Mechanismatic

I tried, but I just can't go back and play Oblivion after playing Skyrim with all the quality of life mods. I'm waiting on the Skyblivion release to revisit it.

My significant other and I still talk about how great the internet was in the 90s. You could be yourself without having to mask. You didn't have to focus on the visual because uploading a picture either wasn't feasible or just took too long and too much data. No selfies, just being yourself with people you'd probably never meet, discussing mutual interests, and not having your interactions commoditized or interrupted with ads.

I guess the upside to the vast commercialization and commoditization of every last aspect of the internet is that there's a lot of greedy dystopian conventions to write about. I've got a few cyberpunk stories I'm going to include in an upcoming collection that utilize some examples of that issue.

I haven't read through these, but it sounds like any number of a few patterns I've recognized in some older works might be occurring for you.

The "you had to be there" thing is definitely common. It might be more relevant if you got a lot of physical junk mail like decades past. It might be making clever references to things you're not familiar with or mimicking a style you haven't seen because its practitioners are gone.

It's also possible that it wasn't all that clever to begin with, but it was good filler at the time when there was far less of the subgenre available. They were fiction magazines rather than a thousand online sources and movies and graphic novels, so standards were lower for many people just wanting more.

For anything that was actually good for its time but didn't age well, I've noticed that they often suffer from being surpassed by the later works that they inspired or broke down barriers for. The practical effects of Star Wars were a lot more impressive in 1977 when you saw cheesy rubbery aliens and blocky cardboard robots in earlier scifi works.

No matter how much he pointed to his white beard as proof, the witch didn't believe Grumbles when he insisted he wasn't a child and wouldn't taste good in a nice meat pie.

I was referring to the 1994 version.

Have you read the Ghost Rider 2099 comics by Len Kaminski? The art is good too, but Kaminski's writing and cyberpunk stylings is inspired and inspiring.

Check out Optimistic Nihilism.

It's a great collection. There's a good variety of topics and styles and if you don't like one story, there's always another. Some of my favorite authors are included like Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, Doctorow, and Stephenson. It's got a nice breadth to it such that lesser known authors could get included rather than only settling for the more well-known names and reprinted stories you might have already read elsewhere.

Note: they dropped the 360. It's just Autodesk Fusion now.

I've got a story in the Big Book of Cyberpunk called Keep Portland Wired. Here's the blurb:

In an anarcho-capitalist near-future Portland, the government is extinct, corporations own everything, the poor with no credit score can’t even cross the street safely, and dissident punks race stolen rideable drones in dangerous rooftop competitions. Kal, a member of a local punk collective, finds that she can’t escape her past, no matter how hard she glides over the ruins of Portland’s landmarks.

Hollywood producers: "13 pages, you say? That's enough for a new trilogy!"

When one hard-boiled officer by the name of Benedict was asked to comment about the egg poaching, he said, "I don't think this theft will go over easy."