Weekly cyberpunk chats in the Twitterverse continue this week, at 1:00PM PST.
Our lovely mods are Josh K. Evans, Johann Carlisle and Melissa Dominic. Today’s chat focuses on the movies Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Ghost in the Shell. If you enjoy William Gibson’s writing, and/or Philip K. Dick, you already know cyberpunk. You can either follow and add the hashtag #cyberpunkchat to your tweets, or alternatively log into Tweetchat and enter that same title as the hashtag, wherein you will see only those comments and the site will automatically add the #cyberpunkchat hashtag to all your tweets, saving you time and typing.
Last week’s chat focused on William Gibson’s book, Neuromancer, and was one of the liveliest. Mr. Gibson himself even retweeted one person’s comment but although he appeared to be lurking did not actively join in the chat.
Here’s a chart of time zones around the world, showing what time the chat takes place in your local environs:
Most of you are familiar with the cast of characters in my department, and my direct manager popularly known as HMFIC. Today just reinforced why I hate this man so much.
When I first started working for him, he made a big deal of not having me keep his calendar for him, reiterating again and again to anyone who would listen that he preferred to take care of it himself, book his own meetings and so on, how much easier it was for him to just deal with it himself, in the time it took him to explain to me what he wanted he could have it done, blahblahblah…
I hear you snickering, knowing what’s coming.
I don’t think he books anything for himself anymore, except his own doctor’s appointments (and I had a manager in the past who actually had me make dental appointments for him). So I guess he gets props for that.
Anyway, I’ve been enjoying taking the train to work, but this morning I drove myself because I had a bunch of extra stuff I wanted to haul in and didn’t want to be an obnoxious train commuter with bags of junk taking up excess space. So I’m struggling into my cube just after 8:00 (traffic. This driving stuff sucks), just barely walked past his cube, and he’s out like a shot saying “Well as soon as you get settled I need to have you set up a meeting for me…” and proceeds to tell me the details of who, when, what this meeting will include. While he’s talking I’m going about setting my purse and bags down, digging out my glasses from the purse, taking my coat off, etc., etc. Did I bother to stop and write down what he was saying? Hellz no.
Additionally, I’m the only person in the department who still has a desktop computer, not a laptop. When I boot this beast up on Monday mornings it takes a good hour to load all the programs and patches/fixes/spyware/bloatware/keylogger programs the company has loaded on it in over the last five years. So I did the only thing I could: Walked off to the cafeteria to get breakfast.
By the time I got back ten minutes later he was busy with Overseer discussing some football game. Uh-huh. Instead of sending out the frigging meeting request himself for the few people he needed in attendance at 9:00 THIS MORNING, it was clearly more efficient to wait for my computer to boot up while he talked football. Not that it really mattered, most of the people he wanted at the meeting don’t typically show their faces here until after 9:00 anyway.
So feeling rather martial and cyberpunky this morning, let’s have My Chemical Romance “SING” us out with some post-apocalyptic laser blasts (I wish there was a video for “Bulletproof Heart” but there’s not yet so this will work for now) This is from their latest release, “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys”. The whole album is fantastic, not a single throw-away track. (if an advertisement starts in the video, pause it and you’ll get the button to skip it)
Just a short note for those on Twitter who are also fans of, writers of, curious about, or cowboys of cyberpunk, there is a moderated (meaning there are actually topics that the ringleaders try to keep to) cyberpunk chat on Saturdays from 1:00 – 3:00PM PST (2100-2300UTC) or longer, if people are exceptionally chatty. If you need to find your time zone you can check here: The World Clock).
For those unfamiliar with the sci-fi genre, think The Matrix, TRON, Bladerunner. It’s dark, it’s edgy, it’s the little guy using computers and technology to fight The Man. In books, the granddaddy of them all is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It was in that book that Gibson coined the term. (although Gibson is on Twitter, he does not join our merry little band. I think I’d fall out of my chair if he ever did). Other authors who write in the genre include Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Philip K. Dick. Cory Doctorow’s YA novel Little Brother pits a group of tech-savvy teens against Homeland Security.
This past week we discussed Virtual Worlds-Metaverse, Matrix, Cyberspace, augmented reality and its role in cyberpunk. The mods are Josh K. Evans (@JoshKEvans), Sean Francis (@SeanDFrancis) and Johann Carlisle (@johanncarlisle). You can use the hashtag #cyberpunkchat to follow along, or better yet, log into Tweetdeck.com and enter the same hashtag, and it will essentially drop you into a chatroom and insert the hashtag term with every tweet so you don’t have to. Easy! Drop by if you can.
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