Die alten Herren brachten das Licht nach Wiesbaden, und während ich den Wortwitz mit Wizobaden sehe bin ich doch der Meinung, dass “WiZo-baden” sich besser als Tätigkeitsbeschreibung für die Teilnahme am Moshpit eignet xD
Es war, wie eigentlich jedes Mal wenn der WiZo spielt, ein absolutes Fest.
Viel schönes dabei.
A Thing I’ve Read 07/26: Virtual Light (Bridge I), by William Gibson
This is not a Sprawl-tale. I am both happy and sad about that.
This is, as per the cover-quote, a tech-thriller, and it is very much set in a cyberpunk-ian dystopia, where it plays out very much on the punk-side and very little on the cyber-side.
The book follows an ex-cop and a bike courier, who stumble into a plot to [redacted] San Francisco, and who are mostly trying to stay alive through the whole ordeal.
It was a good read, and I am very curious what other shenanigans the Bridge-Trilogy will hold.
Okay, bear with me, this is a WILD one.
Snow Crash begins with the story of how our hero and protagonist Hiroaki Protagonist loses his job as a deliverator for the Nova Sicilia franchulate when he misjudges a shortcut through another franchulate (a franchised nation-state within the now-gone US) and only does not have to Very Finally Answer to Uncle Enzo, head of the Mafia franchising both Nova Silicia and the pizza delivery service in the country, because the other protagonist, a teenaged skateboard kourier by the nom-de-guerre of Y.T., takes over the last leg of the delivery, earning her A Certain Standing within the Mafia.
The worldbuilding only goes harder from thereon in, including a full-blown goggle-accessible Metaverse and a plot that moves into literally infectious thoughts and (presumably) heavily fictionalized Sumerian Cosmology.
It certainly is one of the Most novels I’ve ever read.
A well animated movie with almost disturbingly catchy songs, and despite some moments of “wait what” a pretty decent story about, well, a group of demon hunters who in this day and age work their magic as k-pop band needing to face their opponents on their own turf.
Unless the virability of Golden completely put you off of this one forever, consider giving it a go. It’s enjoyable cinema.
del Toro’s take on a Kaiju-vs-Jaeger-movie (read: “del Toro’s take on Evangelion”) was an absolute insane joy to watch.
It has giant monsters, giant mechas piloted by pairs of pilots, giant monsters fistfighting with giant mechas, a properly weird couple of scientists, and so much excellence in filmmaking. It has also a whole bunch of Personal Drama(tm) fitting neatly into everything else, because balance is important.
Go watch, on the biggest screen you can find.
This absolutly wild ride of a self-styled goth rock opera was even more wild than I had remembered.
A world where you better stay on top the payments for your replacement organs, otherwise the repo man will come to take it back, where people are addicted to both cosmetic surgery and the extracted-from-the-dead painkiller drug commonly used in it and where the worlds leading megacorp is on the verge of collapse following the imminent death of its founder, and those are only three of many beats crammed into this thing.
The visuals are peak 2000s goth, backstory gets told in graphic-novel-interludes, the songs are mostly bangers… go watch this thing.
(cn: it is very b-movie-bloody.)
It’s been a long while since I’ve watched something this irrelevant.
There’s a skeleton of an interesting story somewhere in there, and it sure looks vaguely like Tron-movie 🤷♂️
The short story collection that, well, collects Gibson’s stories that built the foundation for the Sprawl-trilogy. It contains ten stories, of which I remembered the grand total of three – re-read books, people, you’re in for surprises.
The probably most widely recognized of these stories will be Johnny Mnemonic, given the movie of the same name; the titular Burning Chrome around the Blue Lights-Run and the Gernsback Continuum about glimpses in another past’s future were the others stuck in my head.
Most of the stories fall under the cyberpunk-umbrella, with a few that are more -adjacent scifi, and without fail they are good ones.
If you want to pick up on genre history, pick this up.
This one is… difficult. I love the story, and how it broadens and contextualizes the story of the main game. I adore the location, which as a singular place works well to integrate it in the setting, but leads to a lot of “same way backtracking”. I hate the spatial puzzles, but all of them can be cheesed into nonexistence (even without looking anything up, the things you need to add up are there but not obvious).
What still bugs me most is that one very important information was conveyed so convoluted that I did not catch it, and that massively derailed my playthrough.
Is it a good DLC? Yes.
Is it as great as the base game? No, but your mileage may vary.
Since then I’ve done some achievement hunting, and there’s mostly only those left that require actual piloting skills xD
Addendum by LaterSjut: I have since 100%ed the achievements, and while two of the DLC ones require more luck than I’d like it was an interesting ride. I’ve also watched as of now most of the endings, just for the fun of it, and this little bit of clearing up is indeed fun.