JacobCoffinWrites

A few months back, one of my favorite let's play channels introduced me to Shadows of Doubt, a procedurally-generated cyberpunk detective game that plays like an immersive sim. I find it kind of fascinating, and love the look, the crowded, densely-packed setting, and the depth of the simulation, where it maps out stuff like every NPC's routine whether they're relevant to a case or not, where they live, even where they leave fingerprints.

I don't play many games, mostly for lack of time, and tend to avoid proc-gen stuff that relies on emergent gameplay and emergent storytelling (I guess I have an easier time justifying a story-based game as it's more like reading a book or watching a show? I don't know). But I keep thinking back to this one and wanting to give it a shot because the cyberpunk immersive sim thing is very much my jam. I thought I'd see if anyone else has played it, and if you've had any good adventures in it.

Here's an article I stumbled onto while gathering links, in case you want more info: https://www.pcgamer.com/this-procgen-cyberpunk-detective-game-is-like-an-endless-deus-ex-and-it-could-become-a-stone-cold-classic/

I have a kind of specific fascination for proto-cyberpunk, generally stories that preceded the cyberpunk genre's start and have most of the elements but aren't quite there for one reason or another. I think it's fascinating to see how these things form, to try to find strands of DNA through fiction. Writers, sometimes decades earlier, voicing the same complaints, identifying the same problems I associate specifically with cyberpunk.

The first one I thought I'd mention is a pretty safe bet: Frederik Pohl and C M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants

Written in 1952, this book has everything but the 1980s feel of a cyberpunk story: Megacities, corporate-states, corporate espionage, addiction-based-marketing, subscription-based-police, corporate citizenship in layers right down to indentured servitude, ecological collapse and a society that doesn't care. Even the visuals of layered, overcrowded, continent-spanning cities.

But it feels like a 1950s science fiction story. It's great; very slick and steeped in the language of marketing. That works really well for it. But it doesn't feel like a cyberpunk story.

I think that's part of the reason I find looking at these precursor stories so fascinating. Cyberpunk discussions often fold in on 'is this even cyberpunk?' and it can be really interesting to see something that has so many of the elements but is still something else.

Obviously these are all just my opinions, and I'd love to hear anyone else's on this book.

Oh, one last opinion: If you're going to get a paperback, get the 1976 version, it looks great.

Most of the ones I knew about, like Neon Dystopia, seem kinda dead these days, and I was wondering if anyone here knew of anything active, especially fiction zines.

Awhile ago I was watching a let's play(?) Podcast(?) using the Aliens tabletop game system. During one of the sessions, the players and GM joked about a keyboard being in Fly Agaric, like it was the Dvorak keyboard from hell you'd have to sit and really think hard to remember how to use. Wanting to know what they were talking about, I stumbled into this typography blog which did explain the history of that keyboard prop, but also goes into detail on any prop with text on it, some subtle foreshadowing, and even some translation issues that might be plot-relevant. It also talks about references to other films and ways Alien influenced scifi movies that came later.

Talking about Space Sweepers recently got me thinking about Alien/Aliens props and that reminded me of this. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

By the way, which Alien stuff do you consider cannon? There's enough of it that most people I've talked to seem to pick and choose. Personally I go: Alien, Aliens, Alien Isolation, then these two tabletop podcast/video series.

A few years ago, while we were cooking, my SO showed me a blog post about common spices and their substitutions. I thought it’d be cool to use that to make a chart we could hang on the wall. It turned into a fun light research project, then a fun art project.

I started reading various blogs and realized that while many covered the same core spices, there were a lot of others that only one blog or another mentioned. So I started gathering them all up. As I read about them on Wikipedia I’d stumble into their histories, and scope creep hit. I decided to add a column for interesting facts about each. (While gathering those, I was kind of struck at the disparity between them - some spices, have centuries of warfare, murder, and espionage wrapped around them, while others are so common or easy to grow that nobody seems to have stabbed anyone at all for it.)

I built it first as a spreadsheet in Google sheets while I was researching, pasted it into a poster-size libre office writer document for layout and font changes, exported that as a pdf so I could import it into GIMP. That let me make more detailed changes and add the flourishes that hopefully make it look like something that might’ve hung on the wall in your grandparents’ kitchen.

This was a pretty casual project spread over seven months. It’s got forty-some spices with descriptions, fun facts, and substitutions shamelessly plagiarized from cooking blogs and Wikipedia.

