For debate: The Cyberpunk Timeline.
“Never Mind the Bullocks”?
through 1992 that’s a pretty good list.
Time article from 1993. amazing read.
Now a new subculture is bubbling up from the underground, popping out of computer screens like a piece of futuristic HYPERTEXT
oh man, more nuggets of greatness:
The newest, a glossy, big-budget entry called Wired, premiered last week with Bruce Sterling on the cover and ads from the likes of Apple Computer and AT&T. Cyberpunk music, including ACID HOUSE and INDUSTRIAL, is popular enough to keep several record companies and scores of bands cranking out CDs. Cyberpunk-oriented books are snapped up by eager fans as soon as they hit the stores. (Sterling’s latest, The Hacker Crackdown, quickly sold out its first hard-cover printing of 30,000.) A piece of cyberpunk performance art, Tubes, starring Blue Man Group, is a hit off-Broadway. And cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner, Videodrome, Robocop, Total Recall, Terminator 2 and The Lawnmower Man have moved out of the cult market and into the mall.
nostalgic cyberpunk retrofuturism is so late 2004 / early 2005.
PostSpectacular has designed a system for creating one of a kind covers for Faber Finds, Faber’s print-on-demand service. The generative design system is built using PHP, Java, and Processing.
The gorgeous font used on the covers is B-HMMND, designed by Corey Holms.
More images can be found here.
(↝via MoT)
Generating a single cover only takes about 1 second, but due to its iterative and semi-random nature can sometime require hundreds of attempts until a “valid” design is created which is judged to be “on brand” by software itself.
He’d Make Such a Beautiful Corpse
I love this somewhat creepy letter to readers from Åsa Larsson, former tax lawyer and author of several chilling thrillers set in rural Sweden, explaining how she came up with the victim for her first book, The Savage Altar, which was published by Penguin in the UK by for the first time.
NEVER trust an author. He or she is perfectly capable of taking everything you say or do and making it into a lovely soup to serve up to his or her readers. Never let an author into your house.
Then I caught sight of some photographs standing on a cupboard there in her kitchen. They were pictures of Lena’s children and her nieces and nephews. And in one of the photographs was her eldest son, Fredrik. It was as if an electric shock ran through me when I looked at the picture of him. He’d grown up so much. When I lived in Kiruna, he was just a little boy. But this picture showed a young man.
He’s so good looking, I thought, experiencing a real jolt at how quickly time passes, and the fact that nothing lasts forever.
He had long, fair hair. And I knew he played the violin.
He looks like a saint, I thought.
Then I thought:
He’d make such a beautiful corpse.
Her friend’s response upon reading the finished manuscript and being asked permission:
“Fine,” she said in her terse Kiruna way when she’d finished reading it. “You can publish it. But you’re not spending any time alone with our children from now on.”
The Savage Altar was published in the United States in 2006 as Sun Storm. Åsa Larsson’s newest book, The Black Path, was published in August.
More DJ’s living rooms here.