi-page hardcore sex scenes and the protagonist being, uh, a pretty bad person.

There’s just something about Doorstop Sci-fi books that seem to lead their writers into trying their hand at fancy space smut.

It contrasted to Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince series, which I read around the same time, where (IIRC) it’s either wholesome romance or very obviously intended as something deeply unhealthy… although there was a lot of that!

If there’s anything Star Wars loves it’s an excuse to rerelease something - they can do the New Digitally Remastered Rogue One, with frame-by-frame AI-aging effects added on.

…it won’t look great though.

The perfect TTRPG worldmap.

Larian’s character writing has never been very interesting to me - I’m not sure what it is, perhaps there’s a showiness to them that feels shallow. It doesn’t help that their back stories are almost always “supercool world-shaker who had a More Interesting Adventure than this… Level 1”, as that always starts them off on the back foot with me for entirely petty reasons.

By contrast with various other games, perhaps their character backstories and the talk they inspire are less about “the cool things I did and their Dark Consequences that now directly affect you” and more about life events that exist outside the Plot?

Eh, I’m probably remembering things a bit rosily…and, uh, I forgot that I was originally trying to say something about their appeal rather than just rambling.

TNG is so much better and nothing like this

Having just rewatched it, it’s honestly worse in a few places, because it tries to have Lwaxana/Crusher/Troi-centered episodes but all they can think of is “Ghost Rape”, “Lol Menopause”, and “Space Baby Jesus”.

TOS almost only ever introduces a woman for her to fall in love with the sexy male villain/god/robot, and while being basically treated as set dressing is bad in itself, at least they spend less time writing them badly.

I guess the difference is that TNG actually has some good representation of women mixed in.

Rrrrr… chaaaaiiiiins.

Send… more… bourgeois…

After a day of Michael Bublebublyboo on repeat I had the “It’s beginning to look a lot like fish men” parody stuck in my head all night… it was much better, albeit confusing, to have a song I’d never heard stuck in my head.

Well if solar-dimming geoengineering goes ahead (seems likely) and is actually successful enough to preserve the infrastructural capacity for space launches then we may well need to revive the old Soviet solar mirror satellites to selectively increase sunlight on cropland…

I learnt a lot as a kid from an old point and click horror game called Biosys, about being stranded in a set of biospheres. It had a great in-game encyclopedia about the plants of various biomes, and you needed to use it to safely find food and water, etc.

Also learned about mescaline, white angels trumpet, and mutant maneating plant vampires that keep stealing all your precious CO2 facehugger style…

Dungeon Meshi is getting an adaptation, and has a great dwarf character.

IIRC child soldiers weren’t the only option.

But then NERV was never about saving the world, it was about fighting back juuuuust enough to create an opportunity for the absolute and final domination of the collective souls of humanity by a shadowy cabal who would be the immortal rulers of paradise. And also Gendo’s big widower energy.