I’ve learned since that several spices are actually really unspecific, like what’s sold as oregano apparently may come from several different plants. So I’ll say it’s useful for cooking and accurate to the best of my ability, but I wouldn’t reference it as a historical or scientific resources.

I'm new to this community but I know we're still trying to work out the kind of content we want here. I really like discussions of cyberpunk settings, technologies, and their implications so I thought I'd submit my recommendation for a(n unfortunately less-well-known) story that has a lot of that. (I've got a few other recommendations if anyone wants to hear them.)

I'm biased here because I'm already a fan of the author, who passed away last year, but it's really, really good and I wanted to recommend it.

The Other Kind of Life is a cyberpunk noir detective story. It's thoughtful, well-built, and it never cheats the audience out of seeing how the protagonist pulls something off. The story and setting are cohesive, take no shortcuts, and build a very distinct world.

The elevator pitch about a con artist solving robot murders sounds pretty trite in summary, so I'll give you the cool parts:

1: It's set in a custom world, fantasy style, with no connection to our world, which gives the author a lot of freedom and neatly exposed how accustomed I am to seeing this in fantasy books with the slightest hint of magic, and how much it throws me when a hard scifi story exists in the same kind of place.

2: Everything about the AIs carefully considers how they would develop, rather than just writing mechanical humans. They're wonderful and alien in small, interesting ways. And the book is saturated with conversations about them, their drives and design challenges. It feels like a successor to Free Radical, one of his earliest books, but more polished.

3: This book takes no shortcuts. It shows you how the protagonist talks his way past people, plans his heists, and even how he finds and maintains his contacts. (Transmet for example had a habit of letting Spider summon up past contacts whenever he needed a lead, before burning them, making me wonder how he ever made those connections. It worked there, but this stood out in contrast.) I love stories about characters who are smarter than me, and this one shows him being smart. Every step of the investigation feels earned. As trite as the buddy-cop-robot-murder-investigation premise feels... for me, this might be The buddy-cop-robot-murder-investigation book.

Bonus stuff: There's a DM's fascination with how things got the way they are in the setting, from infrastructure to bureaucracy, to technology, to politics. An analyst's perspective that informs pretty much everything else.Young has a real knack for making careful analyses of situations and emotional states almost absurdly engaging, and he has a focus on workable AI designs that I really enjoy. His writing voice shows through in places in the novel's narration and dialogue, but it has the effect of making the characters seem more thoughtful and intelligent than you often get with this genre so I don't mind it. There's not much hacking in this one, which is a shame because he does it well elsewhere, but what's here is solid and believable, and the social engineering probably make up for whatever's missing. I'm probably overselling it, but if you enjoy scifi, I'd say it's worth it for the AIs and the world at the least.

I was surprised to see so many tubes sealed (it's on its second year but it looks like we missed the window to swap in the replacement tubes I'd made). If you spot any other issues please let me know.

A few years ago, while we were cooking, my SO showed me a blog post about common spices and their substitutions. I thought it'd be cool to use that to make a chart we could hang on the wall. It turned into a fun light research project, then a fun art project.

I started reading various blogs and realized that while many covered the same core spices, there were a lot of others that only one blog or another mentioned. So I started gathering them all up. As I read about them on Wikipedia I'd stumble into their histories, and scope creep hit. I decided to add a column for interesting facts about each. (While gathering those, I was kind of struck at the disparity between them - some spices, have centuries of warfare, murder, and espionage wrapped around them, while others are so common or easy to grow that nobody seems to have stabbed anyone at all for it.)

I built it first as a spreadsheet in Google sheets while I was researching, pasted it into a poster-size libre office writer document for layout and font changes, exported that as a pdf so I could import it into GIMP. That let me make more detailed changes and add the flourishes that hopefully make it look like something that might've hung on the wall in your grandparents' kitchen.

This was a pretty casual project spread over seven months. It's got forty-some spices with descriptions, fun facts, and substitutions shamelessly plagiarized from cooking blogs and Wikipedia.

I've learned since that several spices are actually really unspecific, like what’s sold as oregano apparently may come from several different plants. So I'll say it's useful for cooking and accurate to the best of my ability, but I wouldn't reference it as a historical or scientific resources.

I had two basic farberware kitchen knives break in the same way. Both blades had the tang snap back inside the handle. Gluing it back in the grip didn't work, so I set them aside for a bit.

I have been fixing broken kitchen tools lately, so I decided to replace the handles for both knives.

I started by grinding a new tang into the knife blade. I had to shorten the blade of the knife to do this but my favorite kitchen knives are short, so I don't think I'll mind.

Next I turned the first handle on the lathe. I started with a piece of an oak branch I collected after a storm broke it off a tree in a local park three years ago. Several large (up to 8" diameter) branches came down, and the city took their time in cleaning it up. It was good hardwood that would have just been chipped anyways, so we decided to save them some person-hours and gas and went down with a hand saw one night, cut the branches into manageable pieces, and carried most of it home.

Once we got it home, I sealed the ends with wax and stripped the bark with a draw knife so it could dry in the basement. The slow (1 year per inch of material is what I've read) drying process seemed impractical at the time but I barely noticed it, getting distracted with other projects.

For these knives and the rubber scraper, I used the smallest of the branches we took.

I When it was ready, I removed it from the lathe, cut away the scrap on either end, sanded either end through all the same grits of sandpaper I used while it was on the lathe, and drilled/cut the slot for the tang.

The second handle took much longer to make - turns out it's harder to duplicate the dimensions of an existing piece than it is just winging it. That said, there's a noticeable difference in quality just between these two, so I'm learning as I go at least.

Like the first, I removed it from the lathe and cut away the extra material, and sanded both ends through all the grits of sandpaper I used on the piece while it was on the lathe.

I ground a matching tang into the second blade, drilled and cut the slot into the top of the second handle, and put them together for a test fit.

All in all, I was pleased with the result. The blades fit very tightly, and the handles looked and felt nice enough. The next step was to stain them.

I went for something a little different this time. I coated both with rustoleum black cherry stain I found on trash day, and noticed that certain parts of the wood came through much more red than the purple-brown color of the stain elsewhere. So when I did the second coat, I doubled down on that and used sedona red on the red parts and black cherry on the purple parts, all in the same coat, let them soak in, wiped them down, and let them dry.

I then touched it up with dabs of Red Oak stain and two sharpies, purple and brown.

I finished both handles with two coats of high gloss polyurethane. Once they were dry, I scored each blade on the tang near the end (I wanted a way the glue could grip it better, but found I couldn't drill through these with my metal bits and only the cutting wheel on the dremel would mark them.) They were already a tight fit, but I wanted to be sure they wouldn't slip out. Then I glued the blades in place.

I'm still very much an amateur at turning, and am learning as I go, but I've always preferred to learn by just doing a project, so getting these broken (fairly cheap) kitchen knives usable enough to return to the kitchen seemed like a good way to practice turning and finishing, and overall I'm pleased with the result.

Pine isn't the perfect material for tool handles, I wouldn't use it for anything that's going to bear an impact like a hammer or axe handle. But it turns easily, and cleans up pretty nice. I've used lengths of Christmas Tree trunk both because it was quick/easy (as for this quick handle for a file) and because it's nice when the materials have their own story, and I can preserve a bit of a special time in something I make.

I don’t know what the slrpnk.net opinion on Christmas trees is. Around where I live, when a farm or orchard goes out of business, developers turn it into another subdivision. A tree farm might not be an ideal habitat, but I’m willing to bet on it being better than another clearcut, paved, human neighborhood. So for us, we figure we can give some money to the Boys and Girls Club, help keep a farm solvent, and then use the wood left over for projects. I think this fits the zerowaste ethos well enough.

I've got two examples to show off today. The first one was actually the very first thing I made on the lathe after I got it restored . We had a few years of Christmas Tree trunks drying at the time, so it was an easy, low-stakes material to start with, and already round, which makes starting on the lathe easier.

The finished version was obviously pretty crude, but I didn't want it to go to waste, and I liked the feel of it, so I attached it to an old file I got at a junk store awhile back.

I've been using it for several years now with no problems.

The second example is a knife repair, (though on this one I chose the Christmas Tree wood more for sentimental reasons than for convenience). This was a gift/repair for my grandmother - a few years ago she threw a party, and someone dropped this knife on the floor. The bakelite handle shattered near the top. She was going to throw it away but I said I'd make a new handle for it, though I'll admit it took me a few years to get around to it.

Step 1 was to take the handle the rest of the way apart and get just the blade and it's decorations separated from the broken plastic.

I cut this piece of pine from the trunk of our 2020 Christmas tree after it had had awhile to dry. It was the same piece I carved most of the koroks from though this piece was too skinny to fit any koroks inside easily.

I'm still very much an amateur at turning, and made some mistakes as I went, but I learned a lot on this one, and was able to get some results I was pleased with.

I cut the top to fit the little decorative cap, drilled a line of holes for the tang of the blade, and did some test fits and adjustments. I also cleaned up the bottom end and sanded it with all the same grits of paper the rest of it got.

I wanted the stain to be a reminder of the original handle, so I started with gunstock (a very bright, orange-red color) and then while it was still wet, I worked in Red Oak, which is darker and more brown. This deepened it and brought out some nice detail in the grain. The red oak on its own turned the test pieces very dark brown, and it wasn't as visually interesting, so I'm glad I did it this way.

I followed that up with four coats of high-gloss polyurethane, with some light sanding in between. The pine was thirsty - drank up the urethane in some spots on the first coats so you wouldn't think any had been applied. Eventually I got a nice, even finish.

On the Zerowaste side, the blade was old and I was able to put it back in use. The wood was left over from a Christmas tree. All the stains were found on our local Everything is Free group, or left over from old projects. The urethane was also leftover. The project cost time and electricity, but nothing beyond that.

For the last few years I've been keeping the parts of any tools or kitchen implements that break with the intent to fix them. We had a rubber scraper/rubber spatula that snapped where the plastic handle thinned to fit inside the rubber head. The actual spatula part was still good, so I turned a new handle for it.

I started with a piece of an oak branch I collected after a storm broke it off a tree in a local park three years ago. Several large (up to 8" diameter) branches came down, and the city took their time in cleaning it up. It was good hardwood that would have just been chipped anyways, so we decided to save them some person-hours and gas and went down with a hand saw one night, cut the branches into manageable pieces, and hauled most of it home.

Once we got it home, I waxed the ends and stripped the bark with a draw knife so it could dry in the basement. The slow (1 year per inch of material is what I've read) drying process seemed impractical at the time but I barely noticed it, getting distracted with other projects.

I cut a piece of one of the smaller dried lengths of oak, and turned it on the lathe until it was similar to the original in dimensions. To be honest, it's a bit more chunky than I'd prefer, but considering that the original plastic handle broke, making the replacement sturdy is probably a good idea.

Then I cut off the extra material on either end and carved it down so it would fit the head of the rubber scraper. It's not centered vertically because the scraper was the same thickness as the end of the handle, but the rectangular hole was closer to the back than the front.

This also lined that part up with the heartwood of the branch, which seems like it should help with reinforcing it.

I stained it with two coats of stain, applying the second one while the first was still wet and rubbing it down so there was no extra. The first coat was gunstock (a bright, orange stain) and the second coat was red oak (a darker brown). Then I applied high gloss polyurethane, sanded it lightly, and applied a second coat.

For no extra materials, it's back in use in our kitchen.

This is a bit simpler than some projects, and I think it would fit https://slrpnk.net/c/zerowaste just as well, but I think it’s nice to show the chance to fix even simple tools that break. I’ve got a few kitchen tools (other knives and a broken rubber scraper) that I plan to fix next.

A few years ago my grandmother threw a party, and someone dropped this knife on the floor. The handle was some kind of resin-plastic and it shattered near the top. She was going to throw it away but I said I'd make a new handle for it (it wasn't until I went looking for this picture that I realized I'd said that five years ago you guys jeez!).

I started by taking handle the rest of the way apart and breaking up some old glue, so I could separate just the blade and it's decorations from the broken plastic.

Then I started on a replacement handle. I cut this piece of pine from the trunk of our 2020 Christmas tree after it had had awhile to dry. It was the same piece I carved most of the koroks from: https://imgur.com/gallery/5zErlHt I'm still very much an amateur at turning, and made some mistakes as I went, but I learned a lot on this one, and was able to get some results I was pleased with.

I cut the top to fit the little decorative cap, drilled a line of holes for the tang of the blade, and did some test fits and adjustments.

I wanted the stain to be a reminder of the original maroon handle, so I started with gunstock (a very bright, orange-red color) and then while it was still wet, I worked in Red Oak, which is darker and more brown. This deepened it and brought out some nice detail in the grain. The red oak on its own turned the test pieces very dark brown, and wasn't as visually interesting, so I'm glad I did it this way. I followed that up with four coats of high-gloss polyurethane, with some light sanding in between. The pine was thirsty - drank up the urethane in some spots on the first coats so you wouldn't think any had been applied. Eventually I got a nice, even finish. I'm glad I finally got this done and I'm looking forward to returning it.